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

Dadès Valley and the Atlas Mountains

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

Mats of chemosynthetic bacteria forming below the layer of turbidity.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Auto)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Malevolent Design - Why Autism Refutes Intelligent Design - Or Is the Designer Incompetent?

Evolution's well-tinkered machine.

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Autism Research Breakthrough Discovered by Hebrew University Researchers | en.new.huji

Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have uncovered a mechanism that leads to autism. If this is the product of intelligent design then the designer is either incompetent or malevolent, but as so often with diseases that arise when systems go wrong, it is exactly what we expect of an evolved process. Their paper has just been published open access in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

For proponents of Intelligent Design such as Michael Behe and William Dembski, biological systems are supposed to bear the hallmarks of careful engineering — intricate machines whose parts work together with purpose and precision. But the mechanism uncovered in this study looks nothing like the output of a competent engineer. Instead, it reveals a fragile regulatory network in which a single biochemical modification destabilises a key control protein and sends an entire signalling pathway out of balance. The result is a cascade of downstream effects that ultimately alters brain development and behaviour.

What the researchers have uncovered is not a piece of irreducibly complex machinery but a regulatory system that can be knocked off course by a small perturbation. Nitric-oxide signalling modifies the protein TSC2, leading to its degradation and the subsequent overactivation of the mTOR pathway — a pathway that controls cellular growth and protein synthesis throughout the body. In other words, the pathology arises because a normal biological control system fails to maintain the delicate balance on which it depends.

This is precisely the sort of vulnerability we expect from systems produced by evolution. Evolution does not design organisms from scratch with perfect foresight; it works with what already exists, modifying and repurposing pathways that originally evolved for other purposes. The result is a network of interacting components that usually works well enough to keep organisms alive and reproducing, but which inevitably contains points where the system can fail. When those failures occur, the consequences can be severe.

Far from supporting Intelligent Design, discoveries like this highlight the jury-rigged nature of biological systems. They show that life’s complexity arises not from optimal engineering but from the gradual accumulation of workable solutions over evolutionary time — solutions that function most of the time, yet remain vulnerable to the occasional catastrophic malfunction.

Refuting Creationism - A Relative Of Crocodiles That Only Walked on Two Legs As An Adult - 200 Million Years Ago

Artist's reconstruction of Sonselasuchus cedrus in its environment in what is now Petrified Forest National Park, 215 million years ago.

Artwork by Gabriel Ugueto.

“Peculiar” ancient ancestor of the crocodile started life on four legs in adolescence before it began walking on two - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

In Greek mythology, Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx and so saved the city of Thebes. The riddle asked, “What goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon and three in the evening?” Oedipus correctly answered “Man” (crawling as a baby, walking upright as an adult and using a walking stick in old age.)

Of course, that myth is no less plausible than the Hebrew origin myths that creationists regard as literal history but, in a way, Oedipus was lucky. Not only did the Sphinx allow the stretch of regarding a walking stick as a leg (for poetic licence?), but the riddle did not stop at two legs, as there are very many bipedal species, and at least one went on four legs in infancy.

Researchers, Elliott Armour Smith from the University of Washington Department of Biology and Professor Christian A. Sidor of the Washington University Burke Museum, have just published the results of a study in the Journal of Paleontology showing that an ancient relative of crocodiles, the poodle-sized Sonselasuchus cedrus, probably began life as a quadruped and later had to learn to walk upright because of different growth patterns in different bones.

This creates a problem for creationists, not so much because other mythologies contain legends such as the riddle of the Sphinx that, treated as a metaphor, describe the human condition better than any of the implausible tales in the Bible, but because the myths it does contain preclude learning any of the fascinating history of life on Earth that requires a realistic timeline running into hundreds of millions, even billions of years. These peculiar crocodiliform shuvosaurids lived between about 225 and 201 million years ago and were contemporaneous with the bipedal ornithomimid dinosaurs that eventually gave rise to birds.

The interesting question then—and something creationists are precluded from considering—is what about the earthly environment made bipedalism such an advantage that it evolved independently in two distantly related groups of reptiles?

This conclusion comes from the examination of 950 Sonselasuchus fossils unearthed in Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park—a fossil site which has yielded more than 3,000 fossil bones since 2014.

Creationism in Crisis - An Early Relative of the First Primates From North America - 65.9 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Purgatorius

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Artists impression of Purgatorius unio from Late Paleocene North America

By Nobu Tamura - Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link

Miniscule fossil discovery reveals fresh clues into the evolution of the earliest-known relative of all primates - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

Scientists have recently announced the discovery of a small tooth in the Corral Bluffs, in the Denver basin, Colorado that shows one of the group of early mammals from which primates later emerged probably evolved in North America. For Creationists keen to find a reason to dismiss science and the evidence it keeps revealing showing creationism is nothing but an evidence free superstition, this is eerily reminiscent of what they regard as the 'Nebraska Man' hoax.

The supposed hoax was nothing of the sort and was, in reality a creationists lie intended to mislead people, perpetrated by two evangelical Christian con-men, Hank Hanegraff and Grant Jeffrey, who falsely proclaimed it to have been a failed attempt to trick people into believing in evolution - a trick that still has some success on creationists, notorious as they are for failing to fact-check their claims.

Creationists like to pretend that palaeontology is little more than a catalogue of embarrassing mistakes and hoaxes. In reality, of course, the history of palaeontology shows the opposite: new discoveries steadily refine and improve our understanding of life’s history, filling gaps in the fossil record and clarifying evolutionary relationships. A recent discovery reported in a press release by Taylor & Francis and described in a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology is a good example of this process at work.

The discovery concerns a few minuscule fossil teeth belonging to Purgatorius, a tiny, shrew-sized mammal that lived about 65.9 million years ago, shortly after the asteroid impact that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. Purgatorius is widely regarded as one of the earliest known relatives of the primate lineage—the group that eventually gave rise to monkeys, apes and humans. Fossils of this animal were previously known mainly from Montana and parts of western Canada, but the new finds from the Denver Basin in Colorado extend its known range several hundred miles further south.

According to the researchers, this discovery helps fill an awkward gap in the early fossil record of primate relatives. Slightly younger species appear in the southwestern United States about two million years later, leaving palaeontologists wondering why earlier forms seemed confined to the north. The Colorado fossils suggest that these early primate relatives probably spread southwards fairly rapidly after the mass extinction that ended the Cretaceous Period, diversifying as forests recovered in the aftermath of the impact.

However, before creationists begin sharpening their pencils in preparation for another round of “Nebraska Man” rhetoric, it is important to understand what this discovery does—and does not—show. The paper is not claiming that primates themselves evolved in North America, nor that this tiny mammal was a direct ancestor of humans. Purgatorius is better described as a stem relative of primates—an early member of the broader evolutionary group from which primates eventually emerged. In other words, it sits near the base of the evolutionary tree leading to primates, not within the modern primate group itself.

What the discovery really demonstrates is something far more typical of evolutionary biology: as new fossils are found, the geographical distribution and timing of early evolutionary lineages become clearer. In this case, a few teeth barely larger than grains of rice are helping palaeontologists reconstruct how the earliest primate relatives spread across ancient North America in the chaotic ecological world that followed the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Refuting Creationism - First Reconstruction of the Face of 'Little Foot' - From 3.6 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

"Little Foot" in an African woodland

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The original skull (left), digital copy (middle) and reconstructed face of « Little Foot ».

© Amélie Beaudet

The first digital reconstruction of the face of « Little Foot » | CNRS.

Creationists refuse to recognise early hominins such as the australopithecines because they stubbornly refuse to conform to the creationist dogma that says there are no fossils showing the transition from a common ancestor with chimpanzees. Therefore, in the arrogant way creationists often deal with reality, because their stated dogma says otherwise, these fossils can't exist, and ad hoc explanations for their existence have to be invented — the dates are wrong; the scientists lied; Satan planted them to mislead us, etc., etc.

However, they do exist, and now scientists at the Centre national de recherche scientifique (CNRS), France, have succeeded in reconstructing the face of the australopithecine known as 'Little Foot', which was badly crushed and fragmented by the pressure and movement of the sediment in which it was buried. 'Little Foot', discovered at Sterkfontein, South Africa, is the most intact skeleton of an Australopithecus so far found, and this reconstruction helps place it in the evolutionary tree of the hominins as they diverged from the other African great apes. Their findings are published, open access, in the journal Comptes Rendus Palevol.

This reconstruction reveals a number of transitional features, just as one would expect of an early hominin roughly halfway in time between the split from the common ancestor with chimpanzees some 6 million years ago and the emergence of anatomically modern humans. But it also raises an intriguing question, because it appears to be closer to the East African australopithecines than to the South African australopithecines, raising questions about the evolutionary relationship between these two groups and the chronology of the evolution of the modern human face.

'Little Foot' was originally assigned to the species Australopithecus prometheus and later to Au. africanus, but is a school of thought that argues it is sufficiently different to other Australopiths to justify assigning it to a new species altogether.

Refuting Creationism - Evidence For Earliest Large Land Predators - 280 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

New study finds earliest evidence of big land predators hunting plant-eaters | EurekAlert

Contradicting creationist claims that death entered the world when Eve's sin somehow transformed a previously perfect world into a fallen one—with the creator god apparently powerless to prevent some other magical entity interfering in its creation—we now have evidence of predation; that is, the killing and eating of one living organism by another. Needless to say, like 99.975% of the history of life on Earth, this all occurred 280 million years ago, during that long pre-“Creation Week” period before the creationist god supposedly decided to create his small flat planet with a dome over it and call it perfect.

The nonsensical idea that there were no deaths before “The Fall” has always defied logic because all living things require a supply of energy in the form of food. Even if that food is plants, plants must die in the process. But then the Bible’s mythologies were written by people who confused “living” with “breathing”, so assumed plants were not living. Presumably, Bible literalists today believe the same biologically nonsensical idea.

The evidence for the earliest large land predators comes from three palaeontologists led by Professor Robert R. Reisz of the Department of Biology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, who have just published their findings, open access, in the journal Scientific Reports. The group studied tooth marks on the fossilised skeletons of three young herbivores from the Permian of Texas. Two hundred and eighty million years ago was relatively soon after the first terrestrial tetrapods had crawled out of the sea and evolved into amphibians and the earliest proto-reptiles. The evolution of predation would have been a major driver of evolution due to the resulting arms races in which predators became more efficient hunters and prey became better at avoiding being eaten—a process that hardly fits the description “intelligent design”.

Refuting Creationism - How Sex Selection Between Homo sapiens And Neanderthals Played A Part In Human Evolution

Genetic inheritance in Homo sapiens/Neanderthal hybrids

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How ancient attraction shaped the human genome | Penn Today

What creationist mythology cannot account for is the presence not just of Neanderthals, but of traces of their DNA in almost all people who are not of recent African ancestry.

So imagine the mental gymnastics they will need to perform to cope with the news that new genomic research by members of Sarah Tishkoff’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania has shown how that most Darwinian of evolutionary mechanisms—sexual selection—is responsible for how Neanderthal DNA is distributed in the Homo sapiens genome.

It is enough to send any dedicated creationist into deep denial, with cries of foul and accusations that the scientists involved are somehow deceiving the public—anything to avoid accepting the fact that their primitive beliefs are wrong, even to the extent of betraying the uncomfortable reality that their professed ‘faith’ often functions as a front for a political agenda far removed from the basic teachings they claim to defend.

The findings of the University of Pennsylvania team were recently published in the journal Science.

This subject strikes a particular chord with me because, in my novel, The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic, Almora—the mother of the central character, Shana—has a Neanderthal partner and they are unable to produce male children, who either die in early infancy or are miscarried. This was in recognition of the fact that no Neanderthal Y chromosomes have ever been discovered in Homo sapiens, suggesting that male offspring of such hybridisation were either non-viable or sterile.

The Pennsylvania team, however, were seeking to explain why Neanderthal DNA is largely absent from the Homo sapiens X chromosome. As is well known, humans, like other mammals, have two sex chromosomes: females have two X chromosomes (one from each parent), while males have an X (from their mother) and a Y (from their father).

The researchers showed that if there was a preference for mating between Neanderthal males and Homo sapiens females, the fact that Homo sapiens contributed two X chromosomes to the hybrid gene pool for every one Neanderthal X chromosome could, over time, have led to the loss of Neanderthal DNA from the X chromosome. This suggests that sexual selection may have played a significant role in shaping human evolution, in addition to natural selection.

They also showed that Neanderthals possessed disproportionately more Homo sapiens DNA on their X chromosome than on their other chromosomes. This can likewise be explained by the influx of predominantly female Homo sapiens X-chromosome DNA into the Neanderthal gene pool, again supporting the hypothesis that hybrid matings occurred predominantly between Homo sapiens females and Neanderthal males, producing this imbalance.

Refuting Creationism - Evolutionary History of New Zealand Geese.

A reconstruction of the St Bathans goose, Metechen luti.

Artwork by Sasha Votyakova,
© Te Papa CC BY 4.0

New Zealand Giant Geese (Cnemiornis)

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‘Old Mother Goose’ adds to history of NZ birds | University of Otago

This paper is another of those that will probably excite creationists initially, but then set up more cognitive dissonance because the timeline is utterly inconsistent with their preferred Biblical narrative. It will excite them because it suggests biologists might have been wrong about something; the dissonance then comes from the fact that the scientists involved have no doubts at all that the Theory of Evolution explains the facts, and that what they may have got wrong is merely the exact timing of events that happened many millions of years ago.

The possible mistake concerns the assumption that the ancestors of the extinct giant flightless geese of the Cnemiornis genus arrived in New Zealand about 14 million years ago. New evidence suggests that this may instead have been only about 7 million years ago, providing another example of the rapid evolution that can occur through the so-called 'island effect'.

The usual creationist response to the inevitable cognitive dissonance is either to ignore the findings altogether or to claim, with no evidence whatsoever, that the scientists got the dates wrong or invented figures to support a preconceived 'Darwinian' narrative.


But of course, what the paper actually demonstrates is the self-correcting nature of science, the contingency of scientific knowledge, and the willingness to change conclusions when the facts change — features of the scientific method that reflect the intellectual integrity of scientists and that give science its great power to determine the truth. This stands in stark contrast to creationism, which cannot move beyond the primitive superstitions of Bronze Age pastoralists, and which depends on intellectual bankruptcy — and the arrogance to believe one's opinions trump the evidence — in order to maintain belief in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The paper in question was recently published in the journal Historical Biology by members of an international collaboration between scientists from Otago University, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and the University of Cambridge (UK), led by Alan J. D. Tennyson of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

So what exactly did the researchers discover that prompted this revision of the timeline? The answer lies in new fossil material and a re-examination of the evolutionary relationships of these remarkable birds. By comparing skeletal features and analysing their place within the broader family tree of waterfowl, the team were able to reassess when the ancestors of New Zealand’s giant flightless geese first arrived on the islands. Their results suggest that these birds colonised New Zealand far more recently than previously thought, after which they rapidly evolved into the large, flightless forms known from the fossil record.

This kind of rapid evolutionary change is a well-known phenomenon on islands, where isolation, the absence of mammalian predators, and new ecological opportunities can drive dramatic shifts in body size and behaviour. In the case of Cnemiornis, the descendants of ordinary flying waterfowl appear to have evolved into large, heavy, ground-dwelling birds in a relatively short geological time.

Refuting Creationism - How Deep-Sea Species Evolved

A field of deep-sea mussels (Bathymodiolus sp.) on the Atlantic margin seafloor near a cold methane seep.

Image: Deepwater Canyons 2013 -
Pathways to the Abyss, NOAA-OER/BOEM/USGS.

Into the deep: scientists find two paths | News | Physical Sciences Division | The University of Chicago

A recent paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B should ring alarm bells for any creationist with the courage and personal integrity to risk reading it. It reports on the findings of a team of three researchers led by scientists at the University of Chicago and including Stewart M. Edie, of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, that species adapted to deep-sea living evolved to survive in that difficult environment by two different evolutionary pathways.

The first problem for creationists here is that there is no doubt expressed anywhere in the paper that the explanation requires anything other than the Theory of Evolution. There is no sign — as with every other biomedical paper published so far this year — that evolutionary theory is proving inadequate and that biologists are turning instead to creationism, with its unevidenced magic entities and mysteries posing as answers to scientific questions. That narrative exists only in the imagination of creationists.

The second problem arises from the arrogant creationist belief that all living organisms were created especially for humans. If that were so, why ‘design’ some of them to live in the inaccessible depths of the oceans, where for much of human history their existence was entirely unknown? This question has been posed many times in these blog posts, yet not a single creationist has managed to produce anything more convincing than an appeal to ‘mysterious ways’.

The research team set out to understand how organisms living on the abyssal plain — where temperatures hover just a few degrees above freezing, pressures are immense enough to crush all but the most robust submersibles, sunlight never penetrates, and food is scarce — managed to adapt to such extreme conditions. Clearly, they had to undergo substantial evolutionary change, which is probably why relatively few lineages have made the transition, including certain bivalve molluscs such as mussels, oysters, scallops and clams.

The scientists examined the lineages of two groups of bivalves that successfully inhabit the deep sea. They found that one group, already adapted to harsh conditions, moved into the deep-sea environment and adjusted to those conditions without diversifying greatly. A second group, by contrast, radiated into a swarm of new species from a single ancestral lineage.

Refuting Creationism - Earth - Fine Tuned For Catastrophe

Impact-formed glass evidence of cosmic collision in Brazil about 6 million years ago

Geologists led by Professor Álvaro Penteado Crósta of the Institute of Geosciences at the State University of Campinas, Brazil (IG-UNICAMP), in collaboration with researchers from Brazil, Europe, the Middle East and Australia, have discovered evidence of an impact by a large extraterrestrial body at least 6.3 million years ago.

They have recently published their findings in the journal Geology. This impact joins the long list of such collisions in Earth’s history — not merely the one that marked the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) mass extinction that eliminated the non-avian dinosaurs.

Creationists like to imagine they live in some sort of wonderland, specially created with them in mind — perfectly designed for human existence. Of course, this ignores the fact that much of the Earth is uninhabitable and even actively hostile to human life without specialised equipment. They often refer to Earth as existing in a ‘Goldilocks zone’ where everything is “just right”, forgetting that life could only have evolved on a planet where conditions permitted it. Our existence does not demonstrate improbability; it simply confirms that the necessary conditions were present.

Away from the tropics, ordinary human life is only possible with clothing, heating and buildings — or at least some form of shelter and a means of making fire. None of us would survive for more than a few hours naked outdoors in mid-winter at northern or southern latitudes.

Much of the planet is covered by deep oceans, and large areas of land consist of high plateaus or arid deserts where human life would again be impossible without specialised technology.

It also ignores the fact that, throughout its history, Earth has endured catastrophe after catastrophe. Mass extinctions have often been triggered by plate tectonics, which alter ocean currents and weather patterns, or by volcanic activity that disrupts the balance between CO₂ production and its removal by plants. Earth exists within a cosmos capable of bombarding it with the debris left over from planetary formation — from microscopic dust grains to vast bodies of rock that release enough energy on impact to devastate regions hundreds of kilometres across. Such collisions can inject enormous quantities of dust and aerosols into the stratosphere, blocking sunlight for years and plunging the planet into prolonged global cooling, with devastating ecological consequences.

Refuting Creationism - Cleaner Wrasse Have Mammal-Like Cognitive Abilities

Cleaner wrasse, Labroides dimidiatus

By Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Cleaner wrasse with giant moray eel client

By Silke Baron - originally posted to Flickr as Giant Moray Eel getting cleaned,
CC BY 2.0, Link

Cleaner fish show intelligence typical of mammals | Osaka Metropolitan University

A central dogma of creationism—indeed one reason why it persists and is clung to in the face of contrary evidence, massaging the egos of creationists—is the claim that humans were uniquely created, separate from and superior to other animals. Until the middle of the 20th century, humans were believed to possess unique abilities to make and use tools, to learn and design, and above all to be self-aware—qualities that religious people believed placed us next to God in possessing these abilities because we had been created in its image.

Since then, one formerly unique human ability after another has been shown to be possessed by other animals, mainly, but not exclusively, mammals and birds. Many species are now known to use tools and some are even known to make them. And many have been shown to be self-aware, using the 'mirror test' in which an animal can identify the image in the mirror as itself—see the information in the side panel for many examples of other animals with these formerly 'unique' human abilities.

Now a team of researchers, led by Dr. Shumpei Sogawa and Professor Masanori Kohda of Osaka Metropolitan University, Osaka, Japan, have shown that a fish, the cleaner wrasse, shows evidence of self-awareness according to the mirror test. These small fish specialise in removing parasites from the bodies of larger fish, even entering the mouths of predators to remove food particles and parasites from between the teeth and on the gills of their 'clients'. The Osaka-led team recently published their findings, open access, in the journal Scientific Reports.

Refuting Creationism - Why There Are No fossils Of The Early Sponges From 650 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Sponges in the Ediacaran

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A giant barrel sponge from Indonesia. Sponges were the first reef builders and maintain a fundamental role in modern marine ecosystems.

January: Bristol scientists discover early sponges were soft | News and features | University of Bristol

Creationists have a massive gap to try to close; a gap so wide it makes the Grand Canyon look like a mere ditch. It is the gap between the earliest signs of life in the fossil record and the timeline a literal reading of the Bible allows. And that gap just got a lot wider.

Creationists could once take comfort from the fact that there was little solid fossil evidence of multicellular life much before the Cambrian, when organisms with hard body parts that fossilise begin to appear in the record. That gap was closed, not by fossils as we normally understand the term, but by chemical fossils contained in ancient rocks, as I explained in my last blog post. This evidence, together with genetic evidence from other work, shows that the common ancestors of multicellular animal life were very probably sea sponges.

But to a creationist, conditioned to believe that the Theory of Evolution is a theory about fossils—so that any gaps in the fossil record must be fatal for the theory—there is still some comfort in the fact that whatever left these chemical fingerprints in ancient rocks left no tangible fossils.

Now a team of palaeontologists, led by the University of Bristol, have shown that the lack of fossil evidence of these ancestral sponges has a simple explanation: they were soft-bodied, having yet to evolve the characteristic skeletons composed of millions of microscopic glass-like spicules. These did not evolve until about 560 million years ago. The team have recently published their findings, open access, in the journal Science Advances.

The Bristol-led team have now pushed back the evolution of these soft-bodied sponges to between 615 and 600 million years ago by using a combination of genetic evidence from 133 protein-coding genes and fossil evidence. This approach also showed that the spicules evolved independently in different sponge groups by convergent evolution.

Refuting Creationism - Our Earliest Animal Ancestors May Have Been Sea Sponges - 541 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Some of the first animals on Earth were likely ancestors of the modern sea sponge, according to MIT geochemists who unearthed new evidence in very old rocks.

Image: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT

The first animals on Earth may have been sea sponges, study suggests | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Another fatal blow against creationism was revealed recently by geochemists led by Professor Roger E. Summons of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with news that they have found chemical evidence in ancient rocks suggesting that the earliest animals may have been the ancestors of sponges, living some 541 million years ago. Their findings have just been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

They succeeded in extracting the chemical signature of animal life from rocks in Oman, where they found an abundance of steranes that they determined were the preserved remnants of 30-carbon (C₃₀) sterols — a rare form of steroid that they showed was most likely derived from ancient sea sponges known as demosponges.

Not only is this fatal to creationists' notion of Earth being just a few thousand years old, with all living organisms magically created without ancestry and with different “kinds” unrelated to other “kinds”, but it also delivers another hammer blow to the creationist parody of the so-called 'Cambrian Explosion' as a literal explosive creation of multiple body plans in a single event. Slightly more sophisticated creationists attempt to claim that this was the act of creation for which the tales in Genesis are merely a metaphor, with each day of 'creation week' representing millions of years — a claim that collapses on realisation that, according to Genesis, green plants would have had to exist for millions of years with no sun to drive photosynthesis, since the sun is supposedly created the 'day' after plants.

This analysis pushes the origins of the Cambrian biota back into the Ediacaran, showing not a sudden spontaneous creation 540 million years ago, but the cumulative products of evolutionary diversification, probably beginning with these early multicellular organisms.
In addition to Professor Roger E. Summons of MIT, the team included Dr Lubna Shawar of Caltech, Gordon Love of the University of California, Riverside, Benjamin Uveges of Cornell University, Alex Zumberge of GeoMark Research in Houston, Paco Cárdenas of Uppsala University in Sweden, and José-Luis Giner of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

Refuting Creationism - Creationists Rebutted By Old Irish Goats From Before The Legendary Genocidal Flood

Old Irish Goat carries 3,000 years of Irish history - University College Dublin

If the biblical flood really wiped the slate of life almost clean a few thousand years ago, we should expect to see unmistakable genetic signatures of that event across modern species. Instead, what scientists repeatedly find is exactly the opposite: long, continuous lineages stretching back thousands of years before the supposed catastrophe.

A good example comes from Ireland, where geneticists at University College Dublin, in collaboration with colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast and international partners, have shown that the ‘Old Irish Goat’, an Gabhar Fiáin – the wild goat – is a descendant of goats living in Bronze Age Ireland some 3,000 years ago, and thus ultimately of an older population introduced by Neolithic agriculturalists about 5,900 years ago. Their paper is published open access in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

According to Bible literalists, there was a general reset of Earth’s biology a few thousand years ago when their god supposedly decided to destroy everything in a fit of pique because its creation had gone wrong and, rather than undertaking an entirely new creation, chose instead to start again with a few survivors, hoping the outcome would be different this time. However, time and again we find evidence not of a general reset but of uninterrupted continuity of cultures and ancient species, such as the Old Irish Goat, which existed both before and after the supposed reset.

The problem for creationists is that, although they claim there was a period of miraculous hyper-evolution in which a handful of ‘kinds’ that survived the genocide radiated into all the modern species—an event which appears to have gone unnoticed and unreported by the people who supposedly lived while it was happening, and a belief for which there is no Biblical basis—the Old Irish Goat shares its common ancestry with other goats long before the alleged flood, not within the last few thousand years. Within the creationist paradigm, therefore, it must trace its ancestry to just two survivors. However, although there is evidence of a genetic bottleneck, this is very recent and is due to population collapse brought about by human activity; there is no evidence of the narrow bottleneck of just two individuals about 4,000 years ago.

Refuting Creationism - Global Spread of Giant Predatory 'Sea Salamanders' - 250 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Erythrobatrachus noonkanbahensis (foreground) and Aphaneramma (middle ground)

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

250 million-year-old amphibian fossils from Australia reveal global spread of ‘sea-salamanders’

Since the beginning of 2026, with only a few days spent on other projects, I’ve been able to write one or two articles every day about yet another paper that comprehensively refutes basic creationist dogma and illustrates the strength of the Theory of Evolution as the grand unifying theory of biology, without which little of it would make sense. Over the same period, there has not been the faintest hint of a paper providing peer-reviewed support for ID creationism, or even suggesting that the Theory of Evolution is in crisis and in need of replacement because it cannot explain the facts.

Today is no exception, with the second such paper. The first showed how people were using signs and patterns to communicate ideas 30,000 years before creationists think Earth was created; this one discusses the fossil record from 250 million years ago and what it tells us about the evolution of early marine tetrapods — animals that had returned to the marine environment from which their ancestors had originally emerged and had become apex predators. In this case, the focus is on an amphibian that had converged on a body shape resembling a crocodile.

It also shows how an environmental catastrophe — itself utterly inconsistent with creationist notions of a created perfection ideally suited for life — created opportunities that could be exploited by the evolutionary process, allowing surviving lineages to radiate into new species, exactly as evolutionary theory predicts. Again, this stands in stark contrast to the childish notion of special creation without ancestors by some unexplained magical process.

The paper, by an international team led by Dr Lachlan Hart of the University of New South Wales, has just been published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. It explains how fossils of a marine amphibian, Erythrobatrachus noonkanbahensis, found in the Blina Shale and originally described in 1972 from material recovered in the 1960s, turn out on re-examination to represent two different species, one of which rapidly achieved a near-global distribution, probably by coastal dispersal around the supercontinent Gondwana.

These species appear to have flourished soon after the ‘Great Dying’, the end-Permian mass extinction event that saw the disappearance of 90–96% of all species (around 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species).

Dr Hart has explained his team’s research and its significance in a University of New South Wales news item. He has also written an article in The Conversation, reproduced below under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. First, background information on the end Permian mass extinction or 'Great Dying':

Refuting Creationism - Humans were recording information 30,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'.

The Adorant figurine from Geißenklösterle Cave, approximately 40,000 years old, consists of a small ivory plate bearing an anthropomorphic figure and multiple sequences of notches and dots. The application of these marks suggests a notational system, most notably in the rows of dots on the back of the plate.

© Landesmuseum Württemberg / Hendrik Zwietasch, CC BY 4.0

Signs on Stone Age objects: Precursor to written language dates back 40,000 years | Universität des Saarlandes

Creationists have to be increasingly inventive in their attempts to explain away the inconvenient facts emerging from science — facts showing that complex life existed on Earth long before their chronology allows there to have been an Earth at all. That difficulty was not eased today with the discovery that humans were recording information at least 40,000 years ago — some 30,000 years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’.

This discovery, by linguist Professor Christian Bentz at Saarland University and archaeologist Dr. Ewa Dutkiewicz at the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte (Museum of Prehistory and Early History) in Berlin, is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. By analysing more than 3,000 geometric patterns recorded on 260 figurines and tools, the authors showed that these markings contain information densities comparable to the earliest proto-cuneiform scripts from around 3000 BCE in Mesopotamia.

This points to a level of cultural sophistication — and a need to communicate and preserve ideas — among some of the earliest anatomically modern humans to colonise Eurasia, tens of thousands of years before Bronze Age pastoralists in the Middle East began writing down their imaginative origin myths to fill the gaps in their knowledge and understanding of the world.

Refuting Creationism - Closing a Gap In the Fossil Record - 190 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Xiphodracon goldencapensis

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Reconstruction of what the Xiphodracon could have looked like.

Bob Nicholls.

Rare Jurassic 'Sword Dragon' prehistoric reptile discovered in the UK

Creationists crave gaps in scientific knowledge as somewhere to relocate their ever-shrinking little god, but few of them would have been aware of this particular gap — and even if they had been, it lay inconveniently within that vast stretch of Earth’s history that occurred long before creationism’s deity allegedly created the small flat planet with a dome over it described in Genesis.

The gap concerned the fossil record of ichthyosaur evolution — those marine, dolphin-like reptiles that were apex predators in the Jurassic oceans. The gap-filling specimen was recovered from cliffs near Golden Cap in Dorset, part of the ‘Jurassic Coast’.

It bridges the interval between the extinction of earlier ichthyosaur families and the emergence of later ones. Further compounding the embarrassment for creationists, it represents a genuinely transitional species, displaying a mosaic of primitive and derived features.

The new find — one of the most complete ichthyosaurs ever discovered — is described in a paper by Dean R. Lomax of Bristol University and honorary research fellow at Manchester University, Judy A. Massare of the State University of New York at Brockport, and Erin E. Maxwell of the State Museum of Natural History, Stuttgart, Germany, published in Papers in Palaeontology.

An additional difficulty for Intelligent Design advocates is that, like other secondarily marine vertebrates such as dolphins, turtles, seals and other cetaceans, ichthyosaurs were constrained to return to the surface to breathe. Their respiratory system was inherited from their terrestrial tetrapod ancestors. Yet, according to creationist claims, their putative designer had already produced an efficient system for extracting oxygen from water using gills. There is therefore no obvious theological reason why that same designer could not have equipped marine reptiles with gills as well.

Evolution, of course, has no foresight and no capacity to redeploy complex anatomical systems wholesale from one distant lineage to another. It can only modify inherited structures, constrained by ancestry and developmental pathways.

Refuting Creationism - Nosey Secrets of Triceratops Reveal Advanced Evolution - 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Triceratops skull. Seishiro Tada (left) standing next to an awe-inspiring Triceratops skull, with its enormous nasal cavity visible at the front.

©2026 Tada CC-BY-ND

Why Triceratops has such a big nose | The University of Tokyo

Once upon a time, in that ancient world during the 99.975% of Earth’s history that elapsed before creationism’s small god supposedly conceived the idea of creating a small flat plane with a dome over it in the Middle East, there lived a dinosaur that had evolved a horned head and a wide protective frill to shield its vulnerable neck from the jaws of the large predators that ruled the land some 100 million years ago. Carrying those horns and that protective neck shield required a large head — and a large head is difficult to keep cool.

The solution, according to researcher Seishiro Tada of the University of Tokyo Museum, was a large nasal cavity containing turbinate bones to mix incoming air, together with a plentiful blood supply to dissipate excess heat. Tada and colleagues from various Japanese research institutions have recently published their findings in The Anatomical Record.

This is not a fairy story, but what palaeontology is revealing.

From an evolutionary perspective, this research shows that Triceratops was the product of a long evolutionary process in which predation drove the development of large defensive structures, which in turn created new physiological challenges — in this case, the risk of overheating. Those challenges then drove further evolutionary adaptations. In other words, the solution to one problem generated another problem to be solved, all as part of a predator–prey arms race. This dynamic makes no sense as the work of an intelligent designer, but it is precisely what evolutionary theory predicts.

Refuting Creationism - A Small Problem for Science - A Massive Blow For Creationists

Scarisoara Ice Cave in Romania.

Credit: Paun V.I.

Bacteria frozen in ancient underground ice cave found to be resistant against 10 modern antibiotics

As every schoolboy knows, Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic when the fungus Penicillium contaminated a Petri dish in which he had been culturing bacteria. What Fleming had discovered was a naturally occurring antibacterial substance produced by the fungus.

Such compounds are produced by fungi as part of their evolutionary arms race with the bacteria in their environment, and there is a whole range of them, many still awaiting discovery. On the other side of this arms race, bacteria evolve resistance.

It is a struggle that has been going on for hundreds of millions of years, ever since fungi evolved — and perhaps even earlier between ancestral eukaryotes and bacteria. Modern medical use of antibiotics has simply accelerated this ancient contest. We are now facing a major challenge in keeping pace with bacterial evolution, and hospitals in particular have become breeding grounds for resistant strains.

The tendency, therefore, is to assume that antibiotic resistance is a modern, anthropogenic phenomenon. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to learn that a bacterium, Psychrobacter SC65A.3, recovered from 5,000-year-old ice cores in a Romanian cave, has been found to be resistant to ten modern antibiotics.

Frankly, this is difficult to explain other than in terms of earlier evolutionary arms races. The discovery, by a team from the Institute of Biology, Bucharest, Romania, with colleagues from the University of Bucharest and the Universidad de Antofagasta, Chile, is reported in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology.

While this finding presents microbiologists with an intriguing puzzle, it presents creationists with a more acute problem. There simply should not be 5,000-year-old ice preserved in a Romanian cave — let alone viable bacteria within it — if the biblical narrative of a global flood some 4,000 years ago were historically accurate. And if a putative designer deity created bacteria already equipped with resistance to antibiotics that would not be synthesised by humans for millennia, that would imply pre-emptive malevolence.

This leaves modern Intelligent Design advocates with an uncomfortable choice: retreat into literalist theology and abandon scientific reasoning, or confront the implications of the evidence.

Abiogenesis News - Origin Of Complex (Eukarote) Cells - Origin Of The Cell Nucleus

Amoeba infected with a giant virus

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Ushikuvirus: A newly discovered giant virus may offer clues to the evolutionary relationships
Researchers discover a new virus called the "ushikuvirus" that provide evidence for the viral eukaryogenesis hypothesis and reveal virus-host interactions, shaping the evolution of eukaryotic cells.

Professor Masaharu Takemura.

Ushikuvirus: A Newly Discovered Giant Virus May Offer Clues to the Origin of Life | Tokyo University of Science

One of the remaining questions in evolutionary biology is how the complex (eukaryotic) cell acquired its defining feature: a membrane-bound nucleus in which the DNA is stored.

Prokaryotic cells — bacteria and archaea — possess a single circular DNA molecule located in the cytoplasm. By contrast, all eukaryotic cells contain their genetic material within a membrane-bound nucleus. Now scientists at the Graduate School of Science, Tokyo University of Science (TUS), Japan, led by Professor Masaharu Takemura, have provided further evidence that the eukaryotic nucleus may have originated from a giant DNA virus, similar to those that infect certain species of amoeba. Their findings suggest that the origin of the nucleus may be closely linked to the evolutionary history of this class of virus as it adapted to different hosts.

Professor Takemura and Dr Philip Bell, from the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University, Sydney, independently proposed the viral eukaryogenesis theory (a term coined by Dr Bell) in 2001, suggesting that large DNA viruses — such as poxviruses — might represent plausible ancestors. Since then, beginning in 2003, the discovery of several giant DNA viruses has provided more compelling candidates. When these viruses infect a host cell, they establish so-called ‘virus factories’ within the cytoplasm. In some cases these structures are enclosed within membranes that resemble the nuclear envelope.

The hypothesis proposes that, rather than destroying its host, such a virus formed a long-term association with it. Over evolutionary time, it may have incorporated host genes and transitioned from parasite to symbiotic genetic compartment — eventually becoming the nucleus.

For advocates of “irreducible complexity”, the nucleus is often presented as an all-or-nothing structure: a fully formed membrane, nuclear pores, transport machinery, chromatin organisation and regulatory systems supposedly appearing together or not at all. Yet the viral eukaryogenesis model shows how this argument collapses once intermediate stages are recognised. Giant DNA viruses already construct membrane-bound replication compartments inside host cells; they encode components involved in DNA replication, transcription and even elements of translation.

These viral “factories” function as semi-autonomous genetic centres within the cytoplasm — in effect, simplified proto-nuclei. If such a structure entered into a stable symbiotic relationship with a host cell, incremental gene exchange and co-evolution could gradually integrate and refine the system. Each step would confer immediate functional advantages — protection of DNA, separation of transcription from translation, improved regulation — without requiring the simultaneous appearance of a fully modern nucleus. What is claimed to be irreducible instead looks like a product of stepwise evolutionary integration.

Now Professor Takemura’s team report the discovery of a new giant DNA virus infecting amoebae — the ushikuvirus, named after Lake Ushiku where it was isolated — lending further support to the viral eukaryogenesis theory. Their discovery is reported in Journal of Virology.

Abiogenesis News - Origin Of Complex (Eukaryote) Cells - Association With Mitochondria.

Beginnings of symbiosis

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A Break in a Longstanding Mystery about Origin of Complex Life | College of Natural Sciences

Here are a couple of papers published today that deal with related aspects of the origins of complex (eukaryotic) cells — all living organisms apart from Bacteria, Archaea and viruses (the prokaryotes). There is little doubt in biology that eukaryotes evolved from symbiotic associations between prokaryotes, despite the regular creationist straw man claim that scientists are naïve enough — or somehow brainwashed by evil “Darwinists” — to believe that the first complex cell arose spontaneously in a single step so fantastically improbable that magical creation becomes an almost plausible alternative.

In reality, as these two papers demonstrate, the precise details of how these symbiotic associations arose remain matters of active research and debate. I will deal with the second paper in a separate blog post. This post concerns the paper by scientists from The University of Texas at Austin, published in *Nature*, which addresses the question of how the oxygen-dependent bacterium that became the mitochondrion came together with a presumed anaerobic (oxygen-intolerant) archaeon, given that the two would not be expected to occupy the same environment.

The team propose that this apparent problem may be resolved by evidence that some archaea of the Asgard group — which today live primarily in the deep sea and other oxygen-free environments — can use, or at least tolerate, oxygen.

The Asgard archaea most closely related to eukaryotic cells are found in shallow coastal sediments or floating in the marine column. Crucially, they possess metabolic pathways that use oxygen. It is therefore possible that their ancestors did as well, meaning they could have cohabited with the bacterial ancestors of mitochondria.

Creationism In Crisis - What Caused Homo Floresiensis (The 'Hobbit') To Go Extinct - 40,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'?

Homo floresiensis hunting a Stegodon

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Reconstruction of Homo floresiensis

By Cicero Moraes et al, Arc-Team Research
CC BY 4.0, Link

The ‘hobbits’ mysteriously disappeared 50,000 years ago. Our new study reveals what happened to their home

Long before anatomically modern Homo sapiens took their first tentative steps out of Africa and established themselves in Eurasia, an archaic hominin, Homo erectus, had already done so about a million years earlier, spreading across Asia into what is now the Indonesian archipelago and diversifying into a number of species and regional variants along the way.

One lineage settled on the island of Flores, where they encountered a miniature species of elephant, Stegodon florensis insularis, which probably became one of their principal sources of meat. By a process known to evolutionary biologists as Foster's Rule or the “island effect”, the descendants of these hominins also became smaller, eventually evolving into Homo floresiensis, popularly known as “The Hobbit” on account of their diminutive stature. Then, quite suddenly, they disappeared from history some 50,000 years ago.

Now an international team of archaeologists, including scientists from the University of Wollongong (UOW), Australia, believe they have found evidence explaining their extinction. It appears to have coincided with the disappearance of Stegodon florensis insularis and to have been driven by extensive climate change that began about 76,000 years ago, culminating in severe summer droughts between 61,000 and 50,000 years ago. The researchers reached this conclusion through analysis of the chemical record preserved in stalagmites from Flores caves, alongside isotopic data from the teeth of Stegodon. Their paper has just been published open access in Communications Earth & Environment.

In addition to the University of Wollongong news release explaining the study, four of the authors have written an article in The Conversation. Their article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Refuting Creationism - A Dinosaur With Spikes - 125 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Haolong dongi in a Cretaceous forest setting

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Artistic reconstruction of a juvenile Haolong dongi from the Early Cretaceous of China (125 million years ago).

© Fabio Manucci.

A dinosaur with spikes exhibiting unprecedented properties discovered in China | CNRS

Almost eight weeks into the New Year and not a single scientific paper has emerged in support of creationism—or its pseudo-scientific variant, Intelligent Design. Not even a speculative hint of the long-predicted collapse of ‘Darwinism’, nor any sign that Intelligent Design is making inroads into biomedical science. Instead, the steady flow of research continues to do precisely the opposite: quietly and methodically reinforcing evolutionary biology as the indispensable framework through which palaeontology, cell biology, virology and the rest of modern life sciences make coherent, testable sense of the evidence.

Today brings yet another example. An international team led by researchers from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), working at the Université de Rennes, has identified a new species of iguanodontian dinosaur that lived in what is now China around 125 million years ago. Their paper, recently published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, reports that this species was probably covered in hollow spikes, somewhat reminiscent of porcupine quills. The team have named the new species Haolong dongi in honour of Dong Zhiming, a pioneer of Chinese palaeontology.

Using X-ray scans and high-resolution histological sections, the researchers were able to identify preserved skin structures, revealing hollow cutaneous spikes over much of the animal’s body. Although herbivorous, this dinosaur lived in an environment where predation pressure from small carnivores would have been significant, and the spikes likely provided a degree of protection comparable to that of modern porcupines. The structures may also have played roles in thermoregulation and/or sensory perception.