Phylogenetic relationships and geographic distribution of Carabus blaptoides
Junji Konuma
Islands have repeatedly provided some of the clearest demonstrations of evolution in action. The most famous example is, of course, Darwin’s finches, whose differently shaped beaks reflect adaptation to different foods in the Galápagos. More recently, as I described in an earlier article about “Darwin’s daisies”, the Galápagos plant genus Scalesia has diversified from a common ancestor into forms with different growth habits and leaf shapes suited to different island environments.
Now scientists studying the Japanese Archipelago have uncovered another striking example of the same fundamental evolutionary process—this time involving flightless beetles and the land snails they eat.
In a paper published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, Junji Konuma of Toho University, Nobuaki Nagata of Japan’s National Museum of Nature and Science, and Teiji Sota of Kyoto University describe the evolutionary diversification of the snail-eating ground beetle Carabus blaptoides. The species is distributed across the Japanese islands and has diversified into eight recognised subspecies.
Because the beetles’ hindwings are reduced, they cannot fly and must disperse on foot. Seas therefore isolate populations on different islands, while sheer distance, topography and environmental variation can restrict movement even between populations on the same large island. This reduced gene flow allows populations to respond independently to local ecological conditions—the familiar starting point for adaptive divergence and, eventually, speciation.
The principal selective pressure appears to be sitting on the beetles’ dinner plate—or, more accurately, retreating into its shell. Different regions of Japan contain different assemblages and sizes of land snails, particularly species of Euhadra and Satsuma. Beetles living where large snails predominate tend to have long, narrow heads and thoraxes. This slender form allows a beetle to push its head deeply into a large shell and reach the animal inside.
If the Young-Earth creationist claim that there was no death, suffering or predation before Eve’s supposed ‘sin’ were true, four fossil specimens preserved in museum collections in Colombia should not exist. They are the remains of large herbivorous mammals bearing punctures and other damage attributed to the teeth of a giant crocodylian—and they are between approximately 10.5 and 16 million years old.
In other words, these fossils are not merely the remains of animals that lived and died millions of years before there were humans to commit any biblical ‘sin’. They preserve physical evidence of animals attacking—or, at the very least, feeding upon—other animals in a functioning predator–prey ecosystem more than a thousand times older than the entire universe imagined by Young-Earth creationists.
The evidence is described by Oscar E. Wilson of the University of Helsinki and Jorge W. Moreno-Bernal in a paper recently published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. The researchers examined four specimens belonging to three species of large, now-extinct South American ungulates from the celebrated La Venta fossil assemblage of Colombia: the toxodontid Pericotoxodon platignathus and the astrapotheres Xenastrapotherium kraglievichi and Granastrapotherium snorki.
The skulls and jaws bear puncture marks and, in some cases, substantial deformation caused by a powerful bite. From the size and shape of the marks, together with the force apparently needed to produce the damage, Wilson and Moreno-Bernal identify the most likely culprit as Purussaurus neivensis, an enormous relative of modern caimans that may have reached about seven metres in length and weighed approximately 1,800 kilograms.
Middle Miocene South America contained an ecosystem unlike anything living today. The continent’s long geographical isolation had allowed native mammals—including toxodontids, astrapotheres, ground sloths and glyptodonts—to diversify independently. Around the immense tropical wetlands lived giant snakes, flightless predatory ‘terror birds’, terrestrial crocodyliforms and several kinds of aquatic crocodylian. Because large mammalian carnivores were comparatively scarce, reptiles such as Purussaurus occupied the major apex-predator niches.
Earlier studies had inferred this ecological role from the animals’ size, anatomy and the composition of the La Venta fauna. The newly reported bite marks provide direct physical evidence that giant crocodylians interacted with—and probably preyed upon—some of the ecosystem’s largest herbivorous mammals. Purussaurus may therefore have helped to regulate herbivore populations, much as large predators influence prey populations in modern ecosystems.
For creationists, the problem could hardly be clearer. These animals lived, competed, killed, fed, reproduced and became extinct millions of years before any known hominin existed, let alone the mythical couple blamed in Genesis for introducing death into the world. Even if an individual bite mark resulted from scavenging rather than an actual attack, that alternative still requires a dead animal, a flesh-eating crocodylian and an established ecological system based partly upon the consumption of carcasses. It offers no refuge for the claim that the pre-Fall world was free from death and carnivory.
To anyone familiar with Africa today, its extensive grasslands and savannahs can seem almost timeless: landscapes of grasses, scattered trees, grazing herbivores, predators and recurrent fires. But, like every modern ecosystem, the African savannah has a history. It was not created fully formed, stocked with its present collection of plants and animals, during a mythical creation week a few thousand years ago. It developed through a succession of environmental and evolutionary changes extending over tens of millions of years.
Some of that history is preserved not on the African continent itself, where erosion and geological disturbance have left gaps in the terrestrial record, but beneath the neighbouring Atlantic Ocean. Plant waxes blown from the land settled on the sea surface and were incorporated into sediments accumulating slowly on the ocean floor. Layer upon layer, these sediments preserved a chemical record of the vegetation growing in north-west Africa at different times.
Now, Anna K. Schartman, Pratigya J. Polissar and Caroline A. E. Strömberg have used these molecular fossils and their carbon-isotope composition to reconstruct some 24 million years of ecological change. Their findings are reported in an open-access paper, “The origin and development of the Miocene northwest African savanna”, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers found that the region’s closed forests and woodlands began giving way to a much more open ecosystem about 15–14 million years ago—approximately five million years earlier than earlier regional reconstructions had suggested. This first open landscape was not equivalent to the modern African savannah. It was rich in C3 grasses and had no close modern counterpart. The familiar C4-grass savannah developed later and in stages, with its most rapid expansion occurring between about 7.4 and 6.4 million years ago.
This does not conflict with research publicised by UC Santa Cruz in 2023, which found locally abundant C4 grasses in parts of eastern Africa between about 21 and 16 million years ago. That earlier research examined terrestrial fossil sites in Kenya and Uganda; the new study reconstructs regional vegetation in north-west Africa from wind-blown plant waxes preserved in marine sediments. Together, the studies show that Africa did not undergo a single, continent-wide transformation. Different mixtures of forest, woodland and grassland appeared in different regions at different times.
One of creationism’s favourite tactics is to treat every apparent gap in the evidence as evidence of absence - although that never seems to apply to creationists' "God did it!" claims for which definitive evidence either for the god's existence or its actions are invariably absent. If archaeologists have not found something, creationists assume it never existed — or, more usually, that scientists cannot explain its absence without invoking the supernatural.
A study published in the Journal of Quaternary Science provides a neat illustration of what can really lie behind such gaps. In this case, the missing evidence was not missing at all. It consisted of thousands of small, unremarkable-looking fragments of animal bone that earlier archaeologists might easily have overlooked, discarded or left uncollected.
The study, led by Monica Mărgărit of Valahia University of Târgoviște, Romania, examined animal remains recovered from Abri 122/1200, a rock shelter in the Vârghiș Gorges of Romania’s Eastern Carpathians. The site contains an extensive Middle Palaeolithic stone-tool industry and abundant remains of animals, including bovids, goats, wolves and cave bears. Luminescence dating indicates that Middle Palaeolithic occupation extended across a long period, approximately from Marine Isotope Stage 7, about 230,000 years ago, into Marine Isotope Stage 3.
Among more than 10,000 bone fragments, the researchers identified 83 bearing combinations of impact damage, microscopic scratches, smoothing, polish and edge wear consistent with their having been used as tools. They distinguished these traces from damage caused by butchery, carnivore activity, sediment movement and other natural processes, using microscopic examination and comparisons with experimentally used bone fragments.
Some had apparently served as retouchers for shaping or sharpening stone tools. Others had been used to scrape or work softer substances such as hides or plant material, while still others had functioned as wedges, multipurpose implements or simple hammers. Most had not been laboriously carved into specialised shapes. A suitable fragment was selected, used for the task at hand and then discarded—an expedient but effective use of a readily available material.
That distinction is important. The discovery does not show that Neanderthals in Romania possessed an elaborate bone-working industry previously unknown to science. It shows something arguably more revealing about their everyday behaviour: they could recognise the useful properties of an ordinary fragment, adapt it to an immediate problem and employ materials other than stone as circumstances required. “Technologically flexible and resourceful” is therefore more accurate than the rather sensational claim that their technology was simply “more advanced”.
How Can Archaeologists Recognise an Expedient Bone Tool?
A broken animal bone is not automatically a tool. Bones can be fractured, scratched, polished or crushed by many processes, including butchery, marrow extraction, carnivore gnawing, trampling, movement through sediment and weathering. Archaeologists must therefore distinguish evidence of deliberate use from damage produced before or after burial.
This study belongs to the field of traceology, or use-wear analysis. Researchers examine the position, orientation and microscopic structure of marks on an object to reconstruct how it may have been used.
Evidence of use
No single scratch or polished patch is normally decisive. Identification depends on combinations of features occurring in places where they would be expected on a working tool:
Localised smoothing and rounding can develop where an edge or projection has repeatedly rubbed against another material.
Microscopic striations may reveal the direction in which a tool was moved. Repeated scraping tends to produce organised wear rather than randomly orientated scratches.
Polish can develop through prolonged contact with relatively soft materials, possibly including hides or plant fibres.
Pits, grooves and small impact scars can indicate that a bone was used as a retoucher to shape or resharpen the edge of a stone tool.
Crushing, flaking and battered ends may identify bones used as hammers, wedges or intermediate pieces through which force was transmitted.
These marks must be distinguished from other forms of damage. Carnivore teeth can leave pits, punctures, scores and ragged edges; trampling can produce irregular scratches; roots can etch branching patterns into a surface; and movement through sediment can abrade an entire bone. Butchery and marrow extraction also produce characteristic cut marks, impact notches and fracture patterns. Those marks demonstrate human activity, but do not necessarily show that the bone was subsequently used as a tool.
Researchers compare archaeological specimens with experimental reference collections. Modern fragments of similar bone are used for scraping, rubbing, hammering, wedging or working stone. The resulting wear is then examined microscopically and compared with that preserved on the ancient specimens. Archaeological context, fracture history and the distribution of wear across each fragment provide additional evidence.
Even then, conclusions are expressed cautiously. Use-wear may show that a bone contacted a hard or soft material and indicate the kind of movement involved, but it cannot always identify the precise task or material with certainty.
Expedient and formally manufactured tools
A formal bone tool is deliberately manufactured. Its maker selects a suitable bone, produces a blank and modifies it by cutting, scraping, grinding or polishing. The finished object may have a regular shape intended for repeated or specialised use.
An expedient bone tool requires much less preparation. Its user recognises that an existing fragment already has a suitable edge, point, weight or shape, perhaps makes a minor adjustment, uses it for an immediate task and then discards it.
This does not mean that an expedient tool was accidental or that its user lacked the ability to manufacture something more elaborate. It represents a practical decision: there is little benefit in spending time making a specialised implement when a conveniently shaped piece of bone can perform the required task immediately.
Most of the specimens from Abri 122/1200 appear to belong to this expedient category. They were not extensively shaped, but their wear indicates that Neanderthals selected and used them as retouchers, scrapers, wedges, multipurpose implements or percussive tools. Their significance lies in the flexibility with which available materials were exploited, not in elaborate craftsmanship.
How archaeological gaps are created
Expedient tools present a particular problem because they can look like ordinary fragments of food waste. Earlier excavations often concentrated on complete, identifiable or visually impressive bones. Small fragments might be placed in storage without detailed examination—or not collected at all.
Consequently, an apparent absence of bone technology can reflect collection practices, preservation and the questions earlier researchers were asking rather than the behaviour of the people who occupied a site.
The Romanian evidence illustrates why gaps in the archaeological record should not be treated as proof that something never existed. Sometimes the missing evidence is already present, awaiting the methods and research questions needed to recognise it.
No Neanderthal skeletal remains have yet been recovered from Abri 122/1200, so the attribution is indirect. It rests on the age of the deposits, their Middle Palaeolithic stone industry and their wider archaeological context. The researchers are now looking for more direct evidence, including ancient Neanderthal DNA preserved in the cave sediments. This qualification is acknowledged openly by the scientists, unlike creationism, in which uncertainty is habitually concealed beneath declarations of dogmatic certainty.
The Romanian report in Gândul therefore describes more than another addition to the Neanderthal toolkit. The research demonstrates how apparent gaps in the archaeological record can be created by preservation, sampling and the questions researchers previously thought to ask. When those methods and questions improve, the gaps become smaller—not because scientists have invented missing evidence, but because they have learnt how to recognise evidence that was hiding in plain sight.
Auto-translated from Romanian: Important discovery at a site in Romania. Neanderthals had more advanced technology than previously thoughtArchaeologists have made an extremely important discovery right on Romanian territory. Specifically, in the site called Abri 122/1200, a cave in the Vârghiș Gorges occupied in the Middle Paleolithic, approximately 230,000 to 60,000 years ago, specialists have identified things that change what was known so far about the Neanderthals who lived on Romanian territory.
Researchers have identified, in bone fragments, the first evidence that they used bone tools for activities such as scraping, sharpening, or splitting.
The new study, led by Monica Mărgărit from the University of Târgoviște, was published in the Journal of Quaternary Science and focused on animal remains intentionally modified by humans. The researchers tried to determine whether the animal bones were simply remains from food consumption or whether, given the observed modifications, they were also transformed into tools for various activities, such as leather processing.
The context is particularly interesting because the Abri 122/1200 site preserves an important lithic industry and a large amount of faunal remains. Previous research has already identified bones from large herbivores, such as representatives of the bovid family, from the genera Bos and Bison, goats, but also the cave bear (Ursus spelaeus).
The bones show a high degree of fragmentation, compatible with the activities of cutting and exploiting the carcasses. During previous archaeological campaigns, fragments of long bones were discovered that appear to have been obtained by striking, most likely in the process of extracting the marrow. Some of the fragments also showed features compatible with their use as tools, geopop.it shows.
Important discovery on Romanian territory
The new study focuses on this aspect: the animal bones were not necessarily just food scraps. Traceological analyses showed that they were intentionally exploited. Some fragments could be selected and modified for use as tools, which demonstrates that Neanderthal technology was not limited to stone.
Although these fragments were not frequently processed or adapted for a very precise purpose, their shapes and characteristics appear to have been considered useful for carrying out certain activities.
The significance of the discovery goes beyond a single artifact. The intentional use of bones demonstrates a wider range of raw materials exploited by Neanderthals and suggests that, in addition to producing stone tools, these communities may have systematically used materials obtained from animal carcasses.
Abri 122/1200 is also an important site for understanding the presence of Neanderthals in the Carpathian region. The most recent research on the chronology of the site indicates that the archaeological levels with Middle Paleolithic industry could be up to about 230,000 years old.
The discoveries at Abri 122/1200 thus contribute to shaping an increasingly complex picture of Neanderthal technology: a system in which stone represented a fundamental raw material, but in which the bones of hunted and consumed animals could also become useful materials for carrying out technological activities.
ABSTRACT
Archeological evidence has demonstrated that Neanderthals utilized mammal bone remains as tools. These findings are geographically widespread, stretching from the Altai Mountains in Central Asia to the Atlantic Ocean. Such an extensive distribution is indicative of a broad pattern of Neanderthal behavior concerning tool use and resource exploitation, although a notable lacuna exists in the archeological record within the Carpathian region that appears as a blank area on the existing map. The main purpose of our study is to address and fill this geographical gap. To this end, we focused on the site of Abri 122/1200 in Romania as a representative case study. The luminescence dating results indicate that the Middle Paleolithic occupation of the cave spans from the Middle Pleistocene (Chibanian) to the Late Pleistocene, approximately from Marine Isotope Stage 7 (MIS 7, around 230 000 years ago) to MIS 3. A crucial aspect of our investigation involved differentiating between taphonomic marks on faunal remains: those resulting from natural processes such as scavenging or environmental factors and those stemming from technological activities like tool production or usewear. Through meticulous analysis, we successfully identified and isolated a consistent set of faunal remains categorized into five distinct typological groups. Our observations reveal that technological interventions on these bones are infrequent; the majority of fragments appear to have been used in their natural state without extensive modification. Fragments show evidence of being used in activities such as the processing of lithic tools, hides, or plant materials, which indicates a more complex utilization pattern than previously assumed. The assemblage from Abri 122/1200 thus exemplifies the importance of re-evaluating other Middle Paleolithic contexts within the Carpathian region. It highlights the variability, origin, and technological significance of bone production and utilization by Neanderthals, challenging traditional perceptions of their technological capabilities and resourcefulness.
The significance of these finds does not lie in the discovery of some spectacularly sophisticated Neanderthal invention. It lies in the evidence of adaptability preserved on apparently insignificant fragments of bone. The occupants of Abri 122/1200 recognised useful shapes and properties in the remains of the animals they exploited, selected suitable pieces for particular jobs and discarded them when those jobs were finished. This was practical problem-solving—the ability to use different materials flexibly rather than depend upon a rigid repertoire of stone implements.
The study also illustrates why creationist arguments based upon gaps in the evidence are so fundamentally dishonest. The apparent absence of Neanderthal bone tools from the Carpathian region did not mean that no such tools had existed. Many were too small and insufficiently modified to attract the attention of earlier excavators. Once researchers asked a more precise question, examined every fragment microscopically and compared its wear with experimentally produced marks, some of the supposedly missing evidence emerged from material that had been present all along.
Nor can the wider archaeological context be reconciled with a young Earth or a recent global flood. Abri 122/1200 preserves Middle Palaeolithic occupations extending through a substantial portion of the Pleistocene, within an independently dated sequence spanning tens of thousands of years. Its stone artefacts, butchered animal remains and expedient bone tools record repeated human activity long before creationists believe their god created the Universe, let alone before their mythical Flood supposedly destroyed the archaeological landscape. The absence of evidence does nothing for creationism; the presence of evidence utterly refutes it.
The researchers are also explicit about the limits of their conclusions. No identifiable Neanderthal remains have yet been found at the site, so the attribution rests upon its chronology, Middle Palaeolithic stone industry and wider European context. Instead of concealing that uncertainty, the team is looking for additional evidence, including ancient DNA in the sediments. That is how science works: conclusions are proportioned to the available evidence and remain open to refinement when new evidence appears.
Creationism predicted none of these discoveries, supplied none of the methods used to recognise them and offers no coherent explanation for their age or archaeological setting. Its only contribution is to rename Neanderthals as descendants of Adam or Noah and dismiss the dating, stratigraphy, genetics and comparative anatomy that show otherwise. Far from exposing a weakness in evolutionary science, the former blank on the Carpathian map demonstrates how science closes gaps, while creationism survives by pretending that every gap must remain permanent.
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"Triassic Mothers," a life reconstruction of a group of Chiniquodon theotonicus individuals, a pregnant female (left) as well as a female (right) breastfeeding few, relatively large neonates.
A newly published study suggests that one characteristic commonly associated with modern mammals—giving birth to live young—may have appeared in the mammalian lineage far earlier than palaeontologists previously realised.
Creationists prefer to imagine the major groups of organisms appearing fully formed, equipped from the outset with complete packages of supposedly defining characteristics. Evolution, however, produces no such conveniently bundled collections of features. Characteristics arise, change and sometimes disappear at different times, producing the mosaic of inherited and modified traits documented throughout the fossil record.
Creationists also rejoice at any suggestion that scientists might have to change their minds because, in their simplistic view of science, if something is not exactly and eternally true, it's wrong; there is no concept in creationism of incomplete truths or provisional conclusions contingent on future discoveries. Unlike creationism, though, changing one’s mind when the evidence changes is the hallmark of intellectual integrity, and what give science it's reliability and great strength as a tool for discovering the truth.
So here, to sow confusion in the minds of creationists, is an example of science changing its collective mind and still refuting creationists mythology, because it happened 236 million years before the mythical 'Creation Week'. Significantly too, the authors readily conceded that their conclusion is only provisional and they identify what additional information is needed to confirm or refute it. No such reasoning is ever advanced by creationist apologists because it must never be conceded that creationism could be falsified with evidence, lest that evidence be found.
The history of Homo sapiens in Africa between 44,000 and 3,000 years ago was one of isolation, migration, interaction and replacement a shown by characteristic inner ear labyrinth morphologies.
An international team of biological anthropologists has found a novel way to reconstruct tens of thousands of years of human population history in north-eastern Africa: by examining tiny variations in the shape of the bony cavities that once contained people’s inner ears. It's not good news for creationists so it'll be just one more thing for them to ignore one way or another.
The researchers, led by Nicolas Martin and Isabelle Crevecoeur of the PACEA laboratory at the University of Bordeaux and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), have published their findings in Nature Communications.
The bony labyrinth is a complex system of cavities within the temporal bone of the skull. It surrounds the cochlea, involved in hearing, and the semicircular canals, involved in balance. Although its shape varies subtly between individuals and populations, much of that variation reflects inherited ancestry. High-resolution micro-CT scanning allows the labyrinth to be reconstructed and measured in three dimensions without damaging the remains.
This makes it especially valuable in regions such as north-eastern Africa, where heat and other environmental conditions have frequently destroyed ancient DNA. When molecular evidence is unavailable, the shape of the inner ear can preserve an anatomical record of biological relationships between ancient populations.
Martin and his colleagues analysed 194 bony labyrinths belonging to 148 individuals. Their sample included people who lived between approximately 44,000 and 3,000 years ago in the Middle Nile Valley, the Horn of Africa and Central Africa, together with comparative specimens from elsewhere in Africa, Europe and the Levant. The researchers applied three different methods of shape analysis, all of which produced the same broad patterns.
Those patterns reveal a long and complicated history of regional continuity, isolation, migration, interaction and partial population replacement. Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene hunter-fisher-foragers from the Middle Nile Valley showed broad morphological similarities both to one another and to still earlier African Homo sapiens. This is consistent with deep regional ancestry and substantial biological continuity extending across many thousands of years.
That continuity was disrupted during the Neolithic transition. Beginning about 8,000 years ago, food-producing populations with distinctly different inner-ear morphologies appeared in the Middle Nile Valley, supporting the conclusion that pastoralism and agriculture arrived with migrating people rather than being adopted solely by the region’s existing foragers.
This was not necessarily a simple or complete replacement. Individuals retaining affinities with the earlier foragers survived for several millennia in areas bordering the Nile Valley, while some remains display combinations of characteristics consistent with limited interaction or admixture between the old and new populations. Samples from the Horn of Africa and Central Africa also showed considerable morphological diversity, indicating population substructure and differing regional demographic histories.
These results independently support earlier research by Martin and many of the same colleagues, which detected a similar Neolithic population discontinuity from the internal structure of ancient teeth. A CNRS account of that earlier study explains how enamel–dentine junctions revealed population replacement and continuing interaction along the Nile and its Saharan margins. Now two independent anatomical systems—teeth and inner ears—have produced compatible reconstructions of the region’s population history.
This presents creationists with the familiar problem of evidence that should not exist if their mythology were true. According to the young-Earth version of the biblical story, the entire human population was reduced to Noah’s family only a little over 4,000 years ago. Every population on Earth must therefore have descended from that tiny group after an extraordinarily rapid dispersal from somewhere in the Middle East.
Certain bacteriophages found in the human gut have mutation hotspots scattered throughout their genomes that help them modify key defense genes, researchers report.
Credit: Sundharraman Subramanian and Alaina Pabbathi Cryo-EM Core Facility Michigan State University
One of the more persistent creationist falsehoods is the claim that mutations can only damage or destroy genetic information and can therefore provide none of the variation needed for evolution. The claim is usually protected from contrary evidence by leaving “information” conveniently undefined or by dismissing every beneficial mutation as merely a “loss of function”.
However, a new study by Jasper B. Gomez, Jeffrey E. Barrick and Christopher M. Waters of Michigan State University provides an especially clear demonstration of mutation generating heritable variation on which natural selection can act. Their findings were published in Nature Microbiology.
The researchers found that the genomes of the bacteriophages T2 and T4 — viruses that infect bacteria such as Escherichia coli — contain regions of repetitive DNA called contingency loci. These are mutational hotspots in which the DNA-copying machinery is particularly liable to slip while copying a run of repeated bases. It may insert or omit one of the repeats, changing the way the remainder of a gene is read and consequently altering the protein it produces.
Such replication errors occur in these regions thousands of times more frequently than mutations across the rest of the phage genome. Far from producing a population of genetically identical copies, therefore, phage replication continually generates a mixture of variants with different inherited characteristics.
The discovery arose from experiments involving a bacterial antiviral system called TgvAB, normally found in Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes cholera. The researchers transferred the genes for this defence system into laboratory E. coli and exposed the bacteria to T2 phages. Although the defence initially restricted the phages, the viral population began overcoming it within hours.
Now, most of Europe is watching bemused as America degenerates into warring factions over support for Donald Trump and the far-right extremism he advocates and the moderates in the Democrat Party and the few sane voices in Republicanism prepared to put their head above the parapet and risk their livelihood and even their lives, by criticising him.
Trump clearly depends on and enjoys being probably the most divisive American politician since the Civil War, but what bemuses us outside the USA the most is how he gets away with being so obviously a narcissist with an acute personality disorder who struggles to distinguish between fact and fantasy, and someone who struggles to understand even the simplest of evidence and can't utter a coherent sentence if ever he strays off script - which he does frequently.
The American press tore viciously into Joe Biden's declining physical and cognitive capacity during the early stages of the 2024 presidential election campaign, yet the evidence that Trump is going through obvious cognitive decline goes almost unnoticed in the American news media. For example, when asked, in September 2024 what he would do to make childcare affordable, he said:
A paper recently published in Science Advances by an international team led by researchers at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) will make disappointing reading for any creationist with enough courage to read a scientific paper—especially those pinning their hopes on science never closing their favourite gap: the gap between geochemistry and the first living systems.
Leaving that gap permanently open would allow them to declare, “God did it!”, without providing a scrap of supporting evidence or explaining how their preferred god supposedly made chemistry and physics behave in ways that they could not have done unaided. This combination of the god-of-the-gaps argument and a false dichotomy—either science already has a complete explanation, or magic must have been responsible—is standard creationist fare in the absence of positive evidence for a creator.
The new research does not, as some headlines might suggest, show that abiogenesis occurred twice independently. Instead, it presents evidence that the genetic code and a core metabolic network had a single origin before the ancestral lineage divided into Bacteria and Archaea, but that the two lineages subsequently completed the transition to free-living cells independently. As senior author William F. Martin expressed it, the findings point to “one origin of the genetic code, but two origins of life”—with “life” here referring specifically to autonomous, free-living cellular life.
The findings therefore do not overturn universal common ancestry. Both Bacteria and Archaea still trace their ancestry to the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. What the researchers propose is that LUCA was not yet a fully independent cell equipped with enzymes for every essential metabolic reaction. It remained partly dependent on inorganic catalysts supplied by the hydrothermal environment in which its metabolism had evolved. Only after the bacterial and archaeal lineages had diverged did each independently evolve the remaining enzymes needed to become free-living.
A selection of dogs with a common ancestry. Creationists need to explain why this is not macro-evolution even though the scale of the differences between them and wolves is at least as great as that between humans, chimpanzees and gorillas
The story of how wolves became domestic dogs is one to which I have returned several times, for both scientific and personal reasons. It is one of the most remarkable examples of two species forming a relationship that changed the evolutionary future of one and the cultural history of the other.
It also provided the inspiration for two of my novels, The Girl and the Wolf and its sequel, The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic. These are, of course, works of fiction, not proposed reconstructions of an event for which the details will probably never be known. In them, however, I tried to imagine a biologically plausible way in which the process might have begun: not with people deciding suddenly to “invent” the dog, but with individual wolves and humans discovering that tolerance, cooperation and mutual protection could benefit both.
A point made many times but worth repeating so long as there re sill people who insist the Bible is the inerrant word of an omniscient god - and then demand the right to special privileges including the right to mandate us to comply with their Bronze Age morality, is that a simple comparison of the Bible's description of reality with the actual reality it purports to describe.
This should quickly reveal that what the Bible describes is not reality but the satisfying guesses of ignorant people who lacked the science and technology to discover the truth.
And there are few better examples of that than the childishly ridiculous description of the universe as the Bible claims it was created with what science is discovering. The Bible very clearly and unambiguously describes the universe as a small flat planet at the centre, over which there is a solid dome to keep the surrounding water out. The celestial bodies are described as lamps and small lights fixed to the dome so that we can tell day from night. Outside this construction there is nothing but water, apparently extending to infinity in all directions, but above which there is another realm reached by travelling upwards from the surface of the planet – centred then on the Middle East.
Of course, this bears no more relationship to reality than the sort of description a five-year-old might produce when asked to describe his or her world, and yet there are grown adults who believe it is the best available description of the real universe! And these people demand to be taken seriously because they believe that on 'faith', not on an examination of reality.
I'll again remind readers of what the Bible says because so few people who claim to be Bible-literalists actually ever seem to read the Bible, but instead rely on what preachers and creationist sources tell them to believe.
The results of a study co-led by researchers at UCLA and the University at Buffalo, published in Nature Communications in May 2026, provide another straightforward counterexample to the creationist claim that natural processes cannot add genetic material to a genome without the intervention of their particular magic creator. They also show how relatively recent human evolution can be detected, reconstructed and quantified from the DNA of living populations.
What cannot be observed is the intelligently designed caricature of evolution that creationists are conditioned to mistake for the scientific theory: a single dramatic event in which one species suddenly transforms into an unrelated form. There is no plausible biological mechanism for such a transformation, which is why evolutionary biologists have never proposed one. Biological evolution is a change in the frequency of heritable variants within a population over successive generations; larger differences, including those associated with speciation, accumulate through many such changes.
Young-Earth creationists are nevertheless prepared to invoke evolution at an absurdly accelerated rate when their mythology requires it. To squeeze the present diversity of life into the few millennia supposedly available after their genocidal global flood, a small number of vaguely defined ancestral “kinds” would have needed to diversify into hundreds of thousands of beetle species and countless other forms almost overnight. Yet the same creationists baulk at evidence that human populations have undergone much more modest evolutionary changes over thousands of years.
The new research concerns AMY1, the salivary amylase gene. Salivary amylase begins the digestion of starch in the mouth, and people differ considerably in the number of AMY1 copies they carry. An early duplication of the gene occurred in the hominin lineage at least 800,000 years ago, after which repeated duplications, deletions and inversions generated numerous structural variants containing different numbers of copies. These are mutations that change the amount and arrangement of genetic material in the genome — precisely the sort of naturally arising variation that creationists insist cannot occur.
Crucially, cultivating potatoes did not cause the ancestors of Indigenous Andeans to acquire additional AMY1 copies because they needed them. High-copy variants were already present in the population. When potatoes and other starch-rich crops became dietary staples, people carrying more copies probably produced more salivary amylase and obtained a reproductive or survival advantage. Natural selection then increased the frequency of those pre-existing variants — evolution acting as a filter, not as a designer working towards a predetermined goal.
The researchers analysed AMY1 copy numbers in 3,723 people representing 85 populations. Indigenous Peruvian Andeans had among the highest numbers found, with the Quechua participants carrying a median of ten copies, compared with six among the closely related Maya comparison group and seven across the worldwide sample. The genetic evidence indicates that a high-copy haplotype increased in frequency among Andeans from about 2 per cent to approximately 45 per cent after around 10,000 years ago, coinciding with permanent settlement of the high Andes and the domestication of potatoes between about 10,000 and 6,000 years ago.
