Creationist objections to abiogenesis often smuggle in the long-discredited idea of vitalism: the belief that living matter contains some special ingredient or “vital force” absent from non-living matter. This appears to lie behind the familiar creationist refrain that “life cannot come from non-life”, as though “life” were a substance that must be added to matter by a supernatural agent.
The word “life”, however, is rarely defined in this argument. Scientists can devise operational definitions for particular purposes, but life is not a single substance possessed by some molecules and absent from others. It is a collection of properties displayed by sufficiently organised chemical systems. By leaving the term undefined, creationists turn their assertion into a slogan that can neither be tested nor falsified.
The distinction between organic and inorganic chemistry is useful, but partly conventional and historical. Organic chemistry deals broadly with carbon compounds, although some carbon-containing substances—including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and carbonates—are traditionally classified as inorganic. There is no fundamental physical boundary between the two categories: both obey precisely the same laws of physics, chemistry and quantum mechanics.
Carbon’s extraordinary chemical versatility follows from its atomic structure. A carbon atom has six protons and six electrons, four of which are valence electrons in its outer shell. Its small size and ability to form strong covalent bonds with itself and with elements such as hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen allow it to form stable chains, rings, branches and extensive molecular networks. Depending on how it is bonded, carbon can adopt tetrahedral, trigonal-planar or linear arrangements and can form single, double or triple bonds. All this follows from quantum chemistry; no vital spark, magical ingredient or special rule is required.
None of that proves that the origin of life was inevitable, and science does not yet possess a complete account of every stage of abiogenesis. What it does show is that there is no known chemical or physical barrier preventing non-living chemistry from becoming progressively more complex. Under suitable conditions, chemical systems can acquire such properties as compartmentalisation, catalysis and molecular replication. Once populations of replicating systems existed with heritable variation, natural selection could favour those that survived longer, reproduced more reliably and used available resources more efficiently.
One important question is where the organic raw materials involved in this prebiotic chemistry came from. Some could have formed on the early Earth, but organic compounds are also widespread throughout the Solar System and interstellar space. They have been detected in comets and asteroids and regularly occur in meteorites. Earth may therefore have received substantial quantities of organic material from several extraterrestrial sources. This raises another scientific question: what natural chemical and physical processes produced and modified that material in space?
Linda Losurdo, a PhD candidate in materials and plasma physics in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, Australia, has investigated part of that question with her supervisor, Professor David McKenzie. They recreated some of the energetic, near-vacuum conditions associated with stars and other astrophysical environments inside glass tubes. After evacuating the tubes, they introduced nitrogen, carbon dioxide and acetylene and subjected the mixture to an electrical potential of about 10,000 volts for approximately an hour, producing a plasma known as a glow discharge.
A fundamental problem for biblical literalism—the belief that the ancient, pre-scientific authors and compilers of Genesis possessed, through divine revelation, a more accurate understanding of the universe than modern science—is that its claims can be tested against reality. Whenever that is done, reality wins.
Creationists must therefore find ways to dispose of the contrary evidence. It can be declared fraudulent, mistaken, misinterpreted or irrelevant—or, safest of all, simply not examined too closely. Within creationist culture, refusing to change one's mind when the evidence shows that a belief is wrong has somehow been transformed from an intellectual failure into a supposed demonstration of strength of faith.
Another piece of inconvenient reality has now been added to the list. A paper recently published in the journal Scientific Reports by Maurício S. Garcia of the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and colleagues describes Silescelida acristata, a new species of archosauriform reptile known from a fragmentary skeleton discovered near Dona Francisca in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul state.
Silescelida acristata lived about 240 million years ago, during the Middle Triassic, when terrestrial ecosystems were still recovering from the devastating Permian–Triassic mass extinction some 12 million years earlier. It was a relatively small, slender, four-legged predator, probably about the size of a small alligator, with its limbs held in a more semi-erect posture than those of earlier, sprawling reptiles.
Besides being some 240 million years older than the biblical chronology can accommodate, the fossil helps to narrow one of the gaps in the fossil record that creationists are so fond of presenting as evidence against evolution. Phylogenetic analyses consistently place Silescelida among the early-diverging eucrocopodan archosauriforms—stem forms outside Archosauria that help to reveal how the ancestral archosaur body plan evolved. Some analyses suggest that it may have been related to the poorly understood Euparkeriidae, although that placement remains uncertain.
The discovery therefore illuminates an important stage preceding the emergence of the true archosaurs—the great reptilian lineage that includes the crocodilian branch and the dinosaur branch, including birds. It also shows that these early archosauriforms were more geographically widespread, and their diversification more complex, than the previously known fossil record suggested. As so often happens, another supposed “gap” has become smaller as scientists have discovered and examined more evidence.
The paper’s lead author, Maurício Garcia, has also written an account of the discovery in The Conversation. His article is reprinted below under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
Reptile fossil found in Brazil helps shed light on the common origins of dinosaurs and crocodiles
About the size of a small alligator, the Silescelida acristata lived 240 million years ago and holds clues to the origin of animal groups that would transform terrestrial ecosystems forever.
The discovery helps fill an important gap in our understanding of the evolution of archosauriformes, a group of reptiles that gave rise to the archosaurs. Archosaurs, in turn, are the lineage that encompasses two of the best-known groups of terrestrial vertebrates: crocodiles and dinosaurs, including birds.
When Silescelida acristata lived, terrestrial ecosystems were still recovering from the Permian–Triassic extinction event, which occurred about 252 million years ago. This event wiped out much of the life on the planet and paved the way for the diversification of new groups of animals.
It was against this backdrop of ecological recovery that different lineages of reptiles began to take on new roles in terrestrial environments. Among them were the archosauriforms, which underwent extensive diversification during the Triassic. Silescelida acristata was a relatively small, slender animal that moved on all four limbs. Its size can be compared to that of a small alligator.
Although it was neither a dinosaur nor a crocodile, it belonged to a lineage closely related to the forms that preceded the origin of these groups. Its diet likely included smaller animals, suggesting that it played the role of a small predator in the Triassic ecosystems of southern Brazil.
Why is this fossil important?
The fossil primarily preserves parts of the limbs, and at first glance, this type of material may seem limited, but it carries important information about the animal’s locomotion and evolutionary relationships.
One of the most significant characteristics of Silescelida acristata lies in its femur, the thigh bone. Like some of its close relatives, it had legs in a more semi-erect position, lower on the body than to the side.
This change allowed for more efficient locomotion, reducing drag as the body moved across the ground. In evolutionary terms, this type of transformation is related to the set of anatomical changes that would later prove fundamental to the success of archosaurs.
In other words, the new fossil helps us understand a phase preceding the rise of dinosaurs and crocodiles, when their close relatives were still experimenting with different body shapes, postures, and modes of locomotion.
Rare phylogenetic relationship
Phylogenetic analyses indicate that Silescelida acristata may be related to the Euparkeriidae, a rare group of archosauriforms that is still poorly understood by science.
Until now, fossils associated with this group were known primarily from the continents of Africa, Asia and Europe. The presence of a form related to the Euparkeriidae in South America significantly expands the known geographic distribution of these animals.
This suggests that these reptiles were more widely distributed across the world during the Triassic than the fossil record indicated. It also reinforces the importance of South America for the study of the origin and diversification of major groups of terrestrial vertebrates.
The ‘rediscovery’ of a forgotten fossil
The discovery of Silescelida acristata also has an unusual history. Part of the fossil – precisely the portion that preserved essential information about its provenance – was accidentally lost for more than two decades.
It was not until 2022, during a technical visit to the scientific collection at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), that researchers located the missing fragment. This rediscovery made it possible to confirm the specimen’s origin and formally describe it as a new species.
The animal’s very name refers to this story. Silescelida combines words associated with “silence” and “leg.” “Silence” refers to the long period during which part of the fossil lay forgotten, while “leg” refers to the type of preserved material, consisting mainly of limb bones.
The name acristata, meanwhile, means “without a crest.” It was chosen because this animal’s femur lacks a crest or raised bony protrusion – known as a trochanter – where part of the tail musculature would attach. This absence distinguishes Silescelida acristata from nearly all of its close relatives.
What does the discovery change?
The presence of Silescelida acristata in the Middle Triassic of Brazil shows that the evolutionary history of archosauriforms was broader and more complex than previously thought. The fossil indicates that lineages closely related to the Euparkeriidae were also present in South America, highlighting the continent’s role in the early diversification of the relatives of dinosaurs and crocodiles.
Furthermore, the discovery reinforces Rio Grande do Sul’s status as one of the world’s most important regions for the study of Triassic fauna. The region’s rocks preserve fossils from different stages in the evolution of terrestrial vertebrates, including some of the oldest known dinosaurs and large predators that lived before the Age of Dinosaurs.
Every new fossil found in this context helps reconstruct how terrestrial ecosystems reorganized after the Permian–Triassic extinction and how the groups that would later dominate the continents emerged.
Small bones, big stories
Incomplete fossils are often viewed as less informative than nearly complete skeletons. However, it is important to remember that the vast majority of fossils found during excavations are fragmentary. Discoveries such as Silescelida acristata show that even isolated parts of the skeleton can reveal fundamental information about evolution.
In this case, limb bones made it possible to identify a new species, infer aspects of its locomotion, investigate its phylogenetic relationships, and expand the known distribution of a rare group of Triassic reptiles.
More than just describing a new animal, the study shows how Brazilian paleontology continues to contribute to our understanding of central chapters in the history of life on Earth. In rocks from the interior of Rio Grande do Sul, 240-million-year-old fossils still hold clues about the origin of the animal groups that would transform terrestrial ecosystems forever.
Mauricio Garcia, Doutorando no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Biodiversidade Animal , Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM)
Published by The Conversation. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
Abstract
Archosauriformes comprise a diverse range of reptiles, including the crown-group Archosauria, which flourished during the Triassic Period. Early-diverging archosauriforms, such as proterosuchids and erythrosuchids, are becoming progressively well-known due to recent studies and consistently resolve at the base of the clade. More crownward, Eucrocopoda includes archosauriform taxa that increasingly approximate the ancestral archosaur body plan. Early-diverging eucrocopodan archosauriforms have a widespread paleogeographic record but remain poorly understood in terms of ingroup relationships. Within this radiation, Euparkeriidae is particularly challenging, because its ingroup composition and monophyly is debated, with some authors supporting a non-monospecific Euparkeriidae, whereas others fail to recover this hypothesis. The eponymous Euparkeria capensis is known from the Early to Middle Triassic of South Africa, whereas other putative euparkeriids are primarily known from the Early to Middle Triassic of China, Germany, Poland, and Russia. Here, we describe a new early-diverging eucrocopodan (Silescelida acristata gen. et sp. nov.) from the Middle Triassic of southern Brazil. Phylogenetic analyses incorporating this taxon suggest a possible placement within Euparkeriidae, though its position shows instability depending on the operational taxonomic units considered, especially among other putative euparkeriids. This discovery not only informs on the temporal and paleogeographic distribution of euparkeriids but also sheds light on the origin and early evolution of eucrocopodans, representing the first record of this archosauriform grade in the Triassic of Brazil. More broadly, the new taxon underscores the significance of South American Triassic deposits within the evolutionary history of archosauriforms.
Fig. 7
Biogeography of early-diverging eucrocopodans and paleoart depicting Silescelida acristata gen. et sp. nov. in life. (A) Triassic world map depicting the paleogeographic distribution of early-diverging eucrocopods. Classification is based on the phylogenetic analyses in this contribution. Silhouettes (not to scale) based on the skeletal reconstruction of Euparkeria capensis by Demuth et al.83. Dorosuchus neoetus is based on the type-series and Osmolskina czatkowicensis is based on the holotype. (B) Silescelida acristata gen. et sp. nov. life reconstruction. Artwork by Matheus Fernandes Gadelha. Map was generated with GIMP 3.0 (gimp.org) based on The Paleobiology Database (paleobiodb.org).
The remains of Silescelida acristata are fragmentary — little more than a shoulder blade, part of the pelvis and a thigh bone — yet those bones preserve enough anatomical information to identify a distinct species and illuminate its evolutionary relationships, posture and geographical distribution. This is how palaeontology advances: not by waiting for a conveniently complete “missing link”, but by combining each new piece of evidence with everything already known.
The researchers are appropriately cautious about precisely where Silescelida belongs. Their analyses consistently identify it as an early-diverging eucrocopodan archosauriform, while its possible membership of Euparkeriidae remains uncertain. That uncertainty is not a weakness in the science; it is an honest acknowledgement of what the available evidence can and cannot yet establish. Future discoveries may refine or revise its position — something no evidence could ever be permitted to do to a literal reading of Genesis.
What is not uncertain is that this animal inhabited southern Pangaea about 240 million years ago, during the evolutionary recovery following the Permian–Triassic mass extinction and before dinosaurs came to dominate terrestrial ecosystems. It adds another branch to a complex, geographically widespread radiation of reptiles acquiring anatomical characteristics associated with the later success of archosaurs. Nothing about this history resembles the instantaneous magical creation of fixed “kinds”.
Creationists can dismiss the fossil, dispute its age or refuse to consider its significance, but none of those responses explains it. They merely demonstrate that creationism has no room for evidence that contradicts its conclusion. Closing one’s eyes may preserve a belief, but it cannot erase a single bone from 240-million-year-old rock.
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Creationists have been claiming for decades that evolution must be impossible because it supposedly requires a decrease in entropy, in violation of the second law of thermodynamics. As with so many creationist arguments, this one depends upon misrepresenting the science, confusing several different meanings of “information” and “order”, and quietly omitting the conditions under which the law applies.
The second law does not say that entropy can never decrease anywhere. It says that the total entropy of an isolated system cannot decrease. Entropy may decrease in one part of a system provided that an equal or greater increase occurs elsewhere. A refrigerator, for example, reduces the entropy of its contents by transferring heat into the room, where its motor and cooling coils generate still more heat. The contents become colder and more ordered, but the total entropy of the refrigerator and its surroundings increases.
Strictly speaking, a “closed” system is one that can exchange energy, but not matter, with its surroundings. An “isolated” system exchanges neither. Earth is not isolated: it is continually receiving concentrated, high-temperature energy from the Sun and radiating more diffuse, low-temperature infrared energy into space. That energy flow powers weather systems, ocean currents, photosynthesis and almost every ecosystem on the planet. Organisms, meanwhile, are open systems that take in energy and matter and release heat and waste.
Consequently, the maintenance and growth of biological complexity do not require the entropy of the universe—or even that of Earth as a whole—to decrease. Organisms maintain their internal organisation by consuming free energy and exporting entropy into their surroundings. Every growing tree, developing embryo and reproducing bacterium does this without so much as inconveniencing the second law.
Nor is biological “information” simply the opposite of thermodynamic entropy. Genetic information refers to sequences and their biological effects, whereas thermodynamic entropy concerns the number and distribution of microscopic physical states available to a system. Treating the two as interchangeable because both employ the word “information” is not physics; it is wordplay.
Gravity makes the creationist caricature still less defensible. A diffuse cloud of gas can collapse under gravity to form a highly structured star and planetary system. To the unaided eye, this looks like disorder turning into order. Yet the collapse releases enormous quantities of heat and radiation, increasing the entropy of the wider system. Visible organisation and thermodynamic entropy are not simple opposites, especially when gravity is involved.
Now, a paper published in Physical Review D by Professor Ginestra Bianconi of Queen Mary University of London takes this relationship between gravity, information and thermodynamics much further. As Queen Mary University explains in its accompanying news release, Bianconi’s proposed “Gravity from Entropy” theory treats gravity as arising from information encoded in the interaction between matter and the geometry of spacetime.
A paper published on 17 February 2026 in PeerJ by Taia C.A. Wyenberg-Henzler of la of Montana State University, USA, reports on a remarkable fossil from the Hell Creek Formation of eastern Montana: a nearly complete, articulated skull of an adult Edmontosaurus annectens with the broken tip of a tyrannosaur tooth still embedded in its left nasal bone.
The fossil dates from the closing stages of the Late Cretaceous, roughly 66 million years ago, shortly before Edmontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus and all other non-avian dinosaurs disappeared during the Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction. The bone surrounding the embedded tooth shows no evidence of healing or remodelling, indicating that the bite occurred at, very near or shortly after the death of the Edmontosaurus.
In other words, this is physical evidence of a violent interaction between predator and prey tens of millions of years before humans existed—precisely the sort of evidence that creationists are conditioned to reject because it cannot be accommodated within their mythology. According to young-Earth creationism, there was supposedly no death, predation or suffering before human ‘sin’ allowed evil to enter the world and ruin their omnipotent creator’s previously perfect creation—apparently without that omnipotent creator either foreseeing or preventing it. And all this supposedly happened only 6,000–10,000 years ago, shortly after ‘Creation Week’.
The doctrine that no animal died before ‘the Fall’ is not stated explicitly anywhere in the Bible. It is a theological inference imposed upon the text because young-Earth creationism requires it. It belongs to the category of reasoning that says: ‘This must be true for the rest of my beliefs to be true; my beliefs cannot be wrong; therefore, this must also be true.’
Having granted themselves this assumption of infallibility, creationists must then protect it from every fact that contradicts it. The belief cannot be mistaken, so the evidence must somehow be misunderstood, fraudulent, planted by Satan, created with the appearance of age or otherwise unworthy of consideration. Anything, in fact, is preferable to the intellectually honest admission that the belief itself has been falsified.
In almost every other field of human endeavour, such a supremely arrogant claim to personal infallibility would be laughed at and its proponent told to grow up. Yet, when packaged as religious faith, it is not merely tolerated but frequently treated with respect. Its advocates demand—and often receive—special privileges and social status: ‘You must listen to me, allow me to make laws governing your life and let me shape society according to my beliefs because I have an invisible friend and wear special robes.’
And so creationism staggers on, obliged to deny a veritable deluge of scientific evidence rather than concede that its mythology bears no resemblance to the history of life on Earth.
One of the clearest indications that the Bible was written by people with a severely limited knowledge of the world is, in addition to the factual errors in it, such as Earth being flat with a dome over it, there is the evidence of what is not in it. Its authors wrote as though the small part of the ancient Near East familiar to them was effectively the whole inhabited Earth, so there is nothing in the Bible from outside a small area around the Middle East. They had no conception of a southern hemisphere, knew nothing of continents such as South America, and had no awareness of the peoples, cultures and complex histories that had existed there for thousands of years.
That parochial view of the world is exposed every time archaeologists and palaeoecologists reconstruct the history of regions the Bible’s authors did not even know existed. Far from being a divinely inspired account of the whole planet, the Bible reflects the geographical horizons and cultural assumptions of the scientifically illiterate people who composed it.
The latest example comes from the cold highlands of southern Brazil, where an international team of researchers has reconstructed how climate, fire and Indigenous land management shaped the distinctive mosaic of Araucaria forest and campos grassland during the past 6,000 years. The research is described by Oliver J. Wilson, a lecturer in the School of Natural Sciences at the University of Lincoln, in an article in The Conversation and was published in Scientific Reports.
The researchers combined several independent sources of evidence: pollen and microscopic charcoal preserved in continuously accumulating bog sediments, radiocarbon-dated archaeological evidence, a rainfall record preserved in a cave speleothem, and ecological models showing how the forest should have responded to climatic change. Together, these sources reveal a detailed history of gradual climatic shifts, changing fire regimes, forest expansion and human modification of the landscape.
High-resolution stacked image of the blowfly wing and thorax. The translucent wing attaches via an intricate hinge system to the muscular thorax that powers rapid wingbeats.
As a child growing up in the relative silence of a North Oxfordshire hamlet, I could sometimes hear bats overhead. On a still summer night, lying in the quiet of my bedroom, I could also make out the distinctive, high-pitched whine of a mosquito as it approached an exposed arm, guided at close range by body heat as well as by carbon dioxide and human odours. Both sounds now lie beyond what my ageing ears can detect. The relevance of that mosquito’s whine will become apparent shortly.
A paper published on 9 July 2026 in PLOS Biology by scientists from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and Aix-Marseille Université in France explains how aerodynamic constraints have channelled the evolution of flight across the Diptera — the order of insects that includes houseflies, fruit flies, mosquitoes, midges and crane flies.
The researchers examined the body and wing morphology of 133 species and recorded the hovering flight of 46 of them using high-speed stereoscopic cameras. They then used computational fluid dynamics to reconstruct the aerodynamic forces and energy costs associated with their wing movements.
They found that wing shape varied considerably and was strongly influenced by evolutionary ancestry, but that wingbeat movements were broadly conserved across most of the order. Despite the enormous diversity of dipterans in size, appearance, habitat and ecology, most have evolved strikingly similar flight mechanics because the physical requirements of remaining airborne restrict the range of workable solutions.
Evolution, of course, depends upon heritable variation, but not every imaginable variation is viable or advantageous. A change that demands more energy without providing some compensating benefit is unlikely to spread through a population. Natural selection therefore tends to channel evolution towards a comparatively narrow range of effective solutions. In this case, the need to generate sufficient lift while limiting aerodynamic power consumption has produced a broadly shared flight pattern across most dipterans.
It must be galling for those few creationists who can read and understand scientific papers, yet are still eagerly awaiting the long-promised day when biologists abandon “Darwinism” and embrace creationism, to encounter paper after paper such as this one. Once again, evolutionary theory provides the accepted framework within which the observations make sense, without so much as a hint that the researchers are preparing to replace it with supernatural magic.
An enterprising creationist might nevertheless seize upon the apparent exceptions. Mosquitoes and their close relatives, the midges, do not follow the usual energy-saving pattern. Mosquitoes can beat their wings as many as 1,000 times each second, using almost three times as much aerodynamic power as similarly sized fruit flies. Crane flies also depart from the general pattern, although in the opposite direction, having evolved unusually economical flight.
Surely, the creationist might argue, if aerodynamic constraints channelled the evolution of the other flies, mosquitoes should have been constrained in precisely the same way. If an exception exists, perhaps there is something wrong with the theory.
But this objection rests on the mistaken assumption that natural selection must optimise every characteristic for a single purpose. Evolution does not produce organisms in which each structure is independently perfected. It produces compromises between competing demands, with reproductive success ultimately determining which combination of costs and benefits persists.
The researchers found that mosquitoes and midges produce disproportionately powerful sounds for insects of their size. Their rapid, low-amplitude wingbeats generate increased aerodynamic drag and require enlarged flight muscles, making flight more energetically expensive. That apparent inefficiency, however, may provide a substantial reproductive advantage because acoustic communication plays an important part in their courtship.
Studying the metabolism of living brachiopods like these collected from San Juan Island, Washington, allowed Stanford researchers to understand how the physiology of the modern fauna and Paleozoic fauna may have differed and how these groups would have been differentially impacted by oxygen and temperature changes during the Permian–Triassic mass extinction.
Image credit: Erik Sperling.
Many of Earth's climatic, geological and biological processes behave as complex, nonlinear systems, resembling systems in chaos. In this context, “chaotic” does not mean random. It means that small differences in starting conditions can sometimes be amplified until they produce very different outcomes — the phenomenon popularly known as the “butterfly effect”. The butterfly is not literally responsible for a distant storm; it merely illustrates how a tiny disturbance can cascade through a sufficiently complex system.
This is not the picture of a planet engineered to remain permanently benign or perfectly “fine-tuned” for life — still less for human life in the United States. Earth is habitable, but its habitability is contingent and sometimes precarious. The same interacting atmospheric, oceanic, geological and biological processes that sustain life can, when pushed beyond critical thresholds, drive abrupt environmental change, ecological collapse and mass extinction.
At several points in Earth's history, reinforcing feedbacks have transformed relatively small initial disturbances into rapid and profound environmental changes. Organisms adapted to the previous conditions were then confronted with combinations of heat, cold, acidification, oxygen loss or other stresses occurring too quickly for most populations to adapt. The result was widespread extinction.
What has been less well understood is why some groups were devastated while others living in the same changing environment survived. This is an important question for us because every organism alive today is descended from lineages that somehow survived every previous mass extinction.
Looked at objectively, beneath the superficial appearance of design, the human body, with its inefficiencies, vulnerabilities and vestigial features, is best explained through the lens of evolution.
Far from reflecting intelligent design, our anatomy and physiology reveal a history of incremental changes shaped by natural selection and constrained by pre-existing structures. These imperfections underscore the reality of evolution as a tinkering process, producing functional but far-from-perfect outcomes.
In this light, the human body stands as a powerful testament to our evolutionary heritage and tells a story far more impressive than the childish notion of it all being made by magic by a super-intelligent yet invisible and undetectable designer.
It is therefore gratifying to see those conclusions independently reinforced by Lucy E. Hyde, a Lecturer in Anatomy at the University of Bristol. In a recent article in The Conversation, she makes essentially the same case, drawing upon many of the same examples that I used.
This is not because anatomists and evolutionary biologists have agreed upon a preferred story and then set out to make the evidence fit it. It is because people who understand evolution and possess more than a superficial knowledge of human anatomy and physiology can examine the same evidence and independently reach the same broad conclusion: the human body is not the product of foresightful engineering but a historical patchwork of inherited structures, evolutionary compromises and modifications to what already existed.
Evolution explains not only why the human body works as well as it does, but also why it so often fails, why some of its structures follow absurdly circuitous routes, why others are poorly suited to their present functions and why still others persist despite having little or no remaining usefulness. “Intelligent design”, by contrast, explains none of this without retreating into the scientifically worthless claim that an unknowable designer must have wanted things that way.
Lucy Hyde’s article is reproduced below under a Creative Commons licence, with its formatting adapted for consistency with this blog:
It is probably fair to say that no branch of science is a friend of creationism. That is presumably why creationists devote so much time and effort to trying to discredit science—often without the slightest appreciation of the irony of using computers and the Internet, both products of science and engineering, to tell the world that science does not work. Yet their attitude towards science is not merely hostile but opportunistic: whenever they encounter a scientific finding that they think can be misrepresented as supporting creationism, they suddenly become jubilant champions of ‘the evidence’.
Archaeology is one of the most persistent threats to literalist creationism. Far from confirming the biblical narrative, it repeatedly uncovers evidence of human cultures, environmental changes and extinct animals extending far beyond the few thousand years permitted by Young Earth Creationism. Nor does archaeology stand alone. Its findings repeatedly converge with those of genetics, palaeontology, geology and climatology to produce the same coherent history—a history in which neither a recent magical creation nor a global genocidal flood leaves the slightest trace.
True to form, a recently published paper in the journal npj Biodiversity, by an Australian-based team of archaeologists and palaeontologists, presents evidence from New Guinea that simply could not exist if the biblical narratives of a magical creation a few thousand years ago, followed by a global flood about 4,300 years ago, bore any resemblance to reality. The evidence indicates that a large extinct kangaroo relative—probably Protemnodon tumbuna—survived on the northern coast of New Guinea until the Middle Holocene, perhaps as recently as about 6,500 years ago.
This was tens of thousands of years after every known species of Protemnodon had disappeared from Australia, where the genus is thought to have become extinct by about 41,000 years ago, along with most of the continent’s other megafauna.
Protemnodon tumbuna was a stocky, muscular forest-dwelling kangaroo weighing an estimated 50–90 kilograms—roughly comparable in size to a modern red kangaroo. Unlike modern large kangaroos, however, it was probably predominantly quadrupedal, using its powerful forelimbs to move through dense forest and hopping only inefficiently and for short distances, if at all. It was one of seven currently recognised species of Protemnodon known collectively from Australia and New Guinea.
Creationists have to explain away why the long-predicted abandonment of 'Darwinism' by biomedical scientists has not yet taken place despite the almost daily assurance that this is imminent for the last half a century, by claiming without a shred of evidence that scientists are prohibited from publishing anything which challenges the current consensus, and that the peer-review process is designed to filter out these papers.
In other words, creationist organisations begin with conclusions that may not be questioned and permit evidence to be published only when it can be made to support those conclusions. Scientific peer review does the opposite: it scrutinises the evidence, methods and reasoning while leaving the conclusions open to revision. Accusing science of enforcing the very dogmatic censorship that creationist organisations practise openly looks less like criticism than projection.
The scientific literature is, in fact, full of discoveries that expose weaknesses in existing explanations and force researchers to reconsider accepted models. Creationist claims to the contrary are generally made in the safe expectation that their followers will neither read the relevant papers nor understand what those papers actually say.
One recent example is a paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics reporting the discovery of 31 previously unknown quasars in the early Universe using data from the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope. Twelve have redshifts of 7 or greater, more than doubling the number previously known from that period. The two most distant, with redshifts of approximately 7.69 and 7.77, are the earliest quasars yet observed, existing when the Universe was only about 670 million years old.
We’ve long suspected that the transition to farming and animal husbandry opened the door to a new era of disease – now DNA shows us that it happened at least 6,500 years ago,” says Professor Eske Willerslev, author of the new study.
Young Earth creationist mythology has it that sin, shortly after the magical creation of two adult humans, caused death and disease to enter the world. Until then, so we are expected to believe, there had been no disease and nothing ever died — not even, apparently, the plants Adam, Eve and the other animals ate.
Reality, of course, is materially different from the mythology produced by scientifically ignorant ancient pastoralists and later scribes who knew nothing of bacteria, viruses, parasites, epidemiology or evolution, and who interpreted misfortune in magical terms. Disease was not a supernatural punishment introduced at a single moment by a talking snake, a disobedient couple and an irritable god. It was, and remains, a biological process involving organisms evolving, spreading, adapting and, sometimes, crossing from one host species into another.
And the evidence now shows that at least 6,500 years ago, diseases were passing from animals into the humans who lived alongside them. The domestication of animals, the growth of settled farming communities and the rise of pastoralism brought humans, livestock, waste, parasites and pathogens into much closer proximity than before. This has long been thought to explain why humans suffer from so many infectious diseases. It is also a point Jared Diamond made in Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies, where he argued that Eurasia’s abundance of domesticable animals, and Europeans’ long exposure to the diseases associated with them, helped Europeans to dominate other populations, often with their pathogens acting as an advance guard against peoples with no previous exposure or immunity.
That view of the zoonotic origin of many human diseases has now been strongly supported by the work of researchers led by Professor Eske Willerslev, of the University of Copenhagen and the University of Cambridge, in a study published open access in Nature in July 2025. The team analysed DNA from more than 1,300 prehistoric individuals, some up to 37,000 years old. Their bones and teeth provided an extraordinary archive of ancient microbial DNA, revealing traces of bacteria, viruses and parasites that infected humans across deep Eurasian history.
The results suggest that close cohabitation with domesticated animals, together with large-scale migrations of pastoralists from the Pontic Steppe, played a major role in the spread of zoonotic diseases. The researchers found that identifiable zoonotic pathogens first appear in their data from around 6,500 years ago, became more widespread after about 6,000 years ago, and peaked roughly 5,000 years ago — precisely the sort of pattern expected if lifestyle, animal husbandry, mobility and population contact were driving disease transmission.
This is especially awkward for creationists because the evidence does not point to a sudden, supernatural transformation of the world’s biology. It does not show disease appearing overnight as the result of a mythical “Fall”. Instead, it shows a long, historical and evolutionary process, unfolding through early Eurasian human history as changing human behaviour created new ecological opportunities for pathogens.
