Out of curiosity, I searched on youtube "theory of evolution". Out of the first 20 results, 4 were about trying to prove that evolution is a myth, and it never happened.

Then I tried in Italian, "Teoria dell'evoluzione". 9 results of the first 20 were about "debunking" the theory of evolution.

I'm not sure this is related to my personal feed, but I found it interesting. It's almost half of the results in Italian!

@realcaseyrollins Are you being ironic? I think it's just that those videos are more seen, or more abundant

@arteteco Nope. What you're documenting is algorithms censoring english search results debunking evolution. What is notable about this is that, in comparison, the french results are far more balanced, which make it seem more likely to me that this a censorship and not just a coincidence.

@realcaseyrollins how do you know different languages of youtube have different algorithms and that that is the reason of the difference in the number of pro-against in the results?

Also, what do you mean by "more balanced"? Compared to what?

@arteteco Because efforts for censorship would likely target keywords, and those keywords might only be in certain languages, depending on the market the company wishes to target their censorship for.

As far as balance, it we that an equal representation of both the belief and disbelief of a theory is only fair, albeit too much to ask if it's widely believed like evolution.

@realcaseyrollins So you don't have like a proof, is just "likely"?

I don't see any reason for google to censor this contents, they basically want to get you what you are looking for. If you have evidence, I'll surely change my mind, but frankly it was also beside the scope of my very quick and dirty 5 minutes research =D

If for you 50/50 is a balanced representation of a theory for which we have a basically unanimous scientific consensus, that is another kind of problem. It's like saying that we should have 50/50 on the existence of cells.

@arteteco

1) Google has done this sort of censorship before, which is why I think I is likely.

youtu.be/YOByUDv1ftQ
youtu.be/G-dh5wpXNA0

2) Also, the theory of evolution is not comparable to the existence of cells; one is a theory and the other can be proven imperically.

Now not everyone supports evolution, and even those who do have different opinions on how it works. Besides, the most reliable texts of all time, the Bible, already tell us how the world came into being.

@realcaseyrollins there is not a single biologist/naturalist/ecologist/scientist working with this stuff who doesn't support evolution. The consensus is basically unanimous.

The fact that scientists disagree on the details is because we are scientists. Even on the mechanisms involved in the cell there are disagreement and there is still stuff to explore, doesn't mean the cell theory should collapse.

This was just to keep the example, but you can choose whatever theory and you'll see scientists debating on the details, consequences, relative importance of every factor and so on.

@realcaseyrollins half of the people, yes, I know the stats.
How many of the scientists, though? Like all of us.

When to keep a conversation the person I'm talking to, ie you, forces me to use hours of my time reading resources and watching videos, while I managed to keep most of the very complex evolutionary theory stuff down to a few lines, I'm sorry buddy, but seems like a dick move, and I'm out of the conversation.

@arteteco That's fair.

Here's an excerpt from one of the resources that serves as a pretty good case against it, listing issues in the evolutionary theory:

(1) Tell students that the fossil record often lacks transitional forms and that there are “explosions” of new life forms, a pattern of radiations that challenges Darwinian evolutionary theory.
(2) Tell students that many scientists have challenged the ability of random mutation and natural selection to produce complex biological features.
(3) Tell students that many lines of evidence for Darwinian evolution and common descent are weak:
a. Vertebrate embryos start out developing very differently, in contrast with the drawings of embryos often found in textbooks which mostly appear similar.
b. DNA evidence paints conflicting pictures of the “tree of life”. There is no such single “tree.”
c. Evidence of small-scale changes, such as the modest changes in the size of finch-beaks or slight changes in the color frequencies in the wings of “peppered moths”, shows microevolution, NOT macroevolution.

@realcaseyrollins

1) We have explosions, like the cambrian explosion, which have a massive radiation, and we also have transitional forms, like we have for many of the horse ancestors. Some speciation events even happen in a single season, others in millions of years. Evolution does not have a fixed rate, but varies. This is called, in the field, punctuated equilibrium and saltation, proposed by stephen j gould (just to give you some keywords to search)

2) Who? And how was the challenge proposed, and how did it developed?

3)
a) The vertebrate embryos develop in a very similar way actually. Have you ever seen an embryo development? Do you think you can have one without gastrulation, just to say one?

b)Yep, we do not have a single tree of life. We have many different trees, with support for branches, oftentimes based on the traits we use in our matrix. I don't think we'll ever know the real tree (even if we knew wouldn't know that is the one), but we can make guesses and those are developing very quickly. We can get closer and closer, and in the past 40 years we have major jumps in the field. What is exactly the point here? Is like saying that tectonic isn't real because I can't tell you exactly where a single rock was formed. We use those methods daily in the medical field when we look at virus evolution and changes, agronomical pest control because they evolve pretty fast, etc. Rebuilding the tree is a corner stone of such researches, and it works pretty well even without a 100% probability.

c) We do have evidence for both macro and microevolution. The mechanisms involved are the same (mutation, drift, selection, etc) but the scale of course changes. The methods could be paleonthological, molecular, you name it.

So, what's really your point? All of the methods of inquiry we have agree (with higher or smaller variance) on the results. You'll never have a rabbit in the precambrian.

@arteteco

1) You are correct on this point (link.springer.com/article/10.1)

2) There is a big list here (discovery.org/m/2019/10/Scient) but it's actually a whole lot, even more than I was expecting. Most of them have PhDs in Chemistry, Physics, Biochemistry, Genetics, and Biology, among others.

(I unfortunately am not familiar with all their critiques of evolution, however.)

3)
a) “Counter to the expectations of early embryonic conservation, many studies have shown that there is often remarkable divergence between related species both early and late in development.” “despite repeated assertions of the uniformity of early embryos within members of a phylum, development before the phylotypic stage is very varied.”

(evolutionnews.org/2015/02/prob)

b) I think the point here is to say all life did not evolve from a single organism, as it does not refuse evolution per se, but disagrees with the concept of all of life descending from a singular life form.

c) What is the evidence for macroevolution?

@realcaseyrollins

2) Even I would sign off there. Mutation and natural selection are not enough to explain life (if you don't chip in the drift I say it's a pretty bad framework in general), and I totally agree that all evidence should always be carefully examinated. Darwin also had some things wrong, and at the time genetics didn't even exist, so of course we need to work on it. How is this a list of people refusing evolution? Am I missing something?

3)

a) Again, you have some parts of the onthogenesis which are the same regardless of the species for all vertebrates, like gastrulation, or the development of the notochord. You have many body parts which are evidently analogous, I am not a zoologist so I may not have all the comparative anatomy straight regarding vertebrates. Of course there are going to be differences, otherwise they would be the same organisms.

b) just because we don't know the tree of life it means that life originated multiple times? How so? Just consider for a moment that evolution happened from a single organism: why, in this case, you reckon that it would be easy to trace all of the existing life forms lineages? Data is messy, and spans billion of years.

c) For example the evolution of cetacea, where you still see unused appendeces useful for land movement today, you have fossils of transition and you have molecular evidence. I'm sure it makes sense to you that it's more difficult to gather all the evidence for something that took millions of years, but we have a lot of stuff.
Some changes may often be due to how the DNA works, especially in terms of mutations on a regulatory gene, like the Hox. But I really am trying to avoid being too technical.

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