u/jnpha

I've taken the title (which is playful) from Weiss (RIP) (2006); the diagrams are from Bannert (2006) and Meyer (2017) - all linked below.

BTW, today May 22nd is the 200th anniversary of the first voyage of HMS Beagle.

---

A really neat thing, besides serving as genetic markers, is that they allow for robust timing:

> During its residence in the germline, an ERV accumulates substitutions, and the two identical LTR sequences diverge at a rate approximating the neutral mutation rate of the host genome (with the possible exception of ERV loci evolving under selection). [...] If the ERV locus is shared by two or more species, a phylogenetic tree that incorporates both sets of LTR sequences (5′ and 3′) has a very predictable structure, allowing more robust time calculations ( Figure 3 ) (89, 95). The predicted topology has all the 5′ LTR orthologs of the ERV locus clustering together on one branch and the 3′ LTR orthologs clustering together on a separate branch [...].

-Johnson, Welkin E. "Endogenous retroviruses in the genomics era." Annual review of virology 2.1 (2015): 135-159.

 

Extras

• Stated Clearly's explainer: DNA Evidence That Humans & Chimps Share A Common Ancestor: Endogenous Retroviruses - YouTube
• Royal Institution lecture: Are Viruses Alive? - with Carl Zimmer - YouTube
• The history of discovery:
  Weiss, Robin A. "The discovery of endogenous retroviruses." Retrovirology 3.1 (2006): 67.

 

• Diagram sources:
  • Bannert, Norbert, and Reinhard Kurth. "The evolutionary dynamics of human endogenous retroviral families." Annu. Rev. Genomics Hum. Genet. 7.1 (2006): 149-173.
  • (top-left inset) Meyer, Thomas J., et al. "Endogenous retroviruses: with us and against us." Frontiers in chemistry 5 (2017): 250541.

 

For other markers, there's e.g. SINEs:

> [...] genetic markers called short interspersed elements (SINEs) offer strong evidence in support of both haplorhine and strepsirrhine monophyly. SINEs are short segments of DNA that insert into the genome at apparently random positions and are excellent phylogenetic markers with an extraordinarily low probability of convergent evolution (2). Because there are billions of potential insertion sites in any primate genome, the probability of a SINE inserting precisely in the same locus in two separate evolutionary lineages is “exceedingly minute, and for all practical purposes, can be ignored” (p. 151, ref. 3).

-Williams, Blythe A., Richard F. Kay, and E. Christopher Kirk. "New perspectives on anthropoid origins." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107.11 (2010): 4797-4804.

Preempting the Why waste your time: the target audience is once again the 99%, and fans of biology. Also - selfishly(?) - trying to explain something helps one understand it better.
You can skip to the summary section, and read the sections later, if you wish.

The post is necessarily long (but made with love) for one main reason: my issue is not just the answer, but the challenge/question itself.

 

Duffy's challenge

Will Duffy, an hour and a half into his second lesson with Erika (six months ago), recounted his visit with a friend to Richard Dawkins' building at the University of Oxford (he wasn't in), with a printed challenge in hand (the friend made it), which a receptionist put in Dawkins' mailbox.

I uploaded a screen grab of that printout here.
It reads (I've removed Duffy's bold emphases except for one):

> Let's ignore all the wild complexity of the genetic code and try to give a Darwinian explanation for one of the simplest aspects of our DNA. Richard Dawkins, drawing on your lifetime of studying evolution, can you describe in as vague terms as you'd Like, how the 3-to-1 pattern could arise by a non-directed material process, such that three genetic letters code for one amino acid?

As Erika pointed out, this is a question about the origin of the genetic code, i.e. the origin of life, and she said she recalls Crick writing about that.
Indeed it was Crick, Woese, and a whole army, with a mountain of published research.
Because guess what? scientists love asking questions(!).

 

My gripes

Why pose that question to an evolutionary ethologist (animal behaviorist), beats me (not really; it's the YEC priming of "Atheists need evolution" and Dawkins is a prominent atheist, little they know atheism doesn't require a single scientific fact, and that the burden of proof is on them).
Of the points I'll try to make: they don't want to know the answer, despite the theatrics of the debate scene and going uninvited to a busy person's office with a googleable question.

Duffy preempted that by stating he just needs a "vague" answer, but IDists love nothing more than turning a simple answer into a straw man, so they can false-balance that with a quote mine of said straw man. (I have an example of Duffy doing the latter after the lesson on whales.)

 

Challenge breakdown

Again, not out of pedantry, as I've mentioned already:

> "Let's ignore all the wild complexity of the genetic code"

"Complexity" is the ID speak for design, so to burst that bubble (one of my pastimes here):

It took nine years from the discovery of the structure of DNA to decipher one codon, and 13 years in total to decipher all of them.
All the logical attempts, mostly by eager physicists, failed spectacularly, because the code has no logic behind the codon mapping (a fact that I'll explain). I think this should matter to the IDists:

No Logic Behind The Mapping.
No Logic Behind The Mapping.
(I'll mention below something about plants, when you get to it, revisit this)

 

> "try to give a Darwinian explanation ... a non-directed material process"

This nicely illustrates his IDist anti-materialism and very likely confusion given that tautology. Darwinism (in its academic sense), i.e. the process, is universal in the sense that to a Darwinist (in its respectable sense) it has no trouble at all accounting for the origin of the genetic code, even without knowing any of the details.

There is a reason engineering relies on that blind process to solve otherwise unsolvable problems. (See this post by u/gitgud_x and the one linked therein by u/theosib.)
Heck, Universal Darwinism was a Dawkins paper published in 1983.
And it's the same reason Dennett titled his 1995 book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

It's a process that not only solves the aforementioned engineering problems, it demonstrates that mind needn't come first. (The relevance of this to the "debate" is covered in the linked post just above.)

 

> "one of the simplest aspects of our DNA"

It's not the simplest aspect, unless - again - one is thinking like an IDist. Solving that one, solves all of it, bottom-up.

 

> "3-to-1 pattern could arise ... such that three genetic letters code for one amino acid"

Again with the tautology.
Duffy (or the friend) knows enough biology to know said pattern, and doesn't know the word "codon"? and hence codon mapping?
This feels like the intended audience wasn't Richard Dawkins(?).

The main point of this section was to highlight the erroneous, misleading and presuppositional framing; and the laziness to go on Google Scholar, or schedule a meeting with an appropriate expert - but no, best pretend it's unsolveable because personal incredulity.

 

Another IDist's "challenge"

The same comes up regularly here - here's one such recent example:

> I don't think AIG (or someone like Stephen Meyer) would argue that random mutation is unable to create a very small amount of information, like the 4 letter word in your example. Especially when you chose the initial word in the first place. What they (and I) would argue is that random mutation won't generate the sequence needed for even a small gene, much less all of the information needed to produce the proteins and rna that perform the transcription and translation processes. Without those processes, the information encoded in DNA is useless.

Quick breakdown:

> "What they (and I) would argue is that random mutation won't generate the sequence needed for even a small gene"

Randomly-generated sequences have literally disproved that (btw), but then again that comment was left by someone who once (hopefully that has changed) refused the role of stochasticity in chemistry(!), let alone that specificity isn't on/off.
Now take a closer look at:

> "the information needed to produce the proteins and rna that perform the transcription and translation processes. Without those processes, the information encoded in DNA is useless."

Not only is it self-contradictory, the author of that comment - if only they'd remove the intelligence blindfolds - answered their own question.
And like Duffy, I still wonder (not really as I've explained) where is the difficulty in searching for, ideally, books on Google or Google Scholar.
I, too, am curious about the world, I've asked the same question, and I've found answers.

 

---

The answer

- Let's meet the cast

• tRNAs (transfer RNA)
  they "carry" (I'll dispense with the scare quotes moving forward) the activated amino acids
• ribosomal proteins
  they come together to form the ribosome (part-RNA too) that makes the proteins
• AARSs (aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases)
  they activate the amino acids and attach them to the tRNAs

 

- Present setting

An RNA enzyme (polymerase) reads the DNA and makes an mRNA or tRNA.

The ribosome (made of the aforementioned ribosomal proteins and some RNA) reads holds said mRNA, and matches waits for the tRNA ferrying the right amino acid to bump into it (stochastic bumping, verifiably so).

And earlier the AARSs (one for each amino acid) activate and attach said amino acids to the tRNAs.

 

- Prebiotic setting

Here, Jacques Ninio's (1982) analogy for molecular evolution will be useful: a hotel's passkey (which opens all the doors) is less complex than the room keys, because it is less specific, and it is the same case here: an increase in specificity, due to and via selection - Darwinian evolution 101.
(fun fact! direct evidence of this at the single-molecule kinetics level has been achieved)

But selection for what? That's the Darwinian answer Duffy wants.
Carl Woese pointed out selection for what in 1965, 61 years ago. (recall what I said about scientists, and the refusal to google)

• Selection for:
  • Reduction in translation error
  • Reduction in code ambiguity

Starting from statistical RNAs and proteins, a reduction in translation error means a selection for an increase in ribosomal proteins, for an increased specificity, with the tRNA coevolving (1859 Darwinism applied to a molecular - still "ecological" - setting). This selection for specificity (and redundancy; in molecular speak: codon degeneracy) also explains why the codon is 3 letters long (has to do with the biophysics error rate of each position with the second being the most stable - needs to be flanked, in other words).

But because the code (codon mapping) was still ambiguous, this alone does not help.

Enter the simultaneous selection for ambiguity reduction, which is a selection for an increase in the AARS proteins and the secondary amino acids.
Back and forth, back and forth, until it has settled into what has been termed a frozen accident - very optimized but an accident. (recall what I've mentioned earlier: the codon mapping is not logical)

-

Can this be bootstrapped from random sequences? (That's why I mentioned that earlier.) With an increase in specificity? (The passkey.) With clues left behind? (A mountain of research.)
So Yes to all. As an example of a clue: remove selection from the translation, and the tRNAs evolve away and the mapping changes (e.g. a very recent study on plants that become parasites of other plants; Ceriotti et al 2026, which I shared on r /evo). An older clue: the genetic code is not universal (only nearly so).

There you go, and a couple of billion years later, and Bob (the extinct hominoid) is our uncle.

 

Example research area

AARSs, annoyingly, come in two classes.
Two very different classes, which poses a problem. Because assuming two separate origins would leave the above genetic code origin in a pickle.

What did I say about scientists, as opposed to IDists?
Enter the Rodin-Ohno hypothesis; they "proposed that the two superfamilies descended from opposite strands of the same ancestral gene", based on tantalizing evidence.
Initially it was thought to be unfalsifiable, but as it turns out, that is not the case; experimental attempts at falsification failed, and Bayesian analyses support it.

As a taste:

• 1995
  Rodin, Sergei N., and Susumu Ohno. "Two types of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases could be originally encoded by complementary strands of the same nucleic acid." Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere 25.6 (1995): 565-589. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01582025

• 2014
  Carter Jr, Charles W., et al. "The Rodin-Ohno hypothesis that two enzyme superfamilies descended from one ancestral gene: an unlikely scenario for the origins of translation that will not be dismissed." Biology Direct 9.1 (2014): 11. https://doi.org/10.1186/1745-6150-9-11

• 2025
  Wang, Minglei, M. Fayez Aziz, and Gustavo Caetano-Anollés. "Tracing the origin of the genetic code and thermostability to dipeptide sequences in proteomes." Journal of Molecular Biology (2025): 169396. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmb.2025.169396

and

• The media picked it up on September 16, 2025
  Researchers trace genetic code's origins to early protein structures.

What do IDists do in such a case?
What they always do: move the goalpost (pretend the question, "How could it have happened?" wasn't answered) to something else, e.g. But you didn't see it (because when in doubt: Last Thursdayism), or the equally braindead false Thomistic analogy: But the experiments needed intelligence.

 

Recap (all qualified above)

• TL;DR: Will Duffy's requested an answer in vague terms, and so:
  (barring trickster deities and Last Thursdayism)
  The genetic code and "3-to-1" evolved via an increase in specificity starting from statistical RNAs and proteins in response to the dual selection on error and ambiguity reduction, supported by the very attributes and heterogeneity of the "machinery" of the cell across life.

• IDists pretend scientists don't ask or ignore questions

• IDists pretend to have unanswer_able_ questions, therefore... <shrugs>

• IDists pretend to seek answers

• IDists pretend Darwinism hadn't already solved the no-mind-first problem, and so the design presupposition is present in their questions

• IDists need to read this from 1859:

It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the “plan of creation,” “unity of design,” etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact.
-Darwin, Charles

Finding a multi-part system, and restating the fact as "design", is, as noted by Darwin above and Francis Bacon centuries earlier, is not will never be an explanation.
Between their bogeyman "materialistic science", and their ID, only one of those actually answers questions.

 

Over to the pros here, and I hope it wasn't too boring.

 

^(edits: my memory failed me at the details of the visit, so revised that, plus one typo fix, the rest of the blemishes are left intact)

• The open access PNAS article:
  R.G. Winther, & E. Willerslev, Wilson and Sarich (1969): The birth of a molecular evolution research paradigm, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 120 (11) e2220473120, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2220473120 (2023).

• For the above trichotomy of human, chimp, and gorilla, see:
  [Historical lit. review] Sibley & Ahlquist's 1984 resolution of the hominoid phylogeny : evolution.

• The image's source:
  Carroll, Sean B. Remarkable creatures: epic adventures in the search for the origins of species. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

Varga, Zsombor, and Máté Varga. "Gene expression changes during the evolution of the tetrapod limb." Biologia Futura 73.4 (2022): 411-426.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42977-022-00136-1

For the caption: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42977-022-00136-1/figures/2

• The study from last year:
  Puente-Lelievre, Caroline, et al. "Evolution and structural diversity of the MotAB stator: insights into the origins of bacterial flagellar motility." Mbio 16.10 (2025): e03824-24.
  https://doi.org/10.1128/mbio.03824-24 (open access).

• The press release:
  How life first got moving: Nature's motor from billions of years ago.

This is the change of function (Darwin 1859) or exaptation as the theory of evolution says when it comes to complex multi-part systems; open access educational article: The Evolution of Complex Organs | Evolution: Education and Outreach | Springer Nature Link.

6 weeks ago:

We are 6 weeks out from the most important debate in the history of Genetic Entropy : DebateEvolution

I watched the debate, start to finish. And it was my first experience with the debate channel "SFT".
And I was pleased with the moderation and well-timed segments (credit where credit is due).

Of course I have many gripes, mostly to do with the lack of real-world data from Mr. Price, his use of AI to create a comic of Dr. Zach (the theatrics of the debate! - it may score points on the creationist side, but it was, at best, very childish), and how he basically kept talking past the points Dr. Zach made, but I was glad Dr. Zach pointed that out - namely: zero response to the models that actually match reality, and the food we eat.

 

Now, a point that stood out to me that I'd like to share is when Mr. Price said:

> I will say it is a pet peeve of mine. Evolutionists constantly accuse creationists of quote mining. When you make that accusation, what you're essentially saying is that I took a quote out of context and I misrepresented the intended meaning of the author. So, if you're making a claim like that, you've got to back it up. You can't just throw it out and say I was quote mining. And in fact, I would also answer the claim that the quotes that I had were unfortunately - it's quite common in the literature for people to speak in a shorthand way and just say neutral [theory]. But if you read the literature closely, it is well understood that no mutations are strictly neutral. All the way back to the 70s. Kimura's 1979 paper had zero strictly neutrals and that is confirmed by the Walker and Keightley paper that my opponent cited in his published work. So no, when these scientists say neutral, they don't mean strictly neutral. They mean effectively neutral.

 

To take two excerpts from that for my commentary:

• RE:

> unfortunately - it's quite common in the literature for people to speak in a shorthand

It's because they are addressing their fellow subject-matter experts. If they weren't, each paper would be book length, defeating the purpose.

• And RE:

> when these scientists say neutral, they don't mean strictly neutral. They mean effectively neutral.

This is what philosophers do - they keep guessing what X or Y philosopher said and meant.
So on the one hand: a subject-matter expert (with real-world data); and on the other: a layperson who is treating a model (a spherical cow) as an edict.

 

On that point, here's from an academic review on 50 years of work on neutral theory:

> ... we have reached this peculiar situation where the analysis of amino acid substitution rates has both led to a clear rejection of a major claim of the neutral theory—that most observable changes are neutral—and at the same time indisputably demonstrated the importance of drift in protein evolution. > > Of note, this research was sustained by a remarkable effort to develop models of sequence evolution and statistical methods of substitution rate estimation (e.g. Thorne et al. 1998; Yang and Nielsen 2008; Lartillot and Poujol 2011), which, in turn, opened exciting opportunities such as, among other things, the characterization of the distribution of fitness effects of mutations (Castellano et al. 2019), the reconstruction of ancestral Ne and ancestral traits (Brevet and Lartillot 2021), and the connection between the biochemistry and the evolution of amino acids and proteins (Glaser et al. 2003; Goldstein 2013).
https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evae003

 

This is what the "debate" should have been about; e.g. whether drift can account for evolution at the molecular level - the evolution of the so-called molecular "machines". And the answer is yes.

Also I'm yet to square the circle that is design and genetic entropy - as in: Is life "intelligently" designed to deteriorate? I'm betting it's one of those, Who knows his wisdom kind of topics, while ignoring the internal inconsistency with the whole "design" thing.

N.B. needless to say re all the above: I'm commenting on the argument, NOT the person.

Initially I wanted to post something about Fitch & Margoliash's (1967) first application of statistical phylogenetics to a molecule, cytochrome c.
But One Rabbit Hole Later, I present Sibley & Ahlquist (1984).

• On the left:
  The situation at the time (just 42 years ago); up until then the "problem of the trichotomy of man, chimpanzee and gorilla" was unresolved (TIL!).

• On the right:
  The resolution and the remarkably-accurate(??)* dating; another "TIL" (besides the recency of the resolution) was about the DNA clock, as opposed to the molecular clock.
  (*more + excerpts in the comments)

Source:
- Sibley, Charles G., and Jon E. Ahlquist. "The phylogeny of the hominoid primates, as indicated by DNA-DNA hybridization." Journal of molecular evolution 20.1 (1984): 2-15. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02101980

> Protein function evolution provides a powerful lens to uncover biological complexity. Here, we introduce the concept of the pan-functionome—the full set of protein functions encoded by the proteome of individuals belonging to a taxonomic group—and explore its evolutionary implications. By analyzing over 1,000 annotated proteomes across major branches of life, we identify systematic differences in functional composition that reflect deep evolutionary patterns. The number of biological processes per protein increases non-linearly over time, with functional diversification rather than protein expansion driving organismal complexity. Distinct taxonomic divisions invest differently in biological processes, highlighting signatures of multicellularity, metabolism, and stress response. Phylogenetic analyses suggest that the evolution of protein functions follows a non-neutral model. Furthermore, functional profiles allow robust taxonomic classification and reveal unique adaptations in individual organisms. Our findings suggest that the functionome provides a complementary perspective on evolution, with potential applications in taxonomy, evolutionary biology, and comparative genomics.

• A Muñoz-Mérida, A J Muñoz-Pajares, Beyond Genomes: Functional Signatures Reveal Evolutionary Patterns Across the Tree of Life, Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2026;, msag121, https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag121

(accepted yesterday; in press; open access)

> The relationship between the three domains of life—Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya—is one of Biology’s greatest mysteries. Current favored models imply two ancestral domains, Bacteria and Archaea, with eukaryotes originating within Archaea. This type of models has been supported by the recent description of the Asgardarchaeota, the closest prokaryotic relatives of eukaryotes.
However, there are many problems associated with any scenarios implying that eukaryotes originated from within the Archaea, including genome mosaicism, phylogenies, the cellular organization of the Archaea, and their ancestral character. By contrast, all models of eukaryogenesis fail to consider two relevant discoveries: the detection of membrane coat proteins, and of phagocytosis-related processes in Planctomycetes, which are among the bacteria with the most developed endomembrane system.

• Devos, Damien P. "Reconciling asgardarchaeota phylogenetic proximity to eukaryotes and planctomycetes cellular features in the evolution of life." Molecular Biology and Evolution 38.9 (2021): 3531-3542.
  https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msab186 (open access)

Those who research this area, share your thoughts!

This was a fun read: One Graph Attempts To Connect Every Object In The Universe - Universe Today

Based on:
- Steward, Gabriel M., and Matthew Hedman. "The Cohesive Object Sequence: The Mass–Density Distribution of Astronomical Objects from Asteroids to Stars." Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 138.4 (2026): 041001. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06029

The images in order:

1. Damas et al 2022
   The synteny diagram shows a reconstruction of the chromosomal rearrangements Mammalia has went through (n.b. these are not single generation events); a close to home one is the crash fusion leading to our chromosome 2 (bottom of the image);
2. Schematic of said chr2 fusion from Vorob'eva et al 2006;
3. 20 Years Later
   Details galore of said fusion from Yang et al 2026;
4. I'll come back to that (Schultz et al 2023) in the comments.

(comments section for more)

Human-Chimp chromosome 19 alignment
A colored pixel in the difference columns is a single letter change. For the two big differences shown above (areas annotated A and E on the left):

> (A) Chimpanzee has a ∼1700 bp sequence not present in Human, (B,D) followed by an inversion, (E) which ends at a AAAC tandem repeat where Human has twice as many copies.

Source: Fig. 3 in:

• Seaman, Josiah, and Richard JA Buggs. "FluentDNA: Nucleotide visualization of whole genomes, annotations, and alignments." Frontiers in Genetics 11 (2020): 292.
  https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2020.00292

1-hour explanation from last year by Erika (Gutsick Gibbon): Okay How Similar are Humans and Chimps Genetically Now That We Have Full Genomes? - YouTube.

Sources:

• User:Conquistador, User:Dbachmann, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
• Stringer, Chris. "What makes a modern human." Nature 485.7396 (2012): 33-35.
  https://www.nature.com/articles/485033a
• Dbachmann, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The first diagram is based on the second after incorporating the latest findings as of around 2017 (they are listed in the Wikimedia link). And doubtless the phylogeny is even clearer now; this is where your insights come in :)

Image source:

• Stefanie D. Hueber, Georg F. Weiller, Michael A. Djordjevic, Tancred Frickey, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Quick background:

> [Hox genes] are general purpose in the sense that they are similar in many organisms; it doesn’t matter if it’s a mouse’s head or a fly’s head that is being built, the same gene directs the process. Small changes in such powerful regulatory genes, or changes in the genes turned on by them, could represent a major source of evolutionary change.
- berkeley.edu's Hox genes

Some links:

• The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1995 - Press release - NobelPrize.org
• Lewis Wolpert's 1986 Christmas Lectures:
  https://www.youtube.com/@TheRoyalInstitution/search?query=wolpert
• Evo-devo biologist Enrico Coen lecture at The Royal Society from 2014:
  Cells to civilizations - YouTube

This is a short one for a change, and what I find as the shortest rebuttal.
And since Darwin lives rent free in their heads, I'll start there:

> It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the “plan of creation,” “unity of design,” etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact.

(emphasis mine)
- Darwin, Origin, 1st ed., 1859.

 

Oh, look; he had considered it.
Restating facts is never an explanation. Imagine an engineer tasked with reverse engineering a competitor's device, and all they could state is, "It has interdependent components; I infer a designer made it". Or as Dr. Padian remarked during Dover, no one has gotten a Nobel for stating what an eight-year-old knows - yes! it has parts, and we've worked out the how.

This is how silly both arguments are.

 

And given the purpose of this sub, some links for the 99%:

• The Evolution of Complex Organs | Evolution: Education and Outreach | Springer Nature Link;
• Here's a simple live demonstration by Dr. Dan;
• A three-level masterclass by Dr. Zach on phylogenetics;
• A simple introduction: Misinterpretations about relatedness | berkeley.edu; and
• Testing Common Ancestry: It’s All About the Mutations - Article - BioLogos.

 

(also I'm curious to see if any will attempt to back up ID's rhetoric instead of deflecting)

Sources:

• Petter Bøckman, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
• Benton, Michael J., and David AT Harper. Introduction to paleobiology and the fossil record. John Wiley & Sons, 2020.

(for why I love them, see the comments)