Creationism Refuted - A Possible Human Population Bottleneck - 64,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Toba supereruption

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An Impression of the Toba Supereruption, 74,000 Years Ago

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A massive eruption 74,000 years ago affected the whole planet – archaeologists use volcanic glass to figure out how people survived

Mount Toba in the lake formed in the volcanic caldera

Sometimes, religion can be right, but, as Sam Harris has pointed out, when it is right, it is right by accident. Religious beliefs are not based on testable evidence, predictive models or a willingness to be corrected by facts; they amount to little more than inherited guesses, protected from scrutiny by faith. In the loosest possible sense, creationist stories of a tiny ancestral human population contain an accidental echo of a real scientific idea: human ancestry includes bottlenecks, founder effects and periods when populations were small and vulnerable.

But that is where the similarity ends. There was no global flood a few thousand years ago, no ark, no family of eight repopulating the world, and no magic reset of human history in the Bronze Age Middle East. One of the real events sometimes discussed in this context occurred about 74,000 years ago, when the Toba volcano, in what is now Sumatra, Indonesia, produced one of the largest eruptions of the last 2.5 million years. The eruption ejected an estimated 672 cubic miles, or about 2,800 cubic kilometres, of volcanic material into the atmosphere, with the potential to darken skies, cool the climate and devastate ecosystems close to the volcano. [1]

For some years, this gave rise to the Toba catastrophe hypothesis: the idea that the eruption caused a volcanic winter and drove the human population down to fewer than 10,000 individuals. That would have been a dramatic genetic bottleneck, and it is easy to see why it attracted attention. However, the link between Toba and a species-wide human near-extinction is still debated, and recent archaeological and environmental evidence has increasingly complicated, and in some cases weakened, the original claim. Human groups close to the eruption may well have been wiped out, but evidence from other regions suggests continuity, survival and adaptation rather than global extinction followed by repopulation from a tiny remnant. [2]

The more interesting scientific question, therefore, is not simply whether humanity was almost wiped out, but how different human populations coped with a major environmental shock. Like many catastrophic events, the Toba eruption would have imposed severe local and regional pressures. Those who survived would not have done so because they were specially created or divinely protected, but because some populations had the behavioural flexibility, social cooperation, tool use and ecological knowledge needed to adapt to rapidly changing conditions.

The evidence for the eruption and its possible effects on human evolution is discussed in an article in The Conversation by Jayde N. Hirniak, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University, USA. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence:

How Science Works - Correcting A Mistake But Still Refuting Creationism

Ediacaran microbial mats

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Visible to the naked eye, fossilized bacteria or algae were found in an ancient seabed that emerged in the current Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul

Photo: Bruno Becker-Kerber/Harvard University

Microfossils interpreted as animal traces were actually algae and bacteria

A paper in Gondwana Research, recently highlighted in a FAPESP press release, helps illustrate one of the great strengths of science and one of the fatal weaknesses of creationism as a means of discovering the truth.

It reports the results of a reassessment of microscopic fossil evidence from the late Ediacaran, previously interpreted as evidence of burrowing, worm-like animals — possibly the earliest known meiofauna, a type of tiny animal life otherwise securely associated with the Cambrian fossil record.

The earlier interpretation also carried a secondary implication: that oxygen levels in those late Ediacaran marine environments may already have been high enough to support active, motile, multicellular animals. That conclusion now looks much less secure, because the structures appear not to be animal burrows at all, but fossilised communities of algae and bacteria.

That is where the real lesson lies. One of the attractions of creationism is that it offers a spurious sense of certainty to people who value certainty more than truth and accuracy — the so-called “certainty embracers”. To them, the fact that science sometimes corrects itself, and that scientists change their minds when new evidence becomes available, is misrepresented as a weakness. Creationism, by contrast, is treated as an unchanging, eternal truth precisely because it is protected from correction by refusing to submit itself to evidence.

Religion = unreasonable certainty
Science = Reasonable uncertainty

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Religion offers unreasonable certainty; science works with reasonable uncertainty. The difference is that science is amenable to reason, evidence and correction, while creationism survives by rejecting them whenever they become inconvenient.

So creationists often seize on cases where one team of scientists re-evaluates evidence relied upon by an earlier team and concludes that the original interpretation was wrong. But this is not science failing; it is science working. It is exactly what makes science such a powerful tool for discovering what is true: it can change its collective mind when better evidence, better techniques and better analysis point in a different direction.

Sadly for creationists, however, this improved understanding rarely, if ever, turns out to support their beliefs. They may derive a few crumbs of comfort from the familiar refrain that “Darwinists got it wrong again”, but there can surely be little comfort in discovering that the structures in question were still made by living organisms some 540 million years before creationist dogma says Earth existed.

The corrected interpretation does not rescue creationism; it simply replaces one natural explanation with a better-supported natural explanation. The fossils are still ancient. They are still biological. They are still part of a deep-time history of life that creationism cannot accommodate without special pleading. The only thing that has changed is the identity of the organisms responsible for them.

The reassessment was led by Dr Bruno Becker-Kerber as part of his post-doctoral research at the Institute of Geosciences at the University of São Paulo (USP) and the Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM), supported by a fellowship from FAPESP — Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, the São Paulo Research Foundation.

Unintelligent Design - Newts Show Evolution Is About Compromise And Trade-Off

Paedomorph of Lissotriton helveticus

From Denoël, M., Mathiron, A.G., Baouch, S. et al (2026).

The aquatic paedomorph (of Lissotriton helveticus) (a) retains gills at the adult stage whereas the metamorph (b) is a metamorphosed adult that is adapted for life on land.

Photographs by M. Denoël.
From Oromi, N., Michaux, J. & Denoël (2016)

The cost of metamorphosis in amphibians

A paper recently published in BMC Biology on metamorphosis in the palmate newt, Lissotriton helveticus, illustrates something creationists rarely acknowledge: evolution is not a process of perfection, but of compromise. Adaptations come with costs as well as benefits, and the balance between the two can be so finely poised that it varies not only between environments, but even between the sexes of the same species.

For any creationist who understands the subject, that should be disturbing, because it is not what creation by an omnipotent, omniscient designer should lead them to expect. A designer supposedly capable of creating a universe from nothing should have no difficulty creating a benefit without a penalty attached. Yet, throughout nature, we see trade-offs, constraints and compromises — exactly what we should expect from an unintelligent, natural process working with what already exists, not from a perfect designer producing optimal solutions from scratch.

The paper, by Mathieu Denoël, Anthony G. E. Mathiron and Sarah Baouch, from the University of Liège, Belgium, with Jean-Paul Lena, from Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France, shows that metamorphosis in the palmate newt carries a measurable cost in the form of weight loss, with likely consequences for survival and reproductive fitness. In this species, metamorphosis is facultative — in other words, optional depending on environmental conditions. Some individuals retain their gills and aquatic lifestyle into reproductive adulthood, a condition known as paedomorphosis, while others undergo metamorphosis, lose their gills, and become capable of leaving the water for a terrestrial phase before returning to breed.

Metamorphosis has usually been regarded in terms of its advantages: it allows an animal to exploit different habitats and escape deteriorating aquatic conditions, such as falling water levels. But the Liège-led team has shown that this transition is not free. By experimentally manipulating water level and temperature in 80 adult paedomorphic palmate newts, and tracking individual body mass over 85 days, the researchers found that newts which metamorphosed lost significant weight, whereas those which remained paedomorphic did not show net weight loss. The weight loss was not simply the result of bodily reorganisation; the metamorphosing newts also reduced their food intake, even when food was freely available.

The study also found an important sex difference. Females began losing weight earlier, lost more weight overall, and completed metamorphosis later than males. This supports the so-called “male escape hypothesis”, which suggests that males may be more likely to metamorphose in natural populations because the transition is proportionally less costly for them. For females, remaining aquatic and paedomorphic may often be the less costly option.

So, far from showing the work of a designer optimising every feature for the benefit of the organism, the palmate newt shows the messy reality of evolution: alternative developmental pathways, each with advantages and disadvantages, shaped by environmental pressure, reproductive strategy, energy reserves and sex-specific costs. It is exactly the sort of compromise-laden system that evolutionary biology predicts — and exactly the sort of system intelligent design has to explain away.

Refuting Creationism - Fine Tuned for Life, But Not How Creationists Imagine - No Magic Needed

How a cup of water can unlock the secrets of our Universe - Queen Mary University of London

Creationists are always on the lookout for anything in science that can be misrepresented as evidence that the Universe must have been designed, preferably by whichever locally popular god they have already decided exists. So it will not be surprising if they seize on a paper in Science Advances, as though it proves their case.

It does nothing of the sort, of course. In fact, properly understood, it does something much more interesting — and potentially much more damaging to the simplistic creationist claim that “fine-tuning” must mean “fine-tuned by an intelligent designer”.

The paper, by Professor Kostya Trachenko of Queen Mary University of London, concerns the way fundamental physical constants constrain the viscosity and diffusion properties of liquids. In plain English, it asks why liquids such as water are fluid enough for molecules to move around in them at rates compatible with cellular life. Life is not just a matter of having carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and other useful atoms available. It also requires those atoms and molecules to move, interact, react and be transported inside and between cells. That means the physical properties of liquids are not incidental details; they are part of the basic physical background without which living cells could not function.

In 2020, Trachenko and colleagues showed that there is a fundamental lower limit to liquid viscosity — in other words, to how runny a liquid can be. This later paper takes that insight into biology and asks how changes in fundamental constants would affect the viscosity and diffusion rates needed for living processes. The conclusion is that there appears to be a “bio-friendly” window within which fundamental constants must fall if liquids are to have the right properties for life as we know it.

Creationism Refuted - A Common Protist In An Oxford Pond Refutes Common Design

A ciliated protist, Oligohymenophorea, found in an Oxford pond, has a unique genetic code.

The end of genes: routine test reveals unique divergence in genetic code | Earlham Institute

When working as a Senior Medical Research Technician for Oxford University, one of my pleasures on a sunny Summer day was to take a lunch break walking in the University Parks with colleagues, where we could watch first class cricket free, or, more interestingly, explore the ponds and banks of the Cherwell. Little did we know that almost 60 years later, an organism living in one of those ponds would yield up such compelling evidence that life is the result of an evolutionary process, with no evidence of divine intervention.

Creationists often cite the near-universality of the genetic code as evidence of a single designer using the same system for all life. Of course, the more obvious scientific explanation is common ancestry: all living organisms inherited the same basic translation system from a remote common ancestor, with later lineages modifying it in small but revealing ways. But even on creationist terms, the argument is a hostage to fortune, because if the same code supposedly points to the same designer, then differences in that code raise the obvious question: why would the same designer do the job in different ways?

That awkward question is neatly illustrated by research from the Earlham Institute, published in PLOS Genetics. The research concerns a single-celled ciliate, Oligohymenophorea sp. PL0344, found in a pond in Oxford University Parks, which has done something highly unusual with its genetic code. Codons that normally act as full stops in genes have been reassigned so that, instead of telling the cell to stop making a protein, they now code for amino acids.

This is not a trivial detail. The genetic code is the rulebook by which DNA and RNA sequences are translated into proteins. In most organisms, three particular codons act as stop signals, marking the end of a gene’s protein-coding sequence. Altering those signals might be expected to cause chaos, yet here is an organism in which evolution has tinkered with one of biology’s most fundamental systems and produced a viable alternative arrangement.

For creationists, this creates a familiar problem. The genetic code is invoked when it appears convenient to claim common design, but its exceptions are quietly ignored because they point instead to historical contingency, descent with modification, and evolutionary experimentation. Biology is not showing us the work of an omniscient engineer standardising a perfect system; it is showing us inherited systems being modified, repurposed and patched by evolution.

Creationism Refuted - 240 Million-Year-Old Giant Amphibian Fossil Found In A Wall

Reconstruction of Arenaerpeton supinatus, preying on Cleithrolepis granulata.

Reconstruction by José Vitor Silva.

Arenaerpeton supinatus

From Hart, L. J., et. al(2022).

Scientists name new species of giant amphibian found in retaining wall

As a child growing up in the North Oxfordshire countryside, and already deeply interested in all things to do with nature, one of my favourite ways of looking for fossils was to search the many dry-stone walls used as field boundaries in the area. Being made largely from sedimentary limestone, they often contained fossils of ancient marine molluscs. It would probably have given a creationist nightmares to find evidence of vanished seas in a field wall, but even that is modest compared with a fossil discovered in a slab intended for use in a garden retaining wall in New South Wales, Australia.

The slab was among stones obtained in the 1990s from a local NSW quarry by a retired chicken farmer who intended to use them to build a garden retaining wall. When he spotted the fossil, however, he donated the slab to the Australian Museum in Sydney. Decades later, Australian Museum palaeontologist Lachlan J. Hart, with colleagues from the University of New South Wales and the University of Washington, Seattle, identified it as the 240-million-year-old fossil of Arenaerpeton supinatus. The fossil preserves most of the skeleton and, unusually, even shows the outline of the animal’s skin. Their formal description was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Arenaerpeton supinatus, meaning ‘supine sand creeper’, inhabited freshwater rivers in what is now the Sydney Basin during the Triassic Period, around 240 million years ago. It may have been one of the top predators in that environment, hunting ancient fish such as Cleithrolepis. Superficially, it resembled the modern Chinese giant salamander, but it was more heavily built and armed with powerful teeth, including a pair of fang-like tusks in the roof of its mouth.

Creationism Refuted - Butterfly Speciation - 180,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Top Heliconius elevatus
Left: Heliconius pardalinus   Right: Heliconius melpomene

Heliconius elevatus, a hybrid between Heliconius melpomene and Heliconius pardalinus

New butterfly species created 200,000 years ago by two species interbreeding - News and events, University of York

About 200,000 years ago, in the Amazon rainforest of South America, something happened that creationists claim cannot happen. Not only did it happen long before the world existed according to creationist mythology, but a new species arose without the intervention of a supernatural entity, and without the magical creation of a new species without ancestors.

As reported in the journal Nature, a new species of butterfly, Heliconius elevatus, arose through hybridisation involving the ancestors of two related Heliconius species, Heliconius melpomene and Heliconius pardalinus. Today, all three species coexist in the Amazon rainforest.

But that is not the only problem for creationists who continually demand evidence of a “speciation event”, as though speciation were a single moment involving a single individual, rather than the population-level process explained by the Theory of Evolution. This example shows that speciation can be rapid in evolutionary terms, yet still go completely unnoticed. A single hybrid, even if found, would not be regarded as a new species, but as the product of a chance mating between two related species. It is only if hybridisation produces a population that remains distinct over generations, with its own ecological niche, mating preferences and genetic identity, that taxonomists are justified in recognising it as a new species.

In plants, hybrid speciation often involves polyploidy — a doubling of chromosome number — which can prevent hybrids from breeding with either parent species while allowing them to breed with one another. But Heliconius elevatus is a much rarer example of homoploid hybrid speciation, in which a new species arises without a change in chromosome number. The picture is complicated by the fact that, over time, there has been continuing gene flow from one of the parent lineages, H. pardalinus, which has homogenised about 99% of the genome. However, the remaining small islands of DNA introgressed from H. melpomene control traits that help maintain H. elevatus as a distinct species: colour pattern, wing shape, host plant preference, sex pheromones, mate choice and flight behaviour. It is this distinctive combination of traits that enables the new species to coexist with both parent species rather than being absorbed back into either of them.

Creationism Refuted - How Evolution Works

Mimicry in Butterflies Is Seen here on These Classic “Plates” Showing Four Forms of H. numata, Two Forms of H. melpomene, and the Two Corresponding Mimicking Forms of H. erato.

Source - Repeating Patterns of Mimicry. Meyer A, PLoS Biology, Vol. 4/10/2006, e341 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040341, CC BY 2.5, Link

Evolution has reused the same genes for 120 million years, study shows - News and events, University of York

The great day creationists have been assuring themselves is imminent — and have been doing so for at least half a century — when evolutionary biologists finally announce that they have abandoned the Theory of Evolution because it fails to explain the evidence, seems to recede even further with almost every new research paper. Instead of being replaced by creationism, complete with unproven supernatural entities, magic, “unknowable mysteries” and evidence-free Biblical folklore treated as real history, evolution remains the basic framework within which modern biology makes sense of the evidence, formulates hypotheses and interprets results.

Almost invariably, research that appears at first sight to question some aspect of evolution is doing nothing of the sort. It is refining the details. That is the case with a new paper in PLOS Biology by a team led by scientists at the University of York, the University of Sheffield and the Wellcome Sanger Institute, which suggests that, in some circumstances, evolution may be more predictable than a simple caricature of random mutation filtered by natural selection would lead us to expect.

The team analysed the genomes of seven species of Ithomiini and Heliconius butterflies, together with the day-flying moth Chetone histrio. These lineages diverged between about 1 million and 120 million years ago, yet they have evolved remarkably similar wing colour patterns as members of neotropical mimicry rings. These warning patterns signal to predators that the insects are toxic or distasteful, so different species benefit by converging on similar “do not eat me” designs.

What the researchers found was striking. In several butterfly lineages, similar colour-pattern switches were associated with the same two genes, ivory and optix. More precisely, the important changes were not usually in the protein-coding parts of those genes themselves, but in nearby regulatory regions — the genetic switches that determine when and where those genes are turned on and off during wing development. In other words, natural selection has repeatedly arrived at similar visible results by acting on the same underlying developmental toolkit.

This is not evolution being refuted; it is evolution being understood in greater detail. What looks like simple convergence from the outside turns out, at the genomic level, to be a repeated use of the same limited set of viable routes. Evolution is still contingent, still dependent on mutation, recombination, selection and inheritance, but it is not infinitely free to do anything at all. Developmental systems constrain what variations are available, and those constraints can make some evolutionary outcomes more likely than others.

One particularly awkward aspect for creationists such as Stephen Meyer, who insist that new “information” must be intelligently inserted by some unknown mechanism, is that the study shows how major changes in form and appearance can arise from changes in the regulation and arrangement of existing DNA. In the moth Chetone histrio, colour-pattern variation is associated with a large inversion — a section of DNA flipped in orientation — closely resembling the inversion-based “supergene” architecture seen in one of the co-mimetic butterflies, Heliconius numata. No designer is required; ordinary genomic processes, filtered by selection, are enough.

It is also worth noting the timescale. These same genetic routes appear to have been available to lepidopterans since deep in the Mesozoic, around the time of the dinosaurs. The predators, environments and ecological communities have changed enormously since then, but the evolutionary principle remains the same: when similar selective pressures act on organisms with similar developmental machinery, evolution can repeatedly find similar solutions.

Refuting Creationisn - How An Evolutionary Arms Race Made Us What We Are

Graphic representation of the impact of malaria on the formation of the human niche

© Michela Leonardi

Malaria Shaped Distribution of Early Human Populations

A powerful and predictable result of an arms race between a host and a parasite is that the host population will evolve in ways that make it better able either to resist the parasite or to survive despite its presence. In other words, the presence of a parasite can be a strong environmental selector and a major driver of evolutionary change. And, of course, parasite-host arms races make no sense in terms of intelligent design, still less when the designer is supposed to be omnibenevolent.

One well-known example of this evolutionary pressure is the persistence of the sickle-cell allele in parts of the world where malaria is, or has been, common. Carrying one copy of the sickle-cell mutation provides a degree of protection against the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum. Carrying two copies, however, causes sickle-cell disease, which can be severely debilitating and sometimes fatal. The result is a classic example of balancing selection: in malarial regions the allele can be maintained in the population, despite its harmful effects in those who inherit two copies, while in populations not exposed to malaria it tends not to persist at high frequency.

Now scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Cambridge, with colleagues, believe they have shown that Plasmodium falciparum malaria was a significant factor in the deep history of Homo sapiens in Africa. Their study suggests that malaria helped shape where early human populations could live between about 74,000 and 5,000 years ago, fragmenting populations across the landscape and influencing patterns of contact, separation and genetic exchange long before recorded history. This was the crucial period before humans dispersed widely beyond Africa and before agriculture dramatically altered patterns of malaria transmission.

They have recently published their findings, open access, in the journal Science Advances.

The irony, of course, is that this study shows modern humans not as the product of an intelligent designer’s magic, but as the outcome of deep evolutionary history, shaped in part by parasite-host arms races — one of the strongest arguments against any intelligent, benevolent agency being involved in the process.

Creationism Refuted - Crabby Creationists Scuttle Off

Some of the true crab species included in the study.

Clockwise from top left: Two photographs of Tuerkayana hirtipes; Cardisoma carnifex (by Tsubasa Inoue); and Ocypode sinensis (by Junya Taniguchi)

European shore crab, Carcinus maenas

By © Hans Hillewaert, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Study suggests crabs’ iconic sideways walk evolved from common ancestor | For the press | eLife

Unlike real intelligent design, evolution has no plan, no foresight and no ability to review progress and start again. It is a non-sentient, reactive process, constrained by what already exists, and able to respond to changing conditions only by favouring advantageous variations in the inherited material available to it. The result is that future generations always carry traces of earlier generations — not merely for a few years, but for millions of years.

This simple consequence of descent with modification explains why living organisms can be grouped into clades, and why the descendants of earlier taxa remain members of those taxa. These nested hierarchies are themselves confirmation of the Theory of Evolution because they are exactly what the theory predicts. Conversely, they are evidence against intelligent design, which, if it were real, should show no such inherited constraint, but rather repeated innovation, clean design solutions and optimal responses to environmental change.

For a good example, look no further than the familiar sideways scuttle of a shore crab (Carcinus maenas). This distinctive form of locomotion is characteristic of true crabs, although not universal among them, and a research team led by Associate Professor Yuuki Kawabata of the Graduate School of Integrated Science and Technology, Nagasaki University, Japan, has shown that it probably arose once, in a common ancestor, around 200 million years ago. Their findings have just been published as a Reviewed Preprint in eLife.

Creationism Refuted - A 'Living Fossil' - from 275 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Tanyka amnicola grazing

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)
(after an illustration by Vitor Silva

Fossils of jaw bones of Tanyka amnicola

Pardo, J.D; Marsicano, C.A; Smith, R.; et al (2026)

This ancient plant-eater had a twisted jaw and sideways-facing teeth - Field Museum

Creationists love so-called ‘living fossils’ because they imagine they show evolution has not happened and that Earth is only a few thousand years old. Of course, by the twisted logic of creationism, the vast number of species that have changed over time somehow do not prove the opposite: that evolution does happen and that Earth is vastly older than a few thousand years.

Their argument also ignores the scientific definition of evolution: change in allele frequencies in a population over time. Without DNA from earlier members of the same lineage, it is impossible to say whether evolution has or has not occurred within that lineage. Superficial resemblance is not genetic stasis. But then, the creationist ‘definition’ of evolution is not the scientific one. It is a childish straw man parody, designed to be easier to attack.

So this latest ‘living fossil’, reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society B by a team led by Dr Jason D. Pardo of the Field Museum, Chicago, is bound to set up cognitive dissonance in creationists. That will probably result in their usual coping strategy: ignoring it altogether, or blaming scientists for trying to make them change their minds.

The fossil belongs to a new species, Tanyka amnicola, an archaic stem tetrapod from the Early Permian of Brazil, about 275 million years ago. It belonged to a lineage that had been thought to have disappeared much earlier, making it a “living fossil” even in its own time. The fossils were found in a dry riverbed in north-eastern Brazil, in the Pedra de Fogo Formation, one of the few windows scientists have into Gondwanan animal life during this period.

What the team found was not a complete skeleton but a set of fossil lower jaws — nine in all — each showing the same extraordinary feature: the jaw was twisted, with some teeth pointing sideways, while the inside of the jaw was lined with numerous small denticles that appear to have formed a grinding surface. Since all the jaws show the same structure, this was not a deformity or fossilisation artefact, but part of the animal’s normal anatomy.

The researchers suggest that this strange arrangement may have allowed Tanyka to process food in a highly unusual way. The Field Museum describes it as probably eating aquatic plants, while the paper itself leaves open the possibility that the jaw was adapted either for processing plant material or for specialised feeding on small invertebrates. Either way, this was not a static remnant of a bygone age, but a member of an ancient lineage still exploring new ecological possibilities in Permian Gondwana.

Malevolent Designer News - How The Malaria Parasite Is Cleverly Designed to Maximise Suferring

Immune response to
Plasmodium falciparum infection

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Plasmodium falciparum parasite.

Malaria’s mRNA: Messages that Mess with the Immune System | Weizmann USA

Research is continually revealing just how efficient the human malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, is at making people sick — and, all too often, killing them. There can be few better examples of the sort of intricate, information-rich biological machinery that Discovery Institute Fellows such as Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski insist points to an intelligent designer. Although they are careful never to say so plainly, their dog-whistle signals leave their followers in little doubt that this putative designer is meant to be the god of the Bible and Qur’an. That ambiguity gives them enough wriggle-room to tell courts and educators that Intelligent Design is science, not creationism in a lab coat, while still presenting it to supporters as a moral crusade against “Darwinism”.

Now researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in a paper published recently in Cell Reports, have shown yet another reason why this parasite is so successful. Malaria caused an estimated 610,000 deaths in 2024; the WHO African Region accounted for about 95% of those deaths, and children under five made up about three-quarters of the deaths in that region, according to the World Health Organization.

The researchers, led by Professor Neta Regev-Rudzki, discovered that the parasite exports tiny vesicles containing messenger RNA (mRNA), not only into the red blood cells it infects, but also into the host’s monocytes — immune-system cells that should be helping to fight the infection. Once inside the monocyte, the parasite’s mRNA enters the cell nucleus and binds to two essential human proteins, ACIN1 and PNN, which are normally involved in cutting and splicing RNA transcripts so they can be translated into proteins. With this splicing machinery disrupted, crucial immune-related transcripts are misprocessed and degraded, suppressing the production of proteins needed for an effective immune response.

In other words, P. falciparum is not merely hiding from the immune system; it is actively sabotaging part of the host’s cellular communication network from inside the nucleus. The result is a neat evolutionary trick: the immune system is distracted and disrupted while the real threat — parasites multiplying inside red blood cells — continues to spread.

Refuting Creationism - The Giant 50 Foot Snake Deity, Vasuki, of Hindu Mythology - The Fossil Evidence?

Vasuki indicus,
Nāgarāja (Serpent King) of Hindu mythology

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

A colossal prehistoric snake, Vasuki indicus, may have rivaled the largest snakes in history, stretching up to 50 feet long. Fossils from India suggest it was a slow-moving ambush predator and part of a widespread ancient snake lineage.

Credit: AI/ScienceDaily.com.

50-foot ancient snake discovered in India may be one of the largest ever | ScienceDaily

An open access paper published in Scientific Reports in 2024 describes an astonishing giant snake from India which, in life, may have reached up to about 50 feet in length. Ignoring, for the moment, the inconvenient age of the fossils, its existence bears an eerie superficial resemblance to the mythical Hindu serpent king, Vasuki.

Imagine the unbounded joy and celebration there would be if creationists were finally presented with fossil evidence that appeared to confirm one of their favourite myths, giving them something more tangible than the written-down stories of Bronze Age pastoralists.

Strangely, though, there have been no such celebrations over evidence which, superficially at least, appears to echo Hindu mythology. It is almost as though creationists understand perfectly well that religious myths are just that — myths — and that any evidence which appears to support someone else’s mythology can be dismissed without a second thought. Unless, of course, it happens to be their own mythology, in which case coincidence, metaphor and wishful thinking are suddenly promoted to “evidence”.

Named by its discoverers Vasuki indicus, the snake is estimated to have been between about 11 and 15 metres long, making it one of the largest snakes ever known. The genus name comes from Vasuki, the great serpent king of Hindu mythology, often depicted coiled around the neck of Shiva. Vasuki is one of the mythological nāgas associated with serpent worship, including the Hindu festival of Naga Panchami.

However, as a supposed source of the Vasuki myth, there is one small snag: Vasuki indicus lived about 47 million years ago, in the early Middle Eocene, a mere 19 million years after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction that ended the reign of the non-avian dinosaurs. That is long before humans, long before language, long before writing, and long before any culture capable of inventing and transmitting religious mythology existed. Like all religious mythology, the stories of Vasuki arose much later in human history — not in the Eocene swamps of India, and certainly not as a folk memory of a snake that had vanished tens of millions of years before there were any people to remember it.

The fossil vertebrae of Vasuki indicus were discovered in the Panandhro Lignite Mine in Kutch, Gujarat State, western India, and described by Debajit Datta and Sunil Bajpai of the Department of Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India. The remains consist of 27 mostly well-preserved vertebrae, some still articulated, from what appears to have been a fully grown animal. The authors identify it as a member of the extinct madtsoiid snake family and suggest that it represents a distinctive Indian lineage of large-bodied snakes. ([EurekAlert!][2])

The accompanying Springer Nature news release, reproduced by EurekAlert!, is available here. The original Springer Nature press release is accessible to accredited journalists only.

Refuting Creationism - Why Neanderthals Went Extinct - 30,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Neanderthal family

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

The study shows that regions favourable to Homo sapiens were found to be more highly connected than those of Neanderthals.

Why did the Neanderthals disappear? - UdeMnouvelles

A recent paper in Quaternary Science Reviews by a team led by Professor Arianne Burke of the Department of Anthropology at Université de Montréal, and head of the Quebec-based Hominin Dispersals Research Group, offers fresh insight into why Neanderthals disappeared from Europe around 40,000 years ago.

The timeframe alone should be enough to send any self-respecting creationist reaching deep into the catalogue of prepared excuses for dismissing inconvenient facts. What we will not see, of course, is any acknowledgement that science has once again produced evidence that flatly contradicts their beliefs, or even the faintest shadow of doubt about the Bible’s usefulness as a textbook of history or science.

Archaic hominins have always been a major problem for creationists, whose responses range from outright denial, through misrepresentation of the science, to the extraordinary mental gymnastics needed to shoehorn the evidence into a childish Bible narrative of a single ancestral human couple living some 6,000–10,000 years ago.

A recent example is Ken Ham’s assertion, through Answers in Genesis, that Adam and Eve were the ancestors not only of modern humans but also of Neanderthals and Denisovans. That would make Adam and Eve something like Homo heidelbergensis, H. antecessor, or whichever Middle Pleistocene hominin eventually proves to have been the last common ancestor of these lineages. It also neatly ignores the African fossil record and raises the obvious question — even if we ignored the evidence for the age of these archaic humans for the sake of argument — of how their descendants could have spread so widely, diversified so markedly, and then partly disappeared, all within a few thousand years.

Of course, it is nonsense, and is clearly aimed at people who are either unaware of the evidence but vaguely aware of these archaic hominins, or are so eager to clutch at straws that any apologetic will do, however absurd it becomes when placed beside the facts.

“Primitive” people were actually just humans like you and me. pic.twitter.com/NXGQm0sYCW

— Answers in Genesis (@AiG) April 13, 2026

Yes, there are still unanswered questions about the common ancestry of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans, but one thing we can be certain of is that their common ancestor did not live within the absurdly compressed timeframe allowed by the Bible narrative. That is just one of the many ways in which we know the Bible story is wrong — which is precisely why Ken Ham does not want his followers to think too carefully about it.

But if the question of origins is awkward for creationists, the question of extinction is no less so. Why did the Neanderthals disappear, and why did Homo sapiens survive and expand? There are several competing explanations, and, as so often in science, they are not mutually exclusive. Did Neanderthals succumb to climate instability? Were they weakened by inbreeding and low population density in small, scattered groups? Were they outcompeted by H. sapiens, with their wider social networks, more flexible technology and perhaps, eventually, dogs? Or were some Neanderthal populations simply absorbed into the larger and expanding population of H. sapiens through interbreeding?

Now, modelling by Professor Burke’s team suggests that the answer was not a single, simple cause. Climate change and interspecific interaction with H. sapiens were factors, but their importance varied across Europe. The study suggests that a significant difference may have been the resilience of social networks. In regions favourable to H. sapiens, populations appear to have been more strongly connected than Neanderthal populations, giving them a better safety net when climate, resources or local demography became unstable.

This does not mean Neanderthals were isolated, unintelligent or incapable of maintaining relationships between groups. Archaeological evidence shows that they had interregional connections too. But, according to the models, those networks appear to have been more fragile, especially in parts of Central and Eastern Europe. In a world of rapid climatic swings, that difference may have mattered. A better-connected population can share information, exchange partners, move temporarily into allied territories, and recover after local shocks. A more weakly connected population can be left isolated, vulnerable and demographically brittle.

Creationism In Crisis - Evolution In Progress As A Familiar Mediterranean Lizard Goes Green

Common wall lizard, Podarcis muralis.
The yellow and orange colour morphs disappeared over time.

Photo: Roberto García Roa

The "Hulk" lizard.

Photo: Roberto García Roa.

“Hulk lizard” knocks out ancient colour palette | Lund University

This lovely example of evolution in progress will no doubt have creationists demanding that science abandon its definition of evolution and adopt their childish “change of kind” parody instead — a caricature which, if it meant one basic type of organism suddenly turning into another, would falsify evolution rather than confirm it.

The example concerns the common wall lizard, Podarcis muralis, a species widespread in the Mediterranean region. For millions of years, populations of this lizard have included three genetically determined throat-colour morphs: white, yellow and orange. These colour forms are not merely superficial differences. They are associated with different strategies for gaining territories, attracting mates and competing with rivals, and their long-term coexistence has been a textbook example of evolutionary balance maintained by natural and social selection.

Now that balance has been disrupted by the spread of a new phenotype: a larger, bright green, aggressive and sexually dominant form, known to science as the green-and-black, white-throated nigriventris phenotype, nicknamed the “Hulk” by the researchers appears to have arisen near Rome several thousand years ago (a mere tick in evolutionary time) and is now spreading through Italy.

As this form spreads through the landscape, the yellow- and orange-throated morphs are disappearing, leaving the white-throated form behind. The change has been so rapid that, had it involved a marked alteration in a structure likely to fossilise, such as teeth or bones, it would appear in the fossil record of the future as a sudden change after a long period of stasis — in other words, exactly the kind of pattern described by punctuated equilibrium. It is, of course, classic evolution: allele frequencies in populations shifting as a newly successful phenotype spreads.

This evolutionary change in progress is the subject of a paper in Science by an international team of researchers led by Professor Tobias Uller of Lund University, Sweden. The team analysed colour data from about 240 populations of P. muralis, comprising more than 10,000 individuals. The results show that the newcomer has significantly altered the long-standing balance within the species, eliminating the yellow and orange morphs as the larger, more aggressive form spreads through the region.

Creationism Refuted - The Complex Origins of Modern Humans Revealed - No Magic Required

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

View of the village of Kuboes, on the border of South Africa and Namibia. DNA samples were collected from Nama individuals who have historically lived in the region.

Brenna Henn/UC Davis.

New UC Davis Research Using DNA Changes Origin of Human Species | College of Biological Sciences

Research first published in Nature in 2023 shows just how wide of the mark the Bronze Age authors of the Bible’s origin myths were when they guessed at human origins. Of course, in the absence of any knowledge or understanding of the true age of Earth, the history of life on it, or the existence of deep human ancestry, their guesses were no better than we would expect from people trying to explain the world with folklore rather than evidence.

In fact, as the evidence in the 2023 paper by a team co-led by Professor Brenna Henn of the University of California, Davis, and Simon Gravel of McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, shows, modern humans did not emerge from a single founding couple, or even from one simple, isolated ancestral population. Instead, our origins lie in a complex, dynamic network of human groups that diversified within Africa, evolved in partial isolation, and later exchanged genes as populations moved and merged.

In that respect, human evolution resembles other cases in nature where populations diverge, remain partly distinct, and yet continue to exchange genes — such as the carrion crow/hooded crow Corvus complex, the Eurasian complex of the great tit (Parus major) and its related forms, and the circumpolar herring gull/lesser black-backed gull Larus complex. These examples show evolution not as a neat ladder or a set of separately created “kinds”, but as a branching, reticulating process in which boundaries can be blurred by gene flow.

This process of diversification and later remixing continued in Eurasia, where Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals, Denisovans and, possibly, other human populations. Neanderthals eventually disappeared as a distinct population, or were partly absorbed into expanding Homo sapiens populations, around 40,000 years ago.

Far from the single ancestral couple that may have seemed intuitive to parochial Bronze Age pastoralists, modern humanity emerged from a population history that looks less like a single line of descent and more like a tangled bush with cross-linking branches.

The researchers reached this conclusion by analysing DNA sequenced from saliva samples from 44 modern Nama individuals from southern Africa, an Indigenous population known to carry exceptionally high levels of genetic diversity compared with many other modern groups. From that genetic data, the team developed a model suggesting that the earliest detectable split among ancestral human populations occurred between 120,000 and 135,000 years ago, after two or more weakly differentiated Homo populations had already been interbreeding for hundreds of thousands of years.

Even after that split, migration continued between the populations, producing what the researchers describe as a “weakly structured stem” for modern human origins in Africa. Rather than a single stem from which humanity simply sprouted, human evolution is better understood as a reticulated process: branching, merging, and branching again.

Creationism Refuted - A Newly-Discovered Mammal That LIve Alongside Dinosaurs - 75 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

An illustration of Cimolodon desosai on the tree with a fruit in its mouth. It was about the size of a golden hamster. It likely scampered on the ground and in the trees and ate fruits and insects.

Photo: Andrey Atuchin.

Researchers discover the fossil of a new hamster-sized mammal that lived alongside dinosaurs on the Pacific Coast – UW News

Although the catastrophe at the end of the Cretaceous exterminated about 75% of life on Earth, including all the non-avian dinosaurs, some small mammals survived. Among them were rodent-like multituberculates: not rodents, but an extinct and highly successful group of mammals that had already lived alongside dinosaurs for more than 100 million years. One newly identified member of that group was a small mammal, about the size of a golden hamster, described in a recent paper published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The people who made up the creation myths in the Bible could have known nothing of this, of course. As their stories show, theirs was a narrow, parochial view of the world, centred on a small part of the Middle East and on the folk history of one people. Their modern legacy is a movement of equally incurious believers who treat those ancient stories as real history and their creation fantasy as real science. Consequently, the evidence revealed by palaeontologists is almost invariably too awkward for them to acknowledge honestly.

Sadly, creationists continue trying to boost their dwindling numbers, and soothe their fragile egos, by demanding the right to indoctrinate children at public expense. Behind that demand lies the curious belief that falsehoods become less false if enough people can be persuaded to believe them. The facts themselves are of little consequence. What matters is recruitment: encouraging ignorance, anti-science conspiracism and belief in magic, while leaving children ill-equipped to evaluate evidence, understand complex data, or perhaps become the scientists society will need in the future.

Nevertheless, the facts remain what they are, regardless of who accepts them. In this case, a research team led by the University of Washington has identified a new 75-million-year-old species of Cimolodon from a fossil discovered at a research site in Baja California, Mexico. The species, named Cimolodon desosai, was about the size of a golden hamster and probably scampered both on the ground and in trees, feeding on fruit and insects.

Creationism Refuted - Amazingly Detailed Fossils From Australia - 11-16 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A large trapdoor spider preserved in McGraths Flat.

Michael Frese

Unusual red rocks in Australia are rewriting the rules on exceptional fossil sites

A research paper published online last year in Gondwana Research should have been giving creationists nightmares. It reports work by an Australian and American team of palaeontologists and geologists, led by Tara Djokic of the Australian Museum and UNSW Sydney, showing how iron-rich minerals can preserve fossils in such exquisite detail that individual pigment cells in fish eyes, internal organs of insects and fish, and even delicate spider hairs and nerve cells can be seen in deposits dated to between 11 million and 16 million years old.

The fossils come from McGraths Flat, a Miocene rainforest lake deposit in New South Wales, where organisms were entombed not in the usual shale, sandstone or limestone, but in iron-rich ferricrete composed largely of the iron-oxyhydroxide mineral goethite. Instead of destroying delicate biological structures, as might have been expected, the iron-rich sediment preserved them in astonishing microscopic detail.

This is not the first time iron has been shown to play an important role in preserving soft tissues rather than just the hard bones and teeth that normally fossilise. It was also implicated in Mary Schweitzer’s famous discovery of preserved collagen and soft-tissue-like structures in dinosaur fossils — a discovery that creationists frequently misrepresent today as “proof” that dinosaurs were alive only a few thousand years ago. Despite repeated corrections of these claims, creationist accounts of Schweitzer’s work have grown ever more fanciful with the passage of time, and now routinely include assertions that she found fresh blood and that the tissue was carbon-dated to just a few thousand years old.

In reality, the “fresh blood” claim is a distortion. Schweitzer described microscopic red structures that resembled blood cells, but their appearance was the starting point for a scientific investigation, not a claim that liquid blood had survived for millions of years. Nor was there any question of carbon dating, which is not used to date dinosaur fossils of this age. Schweitzer herself, writing in Scientific American, explained that the scientifically interesting question was not whether the fossil was young, but what chemical processes could allow traces of original biological material to persist for tens of millions of years.

The new paper extends that understanding by showing another way in which soft tissues can be preserved in remarkable detail over deep time. In favourable conditions, microscopic particles of iron-oxyhydroxide, each only about 0.005 millimetres across, can enter tissues and cells before decay destroys them, replicating delicate structures at cellular and even subcellular scales.

How this was discovered, and why it matters for palaeontology, is explained in an article in The Conversation by Tara Djokic. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism Refuted - Why Snakes, Like Creationists, Don't Have A Leg To Stand On - Evolution

Najash rionegrina

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Najash rionegrina

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

An ancient snake's cheekbone sheds light on evolution of modern snake skulls | Faculty of Science

Creationism is the art of ignoring evidence while pretending to be interested in it. Creationists continually demand that science provide supporting evidence for their childish parodies of evolution, abiogenesis, the Big Bang, and other scientific explanations; then, when the evidence is provided, they either ignore it, misrepresent it, or move the goalposts.

This is neatly illustrated by a paper published in Science Advances in 2019 by an international team of palaeontologists, including researchers from Argentina, the University of Alberta and McGill University. The paper provides creationists with something they are forever pretending to ask for — a transitional fossil — while also undermining another of their favourite assertions: that evolutionary change must always involve adding something new, and that loss or reduction cannot contribute to evolution.

The fossil in question belongs to Najash rionegrina, a rear-limbed fossil snake from Argentina. The presence of hind limbs is striking enough, but it is not the most important point of the paper. The fossil also shows that, during snake evolution, legs were not the only structures to be reduced or lost. The skull of Najash still retained a cheekbone — the jugal bone — which has almost entirely disappeared in living snakes.

That matters because it helps refine our understanding of how the modern snake skull evolved. Rather than appearing suddenly, fully formed and magically snake-like, the snake body plan was assembled over time through a series of anatomical changes, including elongation of the body, reduction of limbs, modification of the skull, and the loss or reduction of bones that were present in earlier ancestors. In other words, this is exactly the kind of transitional evidence creationists claim not to have seen, and exactly the kind of evolutionary reduction they claim cannot happen.

Creationism Refuted - Creationists Left Gasping As Harvard Scientists Discover How Breathing Evolved - 300 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Landscape with Captorhinus life reconstruction.

AI-generated (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)
based on artwork by Michael deBraga.

Landscape with Captorhinus life reconstruction.

Artwork by Michael deBraga.

The Oldest Breath: A 300-Million-Year-Old Mummy Reveals the Origins of How Amniotes Breathe | Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology

Today’s casual refutation of creationism comes from a team of palaeontologists who have examined an extraordinary, mummified fossil and uncovered yet another piece of evidence that creationist dogma says should not exist. Their findings have now been published in Nature.

The fossil, an early amniote reptile, Captorhinus aguti, is awkward for creationists on several counts. To begin with, it is about 289–286 million years old — vastly older than their mythology permits, and far beyond anything that can be hand-waved away as a dating “margin of error”. But it is even more troublesome than that, because it preserves evidence of a crucial evolutionary innovation: an early rib-assisted breathing apparatus for ventilating the lungs, helping to free vertebrates from the more limited breathing methods of their amphibian relatives and allowing them to thrive fully on land.

That innovation was a major step in the evolution of terrestrial tetrapods. Costal breathing — using the ribcage and associated muscles to expand and compress the chest — provided a far more efficient way of moving air in and out of the lungs. It helped set amniotes on the path to a more active life on land, in drier environments, and ultimately to the huge evolutionary success of reptiles, birds and mammals.

The remains are remarkable for the level of preservation. The fossil retains not only the skeleton, but also three-dimensional skin, preserved cartilages and even ancient protein remnants. Most importantly, it preserves elements of the thoracic apparatus involved in costal breathing, including structures linking the ribcage, sternum and shoulder girdle. These fossils come from the Richards Spur cave deposits in Oklahoma, already famous for yielding one of the most diverse known vertebrate assemblages from the Early Permian.

To study the fossils without damaging them, the team used high-resolution neutron computed tomography, allowing them to look beneath the surface of three specimens non-destructively. What they found sheds new light on how the amniote breathing apparatus evolved and helps document one of the key anatomical changes that made vertebrate life on land so successful.

How Science Works - 'Miniature Dinosaur' Fossils Identified As Baby Ankylosaurs

Liaoningosaurus paradoxus

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Numerous fossils of Liaoningosaurus paradoxus have so far been discovered.

© Zheng et al. 2025

First armoured dinosaur hatchling discovered in China | Natural History Museum.

Unlike fundamentalist belief systems such as creationism, in which facts are either forced to fit sacred dogma or dismissed with ad hoc excuses, science readily incorporates new information and adjusts its understanding accordingly. That process was neatly illustrated by the paper published in September 2025 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, which reported a reassessment of fossils from China first described in 2001.

These fossils were initially classified as belonging to a miniature armoured ankylosaur named Liaoningosaurus paradoxus. Since then, more specimens have been found, but none exceeds 40 cm in length, which is strikingly odd for ankylosaurs, a group whose members were typically around 3 metres or more long.

Where creationism would brush aside anomalies like this with a shrug and a retreat into theology, muttering about ‘mysterious ways’ or ‘tests’, science treats them as clues that something is not yet fully understood. The existence of these fossils pointed to something that had yet to be properly integrated into our knowledge of ankylosaurs, requiring scientists to refine either their understanding of the animals themselves or of the fossils attributed to them.

Now, a re-examination by a team of four palaeontologists, including Professor Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum, London, has shown that these specimens were not miniature adults at all, but baby ankylosaurs. That makes them the youngest ankylosaurs yet discovered. There is still much to learn, because no adult Liaoningosaurus paradoxus has yet been found. Even so, these hatchling fossils add significantly to our understanding of how ankylosaurs developed.