I'd already listened once to the Dark Horse podcast, was Darwin wrong? but had to listen again because it was rather a blur in my mind as I tried to recall the point of it.  I didn't listen all the way thorough and I'm hoping I don't need to but if I find out I made a mistake later I'll come back here and correct the error.  I've pretty sure, though, in fact very sure I did not make an error.  

The pocast isa response to an interview of creationist scientist James Tour as interviewed by Tucker Carlson in December, and after backing up a number of times bto be sure I was hearing correctly, and then going to the interview itself with Carlson, it's quite clear to me that Bret completely miun  misunderstood what Tour was saying.  He thinks he eeffectivelyt rebutted his argument but he was not rebutting what Trour actually said.   Tour was not as clear as he should have been.  He didn't grasp what Tucker was getting at so he didn't get the problem clarified but I think it's really clear enough.  It's a bit more clear in the original but I think it comes through in the podcast with Bret and Heather too.  

Tour is a creationist but Bret appreciates him as a scientiest and considers him worthy of a serious response.  He thinks Tour is only saying, however, that there is a problem  with the lack of transitionals in the fossil record, and that's the total misunderstanding.  Well, let's back up a bit.  Tour starts out saying that although we can see many permutations, has he calls them, we never see a body plan changhe ever.  The permutations he is talking about are the changes we do see in so called "miscroevolution" where many changes are observed all the time, including highly adaptive changes so that it is always used as foundational to the theory of evolution.  He is ONLY talking about this observatble form of "evolution" in living things, he is NOT talking about the fossil record at all, but he takes fatal misstep to the fossil record to say that many hypothesize these body plan changes from the fossil record but that in fact we never ever see them ... in the realm of observable changes in living things.  Bret misunderstand s him to be saying we don't see them in the fossil record.  But that is not what he is saying.  He is saying, though it could cewrtainly have been said much more clealry, that ALL WE CAN EVER HAVE from the fossil record is hypotheses, so ALL the claims that body plans have evolved come freom the fossil record and are nothing but hypothetical.  Where we never ever see such changes is in the observable realm of change in living things we see all the time which is miscalled microeveolution.  I'm the one saying it is miscalled.  It is not evolution at all, it is variation built into the geneome of a particular creature, variation buiilt into the structure of the genetic system.  He is not talking about the fossil record.  He simply made that one brief side trip to make the point that such body plan changes are hypothesised all the time but that in fact they are never seen in living things that nevertheless do show many changes.   The actual interview with tucker Carlson does make this cslightly clearer as he talks about microevolution specifically and that part was left out of Bret's excerpt, so with tucker it is cleaR HE IS REFERRING BACK TO THAT TOPIC OF MICROEVOLUTION.  hOWEVER, tUCKER IS ALSO CONFUSED AND TRIES TO PIN HIM DOWN TO FIND OUT IF HE IS REFERRING TO THE FOFSSIL RECORD AND THIS IS WHERE tOUR IS JUST NO T CLEAr enough.  I think if you listen very carefully you'll see that he is not talking about the fossil record at all, he is dismissing it as the source of nothing but hypotheticals in contrast to the actual changes we can observe in living things where his point is that nothing on the orfder of a body plan change is ever seen.

He chooses a huge body plan category, vertebrates to , sorry from invetrtebrates, and certainly that is never seen either, but I think it is very clear that we don't see body plN XHnfwa on  MUXH AXllamLLWE AXlw rhN RHr wirhwe.  Qw nwcwe aww NYRHINF     in the cat body plan blur into something in the dog body plan although thjey are verysimilare in their overall presentation .  You can tell a dog from a cat by their skeletaons I believe, without confusion.   Also a bird is a bird is a nitrd.  Look at the skeletons of every bird you can find illustrated in that form and thei are all clearly built on the same patern, limbs in the same place on all of them, etc.    A chicken is built like a penguin like a dove like a duck like a swan like an ostrich and so on.  There are some dratic differences such as in the beak and feet of the dubk and the long neck of the swan but the body plan is the basic proportions of tghe skelecton and those are superficial characteristics.

One clue that Tour is taling only about the living things and not the fossils is that he keeps using the term "genetic networks" as necessary to the changes we esee and all changes are dependent on those genetic networks.  I think this is the same thing as Steven Myeyeter says in his inerview with Joe Rogan some time ago, that you only get change where there is code of it and the change is built in  to the code itself.  To get a change FROM that built in chage requires a change in the code and changes in the code itself, which arte mutations, tend to degrade the code, they don't enhance it and eventually they lead to the destruction of the genetic ability to produce whever it was first designed to produce, it doesn't dhange from that first design to something else that is coherent at all.

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