Current mechanistic accounts of the unfolding of life can all be styled as Potemkin theories of evolution, because a façade of similarities among creatures that can reasonably be ascribed to mere common descent is used to hide the utter lack of a plausible mechanism to account for the most fantastic differences. That recent argument of mine at Evolution News¹ has triggered a calumnious response² from Daniel Stern Cardinale, an evolutionary biologist and lecturer at Rutgers University who posts on a YouTube channel called Creation Myths. Here I’ll show that Stern Cardinale’s nearly thirty-minute video response itself nicely confirms my argument. In brief, he mistakes descriptive studies of comparative biology for mechanistic studies of evolution, and he exhibits a seemingly invincible ignorance (meaning, in this context, an apparently complete inability to comprehend)³ of the most basic features of life that need to be explained.

Early, Petty, Misguided

An early, petty, misguided complaint of Stern Cardinale’s concerns the title of my piece at Evolution News, “Darwinism Is a Potemkin Theory of Evolution.” The “Darwinism” label is misleading, he grouses, because of all the progress that’s been made since 1859; only design proponents use the woefully outdated term.

He should tell that to J. B. S. Haldane, who invented the “darwin” as a unit of evolutionary change in 1949.⁴Tell it to Theodosius Dobzhansky, who wrote “On Some Fundamental Concepts of Darwinian Biology” in 1968.⁵ To Richard Dawkins, author of the essay “Universal Darwinism” in 1983.⁶ To National Geographic, which in 2004 asked “Was Darwin Wrong?”⁷ Or to the authors of a recent paper in Nature Chemical Biology, who investigated “directed evolution and Darwinian adaptation.”⁸

The words Darwinism, Darwinian, darwin, neo-Darwinian, and more are all cognates of the name of the man who proposed that adaptive evolution occurs mainly by natural selection acting on heritable random variation. They are routinely used to refer to that process, whether or not the selection occurs in subtler ways than Darwin knew or the variation by processes unknown to him (which isn’t hard, since Darwin and his contemporaries were clueless about how inheritance occurs). Exactly no one reading my piece would think it concerned only 19th-century evolutionary thought.

Genomics

Stern Cardinale gestures at major advances in modern biology, including all that has been learned about molecular biology and especially the amazing recent progress in DNA sequencing technology, which in turn allows the study of genomics and related topics. He then pretends that I am trying to hide those widely known advances (which I have discussed extensively in my books) from the yokels who read Evolution News. He concludes (reluctantly, of course) that I am a lying liar.⁹

Stern Cardinale seems oblivious to the fact that by themselves gene and genome sequences concern only common descent — that is, the similarities that I wrote were the easy part of Darwin’s mechanism. Uncovering a sequence of DNA in one organism that is more or less similar to that in another organism may be evidence that the two shared a common ancestor, but by itself it says nothing about how the ancestral sequence arose, how it came to differ in the descendants, or especially whether it explains the “cool new features” — the major differences — that I said constituted the “big mystery,” the “killer question” of life. By itself, genomics is essentially an exercise in comparative biology, noting in what ways the genes of various organisms are similar to and different from each other — nice for drawing phylogenetic trees, but indicating nothing about what process is building the major functional features of life.

Changes Happen “Through Evolution”

Stern Cardinale claims that a modern understanding of biology easily shows how transformations can occur. Riffing off a thought experiment in my essay where I write that “for some odd reason” descendants of separate lineages of a common ancestor developed thorns on their feet versus spiral fingers, Stern Cardinale asks in high dudgeon, “What do you mean ‘for some odd reason,’ Mike? We know how changes happen — through evolution.”

So, the lecturer instructs us, changes happen … through evolution! Feeling enlightened yet? That profound insight makes one wonder why Darwin worried so much about the vertebrate eye and other “organs of extreme perfection.”

But wait, there’s more. Stern Cardinale continues, “You’ve got recombination. You’ve got mutation. You’ve got horizontal gene transfer. We know how new things occur in a lineage.” Later in the video he adds gene duplication and some other processes. Yet, (leaving aside horizontal gene transfer) for explaining the development of complex functional structures, simply ticking off molecular mechanisms that can alter the genetic patrimony of a species isn’t any improvement on Darwin’s bare 19th-century invocation of “variation” as the fodder on which selection acts. Darwin would speculate that unidentified random heritable variations allowed the development of whatever he was writing about — maybe thorns on the feet of one lineage, spiral fingers in another, and the vertebrate eye in a third. Stern Cardinale’s list just indicates in effect that unidentified variation can be supplied by various now-known processes — and leaves it at that.¹⁰

Precise, Detailed Questions

But how does a lineage go from random variation to a specific major functional feature (say, thorns on feet, spiral fingers, or the vertebrate eye)? To move beyond Just-So storytelling, a purportedly modern scientific evolutionary explanation would have to answer precise, detailed questions such as: Exactly what point mutations, what gene duplications, what recombination events caused each step in the particular proposed pathway leading to a particular, identifiable, actual complex functional feature? What factors favored each step of the change at both the macroscopic and molecular levels? What factors opposed each step of the change but might be overcome? What was the selection coefficient for each step? What was the population size of the species? Are all these events statistically consistent with random changes? Were simpler adaptations available — such as the much more frequent adaptive degradative changes I discussed in Darwin Devolves — that would have short-circuited more complex pathways? Is there experimental evidence that changes building a complex structure can occur in the absence of investigator interference? (Spoiler alert — no, there isn’t.) And many other questions.

Wouldn’t answering all those questions be really hard? Of course! But one can’t brush aside critical questions and simply assume one’s theory is correct. That’s a prescription for living in a dream world — one that is based on wish fulfillment, not empirical facts. Physicists worked for decades and built billion-dollar accelerators, all to test whether the Higgs boson existed or not. If instead they complained it was too hard to experimentally confirm their theories, and just decided to assume their latest ideas were true, then that would effectively be the intellectual end of their discipline.

In the absence of such precise, detailed, pertinent studies, mechanistic evolution remains a Potemkin theory, with its façade of similarities obscuring the absence of knowledge of how complex functional structures arise.

An Entire Day

Stern Cardinale loses it at the point in my essay where I note that Darwin-boosters go mute when asked how complex new traits evolve (such as, say, those of bats or whales). The utter mendacity, he snorts (in less polite words)! Why, “I teach evolutionary biology … and we spend an entire day of class on how do new traits evolve.”

So … of the approximately forty lecture-days in a typical semester-length course, Stern Cardinale spends a grand total of one — maybe an hour, maybe two or three percent of the course — on the most basic, most fascinating, most contentious question in the field. I think that little fact can help us understand a couple of points about why it is so difficult for Darwin-enthusiasts such as himself to comprehend Darwin-skeptics such as myself.

The first point is that the state of Stern Cardinale’s syllabus roughly reflects the state of the field in general, in that thinking rigorously about pathways for the origin of complex functional traits is at best a tiny, essentially negligible part of the academic field that goes by the name of “evolutionary biology.” The majority of biologists simply assume that Darwinian or other unguided mechanistic processes somehow account for major changes, but almost no one even attempts to demonstrate that they can.

In his video, Stern Cardinale explicitly denies this. He claims there is a large amount of work being done to explain how macroevolution occurs. To show his good faith, Stern Cardinale double-dares the viewer to enter “bat wing evolution” on Google Scholar, to find all the many books and papers on the topic. In a wonderfully clarifying video, my Discovery Institute colleague Cornelius Hunter does just that — and turns up a raft of comparative studies of organisms that simply ascribe differences to presumptively Darwinian evolutionary processes.¹¹ None of the papers even tries to show that an unguided evolutionary mechanism could accomplish the transformation.

For example, in a typical paper (with the juicy title “Making a bat: The developmental basis of bat evolution”¹²) that Hunter analyzed, among similar sorts of results mouse embryo development is compared to bat embryo development. Quite unsurprisingly, the study shows that the time for limb development is greater in bat vs mice embryos, and transcription factors regulating the process have a larger range in bats (Figure 2 of reference 12, “Differences in signaling centers between bat and mouse limb development”).

Interesting work. Yet, as the content of that and other papers he invited us to peruse demonstrates, evolutionary biologists in the mold of Stern Cardinale seem unable to grasp that the general statement “A differs from B in a certain aspect” does not warrant the conclusion “A differs from B in a certain aspect because of Darwinian processes.” And it most certainly does not justify the grossly extrapolated conclusion that a complex new structure of which the aspect is a tiny part was built by Darwinian processes.

The statement in my essay where I wrote, that for questions of how major complex functions could be constructed, “Darwin boosters go mute” greatly disturbed Stern Cardinale. Undoubtedly he thought of many interesting papers he had read or heard about, written by persons he perhaps admires, and that led to his Google Scholar challenge. But, of course, by “mute” I meant that the Darwin boosters had nothing pertinent to say. It’s not that there haven’t been many good studies of the comparative biology of organisms that, as evidenced by their similarities, likely descended from a common ancestor. There just haven’t been any studies showing that such a phenomenon could be driven by a Darwinian process.¹³

The Second Point

This leads to the second point. By working diligently on the 97 percent to 98 percent of other topics covered in Stern Cardinale’s evolution course syllabus, most practitioners of evolutionary biology convince themselves that the field as a whole simply must have a handle on a mechanism for how life developed. After all, with all that hard work being done by really smart people, somebody must know! So they sincerely believe that folks who say otherwise are ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked like me).

Regrettably, as with the blind spot of the vertebrate retina that some Darwinists invoke to avoid thinking seriously about how undirected mutation and selection could build a real eye, many evolutionary biologists themselves have a blind spot for what it would take to provide an actual mechanistic evolutionary explanation for a real complex system. Instead of working to address that question, they immerse themselves in studies of the comparative biology of many marvelous aspects of life, or microevolutionary processes, or abstract models, or other interesting topics. They cannot comprehend that they are actually oblivious to how complex functional systems arose.

Notes

1. https://evolutionnews.org/2025/04/darwinism-is-a-potemkin-theory-of-evolution/
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RttY_vjW25w
3. In honor of the election of Pope Leo XIV, I’m borrowing this poignant phrase from the Catholic lexicon. The meaning I give the phrase here is a shade different from that in theological circles, but it’s close enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincible_and_invincible_ignoranc
4. Haldane, J.B.S. 1949. Suggestions as to quantitative measurement of rates of evolution. Evolution 3, 51-56.
5. Dobzhansky, T. 1968. On Some Fundamental Concepts of Darwinian Biology, in: Dobzhansky, T., Hecht, M.K., Steere, W.C. (Eds.), Evolutionary Biology: Volume 2. Springer US, Boston, MA, pp. 1-34.
6. Dawkins, R. (1983) Universal Darwinism. In: Evolution from molecules to man, ed. D. S. Bendall. Cambridge University Press.
7. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/was-darwin-wrong
8. Ma, L. and Lin, Y. 2025. Orthogonal RNA replication enables directed evolution and Darwinian adaptation in mammalian cells. Nature Chemical Biology 21, 451-463
9. As the video proceeds, Stern Cardinale’s reluctance to question my honesty morphs into enthusiasm. Near the end, he latches onto a sentence near the finish of my essay: “As a succession of sages over the centuries wrestled futilely with the question of what mechanism could possibly account for the elegant structures of life, various monikers have been attached to the notion of evolution: Lamarck’s theory, Darwin’s theory, neo-Darwinism, the Modern Synthesis, the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.” From that sentence, Stern Cardinale reasons on camera that, not only does he himself know that the names refer to different mechanisms, he knows Behe knows they refer to different mechanisms — yet Behe dishonestly lumps them together. Stern Cardinale states that he doesn’t want to insult my intelligence, so instead he insults my character. Since I lump those disparate ideas together, he declares, then it’s clear I am intentionally lying. Stern Cardinale needs to work on his reading comprehension. The quoted sentence plainly states that sages wrestled with the question of a mechanism, which is demonstrated by the fact that Lamarck, Darwin, etc. proposed different mechanisms. The sentence also plainly states that the mechanisms all concern the notion of evolution (i.e., Lamarckian evolution, neo-Darwinian evolution, Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, etc.), which of course all of them do. The obvious point being made is that none of the various mechanisms ever proposed for evolution has successfully explained the complex functional structures of life. (I hate to be so pedantic, but apparently it’s necessary for some people.) Stern Cardinale mistakes his own incomprehension for someone else’s dishonesty. That is sadly typical of internet culture. Nonetheless, it is reprehensible conduct for an academic. It is certainly no behavior for an instructor to model to his students.
10. What is a “slight” modification? The knees of some evolutionary biologists like Stern Cardinale jerk when Darwin’s maxim — that evolution as he conceived it has to work by “numerous, successive, slight modifications” — is quoted by critics such as myself. They seem to think “slight” must refer only to individual point mutations of DNA. Since it is now known that changes involving many nucleotides can happen in a single step (gene rearrangements, gene duplications, whole genome duplications, etc.), they conclude that those larger alterations constitute non-Darwinian evolution that happens by big steps. They are mistaken. Since Darwin didn’t know about the role of DNA in inheritance, a “slight” modification in his sense was simply some alteration of small effect in the unknown genetic material. Thus any change that we now know can occur in a single step — whether one nucleotide, one rearrangement, one duplication of some or all the genomic DNA, etc. — can be subsumed under his term “slight modification.” To remain “Darwinian,” the critical characteristic is that mutations occur one undirected step at a time — there cannot be a series of coordinated mutations in a single step of Darwinian evolution. Any series of beneficial mutations (which could be any combination of rearrangements, duplications, point mutations, etc.) must occur in multiple, undirected, gradual steps, so natural selection can act upon each step successively. As Richard Dawkins has written, “Evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact; it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work.” (The Greatest Show on Earth, p. 155) That principle holds for each level of life: the organismal level (say, giraffes); the organ level (for example, the eye); and the molecular level (say, the bacterial flagellum).  As an additional aside, neutral evolution can also easily be considered to be a Darwinian processes. Mutations are either favorable or unfavorable, stronger or weaker. They can be categorized and quantified by assigning to them either positive or negative selection coefficients. Neutral mutations, then, are simply those mutations in the continuous spectrum that have selection coefficients equal or very close to zero.
11. https://evolutionnews.org/2025/05/professor-stern-cardinale-stumbles-on-bat-wingevolution
12. Sadier, A., Urban, D.J., Anthwal, N., Howenstine, A.O., Sinha, I., Sears, K.E., 2021. Making a bat: The developmental basis of bat evolution. Genet Mol Biol 43, e20190146.
13. That same kind of misdirection was featured in the 2005 Kitzmiller versus Dover federal trial to which Stern Cardinale alludes. In a courtroom stunt, twenty years ago attorneys for the plaintiffs dumped a pile of books and papers on the witness stand where I was sitting to show all the wonderful work that was being done on the evolution of the immune system (not the blood clotting cascade, as Stern Cardinale mistakenly states). However, just as with the bat wing literature, nothing in the pile contained any serious detailed Darwinian proposals for how the immune system developed, only comparative studies and speculation. The distinction was lost on the judge, a college political-science major and former head of the state liquor control board. Today, twenty years after the trial and thirty years after the publication of Darwin’s Black Box, the situation remains unchanged.  For discussions of the trial, the clotting cascade, immune system, and many other topics, see my responses-to-critics book, A Mousetrap for Darwin.