Creationism in Crisis - How Bat Faces Evolved Under Selective Pressure of Food Resources - In Just 25 Million Years

Top left: Wrinkle-faced bat, Centurio senex (Fruit)
Bottom left: Jamaican fruit bat, Artibeus jamaicensis (Fruit)

Top right: Hairy-legged vampire bat, Diphylla ecaudata (Blood of birds)
Bottom right: Orange nectar bat, Lonchophylla robusta (Nectar)

Photographs: Sharlene Santana/University of Washington

Fruit, nectar, bugs and blood: How bat teeth and jaws evolved for a diverse dinnertime | UW News

The pale-faced bat, Phylloderma stenops, is a noctilionoid bat with an omnivorous diet.

Credit: Sharlene Santana/University of Washington

A side-view image of the skull of a greater spear-nosed bat, Phyllostomus hastatus, a noctilionoid species with an omnivorous diet.

Credit: Sharlene Santana/University of Washington

Just as Darwin's finches evolved different beaks to fit them for the differing food on the different Galapagos Islands, so the shape of bats' faces have evolved to fit them for the predominant food in their diet, in just 25 million years, which is a mere tick of the clock in geological time.

What this can tell us about the evolution of bats and especially their dentition is the subject of a study of the noctilionoid bats published in Nature Communications last August.

Creationism in Crisis - Astronomers Discover The Early Stages of Planatary Formation - About Which The Bible is Silent

An image of the radio wave emission strength from the disk around DG Taurus, observed with ALMA. Rings have not yet formed in the disk, suggesting that it is just before planet formation.

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), S. Ohashi et al.

How the Bible's authors saw the Universe.

Press Releases - Astronomers Discover First Step Toward Planet Formation - ALMA

The universe described by the Bronze Age story in the Bible is almost laughable in its naivety, yet there are still ignorant people who think it was accurately described by the creator of it.

It has a flat Earth at the centre, with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, and the sun and moon are lamps hung from the dome to tell us when it’s day or night. All the stars, which we now know are vast galaxies or even superclusters of galaxies, millions of lightyears away, are described as small lights fixed to the inside of the dome, which can shake lose and fall to Earth during earthquakes.

Apart from a magic man speaking some magic words, there is no explanation of how the planet Earth formed, nor any appreciation of planetary systems orbiting a central sun, and of course, no hint that there could be trillions of such planetary systems or the vastness of the Universe.

Of course, you can't really blame the authors who wrote that stuff in the fearful infancy of our species. They were only doing their best with what little knowledge they had. What you can blame though are the ignorant fools who have failed to keep up with scientific discoveries and who still believe those laughably naïve myths are real science and history.

To add to their embarrassment, astronomers have now confirmed what we have suspected for many years now - that planetary systems and planets like Earth form in the accretion discs of second or third generation stars which were formed from condensing clouds of gas and debris produced by exploding earlier stars at the end of their life. These clouds contained not only hydrogen, helium, lithium and lighter elements but also heavier elements produced in the last stages of the earlier sun's demise as it collapsed inwards, forcing the lighter elements in its core to form heavier elements such as iron, calcium, carbon, silicon, oxygen, etc.

As the new sun's gravity pulls these larger elements towards it, angular momentum forces them into a flattened disc orbiting the sun. It was in these discs that the planets condensed around orbitally-stable centres of gravity.

Creationism in Crisis - A 4.5 Billion-Year-Old Meteorite Helping to Understand How The Solar System Formed

Erg Chech 002 meteorite slice (backlit)

Flickr/Steve Jurvetson

Erg Chech 002 (EC 002) Meteorite

Credit: Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Sahara space rock 4.5 billion years old upends assumptions about the early Solar System

According to creationists, a magic supernatural god magicked a flat Earth into existence from nothing and put a dome over it to keep the water about the sky out. It then hung a sun and a moon from the dome and the sun has been orbiting Earth ever since. In its Bronze Age account of this creation, the magic god 'forgot' to say where the sun went at night, and creationists have puzzled over that problem for centuries, never reaching a conclusion.

Nowadays, 25% of Americans still believe Earth is the centre of the universe and the sun orbits it, although most of them now accept that Earth is no longer flat or has a dome over it, whilst believing the Bible, which says otherwise, is the inerrant word of the god who created everything from nothing.

Science, on the other hand, is providing evidence that the universe is some 14 billion years and the solar system, with the sun at the centre and Earth orbiting it, formed some 4.5 billion years ago.

One of the pieces of evidence is a meteorite, recovered from a sand dune in the Saharah Desert which has been dated to 4.5 billion years old, using the aluminium-26 – magnesium-26 (26Al-26Mg) decay system combined with the Uranium/Lead system.

First, a little AI information from ChatGPT3.5 about the dating methods used, their accuracy and limitations. Creationists especially might want to skip this since it refutes many of their claims about radiometric dating in general, and shows their responses to be parrot squawks, regurgitated on cue without the slightest understanding of the subject:

Creationism in Crisis - Cave Art in Borneo From 35,000 Years Before Earth Existed (According to Creationists)

Gua Sireh, Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia

Gua Sireh, Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia

This cave on Borneo has been used for 20,000 years – and we’ve now dated rock art showing colonial resistance 400 years ago

According to creationists, about 8-10,000 years ago a god made of nothing made everything in the Universe out of nothing using nothing more than magic words. It also created humans and all the other animals a few days later. Then, in a fit of anger because its creation hadn't turned out the way it had designed it, it killed almost all of it in a genocidal flood, reducing the human population of Earth to just 8 related people.

While all that was happening, there were people using a large cave in Sarawak on the island of Borneo, in Malaysia from 35-43,000 years before Earth existed and up until and including European colonisation about 400 years ago. These people left a record of their existence and cultural history in the form of drawings on the cave wall. There is no record of a genocidal flood, and nothing about a god creating other people about 10,000 years ago.
But, according to creationists, just a few thousand years ago the island of Borneo was repopulated by people from the Middle East, who, although all descended from 8 related individuals of Middle Eastern origin, mysteriously adopted the same artistic style as the antediluvian population, forgot all about the genocidal flood and the god who caused it, invented their own gods and continued as though nothing unusual had happened.

That is the sort of mental gymnastics a creationist needs to perform to avoid the dreadful prospect of wondering if they could be wrong.

First, a little about the caves in Sarawak and the art and artifacts found in them:

Lesson from France - 2 Million Year Old Orgues d’Ille-sur-Têt

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

Les Orgues d'Ille-sur-Têt, Occitane, France

Note the different layers of soft sandstone formed in ancient beaches as local sea levels changed

In southern France near the pretty Catalan town of Ille-sur-Têt are strange rock formations, or hoodoos, known as the Orgues or organs, so called because they resemble organ pipes (and also the slightly more salacious reason - because they resemble phalluses). The rock pillars with their caps, which give them their alternative name, demoiselles coiffées (ladies with their hair styled) and cheminées de fée (fairy chimneys).

The embarrassing thing for Bible-literalist creationists who believe that all rock strata were laid down in about a year during a mythical genocidal flood, is that there is no way the strata that make up the Orgues could have been deposited in a single inundation because, as can be seen in the accompanying photos, the layers are composed of different sized particles of sand, sometimes mixed with pebbles, sometime not, showing they were once part of different sea levels and river flood plains and the whole was then covered in a shallow sea which produced the limestone cap.

And that means they are very old, pre-dating even the Pyrenees because the erosion into their present formation did not start until plate tectonics caused the Pyrenees to rise up at the boundary between the Iberian plate and the Eurasian plate, the Iberian plate itself being pushed north by the African plate.

The resulting uplift exposed the layers of sandstone which now form the Orgues to be lifted up and exposed to the action of, mostly, water, to give them their present shape - which is still being actively eroded. The evidence for this can be seen along the narrow road that runs between the river Têt and the Orgues, where heavy rain has washed sand across the road in places.