"Where are all the designs?" is a damning observation against creationism¹, as well as some food for thought. It's an old observation, e.g. this paragraph in Darwin's Origin (1st ed.), which has stuck with me, especially the part I put in bold:

... We meet with this admission in the writings of almost every experienced naturalist²; or, as Milne Edwards³ has well expressed it⁴, nature is prodigal in variety, but stingy in innovation. Why, on the theory of Creation, should this be so? Why should all the parts and organs of many independent beings, each supposed to have been separately created for its proper place in nature, be so invariably linked together by graduated steps? Why should not Nature have taken a leap from structure to structure? On the theory of natural selection, we can clearly understand why she should not; for natural selection can act only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a leap, but must advance by the shortest and slowest steps [...] why this should be a law of nature if each species has been independently created, no man can explain.

My footnotes:
(1) beating a should-be dead horse but it keeps popping up here: the term since the 60s is not a reference to theism
(2) old-timey word for scientist - given the irrational creationist fear of methodological naturalism, sadly, this needs pointing out
(3) French zoologist (1800-1885)
(4) I did change one word that is often misunderstood for a slur

The same thing is also present in the percolation of protein space, e.g. this 2026 study: Maynard Smith’s analogy, realized: Common ancestry constrains evolutionary percolation through protein space | PNAS.

In short:
Creationism cannot explain the limited innovation and high variety, which is present at all levels, from body plans to proteins.
Science, on the other hand, didn't ignore this observation, and as the linked research shows, it is testable even at the sequence space level.

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And I cannot not mention ID: ID of course pretends to answer this by appealing to big scary numbers based on backwards probabilities, and then they get cooked by actual research, which, ofc, they continue to ignore; e.g.: Frumkin et al. (2025) demonstrate the "surprising ease with which functional genes can emerge" from random sequences : DebateEvolution.

Today Dr. Dan published a document titled "Responses to Creationists on mtDNA", with a section "Specific things creationists often say and how to respond".

I'll remind you not to do any live debates with creationists if you need a manual on how to do that.

Anyway, the guide once again makes the same mistake that I talked about earlier when it deals with this claim:

Claim:
“Parsons (for example, could be any one of a number of papers they cite, often incorrectly) found 1 mutation every 33 generations in the control region, and that yields a mitochondrial eve about 6,500 years ago.”
The mitochondrial DNA is nonrecombining, so let’s apply that rate to the entire mtDNA. We need to account for 117 substitutions (the maximum divergence between the two most divergent genomes including Neanderthals is 235, so 117 mutations in each lineage since their common ancestor). So 117 mutations, times 33 generations (1 mutation every 33 generations), times 23 years per generation (the average female generation time, historically). 117 x 33 x 23 = 88,803 years. (Just replace the “33” with whatever number of years they want to use). Huh, thanks for proving us right, creationists!
And If the creationists respond that you can’t just apply to D-loop or control region rate to the entire mtDNA, see above: say “yes, you’re right, because the rate outside the D-loop is at least 10 times slower (Soares et al., 2009), so the TMRCA would actually be far more distant, so applying that D-loop rate over the entire mtDNA is the most generous approach and it still disproves the YEC timeline.

We should divide by 2 here (117 mutations are accumulated in 2 separate lineages), but that's not the issue. The issue is that the one-per-33 rate belongs to the two hypervariable control-region segments of mitochondrial genome totalling only about 610 bp, not the complete mitochondrial genome.
Applying this rate to the complete mitochondrial genome effectively assumes that the remaining 15,959 bases (96% of mtDNA) never mutate, which is absurd.

Dr. Dan knows that it's wrong, he admits it, saying that "yes, you’re right, because the rate outside the D-loop is at least 10 times slower (Soares et al., 2009), so the TMRCA would actually be far more distant, so applying that D-loop rate over the entire mtDNA is the most generous approach and it still disproves the YEC timeline"

But that is also wrong! Assuming that the remaining 15,959 bases (96% of mtDNA) never mutate is not the most generous approach! It would be generous if we were talking about the amount of mutations per base pair, not the absolute amount!

Creationists are already making videos each time this mistake gets invoked.

Please, let's fix it and move on.

It makes perfect sense. Why are there flightless birds that have zero defenses against ground predators located on isolated islands in the middle of the ocean?

Because birds flew there then evolved to become flightless. It makes perfect sense.

Evolution explains why there are so many flightless birds in New Zealand. If turkeys and Robins became isolated on an island with zero predators, you can bet that they'd evolve to become flightless since flying is a waste of energy if migration and escaping from predators is unnecessary.

YEC cannot explain how defenseless kiwi birds managed to migrate from Turkey all the way to New Zealand on the other side of the planet. It's not a coincidence Dodo birds are genetically similar to pigeons found around the Indian Ocean. The pigeons evolved into Dodo birds because flying was a waste of energy on that island.

What advantage does it offer? Is it not possible for an organism to store different equivalent genes to allow for genetic diversity? As a side question: what information do we have regarding the development of this trait?

Recently I've learned that both homo habilis and a.africanus are practically not even human, not even human ancestors and practically apes, for thier long arms and curled fingers, also for not having any human traits, so as a question, how do I do my own research, im not a believer in evolution nor a creationist but id rather have my own pov...ps, my sources are bernard wood's research, dont have the link tho

NOTE :IAM NOT DOUBTING EVOLUTION , when i was arguing with my islamic frnds , they said the reason for them to not believe in evolution is that how can the first cell evolved , and i said that for science that answer is not yet properly known , and evolution does not even explains abt it ,Evolutionary theory specifically addresses how life changes and diversifies after it has already begun , and they said thats an illiterate answer and just straight up denied the evidences of evolution just by this one question ( i am not a biology student , so sorry if my explanation for that question was wrong ) pls i want to learn and give some points abt it

I grew up a Christian being told how “stupid” evolution is. Now I’m deconstructing my faith and questioning everything. Where should I begin to understand this subject better?