Imagine, if you will, that you are a military commander back in the dark days of pre-rifle, pre-radio, pre-tank, pre-drone technology. And imagine that you are leading your command along a road in a valley. And then imagine (I hope your imagination isn’t overtaxed by now) that you suddenly see an opposing military force come over a hill in front of you.
The question you might well ask yourself is, “How did they get there?”
Which is the question that one asks evolutionists when they are propounding their theory. So when discussing evolution with Russell Gold , amongst several other issues that we discussed, we brought up the issue of the penis. You know, the male organ of generation.
My claim was ‘you can’t get there from there’… ie that there is and can be no list of functioning, advantageous, intermediate steps which can reasonably lead from an amoeba to the statue of David. That mere ‘bumps’ convey no advantage. That there must be a functioning anatomy, physiology, and psychology to end up with an enchanted evening.
Russ wrote, in regard to the supposed evolution of the penis:
You mention, for example, the penis. Now that happens to be something that has actually been studied. Here is how one AI describes the process:
Penises evolved as an adaptation for internal fertilization when animals moved to land, driven primarily by natural selection, sperm competition, and female mate choice. The oldest known fossilized penis dates back 425 million years in a tiny marine crustacean, showing that intromittent organs arose long before land colonization to secure successful gamete transfer.
The Shift to Internal Fertilization
• Water to Land: Early aquatic life relied on releasing eggs and sperm into open water. Moving to land meant gametes would dry out, requiring direct transfer inside the female’s body.
• Cloacal Beginnings: Ancestral vertebrates used a shared opening called a cloaca to pass sperm packets (spermatophores), which gradually developed into specialized protruding muscular and vascular structures.
Evolutionary Drivers of Shape and Size
• Sperm Competition: In species where females mate with multiple males, penises evolved specific shapes—such as ridges, curves, or spines—to scoop out rival sperm or place fluid closer to the cervix.
• Sexual Selection: Female choice and male-male intimidation heavily shaped the distinct size and visual traits of the organ, notably making human penises larger relative to body size compared to other primates.
Lily Pads
Now, that note is full of amazingly nonsensical and unhelpful statements, but I wish to focus first of all on the issue of ‘Lily Pads’. This is the problem with evolutionary explanations (and this AI did a dramatically bad job): they tend to hop from lily pad to lily pad. Ie they tend to point to one ‘success’ and then the next ‘success’, without looking at the deep, deep, water between them.
So in the above quote you can see a couple of the lily pads. Pretty big, vague pads, but here they are:
Water (open transfer: note: not all water-based organisms use open transfer)
Land (direct transfer: Note, not all land-based organisms use direct transfer)
Pre-scooping penises
Scooping penises
Shoot from afar penises
Get close Penises
Etc. Now what I would like you to notice about all of those (besides the fact that they are amazingly vague) is that they represent not a process, but a stage. A presumably workable stage.
When the daddy salmon sprays his junk onto a bunch of eggs at the bottom of a stream, that is a workable system. His penis (or whatever) has the appropriate hole, which points the appropriate direction; the sperm come out at a good speed; he actually is spraying it on eggs, not stones; he swam up the stream at the right time; the sperm know how to do their thing; yada yada.
The Water Between
IOW the daddy salmon’s penis (or equivalent) represents a lily pad. It represents a fully functional system. But for evolution to work, the evolutionist needs to deal with the water between. The continuous small changes that are needed to turn a snail into a philosopher. Or, in the case of the salmon, an exciting swim into an enchanted evening.
And to continue to beat a dead horse, the changes need to be in several areas. When the penis shape changes, the sperm delivery physiology needs to change, and the sperm delivery psychology needs to change.
(A deeper dive: IOW there needs to be intermediate, workable, steps that translate from ‘swim over a bunch of eggs and spray’ (a complex task); to ‘find a momma fish, get close behind her (and she has to be ready for this!), get even closer, mount, spray, dismount, and sit around afterwards and talk about how great it was for you.
The shape of the penis has to change, the physiology of the sperm need to change, and above all the psychology (if that’s the word) of the process has to change. Our society is having a huge dating and marriage problem… but at least our bodies are designed to do the deed.)
Just So Thinking
Which is where the above selection fails so miserably. It confuses result with cause, and need with action.
Note this laughable quote:
Sexual Selection: Female choice and male-male intimidation heavily shaped the distinct size and visual traits of the organ, notably making human penises larger relative to body size compared to other primates.
How long did it take you to realise that this Just So Story has things (pun intended) exactly backwards? Assuming, for some reason we aren’t told, that the ‘bigger is better’ psychology was already in place, and assuming that primitive females had some sort of choice in who they mated with… you have to also assume that the genetics for being better hung… were already in place!
(A brief dive down into this. Either you are saying that the psychology of ‘well hung is better’ is in place for generation after generation when there is no ‘well hung’ to admire and lust after, or you have the genes for bigger and smaller hungness existing for generation after generation until the psychology catches up.
And all of this is leaving aside the absolute howler that other men will somehow be intimidate by a well hung man… as opposed to large biceps or a smouldering look. Give me a break!)
IOW this is mere natural selection… not progression by random mutation.’
And then we have this howler:
Moving to land meant gametes would dry out, requiring direct transfer inside the female’s body.
As if somehow the word ‘requiring’ meant that the thing would happen! And ‘moving to land’???
This example demonstrates the utter circularity of the problem. In order to move to land, the species has to have an effective reproduction system. Which includes, among many things, a functioning penis and ‘enchanted evening’ system.
And the organism will have to have a few dozen or hundreds of other changes. None of which can fail to be in place for the organism to successfully live on land. The whole thing smacks of a Just So Story… where the need produces the result. Instead of a dead fish on the shore, they ask us to imagine dozens or hundreds of changes happening simultaneously with the first step onto land!
All of which the AI just brushed off under ‘moving to land’.
Natural Selection Can’t Drive
It’s legs are too short to reach the pedals. Ok, bad joke. Russ quoted:
Penises evolved as an adaptation for internal fertilization when animals moved to land, driven primarily by natural selection, sperm competition, and female mate choice.
And I wish to point out that natural selection… can’t drive. It can only crash.
To ‘drive’ means to decide where one is going, and turn the wheel in that direction. Natural selection, by definition, can’t do that. It can’t even back seat drive. Natural selection can only crash… ie it can prove that a given genetic change won’t work.
And it can cheer. It can, far after the fact, praise a given genetic change.
But it cannot drive. It cannot ever say, “Hey, we need to work on this internal fertilization thing, how about y’all genes start moving in that direction.” It cannot turn the wheel, or step on the gas pedal. Or the brake pedal. It can only count the score long after wards.
(Indeed it could be said that our modern, western, society is being counted and found wanting. We have a less than reproduction level of, umm, reproduction. Our line is dying out.)
Back to Lily Pads
So to reiterate the problem: Evolutionists face the daunting task of showing how not-yet-workable changes can, umm, work. Not of saying, “At this point in time, this particular mechanism worked for this particular thing.” But of saying, “Starting from that workable thing, here is a teeny, tiny, poka dot sized change that is a proposed move on from there.”
When the army came over the hill, the commander asked where it came from. The answer ‘it is on the hill’ is not an answer, but neither is ‘they crossed the bridge at Toko-Ri’. From the bridge at Toko-Ri how did they… how could they… have arrived at the top of that hill, at this time?
The tree of life has many branches… but no lily pads. Evolution, if it happened, would have needed to happen one tiny change at a time. Anything else is just a Just So Story.
Interesting... This topic is very intriguing. I am engaged.