Refuting Creationism - No Sex Please, We're Ediacaran

A lack of sex held back life’s diversity for millions of years | University of Cambridge

Try debating with a creationist on social media and before long you will be challenged to explain how sexual reproduction evolved, because there must have been a first male and a first female. A regular form of this, betraying the abysmal ignorance of the creationist, is the childish attempt at a "Gotcha!" with, "How long did the first man have to wait for the first woman to evolve?"

Like so many creationist preconceptions about what evolution is and what evolutionary biologists claim, this assumes that each species somehow evolves without ancestry, so everything about it must have arisen spontaneously in a single individual or, in this case, in a single couple. There is no awareness of inheritance from common ancestors, nor of the slow accumulation and honing of traits over time. Presumably, the questioner thinks adult men and women being magicked into existence without parents is a perfectly rational belief.

In reality, sexual reproduction did not begin with men and women. A form of sex almost certainly arose long before animals, among single-celled eukaryotes, and need not have involved anything recognisable as male and female. At its simplest, sex is the mixing of genetic material from different individuals. The interesting question, from the point of view of evolutionary biology, is not where the first man and first woman came from, but what advantage genetic mixing had over cloning or other asexual forms of reproduction, such that it became the predominant, although far from exclusive, method of reproduction among complex organisms.

Now two researchers from the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, UK, believe they have part of the answer, and have just published their findings in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The paper, by Dr Emily G. Mitchell and Professor Andrea Manica, examines how reproductive mode affected competition, dispersal and diversity among Ediacaran animal communities. It is accompanied by a research news item from the University of Cambridge.

The Ediacaran Period, roughly 635-539 million years ago, saw some of the earliest known large animals. Many of them would look nothing like any modern animal: they were sessile, lacked mouths and obvious digestive systems, and probably absorbed nutrients directly from the surrounding seawater. In the relatively benign conditions of the Ediacaran oceans, with limited predation and reduced competition, there was less pressure for rapid diversification. As a result, these early animal communities appear to have changed only slowly for millions of years before the later burst of diversity that preceded and fed into the Cambrian radiation.

But, as they began to colonise the shallower seas and coastal regions, the Ediacaran biota would have encountered increasingly unstable conditions with tides, storms and fluctuating temperatures and nutrient levels, so there would have been competition and selection pressure to adapt to these more hostile conditions. And this is what we see in the fossil record as the Ediacaran biota produced a second wave of more diverse forms, leading eventually to the 'Cambrian Explosion'.

Previous work has shown that some of these Ediacaran organisms reproduced asexually by sending out stolons or runners, rather like strawberry plants do today. Their offspring were clones, physically connected to the parent colony and genetically very similar. That can work well in a stable environment, but it has a serious evolutionary limitation: it restricts the mixing of genes from different lineages. Beneficial mutations that arise in separate clonal lines cannot easily be combined in the same genome, so lineages compete with one another instead of pooling their evolutionary gains.

Sexual reproduction changes that. It does not create evolution by magic; it provides natural selection with more combinations on which to act. Beneficial alleles that arise in different lineages can be brought together in the same genome instead of being trapped in competing clonal lines. This is the Fisher-Muller advantage of recombination: sex can turn evolutionary change from a slow serial process into a more rapid parallel one.

How we Know The Bible Is Wrong - Evidence That wouldn't Be there if The Bible Myths Were True

Examples of different treatments and states of preservation of human remains at Vráble-Veľké Lehemby.

Furholt M, et al (2026).

Drone footage of the excavation site.

© Nils Müller-Scheeßel

Headless skeletons offer new insights into farming societies 7,000 years ago

A problem for biblical literalist creationists is that they are wedded to the absurd and demonstrably false notion that the Bible is a literal account of real history, including a catastrophic, genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago. Such a flood would have left a tell-tale, globally recognisable layer of flood sediment containing the jumbled remains of the animals and plants it had killed. It would also have destroyed, displaced or buried earlier human settlements beneath one unmistakable flood horizon.

This, of course, flies in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary. The predicted global layer of flood silt is not there, and the archaeological record continues, uninterrupted, through the very period in which creationists need their flood to have occurred. Practically every archaeological find older than the various creationist dates for Noah's Flood — from the pyramids at Giza to the less spectacular but more numerous Neolithic and Bronze Age burial grounds, field systems, settlements, tools and artefacts that litter the African and Eurasian landscape — should not be where it is, least of all in the Middle East, the supposed epicentre of the alleged catastrophe.

And yet archaeologists are regularly digging up evidence of human activity that long predates the creationist timescale. A recent example is the grim, 7,000-year-old evidence of headless human bodies at Vráble-Veľké Lehemby in Slovakia, reported in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. The refutation of creationist mythology is, of course, entirely incidental. The archaeological question is what this extraordinary find tells us about an Early Neolithic farming society. The indications so far are that the heads were not removed by violent decapitation as a form of execution — which might have suggested a society in crisis or conflict — but were skilfully removed around the time of death. That points instead to some form of social, ritual or funerary practice, although the precise meaning of that practice remains uncertain.

The site at Vráble-Veľké Lehemby comprises more than 300 house outlines arranged in three neighbourhoods, with up to 80 buildings inhabited at the same time. The settlement existed for several centuries, approximately between 5250 and 4950 BCE. One neighbourhood was enclosed by a ditch, probably marking a boundary, and it was in or around this ditch, especially near the entrance to the settlement, that archaeologists found the remains of at least 78 individuals. Of these, 77 lacked heads, the single exception being a child whose skull was still present.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Hagfish By LOSS of Eye Complexity

Feeding hagfish

Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Creationism Refuted - British Fallow Deer Have LOST Genetic Diversity - Over The Last 120,000 Years

Fallow deer, Dama dama

Photo credit: Jiří Nedorost.,
CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Fallow deer

Photo credit: Memurubu, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

UP News - University of Potsdam

A paper just published in iScience should, if they were aware of it, at least cause an honest creationist to question some basic assumptions. It reports that modern European fallow deer, Dama dama, retain only a fraction of the genetic diversity present in their Ice Age ancestors. This finding is based on ancient DNA recovered from the fossilised remains of ten, approximately 120,000-year-old fallow deer from Neumark-Nord in Germany, analysed by researchers from the University of Potsdam, the MONREPOS Research Center and Museum in Neuwied, and Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Creationism continues to take a battering in the world of real science, where yet another paper quite incidentally refutes several of its basic dogmas. Creationists, who are notoriously reluctant to read serious science and would probably struggle to understand it if they did, will no doubt remain blissfully unaware of this constant refutation of their core superstitions.

To ensure that ignorance is maintained, creationist disinformation sites expend considerable effort in spreading distrust of serious science amongst their followers. What cult leader would want his followers reading anything that exposes his claims as bogus?

However, ignoring the facts does not make them go away, and the facts this paper reveals go to the heart of creationist mythology. Firstly, this evidence should not exist at all if the Bible creation myth were real history: a magical creation just 6,000-10,000 years ago, followed by a catastrophic global genocide, would leave no room for a 120,000-year-old population of fallow deer preserved in an Eemian lake environment. Secondly, it undermines the creationist parody of evolution that they so often attack: the false claim that evolution must always mean increasing complexity, and that any loss of genetic information is invariably fatal.

The reduced genetic diversity of modern fallow deer is a clear example of evolution involving a loss of genetic variation within a population. So far as individual deer are concerned, there need be no immediate reduction in fitness; the problem comes when a population has less capacity to respond to environmental change, disease, or other selective pressures, and may then be more vulnerable to extinction. Evolution, of course, has no plan. Unlike intelligent design, or even guided evolution, it cannot foresee future conditions and prepare a species for them. A species can be driven towards extinction by the simple operation of mindless natural processes.

Refuting Creation - With Goethe's 40-Million-Year-Old Ant

Amber piece 1552.b showing bioinclusions. Arrow in a (top): inclusion of †Ctenobethylus goepperti; arrow in b (bottom): inclusion of the Sciaridae. Scale bar 5 mm.

Boudinot, B.E., Bock, B.L., Tröger, D. et al. (2026)

Exceptionally Well-Preserved Ant in Goethe’s Amber | Uni Jena

Some years ago, while staying for a few days in Berlin in a hotel just off Goethestraße, I made the mistake of telling a taxi driver that our hotel was just off “Go-eth Straße”. It took several minutes and a map to sort out the confusion.

“Nein! Goethe-Straße!” he laughed. Only then did I realise that “Go-eth” and “Goethe” were not two different German philosophers.

“Ach ja! Danke! Goethe! Ich bin ein Engländer!” I explained, in my best German.

“Ja! Is better we speak English,” he replied.

Goethestraße — Goethe Street — is, of course, named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832), the German writer, poet, novelist and playwright. He was also an administrator, scientist, geologist, botanist and philosopher. As a naturalist and collector, he left behind an extensive geological and mineralogical collection, including 40 pieces of Baltic amber, which have now been closely examined by biologists at Friedrich Schiller University Jena — appropriately enough, since Goethe and the playwright Friedrich Schiller were friends.

What they found was the subject of a paper in Scientific Reports, published in January 2026. It is not good news for creationists, since it concerns an approximately 40-million-year-old ant, preserved in exquisite detail and now visible using modern imaging techniques such as synchrotron micro-computed tomography. In addition to the ant, the scientists also found a fungus gnat and a blackfly in Goethe’s amber.

It is unlikely that Goethe knew these creatures were preserved in his amber, since the pieces are unpolished and the contents are barely visible to the untrained eye. He certainly could not have known that the amber was tens of millions of years old. Had he known, we can only speculate how that knowledge might have affected his view of nature, time and human origins. His famous work, Faust, draws deeply on Christian motifs, including the story of a man who makes a pact with the Devil; but Goethe was also a serious observer of nature, living at a time when geology, palaeontology and evolutionary thinking were still in their infancy.

In the early nineteenth century, Europeans had not yet accumulated the overwhelming evidence that Earth is billions of years old and that life has changed profoundly over vast periods of time. Many educated people still interpreted history, nature and morality through a biblical framework, even when their own thinking was more subtle than simple literalism. Goethe, despite his scientific curiosity, lived before Darwin, before modern stratigraphy was fully established, and long before modern imaging could reveal the hidden contents of an opaque piece of amber.

Now, of course, we know better, because of the tremendous scientific progress made over the last two centuries.

Refuting Creationism - Yet Another Gap Is Closing - No God Found

Illustration of the Qreiya 3 fauna.

Image credit: Ian Baylatry.

Fossil discovery fills in missing information about modern fish evolution | Michigan News

Complete skeleton of the oldest jack fish, part of the group that includes modern jacks and trevallies.

A close-up of sharp teeth in an early relative of modern tunas.

Images credit: Professor Hesham Sallam, Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center

There are only two things in the universe faster than light: monarchy and gods. When a monarch dies, the monarchy passes instantaneously to the sovereign’s heir, regardless of where either of them happens to be at the time; and when science shines a light into one of the gaps in which creationists have been hiding their god, the god has already departed. That, presumably, is why no god has ever been detected by science.

Creationist dependence on these god-shaped gaps has produced an ever-shrinking god as science fills one gap after another with evidence. The fallacy depends on the gamble that, unlike every previous gap closed by science, this one will turn out to require a supernatural creation event. It never does, of course, but that never seems to diminish creationist confidence that the next gap will be different.

True to form, science has now closed yet another gap with evidence, not magic. It is one few creationists are likely to know about, and fewer still would be willing to acknowledge, because it concerns a gap in the fossil record between the K–Pg mass extinction, which eliminated the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago, and about 56 million years ago. In other words, it is a 10-million-year interval in the very long pre-‘Creation Week’ history of life on Earth — a history no self-respecting creationist can honestly admit exists without conceding that the Bible’s creation myth is not real history. Specifically, it is a gap in the fossil record of fish evolution, from the devastation at the K–Pg boundary to the later appearance of many species that look markedly different from those that preceded it.

That gap, known to palaeontologists as “Patterson’s Gap”, has now been partly filled by the discovery of the earliest known examples of six modern fish groups by a research team led by Sanaa El-Sayed, a University of Michigan doctoral student and researcher at the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center. The fossils were found in the Qreiya 3 Lagerstätte, dated to 62.2 million years ago, in Egypt’s Eastern Desert. The discovery has just been reported in Science Advances.

Refuting Creationism - Wild Cattle Roamed The Grasslands Of Europe - 4 million Years Before Creation Week

Half-ton early Bovines roamed 4-million-year-old grasslands in Europe | EurekAlert!

Palaeoartistic reconstruction of the environment in the surrounding of Camp dels Ninots maar lake during the early Pliocene.

Artwork by Mauricio Antón.

Nowhere in the Bible will you find any mention of wild cattle roaming the land, nor any indication that domestic animals are highly modified descendants of wild species, reshaped by human selection because their wild ancestors were not conveniently suited to human use. Instead, we find the childish claim that all animals were created for the exclusive benefit of humankind — which raises the obvious question: did the creator not know what humans would later need, or did it simply get things wrong, leaving humans to correct the design by selective breeding?

This is easily explained once we recognise that the authors of Genesis had a narrow, parochial view of the world. They knew little or nothing of Earth’s history or of the origins of life on it, so they made up stories that conformed to their own cultural assumptions and superstitions, often borrowing from neighbouring cultures.

They were completely unaware of the rest of Eurasia beyond their limited view from the Canaanite hills, and equally unaware of the great age of the Earth or the cycles of glacial and interglacial periods that had characterised it for the previous several million years. Indeed, the concept of such deep time seems to have been far beyond their comprehension. They could therefore have had no concept of the early forms of cattle-like bovines that once roamed Europe, already fitted by evolution for life in the changing environments of the Pliocene.

One such animal was a large bovine species, weighing up to about half a ton, which lived in what is now north-eastern Iberia about 4.41 million years ago. The discovery and re-analysis of this animal has just been published in PLOS One by Leonardo Sorbelli of the Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Germany, and colleagues.

The fossils, from the Camp dels Ninots site in Catalonia, include remains from at least 14 individuals, among them eight nearly complete and partly articulated skeletons. The species, Parabos tigneresi, helps fill a gap in the evolutionary history of Eurasian bovines, including the wider lineage that eventually gave rise to modern cattle, bison and buffalo. Although smaller than many living domestic cattle, these animals were larger than comparable bovids of their time, suggesting an early stage in the increase in body size that later became characteristic of the bovine lineage.

The researchers suggest that this increase in size may have been associated with the climatic and environmental changes that characterised Pliocene Europe. The anatomy of Parabos tigneresi also indicates an animal adapted mainly to humid, vegetation-rich environments, consistent with the reconstructed setting of Camp dels Ninots as a water-rich maar lake ecosystem.

This incidental confirmation of an earlier reconstruction of the lake ecosystem at Camp dels Ninots is a good example of how independent strands of evidence converge on the same conclusion. It also illustrates the strength of Darwinian evolutionary theory: organisms are expected to show adaptations to the environments in which they lived, rather than appearing as arbitrary, ready-made forms. In this case, the anatomy of these bovids is consistent with animals adapted to a humid, vegetation-rich lakeside habitat, exactly as the geological and palaeoecological evidence had already indicated.

Refuting Creationism - The Evidence Shows How Wrong The Bronze Age Myths In The Bible Were

A crouched burial of a 40 year old man in Oostwoud, the earliest known Bell Beaker grave identified by the researchers.

Source: Provincial Depot for Archaeology Noord-Holland.

DNA study uncovers continental origins of Britain’s bronze age population

Leaving a side the long history of archaic hominins such as the Neanderthals and their ancestors inhabiting Western Eurasia for about 250,000 years before the arrival of large numbers of anatomically modern humans, which itself is deeply problematic for creationists, there is also the archaeological record of the complext history of modern humans going back at least 40,000 years which simply would not be there if the Bible narrative of a recent spontaneous magical origin and a later global genocidal flood were true.

As reported in a paper in Nature last February (2026), the history of Northwest Europe and the Bristic Isles is far mpre complex and interesting that the simple Bronze Age fairy tail in Genesis.

Of course, the arcahaeolgeneticists never set out to disprove the Bible. The facts they revealed did that as a matter of course, because unlike Genesis, the facts record real events.

The contrast could hardly be more stark. Genesis gives us a world populated from a single specially-created human pair, followed by a later repopulation of the world from Noah’s family after a global flood, and then the dispersal of peoples after Babel. That is a story of magical manufacture, catastrophic reset and sudden dispersal. The ancient DNA tells a completely different story: long-lived regional populations, gradual migration, intermarriage, cultural exchange, local ecological adaptation and no global genetic bottleneck compatible with a recent universal flood.

Eco-Friendly Books

All my paperback books are now printed on lower carbon groundwood paper. What does this mean for the reader? Here is what Amazon have to say:

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Groundwood paper is a lower carbon option perfect for paperback novels and text-heavy books. Because of its higher opacity and textured feel, it makes pages easier to read and turn. Additionally, print-on-demand books made from groundwood paper have at least 15% fewer CO2-equivalent emissions compared to other paper types.

So, whether you want to read my novels about life in the Ice Age, An Oxfordshire Childhood, Religion, Atheism and Science, Unintelligent Design, The Internet Apologists' Handbooks or my Light of Reason series, you can now feel you are helping to reduce global warming by greenhouse gas emissions.

A complete list of my books is available here.

Enjoy!

Creationism Refuted - The Theory of Evolution May Be Slightly Wrong - But It's No Comfort To Creationists

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Microscopic fungi, baker’s or brewer’s yeast, are used as probiotics to restore normal flora of intestine.

Image credit: Adobe Stock

A new theory of molecular evolution | University of Michigan News

A paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution last november (2025) by four evolutionary biologists from the University of Michigan might have caused a stir of excitement in creationists cirles if any of them ever read a science paper because it appears on first sight to question the basis of the Theory of Evolution - what creationists call 'Dawinism'. However, that excitement would have been short-lived if they had read the details.

This is not the long-awaited collapse of the Theory of Evolution that creationists have been confidently predicting since at least the middle of the last century. It is nothing of the sort. It is a normal example of science doing what science does: testing a model against evidence, finding that the model is incomplete, and adjusting the explanation accordingly.

The theory being challenged here is not evolution itself, nor common descent, nor natural selection, nor mutation, nor population genetics. It is the neutral theory of molecular evolution, a theory developed in the 1960s to explain why many genetic changes appear to spread through populations without obvious adaptive advantage. The new paper argues that this appearance of neutrality may be misleading. What looks neutral in the long term may, in fact, be the result of short-term adaptation to changing environments.

The researchers found that beneficial mutations are more common than the classic neutral theory assumes. The problem, then, is why these apparently useful mutations do not become fixed at the rate one might expect. Their answer is beautifully evolutionary: environments change. A mutation that helps in one set of conditions may be useless, or even harmful, in another. So populations are not marching steadily towards some perfect design; they are continually tracking a moving target.

That is what the authors mean by adaptive tracking with antagonistic pleiotropy. “Pleiotropy” means that one mutation can have more than one effect. “Antagonistic” means that those effects can pull in opposite directions: helpful here, harmful there; useful now, costly later. This is not magic. It is not supernatural intervention. It is the ordinary interaction between genes, organisms and environments.

Creationists often pretend that science is an orthodoxy in which biologists merely defend Darwin at all costs. This paper shows the opposite. Scientists have examined one of their own long-standing theories, compared it with new evidence, and proposed a better explanation. No sacred text was protected. No dogma was shielded from scrutiny. No conclusion was declared immune from revision.

The result is not less evolution, but more evolutionary detail. Mutation still supplies variation. Selection still acts on differences in reproductive success. Genetic drift still matters. Environments still shape which variants succeed and which fail. What has changed is the understanding of how molecular change can appear neutral over deep time while still being shaped by episodes of adaptation in shifting environments.

So, far from helping creationism, this paper undercuts one of creationism’s favourite caricatures of science. It shows evolutionary biology as a living, self-correcting science, not a rigid ideology. It also shows why no supernatural designer is needed. The process described is entirely natural: mutations arise, their effects depend on circumstances, environments change, and populations respond as best they can, without foresight, plan or purpose.

Refuting Creationism - Another Bizarre Dinosaur - From 70 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A reconstruction of Kank australis

Gabriel Díaz Yantén

A reconstruction of Kank australis

Gabriel Díaz Yantén.

Heron-like, fish-eating dinosaur from 70 million years ago discovered in Argentina - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

In my previous post, I wrote about Labrujasuchus expectatus, a bizarre distant relative of the crocodile line which walked on two legs, had tiny arms, and possessed a toothless mouth tipped with a beak. Although not a dinosaur, it looked superficially dinosaur-like — a neat example of convergent evolution. Because earlier and later shuvosaurids were already known from the region, palaeontologists predicted that a form occupying the gap between them should exist, and Labrujasuchus duly turned up in the right place and in the right rock formation.

That is how science works: evidence fits into a testable, predictive framework. Creationism, by contrast, has nothing to offer except hand-waving, misrepresentation and denial when confronted with a bizarre extinct archosaur from some 212 million years ago, just as it has nothing to offer in explanation of this almost equally bizarre dinosaur from about 70 million years ago.

The new species, Kank australis, is described by palaeontologist Dr Matías J. Motta, of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires (Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales “Bernardino Rivadavia”), and his colleagues in a paper published on 28 May 2026 in the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Kank australis was a paravian theropod — an unenlagiid, belonging to a group of small- to medium-sized raptor-like dinosaurs known from Late Cretaceous Gondwanan deposits. Its discoverers suggest that it may have lived rather like a large heron. Its long jaws, armed with teeth, suggest a fish-eating habit, while its cervical vertebrae show structures associated with muscle attachment and the protection of neck blood vessels, features comparable with those seen in modern birds that rely on rapid, precise neck movements. In other words, this was probably not the familiar pop-culture image of a raptor as a fast-running terrestrial predator, but a specialised animal exploiting the riverine and wetland ecosystems of southern Patagonia.

And, as so often with new fossil discoveries, Kank australis fills in yet another of those gaps so beloved of creationists looking for somewhere to hide their ever-shrinking little god. In this case, it helps bridge a distributional gap in the Late Cretaceous record of southern Patagonia, connecting better-known unenlagiid records from northern Patagonia with those from Antarctica, and adding more detail to the still-patchy evolutionary history of these South American paravian dinosaurs.

Refuting Creationism - Bizarre Creature From The Long History of Earth Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Labrujasuchus expectatus

Art by Jorge Gonzalez
© NHMLAC Dinosaur Institute.

Reconstruction of Labrujasuchus expectatus, a new species of Shuvosauridae from Late Triassic rocks of Ghost Ranch, New Mexico

Art by Jorge Gonzalez, © NHMLAC Dinosaur Institute.

New Species of Bizarre, Bipedal, Toothless Crocodile Relative from the Triassic Discovered | Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County

Evolution, proceeding without a plan and lacking any sense of direction, can produce some truly bizarre creatures which, despite their appearance, survived perfectly well in the environments in which they evolved. Indeed, it would be bizarre to suppose otherwise, given that natural selection favours those forms that work well enough to survive and reproduce over those less well fitted to do so. To suppose otherwise would rival creationism for irrationality.

In this post, I’ll deal with a bizarre distant relative of the crocodiles; in the next, I’ll write about a strange theropod dinosaur from 70 million years ago that comes close to what any creationist might imagine a transitional species between dinosaurs and birds should look like.

Creationism is, of course, itself the product of an evolutionary process, forced into ever more bizarre forms by the hostile environment of scientific evidence. Modern creationism has therefore, by a similar process, become almost as bizarre as the life forms it is forced to deny in order to survive.

The sad thing is that creationists are denied the wonder of the truth about our planet as revealed in increasingly astonishing detail by science, because the facts must be waved aside and denied in order to cling to the childishly simplistic belief in magic and a world full of evil conspirators diligently working to trick them into changing their minds.

Who, for example, could have predicted that a distant relative of the crocodiles walked on two legs, had tiny arms, and had a toothless mouth tipped with a beak? It is almost as bizarre as the mental gymnastics creationists need to perform to dismiss it and force-fit the evidence into the predetermined conclusion that it must have been magically created within the last few thousand years and then allowed to go extinct for no apparent purpose — or that the evidence must either have been forged, misinterpreted or planted to test or deceive us.

Nevertheless, this creature, Labrujasuchus expectatus, did exist about 212 million years ago, in the Late Triassic, and its description is the subject of a recent paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Its fossilised remains were unearthed in Late Triassic rocks at the Hayden Quarry, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, USA, by a team of palaeontologists led by Dr Alan H. Turner of Stony Brook University, New York, USA, with colleagues including Dr Nathan D. Smith of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, California, USA.

To add insult to injury for creationists, this find fills one of those beloved gaps into which creationists try to force fit their creator god. The gap was that between two earlier discovered shuvosaurs from the region. It's discovery was thus a predicted by the Theory of Evolution, not by a book of Bronze Age mythology.

Creationism Refuted - Evolution of Gigantism in British Island Wrens

A St Kilda Wren, Troglodytes troglodytes hirtensis

Photo: Craig Nisbet

A Shetland Wren, Troglodytes troglodytes zetlandicus, Kergord, Mainland, Shetland

Photo credit: Dr Michał Jezierski

New research helps scientists unlock evolution of gigantism in Scottish island wrens - University of Birmingham

Creationists will continually demand evidence for evolution being observed, then, when the evidence is provided, immediately insist that science should adopt their childish parody of evolution, in which one species turns into an unrelated species in a single miraculous event. That is not evolution as any biologist understands it. In fact, if such a thing were ever observed, it would falsify the Theory of Evolution, not confirm it.

By demanding evidence for something no scientist has ever claimed happens, creationists imagine they are somehow refuting science, or at least providing a plausible anti-Darwin argument for people who do not understand the science.

So this example of evolution in living populations will almost inevitably be dismissed by creationists using that same disingenuous tactic. It is evidence for the evolution of island gigantism in isolated populations of the wren, Troglodytes troglodytes, on Scottish islands. And, to rub salt in creationists' wounds, it is not merely a single isolated example, but multiple examples of gigantism evolving in island environments — an example of parallel evolution in response to similar environmental pressures acting on different local populations.

In other words, this is not some local curiosity that can be waved away as a one-off oddity, but the predictable result of isolation, restricted gene flow and similar island conditions acting on related populations. The evidence has just been published, open access, in the Evolutionary Journal of the Linnean Society by researchers led by the University of Birmingham.

The researchers, led by Dr Michał Jezierski, examined four subspecies of island wren, each isolated on a specific Scottish island or archipelago — Shetland, Fair Isle, the Outer Hebrides and St Kilda. Each of these subspecies is geographically isolated, yet exposed to broadly similar island environments, and each differs significantly from the wrens found throughout mainland Britain and continental Europe.

The study showed that the wrens of St Kilda and Shetland show little evidence of interbreeding with the mainland population. These two populations have evolved spectacular island gigantism: a wren from England will typically weigh about 7–10 grams, while a St Kilda wren weighs about 13–16 grams. The largest St Kilda wrens are therefore more than twice the weight of the smallest mainland wrens, and their genetic distinctiveness is so marked that the researchers say they may be on the way to becoming separate species.

Importantly, the genomic evidence shows that the Shetland and St Kilda wrens are genetically distinct from each other, despite having evolved similar enlarged body sizes. In other words, the same broad evolutionary outcome has arisen independently in separate island populations, rather than being inherited from a single already-giant ancestor. That is exactly what evolutionary biology predicts: related populations, isolated in similar environments, can be shaped in similar directions by similar selection pressures, even when the detailed genetic route differs.

Malevolent Design - How Honey Bees And A Parasitic Fungus Have Teamed Up

“Invasional Mutualism” Between Honey Bees and Myrtle Rust Pathogen | Blog

Figure 1.
Foraging of urediniospores by bees on plants infected with myrtle rust. a. Honey bee forager collecting Austropuccinia psidii urediniospores from leaves of broadleaf paperbark [Melaleuca quinquenervia (Myrtales, Myrtaceae)], Bungawalbin, New South Wales, Australia; b. A. psidii urediniospores in the opening of a Geraldton wax [Chamelaucium uncinatum (Myrtales, Myrtaceae)] flower bud in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

Photographs by Geoff Pegg.

A paper published in March 2026 in NeoBiota is entirely unsurprising to an evolutionary biologist, but deeply awkward for anyone trying to present nature as the intelligent design of an omnibenevolent creator. It reports what appears to be a mutually beneficial relationship between the introduced Western honey bee, Apis mellifera, and the invasive fungal plant pathogen myrtle rust, Austropuccinia psidii. It is a neat example of how evolution has no foresight, no moral purpose and no long-term plan. Symbiotic alliances can arise naturally between different species when there is an immediate benefit to both, even when the longer-term consequences for one or both partners — and for the wider ecosystem — may be destructive.

Myrtle rust, Austropuccinia psidii, is an invasive rust fungus in Australia. It infects more than 500 species in the Myrtaceae family, which includes many of Australia’s culturally, ecologically and economically important native plants, including eucalypts, paperbarks and related species. In Australia, the pathogen is regarded as a serious threat to native ecosystems, with around 17% of endemic vegetation considered at risk. The other partner in this apparent mutualism is also an introduced species: the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera.

The basis of this relationship is an exquisite example of the sort of functional complexity creationists routinely try to claim as evidence for intelligent design. That, of course, raises the obvious question: why would an omnibenevolent designer design a fungal pathogen capable of damaging so much of Australia’s native vegetation, and then provide it with a convenient pollinator-assisted dispersal system?

The mechanism is ingenious, but only in the blind, short-term sense in which natural selection can be ingenious. The bright yellow urediniospores of myrtle rust are collected by honey bees much as pollen is collected. The bees pack the spores into their pollen baskets and carry them back to the hive. For the fungus, this provides a potential route for dispersal beyond simple wind movement. For the bees, the spores are not just inert particles accidentally mistaken for pollen; they have real nutritional value. The researchers found that myrtle rust spores contained more than 22% protein and all ten amino acids regarded as essential for honey bee nutrition, making them comparable with high-quality pollen.

Laboratory feeding trials also showed that honey bee larvae could develop normally on a diet based on myrtle rust spores, with survival, development time and body weight similar to larvae reared on a high-quality pollen diet. Even more concerning from a biosecurity point of view, the spores remained viable inside honey bee colonies for at least nine days, meaning that hives could potentially act as reservoirs and transport systems for the pathogen.

So, the fungus gains a mobile vector, while the bees gain an alternative protein source. But what benefits both in the short term could be damaging in the longer term. As myrtle rust damages Myrtaceae-rich habitats, it can reduce the availability of flowers and pollen. That, in turn, could encourage honey bees to rely more heavily on fungal spores or other alternative foods, while the fungus benefits from the continued movement of bees and managed hives. The result could be a damaging ecological feedback loop, with plant-pollinator networks and forest regeneration placed under increasing pressure.

This is precisely the kind of outcome that any omniscient, intelligent designer should have foreseen and avoided. It is also precisely the kind of outcome that a mindless evolutionary process can produce without difficulty. Natural selection rewards immediate reproductive or nutritional advantage; it does not plan for ecological stability, protect biodiversity, or ensure that mutually beneficial relationships remain harmless in the long term.

Refuting Creationism - How Our Blood Cells Have Evolved From Our Single-Celled Ancestor from 700 Million Years Ago

The origin of blood cells can be traced back approximately 700 million years to when human ancestors were single-celled organisms. When these ancestors evolved into multicellular organisms (animals), macrophages emerged as the first blood cells. Over the course of subsequent evolution, various blood cells, such as mast cells, diversified.

KyotoU / Yosuke Nagahata

The 700-million-year history of our blood cells | EurekAlert!

In a stunning, albeit unwitting, rebuttal of creationist claims, a team of researchers at Kyoto University is due to publish, on 29 May 2026, the results of their investigation into the evolutionary history of animal blood cells in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The paper, entitled "Animals have expanded the evolutionary legacy of unicellular ancestors in blood cells", is unlikely to please those creationists who keep assuring their dupes that biomedical scientists are about to abandon 'Darwinism' and adopt creationism instead.

It will also disappoint those who insist there is no evidence for the evolution of complex multicellular organisms from single-celled ancestors — what they like to caricature as the 'microbes-to-man hypothesis', as though humans, preferably modern Americans, were the preordained end-point of the entire history of life. That, of course, is creationist teleology masquerading as biology: the assumption that evolution must have been aiming at us because Bronze Age religion says humans are the central purpose of creation.

What the Kyoto University team found was not a sudden, magical appearance of blood cells, but a deep evolutionary continuity. They developed a new method for comparing gene-expression profiles across different animal cell lineages and species, and included unicellular organisms in the comparison in order to trace the possible origin of blood cells back to our single-celled animal ancestors.

Among human blood-cell lineages, macrophages showed the closest resemblance to unicellular organisms. This is hardly surprising, since macrophages still behave in a remarkably cell-autonomous way: they move through tissues, detect targets, engulf bacteria, clear dead cells and remove unwanted material — behaviour strongly reminiscent of free-living phagocytic cells.

The team then traced the gene FOS, commonly expressed in blood cells across animal species, back to a single-celled ancestor that lived about 700 million years ago, around the time when the first animals were evolving. The implication is that the earliest animal blood cells did not appear from nowhere. They arose when early multicellular animals repurposed genetic programmes inherited from their unicellular predecessors.

From there, the researchers were able to reconstruct a family tree of blood-cell lineages spanning roughly 700 million years. Their analysis suggests that early blood cells were macrophage-like, that mast cells later branched from that macrophage lineage, and that prototypic T cells and red blood cells subsequently branched from mast cells. Prototypic B cells, meanwhile, appear to have branched from the macrophage lineage after mast cells had already diverged.

In other words, the blood and immune cells circulating in our bodies today are not isolated, specially-created structures with no history. They are modified descendants of ancient cellular systems, inherited, repurposed and diversified during the evolution of animals from unicellular ancestors.

So, far from supporting the creationist claim that there is no evidence for the evolution of complex life from single-celled ancestors, the evidence is literally circulating in our blood. It is also circulating in the blood and immune systems of other animals, carrying with it a molecular and cellular legacy hundreds of millions of years older than the creation myths of the Bronze Age.

And, as usual, the Theory of Evolution provides the only coherent explanation for the observable facts. The research does not point to separate acts of creation, nor to a sudden magical appearance of blood cells fully formed and without ancestry. It shows descent with modification, inherited genetic programmes, divergence of cell lineages, and the repurposing of ancient biological mechanisms — exactly the pattern evolutionary theory predicts, and exactly the pattern creationism cannot explain without special pleading.

How we Know The Bible Is Wrong - This Evidence Wouldn't Exist If The Genesis Myths Were Real History

An artist’s reconstruction of a Marathousa 1 paleolithic woman producing a digging stick from a small alder tree trunk with a small stone tool. This kind of wood was used for the Marathousa 1 digging stick. Use-wear analysis of stone tools at Marathousa 1 shows evidence of woodworking.

Credit: Original art by G. Prieto, copyright K. Harvati.

Earliest evidence of wooden tools used by humans - University of Reading

This is another of those pieces of evidence that should not exist if the Bible narrative were true — yet it does. The only honest conclusion is that the Bible narrative is false. It simply never happened. In scientific terms, this is falsification.

The evidence was published on 26 January 2026 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). It consists of two worked wooden objects discovered at Marathousa 1, in Greece’s central Peloponnese, by an international team led by researchers from the University of Reading, the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment. The tools have been dated to about 430,000 years ago, making them the earliest known hand-held wooden tools and pushing back direct evidence for this kind of technology by at least 40,000 years.

That is awkward evidence for creationists, because the Bible is commonly interpreted by them as saying that humans were created only about 6,000–10,000 years ago, followed by a catastrophic global flood that supposedly covered even the highest mountains. Such an event should either have obliterated fragile evidence of wooden tool use or buried it beneath a thick, worldwide layer of flood sediment containing the remains of the animals and plants destroyed in that catastrophe. And, of course, loose wooden tools submerged in a global flood would hardly be expected to remain neatly preserved in the archaeological context in which they were used.

Yet these wooden tools exist. They were recovered from secure Middle Pleistocene deposits, not from some chaotic jumble of flood debris. They are associated with stone tools, worked bone and butchered animal remains, including elephant, showing that Marathousa 1 was a lakeshore site used by early humans for a range of activities, including butchery and woodworking. In other words, the evidence is not floating around without context; it forms part of a coherent archaeological scene about 420,000 years older than the creationist date for the magical creation of Earth and everything on it.

One of the objects is a small alder trunk fragment with clear traces of shaping and use-wear, consistent with a multifunctional digging stick probably used at the edge of the ancient lake. The other is a much smaller worked piece of willow or poplar, possibly representing a previously unknown type of small Pleistocene wooden tool. A third piece of alder, initially investigated as a possible artefact, appears instead to have been marked by a large carnivore, possibly a bear — another indication that humans and carnivores were exploiting the same lakeshore environment.

The Marathousa 1 site lay in the Megalopolis Basin, a region that appears to have acted as a glacial refugium during a critical period in human evolution, when more complex behaviours and more diverse technologies were developing. The finds show early humans using not just stone, but wood and bone too — exactly what we should expect from intelligent, adaptable hominins making use of the materials around them, and exactly what is so rarely preserved because wood normally decays long before it can fossilise or survive archaeologically.

Refuting Creationism - The Fossil Record Confirms Evolution - And Falsifies Creationism

Reconstruction of a hypothetical deep-water paleocommunity from the new fossil site in Canada’s Northwest Territories, based on fossils recovered by the researchers.

Alex Boersma

Fossil Trove Expands Range of Squishy Early Animals - American Museum of Natural History

A paper published on 20 May 2026 in Science Advances by a team of palaeontologists led by Scott D. Evans of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, very neatly illustrates the difference between evolutionary biology and creationism. It reports the discovery of a rich new Ediacaran fossil site in the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada’s Northwest Territories, containing fossils that appear earlier in the record, and in deeper-water settings, than current models of the Ediacaran biota had led palaeontologists to expect.

That is not a problem for evolution; it is how science progresses. Unexpected evidence does not destroy a scientific theory merely because it requires a refinement of detail. In this case, the discovery extends the known geographical, ecological and chronological range of part of the Ediacaran biota — the strange, mostly soft-bodied organisms that preceded, and helped set the stage for, the later Cambrian diversification of animal life.

When asked what would falsify the theory of evolution, the evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane is said to have replied, “a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian”. He was making the simple point that evolutionary theory predicts a broad historical sequence: mammals should not appear before vertebrates, vertebrates should not appear before animals, and rabbits should not appear hundreds of millions of years before their ancestors. A genuine rabbit in Precambrian rocks would be an anachronism so extreme that it would call the whole historical framework into question.

But that is not what palaeontologists have found here. The newly reported fossils are not out of sequence; they are exactly the kind of organisms that belong in late Precambrian rocks. The surprise is not that they are in the wrong part of life’s history, but that some of them appear a little earlier, in a wider geographical range, and in somewhat different environments than previously recognised. In other words, the anomaly is chronological and ecological, not evolutionary.

To a creationist, of course, the question of falsification has to be avoided, because the honest answer is deeply uncomfortable. The fossil record as a whole does not show a sudden magical creation of all living things a few thousand years ago. It shows succession: organisms appearing, diversifying, changing and disappearing through vast spans of geological time. The dating of the rocks, using multiple independent geological and radiometric methods, consistently points to an ancient Earth and a long history of life, not to a recent creation week followed by a global flood.

That is why every such discovery is awkward for creationism but routine for science. Fossils are not distributed randomly, as they would be if all life had been created at once and then jumbled together in a recent catastrophe. They occur in a recognisable sequence, constrained by stratigraphy, radiometric dating, comparative anatomy, developmental biology and, for later organisms, genetics. The details are continually revised, but the broad pattern remains overwhelmingly consistent with evolution and wholly inconsistent with Biblical literalism.

By any honest application of the scientific method, that should be enough to falsify the creationist narrative beyond reasonable doubt. That it does not do so for creationists is not because the evidence is weak, but because the conclusion is protected from evidence. When the conclusion is sacred, facts become things to be explained away, misrepresented or ignored.

For evolutionary biologists, however, an unexpected fossil is not an embarrassment to be dismissed, but a clue to be investigated. If the evidence shows that part of the White Sea assemblage was present in Laurentia earlier than previously recognised, and in deeper-water environments, then the scientific response is to refine the model. The theory is not weakened by that process; it is strengthened, because it can absorb new evidence, generate better questions and produce a more accurate account of what happened.

The fossils described in this paper include more than 100 specimens, with several groups not previously recorded from North America, including Dickinsonia, Funisia, Kimberella and Eoandromeda. Some are estimated to be about 567 million years old, overlapping with the older Avalon assemblage and extending the known range of the White Sea assemblage by around 5–10 million years. The researchers also found that these organisms lived in deeper-water settings than had previously been recognised for this assemblage, supporting the idea that some early animal innovations may have begun offshore before spreading into shallower environments.

How Creationists Lie To Us - Ken Ham Shows Us His Cult Is For Fools Who Believe Lies

Tiny fossils found in 1.7 billion-year-old mud yield clues to the evolution of complex life.

The creationist Ken Ham’s website, Answers in Genesis (AiG), is notorious for the way it exploits the ignorance of its target readership and their eagerness for spurious “scientific” validation of evidence-free superstition. For example, AiG recently posted on X, formerly Twitter, asserting that the fossil record is “the graveyard of the global flood”:

The fossil record is the graveyard of the global flood. pic.twitter.com/1OWyNcEk5o

— Answers in Genesis (@AiG) May 20, 2026

What AiG does not say, of course, is that fossils are not found in a chaotic jumble, as would be expected from a single global catastrophe. They occur in a consistent geological sequence, with older rocks containing older fossil assemblages and younger rocks containing later ones. The succession is not random; it records changing environments, extinctions, radiations and evolutionary transitions over immense spans of time. The rocks themselves contain independent evidence of their age and origin — including stratigraphic relationships, geochemical signatures, volcanic ash layers where present, and other dating markers — and many sedimentary sequences accumulated gradually over thousands, millions, or even hundreds of millions of years.

Nor do fossil-bearing rocks show the global mixing that a planet-wide genocidal flood should have produced. Instead, they preserve organisms that lived in particular environments at particular times. Marine organisms occur in marine sediments; freshwater organisms in freshwater deposits; terrestrial organisms in terrestrial deposits. Local and regional faunas remain local and regional.

We do not find Australian marsupials randomly mixed through Cambrian marine deposits, nor African mammals churned together with Jurassic dinosaurs and Ordovician trilobites. If a flood had covered even the highest mountains, tearing up ecosystems across the planet and carrying bodies wherever the currents took them, that is exactly the kind of disorder we should expect. It is not what the fossil record shows.

So, far from proving there was a global genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago, fossils in sedimentary rocks demonstrate exactly the opposite. They record a long, ordered, localised and historically structured history of life on Earth. That history is not only incompatible with the childish flood myth promoted by AiG; it is one of the strongest lines of evidence for evolution over deep time. And that is probably why Ken Ham’s creationist organisation needs its followers to believe otherwise. The tactic is perfectly plain and deliberately dishonest: if the facts contradict your claims, misrepresent the facts.

Malevolent Design - Fungi That Turn Spiders Into 'Zombies'

Spider infected with Gibellula pseudosolita

Chang, Chen-xin, et al (2026)

Spider infected with Gibellula pseudosolita

Chang, Chen-xin, et al (2026)

Inside the Hidden World of Spider-Attacking Fungi | Blog


Parasites are hard enough for creationists to force-fit into their predetermined belief that all things were created by an omnibenevolent god, short of resorting to the near-blasphemous claim that 'Sin' somehow gave a rival creator unfettered access to their god's supposedly perfect creation in order to corrupt and destroy it. That rather undermines the claim of perfection in the first place, because a perfect creation, by definition, ought not to be corruptible.

But even harder for creationists to explain are parasites which, judged by their own favourite pseudo-scientific slogans — 'complex specified information' and 'irreducible complexity' — appear exquisitely adapted not merely to parasitise a living organism, but to consume it from within and then use its body as a platform for producing more parasites. In Pensoft's own popular description, these are "zombie" fungi: araneopathogenic fungi that parasitise spiders, mummify them, and then grow spore-producing structures from their bodies.

For example, newly identified spider-attacking fungi have recently been reported in two papers, published respectively in IMA Fungus and MycoKeys. Together, they add to the growing picture of a hidden diversity of highly specialised fungal parasites adapted to exploit spiders in different habitats.

The first is a new species of Purpureocillium fungus, belonging to the Purpureocillium atypicola group: Purpureocillium atlanticum. It was discovered in Brazil's Atlantic Forest, where it infects trapdoor spiders hidden in their burrows in the forest floor. The fungus covers the spider in cotton-white mycelium and eventually sends a purple fruiting structure up from the spider's cephalothorax, allowing spores to be released above the burrow. This discovery also shows that Purpureocillium atypicola, originally discovered in Japan in 1897 and thought to be a single species, is actually a global complex of multiple species.

The second paper reports three new species of Gibellula fungi — Gibellula pseudopigmentosa, Gibellula pseudosolita, and Gibellula sinensis — discovered on spiders in China and Laos. These fungi erupt from spider bodies in stalked, branch-like structures, and the species were distinguished from one another by differences in their reproductive structures, spore-forming bodies and phylogenetic relationships.

Refuting Creationism - What Was Before The Big Bang? It Wasn't Nothing!

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Forget sci-fi wormholes — physicists now think Einstein’s mysterious “bridge” may connect two directions of time itself.

Credit: AI/ScienceDaily.com

Wormholes may not exist – we’ve found they reveal something deeper about time and the universe

A paper published open access in January 2026 in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity should, if creationists could understand it, shoot one of their favourite foxes: the supposed killer question, "What came before the Big Bang?"

Only a creationist could believe the absurd notion that once literally nothing existed as a state of being, and that a god — presumably also made of nothing, because there was nothing to make it from — simultaneously existed and created everything out of that nothing by casting a magic spell, spoken in a language there was no-one else to communicate with in. The first intuitive mistake in that convoluted nonsense is the assumption that the default state of existence is non-existence.

Creationists, however, hypocritically try to hold science to a much higher standard than they apply to their own nonsensical superstitions. While demanding answers to what they imagine are "Gotcha!" questions of science, they routinely dismiss any answer with a wave of the hand. One favourite "Gotcha!" is: what was there before the Big Bang? The usual response is that, in the simplest version of standard cosmology, the question may be meaningless, because time and space themselves are part of the universe being described. If time does not extend through t = 0, then there is no "before" in the ordinary sense. But to a teleologically minded creationist, the answer that there was no "before" at the Big Bang sounds like a cop-out — a way of avoiding the question.

But what if there was a "before", not in the naive sense of empty time waiting around for a universe to be inserted into it, but in the deeper sense that what we call the Big Bang may have been a transition between two time-related phases of a larger physical system?

That this is at least a theoretical possibility comes from the work of three theoretical physicists, Enrique Gaztañaga and K. Sravan Kumar of the Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation, University of Portsmouth, UK, and João Marto of the Departamento de Física, Centro de Matemática e Aplicações (CMA-UBI), Universidade da Beira Interior, Portugal. They have revisited the work of Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, whose 1935 paper led to the idea of Einstein–Rosen bridges. These were later popularly interpreted as "wormholes" connecting different regions of spacetime, although that was not the original purpose of the idea.

Using a quantum-field-theoretic approach, Gaztañaga, Kumar and Marto argue that Einstein–Rosen bridges may not be space-travel tunnels at all, but mathematical bridges connecting two complementary components of a quantum state — two microscopic arrows of time. In one component, time flows in the direction we experience; in the other, it is mirrored in the opposite direction. Near black holes, or in expanding and collapsing universes, both components may be needed for a complete quantum description.

This offers a possible route through the black hole information paradox: the puzzle of how information can be preserved when matter crosses an event horizon and a black hole eventually evaporates. In the authors’ interpretation, information is not destroyed; it continues to evolve through the time-reversed, mirror component of the quantum state. That would preserve the quantum requirement that information is not simply lost, without requiring science-fiction wormholes, time machines or supernatural intervention.

The idea also opens the possibility that what we call the Big Bang was not an absolute beginning, but a bounce — a quantum transition from a preceding phase of cosmic evolution. In that scenario, our universe could even be the interior of a black hole formed in an earlier, parent cosmos, where collapse on one side becomes expansion on the other. The Big Bang, in other words, would not be a magical creation event, but a natural physical gateway.

That possibility also recalls an earlier speculative but serious scientific idea proposed by Lee Smolin in 1992, known as cosmological natural selection. Smolin suggested that black holes might give rise to new universes, with the physical constants of each descendant universe varying slightly from those of its parent. Universes whose laws favour the formation of many black holes would therefore tend to leave more descendant universes, rather as organisms that leave more offspring become over-represented in a biological population.

This is not evolution by genes, of course, and it is not established fact. It is a speculative cosmological hypothesis. But it is scientific speculation of the proper kind: naturalistic, mathematically framed, open to criticism and, in principle, vulnerable to observational evidence. It stands in stark contrast to creationism, which answers the same question with nothing more substantial than magic, asserted certainty and Bronze Age mythology.

One of the authors of the paper, Enrique Gaztanaga, also wrote an article in The Conversation, explaining their idea for a lay readership. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency: