I’ve got a lovely crocoduck tie, but maybe I need a new pigbird tie. Look! Evolution is impossible! It’s like a flying pig!

This is some
new awful short video from Answers in Genesis. It’s slick and fast and just babbles rapid-fire lies at the viewer — don’t stop, don’t think, you might catch on to the nonsense!

It makes precisely two discrete claims that it claims disprove evolution. All you have to do is watch this video and yay, you’re done, you can forget that science stuff and move on to loving Jesus. Here are the arguments:

1. 
   There is no known observable process by which new genetic information can be added to an organism’s genetic code.

   Except mutations and gene transfer, of course. Oh, hey, they forgot those! That does sort of scuttle their whole point. I’m afraid we do know of observable processes that add measurable, quantitative genetic information to an organism (not to its code, though: that’s stupid. Whoever created this thing is one of those common ignoramuses who can’t tell the difference between a genome and a genetic code). Geneticists have seen this happen: look at copy number variants in humans, for instance, and geneticists have seen novel mutants in flies in which a segment of the genome is duplicated; parents don’t have it, progeny does. We also have evidence from gene families. We have five α globin genes and six β globin genes (some of which are dead pseudogenes), for instance, and they’re clearly derived by duplication and divergence.

   So sorry, guys, this one is simply a lie. I’d be happy to be confronted by a creationist peddling this bit of misinformation, since it is so patently bogus.

2. 
   Life has never been observed to come from non-life.

   Ooh, better. This claim is literally true and not a flat-out lie. It’s also irrelevant. One of the things you’ll discover as you get deeper and deeper into biology is that it’s chemistry all the way down. There are no vital agents working away inside a cell, adding intelligent guidance: it’s all stoichiometry and reaction kinetics and thermodynamics. In a sense, all life is built of non-life and denying it is like seeing the Lego Millennium Falcon and arguing that it couldn’t possibly be made of little tiny plastic bricks. Yeah, it is.

   But it’s true that we haven’t seen life re-evolving from simple chemicals now, and there’s a good reason for that: this planet is now crawling with life everywhere, and life’s building blocks that form nowadays don’t last long — they’re lunch. We also have only rudimentary ideas of what prebiotic chemicals were reacting in ancient seas, so we can’t even simulate early chemistry in an organism-free test tube, yet. Scientists are busily tinkering, though, and we do have protocols that spontaneously produced complex organic chemicals from inorganic sources, we just haven’t found the formula for a chemical replicator yet.

   But it’s an irrelevant objection, anyway. Nobody has shown me god conjuring people out of mud, either. Creationists have their own problem of demonstrating origins, and they aren’t even trying to puzzle it out — goddidit, they’re done.

The conclusion is, of course, to claim that they have now disproven evolution (they haven’t), and therefore…Jesus. Faulty premises and ludicrous leaps of logic make this one a pathetic foray into addressing evolution. It’s slick, though — maybe they should have used a picture of a greased pig as their header image.

(Also on FtB)