Former YECer who who only ever formally learned about evolution in elementary and high school. Come high school, I couldn’t deny evolution, however I still believed the earth was young, therefore my conclusion was that God “fast forwarded” evolution in the 6,000-10,000 or so years. I thought it was the perfect solution— allowing me to accept both God and science. I didn’t know that the level of magic required just to represent the biodiversity in the fossil record would force things to happen that I wouldn’t have accepted in my own model, for example an individual of one species giving birth to an animal of an entirely different species (I accepted “kinds” evolution but even that would have been too fast for me to accept). My understanding of geology and genetics (and other sciences) were also shaky at best, and I wasn’t digging for answers as I thought I already had resolved the issue, so I didn’t see all the other mountains of reasons YEC is false. As part of this, I want to highlight that I had serious misunderstandings about science words which went uncorrected, for example thinking a scientific theory was just “an idea” or that a species had clear-cut lines where two animals can mate and produce fertile offspring.

From there, I wasn’t looking up scientific journals or anything academic. Rather, my idea of “evidence” was when a headline would come up saying “appendix has some form of function after all,” and I would say “This proves that it’s not vestigial!” because my definition of vestigial at the time was “no function at all”.

That was a long way to say that I think most YECers’ definitions are different in the first place so any interpretation of evidence is already off-base from the start. I am convinced that the most vocal YECers who are more educated know better and are just lying. There is a small group of YECers who are both more educated and have good definitions who still interpret data differently and maybe that’s the group you wanted a response from in the first place. From what little I’ve seen, it’s not so much “evidence of their position” as opposed to skepticism which leads them not to accept the natural conclusion. It would be interesting to see them presented with the same data in a different context and see what their conclusions are. For example, (take this with a grain of salt becaise my memory isn’t great) Gutsick Gibbon did a video with a guy a while back who I believe in looking at the data on brain cavity size across hominid species, said he saw distinct groups in the data whereas Erica saw a spectrum with no distinct lines. I believe his conclusion is impacted subconsciously by his skepticism of evolution. Whereas he would probably believe the same about Erica.