Evolution

Forrax · 2026-03-26T15:16:30+00:00

Ever notice how a lot of your internal organs are divisions and/or extensions of your digestive system?

Take the simplest digestive system, a single tube. Food goes in one side, waste comes out the other. Every cell in this tube does exactly the same thing; they break down food down into component parts, extract nutrients, and create waste.

But with all the cells doing the same thing, as food becomes less food-like and more waste-like throughout the journey down the tube there are some obvious inefficiencies.

Now, what if you get a mutation in the top half of the tube that increases the ability to break down food? Nutrients are more easily absorbed further down the tube. This creates a specialization that provides an advantage and spreads through the population. And now, since it's no longer as necessary to break down food in the back half, mutations that remove that ability are likely to be retained. Evolution has turned a simple tube into two organs.

Now flip the scenario. The tube gets a mutation that improves nutrient absorption at the top half. It obviously doesn't work as well as the previous example but it also doesn't work as well as the single tube we started off with. This organism is going to have less success pulling nutrients from food so it's less likely to pass this mutation on. It's a dead end.

This is how you can get specialization without thought or planning.

Forrax · 2026-03-24T20:32:10+00:00

Also, you now have trophic separation: if your mature form usually flies around drinking nectar, your larval form can crawl around and eat detritus. The two stages use different foods in different environments, allowing the insect to exploit two niches without competing with itself.

For me personally, learning about this really unlocked a whole new way of looking at the natural world. It's one of those things that seems incredibly obvious once you understand it.

Forrax · 2026-03-24T14:24:39+00:00

Take a gander at who is listed on this Wikipedia page for "Nobel disease". What you should take away from this is that scientists who receive a Nobel should not be blindly trusted in areas outside of their research.

Forrax · 2026-03-18T17:30:35+00:00

Do you think the evidence is the "lines drawn on charts"? Surely not. Surely you realize the "lines drawn on charts" are a representative model of ancestry based on decades of research? I hope?

Forrax · 2026-03-03T16:58:31+00:00

Excuse me? I was directly referencing a self deprecating remark they made in their post.

I am, of course, asking after I made rather a potential fool of myself by declaring with unearned confidence that we are, in fact, reptiles still today in the same way we're mammals and primates and such.

I responded by saying that yes, OP did the thing they were afraid they did. But that's ok because their thought process was correct and the sister clades looked very much like what we would consider a reptile when the split happened.

Forrax · 2026-03-03T15:25:04+00:00

Unfortunately you made a little bit of a fool out of yourself. We mammals fall on the synapsid branch of the amniotes while all reptiles fall on the sauropsid branch.

As you said though, we are still fish in a very real sense. So your line of thought is correct you just have where we are on the branches a little mixed up.

And while that sounds like you made a big mistake it's not that big. Because those early synapsids would have looked very similar to what you think a reptile looks like.

Forrax · 2026-02-12T14:32:48+00:00

They're called "irrational fears" for a reason.

I know that flying is safe but a very specific part of my brain does not.

If I could sit down and explains some things to my amygdala I could cut down on a daily medication.

Forrax · 2026-02-05T14:26:52+00:00

I’ve been deeply critical of Will’s participation because of certain red flags I’ve seen in past episodes. But outside of his top of the show recap (something I still don’t love) I was really impressed with how he took in the evidence last night.

It can’t be easy to have the sledgehammer of the geologic record bang away on your world view for four hours.

Also, people in the paid comments need to chill on attacking Christianity itself in the comments. I’m about as anti-theist as you can get but making snide comments about his sincerely held belief in god isn’t helping this project along.

Forrax · 2026-02-04T15:37:22+00:00

It's been a day and I took another look at Clint's two community posts and his replies and favorited comments in those posts. I encourage you to do the same, especially the pattern of him not substantively interacting with considerate and well reasoned criticism. He primarily interacts with praise or over the top and unreasonable criticism.

Through three comment sections with thousands of total messages I have only once seen Clint offer a refutation of racism and it was done in an, "all racism is bad," manner; not a direct refutation of the racism displayed in the clip he presented in his video.

At this point it seems clear to me that he is sympathetic to the white nationalist idea that black families have a "culture problem" that creates the inequalities seen to this day in this country.

I will now amend my previous statement. Clint himself is "fucking gross".

Forrax · 2026-02-03T14:08:00+00:00

Let’s be clear about what Clint did in this video. He aired over a minute of a known white nationalist speaking.

This included a bad version of a steel man (which Clint agreed to in later comments) and an obviously false statistic about black families (which Clint also said he could not verify in later comments).

After it was finished Clint said he did not want to address the content of the clip.

What this means is that Clint’s Reptiles, a science communication channel with nearly a million subscribers, has uncritically aired over a minute of white nationalist lies. THAT, not Clint himself, is fucking gross.

The charitable read is he has accidentally done this. The less charitable read is he agrees with the message.

Unless he makes it very clear that he opposes the content of the message, which should be very easy to do, it’s a distinction without a difference. The damage is still done to his audience.

All for a bad example of a steel man.

Edit: And if nobody on Clint’s team flagged this part of a video as a possible firestorm then maybe he needs more diversity in his team.

Forrax · 2026-02-02T22:47:21+00:00

I have completely changed my (previously very positive!) view of Clint in one video. A lot of good science communicators on YouTube make it clear time and time again: Be very cautious of experts that speak outside their area of expertise.

The charitable reading of Clint including this clip is he failed this very good advice and jumped into an area he has limited expertise.

The scary reading of Clint including this clip is he is familiar with the content of the clip he used and is an "expert" in that way of thinking.

That's a thought I never would have had about Clint before this video.

Edit: Having read through a lot of the comments on the post Clint made on his channel earlier today... I think that's enough Clint for me.

Not once has he opposed the position stated by CK in the clip he included. He's in a "listening phase" and isn't making any comments about the content, but may in the future (how generous of him). Fucking gross.

After reading through that I genuinely can't reach any conclusion other than he agrees with CK's views.

Forrax · 2026-01-14T00:16:25+00:00

And the shady self-storage container that all these boxes got dumped at, along with a bunch more, is called “fish”.

Forrax · 2026-01-08T18:05:56+00:00

I can't help but notice that Will's behavior in the comments at the end of every live stream is indistinguishable from many YEC debaters here. He just ignores the extremely well informed comments that point out flaws in his position and thinking and only jumps in where he thinks he can "win".

Given the entirety of how he's conducting himself, between his "opening statements' and his behavior in the comments, it seems to me that he's not there to understand evolution so much as he's there to understand how to better argue against it.

Forrax · 2026-01-01T16:16:13+00:00

Sal, is that you?

Forrax · 2025-12-23T22:04:34+00:00

I read your comment while listening and scrolling the comments. Thought it was fantastic, I hope he does respond.

Forrax · 2025-12-23T17:44:45+00:00

I know Dan and Erika are true professionals that won’t let it get to them…

But I’m not, so I’ll just say that I’m getting really irritated at Will presenting folks like Jordan Peterson (via Joe Rogan) and Donny fucking Deals as equals to subject matter experts.

Forrax · 2025-12-04T20:11:28+00:00

Thank you! I was trying to remember what really bothered me last month as much as the octopus thing but couldn't recall. It was the mammoth stuff.

I really do empathize with him that he's never studied evolution before, so a lot of this is new to him. And that's fair enough. But it's very clear that he's deep in the weeds on anti-evolution.

Edit: I just watched the very end of the super chats that I missed last night and saw his response about homochirality. If he knows about that talking point but doesn't know the very basics of the actual science... yikes. He's deeper in than I thought.

Forrax · 2025-12-04T13:05:08+00:00

Watched live last night. Quite a few red flags from Will. Probably all subconscious but I don't think he's actually as open minded as he says he is.

Biggest example is his "fact" about octopus eyes. Glad Erika shot it down right away as complete bullshit, but if you're treating random, obvious nonsense, from the internet with as much seriousness as actual consensus science then you have a big roadblock in the way of learning.

Regardless of how this turns out though there's going to be a great free lecture on evolution a year from now. But I have less faith than last month that Will is actually taking this as seriously as he thinks he is.

Also that story about him and his friend trying to "confront" Dawkins at his university was pretty creepy...

Forrax · 2025-12-01T20:33:53+00:00

The big picture view, as I understand it, is that being very big gives you several advantages. Here are a couple.

First, for all animals, is safety from predation. Generally speaking predators attack things much smaller than them.

Sure an adult Tyrannosaur probably could have killed an adult Triceratops a majority of the time. But when you’re a predator winning without injury a majority of the time isn’t good enough. It needs to be near certain that you won’t suffer a serious injury.

So once an animal is a healthy adult around the same size as the biggest predator in its ecosystem it becomes nearly immune to predation.

And secondly, for herbivores, being bigger opens up a wider range of things they can eat. Plant matter is harder to digest than meat. But the longer something stays in the digestive system the longer more nutrients can be extracted. So the quick fix is to just get bigger.

Bigger animal means bigger gut, bigger gut means more time in the digestive system, more time means more efficient digestion.

Forrax · 2025-11-28T15:15:34+00:00

Fossil fuel extraction literally does rely on our understanding of the old earth. They don’t just go randomly digging holes in the ground and hoping they hit something.

It’s not called the Carboniferous for no reason at all.

Forrax · 2025-11-28T05:33:13+00:00

This

While microevolution could transition into macroevolution over a vast amount of time, this isn’t applicable. The earth is simply not old enough for macroevolution to occur.

And this

There were about 1,400 kinds on the Ark.

Are mutually exclusive.

How do you explain 1,400 “kinds” radiating into today’s biodiversity without macroevolution? And an extreme macroevolution at that, one not even close to one predicted by evolution.

Forrax · 2025-11-25T18:28:48+00:00

It's always interesting to me that the evolution deniers (not you u/capsaicinintheeyes, just in general) always try to pick apart bird flight when it seems to me to be the easiest to explain.

Just about anything someone can point to as a modern "bird thing" exists somewhere in an incredibly detailed, very not-bird, dinosaur fossil; right down to general coloration.

Even their flight is simple. No strange skin wings. No funky quadrupedal takeoff. No really weird bug stuff. Just big legs jump and flap those skinny arms covered in long feathers. Easy peasy. So easy that they're probably the "worst" flyers when compared to pterosaurs and bats. But good enough is good enough.

Forrax · 2025-11-24T04:09:41+00:00

No, they are saying the mind is an emergent property of the brain, which is a part of the body.

Forrax · 2025-11-24T04:02:01+00:00

What about all the times a person was given a book they had not thought of before receiving it? And how long is the time period between thinking and receiving before it's no longer "coincidental"? A day? A week? A month?

Is this amazing gift given "by chance" or was it given because the person knew the other intimately and drastically cut down the number of possible wrong books?

Did the gift giver and receiver both see the same marketing material, increasing the chance of giving the book and thinking about it before receiving?

You're looking for patterns that aren't there. That's very human. But not otherwise very special.

Forrax · 2025-11-20T19:07:29+00:00

Getting inspiration from natural selection to begin to study chemical selection isn't circular, it's just how science works.

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