First, I’ll give a hat tip to this nicely succicnt post by @Kevin_Levites, which neatly summarises the various canards we see from the usual suspects. However, I think it useful to elaborate upon each section, and provide resources that back up the sections in question. Starting with (emphases mine):
Ah, yes, the duplicity of “design” apologetics, which apart from being covered as Canard #20 in my grand list of creationist canards, is elaborated upon in more detail in this extended exposition on the subject, which I suspect many here will find useful.
Ah, this particularly noxious piece of apologetic mendacity is the centrepiece of Canard #7. A canard I treat with particular scorn and derision.
The pedlars of this nonsense also need to learn that there are two scientific papers destroying this myth. These papers are:
[1] Stars In Other Universes: Stellar Structure With Different Fundamental Constants by Fred C. Adams, Journal of Cosmology & Astroparticle Physics (August 2008) DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2008/08/010 [Full paper downloadable from here]
[2] A Universe Without Weak Interactions by Roni Harnik, Graham D. Kribs and Gilad Perez, Physical Review Letters D, 74(3): (1st August 2006) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.74.035006 [Full paper downloadable from here]
The first of these papers establishes that stellar nucleosynthesis and organic chemistry would remain essentially unchanged, even if key physical constants varied by as much as five orders of magnitude. The second paper establishes that the same would be the case, even if we deleted the weak nuclear force wholesale from the universe.
So much for “fine tuning”.
And indeed, I’ve devoted voluminous amounts of posts here to the matter of prebiotic chemistry. This false dichotomy between “chance” and “design” also features as part of Canards #10 and #30 (among others).
And once again, I’ll point everyone to my voluminous expositions on prebiotic chemistry. Along with the fact that said research has now moved on to experiments with synthetic model protocells. But mythology fanboys are always at least 50 years behind the curve, so to speak.
This, of course, forms the subject matter of Canard #28, which includes detailed exposition of several scientific papers on the matter that destroy this piece of ex recto apologetic fabrication.
Again, been there, done that (is anyone really surprised at this? ). Apart from an earlier post in this thread dealing with eye evolution, there’s also this grand exposition on the subject, including detailed exposition on the genes involved. As for the bacterial flagellum, I deal both with Behe’s canards about “irreducible complexity” and the scientific papers covering the bacterial flagellum and its evolution in this detailed exposition.
Again, as noted above, this canard is a flat out lie. Even though my knowledge of the tetrapod lineage is incomplete, i’m aware of numerous organisms that clearly form a well-defined lineage exhibiting the relevant anatomical transitions, from Eusthenopteron to Panderichthys and Ventastega, through Tiktaalik to Acanthostega and Ichthyostega. Which, if you examine them, exhibit another feature that I’ve only recently realised - namely, that the morphological changes constitute topological transformations of shape that are well within the remit of mechanisms such as Turing morphogenesis - a topic I cover in some detail with respect to Papilio dardanus wing patterns in this detailed exposition. Then of course there’s my exposition on the genes involved in major morphological changes in domesticated Goldfish, and I suspect that those genes will turn out to be either homologues of, or related to, HOX genes, which have been known to be implicated in the bauplans of living organisms for decades.
Indeed, I’m reminded here that no less a person than Linnaeus, the father of modern biological taxonomy, regarded humans and chimpanzees to be sufficiently closely related, on the basis of comparative anatomy, to warrant their placement in the same taxonomic Genus.
Linnaeus even wrote a letter discussing this topic to fellow taxonomist Johann Georg Gmelin, the original (and transcription thereof) being available here. It’s apposite to reproduce the relevant section - first, the original Latin:
This translates to:
Note that Linnaeus wrote this SIXTY TWO YEARS BEFORE DARWIN WAS BORN.
Of course, we also have a wealth of modern data, both from palaeontology and molecular phylogeny, which establishes overewhelmingly that, as you’ve stated above, humans are apes. I’m also reminded of the data from direct genome comparisons, including the data involving endogenous retroviral insertions, which are practially the smoking gun for this.
Finally …
To which my retort would be, of course, that it’s monumentally arrogant to believe that these people know better than the world’s cosmological physicists, just because they treat uncritically as fact, the vacuous assertions of pre-scientific mythologies. See among other resources, my exposition on Steinhardt & Turok’s braneworld cosmology, which includes within it a testable prediction, unlike the assertions of mythologies.
And, on this note …
Fat chance. The ex recto apologetic fabrications you’ve highlighted have been doing the rounds for decades (and in the caase of Paley’s gibberish, the best part of 200 years). Idiot mythology fanboys still think that the garbage in question constitutes some sort of ineffable “wisdom” with which they’re going the hand-wave away 350 years of scientific progress, instead of being collapsed intellectual soufflés of a particularly sloppy constitution.
If anyone wishes to bookmark this, feel free.