Refuting Creationism - Bible Mythology Dead And Buried Beneath The Gondwana Supercontinent

Artists impression of the supercontinent Gondwana.

Source: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty (Royalty-free)

Reconstruction of Greater Gondwana at ca. 500 Ma or at 550 to 500 Ma compared with conventional paleogeographic interpretations (inset).

From: Tao Wang et al.(2026).

Gondwana really was a supercontinent. And it helped kick-start life on Earth

More than half a billion years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of biblical literalism, moving continents were reshaping the planet and helping to establish the environmental conditions in which early animals diversified. That is the inconvenient historical setting of new research into Gondwana: a vast continental assembly whose formation, geological activity and subsequent fragmentation belong to a timescale that bears no resemblance to the few thousand years allowed by young-Earth creationism.

A paper in Science Advances , by Tao Wang of the State Key Laboratory of Deep Earth and Mineral Exploration, Institute of Geology, Beijing, China, and colleagues, suggests that Gondwana was substantially larger than conventional reconstructions show. As co-author Bill Collins explains in his accompanying account in The Conversation, isotopic evidence in granites identifies ancient continental material now concealed beneath younger geological formations across much of Asia. Including these overlooked fragments increases Gondwana’s estimated share of Earth’s continental landmass to roughly 80 per cent, making it a supercontinent even under a restrictive definition of that term. This reconstruction concerns the world of approximately 550–500 million years ago.

Its significance extends beyond redrawing an ancient map. The researchers propose that the reorganisation of plate boundaries associated with Gondwana’s assembly established an enormous belt of volcanic activity. Sustained emissions of greenhouse gases could then have helped alter the climate, contributing to conditions favourable to the diversification of Cambrian life. This is a proposed connection between geological and biological change, rather than a demonstration that volcanism alone caused the Cambrian radiation.

One distinction matters here: despite the article’s headline, this concerns the diversification of life, not its original appearance. Life already had a long evolutionary history before the Cambrian, and animals existed before that period began. Nor was the Cambrian ‘explosion’ an instantaneous event resembling a magical creation. The term describes a geologically rapid evolutionary diversification, unfolding over millions of years.

For creationism, therefore, the problem is more substantial than another inconvenient date. Here is a testable account connecting the history of continents with the environmental context of biological evolution. Continents assemble, plate boundaries change, volcanoes influence the atmosphere, and organisms evolve in the resulting conditions. None of this requires foresight or a predetermined destination. It requires physical processes, evolving populations and the immense passage of time.

Creationism Refuted - How Mammalian Genes Combine to Produce New mRNA - No Magic Required

AI-generated depiction of a chimeric mRNA being formed from two different genes

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A watercolor painting depicts chimeric mRNAs.

Image: Hannah Davis/Jackson Lab.

Mammalian Genes Can Combine To Make Previously Unknown mRNAs, Proteins | Harvard Medical School

An immune system that saves your life in one circumstance can help kill you in another makes sense in the light of evolution: natural selection favours advantages whose benefits outweigh their costs under prevailing conditions, without guaranteeing safety in every eventuality. For creationists who present biological complexity as evidence of perfect intelligent design, however, such compromises require some explaining.

A new study published in Nature on 2 September 2026 provides a particularly revealing example. Researchers found that mammalian cells can join RNA sequences copied from separate genes into a combined message. One resulting protein improves antibacterial defence in mice, but also increases vulnerability to lethal inflammatory responses in experimental models of sepsis. The same molecular mechanism brings both protection and danger.

To understand the discovery, think of DNA as a collection of stored recipes. Messenger RNA, or mRNA, is a working copy that a cell uses to assemble a protein. Scientists have long known that cells can edit these copies, allowing a single gene to produce different proteins. Here, the researchers investigated messages containing material from different genes, sometimes located on different chromosomes. It is rather like making a new recipe by combining instructions from two separate cookbooks. The joining occurs at the RNA level; it does not require the original DNA recipes to merge.

These combined messages are called chimeric RNAs. Crucially, the team demonstrated that one produces a functional protein, named GSDMD–TMEM106A, during inflammation in mice. Most of the other candidate messages have yet to be shown to produce functional proteins, so the discovery should not be mistaken for proof that every detected combination has a useful role.

The evolutionary interest lies in the consequences. Strengthening an inflammatory response can help an animal resist infection, yet the resulting damage can become lethal. Weakening that response can reduce the danger from inflammation while leaving the animal less able to control bacteria. There is no simple setting at which “more immunity” always means “better health”.

This is precisely the sort of trade-off evolutionary biology helps us understand. Natural selection works with inherited mechanisms and their competing consequences; it has neither foresight nor a commitment to the welfare of every individual or to the perfect solution. The study does not reconstruct the evolutionary history of this particular protein, but its findings illustrate why a useful biological feature need not be harmless, let alone perfect. For intelligent-design advocates, the question is therefore more demanding than “Is it complicated?” It is why an allegedly flawless designer’s protective machinery comes with the capacity to inflict fatal damage on the organism it protects.

Creationism Refuted - A Cretaceous Dinosaur From Brazil With A Close Relative From Spain - From 120 Million Years Ago

AI-generated impression of Dasosaurus tocantinensis in the Cretaceous.

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Artistic reconstruction of the new dinosaur from Maranhão state. It was 20 meters long and had a European relative .

Paleoart: Jorge Blanco.

New long-necked dinosaur found in Northeast Brazil was a close relative of a European species

A newly described giant dinosaur from Brazil presents creationists with more than the familiar problem of a fossil vastly older than their supposed creation of the Universe. Its evolutionary relationships also preserve evidence of a world whose geography has changed profoundly: continents separating, ancestral populations dispersing, and related lineages following different evolutionary paths. This is precisely the sort of historical pattern we expect when common descent operates on a planet reshaped by plate tectonics.

The dinosaur, Dasosaurus tocantinensis, was approximately 20 metres long and lived around 120 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous. Its remains were discovered during construction of a road–rail terminal at Davinópolis, in the north-eastern Brazilian state of Maranhão. Described by Elver Luiz Mayer and colleagues in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, it has its closest known evolutionary relative in what is now Spain. The researchers interpret this affinity as evidence that its ancestors probably reached South America from Europe via North Africa between about 140 and 120 million years ago.

That proposed route needs to be understood against the geography of the time. Africa and South America had not yet completed their separation, and connections between landmasses offered opportunities for dispersal that the modern map conceals. The finding therefore concerns ancestral movements through an ancient landscape, rather than dinosaurs somehow crossing the present-day Atlantic.

The broader evolutionary principle is straightforward. Populations can spread when geographical connections permit; when barriers interrupt gene flow, their descendants can diverge. Consequently, relationships between species should reflect both their ancestry and the changing opportunities for movement and isolation. Evolutionary biology supplies the explanation for the branching relationships, while plate tectonics supplies the changing geographical setting. This particular fossil does not, by itself, prove that continental separation caused a specific speciation event, but its affinities fit the larger picture remarkably well.

For young-Earth creationism, the difficulty is therefore both chronological and explanatory. A dinosaur living 120 million years ago cannot be accommodated within a literal Genesis chronology. Nor does the assertion that a creator suddenly produced separate “kinds” explain why their anatomical relationships should correspond to ancient geographical connections. Common descent makes that correspondence intelligible; magical creation provides no comparable prediction.

What emerges is a history of life unfolding on a changing Earth, with neither continents nor their inhabitants fixed in their present arrangements. Understanding that history requires evidence, evolutionary relationships and deep time — all conspicuously absent from the biblical creation account.

Creationism Refuted - Complex Symbiosis Between Animals And Microbes - 550 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Ediacaran tubular fossil Conotubus (inset: symbiotic chemosynthetic bacteria)

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 6 Astra)

Ancient fossil from China reveals animal-microbe partnerships dating back 550 million years

Some 550 million years ago, long before the world existed according to a literal reading of Genesis, an early animal may already have been exploiting the biochemical abilities of bacteria. New research on the Ediacaran tubular fossil Conotubus suggests that animal–microbe partnerships have a history extending back towards the beginnings of animal life. For creationism, the inconvenience is twofold: the immense timescale, and a biological arrangement that makes excellent evolutionary sense but raises awkward questions about supposedly intelligent design.

The study, led by Zhenfei Wang and Yongbo Peng of Nanjing University and published in PNAS, examined sulphur and molybdenum isotope signatures in fossils from southern China. These suggest an association with sulphur-oxidising bacteria, potentially supplying nutrition and helping the animal tolerate toxic, sulphide-rich conditions. This is a geochemical inference, rather than the discovery of preserved bacterial partners. If the interpretation is correct, however, it extends the fossil evidence for animal–microbe symbiosis backwards by roughly 100 million years, as co-author Peter Crockford explains in his account of the research in an article in The Conversation.

Creationists often present such interdependence as evidence of design, as though two organisms benefiting from one another could only be the result of someone planning the arrangement. But this overlooks an obvious question: why would an omniscient designer make an animal dependent on another organism for a useful biochemical function? Why not equip the animal itself with the necessary machinery? A partnership introduces additional requirements: the organisms must encounter one another or maintain their association across generations, exchange useful substances, and sustain conditions in which both can function. Each dependency creates something else that can fail.

There is a qualification here. Giving an animal bacterial capabilities would not necessarily be as simple as inserting a few genes into its genome. Genes operate within cellular systems; useful metabolism also requires appropriate regulation, enzymes, transport mechanisms and chemical conditions. Division of labour between organisms can therefore be highly effective. Nevertheless, these are constraints facing organisms produced by evolution. An allegedly omnipotent designer, able to specify the entire system from the outset, cannot readily be excused by invoking the limitations of inherited cellular machinery. Complexity alone is no evidence of intelligent planning, especially when it includes dependence on a separate organism to supply an essential service.

As I argued in The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax complexity is not the evidence for intelligent design that creationists like to think since the hallmark of good, intelligent design is minimal complexity. Complexity is evidence of evolved systems where suboptimal solutions to problems often need additional layers of complexity to mitigate failures.

Creationism In Crisis - Scientists Witness How First Complex Cells May Have Formed

3D segmentation analysis of the tomogram showing the identified inner membrane (blue), outer layer (teal), putative ribosomes (gray), extracellular fibers (light orange), and intracellular filament (light green).

From: Nobs S, Johnson M, Williams T, et al. (2026)

A composite image of the Asgard archaeon (inset) found within the microbial mats of Shark Bay, Western Australia.

Image: Iain Duggin, Debnath Ghosal, Brendan Burns

‘First contact’ that may have led to complex life on Earth finally witnessed by scientists

The origin of the eukaryotic cell was one of the most consequential transitions in the history of life. Every animal, plant, fungus and protist is composed of eukaryotic cells—cells containing a nucleus and an elaborate internal organisation that is absent from bacteria and archaea. Without that ancient evolutionary innovation, there would have been no plants, no animals and, of course, no humans.

Yet eukaryotic cells appear not to have arisen through the sudden creation of an entirely new kind of organism. The evidence increasingly indicates that they emerged through an extended evolutionary association between previously independent microorganisms. An archaeal host formed a close relationship with at least one bacterium, and a descendant of an alphaproteobacterium eventually became the mitochondrion—the energy-processing organelle still present in almost every eukaryotic cell. Other cellular features evolved before, during or after this extraordinary merger.

Precisely how that relationship began remains one of evolutionary biology’s most difficult questions. The event occurred billions of years ago, microorganisms rarely leave informative fossils, and the organisms involved have long since disappeared. Scientists must therefore reconstruct the process by combining comparative genomics, cell biology, phylogenetics and observations of living microorganisms whose biology may preserve clues to those ancient interactions.

Now an international research team led by scientists at the University of New South Wales, the University of Technology Sydney and the University of Melbourne has observed something tantalisingly suggestive. As described in an open-access paper in Current Biology, the researchers cultivated a previously unknown member of the Asgard archaea from a microbial mat associated with the stromatolites of Gathaagudu, or Shark Bay, Western Australia.

Creationism Refuted - Recovering DNA from Extinct Galápagos Giant Tortoises

The Pinzón saddleback tortoise, a small giant tortoise species native to Pinzón Island in the Galápagos characterized by a saddle-like curve in its shell.

Credit: Evelyn Jensen

Dome-shelled Galápagos giant tortoise, Chelonoidis nigra

By Mfield, Matthew Field, http://www.photography.mattfield.com - Own work,
CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Reading the giant tortoise DNA that time forgot | Yale News

Few places are more closely associated with evolutionary biology than the Galápagos Islands. Their isolation has repeatedly divided colonising populations into smaller groups, allowing mutation, genetic drift and natural selection to produce distinct island lineages. Yet their subsequent history has not always resembled a neatly branching tree. Occasional migration—and, more recently, the deliberate movement of animals by humans—has brought formerly isolated populations back into contact, permitting them to interbreed and exchange genes.

The evolutionary radiation of the Galápagos giant tortoises is a particularly striking example. Thirteen living and four extinct lineages are currently recognised within the Chelonoidis complex, each descended from the same ancestral colonisation but subsequently differentiated by geographical isolation. Unfortunately, centuries of exploitation by sailors and settlers devastated many populations, leaving some lineages represented only by bones preserved in museums.

Those remains retain a record of their evolutionary history, but reading it is difficult. DNA begins to fragment and chemically deteriorate after death, while contamination from microorganisms and people can overwhelm the surviving genetic material. In some of the museum specimens examined in a new study, researchers could read less than one per cent of the original genome—far too little for many conventional methods of genomic comparison.

However, a team led by researchers at Yale University has now developed a computational approach capable of extracting reliable evolutionary information from such exceptionally incomplete genomes. As described in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the researchers analysed dried bones from five historical specimens and placed their surviving DNA fragments upon a reference phylogeny constructed from high-quality genomes belonging to living and other historical tortoises.

Importantly, the researchers did not manufacture plausible sequences to fill the gaps. Their analytical pipeline was designed to recover the phylogenetic and population-genetic signal present in ultra-low-coverage genomes without imputing the missing genotypes. Even at sequencing depths as low as 0.008 times the genome, the surviving fragments contained enough mutually consistent information to reveal where the specimens belonged.

The results confirmed that the bones represented two evolutionarily distinct, now-extinct lineages: the former tortoises of Santa Fe and an extinct San Cristóbal lineage different from the population still living on that island. These were not merely unusual individuals belonging to surviving populations but genetically distinguishable branches of the wider Galápagos tortoise radiation.

Refuting Creationism - Refining The Details - How Did The Common Ancestor of Hominins And Chimps Climb Trees?

Speculative depiction of the last common ancestor of hominins and chimpanzees

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Researchers observed and confirmed with measurements that wild sooty mangabey monkeys in an Ivory Coast forest display foot bone flexibility that facilitates vertical climbing up skinny tree trunks to hide, forage or sleep.

Photo: W. Scott McGraw.

Last common ancestor, no matter its feet, could have been a vertical climber

One of the standard creationist tactics is to portray disagreement between scientists as evidence that the science itself is unreliable. Yet disagreement over the details of an evolutionary history is not disagreement over whether evolution occurred. On the contrary, it is often the means by which science advances: competing explanations are identified, their testable implications are examined, and evidence is gathered to determine which assumptions remain tenable.

A long-running example concerns the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, whose descendant lineages diverged some six to seven million years ago. Palaeoanthropologists agree that such an ancestor existed; the disagreement concerns what it looked like and how it moved. In particular, was its foot more like that of a modern African ape, with an ankle capable of substantial upward flexion during vertical climbing, or more like that of a monkey adapted principally to moving along branches?

That question matters because the evolution of habitual bipedalism cannot be understood without reconstructing the locomotion from which it developed. Fossilised foot and ankle bones preserve anatomical structure but not behaviour, so palaeoanthropologists must infer what their owners could do by comparing them with living primates. One influential assumption was that a primate needed a chimpanzee-like ankle to climb vertical tree trunks proficiently. A fossil with a more monkey-like foot might therefore be interpreted as evidence against frequent vertical climbing.

Luke D. Fannin, Carmen Pape and W. Scott McGraw have now tested that assumption with evidence from living animals. For their study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they recorded wild sooty mangabeys, Cercocebus atys, climbing trees in Côte d’Ivoire’s Taï Forest and measured the movements of their feet. Mangabeys lack the highly flexible ankle of a chimpanzee, yet they achieved an average of about 46 degrees of upward flexion through the middle of the foot—virtually the same range that chimpanzees achieve at the ankle.

In other words, two differently constructed feet can solve the same biomechanical problem in different ways. Chimpanzees flex chiefly at the ankle; mangabeys obtain comparable movement from the midfoot. This is a striking example of convergent evolution: similar selection pressures have produced functionally equivalent performances by modifying different parts of an inherited anatomical system.

Refuting Creationism - How Our Cells Communicate Was Inherited From Our Bacterial Ancestors

Ancient Calcium Signaling in Cyanobacterial Cells

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Even ancient bacteria possessed intercellular communication structures like humans today | CMFI News

The human body is not an organism assembled from newly invented components according to a unique design. It is the latest product of a continuous evolutionary history in which old molecules, old regulatory systems and old cellular capabilities have repeatedly been modified and recruited for new purposes.

Even something as fundamental to our existence as communication between neighbouring cells has roots extending far back into the microbial world.

Our tissues depend upon cells exchanging ions, metabolites and signals through specialised connections. In animals, structures known as gap junctions form channels between adjacent cells, allowing them to coordinate their activity. They are essential, for example, to the synchronised contraction of heart muscle. Calcium ions also serve as important intracellular signals controlling an enormous range of cellular processes.

It might be tempting to regard such coordinated communication as an innovation requiring the complexity of animals or, at the very least, nucleated eukaryotic cells. However, an international research team has shown that a strikingly similar functional principle operates in filament-forming cyanobacteria—organisms belonging to an ancient bacterial lineage.

As the researchers report in The EMBO Journal, the cyanobacterium Nostoc sp. PCC 7120 forms long filaments in which neighbouring cells are linked by structures called septal junctions. These pass through arrays of tiny pores in the peptidoglycan partitions between cells, permitting metabolites and signalling molecules to move along the filament.

Creationism Refuted - Eurasian Homo sapiens Stopped Eating Insects - Thousands Of Years Before 'Creation Week'

Insects in Chang Moi, Mueang Chiang Mai District, Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Credit: mohigan. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

European Homo sapiens ate fewer insects than Neanderthals and tropical populations - Institut de Biologia Evolutiva - CSIC UPF (UPF)

Humans are strange creatures. While we recoil at the thought of tucking into a dish of sautéed maggots, fried grasshoppers or other insects, we happily eat their close arthropod relatives, crabs, lobsters and prawns, and yet the evidence is that this has only been so for Northern Eurasians for about the last 9,000 year.

People are also strange in another way: despite all the evidence to the contrary and with no supporting evidence at all, there are people who believe the whole of history can be compressed into a few thousand years and that animals can be created by magic without ancestors.

For biblical literalists, every human who has ever lived must be squeezed into the few thousand years since the supposed creation of the first couple. Yet evidence preserved in something as commonplace as calcified plaque on ancient teeth tells a very different story: one of several human lineages, changing diets, inherited genetic variation and adaptation to contrasting environments over tens of thousands of years.

In a paper published in Science Advances, Manuel Piñero and Pablo Librado of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona combined two independent sources of evidence to investigate the history of human insect-eating, or entomophagy. They searched ancient dental calculus for insect DNA and examined genetic variants affecting our ability to digest chitin—the tough polysaccharide forming much of an insect’s exoskeleton.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution Of Immunity, Longevity And Cancer Resistance In Bats - No Magic Needed

Myotis bats

Little Brown Bat, Myotis lucifugus. Can live up to 35 years, immune to most viruses and rarely develops cancers

Photo © Michael Durham,
Illinois Department of Natural Resources

Clues to longevity may reside in the genomes of long-lived bats - Berkeley News

Creationists routinely claim that mutation cannot produce new genetic information and that complex biological systems must have been separately designed for their allotted purposes. Yet living genomes bear little resemblance to collections of independently engineered components. Genes are duplicated, deleted, rearranged and modified; the resulting variants are tested by natural selection; and the same molecular machinery is repeatedly recruited for several different functions. A new study of bats provides a particularly revealing example of this evolutionary improvisation.

Viruses and their hosts have been engaged in evolutionary arms races for hundreds of millions of years. Viruses evolve ways to enter cells, evade immune responses and appropriate cellular machinery for their own replication, while their hosts evolve countermeasures. From a creationist perspective, this requires an intelligent designer simultaneously to design the viruses, their means of attacking their hosts and the defensive systems needed to resist them. Evolution provides the far simpler explanation: each side imposes selection on the other, with no foresight, overall plan or concern for the suffering caused along the way.

In a paper published in Nature, an international team of researchers assembled near-complete genomes for eight closely related species of Myotis bat and established primary cell lines with which to test some of the genomic findings. The comparison revealed abundant structural variation—including inversions, translocations and gene duplications—within an otherwise strongly conserved arrangement of chromosomes.

The researchers found that bats have responded differently to different classes of virus. Proteins interacting with DNA viruses showed an unusually strong signature of positive selection, whereas genes interacting with RNA viruses were especially prone to gains and losses of copies. One antiviral gene, EIF2AK2, better known as PKR, occurs in one, two or, in one lineage, three copies. The original duplication appears to have arisen near the base of the Myotis radiation, with duplicated and unduplicated forms persisting across species for tens of millions of years. This is new genetic material arising through mutation and subsequently being retained, modified or lost according to its effects—not information supplied fully formed by an external intelligence.

Refuting Creationism - How We Know The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People - Sex Determination In Geckos

Various Geckos

Source: Wikipedia

XY or ZW? Geckos Reveal Evolution's Hidden Playbook

The simplest way to test the claim that the Bible is the inerrant work of an omniscient creator is to compare its account with observable reality. When that is done, its creation stories reflect the limited biological knowledge of their human authors, not omniscience. Genesis 1:27 presents “male and female” as divinely ordained categories for humans, while the wider biblical narrative assumes the familiar arrangement of sexually reproducing males and females among animals; indeed in Genesis 6:19 the Bible unambiguously states all the animals on the Ark were male and female.

Real biology is much less tidy. Many animal species are simultaneous or sequential hermaphrodites; some lineages consist entirely of females and reproduce by parthenogenesis; and many organisms reproduce without sex at all. The biblical authors displayed only the knowledge expected of people living in an ancient pastoral society. An omniscient creator would have known better.

Nor are the mechanisms that determine sex fixed systems established in a single act of creation, with organisms thereafter reproducing only “after their kind”. They are themselves products of evolution. The new gecko study indicates that different lineages have switched repeatedly between genetic sex determination and environmental sex determination, in which conditions such as egg-incubation temperature influence the offspring’s sex. Even genetic sex determination has repeatedly been reinvented, with different ordinary chromosomes recruited independently to become X and Y or Z and W chromosomes. Instead of one immutable system imposed by a designer, geckos exhibit an evolutionary patchwork assembled and repeatedly modified over millions of years.

The familiar mammalian arrangement in which females are XX and males XY is sometimes treated as though it were the inevitable—and therefore designed—way of determining sex. But nature displays no such uniformity. Birds generally use a ZW system, in which females are ZW and males ZZ, while many reptiles dispense with specialised sex chromosomes altogether and allow environmental conditions, particularly incubation temperature, to influence whether an embryo develops as male or female.

Geckos exhibit all three arrangements, sometimes among relatively closely related species. This extraordinary diversity makes them a natural experiment in how sex-determination mechanisms originate, change and disappear during evolution.

In a new study published in *Science*, Yang Zhou and colleagues compared chromosome-level genomes from geckos representing all seven living families. Their reconstruction indicates that gecko lineages have switched between environmental and genetic sex determination at least 23 times. The researchers identified 22 distinct sex-chromosome systems and traced them to 17 different chromosomes in the ancestral gecko genome. Some of those ancestral chromosomes were recruited independently on several separate occasions.

Refuting Creationism - A Road-Map Of Evolution Over 600 Million Years - From A Common Ancestor

The ever-branching tree of animal Evolution

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 SOL)

Roadmap of animal biodiversity: largest-ever comparison of chromosome-scale genomes

Words such as rules, pathways and highways can become treacherous when scientific findings pass through the hands of religious apologists. A rule, in ordinary speech, suggests someone who made it; a highway suggests an engineer who decided where it should lead. It is therefore easy to anticipate claims that a major new study of animal chromosomes has discovered evidence that evolution follows rules—and that rules must imply a rule-maker directing evolution towards a predetermined goal.

That, however, is not what the researchers have found.

In the largest comparison of chromosome-scale animal genomes yet undertaken, Darrin Schultz and colleagues analysed 5,821 genomes representing 4,454 species in 19 animal phyla. Their study, published in Science Advances, developed what they call “evolutionary genome topology”: a way of mapping the enormous variety of animal genomes according to the organisation and shared ancestry of their chromosomes. The results reveal recognisable, partly irreversible patterns extending back more than 600 million years to the common ancestor of living animals.

The accompanying University of Vienna press release describes these patterns as “evolutionary highways” and says that genomes evolve according to a limited set of “rules”. Those are useful metaphors, but they describe constraints and consequences—not commands, intentions or a plan.

Animal chromosomes can split, fuse and exchange material, but these processes are not free to produce every imaginable arrangement with equal probability. Existing chromosome structure limits what can happen next, while every change becomes part of the starting conditions inherited by subsequent generations. In particular, when ancestral chromosomes fuse and their genes subsequently become intermingled, the original arrangement cannot simply be reconstructed by reversing the fusion. The researchers call this process “fusion-with-mixing”. It makes chromosome evolution path-dependent: where a lineage can readily go next depends partly upon where it has already been.

This is what “rules” means in this context. It no more implies a supernatural rule-maker than the regular formation of crystals implies a crystal designer, or the course taken by a river implies that someone planned its route. Physical and chemical processes have consistent properties; biological structures impose constraints; and inherited history restricts the range of subsequent possibilities. Regular outcomes can emerge from those natural conditions without foresight or intention.

Nor does the statement that genomes “do not change at random” mean that their future has been prescribed. Mutations and chromosome rearrangements can occur without regard to what an organism needs, but randomness does not mean that every conceivable event is equally likely—or even physically possible. Some rearrangements are more readily produced than others; some are lethal or reduce fertility; some survive genetic drift or natural selection; and every surviving arrangement alters the possibilities available to its descendants. Chance operates within constraints, producing statistical patterns rather than fulfilling a programme.

Refuting Creationism - Why Sex Evolved

Recombination by sexual reproduction drives adaptive diversity in yeast

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

The why behind sex — Harvard Gazette

For creationists, who typically know little or nothing about evolution and so have no understanding that it is a process that takes place in a population, not an event that happens to individuals, sexual reproduction is a fertile source of disinformation and misunderstanding with which to attack the Theory of Evolution.

For instance, they frequently argue that the probability of the 'first man' and 'first woman' evolving together is so highly unlikely that their myth of the spontaneous creation out of dirt of a man and the cloning of a woman by magic is a far more rational alternative explanation. The science is attacked because when they try to force fit their childish myth of every species having a single ancestral male and female couple into the science of evolution, it doesn't fit well. The possibility of the myth being wrong must never be contemplated, because that would risk having to change their mind.

However, science works by addressing questions, not by throwing stones at infantile straw-man parodies of alternative ideas and declaring victory by default.

For science, sexual reproduction presents evolutionary biology with a different long-standing puzzle. An asexual organism can pass on its entire genome without finding a mate, competing for one or investing energy in courtship. In species with separate sexes, there is also the familiar “twofold cost of males”: only females produce offspring, whereas every member of an asexual population can potentially reproduce.

All else being equal, an asexual lineage should therefore increase more quickly than a sexual one, and indeed there are a few examples of where this is true - a single female vine weevil can quickly populate a window box or plant pot with devastating consequences for the owner as I have found to my cost; a single marbled crayfish can rapidly spread through a new river system, out-competing any native species.

Yet sexual reproduction is widespread among eukaryotes and has persisted for hundreds of millions of years. This does not imply that evolution requires foresight or that sex was introduced by a designer for some future purpose. It means that, under many circumstances, the descendants of organisms that exchange and recombine genetic material must acquire advantages sufficient to offset the immediate costs.

One important advantage is that sex reshuffles the genome. In an asexual lineage, genes are inherited together as a largely indivisible package. A beneficial mutation can therefore carry neighbouring neutral or mildly harmful mutations with it as it spreads through a population—a process known as genetic hitchhiking. Sexual reproduction and recombination can break up these associations, separating advantageous mutations from some of the damaging evolutionary baggage accompanying them.

Creationism Refuted - The Simple Mutation That Made Grasses So Successful - 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Joinvillea ascendans, a close relative of grass plants. Used in the Study

Photo: Sarah Friedrich.

Maeda and his collaborators sequenced the slow-growing Joinvillea ascendans plant, a close relative of grasses, to compare genomes and learn what makes grass plants unique.

Photo: Sarah Friedrich.

Molecular “bypasses” improve grass plants’ synthesis of lignin and starch, laying the early groundwork for evolutionary success – Department of Biology – UW–Madison

Creationists routinely claim that mutations can only damage genetic “information” and can never produce anything genuinely new. The claim depends partly upon leaving information conveniently undefined and partly upon ignoring the many well-understood processes by which genomes acquire new functions. Gene duplication, mutation and natural selection can preserve an existing function while a spare copy accumulates changes, sometimes enabling it to perform an additional task or participate in a new biochemical pathway.

A new study published in Science provides an unusually clear example. Rather than merely showing that related organisms possess different enzymes, Yuri Takeda-Kimura and colleagues reconstructed how two important metabolic innovations arose during the ancestry of grasses: additional routes for producing starch and lignin. They did this by comparing the genomes of grasses with those of several of their closest non-grass relatives, including Joinvillea, Ecdeiocolea, Pharus and Typha.

Refuting Creationism - Observed Evolution Of Live Birth in the European Common Lizard

European common lizard, Zootoca vivipara

Image credit: Meredith Kimble

European common lizard, Zootoca vivipara

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

University of Glasgow - University news - Scientists uncover the evolutionary process behind live birth in lizards

Live birth is not a simple characteristic that could be produced by switching a single gene on or off. Retaining embryos inside the mother until they are sufficiently developed to survive requires coordinated changes in gestation length, uterine physiology, eggshell formation, gas exchange, nutrient transfer, hormonal control and the maternal immune response. To creationists, this is just the sort of complex biological system that must supposedly have appeared complete and fully functional in a single act of creation.

But that is not what the genomes of living animals show.

In a study recently published in Current Biology, an international team led by Dr Hongxin Xie of the University of Glasgow has reconstructed how live birth evolved in the Eurasian common lizard, Zootoca vivipara. The transition did not depend upon one miraculous genetic leap, or even upon one or two mutations of exceptionally large effect. It arose through natural selection acting upon numerous genetic changes distributed across the genome and accumulated over an extended period.

Refuting Creationism - How Flightless Beetles Evolved On Japanese Islands

Carabus blaptoides

By Adan - Photo taken by Adan at Sendai Miyagi, Japan., CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Reach in or crush the shell? A flightless snail-hunting beetle evolved different body shapes even without a sea barrier | EurekAlert!

Montage created by AI (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Phylogenetic relationships and geographic distribution of Carabus blaptoides

Junji Konuma

Islands have repeatedly provided some of the clearest demonstrations of evolution in action. The most famous example is, of course, Darwin’s finches, whose differently shaped beaks reflect adaptation to different foods in the Galápagos. More recently, as I described in an earlier article about “Darwin’s daisies”, the Galápagos plant genus Scalesia has diversified from a common ancestor into forms with different growth habits and leaf shapes suited to different island environments.

Now scientists studying the Japanese Archipelago have uncovered another striking example of the same fundamental evolutionary process—this time involving flightless beetles and the land snails they eat.

In a paper published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, Junji Konuma of Toho University, Nobuaki Nagata of Japan’s National Museum of Nature and Science, and Teiji Sota of Kyoto University describe the evolutionary diversification of the snail-eating ground beetle Carabus blaptoides. The species is distributed across the Japanese islands and has diversified into eight recognised subspecies.

Because the beetles’ hindwings are reduced, they cannot fly and must disperse on foot. Seas therefore isolate populations on different islands, while sheer distance, topography and environmental variation can restrict movement even between populations on the same large island. This reduced gene flow allows populations to respond independently to local ecological conditions—the familiar starting point for adaptive divergence and, eventually, speciation.

The principal selective pressure appears to be sitting on the beetles’ dinner plate—or, more accurately, retreating into its shell. Different regions of Japan contain different assemblages and sizes of land snails, particularly species of Euhadra and Satsuma. Beetles living where large snails predominate tend to have long, narrow heads and thoraxes. This slender form allows a beetle to push its head deeply into a large shell and reach the animal inside.

Refuting Creationism - How Death Stalked South America In The Form Of Giant Crocodylians - Over 10 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

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Reconstruction of Purussarus neivensis attacking Pericotoxodon platignathus.

Image: Miguel Hernandez.

Giant crocodylians dominated the food chain in Miocene South America | University of Helsinki.

If the Young-Earth creationist claim that there was no death, suffering or predation before Eve’s supposed ‘sin’ were true, four fossil specimens preserved in museum collections in Colombia should not exist. They are the remains of large herbivorous mammals bearing punctures and other damage attributed to the teeth of a giant crocodylian—and they are between approximately 10.5 and 16 million years old.

In other words, these fossils are not merely the remains of animals that lived and died millions of years before there were humans to commit any biblical ‘sin’. They preserve physical evidence of animals attacking—or, at the very least, feeding upon—other animals in a functioning predator–prey ecosystem more than a thousand times older than the entire universe imagined by Young-Earth creationists.

The evidence is described by Oscar E. Wilson of the University of Helsinki and Jorge W. Moreno-Bernal in a paper recently published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. The researchers examined four specimens belonging to three species of large, now-extinct South American ungulates from the celebrated La Venta fossil assemblage of Colombia: the toxodontid Pericotoxodon platignathus and the astrapotheres Xenastrapotherium kraglievichi and Granastrapotherium snorki.

The skulls and jaws bear puncture marks and, in some cases, substantial deformation caused by a powerful bite. From the size and shape of the marks, together with the force apparently needed to produce the damage, Wilson and Moreno-Bernal identify the most likely culprit as Purussaurus neivensis, an enormous relative of modern caimans that may have reached about seven metres in length and weighed approximately 1,800 kilograms.

Middle Miocene South America contained an ecosystem unlike anything living today. The continent’s long geographical isolation had allowed native mammals—including toxodontids, astrapotheres, ground sloths and glyptodonts—to diversify independently. Around the immense tropical wetlands lived giant snakes, flightless predatory ‘terror birds’, terrestrial crocodyliforms and several kinds of aquatic crocodylian. Because large mammalian carnivores were comparatively scarce, reptiles such as Purussaurus occupied the major apex-predator niches.

Earlier studies had inferred this ecological role from the animals’ size, anatomy and the composition of the La Venta fauna. The newly reported bite marks provide direct physical evidence that giant crocodylians interacted with—and probably preyed upon—some of the ecosystem’s largest herbivorous mammals. Purussaurus may therefore have helped to regulate herbivore populations, much as large predators influence prey populations in modern ecosystems.

For creationists, the problem could hardly be clearer. These animals lived, competed, killed, fed, reproduced and became extinct millions of years before any known hominin existed, let alone the mythical couple blamed in Genesis for introducing death into the world. Even if an individual bite mark resulted from scavenging rather than an actual attack, that alternative still requires a dead animal, a flesh-eating crocodylian and an established ecological system based partly upon the consumption of carcasses. It offers no refuge for the claim that the pre-Fall world was free from death and carnivory.

Refuting Creationism - Mammals May Have Evolved Live Birth 236 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

"Triassic Mothers," a life reconstruction of a group of Chiniquodon theotonicus individuals, a pregnant female (left) as well as a female (right) breastfeeding few, relatively large neonates.

Credit: María de los Ángeles Miceli Baro.

New fossil evidence challenges the story of mammalian birth

A newly published study suggests that one characteristic commonly associated with modern mammals—giving birth to live young—may have appeared in the mammalian lineage far earlier than palaeontologists previously realised.

Creationists prefer to imagine the major groups of organisms appearing fully formed, equipped from the outset with complete packages of supposedly defining characteristics. Evolution, however, produces no such conveniently bundled collections of features. Characteristics arise, change and sometimes disappear at different times, producing the mosaic of inherited and modified traits documented throughout the fossil record.

Creationists also rejoice at any suggestion that scientists might have to change their minds because, in their simplistic view of science, if something is not exactly and eternally true, it's wrong; there is no concept in creationism of incomplete truths or provisional conclusions contingent on future discoveries. Unlike creationism, though, changing one’s mind when the evidence changes is the hallmark of intellectual integrity, and what give science it's reliability and great strength as a tool for discovering the truth.

So here, to sow confusion in the minds of creationists, is an example of science changing its collective mind and still refuting creationists mythology, because it happened 236 million years before the mythical 'Creation Week'. Significantly too, the authors readily conceded that their conclusion is only provisional and they identify what additional information is needed to confirm or refute it. No such reasoning is ever advanced by creationist apologists because it must never be conceded that creationism could be falsified with evidence, lest that evidence be found.

Refuting Creationism - How the Earliest Cells Evolved Not Once But Twice - 4 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Shared metal-catalysed metabolic network within a primordial hydrothermal vent, diverging into the bacterial and archaeal lineages.

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Early Evolution of Life: Publication in Science Advances

A paper recently published in Science Advances by an international team led by researchers at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) will make disappointing reading for any creationist with enough courage to read a scientific paper—especially those pinning their hopes on science never closing their favourite gap: the gap between geochemistry and the first living systems.

Leaving that gap permanently open would allow them to declare, “God did it!”, without providing a scrap of supporting evidence or explaining how their preferred god supposedly made chemistry and physics behave in ways that they could not have done unaided. This combination of the god-of-the-gaps argument and a false dichotomy—either science already has a complete explanation, or magic must have been responsible—is standard creationist fare in the absence of positive evidence for a creator.

The new research does not, as some headlines might suggest, show that abiogenesis occurred twice independently. Instead, it presents evidence that the genetic code and a core metabolic network had a single origin before the ancestral lineage divided into Bacteria and Archaea, but that the two lineages subsequently completed the transition to free-living cells independently. As senior author William F. Martin expressed it, the findings point to “one origin of the genetic code, but two origins of life”—with “life” here referring specifically to autonomous, free-living cellular life.

The findings therefore do not overturn universal common ancestry. Both Bacteria and Archaea still trace their ancestry to the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. What the researchers propose is that LUCA was not yet a fully independent cell equipped with enzymes for every essential metabolic reaction. It remained partly dependent on inorganic catalysts supplied by the hydrothermal environment in which its metabolism had evolved. Only after the bacterial and archaeal lineages had diverged did each independently evolve the remaining enzymes needed to become free-living.

Unintelligent Design - How Badly-Designed Mitochondria Can Make Us Sick - When They Behave Like Their Ancestral Bacteria

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