There Is No Such Thing as Evolutionary Creativity

We need schoolteachers armed
with red pens to strike out the
made-up phrases Darwinists use

Fewer Darwinian papers would get published if peer reviewers would do their job. You can’t make up a word or phrase to cover ignorance.

Molière got a laugh in his play The Imaginary Invalid for portraying a doctor who explained something confidently by use of an empty phrase. Asked why opium induces sleep, the doctor replied that it had a “dormitive virtue.” Is it any better to attribute a new animal body plan to “evolutionary creativity”?

Paleontology: A diverse biota in the shadow of a mass extinction? (Douglas Erwin, Current Biology, 9 March 2026). Douglas Erwin is a leading expert on the Cambrian explosion. In this Dispatch, he comments on the spectacular new fossil site in China called the Huayuan Biota (see 13 Feb 2026), which rivals the famous Burgess Shale in species richness and the detail of fossil preservation.

Dr Erwin knows that the Cambrian explosion has been a major embarrassment to evolutionary theory since Darwin’s day. Instead of slow, gradual progress, the first layers of the Cambrian show spectacular diversity and disparity of animal body plans. Some two dozen new phyla appear abruptly in the Cambrian strata, without the evolutionary precursors Darwin said should be there.

Erwin undoubtedly knows that intelligent design advocates have been making hay of this fact in books, videos, and debates. But could he acknowledge this controversy in 2026? Never! Emperor Charlie does have new clothes! Where is your faith?

Watch Erwin follow the example of Molière’s doctor:

The explosion of skeletonized animals in the early Cambrian (about 530 million years ago), known as the Cambrian radiation, was evident in the 19th Century, but only the discovery of fossil assemblages exhibiting extraordinary preservation of soft parts with fine anatomical detail in the Chengjiang and Burgess Sale faunas revealed the degree of evolutionary creativity at the base of animal evolution.

There is no such thing as “evolutionary creativity” because creativity requires a mind, foresight and talent.

When comparing deep-water and shallow-water abundances of Cambrian fossils, Erwin throws in additional magic words:

Moreover, these similarities support the notion that deeper water environments may have facilitated evolutionary novelty. Morphological innovation often occurred after mass extinctions linked to shallow-water anoxic events. It is possible that evolutionary novelties arose in deep waters and then spread into shallow waters during post-extinction recoveries. In many cases, soft-bodied clades from deep waters acquired skeletons in the shallows.

Professor Erwin is not alone. With shameless frequency, other Darwinists commit this fallacy of making up empty phrases in pretense of explaining the origins of things. Regarding “notions” in science, see our 1 Dec 2022 and 6 June 2020 articles.

What does the appendix do? Biologists explain the complicated evolution of this inconvenient organ  (The Conversation, 9 March 2026). In this story (NOT scientific article), Phil Starks and Lilia Goncharova use the adjective evolutionary a dozen times. Try “dormitive” for “evolutionary” in the following examples without falling asleep:

• 

  Scientist entering trance to meditate on his idol and on 747s emerging from tornadoes in junkyards (Grok)

  The evolutionary story of the appendix

• …is supported by evolutionary analyses
• A broader evolutionary survey found that the appendix evolved separately at least 32 times across 361 mammalian species.
• Evolutionary importance and modern life
• the evolutionary pressures that once favored the appendix have largely disappeared.
• A structure that was once a global evolutionary advantage is now more of a medical liability.
• This mismatch between past adaptations and present environments illustrates a core principle in evolutionary medicine

If evolutionists didn’t have circular reasoning, they wouldn’t have any reasoning at all.

These phrases are all vacuous, empty, deceptive: pretending to explain something, they merely reinforce the evolutionary bias of the authors. (Evolutionary bias, you notice, is real. Never would they consider anything other than evolution to explain something.)

When a trait evolves repeatedly and independently, biologists call this convergent evolution. Convergence does not mean a structure is indispensable. But it does suggest that, under certain environmental conditions, having that structure provided a consistent enough advantage for evolution to favor it again and again.

In other words, the appendix is unlikely to be a useless evolutionary accident.

It is still an evolutionary accident, they are saying, but it is a “useful” accident. It has a dormitive virtue that helps put their readers to sleep, where dreams of emergence dance like sugar plums in their heads.

The biology of musicality (Henkjan Honing, Current Biology, 9 March 2026). Here is one more example of evolutionary fluff in an essay from a major biology journal explaining the origin of Pavarotti and Handel. Dr Honing speaks of

• evolutionary histories
• evolutionary origins of music
• evolutionary inferences
• an evolutionary lens
• evolutionary foundations
• an evolutionary by-product
• evolutionary processes
• evolutionary changes
• the evolutionary trajectory of musicality

Summarizing, Dr Honing hands his students a dose of evolutionary opium as he educates them that ‘the evolutionary origins of music evolved by an evolutionary trajectory through evolutionary processes during evolutionary history from its evolutionary foundations as an evolutionary by-product of evolutionary changes.‘

And that, students, is how Taylor Swift got her talent. This all makes perfect sense if you look at it through ‘an evolutionary lens.’

But professor, I don’t believe in evolution.

Go back to sleep, you dunce! You are in a SCIENCE classroom!