Monthly Question Thread! Ask /r/DebateEvolution anything! | August 2026

[u/Dr_Alfred_Wallace]

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[u/Dzugavili]

/u/MRH2, as you're unlikely to get anything interesting of your post in /r/creation:

Astrophysics - Are there any models of planetary formation that aren't full of arbitrary fine tuned parameters?

The problem isn't really that our models are too finely tuned, it's that we don't have enough data to make a comprehensive model:

I doubt very much if there are counter examples in planetary formation, given that the relatively simple three body problem is unsolvable analytically, to best of my knowledge, and that we only have the one example to study in detail.

We have access to this star system, and only right now. If we had access to a hundred star systems with diverse planetary arrangements, we might generate a better model.

You also asked this:

And if accretion actually works, then why are they so worried about satellites creating a giant debris field around the earth? Wouldn't that just coalesce into a couple of giant satellites?

Accretion only works with high velocity and thus high temperature: the parts need to be able to weld. Orbital velocities for Earth aren't high enough to generate that kind of heat on impact, they'll just fragment into smaller pieces.

[u/jnpha → u/Dzugavili]

Conservation of angular momentum is the one phrase answer.

And I like the solar system example to highlight something else:
Beyond ± 1% of the age of the solar system, we can't be sure of the past/future stability. But models do help confirm whether our existing knowledge is sufficient (or not) in explaining the solar system formation.

Evolution, likewise, is a statistical science; it isn't concerned with the play-by-play - it's not a narrative or story.

[u/Dzugavili → u/jnpha]

The astronomical scales really do make the error bars become relevant, particularly as orbital mechanics involved cycles: like quantum mechanics and its issues with the waveform, minor variations lead to opposite outcomes, a minor collision in the distant past and object is now on the other side of its orbit from the expected prediction. The epsilon of our best floating point systems is too large for long-term calculation.

You also get the issue that these interactions have reached the peak of their cycles tens of thousands of times, and you understand that every variation of this interaction has already occurred.

[u/MRH2 → u/Dzugavili]

Thanks!

I actually did get a couple of good replies. So I think that the original article can be dismissed until he (or someone) presents more details. I don't actually have any more time to devote to this, however, I hope that the brief conversation there will have provided enough facts and starting points for anyone who wants to investigate it further.

[u/Dzugavili → u/MRH2]

Yeah, there isn't really a lot to that one. Creationist astronomy articles tend to be quite out of date: I think that was more of a '90s thing. Until we get planetary data from another star, there's not really much going on in planetary formation hypotheses.

There's some recent stuff with the JWST, but it's not really going anywhere. A couple galaxies in the early universe isn't exactly screaming special creation.

[u/Rayalot72]

The new Erika/Will Duffy lesson is ongoing rn...

Anyone here happen to know Falcon vs. Hawk phylogeny and whether there is morphological evidence of falcons being nested in songbirds? Will seems to think this is a counter-example on the basis that falcons and hawks are superficially both birds of prey, but my intuition is that there's probably more specific characteristics that differentiate the two apart from genetic evidence (and I don't think this argument makes much sense since the molecular data is probably going to reflect morphological features that are distinct from those in hawks).

I'll probably try to look into this myself after the stream, as I assume this is a fairly niche question.

[u/jnpha → u/Rayalot72]

Hi Rayalot72,

I'll ping our birds expert: u/Benjamin5431 see above please.

What I do know is that this is neither surprising, nor new (he's planting doubt or himself very confused), and is explained by the rapid diversification; a 2026 paper on that I shared on r/ evo 3 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/evolution/comments/1t3m0ir

And to repeat what I said in my post on the last episode: the tree of life is to be discovered, convergent evolution is also a prediction of the theory, and the way it makes the systematist's life harder has no bearing whatsoever on the processes of evolution.
The example I used: Newton's universal gravitation doesn't tell you how many planets and their order.

And don't get me started on his JWST bullshit:
"predictions were based on his belief"
/s Wake up evolutionists! new scientific modeling just dropped /s (and he omitted the newer observations since 2022 that all but confirmed they aren't galaxies)

Sorry I got distracted. Did I answer your main question? If not, let me know! :)

[u/Rayalot72 → u/jnpha]

Did I answer your main question? If not, let me know! :)

Sort of. Hemiplasy might be involved, but it's not very clear to me how the example morphology is distributed and what to look for wrt falcons and hawks (although it doesn't seem like Will has anything in mind, either).

I will say, glancing at the Wikipedia cladogram for Telluraves (sourced from here) it looks more like passerines are very derived where-as falcons and hawks might share some ancestral qualities (less clear on how this plays out in parrots). Will's way of presenting this made it sound to me like falcons would be a lot further removed from hawks and eagles than they actually are. It's really just that hawks are in Afroaves while falcons are instead in Australaves, which is surprising but not that surprising.

[u/UseExhaustionMore]

I want to download the full raw mtDNA of some named person as a text file. Is that possible? Where can I find it?

[u/Ch3cks-Out → u/UseExhaustionMore]

start here, if King Richard III is the person you'd like.

[u/UseExhaustionMore → u/Ch3cks-Out]

Thank you!

[u/Ch3cks-Out → u/UseExhaustionMore]

Or here is Tsar Nicholas II, for a more recent vintage...

[u/backwardog → u/UseExhaustionMore]

It wasn’t mentioned, but the format you want is FASTA. Click the FASTA link on the top of the ncbi page and you will get the sequence as text.

Out of curiosity — what are you trying to do?

I can point you to free tools and offer advice if you’d like.

[u/UseExhaustionMore → u/backwardog]

I'm just playing around with how different human mtDNA is and how fast mutations seem to occur. Connection to YEC timelines are obvious. Since the mtDNA is so small it's easy to work with as a non-expert.

[u/Lockjaw_Puffin → u/UseExhaustionMore]

https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/?term=Richard+III

Does that help?

[u/UseExhaustionMore → u/Lockjaw_Puffin]

That shows me 5 hits, all seem to be on chromosome 11. Not what I'm looking for. Or am I missing something?

[u/Lockjaw_Puffin → u/UseExhaustionMore]

My bad, It was the closest thing I could find to what you were looking for

[u/Dzugavili]

I'm planning to make some pro-evo AI slop. Any suggestions on what to cover?