I like that the new video series from ID explainer Lukas Ruegger, Basics of Intelligent Design Biology, is being released week by week rather than, as could have been the case, as one longer video. This way, the “drip, drip, drip” effect comes into play: Episodes 1 through 3 successively narrowed some available escape routes for Darwin’s troubled theory. In a brief manner that’s like an alternative and much more accurate version of Khan Academy’s science-challenged treatment of the subject, Ruegger showed why the fossil record offers poor evidence for evolution. (See here, here, and here.)

Perhaps with that distressing reality in mind, Richard Dawkins and others have said that the case for Darwinian evolution is perfectly sound even without fossils. Evolutionists, instead, have all the evidence they need in genes and morphology to draw the one true tree of life. In Episode 4, which is out today, Lukas asks, “Do Homology and Phylogenetics REALLY Support Darwin’s Tree of Life?” The problem is that the “trees” thus sketched are full of fundamental, mutual contradictions. Even if universal common ancestry is true, there seemingly is no drawable “true tree.” As Lukas says, “Those who study homology simply assume evolution to be true, but they’ve never actually demonstrated that the ancestral evolutionary relationships between different organisms are real.”

And, “If the hard facts of paleontology oppose the notion of there being a tree of life, and if that supposed tree of life cannot be independently established by genetic homologies, well, what evidence for Darwin’s tree of life are we left with?” The answer that Khan Academy doesn’t want you to hear is: Not much.