He played chess, and I heard he was an insufferable YEC. Sort of like a YEC-version of Lubos Motl.

He said stuff about the origin of life, but he never acquired the notoriety of James Tour.

Not my favorite creationist. I think that goes to Jonathan Wells.

I haven't even bothered to check CMI in years to see what is he is up to.

I once recall infamous creationist/intelligent design (CID) proponent Ray Comfort declare the banana the "atheist's nightmare" because the banana was a perfect example of God's design. I recall it was later pointed out that the banana's shape did not occur naturally, it was evolved artificially by human hands (talk about egg on one's face).

As I reminisce, I dare to think of an evolutionary equivalent: the male nipple.

Males are usually not the ones providing milk to young, the male nipple is vestigial.

Surely, an intelligent designer would have never granted male's their nipples if they were indeed intelligent? What is even more interesting is that I think our male ape cousins also have nipples. Heck, I think male mammals have non-functioning nipples!

But why? Where is the intelligence in that?..

...As I type, I'm reading some male mammals correctly don't have nipples at all.

I suppose, at some point, the intelligent designer learned from his/her mistakes after designing enough male mammals.

All that said, do you guys think it's safe to say that the male nipple is the CID's nightmare?

Evolution is not perfect. Even less perfect is our theory of evolution. I am proposing here
that science has been so ecstatic about the contribution of Darwinian Theory to our under-
standing of life that it has become dogma. While the Theory of Evolution has evolved over
time, it has retained the essential elements of the interaction of organisms to environments and
the stochastic selection of favorable attributes. Meanwhile, scientists have furtively glanced
away from areas of existence that do not conform to those Darwinian precepts. Darwin’s
ideas seemed vindicated as it moved to Neo-Darwinian Theory with the inclusion of genetics.
Then, the Modern and Extended Syntheses were likewise subsumed as cultural synergies and
epigenetic inheritance were better understood; however, these incarnations of evolutionary
theory have not strayed from the fundamental principles—and for good reason, those princi-
ples explain so much of life as we know it.

...https://www.academia.edu/45144829/Panevolutionary_Theory_Why_we_are_wrong_about_Darwinian_Theory

If you didn't know, a ring species is simply a geographical distribution of connected, neighbouring populations of the same kind of organism living today, where adjacent populations can interbreed, whilst the two terminal populations at the ends of the ring have accumulated enough variation to form a reproductive barrier and no longer interbreed.

Now lets think about what this concept actually demonstrate.

Picture a series of neighbouring populations living around a central geographical feature, such as Ensatina salamanders distributed around California's Central Valley or Phylloscopus greenish warblers around the Tibetan Plateau.

Population A can interbreed with its immediate neighbour, Population B, which in turn can interbreed with intermediate populations C through F along the curve of the ring.

Now, where the two ends of the chain meet to close the ring, terminal Population G and starting Population A have accumulated enough variation between them that they have formed a reproductive barrier and no longer interbreed.

You'll never ever find anyone who disputes the fact that living organisms vary, mutate, adapt to their environments, or form reproductively isolated populations within their own group in the present. A ring species is simply an example of gradual variation producing a reproductive barrier between two populations of the same kind of animal.

At every single point around a ring species, the organism remains the exact same fundamental kind of animal. In the Ensatina ring, Population A is a salamander, intermediate populations B–F are salamanders, and terminal Population G is a salamander; similarly, in the Phylloscopus ring, every population from start to finish remains a greenish warbler.

I think we can all agree with this. There's nothing new or controversial with anything I just said.

Where things gets interesting is a ring species in sensible experience is a constitutive observation of living organisms distributed across geography in the present moment.

I think we all agree wity this. Very trivial observation.

But one cannot treat a spatial arrangement of living salamanders or warblers today as proof of a regulative historical reconstruction across millions of unobserved years. For instance, such as single-celled organisms transforming into whales and humans. Doing so is a definitional equivocation between present-day speciation vs deep-time ancestral state reconstruction.

Equivocation look that up.

Even within mainstream evolutionary biology, genomic studies over the last two decades—such as Alcaide et al. on greenish warblers and Liebers et al. on Larus gulls—have demonstrated that almost every textbook ring species actually experienced historical geographical breaks and genetic discontinuity rather than smooth, continuous divergence around a ring.

I don't think there's anything groundbreaking with what I just said. Sure there are dogmatists who takes these observations beyond sensible bounds. But any level-headed Joe would agree.