Some questions on evolution

[Esquilax]

Hi Esquilax, I don't accept losing teeth and toes and whales going back in the water as becoming less complex; they are just adaptations. The modern whale is probably more intelligent, has a better brain than the creature that was a proto-whale that lumbered about on land a few million years back. It has not got less complex. It has just adapted to the water and evolved.
We will probably have to agree to differ on that one, unless somebody else wants to jump in on one side or the other and shed some light.

So what if the whale is smarter than its ancestor? Growing more complex in one area doesn't preclude growing simpler in another, and in the case of whales their legs evolved into flippers which are demonstrably simpler in terms of bone structure and design. Saying "oh, but it got more complex in this completely unrelated area!" doesn't change what I've said at all, and given that evolution isn't a ladder that goes all in one direction or all in the other, and that organisms don't have, like, some cohesive meta-intelligence governing how their bodies mutate, the metrics for each body part are always going to be changing independently of one another. What you seem to be looking for is a singular organism taking a step backwards in every respect at once, and I don't know why you would think that's even possible as evolution doesn't work that way.

See, this is the problem when you start off a conversation about complexity without ever defining what you think it is, or what you'd expect to see when an organism becomes more or less complex; you've begun in a vague and unfalsifiable place, and a less charitable part of me wants to say that now you're shifting the goalposts to retract your claim away from whatever rebuttals we bring to bear. I don't think that's what's happening, but it's damn close to it, unfortunately; you're leaving us groping in the dark about what you're actually discussing, it seems.