Did Douglas Axe Disprove Evolution? Spoiler: No

[Faizal_Ali]

@lee_merrill

Well, the DI has taken a different approach, they have published articles like Douglas Axe did, but mostly they have written books describing the problems with NeoDarwinism.

Exactly. They have not written letters to journal editors and caused articles to be retracted.

There is that hypocrisy of yours again.

@lee_merrill

He recently, before his tragic death, issued a challenge to his former colleagues, concerning species pairs: “Considering the fact that windows of time of only 5-10 million years account for most of the abrupt appearances of new body plans in the fossil record (Bechly & Meyer 2017, Bechly 2021), the Bayesian likelihood of not finding a single example of similar morphological disparity having originated on a similar time frame among the millions of living species is basically close to zero. I consider this simple argument as a final nail in the coffin of Darwinian unguided evolution.”

Bechly’s challenge was, in fact, answered within a day on this very forum. Isn’t that funny?

Bechly's "Species Pairs" Challenge

Gunter Bechly claims that: There are “many” examples in the fossil record of species with very different body plans (where “very different” means something like “readily categorized by laypersons as different kinds of creatures”) that diverged from each other in roughly 5-10 Ma (for an unspecified value of “many”, unfortunately, and he only gives one real example here) There are no two modern species with very different body plans which diverged from each other in less than 10 Ma (or so). And he considers this a problem with evolutionary theory (implication is that if we see “many” rapid changes in the fossil record, we should see some rapid changes having happened in the recent past). Experts, what are your thoughts on this? I suspect that one or both claims are a bit exaggerated at the very least, but there is probably more to be said in response to this. Edit: @Art posted a response to the challenge around the same time I made this thread (or at least, our posts received moder…

One of my comments in that discussion now seems prescient:

@Faizal_Ali

So to summarize: Bechly issues his challenge yesterday.

It is answered and debunked today.

Any guesses on for how many more years we will be hearing from the ID Creationists that this challenge has never been answered?

Three years and counting…