Unintelligent Design - The Design Blunder That Causes Many Diseases - Malevolence or Incompetence?

Glutathionylated mtDNA

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.1)

New type of DNA damage found in our cells’ powerhouses | UCR News | UC Riverside

Scientists led by the University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside) have identified a previously unknown form of DNA damage in mitochondria that may underlie a wide range of disorders linked to mitochondrial dysfunction. Their findings have just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Mitochondria contain their own DNA (mtDNA), which is essential for the proper functioning of these organelles that convert glucose into ATP, supplying cells with the energy needed to power metabolic processes.

The culprit is a large molecule, glutathionylate, which attaches to DNA and, if left unrepaired, can cause mutations. Researchers at UC Riverside, working with colleagues at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, found that glutathionylated mtDNA accumulates in mitochondria at levels up to 80 times higher than in the cell nucleus. In short, the nuclear DNA repair system is vastly more efficient than its mitochondrial counterpart.

For advocates of Intelligent Design (ID), this discovery—if they understood it rather than dismissing it as part of an imagined conspiracy to undermine their faith—creates an acute theological problem. If we temporarily grant the core assumption of ID creationism, that a supernatural designer indistinguishable from the allegedly omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent god of the Bible and Qur’an is responsible for the design of mitochondrial DNA and its replication machinery, then only two coherent conclusions follow:

• the designer is incompetent, having failed to produce fault-free mtDNA and an adequate repair mechanism, despite supposedly managing this for nuclear DNA; or
• the designer could have produced fault-free mtDNA but chose instead to create error-prone mtDNA and a weak repair process, thereby intentionally designing disease and suffering—in other words, malevolence.

Moreover, the very need for a repair system betrays the absence of omnipotent, intelligent engineering. It is characteristic instead of the layered complexity produced by cumulative, unplanned evolutionary processes, which inevitably yield sub-optimal compromises.

The notion of an omniscient designer also rules out the excuse that the harmful consequences were unforeseeable. An all-knowing creator would have foreseen them; yet, according to ID logic, the designer implemented them regardless—designing mitochondrial DNA to fail and cause disease.

Thus, a biological phenomenon that fits seamlessly within the framework of evolutionary theory becomes an insurmountable theological obstacle for ID advocates, who must contort the evidence to suit a predetermined conclusion while catering to a scientifically illiterate and credulous audience.

Unintelligent Design - Higher Yielding Wheat - If Humans Can Do it, Why Didn't Creationism's 'Desiger'?

By kallerna - Own work CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Wheat That Makes Its Own Fertilizer | UC Davis

Scientists at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) have developed a strain of wheat capable of producing its own nitrate fertiliser, thereby increasing yields and reducing the amount of artificial nitrate that needs to be applied to fields. They achieved this by harnessing the nitrogen-fixing abilities of common soil bacteria that convert atmospheric nitrogen into nitrates in a form plants can absorb. Their research is published, open access, in the Plant Biotechnology Journal.

We seem to have been here before, observing how a food crop or domesticated animal could have been far more productive or better suited to human needs had it been given a more efficient “design” to begin with. In fact, virtually all our cultivated plants and domesticated animals have been profoundly reshaped by human selection, using the same biological principles as natural selection: favouring advantageous genes and eliminating those that are less so.

The new wheat strain produces nutrients that support anaerobic bacteria similar to those found in the root nodules of legumes such as peas and beans. These bacteria thrive in the low-oxygen environment of specialised nodules, where they fix nitrogen for the host plant. Wheat, however, lacks such nodules, and attempts to transfer nodule-forming genes from legumes have so far been unsuccessful. Instead, this new approach encourages nitrogen-fixing bacteria to live in close association with the wheat root system, effectively bypassing the need for nodules altogether.

This raises an awkward question for Intelligent Design creationists who equate their designer deity with the allegedly omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent god of the Bible, Torah, and Qur’an. Why didn’t this deity simply give crops like wheat and other staple foods the genes the bacteria use, or at least give them the genes required to host nitrogen-fixing bacteria directly, rather than devising an unnecessarily complex symbiosis only some plants can use? And if, for some reason, these were impossible, why didn’t it create a system resembling the one now designed by the UC Davis researchers?

As with so much in nature that ID proponents like to cite as evidence of complexity—and therefore design—closer inspection typically reveals solutions that are suboptimal, needlessly intricate, and often wasteful. As I point out in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax, these are not hallmarks of intelligent engineering, which should aim for minimal complexity and maximal efficiency. Instead, they are entirely consistent with an undirected evolutionary process that tinkers with what already exists, with no foresight and with success measured solely by reproductive output.

The simple fact is that humans, using intelligence, can and do devise more efficient, sensible solutions than those found in nature—as the UC Davis team has demonstrated. Such solutions ought to have been obvious to any genuinely omniscient designer.

This leaves creationists with a stark dilemma: must they conclude that their designer god is incompetent, unable to anticipate future needs, or malevolent in withholding solutions that would benefit humanity? Or is it more plausible that these biological systems arose through the natural evolutionary processes they insist “don’t work”?

Unintelligent Design - The Defect that Causes Alzheimer's - Incompetence or Malevolence?

Exosomes

Researchers discover cell defect linked to the development of Alzheimer’s

Researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark have identified a defect in the production of exosomes within cells, linked to a mutation found in patients with dementia. Their findings are published in the journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, *Alzheimer’s & Dementia*.

Advocates of Intelligent Design argue that all genetic information must originate from an intelligent agent, claiming that anything both complex and specified cannot arise without deliberate design. Their proposed designer is invariably indistinguishable from the god of the Bible and Qur’an: an all-knowing, all-powerful and supposedly benevolent creator.

What they never address is why a system attributed to such a being should fail at all—let alone in ways that cause profound suffering. It is akin to a human engineer producing an aircraft with engines that randomly fail or wings that detach mid-flight. And because this designer is held to be omniscient, the failure cannot be inadvertent. It must have been foreseen and deliberately incorporated, making such mutations part of the intended plan rather than unfortunate accidents.

Following the internal logic of ID creationism, Alzheimer’s dementia would therefore count as an intended outcome—meeting William Dembski’s own criteria for “complex specified genetic information”. This provides yet another instance, alongside the cancer example I discussed recently, of biological processes that appear designed to destroy. It sits comfortably among the many parasites and pathogens explored in The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature’s God is Not Good, all pointing to a distinctly malign pattern in the supposed “design”.

ID proponents typically fall back on blaming “The Fall”, implying the existence of another creative force beyond the control of their designer. This manoeuvre only further undermines their claim that ID is a scientific enterprise rather than creationism thinly disguised, since it relies on biblical literalism to rescue the argument from the conclusion of an incompetent or malevolent designer—an outcome that is theologically awkward and, for many believers, outright heretical.

Malevolent Design - How Some Cancers Are Designed to Win - Incompetence or Malevolence?

Cancer cells dividing

Shapeshifting cancers’ masters, unmasked | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Scientists led by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor Christopher Vakoc have uncovered a mechanism by which certain cancers manage to evade modern medical treatments: they can disguise themselves as ordinary cells from entirely different tissues, such as those of the skin. In two recent papers — one in Nature Communications and another in Cell Reports — Vakoc’s team identify the proteins that determine whether pancreatic cancer cells retain their pancreatic identity or slip into a skin-cell-like state. They also highlight a different set of proteins with a pivotal role in tuft-cell lung cancer.

Proteins, of course, are specified by genetic information, and if that information is altered, so too is the protein’s function. In the language of ID creationists, proteins are products of “complex, specified genetic information”.

This presents intelligent design creationists with a familiar problem — one they usually address, as with parasites and pathogens, by ignoring it and relying on the scientific illiteracy of their followers. If complex, specified information were genuinely evidence of an intelligent designer, then that same designer would be implicated in the origin of the proteins that maintain and diversify cancers. Their “specified information” is neither less complex nor less specific than the proteins involved in cognition, immunity, or embryonic development.

Only by refusing to define “complex specificity” in scientific terms — or to explain how it might be distinguished from information that is supposedly non-complex or non-specified — do ID advocates manage to maintain the fiction that all beneficial traits are the work of their designer, while harmful traits must arise from some other agency. This selective attribution, based entirely on subjective human preference, underscores the religious foundations of intelligent design creationism and its distance from genuine science.

The team’s findings are summarised in a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory news release by Jen A. Miller.

Refuting Creationism - Kissing Goodbye to Childish Superstitions

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Ape ancestors and Neanderthals likely kissed, new analysis finds | University of Oxford

Researchers have shown that kissing emerged early in the human evolutionary lineage, and that Neanderthals, along with other close relatives in our tangled family tree, almost certainly kissed as well.

Kissing is an intriguing behaviour, widely assumed to serve important social functions that outweigh the obvious drawbacks of exchanging microbes and viruses.

The team, led by Dr Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist in Oxford University’s Department of Biology, based their conclusion on the principle that when two species on separate branches of the primate family tree share a behaviour, it was likely present in their common ancestor. This approach indicates that kissing arose among the ancestors of the great apes between 21.5 and 16.9 million years ago. Their findings were published very recently in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

Creationists who insist that evolutionary biologists are abandoning the Theory of Evolution—a framework on which this analysis directly relies—may be alarmed to find no evidence of such a retreat. Quite the opposite: the observation that a trait with both costs and benefits will persist when the benefits outweigh the costs neatly explains the evolutionary retention of kissing across several related species.

Creationism Refuted - Unlike Creationists Chimpanzees Change Their Mind When the Evidence Changes

Ngamba Island Chimpanzees, Uganda

Photo: Sabana Gonzalez, UC Berkeley

New psychology study suggests chimpanzees might be rational thinkers | Letters & Science

A recent study has shown that chimpanzees, unlike creationists, are capable of rationally revising their beliefs when presented with new information – another trait they share with most humans.

Creationists, by contrast, tend to take pride in refusing to change their minds. For them, admitting error would be a sign of weakness: a capitulation to the supposedly corrupting influence of scientific evidence that threatens to lure them away from the ‘truth’. In their circular logic, it must be true because they believe it, and they believe it because it is true - a circular logic designed to make intellectual bankruptcy look like a virtue called 'faith'.

Chimpanzees, unburdened by irrational superstition or egos in need of constant reinforcement, appear far more interested in being right than in demonstrating unwavering devotion to a demonstrably wrong belief system.

Interestingly, the chimpanzees can do something human children do by the age of about 4. The ability to asses evidence and base opinions on it, is, of course, the basis of science - which may be the reason creationists struggle to understand it and reject evidence as the basis of opinion, believing themselves to be capable of simply knowing the truth, like a child below the age of 4. So we have a continuum of increasing intellectual ability and integrity from toddlers and creationists through chimpanzees and 4-year-old humans to human adults. The study, carried out by a large research team that included UC Berkeley Psychology Postdoctoral Researcher Emily Sanford, UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Jan Engelmann, and Utrecht University Psychology Professor Hanna Schleihauf, has just been published in Science and is summarised in a University of California Berkeley news item.

Creationism Refuted - Doggy Dos For Creationists

Dogs 10,000 years ago roamed with bands of humans and came in all shapes and sizes

This is the second article in The Conversation which incidentally refutes creationism and shows us why the Bible must be dismissed as a source book for science and history on the basis that, when compared to reality, it's stories are not just wrong; they're not even close.

This one deals with essentially that same subject as my last past - the evolution of all the different dog varieties since wolves were first domesticated some 11,000 years ago. Together with all the other canids that creationists insist are all dog 'kind', including several foxes, several subspecies of wolf, coyotes, jackals, and African wild dogs, the hundreds of different recognised breeds of dog could not conceivably have arisen from a single pair and the resulting genetic bottleneck just a few thousand years ago. Moreover, we are expected to believe that in that short space of time, all the canids evolved from being vegetarian (with canine teeth, meat-cutting incisors and bone-crushing molars, apparently) to being obligate carnivores.

As well as the paper that was the subject of my last blog post, this The Conversation article mentions another paper, also published in Science by palaeontologists led by Shao-Jie Zhang from the Kunming Institute of Zoology, China. This paper draws on DNA evidence from ancient Eastern Eurasian dogs.

The article by Kylie M. Cairns, a Research Fellow in Canid and Wildlife Genomics, UNSW Sydney, Australia and Professor Melanie Fillios of the Department of Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology, University of New England, USA. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative |Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

How We Know The Bible Was Wrong - Creationists Dogged by DNA And Fossil Evidence

Sharma the Wolf

From The Girl and the Wolf,
By Bill Hounslow

Dogs 10,000 years ago roamed with bands of humans and came in all shapes and sizes

This is the first of two articles published in The Conversation concerning the origins of domestic dogs and the myriad different breeds that have been developed under human agency since wolves were first domesticated. Neither of them is good news for creationists for several reason.

Firstly, the DNA evidence points to a history much older that the simple tale origin tale in the Bible allows for - a history stretching back some 11,000 years or more to before creationists believe anything existed.

Secondly, and this is something that I have found creationists will always run away from - if God supposedly created all animals for the benefit of humans, why have we had to modify them to such an extent that in many cases they are scarcely recognisable from their wild ancestors? Did God not know what we would use them for or what designs would be best suited for different purposes?

The answer of course, is that the Bible stories are just that - stories. They were never intended to be written down and bound together in a book later declared, by people with a personal stake who needed a spurious 'God-given' authority to take control of society, to be the inerrant word of a creator god and therefore definitive history and science textbooks. Their complete misalignment with observable reality should be more than a clue that the latter is wrong.

This article by two of the authors involved in the first study - Carly Ameen, a lecturer in Bioarchaeology, University of Exeter and Allowen Evin, CNRS Research Director, Bioarchaeology, Université de Montpellier. Together with a large group of colleagues they have just published their study in Science. Their article in The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

How Science Works - Not Abandonning Evolution - Refining Our Understanding Of It

This article is best read on a laptop, desktop, or tablet

A new theory of molecular evolution | University of Michigan News

A new paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution by a research team at the University of Michigan, led by evolutionary biologist, Professor Jianzhi Zhang, comprehensively, but incidentally, refutes several common creationist claims — such as that mainstream biologists are abandoning evolution because it supposedly cannot explain the evidence, that all mutations are harmful, so cannot underpin evolution, and that scientists are prevented from publishing findings that challenge orthodoxy.

The study examines a key assumption of the Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution — namely that most amino-acid substitutions are neutral (neither beneficial nor strongly deleterious) and fix by drift rather than selection. The authors report experimental data showing that in mutational-scanning assays of over 12,000 amino-acid-altering mutations across 24 genes, >1 % of mutations were beneficial, implying a far higher beneficial-mutation rate than is conventionally assumed.

To reconcile that finding with the fact that comparative genomic data appear consistent with many substitutions being neutral, Zhang’s team propose a new model — “adaptive tracking with antagonistic pleiotropy” — in which beneficial mutations are frequently environment-specific, and when the environment changes the same mutation may become deleterious, hence failing to fix. In this way, although beneficial mutations are common, they rarely reach fixation when environments shift, and substitution patterns can appear neutral.

The paper operates fully within the framework of evolutionary theory by natural selection: it does not challenge evolution itself, but refines a subsidiary theoretical model about molecular changes. Thus, it strengthens the broader evolutionary paradigm rather than undermines it.

Refuting Creationism - Microbes That Create Life From Non-Life

Mud volcano

Fig. 9: Schematic of microbial succession and biogeochemical processes in serpentinite mud at the Mariana forearc.
This schematic depicts lipid biomarker transitions from pelagic sediment communities to extremophiles adapted to high pH and redox conditions in serpentinite mud. The Mariana forearc biosphere is fueled by alkaline serpentinization fluids enriched in H₂, CH₄, DIC, and organic acids, sustaining specialized microbial communities. Lipid and stable carbon isotope data reveal a shift from relict methanogenic archaea, likely engaged in hydrogenotrophic methanogenesis, to a later ANME-SRB community mediating anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM). Changes in substrate availability likely drove this transition. Distinct lipid signatures, including unsaturated diethers, acyclic GDGTs, and ether-based glycolipids, highlight adaptations to pH stress, phosphate limitation, and fluctuating redox conditions. The presence of in-situ branched GDGTs suggests previously uncharacterized bacterial communities persisting in these ultra-oligotrophic conditions. The Mariana forearc serpentinite biosphere, shaped by episodic fluid flow and substrate shifts, provides insights into deep-sea subsurface habitability. DIC = dissolved inorganic carbon, ANME anaerobic methanotrophic archaea, SRB sulfate-reducing bacteria, AOM anaerobic oxidation of methane, GDGT glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraether.

Kumawat, P., Albers, E., Bach, W. et al. (2025).

Fats provide clues to life at its limits in the deep sea

Researchers at MARUM – Bremen University’s Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences – have made a discovery, just published open access in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, which, properly understood, should make depressing reading for creationists.

They have found living organisms both on and within the ocean floor, surviving in conditions where normal life would be impossible. These microorganisms inhabit mud volcanoes with a pH of 14, metabolising hydrogen and carbon to form methane by drawing energy from minerals in the surrounding rock. In other words, they live entirely without oxygen and with almost no organic matter, synthesising all they need from inorganic sources.

Informed creationists will recognise that these organisms directly refute their frequent assertion that life cannot arise from non-life — because producing life from non-life is precisely what these microorganisms are doing.

This also contradicts the biblical claim that all living things were created for the benefit of humans, since there is no conceivable way these organisms could serve any human purpose. Of course, to be fair, the authors of the Bible were completely ignorant of microorganisms, deep-ocean mud volcanoes, and chemosynthetic metabolism. They could only attempt to explain the larger creatures that lived in the limited region around their homes in the Canaanite hills.

And, as any informed creationist should also understand, these are exactly the sort of extreme conditions that biologists believe may have fostered the emergence of the earliest living organisms during the origin of life on Earth — once again undermining any claim that abiogenesis is impossible.

Refuting Creationism - Diverging Sloth Genomes - Just As The TOE Predicts

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Deforested genomes: scientists find signs of environmental degradation in the genomes of the endangered Maned Sloths - Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research

The discovery fits seamlessly within the framework of Darwinian evolution. Two once-connected populations became isolated and exposed to different ecological conditions, followed their own evolutionary paths. Over time, their genomes accumulated distinct mutations reflecting adaptation, genetic drift, and local environmental pressures. The result is two clearly defined species whose divergence can be explained entirely by natural processes acting over generations — a textbook demonstration of evolution in action.

Yet this same process now drives both species along a far more perilous trajectory. As their habitats continue to shrink and fragment, their populations are losing genetic diversity and becoming increasingly inbred. Evolution has no foresight or purpose; it cannot plan for the future or reverse the consequences of environmental destruction. The very mechanism that once diversified life on Earth can, under relentless human pressure, just as readily lead to extinction.

There is no sign of “intelligent design” in this grim reality — only the blind, natural workings of selection, drift, and chance operating within a degraded environment. If a designer were guiding life towards some higher purpose, it would hardly produce a situation where its own creations are being driven to extinction by the ecological collapse of their habitats. The plight of the maned sloths stands as a vivid reminder that life’s diversity, beauty, and tragedy arise not from supernatural intent, but from the impersonal and unyielding logic of evolution.

As world leaders prepare for COP30 in Brazil, the message from the maned sloths’ genomes could not be clearer: conservation must be guided by evolutionary science and ecological understanding, not by comforting myths of divine oversight. Only by recognising the true, natural processes that shape life can we hope to protect what remains of it.

Refuting Creationism - Another of Those 'Living Fossils' For Creationists To Misrepresent

Adult marine shell-boring spionid polychaete.

Vasily Radishevsky/
Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Spionid traces on fossilized bivalve shells.

Javier Ortega-Hernandez/Harvard University.

Half-billion-year-old parasite still threatens shellfish | UCR News | UC Riverside

It’s Coelacanth time for creationist disinformers again.

Hilariously, I’ve known creationists claim that the 'fact' that coelacanths haven’t changed for 200 million years somehow proves the “evilutionists” are wrong and that Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old. How they managed to examine the genome of a 200-million-year-old fossil remains a mystery, but DNA appears to play no part in a creationist’s definition of evolution.

So, for an alternative fallacious argument, here’s an even older fossil that’s still around today, apparently in much the same form as it was almost half a billion years ago. It’s a parasitic worm that attacks oysters. The details have just been published in the journal iScience by scientists led by University of California, Riverside palaeobiologist Karma Nanglu, with colleagues from Harvard.

The parasitic, soft-bodied bristle worm belongs to a group called the spionids. It’s common in today’s oceans and feeds on the shells of mussels and oysters, leaving a characteristic question mark-shaped track in their shells. Their parasitism doesn’t kill the shellfish but probably shortens their lifespan.

Refuting Creationism - 300,000 Years Of Stone Technology In Africa - Over 2 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fig. 1: Map of Turkana Basin with the Namorotukunan Archeological Site and timeline of currently known events in the Plio-Pleistocene.

a Geographical context of the Koobi Fora Formation (red stripes), the paleontological collection area 40 (green square), and the location of the site of Namorotukunan (black dot); [map produced Natural Earth and NOAAA ETOPO 202295]; b Stratigraphic context of the Koobi Fora Formation highlighting members and key volcanic ash marker levels, yellow bars refer to the age of archeological horizons (tephrostratigraphy after McDougall et al.⁹⁶); c A chronology of key Plio-Pleistocene hominins from the East African Rift System (EARS)^11,74,97,98 d A chronology and key localities associated with hominin lithic technology^3,6,12 (images of Nyayanga provided by E. Finestone; images of Lomekwi and BD1 based on 3D models; artifact images are for representation and not to scale) and the investigations at Namorotukunan: red arrows represent the artifact levels in the archeological excavations (photos DRB), and colored circles (lettered A-G) represent geologic sections investigated to develop a synthetic stratigraphic column (presented in Figs. 2 and 3).

Braun, D.R., Palcu Rolier, D.V., Advokaat, E.L. et al (2025)

Stone Tools Through Generations: 300,000 Years of Human Technology | Media Relations | The George Washington University

The story of our origins is written in the ground of Africa. It is real, tangible, and objective — a record that doesn’t rely on belief or interpretation, but on physical evidence left behind by our ancient ancestors. A fresh chapter of that record has just been described in a new open-access paper in Nature Communications, authored by an international team of palaeoanthropologists led by Professor David R. Braun of the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology at George Washington University, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

By comparison, the origins narrative found in Genesis reflects the worldview and assumptions of people who believed the Earth was small, flat, and covered by a solid dome. It is astonishing that, even today, some treat that ancient cosmology as a more reliable account of human history than the rich and expanding fossil and archaeological record in Africa. Yet such individuals continue to seek influence over policy, law, morality, and social institutions, grounding their authority not in evidence, but in pre-scientific tradition — a worldview formed long before the wheel, let alone modern science.

Unintelligent Design - Flatworms Can Regenerate Body Parts - So Why Can't Humans?

The planarian Schmidtea mediterranea

Credit: FLI / Anna Schroll

Schmidtea mediterranea

New research shows a tiny, regenerative worm could change our understanding of healing Stowers Institute for Medical Research

Researchers at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have uncovered new details explaining how the planarian flatworm, Schmidtea mediterranea, can regenerate not just a missing body part, but an entire organism from a tiny tissue fragment. Their findings have just been published in Cell Reports and represent a major advance in our understanding of regeneration at the cellular and genetic level.

This little worm continues to surprise scientists. Remove its head? It grows a new one. Slice it into pieces? Each piece becomes a complete worm. Such astonishing powers naturally prompt two very different kinds of questions – one scientific, one theological.

If one temporarily accepts creationist premises for the sake of argument, we are forced into a series of uncomfortable and contradictory conclusions.

Why would a supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent designer grant a humble flatworm the ability to regenerate an entire body, yet deny this life-saving ability to humans and virtually all other organisms? If this designer could abolish suffering, disease, and limb loss – and knowingly chose not to – what does that imply about its nature?

Creationists are left defending a worldview in which their designer appears either: unwilling to prevent suffering; unable to create beneficial traits consistently; or deliberately designing suffering into its creation. None of these options are theologically tidy – and they certainly do not align with the claim of a universally benevolent designer. The creationist framework produces contradictions, apologetics acrobatics, and moral dilemmas rather than answers.

By contrast, when we ask the evolutionary question – “How did this ability evolve?” – the picture becomes coherent.

Planarians have followed a unique evolutionary trajectory in which extreme regeneration conferred a significant survival advantage. Natural selection acted on stem-cell behaviour, gene regulation, and patterning networks over deep time, refining a mechanism that happens to be far beyond the needs of most other species.

Other organisms have regenerative abilities too – salamanders, zebrafish, sea stars, even humans to a limited extent – but the selective pressures and biological constraints differed. Regeneration is complex, energetically costly, and evolution works from what already exists. Most lineages simply did not follow that path. To borrow Michael Behe’s favourite term, planarian regeneration may appear “irreducibly complex” – and yet, as usual, complexity proves to be a testament to gradual evolutionary refinement, not evidence for supernatural assembly.

Refuting Creationism - Dinosaurs Thrived Until Disaster Struck - 66 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Small primitive mammals live alongside a Triceratops, pre-extinction. A softshell turtle climbs up a log, unaware that its freshwater surroundings will shelter it from the asteroid.

Illustration © Henry Sharpe.

Dinosaurs were on the up before asteroid downfall | News | The University of Edinburgh

This, the second paper, published in 2022 that utterly refutes creationism on several different levels, reports evidence that particularly undermines their claim that an omnibenevolent god created a world fine-tuned for life.

This belief arises from a deeply ignorant, rose-tinted view of the world — one that conveniently ignores history and habitually attributes anything bad to something else: sin, free will, or other theological constructs that, by their own narrative, could only have applied after some supposed “fall”.

In reality, even a superficial understanding of Earth’s history — 99.9975 % of which took place before creationism’s legendary “Creation Week” — reveals that the planet is anything but fine-tuned for life. Life on Earth has repeatedly been subjected to mass extinctions triggered by geological and cosmological catastrophes that wreaked havoc on the environment, often at a pace too rapid for most species to adapt.

One of the most famous of these events was the meteor impact in what is now the Yucatán Peninsula, 66 million years ago. This strike plunged the planet into a “nuclear winter” as atmospheric dust blotted out the Sun. Within weeks, almost all large species were exterminated, leaving only the avian dinosaurs — likely shielded by insulating feathers — and early mammals, protected by their insulating fur.

But as this recent paper shows, the dinosaurs were thriving in a healthy, biodiverse environment in which they were the dominant species right up until the moment the meteor struck. Had they shared the creationists’ mindset, they might well have concluded that Earth was “fine-tuned” for them too.

The evidence for this comes from an international team of palaeontologists and ecologists, including researchers from University of Oulu (Finland), Universidade de Vigo (Spain), University of Washington (Seattle, USA), University College London (UK), New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (USA), and University of Edinburgh (UK).

How Science Works - Biologists Might Need To Rethink A Detail Of Evolutionary Biology

Details of the surface of two sheet-like colonies of the ‘Berenicea’ type: (A) In Hyporosopora dilatata, the colony surface is relatively flat, save for the slightly convex zooids and faint growth lines (Upper Callovian or Lower Oxfordian, Oxford Clay; Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire); and (B) Well-defined transverse ridges cross the colony surface in Rugosopora enstonensis (Bathonian, Hampen Marly Beds; Enstone, Oxfordshire). Scale bars are 500µm.

Source: Bryozoans in the British Jurassic

New Study Reveals Berenicea Zooid Size Reduction Over 200 Million Years Contradicts Cope's Rule----Chinese Academy of Sciences

The discovery that a group of organisms has, contrary to “Cope’s Rule,” undergone a steady reduction in body size over the past 200 million years is a useful reminder of how science works — and why religion so often falters.

A cornerstone of the scientific method is its willingness to acknowledge error. Real intellectual strength lies not in clinging to discredited beliefs as though doing so were a test of character, but in facing up to mistakes, learning from them, and changing one’s mind. That is how knowledge advances.

Religion, by contrast, remains shackled to the dogmas of its ancient founders. To alter those fundamental beliefs is, in effect, to abandon the religion itself. This is why, while science has sent probes into deep space and placed human beings on the Moon, faith — despite lofty claims of being able to “move mountains” — has yet to lift so much as a feather a millimetre off the ground.

The new finding was just reported in the journal Palaeontology by Associate Professor MA Junye of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) and collaborators. They found that Berenicea, a genus of cyclostome bryozoans, has experienced a continuous reduction in zooid size over the past 200 million years. This runs counter to “Cope’s Rule,” which describes a tendency for body size to increase during the evolution of many lineages.

Cope’s Rule was formulated by the American palaeontologist Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897). There are, of course, well-known exceptions — such as the “island effect,” where animals isolated on small islands often evolve into miniature versions of their mainland relatives — but these are localised adaptations to particular environments. Cope’s Rule, by contrast, applies to long-term, broad-scale evolutionary trends.

Refuting Creationism - A Tiny Fossil From New Zealand Is Another Huge Problem For Creationism

A male satin bowerbird by his highly decorated avenue bower.

Photo by Daniel J. Field

Tiny fossil bone helps unlock history of the bowerbird | University of Otago
Apart from the fact that this fossil is a million years old, there is nothing in this discovery that creationists will struggle to dismiss with one of their well-worn stock phrases — “It was just a bird ‘kind’,” “It wasn’t transitional,” and so on. This is despite the fact that their Bible is remarkably vague about how many bird ‘kinds’ there were, includes bats as birds, and says absolutely nothing about anything outside a few square miles of the Middle East.

And of course, the date — like the entire fossil record — will be casually brushed aside as forged, fabricated, or “wrongly dated using proven false carbon dating” [sic].

But to anyone who actually values evidence and truth, and is not intent on proving their strength by clinging to demonstrably false beliefs in defiance of all contrary evidence, this find is genuinely fascinating. It provides strong evidence that the bowerbirds, today confined to Australia and New Guinea, were once far more widespread. This conclusion is based on the fact that the fossil was discovered in New Zealand. It is also suggested that climate change may have brought about its extinction in New Zealand and driven the bowerbirds' range back to its present distribution.

The discovery is reported in the journal Historical Biology by researchers from University of Cambridge, University of Otago, and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. A [news release from the University of Otago]() explains the significance of the find and four of the authors have also written an article about the find in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Refuting Creationism - Eating Carrion Made Us Human

Factors influencing scavenging behavior in humans.

Carmen Cañizares (@canitanatura).

Eating carrion made us human | CENIEH

One of the most telling weaknesses of creationism is how heavily it depends on piling assumption upon assumption to sustain its narrative. As Stephen Hawking observed in The Grand Design, the more assumptions a theory requires, the less likely it is to be true. This is simply the reverse of Occam's razor, the principle that the simplest explanation consistent with the evidence is usually the most plausible.

Creationists take the simplistic story of human origins from the Bible and build layers of speculation upon it — not derived from scripture or evidence, but from the circular reasoning of “this must have been true, or my beliefs are wrong.”

A classic example is their claim that there could have been no death before Eve’s supposed sin, because death is ‘evil’ and evil only entered the world after the Fall. From this, they conclude that Adam and Eve — and indeed all animals — must have been vegetarian. To prop up this contrivance, they add yet another assumption: that plants aren’t really ‘alive’ in the same way as animals, so eating them doesn’t count as causing death.

This is a textbook case of a weak theory being shored up by multiplying entities and assumptions — the very opposite of sound scientific reasoning. It also collapses under biological scrutiny. There is no evidence in the Bible to support it, and human anatomy and physiology clearly reveal that we are omnivores with a long evolutionary history of meat consumption.

And now, a team of evolutionary anthropologists led by Ana Mateos of Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) has published a research paper in the Journal of Human Evolution, in which they argue that before early hominins developed the technology to hunt large game for themselves, they were probably dependent on scavenging carrion—often from the kills of apex predators.

An important advantage of scavenging is that it provides a reliable source of high-protein food with relatively low energy expenditure. Carcasses can also sustain a population through periods of drought, when prey is scarce and some animals die from natural causes. Early hominins could have used sticks and stones to drive off predators, while their highly acidic stomachs minimised the risk of disease from decaying meat. Later, cooking provided additional protection against pathogens.

After what was likely a brief evolutionary phase as scavengers, humans developed the tools and cooperative strategies to become apex predators themselves. This reliance on carrion may even have been one of the critical factors that set our lineage on a different path from the other African apes, driving both physical and physiological changes.

Unintelligent Design - How Wheat Could Have Been Designed To Give Tripple The Yield

A spike of wheat showing three grains clustered within each spikelet, where there is ordinarily just one.

Credit: Vijay Tiwary,
University of Maryland

Wheat monoculture - but it could have been better designed!

Scientists Discover a Gene that Could Triple Wheat Production | College of Agriculture & Natural Resources at UMD

News that a single mutant gene could triple wheat yields raises some uncomfortable questions for Bible-literalist creationists, and indeed for anyone who believes their god created the Earth and all life on it exclusively for humans — its supposed favoured species, for whom “all of creation” was made.

This belief has profoundly shaped Western attitudes towards the planet and its resources. One consequence of this selfish worldview has been the destruction of vast areas of the Earth, its ecosystems, and the countless species that depend on them. In the relentless search for mineral wealth, cropland, and grazing land, humans have transformed immense regions into effective monocultures which, to anything not adapted to those particular crops, might as well be deserts. Moreover, the same belief — coupled with the idea that brown and black people were inferior to whites and therefore “created” to serve Europeans — helped justify imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade.

One question that creationists, in my experience, consistently shy away from is this: if an omniscient god truly created our domestic animals for our use, why have we almost always had to modify them through selective breeding to make them more useful? It’s as though this god didn’t actually know what we would need or how we would use these animals. Which leads to the obvious follow-up question: why didn’t this supposedly omniscient being create ideal domestic plants and crops in the first place?

How Science Works - Revising Our Knowledge Of Plant Dispersal

Plants colonising volcanic tepha on Surtsey

Credit: Pawel Wasowicz (CC BY)

Plants colonising lava field on Surtsey island.

Credit: Pawel Wasowicz (CC BY)

New study overturns long-held assumptions about how plants spread to islands | EurekAlert!

Plants that successfully leave more offspring are those with traits that allow their seeds to spread widely. That usually involves two key factors: tolerance or adaptability to new environments, and an effective way of reaching them. Over time, evolution has produced a variety of dispersal strategies—seeds can float on the wind, stick to animals, or pass through birds and end up deposited somewhere new.

Crossing the sea, though, adds another layer of difficulty. Seeds must survive what amounts to a small ocean voyage. For a long time, scientists assumed birds were the main way plants made these crossings. The idea was straightforward: birds eat fruit, fly to new islands, and excrete the seeds.

But new evidence has challenged that view. A recent open-access paper in Ecology Letters examines how plants have colonised Surtsey, the volcanic island that emerged off Iceland in 1963. This unique setting has allowed researchers to watch ecological colonisation unfold in real time.

Their findings were unexpected: most of the 78 vascular plant species that established themselves on the island weren’t fruit-bearing plants spread by birds, but grasses. While birds like geese and gulls did contribute to dispersal, most of the colonising species lacked the traits typically linked with long-distance dispersal.