Creationism is not scientifically valid - why I've created this blog?
Hello everyone!
My nickname is Szymcionorski (spelled Shym-chyo-nor-skee) and here I plan to upload some content regarding creationism and science communication (aside from my YouTube channel "Polish "Evolutionist" (Szymcionorski)" dedicated to the same goal and Szymcionorski's website that serves as my work's information hub).
But what about the title of this blog post?
Simply put - I do not see essentially any evidence that would validate claims made by creationism in general.
A good example of that is a common argument used by them regarding "new information". From what I've observed the argument usually starts with a given creationist claiming that x evolutionary transition requires huge amounts of "new information" and thus their opponent should provide a mechanism for which this supposed information could arise.
Then the person defending evolution gives examples like gene duplication, de novo gene birth and sequence modification that show a new genetic information can appear in the genome via evolution.
The typical creationist response involves claiming that this is obviously not actually "new information" because it was ✨obviously✨ derived from pre-existing information. In other words: genetic sequences derived directly from other sequences do not count as "new information".
However, this claim actually poses huge problem for the initial claim of the creationist. There is supposed to be a large amount of genetic material completely unrelated to the already existing one (so called "new information") but the problem is that... that's actually not really true. Many useful genes that are crucial for functioning of major evolutionary adaptations are actually derived from pre-existing information. For example many orphan genes (genes that do not have genes related to them) frequently show similarities to non-coding sequences in same or other, related taxa. This simply suggests that orphan genes originate from these non-coding sequences (a process known as de novo gene birth). Analogically, important proteins such as crystallins are frequently derived from other proteins - in case of crystallins (structural proteins present in eye's lens) depending on the animal phylum they are derived from Heat Shock Proteins or even enzymes such as Lactate Dehydrogenase.
If you want to read more about such re-enginiring you may want to read this article regarding crystallin evolution:
Evolution of crystallins for a role in the vertebrate eye lens - PMC https://share.google/kv2FOwBhjWrFpJzWw
In other words - creationists' initial claim is debunked by their own deflection because they accidentally admit that the supposed huge amounts of new, unrelated genetic information are not actually needed as useful information can be derived from pre-existing one.
Sometimes, when creationists claimed that such insurmountable MOUNTAINS of "new information" are required for evolution to work, I asked them what evidence do they have that a given example of transition (for example from fish to amphibian) would require tons and tons of information that couldn't be explained by gene duplication or other known mechanisms.
As you may suspect they weren't able to provide even a single source that would claim that this is the case. One example I tackled was about evolution of lungs. Unsurprisingly, the sources I've read explained that in reality, many genes responsible for development of lungs have already been present in ancestral genomes and are related to other genes that are not involved in formation of lungs.
And that allows me to connect this whole mini-essay to my initial thesis regarding lack of evidence for creationism. As you can see, creationists like to make huge claims but when they are actually asked to provide valid evidence they... come out empty handed. That's why frequently they have to make huge logical leaps such as constantly redefining what constitutes as "loss of information and degradation", assert that there should be magnitudes more of transitional fossils while providing no evidence, reasons or even arguments why that should be the case, claiming that modern human genetic diversity should be much higher if evolution was true (because apparently there's no such thing as a bottleneck effect), etc. etc. etc. And since there's no valid evidence provided (even though creationists will at least sometimes provide evidence it usually does not actually support what they're saying) it's fair to conclude that creationism itself has no validity to speak of as well.
I'd honestly like to add more to this specific post but I'm currently a bit out of time so I'm probably going to focus on other points in my other blog posts.
And here goes a picture of a baby fruit bat (because Chiropterans are my favorite mammals).
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