Scientist Reacts to "Fossil Record Debunked" | Reacteria

here we are back again and i'm super excited to get started today because today i'm going to be reacting to this video called debunked the fossil record proves evolution published by reasons for hope and i'm so excited to react to this video because i found out about this video on tick tock reasons for hope has a tick tock channel just like i do and they published this video there in two parts and somebody tagged me in that video asking me to do a react tyria episode about it and reasons for hope commented on their comment calling them out and saying that they were a problem and that they should already know all this stuff and not have to call somebody else in to come fight their battles for them which is a remarkably shitty thing to say so i'm just stoked to death to get started on this video because it's gonna be this awesome cross platform semi-collaborative mashup mumbo jumbo hootin annie i'm just i'm stoked let's get into it welcome back to reacteria [Music] this is a pretty short video it's only four minutes and 20 seconds long but judging by what i've seen on tiktok from the weird prager university way in which this video is presented and also some of the other content that rhys rope has published i'm pretty certain that we're going to be able to extract a lot of information out of this video but before i get started you know i gotta thank my patrons on patreon every single week my patreon grows and i get new friends and new fans and new supporters and new patrons who come in and bring life to my discord server and make weird memes about me and it just it tickles me and it makes me so very happy and i just i can't express how grateful i am to have all of these incredible supporters because not only do they bring me joy but they make all of this possible every single new patron is one less reason for me to worry about food and keeping the lights on and i cannot express how much that helps both with just not having to worry about my job but also being able to do this so sincerely thank you patrons every single one of you rock and if you watching this are not a patron and you want to be you can find the link to my patreon in the description of this video i should point out though that as much as i try to push my patreon and my merch because it makes me money if you can't afford to do any of that i'm still sincerely happy that you're here i wouldn't have a channel i wouldn't have a patreon if i didn't have a bunch of people watching so if you do nothing else but watch my videos and click subscribe you have no idea how much that means to me so thank you to everybody for being here it means the world to me all right now enough of the sappy stuff let's get into the video we've unearthed millions of fossils around the world so with all this evidence so to speak it's clear that the fossil record proves evolution right well actually no didn't win darwin was alive and hasn't since he's been gone in fact chucky d himself knew this when he wrote the following geology surely does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain and this perhaps is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory the explanation lies as i believe in the extreme imperfection of the geological record okay first of all you said here that this quote is from chapter 10 of on the origin of species it isn't it's from chapter nine and if you grab your copy of on the origin of species and you open it up to chapter nine you'll see here that this chapter is titled on the imperfection of the geological record this entire chapter is about why the fossil record is incomplete and why just saying that it's incomplete isn't a good argument against evolution so he wasn't admitting that the fossil record debunks the idea of evolution here he was being academically honest and saying here's a potential argument against what i'm saying and here's my counter-argument to that and that writing style of addressing a potentially perceived problem before it's even brought up is pretty consistent throughout the book in fact the quote that you polled here is the end of the first paragraph of this chapter and the last sentence here is the explanation lies as i believe in the extreme imperfection of the geological record he's saying that the incomplete fossil record is caused by the imperfect geological record you're using his explanation as if it's part of the problem and it's not i also want to point out just how weird and silly this whole argument is first of all darwin did have lots of fossils at his disposal he even discovered a few species through the fossils that he himself unearthed secondly though even if he didn't have any fossils it wouldn't matter this book was published in 1859 we've discovered a lot more fossils since then millions by your own admission but third and most importantly none of this matters because we don't worship darwin i really want to drive this point home because i get this all the time so many videos that people send me are all about how darwin renounced evolution before he died or how he was actually religious or how he got this or that wrong and so the whole theory should be thrown out i realize that this is really tough to understand if you're a super dogmatic person but in science we don't follow people we follow evidence if tomorrow we found a whole bunch of lost letters from darwin saying that he is now renouncing evolution and that he is following the way of the sith and that he's off to conquer the moon it wouldn't change a single thing about evolution because darwin is not the final arbiter of biology he got some stuff right he got some stuff wrong he was just a dude who made some really interesting observations and came up with a really great idea that's it scientists and philosophers had ideas about evolution thousands of years before darwin and we have been studying and making new discoveries about evolution for hundreds of years since darwin seriously you gotta leave darwin alone he is not as big of a linchpin in this whole thing as you think he is but surely after all the time since darwin digging and discovering fossil after fossil we have a more perfect geological record that supports evolution right not even close bud listen to how two renowned evolutionary biologists summarize the truth instead of finding the slow smooth and progressive changes they saw in the fossil record rapid burst of change new species appearing seemingly out of nowhere and then remaining unchanged for millions of years patterns hauntingly reminiscent of creation but there was no turning back and biologists have for the past century fought over how best to explain the diversity of life does it arise from the gentle molding of genes by natural selection or are there powerful invisible hands at work that visit revolutionary changes upon the biotic world niles eldritch has for three decades been among the leading voices of dissent against what he regards as a simplistic ultra darwinian view of the world that the struggle amongst genes for reproductive success provides a sufficient explanation for organismic diversity the pattern of evolution is his passionate account of how he came to that view eldritch outlines in a popular style a theory of matter in motion to entrain biological evolution to the many climactic geological and even tectonic forces that sculpt the earth eldret sees the power inevitability and even occasional cyclicity behind many of the otherwise puzzling patterns that characterize the history of biotic evolution on this planet that quote that you just used was pulled from a review that mark pagle wrote about a book called the pattern of evolution he wasn't saying that the fossil record supports creationism he was giving a history of science and explaining how early evolutionary biologists were struggling to get away from the creationist model that had been so prevalent for so long you just took an evolutionary biologist's review of a book about evolutionary biology and cited it as a scientific argument for creationism what is wrong with you by the way just for fun let's take a quick look at mark pagle's google scholar page here we've got the comparative method in evolutionary biology inferring historical patterns in biological evolution inferring evolutionary processes from phylogenys yeah this guy really does hate evolution doesn't he the fossil record doesn't show gradual change and every paleontologist has known that ever since cuvier or however you pronounce that do you know what that quote was about punctuated equilibrium it's a model for understanding the fossil record it doesn't go against evolution it's a way of understanding evolution do you know who came up with the idea of punctuated equilibrium stephen j gould do you know who you just quoted here steven j gould by the way it says here that this quote was from a lecture that gould gave back in 1980 and i went searching for that lecture to see if i could find this quote in its full context and i can't find it anywhere but i did find this exact quote cited in this book here called creation and evolution compatible or in conflict by jay siegert let's look that guy up jay siegert has a degree in engineering technology and spent 14 years in the computer programming industry before entering full-time ministry he's the co-founder and principal speaker of the creation education center in wisconsin why would a computer programmer be writing books about evolution well here's a clip that i found of jay siegert that should shed a little bit of light on the situation does it not blow your mind that biologists that understand and study this can still say yep evolution happened well it's interesting because most biologists aren't even aware of these things most scientists certainly aren't they're not even studying evolution they're making rocket fuel fast computers they're curing diseases they're doing great things but they don't know much about evolution they just assume that there are phd scientists out there who have studied it and proven it and it's good enough for them so they have faith in those other scientists and even many of the scientists who are studying evolution haven't gotten to this level they're not that aware of these details is it just that they're so focused on their field that they really okay somebody else has got that i'm i'm dealing with oil or plastic or whatever it is sure and it's not necessarily their fault you know we can't know everything so most scientists are very focused and they know a lot about one area but they don't really know the big picture that's a man who spent 14 years programming computers trying to convince you that he understands biology better than all the people who have devoted their whole lives to studying it and just in case you think that you might be onto something i also found this clip well again the analogy was let's say you worked in a smartphone factory and your job is to write part of the instruction manual to give it to the manufacturing plant to make these phones and so your boss comes to you one day and says i've got a project for you i want you to write the chapter in this manual that explains how these phones are going to download apps from the web and you say no problem that's what i do so your boss is walking away he comes back and he says well wait i forgot one thing when you write your chapter on how to download apps you have to write it in such a way that when you read it backwards it explains how this phone is going to play mp3s in videos wow and you'd be looking at thinking i mean you're kidding right it's impossible he's like no i'm serious this is what we have to do we only have so much room to work with we got to get a lot of information crammed in there well that's humanly impossible not only is it humanly impossible you can't even program a computer to write an entire chapter of separate sets of instructions but that's what we're seeing in the dna you ready to read it one way an entire chapter set of instructions to make all these proteins and you read it backwards a totally separate set of proteins to do something completely different that's a man who spent 14 years programming computers not understanding that dna isn't coded in binary it has four letters not two and it's groups of three letters that code for amino acids for more on that check out this video here no shade to computer programmers by the way you just need to ask yourself if you would be cool with it if your doctor had spent the last 14 years repairing air conditioners but was convinced that he understood medicine better than all these fancy mds who put their faith in things like mri machines and antibiotics i made that joke and then i immediately realized that there are legions of anti-vaxxers out there that are doing exactly that with chilling amounts of confidence and predictability i ain't no doctor but my cousin's brother's mailman's uncle's dog got over the flu with nothing but a pack of rolos and some detox footpaths so i don't need no government poison never mind the fact that i trust expert doctors and scientists on literally every other issue from vehicle specification to water purification all the time without thinking about it somebody on the internet said the word socialism and while i don't rightly know what socialism is i'm pretty sure it involves vaccines besides the jab i've never called a vaccine a jab once in my life but the term is popular now so i use it prolifically the jab ain't 100 effective mind you neither are condoms airbag seat belts or my own human organs but in this particularly politicized context those odds trouble me greatly and just like the cigarettes i'm smoking the big mac that i'm eating the mountain dew that i'm drinking and the countless other pharmaceuticals that i've consumed over the course of my life i just don't know what's in it so i just can't trust it i guess i'll just have to wait until i've already gotten several other people sick while stockpiling toilet paper and then i can set up a gofundme begging people for money and prayers because i suddenly realized that covert is no joke at precisely the same moment that it began to affect me personally something something individual rights do your own research joe wrote okay that was scary bad example moving on okay i could go on and on but there's always going to be opposing views because on both sides of the debate the same evidence is interpreted through different worldviews you got to remember that people facts don't say anything people say things based on their interpretation of facts influenced by their worldview but that's a whole other subject and i don't want to get into it right now that part's actually true we can agree on what the facts are and still disagree on what those facts mean that's why matthew johnson who's an archaeologist that i had to read a lot of in grad school often defines theory as putting facts in order i should point out to anybody who's a fan of johnson that i realize that is one of his many definitions of the word theory don't at me bro the point is this part of the video is half right people can come to wildly different conclusions based on the same evidence because they have different world views but the problem is evolution is not a world view it's a fact scientists are debating how evolution happens and why evolution happens but they are not debating if evolution happens this is something that i covered back in the very first video of this series remember the one where i misspelled a bunch of stuff a theory is not a guess it is a functional explanation of observed natural phenomena that's backed by all the best evidence that we have there are theories about evolution there are theories concerning evolution there are theories within evolution but evolution itself is a fact just like gravity and the shape of the earth it's round by the way can't believe that i have to clarify that in 2022. instead hey let's have a little fun and take a look at some popular secular articles and charts on the fossil record and see if we can learn to separate facts from interpretation of facts by asking a few simple questions question one did the artiste take any artistic license with what i'm looking at here check this out because this happens all the time look isn't that sweet so cute and fluffy okay why do you think the artist made these creatures appear more human-like by throwing in an affectionate smile and depicting them hanging out like a human family going to a picnic or something why did he draw them walking upright why make the shapes and colors of their eyes more human than ape is any of it based on actual fossil evidence let's answer each of those questions one by one number one we know what their faces looked like because of the fields of paleoanthropology and forensics and comparative anatomy that allow us to reconstruct facial features from skulls and they probably did smile considering the fact that pretty much all primate species do so it would make sense that our ancestors did too by the way fun fact each primate species that exhibit smiling has their own social context for what smiling means and usually it's a submissive behavior which is why a lot of bioanthropologists today believe that our social context for smiling being something to indicate familiarity and joy and approval probably evolved from those behavior specifically number two they're all gathered together in a group like they're going to a picnic like this because humans are social animals so again it would make a lot of sense to say that our ancestors exhibited similar behaviors especially these ones here these are australopithecines in this picture we have tremendous amounts of evidence showing that they hunted and traveled together in groups they had communities just like lots of other primate species do just like we do number three they're depicted as walking upright because they walked upright and we know that for sure because of the fossil evidence we see that the foramen magnum is positioned in the bottom of the skull not in the back of the skull we can see the shape of their spine the shape of their pelvis the shape of their feet we can see the angle of their knees all adaptations for bipedal walking and also i can't stress this enough because i say it almost every other video we have fossilized footprints from australopithecines that show bipedal walking number four the shape of their eyes is another thing that we can tell from fossils and this picture is accurate in that if you're talking about the color of their eyes obviously we can't know that for sure but referring specifically to the sclera or the whites of the eyes and how ours are so much bigger than other primates that's something that evolved over the past seven million years that would be at the right time in this picture and this species would have had good use for that adaptation so it's totally reasonable to put it here number five we're not trying to make them look more human and less ape humans are apes you've got to stop trying to draw a line between these two if you want to be taken seriously and finally number six just in case all of my answers here weren't clear yes this painting is based on actual fossil evidence of course not but if you want the story of evolution to appear more convincing you just might fill in missing gaps with your presuppositional imagination just saying that part of the video is also true not the part about filling in gaps with your presuppositions that's all nonsense the part where he says just saying because that's what he's doing he's just saying things none of this is based in science he's just saying stuff question two is the attention-grabbing headline or title supported by actual facts for instance take a look at this popular book called why evolution is true we don't even have to go any further than the jacket on this one because on it you've got a dyno evolving into a bird in three simple steps there you go but then on the inside this is written and i kid you not the jacket depicts a chronological sequence of fossils showing the evolution of birds we do not know whether the actual line of descent included now wait for it the first three say what now doesn't that mean these three shouldn't be on the cover then which means all you got is a modern bird right no evolution just a bird talk about worldview filling in gaps ignoring the obligatory criticisms of literally judging a book by its cover i didn't know about this quote because my copy of this book is paperback which means it doesn't have a jacket but i did hit the index and look up the part where he talks about bird evolution the most and i found this paragraph while we may speculate about the details the existence of transitional fossils and the evolution of birds from reptiles is fact fossils like archaeopteryx and its later relatives show a mixture of bird-like and early reptilian traits and they occur at the right time in the fossil record scientists predicted that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs and sure enough we find theropod dinosaurs with feathers we see a progression in time from early theropods having thin filamentous body coverings to later ones with distinct feathers probably adept gliders what we see in bird evolution is the refashioning of old features four limbs with fingers and thin filaments on the skin into new ones fingerless wings and feathers just as evolutionary theory predicts so again i'm not sure what was written in the jacket of this book but i'm gonna go ahead and bet that it was something like that which means that just like the last couple of quotes that you used you found an evolutionary biologist you took something that they said way out of context to try to support your point and it's painfully obvious to anybody who knows the first thing about this stuff that you're just bs'ing your way through this video like a college kid who's trying to beef up the reference section in their term paper by finding any source that's even a little bit related to what they're saying just to make it look like a smart person agrees with them and there's no shame in doing that i've had senioritis too we've all been there just you know don't put that crap on the internet okay you're not gonna believe this but i really didn't like leaving that last section about what was written on the inner jacket as just pure speculation so i've been on google trying to find any reference that i can find to that quote and you'll never guess where i found it it's right here on page 83 of creation and evolution compatible or in conflict by jay siegert and jay likens this quote to steve martin's quote about how the first step to becoming a millionaire is to just get a million dollars but he has to put this caveat in here about how he does not endorse steve martin because his humor is certainly not appropriate about three weeks ago i met a girl she was real nice and she invited me to her apartment so i went over there and she had the best [ __ ] i have ever oh now come on i'm talking about her cat now that makes me sick right there [Music] that cat was the best i ever had so again this is a man who spent 14 years programming computers who found the spare time to read literally just the cover of a book about evolution and is now convinced that he understands evolution better than the person who wrote the book i like to think that jay seeger was just sitting at his desk one day just furiously cranking out some javascript trying to figure out how to hack runescape so he could power level his phishing ability when suddenly he just had this revelation like wait a minute i can't write this code backwards if i can't code backwards and i can't do dna backward if dna can't be written backwards and evolution can't happen forwards oh god i see it now i can see the secrets as i see the future mother mother i have awakened i have gazed beyond the walls of time and touch the beard of odin on to question three what do the graphics on evolutionary charts indicate i mean they sure do look convincing for instance on this one from the dinosaur book you got solid red columns and white columns showing gradual progression over time but let's read the almost imperceptible two-point font over here it reads tinted areas indicate solid fossil evidence which means the white areas represent no solid fossil evidence right okay then take them away uh-oh looks like patterns hauntingly reminiscent of creation i'd say right from their own charts and the same thing goes for the dotted lines on this one look at all of them just so we're clear dotted lines indicate zero evidence remove them and what do you get no transitional forms or evidence of gradual progression a bat is a bat a kangaroo is a kangaroo and a horse is a horse this actually could be an interesting argument because there is something to talk about here we're going to talk about in a second but notice how this video really highlights that word solid fossil evidence which in this case just means an abundance of fossil evidence but they use it to mean no good or reliable fossil evidence and then they immediately use it again to mean no evidence whatsoever see how they did that little transition there now back to the issue at hand here i've got a diagram showing several species that are important in human evolution each one of those bars is a different species and you can see how the edges of the bars are kind of fuzzy and that some of the bars are a little bit fuzzier than others that's because each bar represents a different species and the ends of those bars represent when that species came into or exited out of the fossil record so the fuzzy ends there are because we only have a few fossils from those particular times and we're not exactly sure when the very first one or when the very last one actually was so that fuzziness there is indicating that we could find another fossil that shows us that this species is around a little bit longer and the more fuzzy it is the more scant that evidence is but those fossils still exist we're just not as sure about this part as we are about this other part you'll also notice that this isn't a cladogram this isn't shaped like a family tree and that's because those types of diagrams are made from inferences that we can make by studying the fossil record the timelines and also what traits pop up when this is something that i had to do quite a bit during my second biology degree we had to be given a chart with saying here's species 1 through 12 or whatever and here are the traits that they have and we have to use those traits to construct the most parsimonious phylogeny or the most logical family tree so for example if i had this group of species that all had wings and this group of species that all didn't it would make a lot more sense to say that they didn't have wings and then wings evolved and then they had wings from then on than it does to say they didn't have wings and then they evolved wings and then some of them lost the wings and then they got the wings back do those things happen yes they absolutely do but should that be your first assumption no it should not so that is what we mean by solid fossil evidence we're not saying that we don't have any fossils and we're not saying that we're just making it all up we're saying that this area here could potentially change if we're presented with new evidence whereas these other areas here are pretty much concrete hey editing forest here i was just re-watching this part and i don't think that i really properly explained one very critical part of this which is that cladograms don't work the way that these people think that they do they showed all of the straight lines and then they pulled away all of the diagonal lines and they said c these are all horses and these are all bats and these are all whatever and there's no transitional forms in here and what they don't realize is that those straight lines are full of transitional forms that's all that they are it leads up to the modern species that we all know and love today the diagonal lines are just showing the relationships between those lineages so that's why they're shaped that way and those diagonal lines those relationships those are what could potentially change with more solid fossil evidence so when i was talking about being back in college and drawing these cladograms that's what i was talking about is i get a bunch of species with however many different characteristics i show their relationships how they're connected together based on those characteristics and if i were to get more data later that might tweak how i lay out the relationships but that doesn't change the fact that they evolved and it doesn't change the transitions it just affects the relationships so that's what we're talking about here with solid fossil evidence that is what these people don't understand and it just goes to show that if these guys don't even know how cladograms work they have absolutely no idea what they are talking about whatsoever it's also important to point out that these phylogenies and cladograms aren't without criticism here's one example from mark pagle the guy that you misrepresented earlier in this paper he points out how evolution by its very nature occasionally covers its own tracks and in this paper he cites another paper here by luca and panel which shows the mathematical models for simulating speciation and then they go on to talk about how unreliable those models can be we all know that these cladograms aren't set in stone they're just teaching tools to show other people oftentimes other scientists what the best evidence currently points to so when they say that this particular part isn't backed by solid fossil evidence they're not admitting to some big conspiracy they're just being intellectually honest you should try it sometime and in summary we agree with mr d geology surely does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain not then not now not ever and that means the whole idea that the fossil record proves evolution has been debunked adios we already covered why that's a really bad argument but just for fun to wrap up let's crack open our copy of on the origin of species to the actual chapter 10 where darwin writes this he who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record will rightly reject my whole theory for he may ask in vain where are the numberless transitional links which must have formerly connected the closely allied or representative species found in the several stages of the same great formation he may disbelieve in the enormous intervals of time which have elapsed between our consecutive formations he may overlook how important a part migration must have played when the formations of any one region alone as out of europe are considered he may urge the apparent but often falsely apparent sudden coming in of whole groups of species he may ask where are the remains of those infinitely numerous organisms which must have existed long before the first bed of the silurian system was deposited if the geological record be as imperfect as i believe it to be and it may at least be asserted that the record cannot be proved to be much more perfect than the main objections to the theory of natural selection are greatly diminished or disappear on the other hand all the chief laws of paleontology plainly proclaim as it seems to me that species have been produced by ordinary generations old forms having been supplanted by new and improved forms of life produced by the laws of variation still acting around us and preserved by natural selection that's what happens when you think really really hard you're able to understand something so well that you can even understand how other people won't understand it and the history of science is full of stories like that although i do admit darwin is my favorite right next to mendeleev well this was a relatively short video but they managed to squeeze a lot of wrong things into just over four minutes and they mainly did it by asking a lot of really dishonest questions rapid fire to try to imply that if they can ask a question that must mean that there is no good answer and that's just silly and for that reason i give this video a science teacher challenge level three out of ten it isn't great but it's pretty average as far as creationism is concerned and with that i'm forrest valkyrie thank you so much for watching for liking for commenting for subscribing and all the other stuff that you're doing on youtube please exit through the gift shop on your way out pick up one of these sweet t-shirts if you like terrible podcasts i've got one of those linked down below as well have an awesome rest of your day and never stop learning bye [Music] so [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Forrest Valkai

Views: 401,270

Keywords: scientist, reacts, reaction, biology, science, evolution, faith, truth, creationism, evolve, humans, bacteria, funny, stupid, gross, dumb, weird, renegade, teacher, tiktok, forrest, valkai, creation, bible, biblical, atheist, agnostic

Id: -UT-7S7g6_I

Length: 33min 4sec (1984 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 24 2022