Malevolent Design - A Parasitic Fly With All Creationism's Hall Marks for Intelligent Design Is Heading For The USA

Lava of the New World screwworm, Cochliomyia hominivorax.

By John Kucharski - via Wikipedia

The New World screwworm, Cochliomyia hominivorax.

Judy Gallagher, CC BY

An article in The Conversation by Richard Wall, Emeritus Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol, should remind creationists—if they had the wit to understand why—of the theological quagmire into which their favourite leaders have led them.

The Discovery Institute and its fellows, with their reliance on notions such as irreducible complexity and complex specified genetic information, have taken creationism to a point where the only escape lies in three almost equally unacceptable options:

• They can abandon the very arguments they present as proof of intelligent design, and so admit that they have no proof at all.
• They can accept that the designer god they traditionally equate with the god of the Bible and Qur'an is in fact an evil god, relentlessly designing ever more ingenious ways to increase suffering in the world.
• Or they can retreat into theology and Bible-literalist fundamentalism, abandoning any pretence that intelligent design is genuine science rather than simply rebranded creationism, by blaming everything on 'The Fall'. But in doing so they must also admit the existence of some other creative force with powers sufficient to rival their creator god—one to which their god is either powerless or indifferent. That, of course, destroys the basic principle of Judeo-Christian monotheism: a single omnipotent ruling deity. Ironically, the Discovery Institute was established for the very purpose of persuading US legislators and state education officials that intelligent design is real science.

This problem for creationism arises because the notions of irreducible complexity and complex specified genetic information apply just as well—if not better—to parasites and pathogens as they do to those aspects of nature that creationists like to present as evidence of their god's existence and benevolence; in other words, anything that happens to benefit them.

Professor Wall's article concerns a parasitic fly, the New World screwworm, Cochliomyia hominivorax, whose larvae feed on open wounds in cattle and sometimes humans, often with fatal consequences. The fly is currently extending its range northwards through Mexico and has now reached states bordering Texas. His article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism Refuted - 100 Million Years Of Cuttlefish and Squid Evolution

Top Left: Pygmy squid. Idiosepius sp.
Photo by Keishu Asada
Bottom left: Ram’s horn squid, Spirula spirula. Photo by Dr. Victor Tuset

Top right: Ryukyuan bobtail squid, Euprymna brenneri Photo : Jeff Jolly
Bottom right: Common cuttlefish, Sepia sp.
Photo by Keishu Asada

The intricate ram’s horn squid shell is only about the size of a fingernail. Compared to other cephalopod species, the shell structure has not degraded over time. As part of this study, researchers used transcriptomics which revealed genes supporting biomineralization and regeneration of the shell.

Credit: Catherine Hodges/OIST

100 million years ago, an ‘evolutionary fuse’ was lit in the deep ocean, sparking squid diversification | EurekAlert!

Another day, another gap in evolutionary history closed by scientists doing what scientists do: following the evidence wherever it leads. This time, the gap concerns the origins and diversification of squid and cuttlefish, the decapodiform cephalopods.

An international team led by the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) has now reconstructed a much clearer picture of their history, and their findings are published, open access, in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The study supports a rapid mid-Cretaceous diversification of the major decapodiform lineages around 100 million years ago, followed much later by expansion into coastal habitats after the K–Pg mass extinction. [1]

That is, of course, disastrous for creationism. Creationists need the history of life to be short, simple, and static: a few thousand years, separate acts of special creation, and only trivial shuffling of variation within rigidly defined “kinds”. What this study shows instead is exactly what evolutionary biology has long predicted - deep ancestry, branching descent, ecological change over immense spans of time, and major radiations triggered by changing environmental conditions. In other words, not magic, not fixity, and not “kinds”, but evolution. [1]

The researchers conclude that the ancestors of modern squid and cuttlefish probably originated in the deep ocean, where oxygenated refugia may have allowed them to survive while shallow marine environments became increasingly hostile. Ocean acidification in shallower waters would likely have damaged shell-bearing forms, and the later recovery of coastal ecosystems and coral reefs after the K–Pg event opened up new ecological opportunities. What followed was not the survival of a few immutable “created kinds”, but the adaptive expansion of lineages into newly available habitats. [2]

That matters because it gives the lie to one of creationism’s central evasions: the claim that organisms merely vary within fixed boundaries. The history uncovered here is not one of minor tinkering around the edges. It is one of common ancestry, divergence, persistence through catastrophe, and later radiation into new environments. It is precisely the sort of deep, branching history that creationists have to deny, ignore, or misrepresent because their belief system simply has no room for it. [1]

The team reconstructed this history using genome-scale data, including newly sequenced genomes that helped fill key phylogenetic gaps. Together with data from the Aquatic Symbiosis Genomics Project and other existing resources, this allowed the researchers to produce a robust evolutionary tree covering nearly all recognised decapodiform lineages. Because cephalopod genomes are often very large, this kind of work has only recently become practical with modern sequencing technology and computing power. [1]

So, once again, creationism is refuted not by some special anti-creationist project, but as an incidental consequence of real scientific research. Scientists set out to understand the evolutionary history of a fascinating group of animals, and in doing so they uncovered yet more evidence for common descent, ancient Earth history, and the power of evolution to generate biological diversity. Reality, as usual, has no respect for creationist dogma. [1]

Creationism Refuted - A Possible Ancestor Of All The Apes - From Egypt

Masripithecus moghraensis in Early Miocene Egypt

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest) based on artist's reconstruction.

Masripithecus: A new Miocene ape from Egypt sheds light on the origins of modern apes

Another piece of the rich and complex story of human evolution may have come to light, and it is not quite what researchers had expected. Competing theories have placed the ancestral home of the common ancestor of African and Asian anthropoid apes either in Eurasia or in Africa. This discovery, however, points instead to Egypt, and more broadly to North Africa and the Middle East, as the region in which the pivotal transition from Old World monkeys to the lineage that gave rise to the modern apes may have occurred.

News that this distant ancestor of humans came from Egypt and the wider Middle East may briefly gladden the hearts of creationists desperate for support for the biblical myth of a special creation of humans in that region. That enthusiasm is unlikely to survive contact with the details, however, because this animal lived 17–18 million years ago and was not a human at all, but part of the lineage leading to the common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and the Asian apes. Like so much palaeontological evidence, it therefore stands not in support of the Genesis creation myth, but as evidence for Darwinian evolution.

The discovery is described in a recent paper in Science by a research team from the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center in Egypt and the University of Southern California in the USA, led by Mansoura University palaeontologist Hesham Sallam.

The fossil, belonging to a species the team have named Masripithecus moghraensis, was discovered at Wadi Moghra. The generic name combines Masri, the Arabic word for “Egyptian”, with the Greek píthēkos, meaning “ape”, so the name can be read as “Egyptian ape from Moghra”.

Although the find consists only of a lower jaw, it preserves several features not seen in any contemporaneous apes, including exceptionally large canine and premolar teeth, and molars with rounded, heavily textured chewing surfaces, all set in a robust mandible. Taken together, these features suggest a flexible feeder able to eat both fruit and harder foods such as nuts, an adaptation that may have helped it cope with the increasingly seasonal climate of Early Miocene Egypt.

In addition to the sophisticated Bayesian methods that placed Masripithecus earlier in ape evolutionary history than any other known fossil anthropoid, the researchers point out that during the Early Miocene the Egyptian region lay at a geographical crossroads between Eurasia and Africa. At that time, the African and Arabian plates were still moving northwards towards Eurasia, while fluctuating sea levels periodically opened migration routes between the continents. As so often in palaeontology, multiple independent lines of evidence converge on the same conclusion.

Refuting Creationism - Observed Rapid Evolution

Biologists in Europe, the Middle East and U.S. planted 360 small plots of Arabidopsis (above) in various types of climates — from alpine to desert — and left them for five years to evolve or die.

Artist: Emma Vidal
for Moisés Expósito-Alonso/
UC Berkeley

White-flowering Arabidopsis growing in sand at a beach near the Baltic sea. The plant, a member of the mustard family, grows in a broad range of climates, from alpine to desert, and is commonly used in genetic experiments in the lab.

Moisés Expósito-Alonso/UC Berkeley

One-of-a-kind experiment tracked plant evolution in response to climate change at 30 sites worldwide - Berkeley News

You won’t need to spend long on a creationist social media site before someone demands evidence of “observed evolution”, only to shift the goalposts the moment you provide exactly that: measurable changes in allele frequencies within a population in response to environmental change. At that point, they usually abandon the scientific definition of evolution and retreat instead to one of their childish caricatures of it — one species suddenly turning into an unrelated taxon, new structures appearing overnight, or, most absurdly of all, unable to let go of the arrogant assumption that the entire universe has a single purpose - to produce them - a bacterium somehow “becoming human”, as though evolution had a preordained anthropocentric goal.

So we can predict with some confidence how creationists will react to news that science has now published precisely the sort of evidence they keep demanding. In a paper published on 26 March 2026 in the journal Science, a team led by Assistant Professor Moisés Expósito-Alonso of the University of California, Berkeley, reported the results of a remarkable outdoor evolution experiment designed to measure how quickly plants can adapt to changing climates. The researchers planted genetically diverse populations of the common laboratory plant Arabidopsis thaliana across 30 climate zones in Western Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and North America, ranging from the snowy Alps to the heat of the Negev Desert, and tracked the evolutionary changes over five years.

Of course, the purpose of the experiment was not to “test” the Theory of Evolution. Evolutionary theory was the framework on which the entire study was built and by which the results were interpreted. The aim was to observe evolution in real time and discover how quickly plant populations can adapt to climate change — and where the limits of that adaptive capacity may lie.

An early analysis of the first three years of genomic data — covering 12 plots at each of the 30 sites, 360 experiments in total — showed that most populations evolved rapidly in response to their new environments. In many locations, similar genetic changes appeared repeatedly, exactly as one would expect when natural selection favours variants suited to local conditions. In the hottest environments, however, the pattern was different: although some populations showed genetic change, it appeared chaotic rather than predictably adaptive, and these populations subsequently went extinct.

If this pattern proves typical of other plant species, it is deeply concerning, because rising global temperatures are precisely the conditions to which many plants will now need to adapt if they are to avoid climate-driven extinction. The study suggests that rapid adaptation is possible, but also that there may be a tipping point beyond which extreme heat pushes populations past an evolutionary breaking point.

Holy Cow! - Clever Veronika Refutes Creationism

This cow uses tools like a primate—and scientists are stunned | ScienceDaily

If humans evolved intelligence, why are there still creationists?

This is a question that evolutionary biologists struggle to answer, with the best attempt probably by Francis Collins, who explained that "Young Earth Creationism has reached a point of intellectual bankruptcy, both in its science and in its theology". (Francis Collins - The Language of God).

Paradoxically though, creationists often cite human intelligence as evidence for the special creation of mankind, separate from the other animals, who, according to creationist mythology, don't display what they define as evidence of intelligence - love, aesthetic appreciation, creativity, etc, as opposed to science which includes things like tool selection, adaptation and use, as characteristics of intelligence and cognitive ability.

So, it will be interesting to see how creationist explain the following video evidence of intelligence in a cow - namely, the ability to select a tool for an appropriate task and its ability to adapt how it uses that tool for maximal effectiveness.

This evidence comes in the form of a paper in Current Biology by Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró and Alice M.I. Auersperg of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria:

Refuting Creationism - New Deep Ocean Species Discovered

Collage of the 24 new Amphipod species identified in Clarion-Clipperton Zone

Credit: National Oceanography Centre, Southampton

(A) Generalized body plan of a gammaridean amphipod, (B) Caprella equilibra, (C) family Corophiidae, and (D) Gammarus tigrinus.

Ritter, Carmen J.; Bourne, David G. (2024)[2]

Biodiversity Boost: 24 new deep-sea species discovered in major Pacific research | EurekAlert!

Among the Bible’s more obviously false claims is the one found in the second creation account, where God first creates Adam, then creates all the animals as “help meets” [sic] for him. In the earlier account, all the animals are created before Adam and Eve. In the revised version, however, none of the animals proves suitable for Adam, so God then creates Eve to be his “help meet”.

In virtually every depiction of Adam and Eve, however, both are shown with navels, implying placental reproduction rather than magical creation. Adam was also supposedly created with genitalia, although it is unclear what purpose these served before God created Eve, after his first attempt to provide Adam with companions had failed through, presumably, a lack of foresight.

Leaving aside the implausibility of that story, there is another major problem that creationists never address: if God created all the animals for the benefit of Adam and his descendants, over whom they were supposedly given dominion, why were so many of them hidden away in inaccessible places such as the deep ocean floor, where we are only now becoming aware of them?

For example, a team of 16 experts led by Dr Anna Jażdżewska of the University of Lodz (UL) and Tammy Horton of the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) have just announced the identification of 24 new species of amphipods found in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a 6 million square kilometre region of the Pacific Ocean between Hawai'i and Mexico.

These new species comprise ten new families of predators and scavengers, including a new family (Mirabestiidae), a new superfamily (Mirabestioidea), and two new genera of predators and scavengers, Mirabestia and Pseudolepechinella.

These findings form part of the International Seabed Authority’s Sustainable Seabed Knowledge Initiative (SSKI), which aims to describe 1,000 new species by the end of the decade.

None of these species was known to humans until now, nor do they appear to provide us with any obvious benefit of the kind implied by the Bible’s claim that animals were created for human use. It is almost as though creationism’s creator god forgot what these species were supposedly for and slipped instead into a purposeless, automatic process of generating biodiversity for its own sake — much as biologists understand the undirected natural process of evolution to do.

Refuting Creationism - A Rhino From The Canadian Arctic - 23 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Artist’s recreation of Epiaceratherium itjilik, at its forested lake habitat, Devon Island, Early Miocene. The plants and animals shown are based on fossil finds at the site, including the transitional seal Puijila darwini.

© Julius Csotonyi

Fossil bones of Epiaceratherium itjilik. About 75% of the animal’s bones were recovered, including diagnostic bones such as the teeth, mandibles and parts of the cranium.

Pierre Poirier © Canadian Museum of Nature

A rhino from the Arctic - Canadian Museum of Nature

Another day, another incidental refutation of the childish biblical creation myth.

This one comes, as so many do, from scientists doing what scientists do best: uncovering the facts and following the evidence wherever it leads.

In this case, the evidence shows that a species of rhinoceros was living in the Canadian High Arctic about 23 million years ago. Even more significantly, the find suggests that rhinoceroses, once widespread across Eurasia and North America, crossed into North America far later than previously thought, by way of northern land connections that remained viable well into the Cenozoic.

Scientists from the Canadian Museum of Nature have just announced the discovery of the species they named Epiaceratherium itjilik in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The discovery creates problems for creationism on several fronts. Most obviously, its age places it far outside the tiny timescale permitted by creationist mythology. It also demolishes the notion that modern animal distributions can be explained by descent from a single surviving pair a mere 4,000 years ago, because no such recent land bridge existed to carry rhinoceroses into North America. Instead, the fossil fits neatly into the well-established evolutionary history of rhinos, which stretches back roughly 40 million years, and into the geological evidence for changing sea levels and intermittent northern land connections between Eurasia and North America. These independent lines of evidence converge for the simple reason that they describe what really happened.

The fossilised remains, representing about three-quarters of a skeleton, were recovered from the rich fossil deposits of Haughton Crater on Devon Island, Nunavut. The animal is now the northernmost rhinoceros species yet known, and its excellent preservation has given palaeontologists an unusually complete picture of this unexpected Arctic browser.

Refuting Creationism - Hominin Diversity In Middle Pleistocene China

Middle Pleistocene humans in China

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

A new study places China at the center of the debate on human evolution | CENIEH

1 million-year-old stone tools from the Nihewan Basin

Continuing the theme from my last post, that the human evolutionary story is vastly richer and more complex than the childishly simplistic fairy tale in the Bible, this paper by a team led by the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing, together with researchers from the Spanish Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), and published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, argues that East Asia may have been a major centre of evolution within the genus Homo outside Africa.

At the heart of the study is a systematic reassessment of the so-called ‘transitional’ hominin fossils from the Chinese Middle Pleistocene. These fossils show intriguing mixtures of primitive and derived traits, and refuse to fit neatly into the tidy, linear progression that older models liked to assume between Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. In other words, the human story in Asia was not a simple ladder of progress but a tangled evolutionary bush, with several populations, overlapping traits, and probably more than one lineage sharing the landscape at different times.

Some of these fossils may represent Denisovans, while recently proposed species such as Homo longi and Homo juluensis hint at an even greater diversity of archaic humans than had previously been recognised. It is also entirely possible that there were other hominin groups in East Asia that remain unidentified. As so often in palaeoanthropology, the more evidence scientists uncover, the less plausible the old cartoon version of human evolution becomes — and the more absurd the Biblical fantasy of humanity springing fully formed from a single magically created couple just a few thousand years ago appears by comparison.

This work also resonates with the recent findings from Atapuerca in Spain, where Homo antecessor has been interpreted as representing a basal population from around a million years ago, potentially close to the ancestry of later human lineages. Far from showing a simple, straight-line march toward modern humans, the fossil evidence increasingly suggests a deep and branching history, with different populations spreading, diverging, mixing, and adapting across Eurasia over hundreds of thousands of years.

The study also re-examines the evidence for the arrival of Homo sapiens in China, suggesting that our species may have been present there as early as 100,000 years ago, rather than only around 50,000 years ago as often assumed. If that interpretation is correct, then modern humans were dispersing across Asia earlier, and in a much more complex pattern, than traditional models allowed. That would mean repeated movements of populations, interaction with other human groups, and probably episodes of interbreeding — all of it part of a dynamic evolutionary process that creationists are forced either to ignore or grotesquely misrepresent.

Taken together, the evidence points to East Asia as an important arena in human evolution, occupied by adaptable and innovative hominin populations capable of surviving in a wide range of environments. This increasing adaptability, associated with larger brains and behavioural flexibility, helped lay the foundations for the eventual spread of Homo sapiens across the globe. Once again, the real story of human origins turns out to be not the childish simplicity of myth, but the far more fascinating complexity of evolution.

Refuting Creationism - Archaic Hominins In Spain - 390,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Homo antecessor working at the Gran Dolia butchery site

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

The Gran Dolina site at Atapuerca reveals an almost exclusive use of local chert 400,000 years ago | CENIEH

In stark contrast to the simplistic Bronze Age mythology of the Bible, in which all humanity is supposedly descended from a single magically created couple with no ancestors just a few thousand years ago, followed by a biological reset in a global genocidal flood a mere 4,000 years ago, archaeology continues to reveal a far richer and more complex human story. Instead of a single recent origin, the evidence shows a deep evolutionary history stretching back hundreds of thousands of years, involving multiple related human species and regional populations, with occasional interbreeding. Part of that long history was played out in Eurasia.

A study led by scientists from the Spanish Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), just published in Quaternary International, has identified 400,000-year-old human artefacts at the Gran Dolina site in Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain, together with what may be the earliest evidence of communal hunting. The findings show the sophisticated manufacture of stone tools from locally available chert. The site is also associated with the remains of 60 bison, strongly suggesting a communal butchering site that implies strategic planning, cooperation, and large-scale social coordination.

What makes this especially striking is that these activities took place before the hominin lineage had diversified into Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans. Taken together with other evidence from Atapuerca, including discoveries from Sima de los Huesos (‘Cave of Bones’), the findings indicate that archaic hominins such as Homo antecessor had established themselves in Iberia long before Homo sapiens entered Eurasia.

Malevolent Design - How Mosquitoes Are Perfectly Designed to Spread Diseases.

Hundreds of Hungry Mosquitoes, a Student Volunteer and a Mesh Suit

What are mosquitoes for?

According to creationist dogma, everything was designed by an intelligent creator for a purpose. So what, exactly, is the purpose of mosquitoes? Because, judged by what they actually do, they appear to have been designed to spread disease. Mosquitoes are among the deadliest animals on Earth, acting as vectors for malaria, dengue, yellow fever, Zika virus and other infections. If an omnipotent, omniscient designer created them, then that designer must have known exactly what they would do. By the logic of creationism itself, mosquitoes were designed for that purpose.

Creationists usually try to escape the implications of this by retreating into theology and blaming “The Fall”. But taken seriously, that excuse creates more problems than it solves. It implies the existence of a second creative force, independent of and apparently beyond the control of creationism’s god, which can redesign living things for harm and produce pathogens capable of exploiting them. In other words, it requires a rival designer with powers alarmingly similar to those creationists reserve for their own deity - something any serious Christian theologian would regard as a serious blasphemy, carrying the risk of eternal damnation.

What creationist leaders dare not admit is that the far better explanation is evolution. There is no need to invent a second supernatural being to explain why mosquitoes are so well adapted to finding human hosts and transmitting disease. Evolution by natural selection explains it perfectly well, without tying theology in knots or making their designer look either incompetent, malevolent, or powerless against a rival entity with god-like creative powers.

This is especially awkward for intelligent design creationists, because they insist that the hallmarks of design are “complex specified information” and “irreducible complexity”. Yet mosquitoes plainly possess precisely those features — at least by creationist standards. Without their finely tuned sensory systems and behavioural adaptations, they could not locate humans so efficiently or spread infection so effectively. In other words, the very traits creationists cite as proof of design would, in this case, be evidence of a designer producing one of the world’s most efficient disease-delivery systems.

That problem was highlighted in a paper published in Science Advances by researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Riverside, led by Professor David Hu.

They showed that mosquitoes use a combination of visual cues and the detection of carbon dioxide exhaled by humans to home in on a target. Of the roughly 3,500 mosquito species, around 100 are anthropophilic, meaning they preferentially feed on humans. Some can even detect a single human in a herd of cattle — all with a brain containing only about 200,000 neurones. The team set out to understand how mosquitoes are so extraordinarily effective at locating a human host from which to take a blood meal, and in the process, transmit disease.

How the team conducted their experiments is described in an article in The Conversation by lead author David Hu. His article is reproduced below under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Refuting Creationism - A Reptile That Looks Like A Cross Between a Greyhound And A Crocodile - From 215 Million Years Ago

Life reconstruction of Galahadosuchus jonesi n. gen. n. sp. The morphology of regions of the body that are not currently known for Galahadosuchus jonesi (i.e., not preserved in NHMUK PV R 10002) is inferred from comparison with Terrestrisuchus gracilis (Spiekman et al., 2023, 2024) due to the high degree of morphological similarity between these two taxa. Scale bar represents 100 mm.

Artwork by M. Dempsey.

New species of ancient crocodile named in honour of Welsh school teacher | Natural History Museum

A newly named, 215-million-year-old species of crocodile-like reptile, discovered in Gloucestershire, UK, and described in The Anatomical Record, looks rather like the sort of creature creationists imagine a transitional fossil should be: half of one modern species and half of another from an unrelated group. That, of course, is the ridiculous parody of evolution that the creationist cult teaches its followers to believe is what those crazy scientists think the Theory of Evolution describes.

In reality, this discovery is nothing of the sort. What it actually reveals is a species that raises interesting questions about the environmental pressures that shaped its evolution. It was a long-legged, fast-running crocodylomorph, resembling a greyhound with scales and a crocodile’s head and jaws. It probably lived its entire life on land, using its speed to hunt small animals. That, in turn, suggests its prey were also fast-moving, rather like the relationship between cheetahs and gazelles, which have co-evolved speed in an evolutionary arms race: one to catch fast prey, the other to escape a fast predator. It is exactly the sort of process that refutes the notion of intelligent design, yet is entirely predictable under the Theory of Evolution by natural selection.

This animal lived in what was then an area of high ground overlooking hot, arid plains during the Late Triassic. That was a period of major diversification, brought to an end by a mass extinction caused by intense volcanic activity. It was followed by the Jurassic, so comparing animals from before and after that extinction event can help us understand how life responded to those dramatic environmental changes. Among the creatures that survived were the ancestors of the dinosaurs, and later, birds and mammals.

The research team, led by PhD student Ewart H. Bodenham of University College London, with colleagues from UCL, the Natural History Museum, London, and the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart, Germany, carried out a detailed analysis of this and other fossils from fissure deposits on either side of the Bristol Channel, in South Wales and South-West England. They concluded that this specimen represented a species new to science.

Unintelligent Design - Men Lose Their Y Chromosome - And Why It Matters

Men lose their Y chromosome as they age. Scientists thought it didn’t matter – but now we’re learning more

Creationists who point to the supposed 'perfection' of the human body as evidence of intelligent design have yet more evidence to ignore if they are to retain that belief. In my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design, I listed many of the conditions and vulnerabilities from which humans suffer precisely because our bodies are the products of evolution, not intelligent design. Viewed objectively, rather than through the rose-tinted lens of creationism, the human body is one of the strongest arguments against intelligent design and in favour of evolution.

We now have additional evidence of this. As men age, increasing numbers of their cells lose the Y chromosome — the chromosome that males normally possess alongside a single X chromosome, while females usually have two X chromosomes. It is becoming increasingly clear that this loss is implicated in several diseases that affect men disproportionately, including cardiovascular disease, Parkinsonism, and some cancers such as ocular melanoma. Together, these help to explain men's lower life expectancy.

According to the ID creationist paradigm, the human body is the supreme achievement of their god's design. So, if we assume, as they do, that this designer is the omniscient and omnibenevolent god of the Bible and Qur'an, then this male-specific vulnerability must either have been intended or be the accidental result of incompetence and lack of foresight. Traditionally, of course, ID creationists try to absolve their designer of responsibility for such flaws by blaming them on some other entity supposedly capable of thwarting the divine plan, with humans bearing the guilt because of the 'sin' of a mythical ancestral couple. This merely exposes Intelligent Design for what it really is: not science, as the Discovery Institute and its allies insist, but biblical literalism in a lab coat, forced to rely on fundamentalist superstition to explain away the failures of its own claims when the facts are examined.

How scientists are discovering this age-related loss of the Y chromosome in men's cells, and the damaging effects it has on male health, is the subject of an article in The Conversation by the distinguished geneticist Jenny Graves, Distinguished Professor of Genetics and Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at La Trobe University, Australia. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

First, some background information on the origins and function of the Y chromosome:

Refuting Creationism - How We Know Evolution Is Not Goal-Centred - Winged Dinosaurs That Couldn't Fly

Anchiornis huxleyi

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.3)

Anchiornis huxleyi Beijing specimen BMNHC PH828.

By ★Kumiko★ from Tokyo, Japan - Dinosaur Feather, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

TAU research about dinosaurs sheds light on the evolution of flight - American Friends of Tel Aviv University American Friends of Tel Aviv University

Because many creationists never seem to have progressed beyond the teleological thinking typical of toddlers, they assume that everything must have agency and must be directed towards some intended end.

That habit of mind was highlighted a few years ago in a study showing that the persistence of teleological thinking into adulthood is associated with the cognitive style underlying both creationism and conspiracism.

This goes a long way towards explaining why creationists so often invoke conspiracies to explain away the evidence against their beliefs, and why debating them can resemble arguing with toddlers who know little, understand less, and yet imagine themselves in possession of profound truths.

Any serious study of evolution, however, quickly shows that there is no plan, no foresight, and no directing intelligence. Evolution has no destination in mind. The only “direction” it has is whatever changing environments impose on it, favouring traits that happen, at any given time, to work best and leave the most descendants.

A recent study by a team led by Dr Yosef Kiat of the School of Zoology at Tel Aviv University’s George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, working with colleagues in China and the United States, provides a striking illustration of that point. Their paper, published on 21 November 2025 in Communications Biology, suggests that some feathered dinosaurs in the anchiornithid lineage of pennaraptoran theropods may have evolved the ability to fly, only to lose it again when environmental change made flight no longer advantageous.

In other words, evolution did not move steadily towards some grand objective. It produced flight when flight was useful, and abandoned it when it was not. Feathers, which may briefly have served an aerodynamic role in these animals, appear then to have reverted primarily to their earlier functions of insulation and temperature regulation.

The key evidence comes from moulting patterns. In living flying birds, feathers are moulted symmetrically so that the bird can retain its ability to fly. In flightless birds, by contrast, moulting can be irregular and apparently disorganised. By examining fossils of these dinosaurs from Chinese deposits, the researchers identified this latter pattern in animals that otherwise appear to have possessed anatomical adaptations for flight.

Refuting Creationism - Rapid Evolution After The Dinosaur Extinction - 66 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

An artist’s interpretation of life and death after the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. The three hair-covered forms (left) represent species of plankton found inside the crater made by the impact. The geometric form (bottom left) is a species of algae. The bones belong to an extinct marine reptile.

The University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences/John Maisano.

Evidence of ‘Lightning-Fast’ Evolution Found After Dino-Killing Asteroid Impact | Jackson School of Geosciences | The University of Texas at Austin

That life on Earth eventually recovered after the Chicxulub impact—the asteroid strike that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs and much of the planet’s megafauna—is hardly surprising. If it had not, mammals and birds would not be the dominant land vertebrates today. What may be more surprising is how quickly that recovery appears to have begun, according to new research led by Assistant Professor Chris Lowery of the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) at the Jackson School of Geosciences.

Their findings have just been published in the journal Geology.

For creationists, the study presents yet another awkward problem. Not only did these events occur 66 million years ago — tens of millions of years before primates evolved, let alone the humans that some creationists insist lived alongside dinosaurs — but the results also show evolution proceeding exactly as evolutionary theory predicts.

Unintelligent Design - The DNA Design Blunder That Causes Cancers and Dementia - Malevolence, Incompetence or Evolution?

New research discovers dementia-linked protein’s role in DNA mistakes | Houston Methodist Newsroom

Scientists have discovered that a protein responsible for regulating DNA repair can itself become a source of genomic instability, contributing to cancers and neurodegenerative diseases. The finding provides another example of the fragile and failure-prone complexity that characterises biological systems shaped by evolutionary tinkering rather than the work of a competent designer.

The research, reported in an open access paper published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research, was carried out by a team led by Professor Muralidhar L. Hegde, PhD, professor of neurosurgery at the Houston Methodist Research Institute's Center for Neuroregeneration and Department of Neurosurgery. The team describe how a key regulatory protein, TDP43, which controls the genes involved in DNA repair, can itself become a major cause of genomic instability.

When the regulation of TDP43 fails, the consequences can include cancers, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The difficulty is that this protein can either be absent or overproduced, and both conditions cause the DNA repair genes it regulates to become overactive, resulting in a destabilised genome. This sort of delicate regulatory balance is exactly what evolutionary biologists expect from systems assembled gradually through natural selection, where new control mechanisms are added to existing processes rather than engineered from scratch.

This presents an awkward problem for creationists who claim that biological complexity is evidence of intelligent design. For those with the intellectual integrity to confront the implications, the findings present a difficult choice. Either accept that evolution provides a coherent explanation for such biological paradoxes, or accept that what is claimed to be evidence of intelligent design instead suggests a designer who is incompetent, malevolent, or possibly both—certainly nothing like the allegedly omnibenevolent god of the Bible and Qur'an.

There are also a couple of additional problems here for ID creationists. First, well-designed DNA should not require an additional layer of complexity in the form of a suite of repair genes, followed by yet another regulatory system to control them. Secondly, a well-designed repair mechanism should not itself require such delicate regulation, and the regulatory system should certainly not fail—let alone fail catastrophically. Within the ID creationist paradigm, this is difficult to reconcile with the idea of a competent and benevolent designer.

The Fallible Bible - How We KNow The Bible's Is Not The Inerrant Word Of A Creator God

Leopard Gecko, Eublepharis macularius

Researchers discover leopard gecko produces females at cooler incubation temperatures and mostly males at warmer ones. This clear sex-determination pattern of leopard gecko has established it as a key model for studying environmental effects on development.

Credit: Professor Shinichi Miyagawa from Tokyo University of Science, Japan.

New study clarifies how temperature shapes sex development in leopard gecko | EurekAlert!

Bible literalists insist that every word in the Bible is true and without error, yet the text itself contains statements that cannot all be true at the same time, so at least one of them must be false*. The Bible also contains factually incorrect statements, such as the assertion in Genesis 6:19 and 7:15–16 that males and females of every ‘kind’ were brought onto the Ark, reflecting the same assumption found in Genesis 1:27 that living creatures were created as male and female.

We now know, unlike the authors of Genesis, that not all species exist as fixed male–female pairs. There are many examples of hermaphrodite creatures that are both male and female; some species that are entirely female, such as the New Mexico whiptail lizard and the marbled crayfish; many aphids and some beetles such as the vine weevil; and species that can change sex during their lifetime, such as certain fish. And, as a recent paper in the journal Developmental Biology by a team of researchers led by Professor Shinichi Miyagawa from the Department of Biological Science and Technology, Tokyo University of Science, Japan, shows, there are also species such as the leopard gecko, Eublepharis macularius, in which sex is not determined by inherited chromosomes at all but by the temperature at which the embryo develops in the egg.

In other words, in some species the difference between male and female is not fixed at conception at all, but depends on something as mundane as the temperature of the nest.

The team showed that there is a discrete window, known as the temperature-sensitive period, during which temperature triggers temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD), activating specific sets of genes that control the development of either testes or ovaries, thereby determining the sex of the developing embryo.

Refuting Creationism - The Evolution of Our Ancestral Fish

Illustration of the Paleolophus swimming in ancient Asian seas.

Credit: Dr Brian Choo (Flinders University)

New pieces link fish puzzle – News

Today we have not one but two papers which together help fill a gap between the bony fishes and the first fish to venture onto land and evolve into the terrestrial tetrapods from which all land vertebrates subsequently evolved. It is a gap that presents creationists with a dilemma: it would have been a perfect god-shaped gap into which to insert their designer; however, it dates to some 410 million years ago, far too distant for their preferred timeline of 6,000–10,000 years, into which they need to try to compress the entire history of the universe.

One of these papers, just published in Canadian Journal of Zoology, is by a team from Flinders University, led by Dr Alice Clement, who have reassessed a mysterious fossil from the Late Devonian Gogo Formation in Western Australia using the latest technology, including CT scanning and computed tomography.

This work adds to our understanding of lungfish evolution from a key Australian fossil site that contains a diversity of lungfish fossils, including some poorly preserved specimens.

Meanwhile, Flinders University researcher Dr Brian Choo and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led by the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, have described a new fossil, Paleolophus yunnanensis (‘old crest from Yunnan’). This team's work has just been published in Current Biology.

Paleolophus helps fill the gap between ancestral lungfish and their diversification a few million years later; in other words, it is one more example of the sort of transitional form that creationists insist does not exist: yet another so-called 'missing link'.

Unintelligent Design - How an Intelligent Designer Could Have Made Photosynthesis More Efficient

Smooth hornwort, Phaeoceros laevis

Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0) Link

Phaeoceros laevis, a species of hornwort commonly known as smooth hornwort.

Credit: Des Callaghan

This odd little plant could help turbocharge crop yields - Boyce Thompson Institute

Scientists led by researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI), Cornell University, and the University of Edinburgh have discovered a plant with a neat trick that makes photosynthesis more efficient and which, if replicated in crop plants, could enhance food production. They have just published their findings in the journal Science. The trick makes the ubiquitous enzyme RuBisCo (ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase) more efficient — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say less inefficient, because it is probably one of the least efficient enzymes in the whole of nature, something that ought to be acutely embarrassing for any advocate of intelligent design who understands it.

A fundamental belief of creationism is that all living things were created for the benefit of humankind on a planet supposedly designed for humans to live on. If that were so, it is reasonable to assume that such a planet would be organised to supply humans with food in the most efficient and productive way possible. Yet here we have an example of one plant possessing something that, had all plants been given it, would have been massively beneficial to humans.

So, did creationism's putative omnibenevolent designer choose not to incorporate this feature into our food crops, or did it simply forget? This is the sort of question that always goes unanswered by creationists, who mutter vaguely about 'mysteries' and 'not knowing the mind of God' — the same god they assure us has a plan for all of us, and whose wishes they somehow claim to know in detail.

First, a little about RuBisCo, from my book The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax:

Refuting Creationism - How A Crocodile's Bite Could Have Caused Creationism - 3.2 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Photo credit: Tyler Stone, University of Iowa.

Researchers name, describe new crocodile that hunted iconic Lucy’s species - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

How does the discovery of an ancient crocodile in the Afar Region of Ethiopia help us to understand why creationists cling so tenaciously to their patently wrong beliefs? The discovery has just been reported by a team led by Professor Christopher A. Brochu of the University of Iowa, in the Taylor & Francis Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.

It is often said that you cannot reason someone out of a belief they were not reasoned into. This is especially true of religions and, as is becoming increasingly clear, of fundamentalist creationism, in which rejecting evidence and reason is often treated as a badge of ideological commitment. So how did creationists, almost without exception, acquire their fundamental beliefs?

One of the causes of religion is memetic inheritance from parents and authority figures during early childhood. As Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit Catholic order, is reputed to have said, “Give me the boy until he is seven and I will give you the man.” As can readily be seen from any map showing the global distribution of religions, if a creationist had been born in India, they would probably have been a Hindu; if born in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey or Afghanistan they would most likely have been a Muslim; and in Japan perhaps a Shintoist or Buddhist. The probability is, however, that those encountered online were born into a Christian family, most probably somewhere in the American Bible Belt.

The puzzle is why children accept, without evidence, the opinions of their parents as established fact beyond questioning and not requiring proof.

The answer lies in the psychological process of childhood naïvety, which raises a deeper question: how and why did this trait evolve? What advantage could there be in accepting what parents and authority figures say without independently verifying it?

Discussing this problem some years ago on the now-defunct CompuServe SciMath Forum, I suggested that the explanation lies in a “safety-first” strategy. For example, a child who accepts the warning not to go alone to the waterhole because their parents say it is dangerous will survive with no loss or detriment. A child who decides to check for themselves might instead end up eaten by a crocodile. Over time, natural selection would favour children inclined to trust parental warnings. This mechanism allowed the accumulated knowledge of previous generations to be passed quickly and efficiently to the next generation with little resistance — a classic example of memetic evolution.

However, the same mechanism that helps transmit practical survival knowledge also makes children vulnerable to religious beliefs and other superstitions, just as the need to breathe makes us vulnerable to airborne viruses.

So it is interesting to see that researchers led by Professor Christopher A. Brochu from the University of Iowa’s School of Earth, Environment and Sustainability, working with colleagues from several American universities, the Ethiopian Heritage Authority in Addis Ababa, and the University of Cambridge, UK, have discovered the fossil of an ancient crocodile that lived in the Afar Region of Ethiopia at roughly the same time as “Lucy” (Australopithecus afarensis), who, if not a direct ancestor of the genus Homo, was at least a close relative.

The crocodile, which the team have named Crocodylus lucivenator (“Lucy’s hunter”), would have been the apex predator in the area and would certainly have preyed on any hominins who came too close to its waterhole without exercising great caution.

Refuting Creationism - Another of Those 'Non-Existant' Missing LInks - 90 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Alnashetri cerropoliciensis based on a reconstruction by Gabriel Díaz Yantén, Universidad Nacional de Río Negro

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Auto)

Alnashetri cerropoliciensis

Illustration provided by Gabriel Díaz Yantén
Universidad Nacional de Río Negro.

Analysis of 90-million-year-old fossil rewrites history | University of Minnesota

Many creationists believe the Theory of Evolution is primarily about fossils and that it predicts every stage in the evolution of a species should be present in the fossil record. From this misunderstanding comes the claim that any “missing link” falsifies the entire theory. The fact that palaeontologists have discovered yet another of those supposed “missing links” will therefore cause another bout of cognitive dissonance between what reality shows and what creationists insist reality ought to look like.

Creationists also traditionally deny that dinosaurs are evidence of an ancient Earth and of a mass extinction event 66 million years ago. Instead, they claim dinosaur fossils are normally found in sedimentary rocks because they were killed and buried during the Biblical Flood. This specimen, however, was rapidly buried and preserved by an advancing sand dune — something that is difficult to reconcile with the idea of a catastrophic global flood.

Its discovery was announced in a paper in Nature by a team co-led by University of Minnesota researcher Peter Makovicky and Argentinian colleague Sebastián Apesteguía. The paper describes the discovery of the complete skeleton of Alnashetri cerropoliciensis, a 90-million-year-old small dinosaur that fills an important gap in our understanding of where this group of dinosaurs originated and how they spread across the world.

Alnashetri belonged to a group of dinosaurs known as the alvarezsaurids, later members of which were characterised by their short, stubby arms and small teeth. Alnashetri, however, had longer arms and larger teeth, yet it was one of the smallest adult dinosaurs ever found in South America, weighing only about 4 pounds (around 2 kg). These primitive features and its small size show that the group became small before evolving their characteristic reduced arms and teeth. At 90 million years old, the fossil also suggests that the group originated on the supercontinent Pangaea before it fully fragmented, meaning their later global distribution reflects continental drift rather than migration across oceans.

Refuting Creationism - How The Centromere Evolved

Abstract digital DNA Helix. Purple elements represent evolutionary changes in DNA.

AI-generated image

26-02-19Uncovering evolution at the center of cell division | Max Planck Institute

AI-generated infographic (ChatGPT Auto)

A paper recently published in Nature by a research team led by Andrea Musacchio, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund, Germany, and Jef Boeke from the NYU Grossmann School of Medicine, refutes a number of creationism's sacred dogmas. It shows how evolution at the cellular level progresses through intermediate stages and how new genetic information can arise and be repurposed. It also shows how complex specified information can evolve naturally by a Darwinian process.

The paper goes some way towards solving the ‘centromere paradox’. This is the observation that although the mechanism of cell replication, which is common to all eukaryotic cells, is highly conserved, the centromere — the specialised point on a chromosome to which proteins attach and pull the chromosomes apart during cell division — appears to mutate freely. This results in a wide variety of centromeres, ranging from large, repeat-rich centromeres in some species to the tiny, minimalist ‘point centromeres’ of yeast.

The team showed that the tiny centromere in yeast evolved through intermediate stages and began as a ‘jumping gene’, or retrotransposon — an essentially parasitic chunk of DNA that can relocate within a chromosome, thereby creating new genetic material. In yeast, this appears to have been repurposed by evolution to create the precise minimalist centromere — an example of what William A. Dembski would call complex specified information and designate as evidence for a creator.

Religion in America - People Continue To Leave Declining Religions

Americans' Religious Engagement Holds at Lower Levels

The latest Gallop survey on religion in America shows those saying religion is important in their lives dropping to at 47% (a decline from 75% in 1952) with a slight uptick for the 'Nones' and attendance at religious services still low.

This is despite increasingly vociferous religious fundamentalism and the apparent rise of far-right White Christian Nationalism, spurred on by the Trump administration's professed support for Christian fundamentalism.

These figures are from a survey conducted between May and December 2025.

Refuting Creationism - Creationists Rocked By Wrinkles In The Atlas Mountains Of Morocco

Dadès Valley and the Atlas Mountains

Photo by Hans Peter Schaefer, Hps-poll
http://www.reserv-a-rt.de/, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Mats of chemosynthetic bacteria forming below the layer of turbidity.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Auto)

Signs of Ancient Life Turn Up in an Unexpected Place | GSA News Release 26-02

Geologists led by Dr Rowan Martindale of the University of Texas at Austin, working with colleagues including Stéphane Bodin of Aarhus University, Denmark, have discovered strange crenulated structures in rocks in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco that reveal something unexpected about microscopic life 160 million years ago. Their findings are published today in the journal Geology. The evidence, plain to see in the rocks, should not exist if creationist mythology had any basis in fact.

The reality is that, during that vast span of Earth’s history before creationists imagine their god created the small flat world with a dome over it described in the Bible, something unusual was happening deep within marine sediments that later became the Atlas Mountains. Bacteria were forming microbial mats at least 160 metres below the sea floor, far beyond the reach of sunlight.

That alone is remarkable, but what makes the discovery particularly unusual is the distinctive ripple-like crenulations the mats produced. Structures like these are normally associated with microbial mats forming on the surface of undisturbed sediment. Such mats were common before the Cambrian Period, more than 540 million years ago, when complex mobile animals had not yet evolved to burrow through and mix the seafloor. In those earlier times, microbial mats could grow across the sediment surface and preserve delicate textures and ripples.

However, once burrowing animals proliferated during the Cambrian, the upper layers of marine sediment began to be constantly churned up in a process known as bioturbation. This destroyed microbial mats and prevented the formation of the characteristic surface patterns they once produced. For the last half-billion years these textures have therefore been extremely rare in normal marine sediments, appearing today only in limited environments such as very shallow waters where photosynthetic microbial mats can still establish themselves.

Yet the Moroccan rocks contain similar crenulated structures formed about 160 million years ago—hundreds of millions of years after burrowing animals had transformed the seafloor. The explanation is that these features formed not at the surface but deep within the sediment, where chemosynthetic microbes were able to grow undisturbed by burrowing organisms. Instead of relying on sunlight and organic debris, these microbes obtained energy from chemical reactions involving minerals in the sediment itself.

Far from supporting creationist assertions that life cannot arise from inorganic sources, chemosynthetic microbes have been exploiting chemical energy from rocks and minerals for billions of years.