Refuting Creationism - A Giant Scorpion from 125 million years Before 'Creation Week'

Rosa Rubicondior

Fossilized scorpions are extremely rare. J. longchengi is only the fourth terrestrial species found in China.

Image credit: NIGPAS

Jiangsu researchers discover 125-mln-year-old scorpion fossil | ENGLISH.JSCHINA.COM.CN

Some years ago, on holiday in Northern Greece, myself my eldest two children were exploring an old quarry which had been used as a local rubbish dump. I had come across it the day before and had told my children that this was just the sort of place to find scorpions. True to my prediction, as I turned over a flat piece of plywood, there in all their glory were two pale yellow scorpions! I gently pressed one down with a stick so my children could watch it sting the stick with a series of rapid jabs with its tail.

Fortunately, they were relatively small compared to the scorpions that lived in what is now China in the Mesozoic in that long period of history from before creationism's little god created a small flat planet with a dome over it, when 99.9975% of Earth's history happened, giant venomous scorpions lived in what is now China, 125 million years ago. Jeholia longchengi was around 4 inches (10 cm) long and was a key species within the food chain of the Cretaceous ecosystem.

Describe the evolutionary history of scorpions, please.

Scorpions have a long and fascinating evolutionary history, stretching back over 435 million years to the Silurian period. They are among the earliest known terrestrial arthropods and have undergone relatively little morphological change over time, demonstrating a remarkable case of evolutionary stability.

Origins: Aquatic Ancestry

The earliest scorpions, such as Parioscorpio venator (dating to around 437 million years ago), show evidence of an aquatic or semi-aquatic lifestyle. These early scorpions likely lived in shallow marine or freshwater environments, resembling their eurypterid (sea scorpion) relatives. Their anatomy suggests they had book gills, similar to modern horseshoe crabs.

Transition to Land: The Devonian Shift

By the Late Silurian to Early Devonian (about 420–400 million years ago), scorpions began to transition to a terrestrial lifestyle. Fossil evidence suggests that some scorpions developed book lungs, an adaptation that allowed them to extract oxygen from air rather than water. This transition is crucial because it marks one of the earliest instances of arthropods colonizing land.

Carboniferous Period (359–299 million years ago): Giant Scorpions

During the Carboniferous, scorpions diversified significantly and some reached impressive sizes. Some species, like Pulmonoscorpius, grew up to 70 cm (27 inches) long. This period was characterized by high atmospheric oxygen levels, which may have supported the evolution of large arthropods.

Mesozoic Era (252–66 million years ago): Early Modern Scorpions

By the Mesozoic, scorpions had evolved into more recognizable forms, with many modern features already in place. Fossils from this time indicate that scorpions had adapted to various terrestrial habitats, from deserts to tropical forests.

Cenozoic Era (66 million years ago–present): Stability and Radiation

Scorpions have changed relatively little over the past hundred million years, suggesting that their general body plan was already highly successful. Today, over 2,500 species of scorpions exist, inhabiting diverse environments worldwide, from rainforests to deserts.

Key Evolutionary Trends

1. Transition from aquatic to terrestrial habitats
2. Development of book lungs for respiration on land
3. Early gigantism during the Carboniferous
4. Stabilization of body morphology since the Mesozoic
5. Diversification into modern ecological niches

Scorpions are an example of evolutionary success, persisting through multiple mass extinctions while maintaining a body plan that remains effective in predation and survival.

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A fossil of one of them has just been described in the journal Science Bulletin and announced in a news item from Jiangsu:

Jiangsu researchers discover 125-mln-year-old scorpion fossil

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A team led by researcher Huang Diying from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences has found an ancient scorpion fossil dating back approximately 125 million years.

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The fossil, named Jeholia longchengi after its discovery site in the Jehol Biota of Longcheng District in Chaoyang City, Northeast China’s Liaoning Province, is the first Mesozoic scorpion fossil unearthed in the country.

Huang explained that the scorpion lived during the Early Cretaceous period and the Jehol Biota preserved numerous fossils, including feathered dinosaurs, early birds and plant fossils, and is regarded as one of the most important paleontological discoveries of the 20th century.

Measuring around 10 centimeters in length, the species is believed to have been a secondary or tertiary consumer in the Jehol Biota food web and features long legs and an elongated venomous stinger.

Only three scorpion fossils have previously been found in China. This discovery will contribute to the understanding of biodiversity of the Mesozoic era, and will help reconstruct the ecosystem of that time.

Huang Diying, lead author
State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy
Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology,
and Center for Excellence in Life and Paleoenvironment,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China.

Graphic Abstract

Xuan, Qiang; Cai, Chenyang; Huang, Yuangeng; Huang, Diying
First Mesozoic scorpion from China and its ecological implications
Science Bulletin (2025) DOI: 10.1016/j.scib.2025.01.035

© 2025 Elsevier.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

As an added extra, just to allay creationists suspicions that the date of this fossil may have been faked:

What information do you have on the Jehol Biota, especially how its age was determined?

The Jehol Biota: An Overview

The Jehol Biota is an exceptionally well-preserved fossil assemblage from the Early Cretaceous (about 133–120 million years ago) of northeastern China, particularly in Liaoning, Hebei, and Inner Mongolia. It is famous for its fossilized birds, feathered dinosaurs, early mammals, plants, insects, and aquatic organisms. The preservation is remarkable, often showing soft tissues, feathers, and even stomach contents.

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Age Determination of the Jehol Biota

The age of the Jehol Biota has been determined using multiple methods, primarily:

1. Radiometric Dating (Zircon U-Pb Dating)
   The most reliable way to date volcanic ash layers interbedded with the fossil-bearing sediments is Uranium-Lead (U-Pb) dating on zircon minerals. Zircons form in volcanic eruptions and contain uranium, which decays to lead at a known rate, providing an accurate radiometric clock.
   
   • Yixian Formation (lower part of Jehol Biota): Dated to ~133–125 million years ago (Ma)
   • Jiufotang Formation (upper part of Jehol Biota): Dated to ~120 Ma
   These ages are consistent across multiple studies, confirming the Jehol Biota as Early Cretaceous (Hauterivian–Aptian stages).
   
2. Argon-Argon (⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar) Dating
   Another method used is ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar dating on volcanic feldspar minerals, which provides independent confirmation of the zircon-based U-Pb dates. These results have generally aligned with the U-Pb ages, supporting the Early Cretaceous timeframe.
3. Biostratigraphy (Fossil Correlation)
   Fossils from the Jehol Biota, particularly certain fish, molluscs, and index fossils like ostracods and conchostracans have been correlated with well-dated formations elsewhere in China and Mongolia. This cross-referencing with other Early Cretaceous faunas supports the radiometric dating results.
4. Magnetostratigraphy
   Paleomagnetic studies (analyzing Earth's past magnetic field reversals recorded in rock layers) also support the Early Cretaceous age by aligning with the global geomagnetic polarity timescale.

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Conclusion

The age of the Jehol Biota (~133–120 Ma) has been established through a combination of U-Pb zircon dating, ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar dating, biostratigraphy, and magnetostratigraphy making it one of the best-dated fossil Lagerstätten from the Early Cretaceous. This precise dating has been crucial in understanding early avian evolution, feathered dinosaur diversity, and early angiosperm development.

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If these dating methods are wrong because radioactive decay rates used to be much higher, this would have meant the forces that hold an atomic nucleus together would have been too weak for atoms to form.

So, it comes down to creationists having to choose between radioactive decay being much faster than today so 6,000 years looks like 125 million years, in which case atoms could not have existed when their putative creator was creating life, or radioactive decay rates are constant and the dating methods that use them are correct, in which case there are 125 million-year-old fossils of giant scorpions that lived millions of years before creationists believe there was a universe.

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Last Modified: Fri Mar 07 2025 01:27:06 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Refuting Creationism - How Humans Had Reached All Seven Habitable Continents Thousands of Years Before 'Creation Week'.

A Chukchi reindeer herder.
The Chukchi are an ethnic group native to Siberia.

Image credit: Natalie Fobes via Getty Images.

Most scientists think that humans reached Australia at least 50,000 years ago. Here, an Indigenous man holds traditional weapons during a ceremonial dance at a festival in Cape York, Australia.

Image credit: chameleonseye via Getty Images.

When did modern humans reach each of the 7 continents? | Live Science

Modern humans had dispersed out of Africa and populated every continent except Antarctica, thousands of years before creationism's little god created a small flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle East and claimed it was the entire Universe, according to creationist mythology.

So, what was the timeline of this dispersion?

After our species, Homo sapiens, emerged in Africa at least 300,000 years ago, some eventually ventured out, trekking and voyaging across the world.

Malevolent Design - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Co-opted A Solutions For It's Own Incompetence, To Ensure Cancers Survive

The Pol-θ enzyme (blue) joins two parts of a broken DNA strand (yellow).
This process is mutagenic and can give rise to cancer.

Credit: Scripps Research

How a crucial DNA repair protein works—and what it means for cancer treatment | Scripps Research

According to creationist mythology, once upon a time a magic creator created animal life complete with DNA which needs to be replicated every time a cell divides for growth and/or repair.

Unfortunately, the process it designed to make this happen wasn't very well designed, so the resulting DNA is often broken or faulty. DNA can be broken in a number of ways, all of which could have been avoided by a more robust design, which should have been within the capabilities of an omniscient deity, capable of creating living organisms ex nihilo:

DNA double-strand breaks can occur in multiple phases of the cell cycle, not just mitosis. While replication stress is a major endogenous source, environmental factors like radiation, chemicals, and viruses can also introduce DSBs. Cells rely on homologous recombination (HR), non-homologous end joining (NHEJ), and alternative end joining (alt-EJ) to repair these breaks, though error-prone pathways like Pol θ-mediated repair contribute to mutagenesis.

Then, in a method typical of creationism's incompetent designer, which in every respect resembles a mindless utilitarian natural process, proceeding without a plan and settling for suboptimal solutions, it added yet another layer of complexity as a work-around for its failure, and designed the enzyme, polymerase θ (Pol-θ), which searches the DNA looking for faults. Unfortunately, due to suboptimal design, this too fails and produces cancers.

Malevolent Designer News - The Clever Way The Herpes Virus Gets Reactivated

UVA IDs Trigger for Those Annoying Cold Sore Flare-ups

The herpes viruses are ingenious designs of creationism's divine malevolence which are highly infectious and, once infected, you have them for life.

Of course, there is no point in designing a virus to just live inside its hosts cells doing nothing to increase the suffering in the world, so they come with a number of responses to various triggers which cause them to proliferate and start infecting other people.

Since these abilities are undoubtedly beneficial to the virus, there is no rational way that this can be presented as 'devolution' from some assumed created perfection - the forlorn attempt by Michael J. Behe to excuse the Christin god from culpability for parasites.

However, William A. Dembski, another Deception Institute Fellow, claims that anything which a gene produces must have been specified by an intelligent designer, so followers of the ID cult are obliged by dogma to give credit to their preferred creator deity for the herpes virus.

Now researchers at the University of Virginia have discovered a surprising way in which herpes can be reactivated, and, true to creationism's divine malevolence's form, it takes advantage of the hosts response to other infections and rides piggy-back on the hosts immune system - an immune system the same alleged designer designed to protect us from the viruses it designed to make us sick (if you believe that childish superstition).

The Herpes virus can respond to a protein produced by cells subject to stress which normally activates the immune system. However, the herpes virus is reactivated and starts producing lots of new virus particles, so the sufferer becomes infectious again and infects lots of other people. Then, job, jobbed, the herpes virus goes back into hiding to wait for the next chance to be reactivated and begin to replicate again, often many years later.

Malevolent Designer News - How Brain Cancer Turns Our Immune System Against Us

The Wistar Institute Discovers a Promising Target in Brain Cancer - The Wistar Institute

It's an old trick often used by creationism's divine malevolence to turn a host's immune system against it and instead work for the parasite.

And, according to a discovery by researchers at the Wistar Institute, this is exactly what one of the most aggressive forms of brain cancer does by reprogramming the white blood cells known as neutrophils, so they supress any further immune response to the cancer.

Of course, whether you accept that or not depends on whether you've fallen for the disinformation promulgated by Deception Institute fellows such as William A Dembski and other leading apologists for the intelligent design cult. Dembski, for example, promotes the notion that genes which produce any given functional protein only do so if they've been given 'complex specified information' to enable them to produce that particular protein.

His presuppositional circular reasoning goes something like, the output from a gene must have been intentional and intent implies sentience, so an intelligent designer must have supplied the information in order to achieve a desired outcome. This of course ignores the fact that mutation and selection occurs in a gene pool consisting of millions of cells and not as a single event in a single cell. In a population of a million cells, the million to one chance mutation arises on average once every cell generation.

A cancer, which is a collection of cells in a hostile environment, can evolve by natural selection to survive and replicate in that environment, so the outcome will depend on the result of an evolutionary arms race.

But, using Dembski's self-referencing logic, believers in intelligent design have to accept that the 'complex specified information' that enables brain tumours to reprogram neutrophils and so supress the immune system, must have been provided by an intelligent designer to achieve exactly that result, because, so he wrongly argues, mutation and natural selection alone can't produce a strategy for survival.

The bad news for supporters of Dembski's divine malevolence is that the discovery by researchers at the Wistar Institute may have tipped the balance in the arms race between human medical science and the malevolent designer in favour of human medical science, in that it suggests a form of treatment for this type of brain cancer.

The Bible's Bad Science - What The Bronze Age Pastoralists Could Never Have Guessed At

Andromeda

By Adam Evans. Uploaded by NotFromUtrecht,CC BY 2.0, Link

Andromeda

By Kanwar Singh - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

NASA's Hubble Provides Bird's-Eye View of Andromeda Galaxy's Ecosystem - NASA Science

Q. How do we know the Bible could not possibly have been written by the god described in it?

A. The Bible describes the god it purports to have been inspired by as all-knowing, yet there is a great deal the Bible gets wrong, and even more that is left out. Clearly, whoever wrote it was ignorant of a great deal and almost all of what little they thought they knew they got hopelessly wrong.

For example, the opening few verses of Genesis make it plain that the authors thought the Universe consisted of a small, flat planet, on which they and everything they knew about lived. This planet had a dome over it from which the sun and moon were hung and in which the stars were embedded. The Bible even described how these stars could be shaken loose during earthquakes whereupon they would fall down to Earth.

This description of the universe bears no resemblance to the real universe and is clearly a description of what someone standing on a hill in Canaan thought his universe consisted of. It could scarcely be further from the truth.

There is simply no reason for an omniscient god to have got it so wrong; it's not even of the category of a 'lie to children', like the planetary model of an atom, designed to foster understanding of some of the properties of atoms without the complication of having to understand some quantum physics. The small, flat planet with a dome over it at the centre of the universe provides nothing by way of a useful model with which we can explain observed phenomena.

It is wrong, plainly and simply, and as such has served throughout the centuries to confuse and mislead, to endarken rather than to enlighten us.

Bible Blunder - How Can Anyone Imagine Tales Like The Tower of Babel Are Real History?

The Tower of Babel as imagined by
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1526-1569)

Wikipedia - Originally from Google Art Project.
Public Domain, Link

Street children in Accra, Ghana, often speak multiple languages fluently.

How many languages can you learn at the same time? – Ghanaian babies grow up speaking two to six languages - University of Potsdam

Along with nonsense like the Jonah tale and the Exodus myth, the Tower of Babel story must rate as amongst the more ridiculous stories to have been bound up in a single book later declared to be the literal truth as revealed by a creator god.

These nonsense stories refute any notion of omniscient involvement in their telling. They were made up by people with minimal understanding of the subject about which they were writing, so, not surprisingly, they are unravelling as we discover more and see the magnitude of their errors and misunderstanding.

But the nonsense of the Tower of Babel tale should have been apparent to even the Bronze Age mythmakers who made it up as a simplistic attempt to explain the handful of different languages they were aware of, from their limited view of the world which saw everything within a few days walk of the Canaanite Hills as comprising the whole Earth.

That the story was poorly grafted onto other mythologies becomes apparent when you read the immediately preceding chapter, which explained how the descendants of the sons of Noah all spoke different languages, as though that were even remotely likely. Imaging your own family where you and your cousins and your and their children all speak different languages! Apparently, the authors of Genesis had no problem believing that was at all likely.

So, they concocted the following:

Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood. The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.

And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah. And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim.

By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations… (Genesis 10:1-5)

These are the sons of Ham, after their families, after their tongues, in their countries, and in their nations… (Genesis 10:20)

These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations. These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.(Genesis 10:31-32)

So, a whole chapter devoted to why there are so many different languages by constructing an unlikely family tree with each son in each generation speaking different languages. Unlikely though that silly tale is, we turn the page, and what do we see?

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. (Genesis 11:1)

After than blunder it then goes into the preposterous tale of building a tower up to 'Heaven' which was obviously believed to be just above the clouds over the small flat planet on which they imagined they lived. In those days, the god of the Bible had not yet acquired omniscience so not only had to 'go down' to find out what they were up to but was a timid little god who was worried that the builders were going to invade his domain.

The point of the tale is then revealed - God 'confounded their tongues' so they couldn't communicate with one another, each of them speaking a different language!

So that explains why there are so many different languages!

But what the authors obviously didn't understand is that people can learn more than one language. In our English-speaking monoglot cultures, we often lose sight of the fact that over much of the world, it is normal to speak two or more languages. For example, my daughter-in-law, who was brought up in Czechia, can speak several Slavic languages, including Russian, Polish, Ukrainian and Slovak, as well as English, switching easily between them.

Now a study by linguists from the University of Potsdam, Germany has shown that, in polyglot continents such as Africa, fluency in several languages is normal, and, in Ghana, children can often speak between two and six languages fluently. Their findings are published, open access, in the journal Cognitive Development. Their research is explained in a Potsdam University press release:

What information do you have on the different languages spoken in Ghana and how they are related?

Ghana is a multilingual country with over 80 languages spoken, belonging to various linguistic families. The primary languages belong to the Niger-Congo language family, specifically the Kwa and Gur subgroups. Here’s an overview of the major languages and their relationships:

1. Kwa Languages (Southern Ghana)
   The Kwa languages are predominantly spoken in the southern and coastal regions of Ghana. These languages are part of the Niger-Congo family and share certain phonological and grammatical features.
   
   • Akan (Twi & Fante): The most widely spoken language group in Ghana, Akan consists of dialects such as Asante Twi, Akuapem Twi, and Fante. These are mutually intelligible to varying degrees.
   • Ga: Spoken by the Ga people in and around Accra, it is related to the larger Gbe language group (which includes Ewe).
   • Ewe: Spoken in the Volta Region and closely related to languages in Togo and Benin, such as Fon and Aja.
   • Nzema: Spoken in the Western Region, closely related to Akan but distinct.
   • Guan: A more diverse group of languages spread across different regions, including Anum, Gonja, and Nchumburu.
2. Gur Languages (Northern Ghana)
   The Gur languages are spoken primarily in northern Ghana and are part of a larger grouping that extends into Burkina Faso and northern Ivory Coast.
   
   • Dagbani: Spoken by the Dagombas in the Northern Region, it is part of the larger Oti-Volta branch of Gur languages.
   • Mampruli: Closely related to Dagbani and spoken by the Mamprugu people.
   • Kusaal: Spoken in the Upper East Region and related to languages in Burkina Faso.
   • Dagaare: Spoken by the Dagaaba people in the Upper West Region and also found in Burkina Faso.
3. Mande Languages (Smaller Presence)
   A few languages in Ghana belong to the Mande branch of the Niger-Congo family, spoken mainly in the northwestern regions.
   • Bissa: Spoken by the Bissa people near the Burkina Faso border.
   • Ligbi: Spoken near the border with Côte d'Ivoire.
4. English (Official Language)
   English is the official language of Ghana, used in government, education, and media. It serves as a lingua franca among speakers of different native languages.

Relationships and Mutual Intelligibility

• Akan languages (Twi, Fante, Nzema, etc.) form a continuum where many speakers understand each other.
• Ga and Ewe are separate languages but share some linguistic traits due to historical contact.
• Dagbani, Mampruli, and Kusaal are part of the Gur language family, sharing some similarities.
• Guan languages are more dispersed and less related to each other than the Akan group.

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How many languages can you learn at the same time? – Ghanaian babies grow up speaking two to six languages

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Africa is a multilingual continent, and many adults speak several languages fluently. An empirical study by a research team led by the Potsdam psycholinguists Prof. Dr. Natalie Boll-Avetisyan and Paul O. Omane now shows that the roots of this multilingualism can be found in infancy: In Ghana, most babies grow up multilingually, with most of them coming into contact with two to six languages and just as many regular speakers of each language. The researchers also showed that the babies heard some languages primarily indirectly – i.e. via radio, television or background conversations – while other languages were used by their caregivers to directly communicate with them. The results of the study have now been published in the journal “Cognitive Development”.

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The study, which examined 121 babies aged three to twelve months in Accra, the capital of Ghana, demonstrates a remarkable variety of language input in the early months of life. The children are regularly exposed to two to six languages. Strikingly, the number of caregivers the children have also ranges between two and six, and babies who have more adults in their daily lives who regularly take care of them also hear more different languages. In Ghana, families often live in so-called “compound buildings”, where many everyday interactions take place in the courtyard, where family, neighbors and other relatives play an important role in the lives of children.

The idea that a child learns only one particular language from a single caregiver, as is often assumed in Western cultures, does not apply to these communities. Rather, children are surrounded by a rich spectrum of linguistic inputs from the very beginning.

Paul Okyere Omane, first author.
Department of Linguistics
University of Potsdam, Germany.

The majority of studies on children's language acquisition have been conducted in Western industrialized nations, which is why they often focus on a rather narrow conception of multilingualism. Our research shows that other societies show a much more vibrant multilingual environment.

Professor Dr. Natalie Boll-Avetisyan.
Department of Linguistics
University of Potsdam, Germany.

A key finding of the study is the distinction between direct and indirect language input. While English is primarily acquired through indirect channels such as television and official communication, children receive most of the local languages (such as Akan, Ga and Ewe) through direct contact with their caregivers. Accordingly, the proportion of direct input is higher in the local languages than in English, which is predominantly present as indirect input.

It is often emphasized how important direct language contact is for language acquisition. However, our results suggest that indirect input – especially through media and official communication – also plays an essential role in the children’s daily lives, particularly in urban contexts.

Professor Dr. Natalie Boll-Avetisyan.

As a result of their empirical study, the researchers call for a broader view in language research. The common assumptions do not reflect the diversity and complexity found in other cultural contexts such as Ghana. The study makes it clear that it is not only the number of languages a child hears, but also the diversity of people and the different forms of input that have a decisive influence on language acquisition.

Our research shows that for many children, a multilingual environment is a dynamic, vibrant reality from the very beginning. Multilingualism is not just a bonus, but a fundamental part of children's identity and social structure.

Professor Dr. Natalie Boll-Avetisyan.

Publication
Omane, P. O., Benders, T., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. (2025).
Exploring the nature of multilingual input to infants in multiple caregiver families in an African city: The case of Accra (Ghana). Cognitive Development. In press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2025.101558

Highlights

• Infant language input was estimated in a highly multilingual environment.
• Tools were a Language Input Estimate interview protocol and a logbook over a day.
• Ghanaian infants are raised multilingually, with between two and six languages.
• Infants with more input providers also hear more different languages.
• Ghanaian infants get more indirect than direct input in Ghanaian English

Abstract
Examining the language input experiences of infants growing up in multilingual African environments is essential to understanding their language acquisition. We explored the language input to 3;0–12;0-month-old infants (N = 121) in Ghana (Sub-Saharan Africa), a non-Western and less-economically rich social context and highly multilingual country. Data collection involved an interview assessment, followed by caregivers completing a 12-hour logbook to indicate the languages their child heard over a day. Results demonstrated consistency of the infant's language exposure across both input measurement tools, suggesting their reliability. Results revealed that Ghanaian infants are raised multilingually, exposed to between two and six languages, and engage with between two and six regular input providers. There was no evidence for associations of age with number of languages or regular input providers. Analyses of the relative amount of input in Ghanaian English, Akan, Ewe, and Ga, revealed that infants receive less direct than indirect input in Ghanaian English, with no such difference observed in Akan, Ewe, Ga, and no evidence of age effects. These findings shed light on the language environment and input to African infants raised in multilingual societies, highlighting the impact of social and cultural contexts on linguistic input. We conclude with reflections on studying infants in non-Western, less-economically Rich social contexts in multilingual Africa.

Omane, P. O., Benders, T., & Boll-Avetisyan, N. (2025).
Exploring the nature of multilingual input to infants in multiple caregiver families in an African city: The case of Accra (Ghana). Cognitive Development. In press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2025.101558

Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by Elsevier. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

It's research such as this that reveals the true depth of ignorance of the Bronze Age pastoralists who made up the tales later written down and bound together in a book declared to be the inerrant word of a creator god by vested interests who wanted ordinary people to imagine they were privy to some secret, God-given knowledge, to justify their unelected, unaccountable control over the population of a failing and fragmenting empire.

Unintelligent Design - Flightless Birds Still Have Feathers for Flight

The extinct "elephant bird" of Madagascar.

Photo: Brian Choo

When birds lose the ability to fly, their bodies change faster than their feathers - Field Museum

As though designing birds with wings that they can't fly with wasn't stupid enough, it seems creationism's idiot designer designed them with flight feathers too. That is, if you believe the childish nonsense of special creation of species without ancestors, which is a central superstition of the creationist cult. And presumably, because it's also central to the cult that species don't evolve, it must be assumed that every extinct species was created without ancestors too, so they can't have evolved from ancestors either.

Which makes it all the more puzzling that a study has shown that as flightless birds became flightless over time, they tended to retain feathers that were characteristic of flying birds, and in particular, those of their flying relatives.

In other words, as flightlessness evolved, the last thing to change were their feathers.

Which begs thew question why creationism’s putative designer gave flightless birds feathers that looked as though they had been inherited from flying ancestors.

Of course, there is a rational explanation for this, and it doesn't involve magic creation by a blundering idiot behaving like a mindless process operating without a plan.

Failing Christianity - Decline in Faith Has Stalled in USA But is Set To Plunge Again

US Christian Decline May Be Stabilizing: 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study | Pew Research Center

It's mixed news from the USA which had looked as though it was following Europe, albeit a generation behind, in rejecting religion and becoming a substantially secular society with non-believers and non-affiliated 'spiritual' people in the clear majority. Even formerly strongly Catholic countries such as Spain and Ireland have experienced a massive haemorrhage of members since the clerical child sexual abuse scandals of recent decades broke.

Refuting Creationism - How The Ice Giants Created Complex Life In The Oceans

Glacial grooves stemming from the Wisconsin glaciation at Kelleys Island, Ohio

By Rmhermen, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Giant ice bulldozers: how ancient glaciers helped life evolve - News at Curtin | Curtin University, Perth, Australia

It's generally recognised that complex, multicellular life began in the oceans from colonies of single-celled organisms, but what isn't known is what environmental triggers promoted the evolution of this complexity.

Now researchers from Curtin University, Perth, Australia, in collaboration with the University of Portsmouth and St. Francis Xavier University, Canada, believe they have shown a correlation between this event, or series of events and the melting of vast ice sheets which covered Earth in a period known as snowball Earth. The trigger was not so much the melt-water and rise in sea levels as the minerals this melt-water brought with it. This sudden abundance of minerals was the result of the slow grinding of Earth's surface by giant glaciers as they gouged their way across the planet.

Refuting Creationism - Neanderthals Evolved By Loss of Genetic Information

Life appearance reconstruction of a Neanderthal male at the Natural History Museum of London.

Photo: Allan Henderson under CC BY 2.0.

Fig. 1: Summary of individuals included in the analyses.

a The geographical and chronological range of the Neanderthal clade individuals and modern humans included in the analysis. The symbols correspond to the n of individuals from each site and are colored as follows: blue = Sima de los Huesos; purple = Krapina; green = late Neanderthals; orange = modern humans. Orange ellipses correspond to the approximated geographical range of the extant modern human assemblage. Age estimates of fossil specimens are provided in Table 1. Background satellite image was downloaded from © Mapbox, © OpenStreetMap, © Maxar and rescaled to fit to figure panel size. b–e Three-dimensional models of the left semicircular canal and vestibule of selected individuals for the four groups considered in the present study.

The inner ear of Neanderthals reveals clues about their enigmatic origin

Creationists will confidently tell you that a loss of genetic information is invariably fatal so can play no part in evolution. They believe this because the frauds at the Discovery Institute have misled them into believing that every piece if DNA and therefore every piece of genetic information has a purpose.

And yet researchers have shown that it was a loss of genetic information following a population bottleneck that gave rise to the classic Neanderthals as a distinct species from their pre-Neanderthal ancestors.

This was the conclusion from a study led by Alessandro Urciuoli (Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and Mercedes Conde-Valverde (Cátedra de Otoacústica Evolutiva de HM Hospitales y la Universidad de Alcalá), researchers measured the morphological diversity in the structure of the inner ear responsible for our sense of balance: the semicircular canals.

Malevolent Designer - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Ensured Its Zika Virus Infects Developing Babies

Zika virus's non-structural protein NS1 (red) and mitochondria (green) travel through the tunneling nanotube (TNT, gray) from infected to uninfected placental cells.

Image: Mysorekar lab.

A representation of the surface of the Zika virus, with protruding envelope glycoproteins shown in red.

Kuhn and Rossmann research groups, Purdue University

Stealth virus: Zika virus builds tunnels to covertly infect cells of the placenta | BCM

I've written recently about the lengths creationism's divine malevolence must have gone to to ensure one of its nasty little parasitic pathogens, the zika virus, gets to infect as many of its potential victims as possible. Science has now revealed how it then ensures as many babies being carried by its pregnant victims as possible are infected, by sneaking past the maternal/foetal barrier in the placenta.

Zika, is, of course, the mosquito-borne virus that causes microcephaly and associated mental handicap in babies whose mothers were infected during pregnancy.

To ensure the success of this method of increasing the suffering in the world, the designer had a major problem of its own making to overcome - it had given the human foetus a placenta that included a barrier between its circulation and that of the mother. This barrier is normally sufficient to prevent viruses crossing over into the developing foetus, so clearly, if an many children with microcephaly as possible are born, the designer had to find a way to bypass this barrier.

It produced the ingenious method of creating microtubules (small tunnels) between the mother's cells and the foetus's cells in the placenta and simply passing through them!

Unusually for creationism's divine malevolence, which normally behaves like a mindless evolutionary process and reinvents a novel solution for the same problem encountered by a different species, this is the same sneaky method used by a few other viruses to pass from cell to cell in a sheet of tissue, without going outside and making themselves available for the immune system to detect and respond to.

Refuting Creationism - A Simple Mutation Could Have Given Us the Power of Speech.

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Expression pattern of NOVA1 in the brain of a mouse. NOVA1 in green, nuclei (DAPI) in blue.

Darnell lab.

Model of the evolutionary timing for the 197th amino acid change in the NOVA1 gene, noting the Nova1^hu/hu mice generated in this study. Nova1^hu/hu mice express the modern human-specific amino acid in the NOVA1 protein. The bottom panel shows the corresponding position within the KH2 domain of the NOVA1 protein. Amino acids structurally proximal (<5 Å) to the 197th amino acid, as predicted by AlphaFold2, are highlighted in pink.

Tajima, Y., Vargas, C.D.M., Ito, K. et al (2024) (CC BY 4.0)

The Rockefeller University » A single protein may have helped shape the emergence of spoken language

In the simplistic creationist parody of evolution, intelligently designed to make cult members feel superior to real scientists, the evolution of something like speech in humans must have involved complex, specified, information, that humans alone have that other, lesser, species don't have. Of course, this could only be the result of intelligent design by a supreme intelligence who favours humans, its special creation, who can be whichever your favourite deity is, although it’s not religion because it doesn’t mention God or the Bible. Got it!

The surprising thing is that neither William A. Dembski, nor Michael J. Behe, leading Deception Institute fellows, have written a widely acclaimed (in creationist circles and in selected magazine and newspaper articles emanating from the Deception Institute, for its brilliant conclusive proof of the failure of 'Darwinism') book, detailing the sheer astounding complexity of the genetic basis for human speech, and how this proves we don't share a common ancestor with the African apes.

Perhaps they were aware already of the fact that the genetic basis for human speech involves, no such complexity, but just a single point mutation in a gene we share with the other apes and many other mammals.

Rather than proof of human exceptionalism, our ability to speak turns out to be evidence for common ancestry.

The mutation was discovered by researchers from The Rockefeller University and is a simple substitution of the amino acid isoleucine for valine, in the protein NOVA1 which resulted from the substitution of guanine (G) in the first position in the codon for isoleucine for adenine (A). So, the simplest of all mutations - a single point substitution of one nucleotide for another in a gene, may have enabled humans to speak.

Malevolent Designer News - How a Fungus Makes Its Host Destroy Its Own Brain

Beauveria bassiana on unidentified insect.

© Lisa Bennett (CC-BY 4.0)

Fungus ‘hacks’ natural immune system causing neurodegeneration in fruit flies - University of Birmingham

If we are to believe creationists, their god created insects such as fruit flies, Colorado beetles, etc., and then set about devising ways to kill them with, amongst other pathogens, fungi that infect them and destroy them from inside.

One of the problems this supposedly intelligent designer had to overcome was the immune system it had given the insects in order to protect them from the pathogens it was designing to kill them.

According to an open access paper just published in PLOS Biology by a team led by Professor Alicia Hidalgo from School of Biosciences, The University of Birmingham, one species of parasitic fungus, Beauveria bassiana, cleverly turns its host's immune system against its host, making it destroy its own brain. Although this fungus does not affect mammals, so poses no threat to humans, the team warns that it is possible that another fungus could use a similar technique against mammals, including humans.

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Are Questioning Human Evolution - But Not In The Way Creationists Had Hoped

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A new model upends the decades-old “hard steps” theory that intelligent life was an incredibly improbable event and suggests that maybe it wasn't all that hard or improbable. The team of researchers said the new interpretation of humanity’s origin increases the probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

Credit: NASA. All Rights Reserved.

Does planetary evolution favor human-like life? Study ups odds we’re not alone | Penn State University

An interdisciplinary team of astrophysicists and geoscientists has questioned the evolution of a human-like intelligent species. But the question is not about whether, as creationists have been predicting for 50 plus years, but just how easy or difficult was it? That we evolved was never in any doubt.

The relevance of the easy/difficult question is that it affects our calculation of the probability of similar intelligent life evolving on other planets. If each step in its evolution was hard (the 'hard step' model), then we may be alone in the Universe; if easy, then the Universe could be teeming with life.

Unintelligent Design - A Bird-Brained Designer?

Birds Have Developed Complex Brains Independently from Mammals - campusa-magazine - UPV/EHU

You might expect an intelligent designer to use the same solution to the same problem. After all, no intelligent watchmaker would keep reinventing the movement he or she puts in watches. In fact, an expert horologist can look inside a good watch and tell you who make it, not because the maker's name is engraved inside the case but because the same watchmaker will have used the same design over and over again, maybe varying the outward appearance of the watch and adding some functions like date and phases of the moon, but the basic movement will be the same.

And this is how you can tell that whatever designed living organisms was not an intelligent designer, because whatever it is, it keeps designing different solutions to the same problems. For instance, having designed the basic vertebrate nervous system to have a brain at one end and a cord running through the spinal column, it would have used the same starting components when it came to giving some of those vertebrates the intelligence to make tools, solve puzzles and plan ahead.

Not so creationism's intelligent designer.

Like an amnesiac it seems to have forgotten whichever solution it designed first for the three vertebrate orders in which intelligence is to be found - birds, reptiles and mammals. Starting with the ancestral reptilian brain, the design process has produced two different ways of producing the pallium (the part of the brain responsible for cognition, learning and memory recall) in birds and mammals.

Refuting Creationism - A Mass Extinction of Plants Due To Climate Change - 5,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Flora and fauna in Siberia at the last glacial maximum

AI-generated image (ChatGPT4o)

Image of Lake Ilirney during field work in Chukotka, Russia

Photo: Alfred Wegener Institute / Luise Schulte.

Single view - AWI

10,000 years or so before creationism's little god created the small flat planet with a dome over it, thinking it was a universe, as described in the creation myth in the Bible, there was a mass extinction due to global climate change. In addition to the loss of the Ice Age megafauna, such as the woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave lions, etc. over most of Eurasia and North America when temperatures rose at the end of the last glaciation, we also lost a lot of the Ice Age-adapted plants.

But, because plants tend not to fossilise so readily as the bones of large mammals, we didn't know until now, just how extensive this loss was, and more importantly, what a similar rise in temperatures is going to mean for the extant flora.

To redress this gap, a team of researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), Germany, have analysed DNA recovered from plant remains in the sediment of lakes in Siberia and Alaska. In doing so, they have discovered how the temperature affects the way plants interact, tending to support one another in cold weather and competing with one another in warm weather. A rise in ambient temperature meant increasing competition and loss of mutual support.

Refuting Creationism - Where Europeans' Ancestors Came From - Thousands of Years Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Yamnayan life in the Pontic Area, 5000 years ago

AI-generated image (ChatGPT4o)

Reconstruction of Yamnayan life in the Pontic Area, 5000 years ago.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT4o).

New research based on an analysis of the genomes of 435 individuals has revealed the rich history of the ancestors of modern Europeans, especially the mixing of multiple ethnic groups in the Pontic Area - modern Ukraine - between 8,400 and 4,000 year ago which eventually gave rise to the Yamnaya people who get their name from the Russian for 'pit burial' (Yamna in Ukrainian).

Before the Yamnaya spread into Europe, they were preceded by two earlier waves of migration: firstly, hunter-gatherers who arrived about 45,000 years ago having interbred with and replaced the Neanderthals who had lived there for the previous 250,000 years. These were followed by farmers who came from the Middle East, starting about 9,000 years ago.

The Yamnaya, having formed a stable linguistic and cultural group, and either invented or copied ox-drawn carts and skilled horsemanship, which gave them great mobility, began to expand their range, probably under population pressure beginning about 5,300 years ago and lasting for some 1,800 years, eventually reaching all parts of Western Europe including the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles.