A visitor to YouTube these days will be met with a wide array of AI-generated video shorts, purporting to depict the evolution of whales, humans, and other groups, with extinct species morphing into each other in vivid color and effortless ease.
A Wretched Farrago
These clips are a wretched farrago of scientific misinformation — perfect examples of AI slop. That would be our opinion even if we were tenured biology faculty, fully convinced of neo-Darwinism. In fact, the outrage we feel is largely on behalf of our evolutionary theory teachers, friends and acquaintances, who have labored for decades to persuade the public of critical points such as these:
- Extinct species are not provably lineal ancestors or descendants of each other.
- Apparent morphological similarity is not a reliable criterion of relatedness.
- Cladistic methods identify sister groups, not ancestor-descendant lineages.
- The pace of evolutionary change can be episodic, not steady, with long periods of stasis interrupted by short bursts of change.
Some scientists are indeed troubled by what they see, and are speaking out. The video below, for instance, provoked Dr. Joe Moysiuk, a curator at the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg, Canada, to lament its scientific inaccuracies:
On X, Moysiuk wrote:
Entirely the Wrong Perception
Speaking cynically, maybe we shouldn’t care. If evolutionary theory is entering a state of terminal decline anyway, where anything labelled “evolution” is OK as long as it keeps people away from intelligent design, then the frail patient is on his last legs and nothing can be done to save him. So, what does it matter if a bunch of visually compelling but absolutely rubbishy videos give kids and their parents entirely the wrong perception of evolutionary theory?
One species morphs into another like mice turning into horses in a fairy tale, and Cinderella must be home by midnight. Then the prince will show up with her missing glass slipper, and everyone lives happily ever after. Right?
Come on. Science deserves better.