Unintelligent Design - Vestigial 'Fossil' Ear Muscles Still Try to Function

Muscles of the head

AI-generated image (with AI spelling)

Muscles of the ear

Image by BioDigital, edited by Lecturio

‘A neural fossil’: human ears try to move when listening, scientists say | Biology | The Guardian

In my book, The Body Of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design I list very many examples of the sort of design only a fool would produce - examples of sub-optimal compromises in structures and processes that could have been less error-prone and more efficient in terms of resource use or function.

These also included vestigial structures and system that still exist, sometime causing problems such as appendicitis when the functionless appendix becomes infected, and the wasted metabolism in making all the tiny hairs on your body stand up in cold weather using the tiny arrector pili muscles and the autonomic nerves that supply them.

Now we have another example, involving the superior and posterior auricular muscles that once moved the ears in a remote simian ancestor, but now only serve as party tricks for the few of us that can wiggle our ears.

Refuting Creationism - How Horseshoe Crabs Have Evolved And Diversified

Indo-pacific horseshoe crab, Tachypleus gigas

By Shubham Chatterjee - Own work,
CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Indo-Pacific Horseshoe Crab, Tachypleus tridentatus

Photo: Dr Tang Qian

Preserving Asian horseshoe crab populations through targeted conservation strategies

In creationist mythology, horseshoe crabs have remained unchanged for 400 million years, so they prove there is no such thing as evolution and Earth is only 6-0,000 years old. Apart from the typical lack of joined-up thinking in that non sequitur, there are a couple of fallacy at work here.

Firstly, evolution does not necessarily involve major changes in the phenotype because it happens at the genetic level, so the genome is where we need to look to find evidence of it (or lack of it); secondly there is no requirement for a species that is already adapted to its environment to change unless its environment changes in a way that requires adaptation. This might include increased predation, depletion of food resource, major changes in temperature or oxygenation, increased competition from another species, etc.

With their child-like understanding of evolution, creationists assume a species must change into something else for evolution to happen.

In fact, as a team a research team led by Associate Professor Frank Rheindt from the Department of Biological Sciences at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Faculty of Science have now shown, there are four different species of horseshoe crab which have all diversified from a common ancestor.

Refuting Creationism - How The Common Barn Swallow Shows Evolution In Progress

Hirundo rustica rustica (left) and Hirundo rustica tytleri (right) have different sexually selected traits. For example, one has a red chest and the other has a pale chest.

A pair of Hirundo rustica erythrogaster.

Credit: Matt Wilkins.

A front-row seat to evolution: What common barn swallows can teach us about how new species form | CU Boulder Today | University of Colorado Boulder

This paper in Science passed me by last December but it's too good to ignore because it is an example of something that creationists insist has never been seen because it doesn't happen - evolution in progress. And, to annoy creationists even more, it's an example of something Charles Darwin proposed as a mechanism for speciation - mate selection - as the isolating mechanism.

Barn swallows are one of the species that has formed a commensal relationship with humans that does not, like many other commensal species, involve it in consuming our crops either in the fields or in storage, from when we began building permanent or semi-permanent buildings. They are now dependent on our barns and out-houses as nesting places.

Unitelligent Design - How The Giant Clam Has a Needlessly Complex Way To Get Nutrients

Giant clams have colourful mantles.

Ruiqi Li/CU Boulder

How tiny algae shaped the evolution of giant clams | CU Boulder Today | University of Colorado Boulder

You can depend on creationism's idiot designer to never do something the obvious uncomplicated way when there is an obscure and much more complicated way to achieve the same result. It's almost exactly like it's a mindless fool, blundering about without a plan who sometimes happens across something that works and sticks with it, trying to make the best of it with more blundering.

Quite the opposite of what anyone other than a creationist would call intelligent, in fact.

For example, having designed a giant clam to live in nutrient poor coral reefs, it then designed them to have algae living symbiotically inside them, supplementing their megre diet got by filtering the seawater, with sugars manufactured by photosynthesis. This enables the giant clam to grow up to 4.5 feet (1.4 metres) in length and weigh over 700 pound (317 Kg).

Any intelligent designer could have either designed them to live in a less nutrient-poor environment or given them the chloroplasts the algae have to achieve the same result far more simply.

But of course, the giant clam wasn't intelligently designed; it evolved by the utilitarian evolutionary process that is constrained by its evolutionary history and so finds suboptimal but functional processes that a needlessly complex. This complexity impresses creationists because, not understanding how evolution works, they imagine it reflects intelligent design, instead of refuting it.

Refuting Creationism - Beetles Were Feeding on Dinosaur Feathers - 100 million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Moult remains of feather-feeding beetle larvae intimately associated with downy feather portions from an unidentified theropod dinosaur in Early Cretaceous amber of Spain. Insets show the head with powerful mandibles of one of the larval moults (top) and the pigmentation pattern of feather second order branches (bottom), with the main stem of one feather at the right of the amber fragment. The length of the amber fragment is 6 millimetres across.

Image credit: CN IGME-CSIC.

Fossils reveal a 100-million-year-old relationship between feathered dinosaurs and feather-feeding beetles | University of Oxford

Isolated moult of the feather-feeding beetle larva found in the Spanish amber outcrop of Rábago/El Soplao, with detail of its powerful mandibles (right). Length of the moult is less than two millimetres.

Image credit: CN IGME-CSIC.

To normal people, the discovery of feather-eating beetles and feather fragments in 105-million-year-old amber, 30 million years before there were birds might be a clue that something had feathers before bird had them, suggesting that birds might have evolved from whatever that was.

Not so, creationists, however. Creationists conclude that any evidence that doesn't agree with them must be wrong because their evidence-free dogma is sacred and therefore uninfluenced by real-world evidence.

So, the following is just something else for creationists to ignore while they pretend to know better than the experts who have, unlike creationists, actually studied the subject.

It is news that a study, co-led between the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain of the Spanish National Research Council (CN IGME-CSIC) and Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH) has shown that beetles fed on the feathers of dinosaurs about 105 million years ago. This is based on an analysis of spectacular fossil amber fragments, from the locality of San Just in north-eastern Spain, revealed moults of tiny beetle larvae tightly surrounded by portions of downy feathers.

The feathers belonged to an unknown theropod dinosaur that lived around 105 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous. This means that the feathers could not have come from a ‘modern bird’ species, since current evidence indicates that this group appeared about 30 million years later in the fossil record, during the Late Cretaceous.

Refuting Creationism - How Leaf Beetles Got New Genes

The leaf beetle Spilopyra sumptuosa lives in the rainforests of eastern Australia. Its spectacular, colourful appearance is an example of the rich diversity of the large family of leaf beetles.

© Veit Grabe / Roy Kirsch,
Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology

Asparagus beetle, Crioceris asparagi

David Gould

Reading the genome and understanding evolution: Symbioses and gene transfer in leaf beetles

Creationists who have been fooled by the disinformation pumped out by the Discovery Institute, especially by William Dembski, believe that the only way an organism can gain new genetic information is by being given it, pre-prepared, by a magic intelligent designer, who has the magical power to assemble new DNA in just the right order and insert it into a species' genome, by a mysterious process that neither Dembski, nor one of his co-misinformers, are willing to explain.

This, of course, ignores the scientific evidence that new genetic information can be acquired by a species in several different ways, not the least of which is by horizontal gene transfer from another species, as researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, the Max Planck Institute of Biology in Tübingen, Germany, and a consortium of international scientists have just shown in respect of the leaf beetles, one of the most successful group of beetles with more than 50,000 different species worldwide.

The Malevolent Designer - How Creationism Divine Malevolence Brilliantly Designed HIV to Kill Us With

Getty Images

HZI | Decoding HIV's tactics

This should thrill devotees of creationism's intelligent designer because it exposes what a brilliant job it did in designing the human immunosuppressive virus (HIV) that causes the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). It was discovered by a group of researchers at the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) in Würzburg and the University of Regensburg, Germany.

They have discovered how HIV hijacks the internal machinery in our cells to ensure its own survival.

Creationism in Crisis - Early Hominins in Eurasia - >1.95 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Cut marks on specimen from the Olteţ River Valley assemblage.

Curran, et al (2025)

Research team led by OHIO’s Sabrina Curran finds new evidence that pushes back the arrival of early hominins in Europe; discovery published in Nature Communications

Mandible with cut marks

Curran, et al (2025)

The problem with trying to maintain a belief that Earth is between 6 and 10 thousand years old is that 99.9975% of its history occurred earlier than 10,000 years ago, so almost everything archaeologists and geologists discover will prove to be from before you believe Earth existed, which, for normal people, might just be more than a hint that Earth is considerably older than you think.

Not so for creationists however, who consider their beliefs to be sacred and unfalsifiable, so the facts must be wrong.

The traditional way is to declare that radioactive decay rates on which geological formations and archaeological artifacts are dated must have changed, sometimes by many orders of magnitude.

These same creationists will also argue in a different context that the laws of nature which govern the structure and behaviour of the Universe and everything in it are so finely tuned to support life, that they must have been set by an intelligent designer.

However one of those 'fine-tuned' parameters is the weak nuclear force that binds the protons and neutrons in the atomic nuclei and for a radioactive atom to decay means that a quantum fluctuation in the energy levels in some of these particles must exceed the weak force binding them together, so the particle is ejected. But, for radioactive decay rates to be several orders of magnitude higher, the weak nuclear force would need to be much lower, below the point at which even stable atomic nuclei form at all. This means, when they believe the universe was created along with atoms, planets and life were created, there would have been no atoms to make it all from. Life would have been impossible.

An added problem is that scientists have shown that radioactive decay rates of different elements remain absolutely constant in a range of extreme temperature and pressure conditions, so there appears to be no support whatsoever for the declaration that decay rates have changed by several orders of magnitude so that an age of 10,000 year or less just happens to look like 300 million years or whatever finding is being waved aside.

If there were any merit in the creationist claim of a fine-tuned Universe, then it has been fine-tuned to make it look 14 billion years old, Earth to look nearly 4 billion years old and living organisms to have been on it for most of that time.

With that in mind then, researchers have just announced that they have found evidence of the presence of hominins in Eurasia 2 million years ago, which pushes back the earliest evidence of hominin presence outside Africa by at least 150,000 years to a time considerably earlier than Homo sapiens first appear in the fossil record - supporting the theory that the earliest migration into Eurasia was by an archaic hominin such as H. erectus.

Refuting Creationism - Walking With Dinosaurs - 166 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Researchers found carnivore and herbivore tracks crossing over which raises questions about whether and how the two were interacting.

Credit: University of Birmingham.

Excavated footprint.

Credit: Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Major new footprint discoveries on Britain’s ‘dinosaur highway’ | University of Oxford

Scientists from Oxford and Birmingham Universities have uncovered hundreds of tracks of different sorts of dinosaur in a quarry in North Oxfordshire, and, unlike those in the Paluxy Riverbed, Texas, USA, no-one has carved human footprints in amongst them to fool tourists.

Amongst the tracks are five distinct trackways, the longest of which is 150 meters. Sadly for creationists, we can be sure there will not be any human footprints in the same rock formation because these tracks were made around 166 million years ago when the earliest mammals hadn't diversified even into simians, let alone the African apes.

Refuting Creationism - Our Ancesters Were Vegetarian, 3 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

'Little Foot' from the Sterkfontein Cave, South Africa

Witwatersrand University

Three million years ago, our ancestors were vegetarian - Wits University

The Australopithecus genus is widely regarded as the immediate ancestor of the Homo genus that includes modern humans, Homo sapiens, but, from new evidence revealed by a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, it appears that meat did not become part of our immediate ancestors' diet until after Homo species emerged.

The evidence comes from an isotope analysis of the enamel from the fossilised teeth of seven Australopithecus individuals is strongly indicative of a vegetarian diet with little or no meat consumption.

How they discovered this is the subject of a paper in Science and a new item from Witwatersrand University. Creationists should note that the isotopes of nitrogen on which this analysis is based are stable, so the traditional excuse that radioactive decay rates have changes over time is not relevant here. Besides, they are not the basis of dating these fossils, but of working out where in the food chain these Australopithecines were:

New Book - The Intelligent Design Advocate's Handbook

AI-generated image (ChatGPT4o)

Ever since teaching creationism in public schools in the USA was found to violate the Establishment Clause, by the Supreme Court in Edwards V. Aguillard (1987) the Discovery Institute has been following the "Wedge Strategy" to try to insert Christiaon fundamentalism into all aspects of American cultural, political and scientific life, using the notion of Intelligent Design as the thin end of the wedge. A campaign with the aim of nothing short of the removal of the Establishment Clause and the dismantling of Thomas Jefferson's Wall of separtion between church and state' as a precondition for establishing a Christian theocracy in the USA.

The thrust of this strategy is to try to cast doubt on the scientific validity of 'Darwinism', i.e., the Theory of Evolution, by misrepresenttion, misinformation and downright lies, to present Intelligent Design creationism as a genuine alternative scientific explanation for biodiversity, a strategy that relies on the false dichotomy fallacy that if evolution is false, creationism wins by default.

How they have been persuing this strategy is exposed in this AI-generated spoof ID advocates handbook, based on a systematic analysis and distillation of the tricks, lies and disinformation promulgated by ID advocates under the leadership of the Discovery Institute over several decade, which has become more concerted since the movement lost badly in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in which ID was exposed as creationism in a lab coat. In that trial, leading ID advocate, Professor Michael J. Behe, whose views have been repudiated by his colleagues at Lehigh University Biological Science Department, was forced to admit under oath that ID is science in the same way that alchemy and astrology are science, and that:

There are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred.

Professor Michael J. Behe
Kitzmiller v. Dover, Day 12 Am Session

Unintelligent Design - Creationism's Designer Tries Again, and Fails, Five Times

Barbourofelis in its native Miocene habitat

AI-generated image (ChatGPT4o)

New research reveals why sabre-toothed predators evolved their deadly teeth

Creationism's designer god is nothing if not a trier - or maybe it’s just a slow learner. It tried and failed five times to create carnivores with ferocious-looking but ultimately fatal, sabre teeth.

The problem with long, curved canine teeth is that, although they are good at killing big animals quickly by tearing their throat out or stabbing them to death, because of the additional leverage on the long teeth, and the high risk of striking bone, they are prone to break, leaving their owner to starve to death.

And this has happened at least five times in evolutionary history.

The problem is there is an optimal size and shape depending in the prey species but this produces selection pressure to become more specialised in the prey which in turn produces selection pressure to produce longer, sharper teeth until the tooth shape reaches a pinnacle of shape optimised for that particular prey species. However, there is an evolutionary trade-off in that as the teeth become more specialised, the carnivore becomes more specialised and dependent on the prey species, so they are vulnerable to ecological changes that mean their prey becomes scarce of goes extinct.

How and why this occurred repeatedly due to convergent evolution is the subject of a paper in Current Biology and an open access article in The Conversation by Dr. Tahlia Pollock, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Evans EvoMorph Laboratory, Monash University. Her article is reprinted here, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Ability to Perform Complex Tasks Had Already Evolved Before Chimps and Hominins Split

Male chimp cracking nuts.

Photo: Dora Biro.

Study shows that chimpanzees perform the same complex behaviours that have brought humans success | University of Oxford

Time and again, science is showing that characteristics which were once considered uniquely human, and therefore, according to creationists, evidence that humans are a special creation, distinct from all other animals, are in fact shared with other animals.

Instead of being evidence of unique creation, they are evidence of common origins and descent with modification.

On such human characteristic is the ability to perform complex tasks, involving tool use, in organised sequence, and adapt those sequences if necessary to complete the task. In other words, to plan a strategy for achieving a specific goal.

However, a new study has shown that chimpanzees also have this ability, suggesting it was present in the common ancestor before chimps and Hominins diverged some 6 million years ago.

Refuting Creationism - First Americans Were Killing Mammoths 3,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Clovis people hunting mammoth in Montana during the Ice Age

AI Generated (ChatGPT4o)

An artist’s reconstruction of Clovis life 13,000 years ago shows the Anzick-1 infant with his mother consuming mammoth meat near a hearth. Another individual crafts tools, including dart projectile points and atlatls. A mammoth butchery area is visible nearby. The scene is inspired by the La Prele mammoth site in Wyoming and set against the Montana landscape where the Anzick burial was discovered. Artist Eric Carlson created the scene in collaboration with archaeologists Ben Potter (UAF) and Jim Chatters (McMaster University).

Eric Carlson

Study reveals mammoth as key food source for ancient Americans | UAF news and information

A good 3,000 years before creationism's small god allegedly created the little flat planet with a dome over it described in the Bible, thinking that's what a universe looked like, human beings had migrated to North America and were hunting mammoths.

This is according to a new stable isotope analysis by a team led by researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). Creationists should note that a stable isotope analysis does not depend on radioactive decay rates, so the evidence-free claim that radioactive decay rates have changed isn't open to them. Stabel isotope analysis shows us what the person's diet consisted of.

The analysis was conducted by Professor Ben Potter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and James Chatters of McMaster University, and their colleagues. Their findings are published, open access, in the journal Science Advances and is explained in a UAF new release:

Refuting Creationism - Scientists Got The Date of the Earliest Dinosaur Wrong - It Was Even Earlier

An artist’s rendering shows how Ahvaytum bahndooiveche may have appeared in a habitat dating to around 230 million years ago.

Illustration by Gabriel Ugueto

A University of Wisconsin Geology Museum field crew is seen here in 2016 prospecting for additional material at the site in Wyoming where fossils of Ahvaytum bahndooiveche were discovered in 2013. The researchers are Aaron Kufner (left) and Jennifer Lien.

Photo by David M. Lovelace.

Dinosaurs roamed the northern hemisphere millions of years earlier than previously thought, according to new analysis of the oldest North American fossils

The thing about science that distinguishes it from religion is the willingness to change its collective mind when the facts change. This is because science is led by the fact wherever they lead

Science is reasonable uncertainty religion is unreasonable certainty. Religion appeals to those who value certainty over truth, whereas science appeals to those who value truth above certainty.

And scientists have just changed their collective minds about where and when the first dinosaurs appeared.

The consensus had been that they first appeared on the southern end of the supercontinent Pangea before it split into Gondwana in the South and Laurasia in the north and only spread to Laurasia millions of years later.

What can you tell me about the ancient reptile, Ahvaytum bahndooiveche, and its place in the evolution of dinosaurs? Ahvaytum bahndooiveche is a recently identified dinosaur species from the Late Triassic period, approximately 230 million years ago, discovered in what is now Wyoming, USA. This species is notable for being the oldest known dinosaur from the ancient northern supercontinent Laurasia, challenging previous beliefs that dinosaurs originated solely in the southern supercontinent Gondwana.

Discovery and Naming
The fossil remains of Ahvaytum bahndooiveche were uncovered in 2013 at the Garrett's Surprise locality within the Popo Agie Formation in Wyoming. The genus name "Ahvaytum" translates to "long ago," and the species name "bahndooiveche" means "water's young handsome man," a term used by the Eastern Shoshone to refer to both dinosaurs and colorful native salamanders. This naming honors the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, whose ancestral lands include the discovery site, and reflects a collaborative effort between researchers and Indigenous communities.

Physical Description
Ahvaytum bahndooiveche was a small dinosaur, estimated to be about 3 feet (0.91 meters) in length and 1 foot (0.30 meters) in height, comparable in size to a modern chicken but with a notably long tail. The fossil material includes fragmentary hindlimb bones, such as an isolated left astragalus and a partial left femur, suggesting it had progressed beyond the juvenile stage and was still slowly growing.

Evolutionary Significance
This discovery has significant implications for our understanding of dinosaur evolution. Prior to this find, it was believed that dinosaurs originated in Gondwana and later dispersed to Laurasia. The existence of Ahvaytum bahndooiveche in Laurasia during the same period as the earliest known southern dinosaurs indicates that dinosaurs were more widely distributed across the globe earlier than previously thought. This challenges the hypothesis of a delayed dinosaurian dispersal out of high-latitude Gondwana and suggests a more complex scenario for the early evolution and distribution of dinosaurs.

In summary, Ahvaytum bahndooiveche provides valuable insights into the early stages of dinosaur evolution, highlighting a broader and more rapid dispersal of these creatures across ancient Earth than was previously understood.

Refuting Creationism - Oldest-Known Evolutionary Arms Race in the Cambrian

Lapworthella fasciculata shells (under scanning electron microscope) from the Mernmerna Formation, Flinders Ranges, South Australia

R. Bicknell, et al (2025)

Oldest-Known Evolutionary “Arms Race” in the Cambrian | AMNH

Examples of Lapworthella fasciculata shells (under scanning electron microscope) from the Mernmerna Formation, Flinders Ranges, South Australia showing holes made by a perforating predator. Scale bars represent 200 micrometers.

R. Bicknell, et al (2025)

Perhaps Creationism's designer god is just a slow learner.

Anyone with an intellect greater than that of a plank should be capable of understanding the utter futility and waste in an arms race in which the strategy is to keep running faster just to stay in the same place. Arms races only make sense as the result of a game plan in which you can't communicate with your opponent and have no way of telling what he or she is thinking and if they gain the upper-hand, you lose. The only safe choice is to up the stakes - and that goes for your opponent too.

It becomes even more incomprehensible if the person you're having the arms race with is yourself, unless you're an amnesic with multiple personality disorder, and yet, if we believe creationists, that's exactly what their putative designer god is doing constantly.

Everywhere we look in nature, organisms are competing with one another for resources, or because one is trying to exploit the other as a food source in a predator-prey relationship or as a parasite trying to live in or on another organism and even killing it or making it weak and sickly as a byproduct of its parasitism. And yet creationists insist there is only one designer designing both sides in these arms races.

For some unfathomable reason, creationists like to imagine the idea of a celestial idiot having arms races with itself in millions of relationships in nature is a much better explanation than these arms races being the inevitable result of mindless evolutionary processes where a slight improvement increases the chances of leaving descendants while reducing the chance of the opponent doing the same, so creating a selection pressure for the next twist in the spiral.

New Book - Twenty Reasons To Reject Creationism: Understanding Evolution

This book looks at the ID/Creationism vs evolution debate from multiple angles and analyses why the science of evolutionary biology refutes the childish notion of intelligent design.

I wrote it because, creationism is dangerous. It replaces evidence-based knowledge with superstition and creates the impression that cultural prejudice and ignorant incredulity are better measures of reality than observation, analysis and reason.

Now more than ever we need our politicians, law-makers and captains of industry to be able to make sense of complex data and use it to make wise decisions, not dismiss it as based on ‘flawed’ concepts and the result of conspiracies designed to turn people away from the ‘truth’ as revealed in ancient texts declared to be holy. As is clearly shown in the Discovery Institute’s Wedge Document and in the wilful misrepresentations of science its fellows dutifully feed to the largely scientifically-illiterate public, there is a hidden political agenda that depends on people believing falsehoods and thinking anti-science is some sort of moral crusade to restore Western civilisation to a notional ideal golden age in pre-renaissance Europe when the slave trade was booming and witch-burning was a regular spectacle in the local town square.

This was a time when people like Copernicus and Galileo would be persecuted and deprived of their livelihood and even their life, for revealing the empirical evidence that Earth orbits the sun – not because they had falsified the data but because the data falsified the Bible. The sacred superstitions, even though empirically proved wrong, had to be defended against the truth as revealed by the physical data.

Common Origins - How The Mammalian Outer Ear Evolved - From Our Ancestral Fish Gills

An earful of gill: USC Stem Cell study points to the evolutionary origin of the mammalian outer ear | USC Stem Cell

I'm sorry if this spoils a creationists new year, but a bunch of scientists from the Stem Cell Lab of the University of Southern California have just published a paper showing an ancient ancestor of mammals, including of course us humans, was a fish.

It comes in the form of evidence that our outer ear develops from the same tissues in the embryo as the gills of fish. These tissues have been exapted by evolution for many new structures, one of which is the outer ear of mammals.