Creationism Refuted - Why The Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design And Supports Mindless Evolution.

The human body isn’t a masterpiece of design – it’s a patchwork of evolutionary compromise

Back in December 2024, I published The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design as part of my Unintelligent Design series. In it, I argued that:

Looked at objectively, beneath the superficial appearance of design, the human body, with its inefficiencies, vulnerabilities and vestigial features, is best explained through the lens of evolution.

Far from reflecting intelligent design, our anatomy and physiology reveal a history of incremental changes shaped by natural selection and constrained by pre-existing structures. These imperfections underscore the reality of evolution as a tinkering process, producing functional but far-from-perfect outcomes.

In this light, the human body stands as a powerful testament to our evolutionary heritage and tells a story far more impressive than the childish notion of it all being made by magic by a super-intelligent yet invisible and undetectable designer.

It is therefore gratifying to see those conclusions independently reinforced by Lucy E. Hyde, a Lecturer in Anatomy at the University of Bristol. In a recent article in The Conversation, she makes essentially the same case, drawing upon many of the same examples that I used.

This is not because anatomists and evolutionary biologists have agreed upon a preferred story and then set out to make the evidence fit it. It is because people who understand evolution and possess more than a superficial knowledge of human anatomy and physiology can examine the same evidence and independently reach the same broad conclusion: the human body is not the product of foresightful engineering but a historical patchwork of inherited structures, evolutionary compromises and modifications to what already existed.

Evolution explains not only why the human body works as well as it does, but also why it so often fails, why some of its structures follow absurdly circuitous routes, why others are poorly suited to their present functions and why still others persist despite having little or no remaining usefulness. “Intelligent design”, by contrast, explains none of this without retreating into the scientifically worthless claim that an unknowable designer must have wanted things that way.

Lucy Hyde’s article is reproduced below under a Creative Commons licence, with its formatting adapted for consistency with this blog:

Creationism Refuted - Giant Kangaroos In New Guinea - 1,500 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Impression of Protemnodon tumbuna

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

Giant kangaroos survived until 6,500 years ago on the New Guinea coast.

It is probably fair to say that no branch of science is a friend of creationism. That is presumably why creationists devote so much time and effort to trying to discredit science—often without the slightest appreciation of the irony of using computers and the Internet, both products of science and engineering, to tell the world that science does not work. Yet their attitude towards science is not merely hostile but opportunistic: whenever they encounter a scientific finding that they think can be misrepresented as supporting creationism, they suddenly become jubilant champions of ‘the evidence’.

Archaeology is one of the most persistent threats to literalist creationism. Far from confirming the biblical narrative, it repeatedly uncovers evidence of human cultures, environmental changes and extinct animals extending far beyond the few thousand years permitted by Young Earth Creationism. Nor does archaeology stand alone. Its findings repeatedly converge with those of genetics, palaeontology, geology and climatology to produce the same coherent history—a history in which neither a recent magical creation nor a global genocidal flood leaves the slightest trace.

True to form, a recently published paper in the journal npj Biodiversity, by an Australian-based team of archaeologists and palaeontologists, presents evidence from New Guinea that simply could not exist if the biblical narratives of a magical creation a few thousand years ago, followed by a global flood about 4,300 years ago, bore any resemblance to reality. The evidence indicates that a large extinct kangaroo relative—probably Protemnodon tumbuna—survived on the northern coast of New Guinea until the Middle Holocene, perhaps as recently as about 6,500 years ago.

This was tens of thousands of years after every known species of Protemnodon had disappeared from Australia, where the genus is thought to have become extinct by about 41,000 years ago, along with most of the continent’s other megafauna.

Protemnodon tumbuna was a stocky, muscular forest-dwelling kangaroo weighing an estimated 50–90 kilograms—roughly comparable in size to a modern red kangaroo. Unlike modern large kangaroos, however, it was probably predominantly quadrupedal, using its powerful forelimbs to move through dense forest and hopping only inefficiently and for short distances, if at all. It was one of seven currently recognised species of Protemnodon known collectively from Australia and New Guinea.

How Science Works - Challenging The Consensus

Artist's concept of an ancient quasar

ESA

Quasars discovered by Euclid

The earliest quasars yet observed are shedding light on the infancy of our cosmos | The Current

Creationists have to explain away why the long-predicted abandonment of 'Darwinism' by biomedical scientists has not yet taken place despite the almost daily assurance that this is imminent for the last half a century, by claiming without a shred of evidence that scientists are prohibited from publishing anything which challenges the current consensus, and that the peer-review process is designed to filter out these papers.

The irony appears to be entirely lost on creationists, many of whose own propaganda organisations openly impose exactly the doctrinal censorship they falsely attribute to science. Answers in Genesis (AiG) requires its employees and volunteers to accept its Statement of Faith, which declares in advance that Genesis 1–11 is a factual account of real events. AiG also requires full-time employees to reaffirm that statement annually and subjects everything it publishes to an editorial board charged with preventing any departure from its approved biblical position. Similarly, the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) explicitly states that, whenever scientific evidence appears to conflict with the Bible, “the Bible must govern”, and requires its faculty and board members to sign its doctrinal statement every year.

In other words, creationist organisations begin with conclusions that may not be questioned and permit evidence to be published only when it can be made to support those conclusions. Scientific peer review does the opposite: it scrutinises the evidence, methods and reasoning while leaving the conclusions open to revision. Accusing science of enforcing the very dogmatic censorship that creationist organisations practise openly looks less like criticism than projection.

The scientific literature is, in fact, full of discoveries that expose weaknesses in existing explanations and force researchers to reconsider accepted models. Creationist claims to the contrary are generally made in the safe expectation that their followers will neither read the relevant papers nor understand what those papers actually say.

One recent example is a paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics reporting the discovery of 31 previously unknown quasars in the early Universe using data from the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope. Twelve have redshifts of 7 or greater, more than doubling the number previously known from that period. The two most distant, with redshifts of approximately 7.69 and 7.77, are the earliest quasars yet observed, existing when the Universe was only about 670 million years old.

Creationism Refuted - How Humans Acquired Their Pathogens From Their Animals - No Magic 'Sin' Involved

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

We’ve long suspected that the transition to farming and animal husbandry opened the door to a new era of disease – now DNA shows us that it happened at least 6,500 years ago,” says Professor Eske Willerslev, author of the new study.

Illustration: William Brøns Petersen

Large-scale DNA study maps 37,000 years of disease history – University of Copenhagen

Young Earth creationist mythology has it that sin, shortly after the magical creation of two adult humans, caused death and disease to enter the world. Until then, so we are expected to believe, there had been no disease and nothing ever died — not even, apparently, the plants Adam, Eve and the other animals ate.

Reality, of course, is materially different from the mythology produced by scientifically ignorant ancient pastoralists and later scribes who knew nothing of bacteria, viruses, parasites, epidemiology or evolution, and who interpreted misfortune in magical terms. Disease was not a supernatural punishment introduced at a single moment by a talking snake, a disobedient couple and an irritable god. It was, and remains, a biological process involving organisms evolving, spreading, adapting and, sometimes, crossing from one host species into another.

And the evidence now shows that at least 6,500 years ago, diseases were passing from animals into the humans who lived alongside them. The domestication of animals, the growth of settled farming communities and the rise of pastoralism brought humans, livestock, waste, parasites and pathogens into much closer proximity than before. This has long been thought to explain why humans suffer from so many infectious diseases. It is also a point Jared Diamond made in Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies, where he argued that Eurasia’s abundance of domesticable animals, and Europeans’ long exposure to the diseases associated with them, helped Europeans to dominate other populations, often with their pathogens acting as an advance guard against peoples with no previous exposure or immunity.

That view of the zoonotic origin of many human diseases has now been strongly supported by the work of researchers led by Professor Eske Willerslev, of the University of Copenhagen and the University of Cambridge, in a study published open access in Nature in July 2025. The team analysed DNA from more than 1,300 prehistoric individuals, some up to 37,000 years old. Their bones and teeth provided an extraordinary archive of ancient microbial DNA, revealing traces of bacteria, viruses and parasites that infected humans across deep Eurasian history.

The results suggest that close cohabitation with domesticated animals, together with large-scale migrations of pastoralists from the Pontic Steppe, played a major role in the spread of zoonotic diseases. The researchers found that identifiable zoonotic pathogens first appear in their data from around 6,500 years ago, became more widespread after about 6,000 years ago, and peaked roughly 5,000 years ago — precisely the sort of pattern expected if lifestyle, animal husbandry, mobility and population contact were driving disease transmission.

This is especially awkward for creationists because the evidence does not point to a sudden, supernatural transformation of the world’s biology. It does not show disease appearing overnight as the result of a mythical “Fall”. Instead, it shows a long, historical and evolutionary process, unfolding through early Eurasian human history as changing human behaviour created new ecological opportunities for pathogens.

Refuting Creationism - Population Collapse And Migration in Neolithic Europe - And No Evidence Of A Genocidal Flood

The researchers have conducted DNA analyses of the skeletons from a burial site like this one in France and found traces of several different diseases.

Photo: Getty Images / Michal Boubin

Stone age population collapse revealed by DNA study in France – University of Copenhagen

A paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution by a large international team led by researchers at the University of Copenhagen, reports evidence that simply should not exist if the Bible creation myth, and its later global genocidal flood myth, had any basis in reality. The evidence shows a significant population collapse among Neolithic farming communities in what is now northern France about 5,000 years ago, followed by migration into the depopulated area by people with strong genetic links to southern France and the Iberian Peninsula.

The study is based on ancient DNA from 132 individuals buried in the allée sépulcrale at Bury, a large megalithic tomb about 50 kilometres north of Paris. The site was used during two distinct burial phases, separated by a hiatus associated with the wider Neolithic decline around 3000 BC. The researchers found that the people buried before and after this decline were not simply later descendants of the same local population, but belonged to largely discontinuous genetic groups. In other words, this was not merely a change in burial custom; it was a major population turnover.

The problems this presents for creationism are multiple. First, there is the evidence of established farming populations in northern Europe at a time when, according to Young Earth Creationist chronology, the world had only recently been magicked into existence. Secondly, there is the embarrassing survival of archaeological and genetic evidence which, under the same mythology, should either have been destroyed in a global flood a few centuries later, or buried beneath a distinctive, worldwide layer of fossil-bearing flood silt — a layer which is conspicuous by its absence. Thirdly, there is the evidence that the human population of Europe had already diversified into regionally distinct genetic populations by about 3000 BC, with enough structure for ancient DNA to distinguish northern French and German-like Neolithic farmers from later migrants with strong southern French and Iberian affinities.

None of this, of course, will cause creationists to reconsider the mythology. We can confidently predict that it will instead be treated as another test of faith: one more opportunity to demonstrate the strength of their determination never to let evidence change their minds. In creationist apologetics, refusal to learn is often mistaken for intellectual victory. The more compelling the evidence, the greater the achievement in ignoring it.

The reason for the population decline is not yet clear. The human remains contained genetic traces of pathogens, including the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, and the louse-borne relapsing fever bacterium, Borrelia recurrentis, but the evidence does not support plague as the sole cause of the collapse. The more likely explanation is a combination of disease, environmental stress, demographic disruption and social breakdown. Earlier burials contained multiple generations from the same extended families, suggesting stable, kin-based communities. Later burials were more selective and were dominated by a single male lineage, indicating a marked change in social organisation after the population turnover.

This adds to the growing picture of the so-called Neolithic decline as a widespread phenomenon affecting much of northern and western Europe, not just Scandinavia and northern Germany. It also offers a plausible explanation for the abrupt disappearance of megalithic tomb-building and other monumental traditions across parts of Europe at about the same time. The people who built those monuments did not merely change their minds about architecture; in places such as the Paris Basin, the population itself appears to have collapsed and been replaced.

Refuting Creationism - Humans And Wolves Share A Long Evolutionary History

View from the Stora Förvar cave on Stora Karlsö. The cave was explored between 1888 and 1893. The limestone-rich bedrock has contributed to the skeletal material found there being very well preserved.

Photo: Jan Storå

Ancient wolves on remote Baltic Sea island reveal link to prehistoric humans - Stockholms universitet

A point I have made several times in these blog posts, and one that creationists typically prefer not to address, is that the Bible presents living things as part of a world made for human use and dominion. Yet the history of animal and plant domestication tells a very different story. The domesticated forms often bear little resemblance to their wild ancestors, not because they were created perfectly fitted for human needs, but because humans altered them by selective breeding over many generations.

For an honest creationist, the question should be obvious: why did an allegedly omniscient creator god fail to anticipate human needs and create animals and plants already ideally suited to them? Why did humans need to do the improving? But, as so often, creationists appear to prefer belief in an incompetent designer to the simpler conclusion that their creation myth is wrong.

No domestic animal illustrates this better than the dog. Domestic dogs are descended from wolves, yet the vast range of dog forms, behaviours and abilities shows what prolonged selection, human preference and cultural need can do. Herding dogs, guard dogs, hunting dogs, sled dogs, lapdogs and companion animals are not the result of a single act of perfect creation; they are the result of human-managed evolution.

Now, new research by scientists from the Francis Crick Institute, Stockholm University, the University of Aberdeen and the University of East Anglia, published online in November 2025 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), shows that human relationships with wolves were more varied and complex than a simple tale of fear, hunting or eventual dog domestication. The researchers report wolf remains from the isolated Baltic island of Stora Karlsö, in a context strongly suggesting that prehistoric people were managing, feeding or otherwise controlling wolves thousands of years ago.

This research resonates with me because two of my books, The Girl and the Wolf and The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic, are fictional accounts of how wolf domestication might have begun. In those stories, the process is initiated by a single act of compassion: a woman raises an abandoned wolf cub alongside her own child. That act becomes a legend, and the legend later inspires another tribe to form a relationship with wolves, helping them to survive hardship and setting humanity on a path that would eventually produce the many varieties of domestic dog, each shaped for different human purposes.

The stories are also framed to illustrate the hardships of Ice Age life for our ancestors, and the same social forces that still shape human societies: conservatism versus progress, suspicion of novelty, and the struggle to be different in a culture that demands conformity. In both stories, teenage girls must negotiate those pressures and, in doing so, help change the future.

Bible Blunder - NASA Provides Red, White & Blue Stars For 4th July - And A Reminder That The Bible Was Made Up By Ignorant People

NASA's Hubble Spies Stellar Sparkler for July 4th - NASA Science

By releasing a spectacular red, white and blue image of a globular star cluster almost as old as the universe itself, NASA has inadvertently provided yet another striking demonstration that the Bible’s cosmology was invented by people who knew nothing of the real universe beyond the limits of unaided human imagination.

A point that seems to be lost on creationists is that claims made in the Bible can be checked against reality, just like any other claim. And, like any other claim, they can be rejected when they bear little or no resemblance to the evidence. To take a deliberately silly example, imagine someone claiming that the Bible has only 120 pages. Simply by opening a Bible and counting the pages, we can see quickly and easily that the claim is false. In scientific terms, the claim is a hypothesis, and it is falsified by the experiment of looking at the evidence.

Similarly, when the Bible presents a universe consisting of a small, flat world beneath a solid dome, with the sun, moon and stars functioning as lights set in or associated with that dome, we can test that claim by doing the same simple thing: looking at reality. Curiously, when creationists do this, they often apply a special standard of reasoning that would be absurd in any other context, and possibly a sign of mental incompetence if applied to everyday life. They conclude, not that the ancient claim is wrong, but that reality itself must somehow be mistaken because the claim has been placed inside a book declared, in advance and without evidence, to be inerrant “scripture”.

Imagine applying that standard when deciding whether it is safe to cross a busy road, while clinging to the belief that cars cannot exist because someone in the Bronze Age said all wheeled transport was drawn by horses!

So, let us carry out that simple scientific experiment. Let us compare the biblical claim with reality, starting with the hypothesis that the Bible is inerrant truth and therefore contains an accurate description of the universe.

Malevolent Design - How Melanomas Are Cleverly 'Designed' To Stay Alive

Telomeres shown as white caps on the ends of the chromosome arms.

Pitt scientists discovered a key genetic step in melanoma’s race to live forever | University of Pittsburgh

Examples from nature in which, if creationist arguments for the existence of an intelligent designer are applied consistently, that designer can only be regarded as a malevolent entity intent on increasing suffering in the world, continue to accumulate. And the more examples there are, the more creationists need to ignore their own arguments, abandon any pretence that creationism is a genuine alternative science, and retreat instead into the fundamentalist biblical myths of 'The Fall' and 'Original Sin'. The evidence remains the same; only the interpretation is twisted to preserve the preferred narrative.

The latest such example concerns the genetics behind one of malignant melanoma's most dangerous properties: its ability to evade the normal cellular limit on repeated division. This had long been a missing piece in understanding how melanoma cells avoid the ordinary route to cellular senescence and continue to proliferate. Like Michael J. Behe's and William A. Dembski's supposed 'evidence' for intelligent design, it depends on a set of interacting components being in place and on genetic changes producing just the right molecular effect — precisely the kind of arrangement the Discovery Institute insists cannot arise by natural processes because, in its caricature of biology, evolution is merely 'random chance'. That claim, of course, ignores the elementary biological fact that natural selection makes evolution very much a non-random process.

The discovery, published in Science in November 2022 by Pattra Chun-on, Jonathan K. Alder and colleagues, concerns telomeres — the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes. In most normal somatic cells, telomeres gradually shorten with repeated cell division until the cell can no longer divide. This is one of the body's safeguards against uncontrolled proliferation. Cancer cells, however, often find ways to bypass this limit, and melanoma has long been known for having unusually long telomeres, even compared with many other cancers. What had not been fully understood was how melanoma achieved this.

The answer involves telomerase, the enzyme complex that lengthens telomeres. In most normal adult cells, telomerase activity is switched off or kept very low. Many melanomas carry mutations in the promoter region of TERT, the gene that encodes the catalytic component of telomerase, and these mutations increase telomerase activity. But that turned out to be only part of the story. When researchers introduced TERT promoter mutations into melanocytes, they did not reproduce the exceptionally long telomeres seen in melanoma tumours.

The missing component was TPP1, a member of the shelterin complex that helps regulate telomeres. The researchers found that mutations in the promoter region of ACD, the gene that encodes TPP1, can increase TPP1 production. When these TPP1-promoter mutations occur together with TERT promoter mutations, the two changes cooperate to produce the long telomeres characteristic of melanoma. In other words, melanoma's ability to evade normal cellular mortality depends on a coordinated interaction between altered telomerase activity and altered telomere regulation.

So, in intelligent-design creationist terms, we have a system requiring interacting molecular components, each specified by genetic changes in ordinary cellular genes, and each contributing to a result that benefits the cancer cell at the expense of the patient. If the same kind of molecular cooperation in a harmless or useful organism is to be paraded as evidence of design, then consistency demands the same conclusion here. Melanoma, on that argument, would be another product of the same intelligent designer — one whose ingenuity is directed towards helping cancer cells escape the body's normal restraints.

Of course, the scientifically honest conclusion is not that melanoma was designed, malevolently or otherwise. It is that cancer exploits the same evolved molecular machinery that normal cells use, and that mutations filtered by selection within the tumour can favour cells that divide faster, survive longer and outcompete their neighbours. The creationist problem is that the very mechanisms they claim as evidence for their designer are just as plainly at work in disease, parasitism and suffering.

Creationism Refuted - Common Origin Of Human And Other Ape Laughter.

Apes & humans have been sharing a laugh for 15 million years

A stunning example of how science incidentally refutes creationism has just been published in Communications Biology by researchers at the University of Warwick, UK. This is not merely another example of biologists continuing, despite creationist predictions, not to abandon “Darwinism” in favour of creationist magical thinking — the event that creationists have been confidently expecting any day now for more than half a century. It is also a discovery for which evolution provides the obvious and coherent explanation.

Nor is this one easily dismissed by creationists as the result of “The Fall”, Satanic interference, or any of the other routine excuses used when nature refuses to look intelligently designed. Resorting to “common design” merely makes their putative designer god look as though it deliberately created evidence, which is exactly what the Theory of Evolution predicts, apparently in order to mislead us. As Francis Collins pointed out in The Language of God, this image of God as a cosmic trickster is the ultimate admission of defeat for creationists, and shows Young Earth Creationism to be both theologically and scientifically bankrupt.

The shocking thing is how few Christians ever take their co-religionists to task on social media for being prepared to portray their god in this way, rather than having the moral and intellectual integrity to admit that they are wrong. Even their own god is sacrificed on the altar of their implacable vanity.

So, what is this finding by the University of Warwick group?

Quite simply, it is evidence that humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans share a similar rhythmic pattern in laughter, suggesting that this feature was already present in the last common ancestor of all living great apes, including humans, about 15 million years ago. The finding also offers clues to the evolution of human speech.

The researchers analysed laughter recordings from four orangutans, two gorillas, three bonobos, four chimpanzees and four human children. Across 140 laughter bouts, they found the same basic pattern: all species produced laughter with evenly spaced rhythmic intervals between successive sounds. In other words, great ape laughter is not random noise, but has a conserved rhythmic structure.

However, while this basic rhythm has remained remarkably conserved, human laughter has become faster, more variable and more sensitive to social context. Humans are the only great apes in the study shown to vary the timing of laughter according to context — for example, the difference between involuntary laughter when tickled, polite laughter in a social setting, nervous laughter after a mistake, or infectious laughter in a group. This suggests that the increasing ability to control the timing and rhythm of vocalisations may have contributed to the evolution of speech.

A useful way to frame this is that no single feature “proves” common ancestry on its own. The strength of the evidence lies in the way many independent features — anatomy, genetics, development, physiology and behaviour — all point to the same branching pattern of descent.

Malevolent Design - The Complex Mechanism That Helps Bacteria Make Us Sick

Clockwise: A bacterium retracts its pili, reeling in a piece of DNA in the environment. This action facilitates “natural transformation,” a process by which bacterium acquire new genetic traits, including antibiotic resistance.

Image courtesy the Dalia Lab, Indiana University

IU biologists uncover a molecular mechanism that helps bacteria spread antibiotic resistance genes: College of Arts + Sciences : Indiana University

Creationists have a problem of their own making. The same evolutionary processes they try to rebrand as evidence for a creator god are also the processes that produce parasites, pathogens and the molecular machinery by which they exploit their hosts. If Michael J. Behe wants to claim “irreducible complexity” as evidence of design, and William A. Dembski wants to claim “complex specified information” as the signature of an intelligent designer, then they cannot confine those arguments to the parts of biology they find theologically convenient. The same kinds of complexity and genetic information are also found in organisms that make us sick and increase the suffering in the world.

Although professional creationists, including fellows of the Discovery Institute such as Behe and Dembski, are careful to avoid naming their putative designer, their audience invariably identifies it with the supposedly omnibenevolent god of the Bible, Torah and Qur’an. But that creates an obvious problem: using their own criteria, this creator god must be credited not only with designing humans and other animals, but also with designing the bacteria, viruses, parasites and molecular mechanisms that infect, disable and kill them.

The significance of this is often lost on creationists because it requires a basic understanding of biology and a willingness to follow an argument to its logical conclusion. When they cite Behe’s favourite examples, such as the E. coli flagellum or anti-malarial drug resistance in Plasmodium falciparum, as evidence for their god, they are in effect crediting that god with designing mechanisms that help microbes move, invade, survive and evade our attempts to stop them. Point this out, however, and the same evidence that was allegedly scientific evidence for intelligent design is suddenly reinterpreted as evidence for “The Fall” and “Original Sin”. The pretence that creationism is science is abandoned in a hasty retreat into fundamentalist theology, where the same facts are repurposed to reach a more comfortable conclusion.

In addition to the two examples I recently discussed here and here, another example has now been reported — and this one involves a powerful molecular motor that should, by creationist standards, look very much like the sort of thing they would normally call “designed”. It is the type IV pilus retraction system, recently reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), which many bacteria use to retract tiny hair-like surface structures called pili. These pili act like microscopic grappling hooks, helping bacteria attach to surfaces and tissues, form antibiotic-resistant biofilms, and pull in fragments of DNA from their surroundings, including genes for drug resistance acquired from other bacteria.

Refuting Creationism - Humans Were Living In A West African Rain Forest 140,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Life in a West African rain forest 150,000 years ago

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

Scientists find earliest evidence that our ancestors lived in rainforests 150,000 years ago | News | The University of Sheffield

Stone Tool

Credit: Jimbob Blinkorn, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology

According to the findings of an international team led by the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, with contributions from the University of Sheffield, published in February 2025 in Nature, humans were living in the wet tropical forests of what is now Côte d’Ivoire about 150,000 years ago — more than 140,000 years before creationists imagine their mythical “Creation Week”, when they believe the single ancestral couple of all modern humans was created by magic somewhere in the Middle East.

The date itself is no surprise to anyone who understands the real evolutionary history of our species. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens had emerged in Africa by about 300,000 years ago, and the evidence increasingly points not to a single cradle, but to a pan-African process involving populations adapted to different regions and environments. What is striking about this discovery is not that humans were present in Africa 150,000 years ago, but that they were living in a tropical rainforest — an environment long assumed to have played only a minor, late role in human evolution.

That older assumption fitted neatly with the simplified “savannah hypothesis”, in which the ancestors of humans were thought to have diverged from the lineage leading to chimpanzees and bonobos as climatic change fragmented African forests and created more open grassland and woodland habitats. In that view, rainforest was more of a barrier than a formative environment. But the emerging picture is far more interesting: early H. sapiens were not simply creatures of open savannahs, coasts or grasslands, but members of a flexible, adaptable species able to exploit a wide range of African habitats long before the later dispersals into Eurasia.

Part of the reason rainforest environments have been under-represented in accounts of human evolution is that they are poor places for preserving bones, artefacts and organic remains. Acidic soils, heavy rainfall, dense vegetation and rapid biological decay all work against the survival of the archaeological record. That makes the Bété I site in southern Côte d’Ivoire especially important. Using optically stimulated luminescence and electron spin resonance dating methods, the researchers constrained the onset of human occupation there to around 150 ka. Plant-wax biomarkers, stable isotope data, phytoliths and pollen from the associated sediments then showed that the environment at the time was wet tropical forest.

This pushes the earliest known secure evidence of human occupation of a rainforest environment back by about 80,000 years. It also suggests that tropical forests were not late, marginal or forbidding habitats into which modern humans only ventured after acquiring some special new cultural trick, but part of the ecological range within which H. sapiens was already living during the Middle Pleistocene.

The finding was made possible because modern dating and environmental reconstruction techniques could be applied to sediments associated with stone tools first found at the site in the 1980s. In other words, once again, patient science has extracted a coherent, evidence-based history from the ground — a history that would not exist at all if there had been a recent global genocidal flood churning the world’s sediments into the chaotic mess required by creationist mythology.

Refuting Creationism - How Consciousness Emerges From An Unconscious Brain - No Magic Required

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

Researchers discover advanced language processing in the unconscious human brain | BCM

One of the more persistent claims made by creationists, especially those who have learned that “irreducible complexity” and “no transitional fossils” are not arguments so much as slogans, is that science can never explain consciousness. Consciousness, we are assured, is something special, something non-material, something breathed into us by a creator god; the magical ingredient that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom and places us conveniently at the centre of creation.

It is, of course, another argument from ignorance: science has not yet explained every detail of consciousness, therefore God. The same argument was once used for lightning, disease, embryology, instinct, inheritance, morality and the origin of species. In each case, the alleged supernatural mystery retreated as evidence accumulated and natural mechanisms were discovered. Consciousness is now going the same way — not because science has solved every philosophical puzzle about subjective experience, but because neuroscience is steadily showing that the mental processes creationists like to wrap in mystery are ordinary biological processes carried out by ordinary neural tissue.

A striking example of that comes from a paper published in Nature by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions. The researchers recorded activity from neurons in the human hippocampus while patients were under general anaesthesia during surgery for drug-resistant epilepsy. This gave them a rare opportunity to observe what the brain was doing when the patients were, in the ordinary sense, unconscious.

What they found is deeply inconvenient for anyone who wants consciousness to remain a supernatural mystery. Even under anaesthesia, hippocampal neurons responded to unexpected sounds, showed evidence of short-term plasticity, and, most remarkably, processed spoken language. When patients were played short stories, neural activity in the hippocampus carried information about word frequency, semantic category and grammatical class, and even contained signals predictive of upcoming words.

In other words, processes we might once have assumed belonged to conscious awareness — distinguishing parts of speech, extracting meaning and anticipating what comes next in a sentence — were taking place without the patient being aware of them. The brain was not merely ticking over like an idling machine; it was analysing, categorising and predicting. Consciousness, then, is not where all the clever work is done. Much of the clever work appears to be done before consciousness ever gets involved.

That does not mean this paper has “solved” consciousness, nor do the authors claim that it has. What it does show is that the boundary between conscious and unconscious processing is not where many people intuitively imagine it to be. Consciousness is looking less like a magic light switched on by a soul, and more like a higher-level state arising from coordinated activity across brain systems — a state in which some of the brain’s processing becomes integrated, reportable and available to the organism as experience.

For creationists, that is the problem. Their argument depends on consciousness remaining mysterious enough to hide a god in it. But neuroscience keeps doing what science always does: replacing mystery with mechanism, awe with understanding, and supernatural assertion with testable evidence. Once again, the choice is not between “science knows everything” and “therefore God”; it is between a research programme that discovers how things work and a religious apologetic that depends on hoping we never find out.

Malevolent Design - A Brilliantly 'Designed' Process For Spreading Influenza - Malevolence or Evolution?

Dead cells after the self-destruction and fragmentation process. The large green areas are the “eat me” signals which alert immune cells to kick-start clean-up and recycling process, while the small green circles are the “Footprint of Death” F-ApoEVs left behind by the dying cell.

’Footprint of Death’ gives new clues to cell life, News, La Trobe University

My previous post was about the discovery, reported in Cell Host & Microbe in May 2026, that a single amino-acid change in a coronavirus protein can alter how a bat-related coronavirus interacts with the immune systems of bats and humans. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, such changes help to explain how a virus that may be relatively benign in its natural host can become a serious pathogen when it crosses the species barrier into humans. By creationists' own criteria, this should qualify as intelligent design.

This post concerns another example which, if creationists applied their criteria for intelligent design consistently, would be further evidence of malevolent design. It is the finding, reported in Nature Communications, that influenza A virus can exploit part of the normal process of programmed cell death to help infect neighbouring cells.

Applied consistently, these discoveries would portray creationists' putative designer god as a malevolent entity that designs ways to increase suffering. But, since creationists need to portray this alleged designer as the omnibenevolent god of the Bible, this supposed 'evidence of intelligent design' somehow ceases to be evidence of design at all and becomes evidence of 'Sin' and 'The Fall', as creationists abandon any pretence of science and retreat into Biblical mythology to explain away inconvenient facts.

The discovery, by a team led by PhD candidate Stephanie Rutter in Professor Ivan Poon’s lab at the La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science (LIMS), shows how each step in the process of cell death and renewal is important in helping a dying cell break down and be cleared away by the body’s immune system. The team found that, as cells self-destruct, they change shape, lift away from their surroundings, and leave behind a residue which the researchers dubbed the 'footprint of death'. This contains a previously undescribed type of extracellular vesicle (EV). EVs are small packages used by cells to transport proteins, lipids, DNA and RNA to other cells, acting as an important means of communication between cells.

These new vesicles, known as FOOD-derived apoptotic extracellular vesicles, or F-ApoEVs, normally mark the site of a dead cell and help the immune system identify and clear away the remaining fragments, preventing inflammation and other harmful consequences. But this useful clean-up process can also be turned into a weakness. The researchers found that, when dying cells are infected with influenza A virus, viral proteins and even virus particles can be carried in these F-ApoEVs, providing another route by which infection can spread to neighbouring cells.

Had this process been beneficial to humans, rather than to influenza viruses, creationists would doubtless hail it as a marvel of intelligent design by their god. Yet, because the benefit is to a virus and the result can be disease, suffering and death, the same kind of complexity somehow ceases to count as evidence of design and is quietly reclassified as a mysterious consequence of 'The Fall'.

Creationists get into this bind because they are trying to force the evidence into their preferred mythology. Science has no such problem. The immune system, cell-death pathways and the pathogens that exploit them are all products of evolutionary history, not foresight. They are parts of a continuing arms race in which every useful biological process presents opportunities for parasites, viruses and other pathogens to exploit. An influenza virus that stumbles upon a weakness in a host system does not need to understand it, plan it, or design it; it merely needs to leave more copies of itself than viruses that did not.

Malevolent Design - How SARS-CoV-2 Was Cleverly Designed to Jump From Bats To Humans - Evolution Or Malevolence

A Single Molecular Change May Help Viruses Jump from Bat to Human | UC San Francisco

Two recent papers should delight admirers of creationism's putative intelligent designer, because both show the sort of biochemical ingenuity they normally rush to claim as evidence of design. One, published in Cell Host & Microbe in May 2026 and reported by UCSF in June, shows how a single molecular change can alter the way a coronavirus interacts with bat and human immune systems, helping to explain how viruses related to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, can cross the species barrier. The other, published in October 2025 in Nature Communications, which will be the subject of my next blog post, shows how influenza A virus can exploit the remnants of dying cells to help spread infection to neighbouring healthy cells.

However, that excitement is likely to be tempered somewhat when it dawns on them that, if these systems are the products of intelligent design, their designer can only be regarded as malevolent, since the result is an increase in the sum total of suffering in the world. But this does not seem to trouble ID proponents who cite Michael J. Behe's favourite examples — the Escherichia coli flagellum and anti-malarial drug resistance in Plasmodium falciparum — as evidence of irreducible complexity and hence of intelligent design, while ignoring the awkward fact that these supposed examples of design help microorganisms survive, move, infect, or evade human attempts to control them.

This puts creationists in a familiar bind. On the one hand, they like to claim any useful biological complexity as evidence of their Biblical god. On the other, when the same logic points to a designer of pathogens, parasites, immune evasion, drug resistance and viral spread, they retreat into vague claims about 'Sin', 'The Fall', or some mysterious corruption of nature, thereby absolving their god of responsibility for the very mechanisms they were praising as designed only moments earlier.

The first paper, in Cell Host & Microbe, was by a large team of researchers from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Quantitative Biosciences Institute, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the Institut Pasteur and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. It showed that a single amino-acid change in a viral protein can alter how coronaviruses interact with bat and human immune systems, changing the host's response to infection.

Bats are important viral reservoirs because their immune systems and physiology can allow them to tolerate viruses that might cause serious disease in other mammals. They can therefore harbour viruses for long periods, providing opportunities for viral lineages to persist, diversify and acquire mutations that may matter greatly when those viruses encounter a new host species. The UCSF-led study helps to explain how relatively small genetic differences can make the difference between a virus that remains associated with a bat reservoir and one that is better able to evade human immune defences.

This is precisely the sort of thing creationists should, by their own logic, have to call 'complex specified information'. The change is functional; it affects a specific biological outcome; and it is beneficial from the point of view of the viral lineage. The problem, of course, is that creationists usually smuggle in the assumption that 'beneficial' must mean beneficial to humans. If it benefits a virus, a bacterium, a parasite or a cancer cell, they suddenly decide it does not count.

Comparing SARS-CoV-2 with a related bat coronavirus, RaTG13, the researchers found that a viral protein called ORF9b was a key factor. The SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 versions of ORF9b are very similar, but behave very differently. In human cells, the SARS-CoV-2 version helped disable an innate immune alarm system, allowing the virus to multiply more effectively. In bat cells, the RaTG13 version interacted with a restriction factor that helped suppress infection.

The team found that changing just one of ORF9b's roughly 100 amino acids reversed its ability to evade the immune response. In creationist thinking, if the phrase is to mean anything at all, this would be new functional genetic information. Yet the actual explanation requires no magic, no designer and no supernatural intervention: a mutation changed an amino acid; that change altered protein interactions; and the result affected viral fitness in different host-cell environments. In other words, ordinary chemistry and physics, operating through mutation, selection and host-virus interaction, produced exactly the kind of functional change creationists insist cannot happen naturally.

The paper in Cell Host & Microbe was accompanied by a news item from UCSF by Levi Gadye:

Refuting Creationism - Observed Evolution In A South African Leopard Population

The elusive Cape leopard.

Jana Ohrner/iNaturalist, CC BY-NC

Leopards adapted to South Africa’s Cape so successfully that they’re genetically unique – study

This paper will have creationists hurriedly trying to redefine evolution so that it no longer means what biologists mean by it — change in allele frequencies in a population over time — but instead becomes some childish parody of the idea, carefully constructed to exclude the scientific definition and so safely miss the point. The paper, published last January (2026) in Heredity, shows that a small, isolated population of leopards (Panthera pardus) in South Africa’s Cape Floristic Region is a striking example of incipient allopatric divergence, and possibly early speciation, in progress. The population, estimated at fewer than 1,000 individuals, has developed a distinctive genome and includes small leopards, some with only about half the body mass of leopards elsewhere in Africa.

In what will also disappoint those creationists who are still eagerly awaiting the abandonment of “Darwinism” by mainstream biologists and its replacement by magic-based creationism, the authors — an international group of leopard conservationists and evolutionary biologists — interpret their findings wholly within the framework of evolutionary theory. By comparing whole-genome data from 43 leopards, including 10 from the Western Cape province (WCP), the team found that the WCP leopards diverged from those of northern South Africa about 20,000–24,000 years ago — in other words, many thousands of years before creationists’ mythical “Creation Week”. They found no obvious evidence that genetic drift alone was responsible for this divergence, and concluded instead that it is more likely to reflect the population’s demographic history, long-term isolation and adaptation to the Cape’s distinctive environmental conditions, including low prey availability.

Their conclusion is that the leopards of the Western Cape can be regarded as an evolutionarily significant unit (ESU): a genetically distinctive population representing a unique component of the species’ evolutionary history and therefore one that should be managed and conserved as such.

One of the team, and first author of the paper, Assistant Professor Laura Tensen of the University of Greifswald, has written an article in The Conversation describing the research and its findings. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Ancient Hominins Were Using Fire In A South African Cave - About 1.5 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Stages of Burning on Bones – white (#5 on right) is the most burnt while yellow-beige (on left #1) is unburnt

Credit: Wonderwerk Cave Project.

Ancient Fire Record Rewritten: Researchers Push Earliest Evidence of Human Fire Use Back to over a Million Years | EUROPEAN FRIENDS OF THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY

A recent paper in PLOS ONE, by an international team including Dr Liora Kolska Horwitz of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reminded me of a quote by Francis Collins, former director of the Human Genome Project and founder and president of The BioLogos Foundation, which aims to reconcile Christian theology with science. It also reminded me how Young Earth Creationists traditionally cope with information that refutes their beliefs. The paper reports evidence for the use of fire in a South African cave by early hominins between 1.07 million and 1.79 million years ago — a fact entirely inconsistent with Young Earth Creationism (YEC).

This image of God as a cosmic trickster seems to be the ultimate admission of defeat for the Creationist perspective. Would God as the great deceiver be an entity one would want to worship? Is this consistent with everything else we know about God from the Bible, from the Moral Law, and from every other source—namely, that He is loving, logical, and consistent?

Thus, by any reasonable standard, Young Earth Creationism has reached a point of intellectual bankruptcy, both in its science and in its theology. Its persistence is thus one of the great puzzles and great tragedies of our time.

Francis Collins - The Language of God

In this quote from The Language of God, Francis Collins is referring to those Young Earth Creationists who dismiss the palaeontological, archaeological and cosmological evidence for life evolving on an old Earth in an even older Universe, as evidence deliberately created by God to test the faith of believers. Creationists also routinely dismiss this sort of evidence either by accusing scientists of faking it, or by attributing it to the work of Satan.

All of these are, of course, variations on conspiracy thinking — more understandable in a teleologically thinking toddler than in an adult. When it persists into adulthood, it is consistent with the findings of a psychology research paper which found that creationism and conspiracism share a common teleological bias: the tendency to explain events and natural phenomena as though they exist for a purpose, or are directed towards some hidden end. It is therefore no surprise that creationism so often depends on conspiracism. The surprise is that there are still so many people, especially in parts of the USA, who try to understand the world around them using a cognitive habit most children eventually learn to leave behind.

Creationism Refuted - Our Ancestors Lived In North America - 56 Million Years Ago

Life reconstruction of Teilhardina

Ai-generated image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

Our primate ancestors evolved in the cold – not the tropics

At times, it seems almost cruel to keep reminding creationists that another day, another week and another month have passed, and still there is no hint that biomedical scientists are about to abandon evidence-based evolutionary biology and adopt magic-based creationism as a better explanation of the facts. And yet here we are again: another paper, another article, and another example of evolution providing the rational framework for interpreting the evidence.

And, to rub salt into creationist wounds, the evidence deals with events around 56 million years before creationists’ mythical “Creation Week”. As though to refute yet another creationist myth — that scientists are only allowed to publish papers that confirm mainstream scientific orthodoxy — the findings, published by Jorge Avaria-Llautureo of the University of Reading and colleagues in the mainstream journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), challenge the long-standing assumption that the primate lineage originated in warm tropical forests.

The study maps the likely geographic origins of our primate ancestors and reconstructs the historical climate at those locations. Its conclusion is surprising: early primates appear to have lived, dispersed and diversified through cold, arid and temperate regions, not primarily in the tropics. Their later colonisation of tropical regions took several million years and seems to have been driven more by local changes between dry and wet climates than by global warming itself.

One useful example is the tiny early primate Teilhardina, a small, tree-dwelling mammal known from fossils around 56 million years old — roughly 10 million years after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. Fossil evidence suggests that Teilhardina had nails rather than claws, helping it grasp branches and handle food, a characteristic associated with primates. Species of this early primate group appear in the fossil record of North America and then dispersed rapidly across what are now Europe and China.

An article explaining the finding and its significance for understanding our evolutionary origins was published in The Conversation by Jason Gilchrist, a lecturer in the School of Applied Sciences at Edinburgh Napier University. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Unintelligent Design - The DNA In A Developing Brain Gets Broken And Has To Be Repaired - Incompetent Design Or Evolution?

Neurons migrating through dense tissue in the developing brain (green) frequently undergo DNA damage (magenta).

DNA in neurons is damaged and repaired during brain cortex formation | News | Kyoto University iCeMS

Like my last post, this post illustrates how the human body, far from being the perfect design of the omnipotent, omniscient designer creationists would have us believe in, is the result of a utilitarian evolutionary process. Layers of complexity arise, not from divine brilliance, but from evolved solutions to problems created by suboptimal earlier solutions to other problems — which were themselves the result of imperfect evolution.

In the previous post we saw how DNA replication is sufficiently imperfect that it requires mechanisms to repair the resulting DNA damage. However, these repair processes are themselves potentially dangerous and need control systems to maintain a careful balance between too little and too much repair. When this control process fails, it can lead to cancers that mimic those caused by the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which are associated with increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer.

In this post we see how newborn neurons in the developing brain need to squeeze through tight spaces in dense tissue, past other cells and between fibres, in order to reach their final positions and form neural circuits in the cerebral and cerebellar cortices. This process is such a physical struggle that the DNA in these neurons can suffer double-strand breaks and must be repaired quickly to ensure normal brain development. This is the finding of a research team from Kyoto University, the University of Tokyo, Osaka University, the National University of Singapore and the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, led by Professor Mineko Kengaku who have just published their findings in Nature.

Mostly, this repair is quick and successful. However, the research team also found striking similarities between the development of mice in which the repair process failed and human genome-instability syndromes that affect the cerebellum.

Another important point is that this repair process appears to be much more successful in damaged neuronal DNA than in similar damage that can occur when some cancer cells migrate through narrow channels. The difference seems to lie in where the DNA breaks occur. In neurons, they tend to occur in regions of the genome that are not actively being transcribed, whereas in cancer cells the damage can involve essential genes. That suggests there is some biological bias in where these breaks occur in neurons, rather than the process being simply random mechanical shattering.

This raises the obvious question for creationists: why create a process that breaks DNA in developing brain cells, only to require another process to repair it, with the inherent risk that the repair process might be incomplete or imperfect? It also raises the possibility that the resulting small differences in the genomes of individual neurons could contribute to neuronal individuality and perhaps to some neurodevelopmental or neurodegenerative diseases.

The emerging picture, from this and from the rogue repair-control process that can mimic cancers caused by the BRCA genes, is not of a human body designed by an omniscient engineer. It is more like a William Heath Robinson contraption: improvised, overcomplicated, dependent on compensatory mechanisms, and always vulnerable to the failure of the very systems needed to keep it working.

Unintelligent Design - What Happens when A Badly 'Designed' Process Goes Rogue - Cancer - Malevolent Design Or Evolution?

Dr. Alexandra Nusawardhana, the lead author of the study and who earned her doctorate in biomedical sciences this year from Penn State College of Medicine, conducts research to understand genomic instability and cancer treatment response.

Credit: Jason Plotkin / Penn State. Creative Commons

DNA repair protein gene gone rogue may unlock new cancer treatments | Penn State University

A characteristic of evolved biological systems, and one that distinguishes them from systems designed from first principles, is that they are often unnecessarily complex, vulnerable to failure and dependent on layers of patchwork compensation. This is what we should expect from systems produced by utilitarian, suboptimal compromises built from whatever was available at the time.

With no plan, no foresight and no predetermined objective, natural selection can only favour whatever leaves more descendants in a particular environment. The result is not an ideal solution, but merely a workable one — one that is better than what preceded it, even if it remains a very long way from perfection. An intelligent designer, such as the one proposed by advocates of intelligent design, would be under no such historical constraints and could, in principle, rebuild a system from scratch to arrive at the optimal solution.

To illustrate this, this post and the next will look at two recent papers that incidentally demonstrate how many human health problems arise from these over-complex, error-prone systems — systems that would not exist if the human body were the pinnacle of created perfection that creationists imagine it to be. Unless, of course, the designer intended us to suffer when its systems failed.

The first concerns a paper published in February 2026 in Nature Communications by researchers at Penn State College of Medicine. It shows how one component of the DNA repair machinery — a system needed because DNA replication and maintenance are themselves vulnerable to error and damage — can itself go wrong and produce a pattern of genomic instability resembling that seen when the BRCA1 and BRCA2 tumour-suppressor pathway is defective.

The culprit is EXO1, a gene that encodes an exonuclease involved in DNA processing and repair. In normal cells, EXO1 helps trim and process damaged or mismatched DNA so that repair can proceed. But when EXO1 is overexpressed, as the researchers found in a significant proportion of several cancers, including about 20–30% of breast and ovarian cancers as well as melanoma, testicular, cervical and hepatobiliary cancers, too much of this normally useful protein becomes destructive. Instead of helping to preserve genome integrity, excessive EXO1 activity can degrade newly synthesised DNA during replication stress, expanding single-stranded DNA gaps and degrading reversed replication forks.

The result is a BRCA-like pattern of genomic instability even in cells whose BRCA pathway is still functional. In other words, the cell behaves in some important respects like a BRCA-mutant tumour cell, not because BRCA1 or BRCA2 is mutated, but because too much EXO1 has overwhelmed the normal protective system. This matters clinically because such tumours may respond to some of the same treatments used against BRCA-mutant cancers, including drugs that target DNA repair vulnerabilities.

So, we have a DNA replication and maintenance system that needs elaborate repair machinery because the genome is constantly vulnerable to damage; then we have the catastrophic consequences when that repair machinery itself goes rogue. Compare that with the simpler, more robust system we might expect from an intelligent designer endowed with foresight and unconstrained by evolutionary history. Complexity is not the hallmark of intelligent design that creationists claim it to be. In biology, it is very often the accumulated consequence of failure-prone, suboptimal compromises produced by evolutionary tinkering without a predetermined objective.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Cultivated Cotton - No Magic Required

Wild cotton, on left, has short, brown, and coarse fibers, while modern domesticated cotton has white, fine and abundant fibers. A new study led by Iowa State University scientists identified the northwestern Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico as the original source of domesticated cotton.

Photo: Corrinne Grover/Iowa State University.

Cotton’s roots trace to Yucatan Peninsula, where wild gene pool runs deepest - News Service

My last blog post looked at the evolution of the strawberry and how the evidence of multiple whole-genome duplications and speciation by hybridisation refutes several basic creationist, counter-evidential myths and articles of faith.

This post deals with the evolution and cultivation of the cotton plant, which again refutes the childish notion of divine creation, perfectly suited for use by the creator god's favourite creation, humankind, as well as the creationist article of faith that no new genetic information can arise without the direct intervention of a designer god, because this would supposedly violate the laws of thermodynamics.

As a recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), by a team of researchers including Professor Jonathan Wendel of Iowa State University, has shown, modern upland cotton, Gossypium hirsutum, is the result of thousands of years of human selection acting on naturally occurring genetic variation. The team traced its domestication to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, probably to the north-western Yucatán, where wild populations still retain the deepest gene pool. Cotton was first domesticated there about 5,000 years ago, which, if creationist chronology were taken seriously, places it before the supposed genocidal global flood, which it appears to have survived along with the people who cultivated it.

The researchers found that domestication transformed a wild, perennial shrub with small bolls and short, coarse, brown fibres into the modern crop with abundant, long, fine, white fibres. This was not the result of a single act of magical design, nor of a sudden, miraculous improvement, but of long-term selection acting on many mutations of relatively small effect, accumulated and filtered over many generations.

The team also showed that, while human selection produced fibres more useful to people, it did so at a cost. Useful traits present in wild populations, such as disease resistance and salt tolerance, were left behind as farmers selected repeatedly from a restricted subset of the original wild gene pool. Each generation of selection narrowed the genetic base still further, pushing cultivated cotton through a genetic bottleneck.

The researchers reached these conclusions by comparing the genomes of cultivated cotton with those of specimens collected from wild populations across the plant's native range. Their analyses showed that domesticated cotton is most closely related to wild cotton from north-western Yucatán, where two random wild plants still show, on average, about twice as much genetic difference as two random modern cultivars.

After cultivated upland cotton spread out of the Yucatán, it eventually became the dominant cotton crop worldwide, displacing or overshadowing other cotton species that had been independently domesticated in South America, Africa and India. Today, Gossypium hirsutum, or upland cotton, accounts for about 90% of the world's cotton crop.