Creationism Refuted - How The Fossil Record Tracks Climate Change

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via Wikimedia Commons

The climate in Catalonia was much rainier 10 million years ago - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - UAB Barcelona

A paper published a few days ago in the Journal of Mammalian Evolution describes how the climate in Catalonia was much wetter 10 million years ago than it is today, with rainfall roughly twice the present rate, and how this was reflected in the evolution of mammals in the region. The study was conducted by palaeontologists at the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP-CERCA), in association with colleagues from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).

This must be deeply frustrating for creationists because, no matter how much they ignore the evidence, misrepresent it, or shout abuse at scientists, the evidence stubbornly refuses to support creationism and invariably supports evolution over deep time on an ancient Earth. The findings presented in this paper are, of course, no exception.

Scientists have previously established a close link between rainfall and the composition of mammalian communities, with wetter conditions favouring insectivores. Increased rainfall promotes the development of forests, which in turn provide abundant niches for insects and other invertebrates—the primary food source of insectivorous mammals. This relationship between small mammals and climate was first studied in detail by Jan van Dam, an associate researcher at the ICP. Van Dam developed equations that allow both average annual rainfall and its seasonal distribution to be estimated from fossil assemblages of small mammals.

Building on that earlier work, the present study analyses the abundant fossil record of small mammals to reconstruct populations that changed dynamically through time in response to shifting climatic conditions—exactly as predicted by the Theory of Evolution. There is, unsurprisingly, no evidence of spontaneous creation of species, nor of a global biological reset caused by a genocidal flood a few thousand years ago.

Unintelligent Design - A Bacterium That Goes Wrong And Self-Destructs

SAR11 bacteria comprise some 40% of marine bacterial cells, making them an essential part of our ocean ecosystems.

Image source: Smithsonian / Xiaowei Zhao.

One of Earth’s most abundant organisms is surprisingly fragile

Microbiologists at the University of Southern California (USC) have discovered that one of Earth’s most abundant species, the SAR11 bacterium, has a fundamental — and potentially fatal — ‘design’ flaw. They have just published their findings in Nature Microbiology, and it should make grim reading for any creationists with sufficient courage to read it.

When you have trillions of copies, what does it matter to ‘selfish’ genes if a few billion go wrong and end up destroying the organisms they travel through time in? For an evolved organism, it matters not one tittle or jot to its genes, because they can always produce more copies. So long as there is a sufficiently large population to keep replicating, they will continue to exist and reproduce — and they have no other ultimate function. This is all they evolved to do.

But could we say the same for an organism designed by an omniscient, intelligent designer? What would be intelligent about creating an organism that, under particular but entirely predictable conditions, attempts to reproduce but succeeds only in making repeated copies of its DNA, fails to divide, and enters a runaway cycle of replication until it becomes so disorganised that it can no longer survive and effectively self-destructs?

SAR11 dominates the surface waters of the world’s oceans and accounts for around 40% of marine bacterial cells. As such, it is a vital component at the base of the marine food chain, and is so successful partly because of a process known as genetic streamlining — the evolutionary loss of genes to reduce energy demands in nutrient-poor environments. This alone is not the main problem for creationists to explain, although it does raise the obvious question of why a designer would burden an organism with a genetic load it does not need in the first place.

The real problem is that this streamlining, as an evolved process, comes at a cost. In shedding a load of mostly surplus genes, some essential ones are lost too — including genes that regulate the cell cycle. The result is a failure to divide after genome replication, with the cell instead entering an uncontrolled loop of DNA replication without division.

How on Earth can that be regarded as intelligent design? The organism does exactly what it is ‘designed’ to do under conditions of low nutrient stress, but in doing so falls into an inescapable trap. The consequence is that populations continue to decline even when nutrients later become available again — with potentially serious knock-on effects for other species higher up the food chain.

Malevoent Design - Has Creationism's Divine Malevolence Been Up To Its Old Tricks? - Another Bat Virus Modified To Infect Humans.

Pteropine orthoreovirus (PRV)

Illustration of a Nipah virus.

Photo: AFP / Ruslanas Baranauskas / Science Pho

Bats Identified as Origin of Unexplained Acute Respiratory Illness and Encephalitis in Bangladesh | Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health

paper just published in Emerging Infectious Diseases by a team led by Nischay Mishra, of the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, shows that Pteropine orthoreovirus (PRV) — a bat-borne orthoreovirus — has crossed the species barrier into humans in Bangladesh, causing a Nipah-like illness that is difficult to distinguish clinically from Nipah virus infection. The disease presents primarily as an acute respiratory infection, sometimes accompanied by encephalitis.

It has long been known that bats possess a markedly more effective antiviral immune system than humans. This fact alone presents a problem for creationists who insist that humans — and, conveniently, themselves — are the special creation of an omnibenevolent deity. There is no coherent reason why such a deity would equip bats with a superior immune system while leaving humans comparatively vulnerable, unless the intention were for humans to suffer more infectious disease than is strictly necessary.

However, the bat immune system appears to have a significant evolutionary trade-off. Rather than eliminating viruses entirely, it often suppresses their pathological effects while allowing persistent infection. As a result, bats function as biological incubators in which viruses can circulate, diversify, and evolve. Inevitably, some of these variants acquire the ability to cross species barriers and infect humans. This remains the most parsimonious explanation for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19 — the pandemic of 2020–2022 that killed tens of millions of people and inflicted severe damage on the global economy.

Creationists argue that complex, specified genetic information must be supplied by their putative intelligent designer and then, by a glaring act of circular reasoning, claim that the mere existence of such information constitutes evidence for that designer. This line of argument has no more merit than insisting that tins of baked beans can only be made by magic pixies, and therefore that the existence of tins of baked beans proves the existence of magic pixies. It is a form of reasoning that functions only for those who lack even a basic grasp of logic.

An additional difficulty for creationists is that PRV could only become infectious to humans if it possessed the precise genetic features required for that capability. Within the internal logic of intelligent design apologetics, the zoonotic PRV must therefore count as the product of deliberate design — and hence as evidence for a malevolent intelligent designer. The usual response is to abandon any pretence that intelligent design is science rather than religion in disguise, and to retreat into Christian fundamentalism, invoking “the Fall” and claiming that some other supernatural entity was empowered to interfere with creation and design its own suite of pathogens and parasites. This claim borders on blasphemy even within Christian theology, which traditionally reserves the creation of living things exclusively to their deity.

Unintelligent Design - The Prolific Waste Of Baby Dinosaurs as Food - 150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Ecosystem reconstruction of the Late Jurassic Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry around 150 million years ago in Colorado, the United States

Credit: Sergey Krasovskiy and Pedro Salas

Life in Late Jurassic Colorado.

AI-generate image (ChatGPT5.2)

Baby dinosaurs a common prey for Late Jurassic predators | UCL News - UCL – University College London.

The prolific-waste reproductive strategy of Late Jurassic dinosaurs has been highlighted in a paper published in a New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin by a team of palaeontologists led by Dr Cassius Morrison of University College London’s Department of Earth Sciences.

The team constructed a detailed food web using fossil data laid down around 150 million years ago in the Morrison Formation of the United States. The Morrison Formation is a prominent sequence of Upper Jurassic sedimentary rocks (approximately 156–147 million years old) spanning around 1.5 million square kilometres across the western United States. It is North America’s most prolific source of dinosaur fossils, preserving vast deposits of mudstone, sandstone, and limestone formed in ancient river systems and floodplains.

Their analysis revealed that a major food source for carnivorous dinosaurs consisted of the young of the largest herbivores. These animals followed a reproductive strategy in which large numbers of offspring were produced and then effectively abandoned after hatching. Such juveniles would have been abundant, vulnerable, and easy prey for predators. This strategy is a familiar one in biology and only makes sense as the outcome of evolutionary processes. As an intelligently designed reproductive strategy, however, it is difficult to make sense of at all.

This is yet another example of the prolific waste that characterises living systems and betrays the absence of intelligent foresight in their design. Prolific waste and unnecessary complexity are hallmarks of evolution, whereas minimal waste and minimal complexity are the defining features of genuinely intelligent design — a distinction I explore in detail in my book The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax.

Malevolent Design - How Complex Specified Genetic Information and Irreducible Complexity Cause Pancreatic Cancer

Study reveals protein linked to spread of pancreatic cancer through nerves

A paper just published in Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology shows how precisely the sort of complex specified information and irreducible complexity that Discovery Institute fellows William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe proclaim as evidence of intelligent design can instead combine to ensure that pancreatic cancer survives, metastasises, and ultimately kills its victims.

This, of course, is true of many diseases, which simply would not exist unless the right combination of genetic information were present and functioning correctly for the disease itself. Yet creationists routinely compartmentalise their beliefs so that harmful “designs” are excluded and blamed on something else, while only those features that appear to benefit humans are credited to a designer.

In the case of parasites, what is harmful to humans is often beneficial to the parasite, but once again the presence of harm causes the logic of creationist arguments to shift. No longer is this evidence of intelligent design, but of something called “sin”, which appears to operate as an autonomous entity capable not only of corrupting creation but of designing living organisms and manipulating their genomes. The formerly omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient designer god now seems strangely impotent, indolent, or indifferent in the face of this alternative “designer”.

This theology also sits uncomfortably alongside another core fundamentalist belief: that God has a plan for everyone, and that everything that happens in a person’s life occurs as part of this divine plan. Presumably, then, that plan must include any diseases they suffer from, including cancer.

It is therefore difficult to see how creationists can escape the conclusion that their god designs and causes cancer as part of this plan, while continuing to cling to the claim that intelligent design is inherently benevolent.

Refuting Creationism - Stone Tool Sophistication and Multiple Hominin Species in East Asia - 150,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Stone tool manufacture in China

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Discovery challenges long-held beliefs on early human technology in East Asia - Griffith News

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with palaeoanthropologist Michael Petraglia of Griffith University, have just published an open-access paper in Nature Communications presenting evidence of advanced stone-tool technology dating to between 160,000 and 72,000 years ago in China.

This represents a significant shift in our understanding of the development and diversity of stone-tool technologies in East Asia. For many years it was assumed that stone technology in China lacked complexity and sophistication because bamboo provided a more versatile alternative — the so-called “Bamboo Hypothesis”. Archaeologists now have compelling reasons to revise that view.

If there is one thing calculated to excite creationists, it is the fact that scientists frequently change their minds when the evidence changes — an essential feature of the scientific method. In the simplistic binary worldview common to creationism, however, science is either right or wrong. Any revision of conclusions is therefore taken as proof that science is “wrong”, and that creationism wins by default, without needing to provide any supporting evidence of its own.

From this it follows, in the creationist imagination, that if scientists were wrong about stone-tool technology in China, they must also be wrong about human evolution and the age of the Earth. Consequently, the very evidence that caused scientists to revise their views — sophisticated tools securely dated to 160,000–72,000 years ago — must itself also be wrong. Few creationists seem to notice the paradox of arguing that science must be wrong because evidence corrected it, while simultaneously insisting that the correcting evidence is also wrong. Within the confines of the creationist rabbit hole, believing six impossible things before breakfast merely requires practice.

Nevertheless, the evidence from Xigou, in the Danjiangkou Reservoir region of central China, shows that stone-tool manufacture was not only an advanced skill but may also have been practised by more than one species of hominin. By this time, humans had already diversified into several relatively large-brained species, well before modern Homo sapiens had migrated into Eurasia in significant numbers.

The tools themselves show clear evidence of hafting — the fitting of handles to stone implements — representing the earliest known composite tools in East Asia. This implies an ability to plan ahead and to understand how tool performance could be enhanced, combined with a high level of technical skill and craftsmanship.

Creationism Refuted - Termite Evolution By Loss Of Genetic Information and Complexity

Physogastric termite queen (top left) of Macrotermes michaelseni being groomed by workers and the larger king, with soldiers in the foreground.

Photo by Jan Sobotnik

The giant northern termite Mastotermes darwiniensis showing the close relationship between termites and other cockroaches.

Public Domain, Link

Scientists solve the mystery of why termite kings and queens are monogamous - The University of Sydney

Researchers from the University of Sydney have just published a paper on termite evolution in Science which will make depressing reading for any creationists brave enough to attempt it. The study comprehensively refutes several articles of creationist faith.

A common creationist assertion is that loss of genetic information is invariably fatal, so mutations cannot be selected for during evolution. They also insist that evolution, as defined by science, is necessarily a process of increasing complexity, which they then claim would violate the laws of thermodynamics by reducing entropy.

The absurdity of this counter-factual claim is easy to see. Variation between individuals is due to genetic differences, and that variation is only possible if mutations generate novelty. Creationists also conveniently ignore the fact that entropy can decrease locally in open systems. Earth is very much an open system, with a continuous influx of energy from the Sun, so nothing in thermodynamics precludes local increases in order or complexity.

Moreover, the claim is demonstrably false. Many endoparasites, such as parasitic worms, have lost substantial amounts of genetic information as they evolved to rely on their hosts for key functions. Several intestinal worms, for example, have no digestive tract at all, because they absorb nutrients directly from their host’s gut. Evolution does not require an increase or a decrease in complexity as such; it requires only a change in the frequency of alleles in a population over time.

The University of Sydney researchers have now identified another striking example of evolution by gene loss — this time in termites. Their results show a massive loss of genes as termites evolved extreme monogamy and sociality. Paradoxically, a reduction in genetic complexity at the individual level was accompanied by an increase in social complexity at the colony level.

Some of the lost genes are those responsible for producing sperm tails, meaning that termite sperm can no longer swim. This is likely a consequence of strict monogamy within the colony, which removes sperm competition altogether. In species where females mate with multiple males, there is strong selection pressure for highly motile sperm, because the fastest are more likely to fertilise the eggs. In termites, that pressure simply does not exist.

To reach these conclusions, the team — led by Professor Nathan Lo — compared the genomes of ‘domestic’ cockroaches (which share a common ancestor with termites), closely related wood roaches that live in small family groups, and multiple termite species exhibiting different levels of social complexity.

Refuting Creationism - Blood Tests On Ancient Fossils - And What They Can Tell Us

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Life in fossil bones: what we can learn from tiny traces of ancient blood chemicals

A paper recently published in Nature details the application of a new field known as palaeometabolomics to reconstruct ancient African environments and track how they changed over time.

Modern medicine can learn a great deal about our health and lifestyle from a blood test, because blood contains traces of metabolites derived from the food we eat, as well as indicators of liver and kidney function and how effectively metabolic waste is disposed of.

But what if we could perform blood tests on archaic animals and human ancestors? Over time, this could tell us not only what they ate, but how their diets changed, which in turn reveals changes in rainfall, temperature, vegetation cover — forest versus savannah — and the species that were hunted and consumed.

Unintelligent Design - One Design Blunder Led To Another And Ended Up Causing Cancer - Or Was It Deliberate?

A broken DNA repair tool accelerates aging | News from Goethe University Frankfurt

Researchers from Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, have shown how a faulty DNA repair mechanism triggers inflammation and leads to accelerated ageing, developmental abnormalities, and cancer.

Their findings are published in Science.

As I explained in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Exposing the Intelligent Design Hoax, one of the hallmarks of an evolved system — and one which creationists have been conditioned to mistake for evidence of intelligent design — is complexity. In reality, the opposite is true: intelligently designed objects and processes are typically *minimally

complex, doing exactly what is required and no more.

One reason complexity arises in evolved systems is the need for additional layers of processes to compensate for the suboptimal designs that evolution inevitably produces. An intelligently designed process — especially one devised by a designer endowed with foresight — would require no such compensatory mechanisms. It would function reliably every time and be robust enough to withstand environmental stressors and other causes of malfunction. Nor would a perfectly designed copying process be prone to copying errors.

What we observe in reality, however, is an excessively complex system that still malfunctions — and when it does, it can do so unpredictably and catastrophically, leading to increased suffering and even death. The equivalent, in engineering terms, would be an aircraft manufacturer producing planes that were mostly safe most of the time, yet costly to build because they relied on intricate back-up systems to compensate for other components prone to failure — and which nevertheless suffered unpredictable mid-flight failures when those back-ups failed, causing aircraft to fall from the sky. Such an incompetent aircraft manufacturer would not remain in business for long.

In contrast to evolved systems which are overly complex and still prone to errors, an intelligently designed organism would be minimally complex, maximally efficient, robust enough to withstand environmental stressors and work perfectly every time. As so often, what ID predicts is not what we actually observe. In normal science, the falsification of a hypothesis is regarded as confirmation that the hypothesis was wrong, but in creationism the reverse holds; if the facts fail to confirm the hypothesis the facts must be wrong. The hypothesis must be clung to with grim determination, come what may.

Refuting Crationism - How Climate Change Shaped the Evolution of Kangaroos And Wallabies

Red-necked wallaby

QUT - Study maps climate-related evolution of modern kangaroos and wallabies

In a clear example of how evolution is driven by environmental change, a study by scientists at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), led by Professor Matthew J. Phillips, has shown how closely the evolution of Australia’s kangaroos and wallabies maps onto the continent’s long-term climate history. Their findings are published in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.

By tracing the climate record over the last 18 million years and comparing it with the fossil record, the team showed that increasing aridity and habitat variability around 7–9 million years ago coincided with the emergence of the macropodines — the group to which most modern kangaroos and wallabies belong. This was followed by the appearance of incipient grasslands around 5–4.5 million years ago, a period that saw a major diversification of kangaroo and wallaby species.

As expected, there is no evidence of sudden creation without ancestors 6,000–10,000 years ago, nor of a wholesale biological reset following a global flood a few thousand years ago. Instead, the record is one of gradual evolution over deep time, driven by environmental change. The long-predicted failure of the Theory of Evolution to explain and make sense of the evidence once again failed to materialise, as it has every time creationists have claimed it was imminent over the past half-century.

Rather than contradicting evolutionary theory, the evidence fits it like a hand in a glove, adding yet another piece to the growing mountain of supporting data. Once again, the underpinning theory of modern biology is shown to be supported by independent lines of evidence from geology, climatology, and palaeontology, all converging on the same conclusion: life has evolved on an ancient planet responding continuously to changing environments.

Creationism Refuted - Only Scientifically Illiterate People Could Have Got the Bible So Badly Wrong

UHZ1, a record breaking galaxy 13.2 billion light-years away, seen when the universe was only 3% of its current age. UHZ1 is puzzling in view of it harboring a supermassive black hole that could not have possibly been seeded even by regular stars, in view of its mass and very little time for the BH to grow. As such, UHZ1 is believed to be evidence for supermassive stars that, upon collapse, generate the supermassive black hole powering the quasar at its center. In this study, the authors show how UHZ1 could harbor a supermassive black hole seeded by the collapse of a dark star. The mechanisms identified by the authors are not restricted to UHZ1 — it provides a pathway for explaining over massive black hole galaxies, of which UHZ1 is a prominent example.

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Ákos Bogdán; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI;
Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & K. Arcand

Dark stars could help solve three pressing puzzles of the high-redshift universe | EurekAlert!

A recent study by scientists from Colgate University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Texas at Austin, led by Assistant Professor Cosmin Ilie, has provided answers to three long-standing puzzles concerning the earliest stages in the formation of the Universe. The picture now emerging stands in stark contrast to the account of cosmic origins found in the Bible.

Quite apart from the hopelessly inaccurate Biblical description of the Universe as consisting of a small, flat Earth capped by a solid dome to which the Sun, Moon, and stars were attached, we are also presented with an equally implausible account of how the Universe supposedly came into being. Far from reflecting divine insight, the narrative reads as the best guess of Bronze Age storytellers attempting to make sense of the world from a position of near-total ignorance of physics and chemistry.

The sequence begins with the creation of light, which at least has the merit of vaguely echoing the fact that, from the earliest moments after the Big Bang, the Universe was dominated by electromagnetic radiation. But matters rapidly unravel. The Biblical account then invokes the separation of land and water—both of which would require atoms and molecules of specific elements. None of these elements could have existed at that time, as they were only forged much later inside stars formed from primordial clouds of hydrogen and helium. Elements such as oxygen, silicon, iron, and aluminium—essential constituents of water and rock—simply did not yet exist.

Even after heavy elements had been created, land could only arise through the formation of planetary systems from the accretion discs of second- or third-generation stars. Yet the Bible places land and water in existence immediately after the creation of light, with no explanation of their origin. The authors clearly assumed these features had always been present because they were part of the familiar world they inhabited. Unaware of atoms, molecules, or stellar nucleosynthesis, they simply imagined their creator working with pre-existing materials.

The result is a confused and self-contradictory narrative: a creator god who allegedly made everything, yet inexplicably relied on materials that must either have existed eternally or have been created earlier, with no account of how or when this occurred. Far from being profound, the story collapses into paradox and incoherence under even minimal scientific scrutiny.

By contrast with this naïve and internally inconsistent creation myth, modern cosmology—supported by sophisticated observational tools such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)—is steadily assembling a coherent, evidence-based account of how the Universe actually formed and evolved.

Refuting Creationism - How U-Pb Dating Proves Humans Not Glaciers Transported the Stonehenge Stones

Grains of sand prove people – not glaciers – transported Stonehenge rocks

Stonehenge in Wiltshire, southern England, is a mysterious place that speaks of a culture and political–religious authority of which we know almost nothing, probably motivated by belief in long-dead gods whose supposed presence was, at the time, undoubtedly considered to be “all around”. This is much as theists of all religions assert of their god or gods today. Who these people were, remains one of the great mysteries, as does how they moved such massive stones into place to build a stone circle with extraordinary precision, and how they transported them over long distances long before the domestication of the horse.

We know they were not the later Welsh-speaking Celts, who did not arrive in Britain until around 1,000 BCE — some two millennia after construction of Stonehenge began. Those Celts replaced the Beaker culture, which itself had replaced the Neolithic farming communities who first built the monument. Construction began around 3,000 BCE, initially as a bank-and-ditch enclosure with a circle of wooden posts. This was later replaced, around 2,500 BCE, by a circle of massive sarsen stones sourced locally from the nearby Salisbury Plain, with the smaller bluestones brought from the Preseli Hills in south-west Wales. The so-called “altar stone” was added last. Its precise origin remains unresolved, with conflicting evidence suggesting either north-west Scotland or west Wales as its source.

While the question of where most of the stones came from has largely been resolved, what remains is the long-standing puzzle of how they were transported using only human labour. The motivation was clearly strong enough to justify the immense effort and manpower involved, and the fact that it was human effort that moved them has now been established beyond reasonable doubt by the falsification of an alternative hypothesis — namely, that the stones were carried to Salisbury Plain by a passing glacier during the last Ice Age.

The refutation of this idea provides a neat example of how science tests and falsifies hypotheses, though it will no doubt unsettle creationists who cling to the absurd belief that the entire history of the Earth can be compressed into a timescale of just 6,000–10,000 years. The work was carried out by two researchers from Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, and relied on dating zircon crystals — a highly accurate method for determining the age of rock formations, as regular readers of this blog will know — along with apatite grains, which similarly exploit the radioactive decay of uranium isotopes into stable lead isotopes.

Refuting Creationism - How Camellias Evolved As The Japanese Islands Formed

Camellia japonica

Camellia Rusticana

How Camellias evolved with the formation of the Japanese archipelago? | News | NIIGATA UNIVERSITY

It's a basic principle of evolution that environmental changes drive evolution by isolating populations which are then free to evolve on their own trajectory, and by creating new ecological niches into which species can diversify.

An almost perfect example of this in progress can be seen in the Camellia group of plants, of which one, tea, Camellia cinensis is perhaps the most important economically, But several others are also important cultivated garden plants with bright red, pink or white flowers.

Another phenomenon of evolution that this group of plants displays is that evolution is not a sudden event but a slow process over time, during which hybridization and gene flow between related species occurs until barriers to hybridization have evolved.

This tendency to form hybrids and the general similar morphologies has made accurate classification of the different species, and subspecies difficult and a matter of debate among taxonomists and botanists.

Now work by a team led by Dr. Harue Abe of Niigata University, Sado, Niiagata, Japan have shown how the evolution and distribution of this genus was strongly influenced by the formation of the Japanese archipelago.

Malevolent Design - How The Toxoplasma Parasite Looks Intelligently Designed - To A Creationist

Toxoplasma gondii cyst in brain cell.

A) Toxoplasma gondii tachyzoites, the rapidly multiplying form of the parasite. B) A bradyzoite cyst containing Toxoplasma gondii within a muscle fiber, showing the cyst wall and individual bradyzoites. C) Histological section of tissue with Toxoplasma gondii cysts. D) Microscopic image of a Toxoplasma gondii oocyst, responsible for environmental transmission.

source.

Scientists find hidden diversity inside common brain parasite | UCR News | UC Riverside

Another example of a nasty little parasite that bears all the hallmarks of the Discovery Institute’s supposed *“proof”* of intelligent design was unveiled today, when scientists from the University of California, Riverside published the results of their investigation into the common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, which infects up to a third of the global population. Their paper was published open access in Nature Communications. It has been released unedited to provide early access to the findings.

Ask Discovery Institute (DI) fellow Michael J. Behe for proof of intelligent design and he will produce multiple examples of what he terms “irreducible complexity”, claiming that such systems could not have evolved step by step and therefore must have been designed by a supernatural intelligent designer. Similarly, ask another DI fellow, William A. Dembski, for proof of intelligent design and he will produce examples of what he calls “complex specified genetic information”, which he claims likewise could not have evolved naturally and therefore must have been provided by a supernatural designer.

Curiously, however, when biologists point to examples of “irreducible complexity” or “complex specified genetic information” in pathogens or parasites — organisms whose sole apparent purpose is to make us ill or kill us, or at the very least to increase suffering in the world - as evidence that, if the ID creationists’ argument were granted, it would imply malevolent intent on the part of the intelligent designer, the response is either silence or retreat into theology. More often than not, the blame is shifted to “the Fall”, while the insistence remains that intelligent design is a genuine scientific alternative to “Darwinism”, and not merely Bible-literalist Christian fundamentalism under another name.

At this point, their supposed “proof” of intelligent design quietly evaporates. Behe will even attempt to argue that the random process he calls “genetic entropy” is responsible, thereby conceding that random processes can generate what Dembski describes as complex specified genetic information — while simultaneously insisting that such information cannot have evolved through random processes at all.

The UC Riverside team have now shown that Toxoplasma gondii is even more complex than previously thought. It was already known that the parasite invades the brain and other tissues, where it forms dormant cysts that can later be reactivated. Its preferred hosts are members of the cat family, and humans are most commonly infected via cats. In some secondary hosts, it has been shown to manipulate behaviour in ways that make them more likely to be eaten by a cat, thereby completing its life cycle. Infected mice, for example, actively seek out the presence of domestic cats, while chimpanzees develop a fascination with the scent of leopard urine. It is possible that effects observed in humans are an echo of this behaviour-modifying mechanism inherited from our evolutionary past.

The new research shows that these cysts are far more complex than simple dormant copies of the parasite. Instead, they are intricate assemblages of multiple sub-types, each with distinct biological functions. In this respect, the cyst exhibits some of the characteristics of a multicellular organism, including a degree of cellular specialisation.

Refuting Creationism - How The Transitional Ediacaran Biota Slowly Evolved Into The Cambrian Biota

Ediacaran fossils

How Did These Strange, Ancient Organisms Turn into Such Remarkable Fossils? | GSA News Release 26-01

A recent paper published in the journal Geology by three geologists from Yale, led by Dr Lidya G. Tarhan, explains how the soft-bodied Ediacaran biota came to be preserved in such exquisite detail, while the transition to the (mostly) soft-bodied Cambrian biota and the Cambrian diversification are so poorly represented in the fossil record. It turns out that this was due to the particular chemistry of Ediacaran seawater, which enabled dead organisms to be coated and encased in a fine layer of clay that protected and preserved their structure. As ocean chemistry changed, this fortuitous process became progressively less effective.

Creationists love few things more than a gap in scientific knowledge as somewhere to position their favourite god, presumably having been fooled into believing a false dichotomy — either science can currently explain it or God did it — or at least expecting their target audience to be fooled by it. Sadly for creationists, this has created an ever-decreasing number of places in which to force-fit their ever-shrinking little god, as science, with relentless, unstoppable efficiency, fills one gap after another.

One such gap which creationists regularly trot out and misrepresent is the so-called “Cambrian Explosion”, which they have been fooled into believing was a sudden event occurring at an instant in time, before which there were no multicellular organisms and after which a myriad diverse body plans all appeared overnight without ancestry.

This conveniently ignores two important facts: the pre-existing Ediacaran biota, and the fact that the Ediacaran biota transitioned into the Cambrian biota over a period of some 30 million years.

In reality, of course, there is no such gap — it exists only in the minds of those ignorant enough to believe the misrepresentation. However, there is, or rather was, a gap, and one which creationists would probably prefer not to think about. It was the lack of a good explanation for how the soft-bodied Ediacaran biota came to be preserved in the fossil record in such exquisite detail, while the Cambrian “explosion” only looks like a sudden event because so few of the (soft-bodied) transitional forms were preserved.

Certainly, once it began, the Cambrian was a period of exponential diversification during which hard body parts evolved as defensive structures such as shells, spines, and hard exoskeletons; offensive structures such as jaws; and organs of mobility such as limbs and fins. Also evolving were sense organs and nervous systems. It would have been astonishing almost beyond credibility if every step of a rapid diversification of initially soft-bodied organisms had contrived to leave a fossil record of every stage, so all we really have is an infrequent series of snapshots at discrete locations, each capturing a brief moment in a global evolutionary history lasting about 55 million years.

Malevolent Design - The Brain-Eating Amoeba is Coming To A Pond Near You!

Invisible but deadly: Scientists warn of a growing global threat from amoebae in water and the environment | EurekAlert!

In a recent paper published in Biocontaminant, a group of environmental and public health scientists from China and the United States warn of the growing threat to public health from a group of dangerous free-living single-celled amoebae, the most notorious of which is Naegleria fowleri, also known as the brain-eating amoeba.

This complex, eukaryotic organism bears all the hallmarks of what Discovery Institute fellows William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe insist is compelling evidence for intelligent design — complex specified genetic information and irreducible complexity — so, if we accept their argument, we have to conclude that whatever designer they imagine is doing this designing must also be the one who designed these nasty little ways to make people sick and die by having their brains eaten, like in some grotesque zombie apocalypse.

This pathogenic amoeba is not new — I wrote about it in The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature’s God is not Good, page 33, based on a blog post I originally wrote in 2015. Since then, assisted by global warming, ageing water-supply infrastructure, and a lack of effective monitoring, the amoeba has become a global threat to public health.

N. fowleri normally lives in soil and water, where it feeds on bacteria and other micro-organisms, but if it manages to get into a victim’s nose it can track along the olfactory nerves to the brain, where it treats brain cells the way it treats soil-borne organisms and sets about eating them. Infections are almost invariably fatal. What makes them particularly dangerous is their ability to survive extreme conditions that would kill most micro-organisms, such as high temperatures and strong disinfectants like chlorine, so they can persist in water supplies that most people regard as safe.

An additional hazard is that these amoebae can also act as carriers for other pathogens such as Legionella pneumophila, Chlamydia, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. By providing these pathogens with protection from disinfection, the amoeba can enhance their pathogenicity and prolong their survival in the environment.

It would be hard to find a better example than N. fowleri of what creationists insist must be intelligently designed, so it follows that there are probably few better examples of the sheer malevolent evil of any designer of such creatures, from the perspective of the humans infected with it. For creationists to retreat into the traditional excuse of blaming ‘the Fall’ is to abandon the claim that irreducible complexity and complex specified genetic information are definitive evidence of intelligent design, and to retreat instead into religious fundamentalism and Bible literalism.

Refuting Creationism - The Unintelligently Designed Ancestral Potato and How Humans Improved It

S. jamesii tubers in a ceremonial basket.

Credit: Alastair Bístoí

S. jamseii flowers

Credit: Tim Lee/NHMU

This wild potato may change the agricultural story in the American Southwest – @theU

Anthropologists at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah have traced the anthropogenic spread and cultivation of a relative of the potato, Solanum jamesii (the Four Corners potato). Their findings are published in PLOS ONE. This plant has been a culinary, medicinally and culturally important food crop across the Colorado Plateau for millennia.

Until now, despite its long history, the extent to which indigenous people domesticated S. jamesii has been unknown. Genetic evidence has shown that it had been transported and cultivated far from its natural range and had acquired frost resistance, longer dormancy and sprouting resilience, all of which made it more suitable for cultivation in its anthropogenic range. The Utah team have now shown how it arrived on the Colorado Plateau from its origins in the south-west USA, probably through a trading network.

A problem which I have found impossible to get a creationist to address without them running for the bolt-hole of ‘mysterious ways’ is the fact that, with only a very few exceptions, every domesticated animal and cultivated plant has been considerably improved on the wild stock and is always the result of a human-mediated evolutionary process. The result is often almost unrecognisable as the same species as their wild ancestor.

Yet according to the Bible, all animals and plants were created for the sole benefit of humankind by a supposedly omnipotent, omniscient god. Had that been so, we could expect them to have been created fit for purpose and perfectly suited to the uses to which we put them. The fact that we have had to adapt them and change them so drastically to make them fit for purpose gives the lie to claims of intelligent design by an omniscient designer.

This relative of the potato therefore serves as an illustration of how humans, unwittingly or otherwise, have modified and changed the distribution of cultivated plants by inadvertently mimicking the process of evolution — mutation → selection → reproduction. S. jamesii is native to the Mogollon Rim, a region spanning south-central Arizona and into the Mogollon Mountains of New Mexico. The researchers were able to build a picture of how this plant was transported from there to the Four Corners region of southern Utah, south-west Colorado and north-west New Mexico by extracting the characteristic starch granules embedded in the stone tools used to process the tubers, recovered from 14 archaeological sites within and beyond the tuber’s natural range.

This research adds to the growing body of evidence that indigenous people in the south-western USA actively cultivated crops of their own and did not just acquire them from other peoples. It had previously been believed that they relied primarily on crops domesticated in Mesoamerica, such as maize, beans or squash. It also adds another species to the long list of plants and animals that have had to be modified from their wild type, and for which creationists are at a loss to explain why their supposed omniscient designer god did not do a very good job of it to begin with.

Creationism Refuted - You Can Tell The Ignorance Of The Bible's Authors By What They Left Out

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Top: The GLEAM/GLEAM-X view of the Milky Way galaxy. Credit: S. Mantovanini & the GLEAM-X team
Bottom: The same area of the Milky Way in visible light.

Credit: Axel Mellinger, milkywaysky.com

A new, expansive view of the Milky Way reveals our Galaxy in unprecedented radio colour - ICRAR

A paper published yesterday in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia presents a stunning new view of the Milky Way galaxy. It was produced by astronomers from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and shows the Milky Way in low-frequency colour images. It is a useful reminder of the stark difference between the Bible’s description of the universe and the real thing.

The Bronze Age authors of the Bible could only write about what they knew — and, manifestly, that wasn’t very much — but then they could never have guessed that some charlatan at some point in the future was going to put their childish tales into a book and declare it to be the word of a creator god. If anything was ever destined to be a self-falsifying claim, it was that.

But if it had been the word of an omnibenevolent supernatural deity with a vital message for humankind, not only would it have been so perfectly written that it could not possibly be misunderstood or misinterpreted, it would also have contained information not then available to its scribes, so there could be no doubt about its authenticity.

Yet there is nothing in the Bible that was not already known in the Bronze Age, and a great deal of what was believed in those days which has since turned out to be badly wrong. In fact, it is true to say that if the Bible were discovered today for the first time, any competent historian could date it and probably place its authorship geographically by the scientific ignorance it contains.

For example, there is nothing about micro-organisms, atoms, electricity, plate tectonics, galaxies, the vastness of space, or the fact that some of those little points of light the authors thought were stuck to a dome over the small, flat Earth were actually galaxies containing half a trillion or more suns. Nothing. Not a single thing that we could point to and say, “Wow! Only a creator god could have known that in the Bronze Age!” Instead, we have a god who supposedly designed and created the human body but believes we think with our hearts and that a clone made from a man will produce a woman.

Imagine if the first chapter of Genesis had been written like Eric Idle’s Galaxy Song from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life:

Creationism Refuted - Messages From Nearly 70,000 Years Ago.

Adhi Agus Oktaviana illuminating a hand stencil.

Max Aubert

Humanity’s oldest known cave art has been discovered in Sulawesi.

There's nothing quite like leaving a message behind to tell future generations that you were here.

Creationists, of course, have a message from about 5,000 years ago telling them that there were ignorant Bronze Age storytellers living in the Middle East — but sadly the only truth in their stories was the one they didn’t explicitly state: that they were making things up to explain what they didn’t know, which meant a great many stories to invent. They couldn’t have guessed, of course, that their tales would later be written down, bound up in a book, and then proclaimed to be the inerrant word of a creator god; otherwise they might have made more of an effort to get it right, or at least admitted they didn’t know. As it is, all we really learn from them is just how ignorant they were, and how vivid their imaginations must have been.

To be fair, it may not have been their intention to mislead and misinform, but that has been the result — mostly, it has to be said, through the fault of those who later declared their tales to be the authentic word of a god, because that conveniently suited their political agenda.

People living much earlier, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, left a much clearer and more honest message in the form of cave art, and particularly hand stencils. All they really say is, “Hi there! I was here!” — with no attempt to elevate themselves to a special status or claim to know things they didn’t know. Where they depicted the animals around them, they showed them just as they saw them: wild and free.

This cave art, which precedes the celebrated art of the French and Spanish caves by tens of thousands of years, has now been identified as the oldest known cave art, telling an unambiguous story of people living there around 70,000 years ago — long before anatomically modern humans made their presence felt in Western Eurasia. The discovery and the methods used to date the art were published in Nature, in a paper that marks a defining moment in our understanding of early symbolic behaviour.

Four of the researchers — Maxime Aubert, Professor of Archaeological Science, Griffith University; Adam Brumm, Professor of Archaeology, Griffith University; Adhi Oktaviana, Research Centre of Archeometry, Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional (BRIN), Jakarta, Indonesia; and Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Professor of Geochronology and Geochemistry, Southern Cross University, New South Wales, Australia — have also written an article in The Conversation that explains the significance of the find in accessible terms. Their piece is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Adding A Little Bit More To The Human Evolutionary Story

Top: Multiple views of MLP-3000-1, the newly discovered Paranthropus partial left mandible and molar crown. Bottom: MLP-3000-1 in side-by-side comparison with mandible fossils from other species — Australopithecus afarensis (A.L. 266-1), Paranthropus aethiopicus (OMO-57/4-1968-41 and OMO-18-1967-18), and early Homo (LD 350-1).

Alemseged Research Group

Two fragments of the newly discovered mandible specimen in the location they were originally found.

Alemseged Research Group.

New 2.6-million-year-old Paranthropus fossil reshapes understanding of early hominins | Biological Sciences Division | The University of Chicago

Research published two days ago in Nature by a team led by University of Chicago paleoanthropologist Professor Zeresenay Alemseged will dismay and delight creationists in about equal measure — especially those who manage to rationalise a fossil dating from about 2.6 million years before they believe Earth and everything on it was created — because it shows that scientists were wrong about something.

It is the news that the jawbone of an archaic hominin, Paranthropus, has been found in Ethiopia some 200 miles further north than the previously believed northern limit of these hominins.

Normally, to a binary-thinking creationist, science being wrong about even the most minor and unimportant detail is “proof” that science is wrong about everything. This childish belief probably stems from them having a single source-book which has been deemed to be inerrant, so even the slightest falsehood in it renders that claim untenable. They assume it is the same with science: that what scientists believe comes from supposedly inerrant textbooks written by “prophets” such as Charles Darwin, serving as the source-books from which all scientists get their information. So, if scientists are ever wrong, all the books from the science libraries of the world can be thrown in the waste bin, leaving creationism’s book of “inerrant” origin myths as the winner.

What they find hard to comprehend, apparently, is that scientific knowledge is cumulative, with current thinking always provisional, pending further confirmation or in need of revision in the light of new information, and that facts are neutral in any dispute, so can be objective referees. They fail to realise that because science works this way, scientists from all over the world will eventually converge on a single answer. Religions, by contrast, because they are not based on evidence but on the tenuous thread of interpretation of an ancient book which itself presents no evidence for its claims, continue to diversify into ever smaller sects, each claiming to have the one true answer but having no evidence to referee the dispute.

But of course, in the best scientific tradition, this jawbone simply adds richness to the hominin evolutionary story and raises the possibility that Paranthropus, like Australopithecus and Homo, was present in the Afar region of Ethiopia. And that opens up the intriguing possibility — given the propensity of hominins to diverge and then hybridise — that modern Homo sapiens could have some Paranthropus ancestry.

Unintelligent Design - Why Some People Suffer More From The Common Cold Than Others - Incompetent or Malevolent Design - Or Evolution?

Electron micrograph showing a human nasal epithelial cell releasing rhinovirus (blue).

Credit: Julien Amat, Bao Wang

Electron micrograph of differentiated human nasal epithelial organoids with cilia of multiciliated cells accentuated in blue.

Credit: Julien Amat, Bao Wang.

Why the same cold can be a sniffle for some and a crisis for others | Yale News

You might expect an intelligently designed system, created by an omnibenevolent designer, to work just as effectively for everybody and not badly for some and only just adequately for others. And yet, as so often with creationism, the facts are not at all what the theory predicts. In science this would be called falsification, but for creationists it is just another inconvenient fact to be ignored or blamed on ‘the Fall’ — or even on the victim.

According to a paper just published in Cell Press Blue, the reason some people suffer more from a cold caused by a rhinovirus is not so much because of differences in the virus, but because their bodies react differently. Some take control and prevent the spread of viruses to adjacent cells of the mucous membrane lining the nasal passages, whereas other people’s bodies fail to prevent the virus spreading.

The paper is by a team at Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA, led by Associate Professor Dr Ellen F. Foxman, PhD.

By growing organoids in vitro and infecting them with rhinoviruses, the team were able to show that whether the infection spreads depends on how quickly the infected cells are able to mount an interferon response. A good response limits the infection to just a few cells and the cold does not develop beyond a ‘sniffle’. Where the response is weak, the infection spreads and, in cases where the victim has an underlying respiratory condition such as asthma or COPD, the cold can develop into a serious illness.

Why the interferon response differs between individuals is not known with any certainty, but it could be due to a number of factors, including genetics. However, it is known that in patients with pre-existing respiratory conditions, the interferon response is inhibited.

That, of course, begs the question for ID creationists: why a system supposedly designed to protect us gets downgraded when it is most needed, and, if the difference is due to underlying genetics, why some people got better genes in this respect than others. Under the ID creationist paradigm, genes that produce any given output are deemed to hold ‘complex specified genetic information’ and, as such, are evidence for intelligent design.

Leaving aside the question of why any omnibenevolent designer would design viruses to make us sick and then design an immune response to prevent them doing so, we are left with the question of why this immune system does not always work very well and why some people have a worse version than others. If an omnibenevolent designer can design an effective immune system, why did it not give it to everyone? Does it actually want those people to suffer more from the viruses it supposedly designed?

The evolutionary explanation is, of course, straightforward, with none of the theological conundrums that plague creationism. Evolution does not seek out perfection and has no interest in equity. In the environment of an evolutionary arms race with viruses, the results are inevitably suboptimal and unevenly distributed throughout the population unless there is particularly strong selection pressure to drive the ‘best’ solution to fixation. It is also in the survival interests of viruses to tone down their victim’s responses, thereby reducing that selection pressure. The resulting trade-off and compromise is what we see today in the different responses to the same virus.

How Do We know The Bible Is Wrong? - We Look At The Real-World Evidence, Of Course!

An example of a binary star system

Hubble uncovers the secret of stars that defy ageing | ESA/Hubble

A paper in Nature Communications by an international research team of astronomers led by Professor Francesco R. Ferraro of the Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “Augusto Righi”, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Italy, reveals a universe utterly at odds with the description of it in the Bible. It should be a simple matter to compare this real universe with the one described in the Bible and draw the obvious conclusion from the glaring differences — but not, it seems, for creationists.

The connection between opinion and evidence appears to be lost on creationists who are determined to cling to patently wrong beliefs, despite the evidence, as though evidence has no right to intrude on their thought processes. In this worldview, truth is unrelated to real-world evidence and must comply with a creationist’s beliefs.

Let’s take a couple of simple examples and apply creationist “logic”.

Firstly: you need to cross a road. How do you know it’s safe before you step off the kerb?

You look at the evidence — how busy is the road? Are there any vehicles approaching, especially on your side? If there are, the evidence tells you that you can’t safely cross and need to wait.

Applying creationist “logic”: you ignore the evidence as unwanted and unwelcome and conclude that the road is safe to cross because you want it to be, and reality is obliged to comply.

What do you think your chances of surviving for long would be using that methodology?

Secondly: you’re waiting at a bus stop to catch a bus. How do you know the bus has arrived?

You can see the bus, of course. It has stopped in front of you and the doors have opened. Other passengers may be getting on or off, so you get on the bus and take your seat.

Applying creationist “logic”: you ignore the evidence and assume the bus must have arrived because you want it to have done so, so you step off the pavement and imagine you’re getting on a bus.

You now look pretty foolish and might even step into the path of the real bus you’ve been waiting for. What you almost certainly won’t do is get on the bus — because it isn’t there.

In both examples, only evidence reveals the real world, and creationist faith may let you down very badly, simply because creationist faith has no relationship to the real world. It reflects only blind imagination and wishful thinking, coupled with the absurd belief that the real world is obliged to comply with personal preferences. Evidence, on the other hand, is the real world, and a rational person allows evidence to determine their beliefs.

So now a third example: how do you know you can rely on the information in the Bible? You compare it with real-world evidence, of course, just as you would when crossing the road or catching a bus.

And if you do that, what do you find?

You find a description of the universe that bears no resemblance to the real universe — just as your faith in a safe and empty road bears no relationship to a real road, or your imaginary bus bears no relationship to a real bus. In other words, the real-world evidence is so far removed from the description in the Bible that the Bible is plainly, obviously, and irrefutably wrong. As such, it is utterly unreliable as a source of factual information about the universe.

What we see in the Bible is a description of a universe consisting of a small flat planet with a dome over it. We see a demon-haunted world that is just a few thousand years old and runs on magic. It has talking snakes and donkeys; it endorses slavery and misogyny, autocratic government and peremptory justice with no right of appeal, and a draconian penal system in which the penalty of choice is death for even minor transgressions. It describes virgin birth and promotes blood sacrifice as absolving people of responsibility for their wrongs.

And doubt itself is treated as a crime carrying the death penalty, as though the worst thing the authors could imagine was people questioning their claims.

With that in mind, let’s look at the real-world evidence as revealed by the European Space Agency (ESA) in conjunction with NASA and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and compare it with the Bible’s description of the universe: