Stephen Meyer had an unusual and amusing New Year’s Eve podcast conversation with Christian comic Brad Stine. Apart from being a funny guy, Stine brings a gift for some shrewd common sense, including about evolution. He recalls, at one point, a routine from one of his albums: about mimicry. (The routine is about mimicry, not the whole album!)
Consider, he says, the example of an insect that can avoid predation by taking on a resemblance to a twig. “After millions of years this bug evolved this camouflage so it could defend itself from its predators. And I said, ‘It took millions of years. What did it do in the meantime? Try to reason with its predators?’” Good question.
He goes on: “If it took a million years, let’s say, for this bug to evolve this leaf-looking evolutionary adaptation, it didn’t need it because it made it for a million years” without the adaptation. Stine asks, speaking in the name of the insect itself: “’So what’s the point of my turning into a leaf if I made it this far without the leaf?’ That never made sense to me. It felt like they were reverse-engineering: ‘That looks like a leaf, like the leaf it’s on. So since it’s here, it must have adapted to that and that’s why it’s still here.’ But it had to take too much time to get there, and it made it [all that time] without it.” Another good point.
Dr. Meyer summarizes: “It’s an ex post facto just-so story.” It’s “another example of the idea of non-functional intermediates,” which is indeed a problem for Darwinian evolution.
Stine asks, “What am I missing in my perspective?” It seems like nothing! Enjoy the conversation here: