Rosa Rubicondior
Religion, Creationism, evolution, science and politics from a centre-left atheist humanist. The blog religious frauds tell lies about.
Tuesday, 7 October 2025
Creationism Refuted - Evolution of 'Language' in Birds.
Birds all over the world use the same sound to warn of threats - The Conversation
A recent paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution lends support to Darwin’s theory that language evolved from learned responses to innate sounds conveying specific information — such as a scream in response to pain — behaviours shared across many species.
The paper, by a team of researchers led by William E. Feeney of the Doñana Biological Station, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Seville, Spain, and the School of Environment and Science, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia, together with James A. Kennerley of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York, USA, suggests that different bird species—separated by thousands of miles geographically and tens of millions of years evolutionarily—may illustrate Darwin’s theory in practice.
This study not only strengthens Darwin’s insight into the evolutionary roots of human language but also highlights how universal biological processes—rather than supernatural design—can account for the complexity of communication across species.
Feeney and Kennerley, with co-author Niki Teunissen of Monash University, have explained their discovery and its significance in an article in The Conversation, reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency.
Refuting Creationism - The James Webb Space Telescope Continues to Highlight The Ignorant Authorship Of The Bible.
Glittering Glimpse of Star Birth From NASA’s Webb Telescope - NASA Science
If a creator god had truly inspired the writing of the Bible, as creationists claim, and genuinely wanted us to believe in it and understand the supposedly vital message it contains for humankind, it could easily have included descriptions of things unknown to the people of the time — such as germ theory, atoms, electricity, photosynthesis, cells, and DNA — along with a more accurate description of the cosmos than the laughably naïve nonsense the authors recorded. Then, as science discovered these things, we would have become increasingly convinced of the Bible’s divine authorship.
Instead, we find nothing beyond the limited, parochial knowledge of its Bronze Age authors, who imagined the sky as a solid dome with water above it. Consequently, as science reveals more and more about the universe, we have no choice — if we wish to retain our intellectual integrity — but to conclude that the claim of divine authorship is false, and the Bible can therefore be disregarded as such. Any message or moral imperative it contains was written by people who believed women existed to serve men, that slavery, land theft and genocide were moral, and that the death penalty was a just punishment for trivial transgressions — such as gathering firewood on the Sabbath or failing to scream loudly enough while being raped.
Compare the Bible’s description of the universe with even a tiny glimpse of reality — for instance, this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), recently released by NASA. Inexplicably, there are still adults who cling to the belief that the Bible’s depiction remains the best available description of the universe, far surpassing, in their minds, the accuracy and reliability of anything science can produce.
Creationism Refuted - Blood suckers Were Around Long Before Creationist Frauds - Leeches are 200 Million Years Older Than We Thought
Rare fossil reveals ancient leeches weren’t bloodsuckers | UCR News | UC Riverside
Unlike creationist frauds, leeches haven’t always been blood-sucking parasites. Around 473 million years ago, they were probably marine predators preying on small creatures.
It had previously been assumed that leeches evolved around 150–200 million years ago, but this fossil, found in the Waukesha biota — a geological formation in Wisconsin —might more than double that timeline to 473 million years, if confirmed. This extended timescale makes sense, as the complex adaptations required for a blood-sucking lifestyle would have had longer to evolve. However, the classification is disputed and may be an example of convergent evolution. This fossil shows the large posterior sucker that modern leeches still possess, but lacks the anterior suctorial mouthparts used by leeches today to pierce their victims’ skin and suck blood.
The fossil was discovered by researchers from Ohio State University, but was initially unrecognised for what it was until it was identified by Karma Nanglu, a palaeontologist with the University of California, Riverside, during the early pandemic years. Nanglu collaborated with researchers from the University of Toronto, the University of São Paulo, and Ohio State University on a paper describing the fossil, which is now published in PeerJ.
Sunday, 5 October 2025
Refuting Creationism - What's Happening In the Real Universe?
Six billion tonnes a second: Rogue planet found growing at record rate | ESO
With their childishly naïve grasp of the structure of the universe, the Bible’s authors could no more have imagined the true nature of the cosmos than a Bronze Age farmer could have designed a particle accelerator. They pictured a flat Earth covered by a solid dome, beneath which the sun and stars moved like lanterns suspended on invisible tracks. Believing rain came from “waters above” this dome, they assumed the sky itself must be a vast ocean — blue, like the sea — and that some celestial sluice gates opened when it rained.
Such primitive guesswork, born of ignorance and untested imagination, could never have encompassed even a single heliocentric solar system, let alone the staggering reality of trillions of such systems scattered across billions of galaxies.
And yet, while creationists still cling to those same Iron Age misunderstandings as “divinely inspired truth,” modern science continues to reveal a universe so vast and dynamic that it mocks the limits of ancient superstition. One striking example is the discovery of a planet that has slipped the gravitational leash of its parent star and now drifts aimlessly through the cosmos—sweeping up tons of cosmic dust every second and steadily growing in mass.
Refuting Creationism - A Tiny Fish Ancestor of Catfish and Carp - From 70 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'
New tiny prehistoric fish species unlocks origins of catfish and carp
A newly discovered fossil fish from the Late Cretaceous has filled a key gap in the evolutionary record of two major freshwater groups – catfish and carp. The fossil was found by researchers from Western University, Ontario, Canada, the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, and international collaborators. Its discovery is bound to send creationists into another bout of denial as they struggle to cope with the cognitive dissonance between reality and their preferred mythology.
When every fossil is transitional, each new find becomes harder for creationists to ignore—unless they retreat to one of their childish parodies of evolution and pretend it means one species instantly transforming into another, as though a ‘species’ consists of a single individual rather than a population, and evolution is a sudden event rather than a gradual process over time. This caricature allows them to dismiss every transitional fossil as a ‘complete species’ with ‘no evidence of intermediates’. From there, they retreat to Bible literalism, invoking vague categories of ‘kinds’ and imagining evolution as one taxon spontaneously giving rise to another—cats turning into dogs, or amoebas becoming humans—something that, if it ever occurred, would indeed defy any scientific explanation.
Hence their constant demands that science provide evidence for their straw-man version of evolution, while they ignore the overwhelming evidence that actually supports evolutionary theory—arguments deliberately crafted to mislead those ignorant of basic biology and to give them spurious reasons to feel smugly superior to ‘elitist scientists’ with their ‘big words’, as though ignorance were a shortcut to expertise.
So they cling to their childish mythology despite the growing number of fossils showing clear mosaic features linking different taxa—exactly what we would expect from ancestral stem species from which two groups diverged. This newly discovered fossil fish from the Late Cretaceous, displaying a mosaic of catfish and carp characteristics, exemplifies that pattern and sheds light on the evolutionary origins of these two major groups of freshwater fish.
Creationism in Crisis - A Trasitional Lizard-Snake - From 167 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A newly described Jurassic fossil from the Isle of Skye, Scotland, has revealed a remarkable “missing link” between lizards and snakes. The find, named Breugnathair elgolensis, provides important evidence of snake evolution and further undermines creationist claims that no transitional forms exist. The research has just been published in Nature and reported by the American Museum of Natural History.
For creationists, this week must feel much like any other, as science continues to produce paper after paper that refutes their beliefs, while not a single one provides a shred of evidence in support of creationism — whether young-Earth or old-Earth, whether invoking an interventionist deity who micro-manages every detail of the universe, or a distant creator who merely lit the blue touch-paper and now sits back to watch the results.
Science, of course, concerns itself only with material reality. It has no use for evidence-free superstitions or fairy tales of the supernatural — notions born of human imagination and the desire for narrative to fill the gaps in our knowledge and understanding. Creationists, therefore, must rely on self-delusion and the irrational belief in a false dichotomy of “facts versus faith”, where even the slightest perceived flaw in science supposedly means total failure and victory for faith by default.
Sadly for creationists, that long-dreamed-of day when science collapses and their god descends triumphantly from the skies in a chariot — looking for all the world like a Bronze Age tribal despot — seems increasingly remote. Science continues to validate the scientific method and to build knowledge upon verifiable evidence, always willing to revise and refine its understanding in light of new discoveries. One such discovery is that of a transitional Jurassic reptile showing a mosaic of lizard and snake features — exactly what we would expect if snakes and lizards share a common ancestor. The problem with pinning one’s hopes on a false dichotomy that depends on science failing is that every new discovery only strengthens science and renders the alternative ever more irrelevant and untenable.
The troublesome fossil for creationists was discovered about ten years ago on the Isle of Skye, in the Inner Hebrides off Scotland’s west coast, by Roger Benson, Macaulay Curator of the American Museum of Natural History, and his colleagues. Named Breugnathair elgolensis — a Latinised form of the Scots Gaelic for “false snake of Elgol” — it has now been described in an open-access paper in Nature.
Saturday, 4 October 2025
A Female Archbishop of Canterbury - As The Christian Church Struggles to Catch Up With Evolving Morality
Sarah Mullally named as new Archbishop of Canterbury - BBC News
The news that Dame Sarah Mullally has been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury – spiritual head of the Anglican/Episcopalian Communion – marks a landmark moment, signalling just how far Western Christendom has moved from the brutal, tribal misogyny of the Bible. It underlines a central truth: religions do not provide society’s moral framework. Rather, morality evolves as societies progress, and religions are dragged along, sometimes kicking and screaming. The alternative, as history shows, is increasing irrelevance and rejection – a trajectory the Christian churches have been on since at least the mid-20th century.
In this blog-post, I’ll trace the historical shifts that culminated in the abandonment of what was once considered a cornerstone of Christendom: male domination and female subservience. For centuries, the priesthood was the exclusive preserve of men, while women were consigned to serving men, bearing children, and running households – denied political and economic power, which was also reserved exclusively for men.
The Foundational Misogyny - the Bible Commands it.
This appointment is all the more striking when set against the backdrop of Christianity’s long history of misogyny, rooted firmly in the texts that its adherents call sacred. From the earliest books of the Hebrew Bible to the letters of Paul in the New Testament, women are depicted as subordinate to men, defined largely by their roles as wives, mothers, or temptresses. The Bible reflects the values of the patriarchal tribal societies from which it emerged: women were property, often bought and sold, and their value was bound up in fertility and obedience.
The Bible even incorporates an attempted justification for this misogyny and strictly 'ordained' roles with the myth of Adam and Eve, with Eve's 'sin' justifying hers and her female descendants' role as the obedient servant of men (Genesis 3:16). Eve herself was supposedly created as 'an helpmeet' for Adam when none of the animals God created proved suitable (Genesis 2: 20-23).
Far from being accidental, this patriarchal framework was codified into doctrine. The Church Fathers and later ecclesiastical authorities reinforced and extended these norms, presenting them not as cultural artefacts of an ancient Near Eastern society but as divine commandments. Through the Middle Ages and into the modern era, the Church institutionalised this male dominance: the pulpit, the altar, and every position of authority were reserved exclusively for men, while women were consigned to silence and obedience.
In short, what today’s Anglicans celebrate as progress would have been regarded by their predecessors as a dangerous heresy – a betrayal of “God’s order” that they believed was revealed in Scripture itself.
The Beginnings of Tension as Society Moves On and Religion Digs In
While the Church clung to its patriarchal order, the wider world was changing. From the Enlightenment onwards, secular society began to question inherited hierarchies and champion ideals of liberty, equality, and human rights - ideas which, along with democracy and accountability of government to the people, are conspicuous by their absence in the Bible. The 19th and 20th centuries saw women gain access to education, property rights, and, eventually, the vote. Women entered the workforce in ever greater numbers, proved themselves in politics, science, and the arts, and demonstrated beyond question their ability to lead and to think independently.Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.
1 Corinthians 13: 33-34
But rather than welcoming these changes, the churches often resisted them. Theological arguments were marshalled to justify the exclusion of women from authority, with biblical passages cited as though they were immutable law. As late as the 20th century, mainstream denominations still argued that women were unsuited to the priesthood, that leadership was divinely ordained for men, and that women’s “natural role” was in the home.
Even when the wider culture embraced women’s rights, churches dragged their feet. The ordination of women priests in Anglicanism came only after long and bitter struggles, with many within the Communion still objecting to this “innovation.” And the idea of women bishops – let alone a female Archbishop of Canterbury – was dismissed as unthinkable not long ago.
This tension illustrates the larger pattern: religion does not set the pace of moral progress but resists it, adopting change only when the alternative is to risk irrelevance. Religions function as a break on moral development....the majority of the Anglican Communion still believes that the Bible requires a male-only episcopacy. [Dame Sarah's support for the blessing of same-sex couples, promotes] unbiblical and revisionist teachings regarding marriage and sexual morality.
Most Reverend Dr Laurent Mbanda, Archbishop of Rwanda
Chairman of Gafcon's leadership council.
Religion as Follower, Not Leader.
The slow acceptance of women in positions of church authority is not an isolated case but part of a broader pattern. Time and again, when societies have evolved morally, religion has followed reluctantly, often only when it could no longer credibly resist.
One clear example is slavery. For centuries, Christian churches not only condoned but actively profited from slavery. The Catholic Church sanctioned the enslavement of non-Christians through papal decrees such as Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455)[1], while the Church of England owned slave plantations in the Caribbean through its missionary arm, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, branding its enslaved workers with the word “Society” [2].
In America, Protestant denominations divided over slavery, with Southern Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists defending it as divinely ordained. Preachers such as Thornton Stringfellow and James Henley Thornwell published tracts asserting that Scripture sanctioned slavery [3]. Slave-owners and their clerical allies proclaimed that slavery was sanctioned by God, woven into the divine order. Yet when society at large began to turn against slavery, recognising its inherent brutality and injustice, churches slowly shifted their stance. Today, no mainstream denomination defends slavery, and many even try to portray abolition as a Christian achievement – despite the historical reality that the loudest opposition came first from secular reformers and only belatedly from church leaders....Jesus Christ recognized this institution [slavery] as one that was lawful among men, and regulated its relative duties... I affirm then, first (and no man denies) that Jesus Christ has not abolished slavery by a prohibitory command; and second, I affirm, he has introduced no new moral principle which can work its destruction...
Rev. Thomas Stringfellow, (1855) Baptist minister
Culpepper County, VA, USA.
A more recent example is LGBTQ+ rights. Only a generation ago, many denominations vehemently opposed any recognition of gay and lesbian people as equal citizens. Homosexuality was routinely denounced from pulpits as sinful, deviant, or even demonic. But as society became more accepting, churches have been forced to soften their rhetoric, reinterpret their scriptures, or face growing irrelevance among younger generations. The debates now raging within the Anglican Communion over same-sex marriage echo almost exactly the debates that once surrounded the ordination of women.The Church’s official position matches the clear teaching of scripture by saying that sex belongs within one man, one woman marriage. Nevertheless, bishops and clergy have been allowed to sow endless doubt about what Christians throughout history and around the world have recognised is God’s pattern for sexuality.
Christian Concern (2022)
These cases make the point starkly: religion does not set the moral direction of society; it trails behind it. Whenever churches are credited with progress, it is usually because they have belatedly adopted values that society had already embraced.
The Significance of a Female Archbishop.
The appointment of Dame Sarah Mullally to the role of Archbishop of Canterbury is undeniably historic, yet its deeper meaning lies less in what it changes and more in what it confirms. It does not represent a sudden leap forward by a bold and progressive church; rather, it is the latest step in a long, reluctant journey towards aligning Christian institutions with the moral expectations of the society they serve.
The symbolism is powerful: the office once occupied exclusively by men for nearly five centuries of Anglican history is now open to a woman. It signals that, at least in the West, the Anglican Church has finally accepted what most of society accepted long ago — that leadership ability is not determined by gender. But this change comes decades after women became heads of government, judges, scientists, business leaders, and university chancellors. In that light, the Church’s decision looks less like moral vision and more like institutional survival.
Nor is this acceptance universal. Across much of the Anglican Communion, particularly in its more conservative provinces in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, women are still barred from senior leadership or even from ordination. These branches of the Church continue to argue that scripture forbids women from holding authority over men — an argument that mirrors the one once used to justify slavery and, later, segregation.
So, while the headlines hail this appointment as a triumph of progress, it might better be seen as an admission that the Church can no longer afford to cling to ideas that the wider world has already rejected. The step is historic, yes — but also overdue.
A Mirror, Not a Moral Compass.
The appointment of a woman as Archbishop of Canterbury is a milestone that reveals, not divine inspiration or timeless moral leadership, but the adaptive instincts of an institution struggling to stay relevant in an age that has outgrown its ancient prejudices. Far from leading moral progress, Christianity has repeatedly shown itself to be reactive — changing only when resistance becomes untenable, or, in this case, when church attendance has fallen to the point where the survival of the church itself is in doubt; when baptisms and church weddings are both at new low points and the biggest problem facing many parishes is now what to do with all the redundant churches.
Religions survive by reflecting the societies in which they exist. As the moral consensus of those societies evolves, doctrines once held sacred are quietly reinterpreted, downplayed, or abandoned. The Church that once defended slavery, opposed democracy, condemned contraception, and excluded women now presents itself as a champion of equality and compassion. The moral direction did not come from revelation but from human reason, empathy, and social progress, what was once accepted as normal is now seen as repugnant.
This latest development therefore stands as a testament not to the moral leadership of religion but to the capacity of human societies to evolve beyond it. Every concession, every reform, every “first” within the Church follows a pattern: first denial, then resistance, and finally reluctant acceptance when the old position becomes morally indefensible.
In that sense, the first female Archbishop of Canterbury is both a symbol of progress and a reminder of how slow religious institutions are to embrace it. She embodies not a triumph of theology but a victory for secular morality — a morality forged by people, not imposed by gods.
Conclusion
Religions are not the architects of morality but its reluctant beneficiaries. As societies evolve, their moral and ethical frameworks adapt to new realities — driven by reason, empathy, and lived human experience. Religions, bound to ancient texts and traditions, must then reinterpret themselves to survive in this new moral landscape. Those that fail to evolve become fossils of a bygone age, preserved only as reminders of the prejudices humanity has outgrown. Christianity’s slow acceptance of women’s equality is one more example of this evolutionary process: the faith adapting to a changing moral environment in order to avoid extinction. Like any organism in nature, a religion that cannot adapt to its surroundings will not endure — and the churches, however unwillingly, know this.
One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.
Arthur C. Clarke, interview with New Scientist, 10 February 1990.
We do not need God to be good or to have good morals. Morality predates religion.
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006).
The moral sense is not a gift from religion. It is a product of evolution.
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011).
You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the coloured races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organised churches of the world.
Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927).
Refuting Creationism - Clues to Abiogenesis In Japan's Hot Springs
Hot springs in Japan give insight into ancient microbial life on Earth – ELSI|EARTH-LIFE SCIENCE INSTITUTE
It’s been a dreadful week for creationists as yet another published paper undermines one of their favourite claims and further reduces the god-shaped gap on which they increasingly depend — the so-called abiogenesis gap. This argument rests on the delusional assumption that if science has not yet fully explained something, then it never will — and therefore creationism wins by default. The history of science, of course, shows the opposite: today’s mysteries are tomorrow’s discoveries.
This time, the blow comes from a publication in the journal Microbes and Environments, which describes how five hot springs in Japan provide natural analogues of the conditions in which the first living organisms could have evolved. These springs are rich in diverse chemical and thermal gradients, making them excellent testbeds for exploring how life can thrive in extreme conditions and use non-traditional energy sources.
The study was conducted by a team led by Fatima Li-Hau, then a graduate student at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI), Tokyo Institute of Science, with Associate Professor Shawn McGlynn as her supervisor. Their work focused on the microbial communities found in these hot springs, which range from moderately warm to boiling.
Friday, 3 October 2025
Creationism In Crisis - How Fungi Created The Conditions For Land Plants - A Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

In that vast expanse of pre-‘Creation Week’ history, when 99.9975% of Earth’s story had already unfolded, a pivotal event occurred that would set the planet on a path towards the astonishing diversity of life we see today. According to researchers led by scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan, that turning point was the evolution of multicellular fungi.
Unlike animals and plants, in which multicellularity appears to have arisen only once, fungi seem to have achieved it independently on at least five separate occasions, between 1.4 and 0.9 billion years ago.
This innovation allowed fungi to colonise land and begin transforming bare rock and rock debris into soil. That process, in turn, created the conditions that later enabled plants to establish themselves on land.
In addition to shedding light on how multicellularity evolved in fungi — a process that involved horizontal gene transfer — this research significantly extends the known timeline of fungal evolution, pushing it back by hundreds of millions of years.
Of course, the authors of Genesis, unaware of the distinction between plants and fungi and apparently thinking all plants were angiosperms, made no mention of fungi at all. Their myth betrays no understanding that plants are living organisms or that green plants depend on sunlight for photosynthesis, since it describes them as being created the day before the sun (Genesis 1:15-17). It names only angiosperms while ignoring ferns, mosses, and algae (Genesis 1:11-12), and later claims that “every living substance” outside the Ark was destroyed (Genesis 7:4), as though plants, like rocks, would somehow have survived unscathed, to provide food for the animals afterwards, despite no mention of their preservation during the flood genocide.
Science, as ever, tells a very different story — one based not on gap-filling tales but on evidence written in fungal DNA and preserved in the fossil record. It is a story of awe and wonder, not at the supposed magical powers of an imagined creator, but at the relentless processes of evolution: variation, natural selection, and the exploitation of opportunity, producing the extraordinary biodiversity we see today.
Refuting Creationism - Scarey Days For Creationists As More Signs of Life on Other Bodies Are Found
(CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

In a soccer manager’s jargon, this is squeaky bum time for creationists who cling to the notion that science will never demonstrate that abiogenesis is even possible, let alone explain how it happened.
Squeaky bum time for a football manager is when the team’s league position — and with it qualification for European tournaments, and often the manager’s job — hangs on a single unpredictable result.
So it is with creationism. One single piece of definitive evidence that life has arisen independently on another world in the Solar System, or on an exoplanet orbiting a distant sun, would comprehensively consign creationism to the dustbin of history where it has been struggling to avoid ending up since 1859. Such a discovery would refute the claim that ‘life from non-life’ is impossible. Instead, it would show that under the right conditions, life is simply a natural product of chemistry and physics.
And the signs are as dire for creationism as for the embattled football team that finds itself 2–0 down in stoppage time. Scientists at the European Space Agency have just announced the detection of possible signs of life in the ocean beneath the icy crust of one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus, as revealed by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. This follows close on the heels of strong evidence that life once existed on Mars.
The tentative evidence from Enceladus points to processes in its subsurface ocean producing organic precursors to amino acids — the basic building blocks of proteins and a fundamental requirement for prebiotic chemistry that could eventually lead to organised cells. Researchers also report the detection of previously unknown molecules, including aliphatic and (hetero)cyclic compounds, esters, alkenes, ethers, and tentatively nitrogen- and oxygen-bearing compounds.
These organics were detected by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) in ice crystals ejected in plumes through cracks in Enceladus’ ice covering. These plumes are thought to form when water seeps into the moon’s rocky core, is heated, and then forced back up to the ocean floor as hydrothermal vents — much like those found in Earth’s oceans. The hot water increases the pressure in the subsurface ocean until the ice cracks and jets of vapour and ice crystals erupt. Most fall back to the surface, but some escape Enceladus’ weak gravity and contribute to one of Saturn’s rings, within which the moon orbits.
Thursday, 2 October 2025
Refuting Creationism - Evidence From Ancient China Buries the Bible Creation and Genocidal Flood Myths
© Antiquity Publications Ltd. 2013
Ancient DNA reveals the population interactions and a Neolithic patrilineal community in Northern Yangtze Region | Nature Communications
The bad news for creationists continues unabated - because science continues unabated to reveal the truth.
Creationists like to insist that the Bible’s tales of creation and Noah’s flood are real history, not myth. But once again, science has delivered a devastating blow to that fantasy. A new open access paper in Nature Communications reports the DNA of 58 individuals from the Baligang archaeological site in central China, spanning from the Middle Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age (6,500 BP - 2,500 BP). Far from supporting the idea of a world repopulated just a few thousand years ago by Noah’s family, the evidence shows continuous human settlement, migration, and cultural development stretching back thousands of years before, during and after the supposed date of the Biblical flood - about 4,000 years BP.
The genetics reveal a population that was anything but “reset.” Northern and southern East Asian groups repeatedly mixed at Baligang, leaving detectable signatures of long-term population movement and exchange. Around 4,200 years ago, southern ancestry became especially prominent, signalling migration into the region. Burial evidence adds further depth: the males were closely related along the paternal line, while the females carried diverse maternal lineages—clear evidence of patrilineal clans drawing in women from outside communities. This is a picture of a complex, interconnected society developing steadily over time.
Uninteligent Design - How The Process of Germ Cell Production Goes Wrong And Creates Genetic Defects.

This article continues my series exploring the many ways in which the human body demonstrates unintelligent design. Far from being the perfect handiwork of a benevolent creator, our anatomy and physiology are full of flaws, inefficiencies, and dangerous vulnerabilities. Each of these makes sense in light of evolution by natural selection—an opportunistic, short-term process that tinkers with existing structures—but they make no sense at all if we are supposed to be the product of an all-wise designer.
Creationists often argue from a position of ignorant incredulity, claiming that complexity implies intelligent design, when in fact the opposite is true. The hallmark of good, intelligent design is simplicity, for two very simple reasons: first, simple things are easier to construct and require fewer resources; and second, simple structures and processes have fewer potential points of failure, making them more reliable.
In short: complexity is evidence against intelligent design and in favour of a mindless, utilitarian, natural process such as evolution.
In addition to being minimally complex, another characteristic we would expect of something designed by an omniscient, maximally intelligent, and benevolent designer is that the process should work perfectly, every time, without fail.
The problem for creationists is that their favourite example of supposed intelligent design — the human body — is riddled with complexity in both its structures and processes. This complexity provides countless examples of systems that fail to perform adequately, or fail altogether, with varying frequency. Many failures occur in the layers of complexity needed to control or compensate for the inadequacies of other systems, and when those compensatory mechanisms themselves fail, the result can be a cascade of dysfunctions or processes running out of control. The consequences manifest as diseases, defects, and disabilities — hardly the work of an all-wise designer.
They are, however, exactly what we would expect from a mindless, utilitarian process like evolution, which prioritises short-term survival and reproduction, selecting only what is better — sometimes only marginally better — than what preceded it, rather than seeking optimal solutions. I have catalogued many such suboptimal compromises in the anatomy and physiology of the human body, and the problems that arise from them, in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design, one of my Unintelligent Design series.
Just yesterday, I wrote about research suggesting that autism may be a by-product of the rapid evolution of intelligence in humans. Now we have another striking example of extreme biological complexity which, when it goes wrong, can have catastrophic consequences: the production of eggs in women and sperm cells in men.
Background^ How Humans Produce Eggs and Sperm. Egg production (oogenesis)This research, led by Professor Neil Hunter of the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at the University of California, Davis, has been published open access in Nature and summarised in a UC Davis news article by Douglas Fox.
- In females, all the eggs a woman will ever have are formed before birth. During foetal development, cells in the ovaries undergo meiosis (a special type of cell division that halves the number of chromosomes).
- These immature egg cells (oocytes) remain “frozen” in an early stage until puberty, when hormones begin to stimulate their monthly maturation.
- Usually, only one egg completes development and is released each month during ovulation.
- Because oocytes are stored for decades, they accumulate damage and errors over time, which explains why fertility declines and the risk of genetic disorders rises with age.
Sperm production (spermatogenesis)
- In males, sperm are produced continuously from puberty onwards in the testes.
- Specialised stem cells divide by meiosis to create sperm cells with half the normal number of chromosomes.
- Each cell division cycle produces millions of sperm every day, but the process is intricate and vulnerable to errors.
- Defective sperm are common, though usually filtered out, and sperm quality can decline with age, illness, or environmental factors.
Why it matters
Both processes rely on precise chromosome sorting and pairing. Even small mistakes—such as an extra or missing chromosome—can lead to infertility, miscarriage, or genetic disorders such as Down syndrome. The complexity and fragility of gamete production underline how far these processes fall short of “perfect design”.
In addition, as this article exposes, the eggs are maintained in a state of partial meiosis, 'frozen' at a critical point, sometimes for several decades, until just before ovulation, requiring special processes to conserve them in that state. If this stage fails then it can result in miscarriage, or birth defects.
Landmark Discovery Reveals How Chromosomes Are Passed From One Generation to the Next
Critical Event Guides Accurate Distribution of Chromosomes To Eggs and Sperm
When a woman becomes pregnant, the outcome of that pregnancy depends on many things — including a crucial event that happened while she was still growing inside her own mother’s womb. It depends on the quality of the egg cells that were already forming inside her fetal ovaries. The DNA-containing chromosomes in those cells must be cut, spliced and sorted perfectly. In males, the same process produces sperm in the testes but occurs only after puberty.
If that goes wrong, then you end up with the wrong number of chromosomes in the eggs or sperm. This can result in infertility, miscarriage or the birth of children with genetic diseases.
Professor Neil Hunter, corresponding author
Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics
University of California Davis
Davis, CA, USA.
In a paper published Sept. 24 in the journal Nature, Hunter’s team reports a major new discovery about a process that helps safeguard against these mistakes. He has pieced together the choreography of proteins that connect matching chromosome pairs — ensuring that they are sorted correctly as egg and sperm cells develop and divide.
Hunter’s discoveries required methods to watch the molecular events of chromosome recombination unfold with unprecedented detail. This involved genetic engineering in budding yeast — a model organism that has been used for decades to discover how fundamental cellular processes work.
The chromosome structures that we studied have changed very little across evolution. Every protein that we looked at in yeast has a direct counterpart in humans.
Professor Neil Hunter.
His findings could improve our understanding of fertility problems and how they are diagnosed and treated in humans.
Forming chromosome crossovers for strong connections
Humans have 46 chromosomes in each of our cells, made up of 23 pairs of matching, “homologous” chromosomes, with one of each pair inherited from each parent. Early in the process of making sperm or eggs, those chromosome pairs line up, and the parental chromosomes break and rejoin to each other. These chromosome exchanges, called “crossovers,” serve two important functions.
First, they help ensure that each chromosome that is passed on to the offspring contains a unique mixture of genes from both parents. Crossovers also keep the chromosomes connected in matching pairs. These connections guide the distribution of chromosomes when cells divide to produce eggs and sperm. Maintaining crossover connections is especially crucial in females, Hunter said.
As chromosomes pair up in developing egg or sperm cells, matching DNA strands are exchanged and twined together over a short distance to form a structure called a “double Holliday junction.” DNA strands of this structure are then cut to join the chromosomes forming a crossover.
In males, developing immature sperm cells then immediately divide and distribute chromosomes to the sperm. In contrast, egg cells developing in the fetal ovary arrest their development after crossovers have formed. The immature egg cells can remain in suspended animation for decades after birth, until they are activated to undergo ovulation.
Left panel: short green irregular lines arranged in pairs. Right: Close up of one pair shows that the two strands form a cross shape. Paired chromosomes showing crossovers in a mouse oocyte.Hunter lab.
Only then does the process lurch back into motion: The egg cell finally divides, and the chromosome pairs that were connected by crossovers are finally separated to deliver a single set of chromosomes to the mature egg.
Maintaining the crossover connections over many years is a major challenge for immature egg cells.
Professor Neil Hunter.
If chromosome pairs aren’t connected by at least one crossover, they can lose contact with each other, like two people separated in a jostling crowd. This causes them to segregate incorrectly when the cell finally divides, producing egg cells with extra or missing chromosomes. This can cause infertility, miscarriage or genetic conditions such as Down syndrome, in which a child is born with an extra copy of chromosome 21, leading to cognitive impairment, heart defects, hearing loss and other problems.
From yeast to humans
Hunter has spent years trying to understand how crossovers form and how this process can fail and cause reproductive problems. By studying this process in yeast, researchers can directly visualize molecular events of double-Holliday junction resolution in synchronized populations of cells.
Researchers have identified dozens of proteins that bind and process these junctions. Hunter and then-postdoctoral fellow Shangming Tang (now an assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Virginia) used a technique called “real-time genetics” to investigate the function of those proteins. With this method, they made cells degrade one or more specific proteins within the junction-associated structures. They could then analyze the DNA from these cells, to see whether the junctions were resolved and if they formed crossovers. In this way, they built up a picture in which a network of proteins function together to ensure that crossovers are formed.
This strategy allowed us to answer a question that previously wasn’t possible.
Professor Neil Hunter.
They identified key proteins such as cohesin that prevent an enzyme called the STR complex (or Bloom complex in humans) from inappropriately dismantling the junctions before they can form crossovers.They protect the double Holliday junction. That is a key discovery.
Professor Neil Hunter.
This years-long research project in yeast is broadly relevant for human reproduction because the process has changed very little during evolution. Failure to protect double-Holliday junctions may be linked to fertility problems in humans.
In addition to Tang, the postdoc, seven undergraduates in the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences contributed to this work, including Jennifer Koo, Mohammad Pourhosseinzadeh, Emerald Nguyen, Natalie Liu, Christopher Ma, Hanyu Lu and Monica Lee.
Additional authors on the paper include Sara Hariri, Regina Bohn and John E. McCarthy, all members of the Hunter lab.
Publication:
Protecting double Holliday junctions ensures crossing over during meiosis Shangming Tang, Sara Hariri, Regina Bohn, John E. McCarthy, Jennifer Koo, Mohammad Pourhosseinzadeh, Emerald Nguyen, Natalie Liu, Christopher Ma, Hanyu Lu, Monica Lee & Neil HunterThis study highlights how even the fundamental processes of human reproduction are fragile, failure-prone, and riddled with inefficiencies. The intricate mechanisms required to produce eggs and sperm—the most basic requirement for life to continue—are full of potential points of breakdown. These flaws make perfect sense in light of evolution, a blind tinkerer that cobbles together workable solutions from existing parts, but they are utterly inconsistent with the idea of an intelligent, purposeful designer.
Abstract
Chromosomal linkages formed through crossover recombination are essential for the accurate segregation of homologous chromosomes during meiosis1. The DNA events of recombination are linked to structural components of meiotic chromosomes2. Imperatively, the biased resolution of double Holliday junction (dHJ) intermediates into crossovers3,4 occurs within the synaptonemal complex (SC), the meiosis-specific structure that mediates end-to-end synapsis of homologues during the pachytene stage5,6. However, the role of the SC in crossover-specific dHJ resolution remains unclear. Here we show that key SC components function through dependent and interdependent relationships to protect dHJs from aberrant dissolution into non-crossover products. Conditional ablation experiments reveal that cohesin, the core of SC lateral elements, is required to maintain both synapsis and dHJ-associated crossover recombination complexes (CRCs) during pachytene. The SC central region transverse-filament protein is also required to maintain CRCs. Reciprocally, the stability of the SC central region requires the continuous presence of CRCs effectively coupling synapsis to dHJ formation and desynapsis to resolution. However, dHJ protection and CRC maintenance can occur without end-to-end homologue synapsis mediated by the central element of the SC central region. We conclude that local ensembles of SC components are sufficient to enable crossover-specific dHJ resolution to ensure the linkage and segregation of homologous chromosomes.
Main
During meiotic prophase I, cohesin complexes connect sister chromatids and mediate their organization into linear arrays of chromatin loops tethered to a common axis2,5,7,8,9. These cohesin-based axes define interfaces for the pairing and synapsis of homologous chromosomes that culminates in the formation of SCs. An SC is a tripartite structure comprising the two juxtaposed homologue axes, now called lateral elements, connected by a central lattice of transverse filaments5,6. Extension of this lattice to achieve full synapsis requires an additional central element complex5,6,10 (Extended Data Fig. 1a). Meiotic recombination facilitates pairing and synapsis between homologous chromosomes and then connects them through crossing over. These connections are necessary for accurate segregation during the first meiotic division1. To this end, the DNA events of recombination are physically and functionally linked to underlying chromosome structures2. The protein complexes that catalyse DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) and subsequent strand exchange are tethered to homologue axes. The ensuing joint molecule intermediates and their associated recombination complexes interact with the central region of the SC. A subset of recombination events is assigned a crossover fate with a tightly regulated distribution to ensure that each chromosome pair receives at least one2. At designated sites, nascent joint molecules mature into dHJs that then undergo biased resolution specifically into crossovers3,4. These steps occur in the context of the SC central region and associated CRCs. The post-synapsis roles of SC components in crossing over remain unclear, particularly whether the SC functions after dHJ formation to facilitate crossover-specific resolution.
Tang, S., Hariri, S., Bohn, R. et al.
Protecting double Holliday junctions ensures crossing over during meiosis.
Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09555-1
Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
Who in their right mind would consider designing a critical function such as the production of reproductive gametes, that needs to be suspended at a critical point for decades, requiring more complexity to minimise the risk of it failing - and then designing that process so it sometimes fails with serious, even fatal consequences for the resulting child?
Gamete production is just one of many such examples: from reproductive bottlenecks to skeletal weaknesses and brain vulnerabilities, our bodies bear the unmistakable stamp of compromise and accident, not foresight or perfection. This is the reality I explore in detail in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design, part of my Unintelligent Design series.
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