Creationism Refuted - How Cephalopods Evolved Intelligence - No Magic Needed

Cephalopods

Californian two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides). Embryo at the final stage before hatching. The species is named after the two prominent blue eyespots that can help deter predators.

3D structure of DNA may explain how cephalopods evolved complex brains

How much new DNA does evolution need to produce a new biological capability? Intelligent design creationists commonly assume that new functions require new “complex specified information”, then insist that only an intelligent designer can supply it. But this overlooks something fundamental about genomes: what matters is not simply which genes an organism possesses, but how, where and when those genes are used. Rearranging existing components can change what a biological system does, without requiring every component to be invented afresh, and, importantly, no new DNA being inserted into the genome.

A new study published in Nature Communications explores this possibility in coleoid cephalopods — octopuses, squid and cuttlefish. These animals have elaborate nervous systems and remarkable behavioural capabilities. The research suggests that part of the explanation for their evolutionary innovations may lie in the three-dimensional organisation of their genomes.

DNA does not lie inside a cell as a neatly stretched-out sequence. It folds, bringing regions that are distant along a chromosome into physical proximity. Those contacts can influence gene regulation. An ancient episode of extensive genome rearrangement in the ancestors of coleoids created opportunities for previously separated regions to acquire new regulatory relationships. The researchers describe the resulting interdependence as “regulatory entanglement”.

Comparing genome organisation and gene activity across species, tissues and developmental stages, the team found a combination of stability and flexibility: larger chromatin domains were broadly conserved, while hundreds of smaller DNA loops varied with species and biological context. Their experiments also went beyond comparisons: deleting a candidate regulatory sequence using CRISPR–Cas9 demonstrated a role for these long-range interactions in neural development.

This is not proof that genome rearrangement alone produced cephalopod intelligence, nor does it mean that no new DNA evolved. The study also considers genome expansion. Its importance is more interesting than either oversimplification: evolutionary novelty can involve changes in the relationships between genetic components, as well as changes to the components themselves.

That leaves the intelligent design argument with a familiar problem. Calling a biological outcome “information” does not demonstrate that it required a supernatural author. Here, scientists are investigating physical mechanisms through which genome evolution can generate new regulatory possibilities. Whether creationists choose to call those possibilities “new information” changes neither the mechanisms nor the evidence. The scientific question is how complexity evolved — and this research offers another testable part of the answer.

Refuting Creationism - Another New Dinosaur From The Isle of Wight For Creationists To Ignore

AI-generated impression of Invictibellatrix amberina in its natural habitat.

ChapGPT-6 Astra (based on a reconstruction
by Sergey Krasovskiy and Pedro Salas).

An artist’s illustration of the new theropod dinosaur, Invictibellatrix amberina (centre of the image), in its ecosystem on the Isle of Wight, United Kingdom in the Early Cretaceous (around 120 million years ago). It lived in what was likely a seasonally wet-to-dry floodplain environment and is surrounded by other dinosaurs including large long-necked rebbachisaurid sauropods (directly behind Invictibellatrix, centre) and relatives of Iguanodon (right). A spinosaurid theropod, potentially the apex predator of the time, fishes (left). Invictibellatrix has just caught and is consuming two small mammals. Gymnosperms dominate the environment as flowering plants (angiosperms) were not common at this time. Other reptiles including relatives to modern lizards, crocodiles and turtles enjoy the warm Early Cretaceous weather of the UK.

Credit: Sergey Krasovskiy and Pedro Salas.

UK dinosaur fossil identified as new long-clawed predator | UCL News

Palaeontologists do not need to set out to refute biblical creationism. They merely need to investigate the history of life, and the evidence does the job for them. Another example comes from the Isle of Wight, where a fossil has revealed a previously unrecognised predatory dinosaur that lived about 120 million years ago — long before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of a literal reading of Genesis. While creationists struggle to squeeze the history of an entire planet into a few thousand years, researchers are reconstructing the evolutionary relationships and geographical movements of animals separated from us by immense stretches of geological time.

The fundamental problem creationists have created for themselves is that, because there is vastly more history pre-'Creation Week' than there is post-'Creation Week', by several orders of magnitude, virtually every palaeontological, geological and archaeological discovery incidentally refutes creationism, so the most risible and dishonest mental gymnastics have to be invoked to dismiss it all, and creationists end up looking both intellectually and morally bankrupt.

For example, as described in a study, published in Royal Society Open Science, a team led by University College London (UCL) researchers has identified Invictibellatrix amberina, the first recognised European member of a group of carnivorous dinosaurs known as megaraptorans. The discovery concerns a partial skull acquired by the Natural History Museum in 1924. CT scanning and anatomical comparisons have now revealed its significance. From its relatives, the researchers infer an animal around three to four metres long, probably feathered and equipped with substantial grasping arms and curved claws.

The discovery also helps fill a geographical gap in the group’s known distribution, supporting the hypothesis that megaraptorans dispersed from Asia through Europe towards the southern continents. This is the sort of question evolutionary science can investigate: how related animals diversified, where they lived, and how changing geography influenced their distribution. A fossil becomes evidence within a wider, testable account of life’s history.

Refuting Creationism - A Newly-Discovered Giant Fungus from A Family That Evolved 65 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'.

Stromata of Dianjunus rex in the field. (a, c, d, f) Stromata attached to host roots. (b, e, g, h) Stromata around host plant. (a) Collectors. (i) Total weight of largest bilobedstromata.

Song, Yan, Pérez-Moreno, et al (2026)

Stromata of Dianjunus rex attached to host root.

Song, Yan, Pérez-Moreno, et al (2026)

Scientists discover ‘D-rex’, a giant fungus from Chinese forests whose unique lineage dates back 65 million years | EurekAlert!

Another newly described species has brought with it an evolutionary history that refuses to fit into creationism’s abbreviated chronology. This time it is a giant fungus from China’s Yunnan Province, named Dianjunus rex, whose family lineage is estimated to have diverged about 65 million years ago — almost 65 million years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of young-Earth creationism. Apparently, this fungus’s ancestors failed to wait for the universe to be created.

Described in a new paper in Frontiers in Fungal Biology, the fungus produces imposing reproductive structures reaching 50 centimetres high and weighing up to 2.2 kilograms. Its anatomy and genetic relationships justified the recognition of not merely a new species and genus, but a new family: Dianjunaceae.

The date needs a little care. The researchers are not claiming that today’s species has remained unchanged for 65 million years. Their evolutionary analysis estimates when its family lineage separated from its closest relatives, with a reported range of approximately 50–80 million years. That uncertainty is scientifically significant, but offers no refuge for biblical literalism: even the youngest end of the range is vastly older than the entire history permitted by a young-Earth reading of Genesis.

There is a further irony here. Genesis offers no recognition of fungi as a distinct group of organisms. Although biblical passages refer to conditions translated as mould or mildew, these are hardly an account of fungal biology or evolutionary relationships. We cannot know that the authors simply assumed mushrooms were plants, but we can say that their creation narrative supplies none of the distinctions needed to understand this discovery. That is unsurprising in an ancient religious text; it becomes a problem only when that text is presented as authoritative natural history.

Unintelligent Design - The Prolific Waste of Spawning Coral

Spawning coral on the Great Barrier Reef - prolific waste in action

Spawning coral release quintillions of eggs each year: new research

spawning coral on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia

One of the most conspicuous features of the living world is its reproductive extravagance. Organisms manufacture enormous quantities of eggs, sperm, seeds and spores, only for the overwhelming majority to leave no descendants. Coral spawning provides a spectacular example: an underwater blizzard of reproductive material, produced at considerable biological expense, from which only a tiny fraction will ultimately contribute to the next generation of breeding corals. If this is intelligent design, its designer appears remarkably comfortable with failure on an industrial scale.

New research by M. M. Bilodeau and K. M. Quigley, published in Ecology and Evolution puts a staggering figure on this reproductive output. The researchers estimate that Indo-Pacific corals could produce approximately 3.46 quintillion eggs — 3.46 × 10¹⁸ — during a single hypothetical spawning period. This is a first approximation based on reproductive traits and coral cover, with missing measurements estimated from other traits. It is neither a direct count nor a precise total for all coral reproduction worldwide each year.

Each egg and sperm normally carries one set of chromosomes: half the usual chromosome complement of the parent’s body cells, including a reshuffled selection of its inherited genetic variants. Producing these cells requires resources, and eggs also contain provisions for early development. Yet many gametes never achieve fertilisation, while many resulting larvae fail to establish themselves and survive to reproductive maturity. The study estimates the scale of egg production, not the precise proportion lost, but the distinction between producing eggs and producing successful descendants is fundamental.

Creationism In Crisis - A Jurassic Crocodile With Needle Teeth - 170 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated impression of Ctenosuchus tenuidens hunting.

ChatGPT-6 Astra

An artist’s restoration of Ctenosuchus tenuidens.

Artwork by Nathan Dehaut.

New species of Jurassic crocodile had unusually slender teeth | University of Portsmouth

Some 170 million years ago, in the rivers and lakes of what is now Morocco, a crocodile relative was exploiting a feeding niche very different from that of the large-prey predators familiar today. Named Ctenosuchus tenuidens, it had a long, narrow snout armed with exceptionally slender, closely spaced teeth. For young-Earth creationists, its existence presents the familiar chronological problem: an animal was living, feeding and participating in a complex ecosystem more than 169 million years before their preferred biblical chronology allows Earth itself to have existed.

The discovery is described in a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by Hamzah Imran of the School of the Environment and Life Sciences, University of Portsmouth, and colleagues. The animal belonged to the thalattosuchians, an extinct group of crocodile relatives. Its delicate dentition suggests a diet of small aquatic prey, such as tiny fish, shrimps and worms, rather than large, struggling animals capable of breaking those fine teeth.

This makes the fossil particularly informative about evolutionary specialisation. Teeth are not simply more or less effective in some universal sense: their usefulness depends on what an animal eats and how it feeds. A robust tooth suited to restraining substantial prey and a fine tooth suited to retaining small organisms represent different solutions to different ecological problems. An adaptation can therefore open up one feeding opportunity while limiting another. Evolution produces such compromises because natural selection favours reproductive success under particular conditions, rather than engineering an organism that excels at everything.

Creationism In Crisis - An Extinct Egyptian Crocodile Fossil In the Same Rock The Sphynx Was Carved From - 45 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

[caption]

[credit]

The holotype skull (SMNS 10575) of H. cairensis n. gen. n. comb. (a) Photograph of SMNS 10575 in dorsal view, (b) interpretative drawing of SMNS 10575 in dorsal view, (c) photograph of SMNS 10575 in ventral view and (d) interpretative drawing of SMNS 10575 in ventral view. Abbreviations: f, frontal; ic, internal choana; j, jugal; m, maxilla; ma, maxillary alveoli; n, nasals; o, orbit; oc, occipital condyle; p, parietal; pa, palatines; pf, prefrontal; po, postorbital; pt, pterygoid; q, quadrate; sof, suborbital fenestra; sq, squamosal; sqp, squamosal prong; stf, supratemporal fenestra. Scale bar, 10 mm.

From: Paul M. J. Burke, et al (2026)

New crocodile species discovered in rocks used to build the Great Sphinx | UCL News

The Great Sphinx of Giza is an ancient monument carved into something vastly more ancient: rocks recording a world that existed long before humans, let alone Egyptian civilisation. A newly recognised crocodilian from the same geological formation lived about 45 million years ago. For anyone attempting to reconcile Earth's history with a literal reading of Genesis and its young-Earth chronology, the difficulty begins with the material from which the monument itself was carved.

As UCL News reports, researchers have identified Herugavialis cairensis, an extinct gavial, or long-snouted crocodilian, from Egypt's Mokattam Formation. Its nearly complete skull was discovered in the 1920s and had long been assigned to Tomistoma, the genus containing today's false gharial. CT scanning revealed distinguishing anatomical features, including a raised ridge around the eyes, supporting its recognition as a separate genus. The findings are published in Royal Society Open Science.

This is a useful example of how science corrects itself. A fossil does not cease to be informative because it has spent a century in a museum, and an identification does not become unchallengeable merely because generations of researchers have accepted it. Better tools and renewed scrutiny can expose distinctions that earlier investigators missed. Revising the classification strengthens our understanding of evolutionary history; it does not undermine the evidence that such a history occurred.

The animal also belonged to a very different Egypt. Shallow seas covered areas that are now land, and several gavial species inhabited its coastal waters. UCL describes a wider Mediterranean history in which crocodilian diversity fluctuated alongside changes in temperature and sea level, before the region lost its crocodilians around the Mediterranean drying crisis roughly six million years ago. Even that much later episode predates the conventional young-Earth creationist date for the entire Universe by orders of magnitude.

Creationism In Crisis - How Breast Feeding Evolved - 165 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fossil skeleton of Megacauda sungei

University of Chicago

Fossil skeleton of Megacauda sungei

University of Chicago

Professor Peishu Li coauthors Nature study uncovering ancient origins of mammalian suckling and swallowing

Some 165 million years before creationists imagine Earth existed, an aquatic relative of modern mammals was already carrying anatomical equipment associated with one of our most characteristic abilities: suckling milk. A newly described fossil from Inner Mongolia, China, adds another inconvenient chapter to the evolutionary history that young-Earth creationism insists never happened. Its significance extends beyond its age, however. It also preserves a revealing combination of ancestral and more modern features — precisely the sort of transitional anatomy that creationists routinely claim is missing from the fossil record.

The animal, Megacauda sungei, is described in a new paper in Nature. It belonged to the docodonts, an extinct branch of mammaliaforms, the broader group encompassing mammals and their closest extinct relatives. Living approximately 168–163 million years ago, it had a broad, flattened tail, swimming adaptations and specialised teeth suited to an animal diet. It was a functioning, specialised inhabitant of Jurassic freshwater environments, with an evolutionary history written into its anatomy.

Particularly informative are small bony projections near the back of the palate and specialised throat bones. In living mammals, comparable structures support the muscles and soft tissues involved in swallowing and suckling. Their presence in Megacauda suggests that important components of this feeding apparatus had already evolved by the Middle Jurassic. This does not mean that the fossil identifies the first animal to produce milk, or preserves a youngster caught feeding. The inference concerns the anatomical machinery that made mammal-like suckling and swallowing possible.

Refuting Creationism - The Earliest Aquatic Mammal Complete With Transitional Features - 120 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Holotype specimen of Dongoconodon platycauda

Reconstruction of the semi-aquatic life of Dongoconodon platycauda

Drawn by Chen Yu.

A joint study by Professor Bi Shundong of the School of Life Sciences at Yunnan University has discovered the earliest known swimming mammal to date.

Some 120 million years before anyone imagined a six-day creation, a small mammal in what is now northeastern China was combining features that refuse to fit the tidy categories creationists would like nature to obey. Dongoconodon platycauda had adaptations for swimming, an unusual pattern of tooth replacement, and an ear apparatus that retained a connection to its lower jaw. Here was a functioning animal with a mosaic of characteristics, illustrating how evolution modifies inherited structures without waiting for an entire collection of supposedly “mammalian” features to arrive together.

The nearly complete skeleton, from the Early Cretaceous Jiufotang Formation of Liaoning Province, is described by Shundong Bi and colleagues in Nature Communications. The research is also explained in institutional reports from Nanjing University and Yunnan University, both in Chinese.

Its broad hands and feet probably supported webbing, while its flattened, tapering tail appears to have helped with steering and stability. Comparisons with the skeletons of 124 living mammal species supported a semiaquatic lifestyle. This adds to the evidence that mammals living alongside dinosaurs occupied a much wider range of ecological niches than the familiar image of small, uniformly shrew-like creatures might suggest.

Creationism Refuted - A Previously Unknown Extinct Yak - Evolved 400,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI depiction of yak on the Tibetan Plateau

ChatGPT-6 Astra

Map showing the locations and sample sizes of sites from which yak X genomes were generated. Extant wild yak distribution is in light orange.¹⁶ Elevation is shown. Map not to scale.

From Oppenheimer, Jonas; et al (2026)

Previously unknown extinct bovine species discovered in Siberia - Stockholms universitet

For young-Earth creationists, the problem with ancient DNA is that it keeps revealing histories which their preferred chronology cannot accommodate. The latest example is an extinct relative of the yak whose evolutionary separation from living yaks began at least 400,000 years ago — long before the supposed “Creation Week” of a literal reading of Genesis. Its existence has emerged from fragments of Siberian bone too incomplete to identify by their shape, but which retained something much more informative: genetic evidence of a lost branch of the bovine family tree.

In a study published in Current Biology, Jonas Oppenheimer, Alexandre Gilardet and colleagues report 20 ancient nuclear genomes from Denisova Cave and other sites in southern Siberia, spanning more than 200,000 years. The lineage, provisionally known as “yak X”, had previously been recognised from mitochondrial DNA. The new analysis provides much broader genetic evidence that it represented a distinct species that effectively separated from the lineage leading to living yaks by about 250,000 years ago.

This was no static population inhabiting an unchanging world. The genomes reveal a demographic decline and suggest population turnover, accompanied by reduced genetic diversity, around the last interglacial, approximately 130,000–115,000 years ago. Warming may have disrupted the distribution of these cold-adapted animals; an earlier warm interval may also have helped isolate populations during their initial divergence. Those climatic explanations remain hypotheses, but the genetic evidence provides a record against which they can be tested. The youngest specimen analysed is about 27,000 years old; precisely when, and why, the lineage subsequently disappeared remains unknown.

There is an equally instructive lesson in the researchers’ caution. Although they interpret the genomic evidence as identifying a separate species, they have not simply attached a new formal species name to these fragmentary remains. Comparisons with previously described yak-like fossils are needed to establish whether the genetic lineage corresponds to an animal already recognised from its anatomy. Discovering a previously unrecognised genetic history and resolving its taxonomic identity are related but distinct tasks. Scientific confidence in one does not require pretending that the other has already been settled.

For creationism, meanwhile, calling the animal “just another member of the cattle kind” does nothing to resolve the chronological problem. The evidence concerns a branching history of populations, divergence and eventual extinction extending across hundreds of thousands of years. Evolutionary biology supplies the framework for reconstructing that history and asking further questions about it. Compressing everything into a few thousand years would require an alternative explanation for the genetic relationships, the ages of the remains and the succession of populations — not merely a biblical label applied after the evidence has been collected.

Malevolent Design - How Ancient Viral DNA Gave Humans An Advantage But Can Be Co-Opted By Lung Cancer - Malevolent Design, Incompetence or Evolution?

AI depiction of the ancient retroviral DNA that is essential for embryo development but can help lung cancer cells survive too

ChatGPT-6 Astra

Post-gastrulation amnioids - models with mimic the development of the amniotic sac forming as expected (top panel). Amnioids without a key calcium-buffering gene and its accompanying switch don't form as expected (bottom two panels).

Credit: Borzo Gharibi, Science Advances (2026).

An ancient advantage, hijacked by cancer | Crick

Some 13 million years before anyone could have written a creation myth, a retrovirus inserted its genetic material into the genome of an ancestral ape. Today, part of that viral legacy helps regulate early human development. This presents creationists with several difficulties at once: a history vastly older than their biblical chronology permits, genetic material acquired from a virus, and an evolutionary innovation produced by putting an existing sequence to a new use. There is also an uncomfortable sting in the tail for advocates of a benevolent intelligent designer: cancer cells can exploit the same biological machinery.

The research, reported in Science Advances, concerns a remnant of an ancient retrovirus known as HERVH. This sequence acts as a switch controlling a form of calbindin, a protein involved in buffering calcium inside cells. Removing the switch or calbindin disrupted the growth and developmental behaviour of human embryonic stem cells and the organisation of models of early embryonic structures.

The evolutionary distinction matters. The original acquisition of viral DNA represents horizontal genetic transfer: genetic material crossed from a virus into its host, rather than arriving through ordinary inheritance from a parent. Once incorporated into the germ line, however, that material could pass vertically through successive generations. Its recruitment to regulate a host gene is an example of exaptation — the co-option of an existing feature for a different function. The virus did not need to invent calbindin, nor did evolution need to create an entirely new protein from scratch. A new regulatory relationship could arise by combining material with different evolutionary histories.

This is precisely the sort of process obscured by the creationist slogan that new genetic “information” requires an intelligent author. Biologically useful novelty can involve changes in when, where and how an existing gene is expressed. Imported DNA can supply a regulatory element; subsequent evolution can preserve and modify its contribution. Calling the result “information” does not erase the natural processes that produced it, still less establish that someone intended the outcome.

The chronology is equally inconvenient. Comparative primate evidence places this insertion roughly 13 million years ago, after the lineage leading to humans and the African great apes had separated from the orangutan lineage. Orangutans are themselves great apes; the relevant event occurred within the broader great-ape family tree. Either way, this is inherited molecular history extending far beyond the few thousand years allowed by a literal young-Earth reading of Genesis.

Yet a mechanism useful during development need not remain beneficial in every context. Earlier research showed that lung squamous cell carcinoma can activate this viral switch, helping cancer cells avoid senescence — a state in which cells stop dividing. The cancer biology is complex, but the central evolutionary point is clear: machinery that supports normal development can also become available for malignant cells to exploit.

That is consistent with an evolutionary cost-benefit trade-off. Natural selection can preserve a developmental advantage despite a vulnerability elsewhere in life; it has no foresight with which to guarantee lifelong protection from every possible consequence. But if intelligent-design advocates insist that useful genetic arrangements demonstrate deliberate engineering, they must apply that reasoning consistently. A designer credited with the developmental benefit cannot simply be excused responsibility for the exploitable weakness. On their own premises, the result raises questions about competence, benevolence, or even malevolent design. Evolution requires no such theological contortions: an ancient infection, inherited variation and the opportunistic reuse of existing material are sufficient ingredients for the story.

Refuting Creationism - More Problems for Creationists As Science Reveals Yet More Evidence Falsifying The Bible Creation Myth

Ediacaran sea floor, Namibia, 543 Millian Years Ago

Oxford University Museum of Natural History

Ediacaran sea floor, Namibia, Southwest Africa, 543 million years ago.

Credit: Museum of Natural History, University of Oxford / Mighty Fossils.

New study suggests animals may have evolved vastly earlier than fossil evidence suggests | Oxford University

One of the strengths of science is that its conclusions remain open to revision. An assumption that once appeared reasonable can be tested against new evidence, found wanting, and replaced with something better. For creationists, who frequently portray such revisions as evidence that science cannot be trusted, this must seem a peculiar way of acquiring knowledge. Yet it is precisely how science improves its understanding: by allowing the evidence to correct the explanation, rather than requiring the evidence to conform to a predetermined answer.

A new study published in Science Advances provides another example. Researchers have challenged an assumption used in some recent estimates of when animals originated. Their analyses support an origin approximately 700–800 million years ago, potentially extending animal evolutionary history by around 200 million years beyond estimates based on a younger maximum-age constraint.

The issue is a deceptively simple one: if a fossil deposit preserves microscopic organisms in exquisite detail, but contains no definite animals, does that mean animals had not yet evolved? Some researchers have used the approximately 590-million-year-old Weng’an Biota of China in this way, reasoning that animals would have been preserved there had they existed. Its lack of unequivocal animal fossils has therefore helped set a proposed upper age limit for animal origins.

The new research exposes a difficulty with that reasoning. The younger Kheseen Biota of Mongolia also preserves exceptionally detailed microfossils, yet none can confidently be identified as animals. In this case, however, animals are known from other deposits of comparable age. Their absence from Kheseen therefore cannot demonstrate their absence from the world. Particular environments and conditions of fossilisation can leave animals out of the record, even when other organisms are beautifully preserved.

This matters because molecular clocks — methods that use genetic differences between living organisms to estimate when their ancestors diverged — require calibration against geological and fossil evidence. Change an unjustified age constraint, and the resulting estimates can change substantially. Using alternative constraints from older deposits, the researchers recovered a much earlier possible origin for animals. They have not discovered an 800-million-year-old animal, nor established a final date for the animal kingdom’s beginnings. They have shown why one argument for restricting those beginnings to a much later interval is unreliable.

For young-Earth creationism, neither chronology offers any comfort. The debate concerns events hundreds of millions of years ago, not whether animal history can be squeezed into the few thousand years allowed by a literal reading of Genesis. Uncertainty over precisely when animals originated does not make every proposed date equally credible, any more than uncertainty over a mountain’s exact height makes it plausibly a molehill.

Creationism Refuted - A Four-Winged, Flying Dinosaur - From More Than 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

An artist’s rendering of the Norellraptor after an “exquisitely preserved” fossil with a complete skeleton and parts of its plumage was unearthed in Liaoning province.

Image: Zhao Chuang/South China Morning Post

Norellraptor barsboldi 130108-MHGU-F4281, appendicular elements.

a Right hand. b Pubis. c Feet. am, acetabular margin; ap, apron; cs, claw soft tissue; gi, gastral impression; mcI-III, metacarpals I to III; mtI-V, metatarsals I to V; p, phalanx; pf, pubic foot; r, radius; sc, semilunate carpal; t, tibiotarsus; u, ulna; uI-III, unguals 1 to 3. Scale bar = 10 mm.

Revolutionary Feathered Dinosaur Discovery in China Suggests Flight Evolved Multiple Times : ScienceAlert

For creationists who insist that complex adaptations could only have appeared as complete, purpose-built packages, another feathered dinosaur has provided an awkward piece of evidence. Evolution does not require a finished flight apparatus to materialise in a single miraculous leap. It can modify inherited structures, combine them in new ways, and produce similar adaptations along different branches of the family tree. A newly described dinosaur from China adds evidence that even among the close relatives of birds, there was more than one evolutionary route towards an aerial lifestyle.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, Xuri Wang and colleagues describe Norellraptor barsboldi, a small microraptorine dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Jiufotang Formation of Liaoning, north-eastern China. Its remarkably complete, 57-centimetre skeleton preserves traces of plumage, including on its forelimbs and hindlimbs. It belonged to the group of feathered dinosaurs famous for their four-winged forms: evolutionary relatives of birds, rather than evidence that modern birds appeared fully formed and unrelated to other dinosaurs.

The crucial finding concerns the sequence in which adaptations arose. The researchers’ evolutionary analysis indicates that approximately 30 per cent of the derived anatomical features identified in microraptorine evolution also evolved independently in the bird lineage. However, they appeared in different orders. This supports the gradual assembly of flight-associated anatomy under different selective pressures, rather than the inheritance of an already completed flight apparatus from a common ancestor.

Refuting Creationism - A 'Jumping Gene' Jumps All Over Creationist Dogmas

AI-generated conceptual illustration of BC200’s transfer from human DNA into a poxvirus, with background neurons representing its association with neuronal regulation.

ChatGPT-6 Astra

AI-generated conceptual illustration of BC200’s transfer from human DNA into a poxvirus, with background neurons representing its association with neuronal regulation.

ChatGPT-6 Astra

New type of human jumping gene found in a poxvirus | Cornell Chronicle

Creationists who insist that functional genetic information requires an intelligent designer have another evolutionary history to explain. A genetic element associated with neuronal regulation in primates began as a “jumping gene”, acquired a cellular function, and nevertheless retained its ability to generate copies elsewhere in the genome. Copies even escaped into a human virus. Far from resembling a collection of sealed, immutable designs, genomes reveal a history of copying, repurposing and exchange.

The element is BC200, the subject of a paper in Science by Pu Gao and colleagues, published on 24 September 2026. Its ancestor was a transposable element recruited into a cellular role approximately 40 million years ago. BC200 produces a non-coding RNA: its product is an RNA molecule, rather than a protein. Abundant in neurons, it is thought to help regulate protein production, although its precise physiological role remains incompletely understood.

This is an example of evolutionary exaptation: existing biological material acquires a new use. A sequence whose ancestral significance lay in its capacity to propagate could become useful to its host. No foresight is required. Variants arise without anticipating future needs, and natural selection can preserve those that improve reproductive success. The new function need not have been the reason the original sequence existed.

The unusual feature here is that recruitment did not end BC200’s mobility. Genes derived from transposable elements typically lose that ancestral capacity; BC200 retained it. The researchers identified two independent transfers into molluscum contagiosum virus during the history of modern humans. Whether the acquired sequence benefits the virus remains an open question.

There are two distinct difficulties here for creationism. For young-Earth creationists, the roughly 40-million-year history already places these events far outside their biblical chronology. For intelligent-design advocates, the difficulty is mechanistic: biological function can emerge through the modification and recruitment of material that already exists. Calling the resulting function “designed” adds no explanation of the evidence.

Nor does transfer into a virus mean that a human became a virus, or that every transferred sequence must be adaptive. It demonstrates something more precise: genetic material can cross the boundary between a host genome and a viral genome. BC200’s history combines inherited ancestry, evolutionary repurposing and continuing mobility — exactly the sort of untidy, contingent history that evolutionary biology allows researchers to investigate.

Creationism Refuted - How an 'Irreducibly Complex' Process Evolved Naturally

AI-generated illustration of competing bacteriophage viruses and the CRISPR-Cas RNA immune system

ChatGPT-6 Astra

Kenneth Loi shows how VIPR RNA (in pink) snakes around the double helix of DNA (yellow and green) to form a unique triplex structure.

Photo: Glenn Ramit.

VIPR Systems Break the Rules of the Genetic Code to Target and Twist Around DNA

One of the recurring mistakes in creationist arguments is to assume that a complex biological system must always have performed its present function. If its components now work together, the argument goes, they must have been created together for that purpose. Evolution, however, can recruit existing machinery for new roles. Two papers in *Science* now provide evidence that this process may help explain the origin of an important form of microbial immunity—with the intriguing possibility that bacteria acquired the precursors of their antiviral weapons from viruses themselves.

To appreciate the discovery, it helps to understand what CRISPR immunity actually is. Although CRISPR is familiar as a tool for editing genes, its natural role is defence. Many bacteria and archaea possess CRISPR–Cas systems that retain molecular records of past invaders. Short pieces of foreign DNA are incorporated into the cell’s genome, between repeated sequences. These stored fragments provide templates for small RNA molecules, which guide CRISPR-associated—or Cas—proteins to matching genetic material during subsequent infections. Depending on the system, the resulting response can destroy invading DNA or RNA. This is adaptive immunity: protection directed against particular threats, with a genetic memory that can pass to descendants.

CRISPR stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”, a description of the DNA arrangement in which those memories are stored. The best-known gene-editing protein, Cas9, belongs to class 2, whose targeting machinery centres on one large protein. Class-1 systems instead use assemblies of several proteins to recognise their targets. It is the evolutionary origin of this latter machinery that the new research addresses.

The studies, published on 17 September 2026 investigate a compact system called VIPR, short for viral interference programmable repeat. Found in viruses and bacteria, it combines a small protein with a guide RNA. The researchers propose that an ancestral VIPR-like system involved in competition between viruses was recruited into bacterial defence, eventually contributing to the evolution of class-1 CRISPR. This would be evolutionary co-option: machinery favoured in one context becoming useful in another.

Malevolent Design - A Newly-Identified Tick-Borne Virus That Teams Up With Another Virus And Kills People - Malevolent Intelligence Or Evolution?

Engorged female Tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis. (ventral view)

Timothy Takemoto / Flickr cc

Engorged Tick"

Timothy Takemoto / Flickr cc

Scientists in China discover new tick-borne virus that causes flu-like illness | CIDRAP

One of the problems with claiming that biological complexity proves intelligent design is that the argument cannot stop conveniently at butterflies, flowers and the human eye. If complex biological machinery requires a designer, then the same reasoning must apply to parasites and pathogens. A virus’s ability to infect us cannot become an unfortunate accident merely because crediting the supposed designer would now be embarrassing. Nor can the animal that carries it from host to host be excluded from the reckoning.

A newly identified tick-borne virus in China provides another uncomfortable example. Described in a correspondence in The New England Journal of Medicine, Asian longhorned tick nairovirus, or ALTNV, is associated with fever, fatigue, gastrointestinal symptoms and, in some patients, reduced platelet counts. Its vector is the already familiar Asian longhorned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis; experiments demonstrated transmission to mice. “New” here means newly recognised by science, not shown to have come into existence recently.

The clinical findings deserve care. All 56 patients reported with ALTNV alone recovered without lasting effects. However, seven of 38 patients infected with both ALTNV and Dabie bandavirus died. These deaths do not establish that ALTNV alone is lethal, or determine its contribution to the fatalities. They do place the discovery within a system of tick-borne infections capable of causing serious illness and death.

Now apply the creationist rule that functional complexity and genetic information require an intelligent author. On that premise, the designer must take responsibility for the infectious agent and its means of delivery. Here is a blood-feeding animal whose activities provide a route for viruses to enter other animals, including humans. If every relevant adaptation was knowingly intended by an all-knowing creator, then the resulting suffering cannot be dismissed as an unforeseen side-effect. The alleged designer knew what its creations would do.

That is the force of the malevolent-designer argument. It does not require us to believe that a supernatural intelligence actually makes viruses. It asks why features that serve pathogens should count as evidence of loving craftsmanship when equivalent features serving their victims are routinely presented as precisely that. If the designer receives credit for our defences, it must also answer for the threats those defences sometimes fail to overcome. Deliberately creating the means of making people ill is hardly an obvious expression of benevolence.

Creationism Refuted - 'Jumping Genes' Create New Functional Genetic Information - No Magic needed.

Eciton vagans, with lava from a raided wasp nest.

By Geoff Gallice from Gainesville, FL, USA Spoils of the raid, CC BY 2.0, Link

Ants look back on an evolutionary story of success. The photo shows workers of the Asian weaver ant.

© Lukas Schrader

“Jumping genes” helped ants in their evolutionary triumph after the extinction of the dinosaurs

One of creationism’s favourite assertions is that evolution cannot produce “new genetic information” without an intelligent designer. What usually goes missing is a clear definition of information, an explanation of why known genetic mechanisms cannot generate novelty, or any evidence of the supposed designer doing anything. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologists continue to investigate the natural processes by which genomes change and organisms acquire new capabilities. A new study of ants provides another example of how productive that scientific approach can be.

As reported in Science Advances, an international team led by Dr Lukas Schrader has investigated the contribution of transposable elements, commonly called “jumping genes”, to ant evolution. These mobile DNA sequences can move or copy themselves within genomes. Their activity can be disruptive, but it can also supply material for evolutionary innovation. The research links their activity to the expansion of gene families, including those encoding the odour receptors so important to ants’ chemical communication.

The researchers compared genomes from 163 ant species, representing twelve of the sixteen living subfamilies. They identified independent bursts of transposable-element activity in the ancestors of major ant groups, preceding their rapid diversification following the Cretaceous–Palaeogene, or K–Pg, mass extinction approximately 66 million years ago. The findings support a connection between changes within genomes and the evolutionary opportunities created by a profoundly altered world.

The evolutionary significance is straightforward. A mass extinction changes the conditions under which survivors live: ecological relationships are disrupted, resources become available in different ways, and opportunities arise as ecosystems recover. A genetic variant that previously offered little advantage may become useful under these new conditions. Natural selection can then favour organisms carrying it. Neither the mutation nor the environmental upheaval needs to anticipate the outcome.

Nor does genetic novelty require a complete, finished gene to appear from nowhere. Duplication supplies additional copies of existing sequences, which can subsequently diverge; changes to the regulation and arrangement of DNA can also alter what an organism does. Calling the starting material “existing information” does nothing to prevent its descendants from acquiring new functions. The relevant questions concern what changed, how it changed, and what consequences followed—not whether creationists are willing to call the result “information”.

Here, the specific finding is an association between mobile DNA, expanding gene families and subsequent diversification. It should not be inflated into a claim that every extra receptor acquired a demonstrated new function, or that the asteroid impact directly produced particular beneficial mutations. Nevertheless, the study supplies evidence for a natural route connecting genomic change with evolutionary diversification, precisely where the creationist argument substitutes an assertion of impossibility.

For young-Earth creationists, there is the additional inconvenience of the timescale. This diversification followed an extinction event some 66 million years ago—thousands of times further into the past than their entire supposed history of the Universe allows. Ant evolution was already unfolding in a world unimaginably ancient by biblical standards. What emerges is a history of genetic change, environmental catastrophe and opportunities exploited by surviving lineages, without foresight or a predetermined destination.

Refuting Creationism - A Star Is Born - And Rewrites The Story Of The Origin Of Starfish

AI-generate impression of Yujingia glutenotunica.
(Colours and aspects of its living appearance are speculative)

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Artist's impression of Yujingia glutenotunica

Credit: Kaiyue He, et al

A star is born: half billion-year-old fossil rewrites the origin story of starfish | University of Cambridge

One of creationism’s favourite misrepresentations of the fossil record, promulgated By Stephen S. Mayer of the Discovery Institute, is that the Cambrian ‘explosion’ was a sudden creation event, when the major animal groups appeared without evolutionary ancestors, already equipped with their modern body plans. This depends on treating ‘rapid’ in the geological sense as ‘instantaneous’, and overlooking the transitional fossils that reveal how those body plans evolved. A newly described animal from China provides another awkward example for that narrative. And of course the existence of transition fossils themselves are a major problem for creationists who insist that they don't exist because their creation myth can't accommodate them.

Named Yujingia glutenotunica, this small, soft-bodied creature lived approximately 518 million years ago. As described by Kaiyue He and colleagues in their paper in Current Biology, its combination of anatomical features places it close to the common ancestor of two groups that now look remarkably different: the echinoderms, including starfish and sea urchins, and the hemichordates, including acorn worms. Together, these constitute the animal group known as Ambulacraria.

The fossils preserve a digestive tract and feather-like feeding tentacles, together with another set of appendages that may have anchored the animal to the seabed. Crucially, Yujingia possessed an elaborate feeding apparatus without a mineralised skeleton. Its anatomy therefore supports the evolutionary interpretation that specialised feeding structures preceded some of the defining features of later echinoderms.
This is what makes transitional fossils so informative. They need not resemble an animal caught halfway through changing into a modern species, nor must they be demonstrably the direct ancestors of anything alive today. They preserve combinations of characteristics that help scientists reconstruct the order in which evolutionary changes occurred. A fully functioning animal can be transitional in its anatomy: ‘transitional’ describes its relationship to other forms, not an inability to survive until evolution has finished building it.

Unintelligent Design - How The Immune System Can Go Rogue And Cause Premature Ageing

AI-generated image

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Reversing hallmarks of rapid aging by silencing a cellular alarm system

Photo credit: Eitan Moses

How the Immune System Rewrites Rapid Aging

One of the difficulties creationists have with presenting the immune system as evidence of intelligent design is explaining why something supposedly designed to protect us so often contributes to our illnesses. A defence system that can turn the body's own damaged DNA into a trigger for further damage is hardly an obvious example of competent, benevolent engineering. It is, however, entirely understandable as a product of evolution: a collection of mechanisms favoured for their benefits, constrained by their history, and carrying costs that natural selection has never eliminated.

Research from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem provides a revealing example. In a paper published in Genes & Development, Marva Bergman and colleagues investigated how a DNA-sensing protein called cGAS contributes to disorders involving defective DNA repair; the body's response to genetic damage can itself become an important source of harm.

The underlying problem is straightforward. DNA appearing in the fluid surrounding a cell's nucleus can be a warning of infection. cGAS helps detect it and activates an inflammatory defence response. But the DNA need not belong to a virus: damaged cells can expose their own DNA to the same sensor. Consequently, an alarm that normally helps protect against infection can sustain inflammation even when there is no invading organism to fight. The response then risks damaging the very tissues it ordinarily helps defend.

The researchers modelled two human DNA-repair disorders, ataxia-telangiectasia and Bloom syndrome, in turquoise killifish, Nothobranchius furzeri. In the ataxia-telangiectasia model, disrupting the gene for cGAS partially alleviated reproductive defects, cellular senescence in the liver, and inflammation in the cerebellum. Several measures of genome instability also improved, consistent with cGAS having additional effects inside the nucleus, beyond its familiar inflammatory role.

There was, however, a crucial complication: losing cGAS in fish without the underlying repair defect made pathology and genome instability worse. This was therefore no demonstration that the immune system contains a universally dispensable component, nor a discovery that switching off one gene reverses normal ageing. The same protein could be beneficial or harmful depending on the biological circumstances.

That is precisely where the evolutionary explanation becomes useful. A sensor that responds to DNA in an unusual location offers a broadly effective means of detecting danger, but that signal does not identify the DNA's origin with certainty. Such a system needs safeguards and regulation, and its usefulness does not guarantee that those safeguards will work under every condition. Natural selection can preserve a mechanism whose overall benefits outweigh its costs; it cannot anticipate every future mutation or guarantee freedom from disease.

The study did not test the evolutionary history of cGAS, but its findings illustrate the kind of context-dependent compromise evolution produces. For intelligent-design advocates, the awkward question is why an allegedly perfect designer would make protection and self-inflicted damage so intimately connected. For evolutionary biology, the useful question is how that connection works—and whether understanding it can help us reduce the harm.

This is just one example of how the human body is not a work of perfect design, but the product of sub-optimal compromises constrained by contingent history and lacking in foresight, where additional layers of complexity are not hallmarks of intelligent design that creationists like to imagine, but of the need for controls and compensations for problems created by earlier iterations of the evolutionary cycle. Many more are explained in my book, The Body Of Evidence: How The Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design

Refuting Creationism - Bigamous Beetles Have Better Babies - Observed Evolution Over 15 Years

Red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum.

By Udo Schmidt from Deutschland Tribolium castaneum (Herbst, 1797) CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

Red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum

Source: Wikipedia - Public Domain, Link

How sex can help save species from extinction | UEA

One of the recurring claims of creationist apologetics is that mutations condemn living populations to relentless genetic deterioration — a supposedly inevitable decline which evolution cannot overcome. What this argument neglects is that mutations do not operate in isolation: selection influences which genetic variants pass to subsequent generations. Now, a long-running experiment with red flour beetles has provided direct genomic evidence that competition for mates can help remove harmful variants, leaving populations more resistant to extinction.

The research, led by Michael D. Pointer, of the University of East Anglia Department of Biological Sciences, described in a report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), also addresses an interesting evolutionary question: why is sexual reproduction so widespread despite its considerable costs? Finding mates takes time and energy, competition can be costly, and reproduction requires contributions from individuals which do not themselves produce eggs. One possible compensating benefit is that competition for reproductive success helps prevent damaging mutations from accumulating.

The researchers tested this idea using populations of the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, maintained under stronger or weaker sexual selection. After 156 generations, whole-genome sequencing showed that populations exposed to stronger sexual selection carried fewer genetic variants predicted to be harmful. Their overall genetic diversity, however, remained comparable. Selection had reduced the burden of damaging variants without a corresponding reduction in variation across the genome.

The distinction matters. Genetic diversity is often used as an indicator of a population’s prospects, but the amount of variation cannot tell us everything about its effects. In this experiment, the estimated burden of harmful variants was a better predictor of extinction under inbreeding than diversity alone. Populations could retain similar amounts of genetic variation while differing in their vulnerability to genetic stress.

Creationism Refuted - Dino Dung Tells Us More Than The Bible's Ignorant Authors Ever Could

Artist's impression of a tyrannosaur preying on an ancient diving bird.

Credit: Andrey Atuchin

The fossil feather preserved in dinosaur poop.

Credit: O’Connor, et al. (2026))

A fossil feather preserved inside dinosaur poop could help explain why birds survived the mass extinction - Field Museum

Creationism’s problems with the fossil record now extend even to dinosaur droppings. A small piece of fossilised dung from Montana preserves evidence of a meal eaten some 66 million years ago — long before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of young-Earth creationism. Within it are feathers that may help illuminate why some ancient birds disappeared while the ancestors of today’s birds survived. As, reported in Current Biology, researchers led by Field Museum palaeontologist Jingmai O’Connor, examining a coprolite — fossilised faeces — from the Hell Creek Formation found exceptionally preserved feathers alongside fish scales and bones belonging to a hesperornithiform, an extinct diving bird.

The feathers combine structures associated with waterproofing in modern aquatic birds with smaller, simpler, fuzzy body feathers. The researchers suggest that differences in insulation, feather replacement through moulting, or both might have influenced which bird lineages survived the cold conditions following the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact. Hesperornithiforms disappeared; the lineage containing all living birds survived. This remains a hypothesis, however: one coprolite cannot establish why entire groups became extinct. The distinction between the observed feathers and the proposed explanation is central to the Field Museum’s account of the findings.

For creationists, the difficulty goes beyond the date. This combination of ancestral and more derived features makes sense within an evolutionary family tree, in which different characteristics change at different rates. Evolution does not require every part of an animal to move together along some imaginary ladder from ‘primitive’ to ‘advanced’. Nor does an extinct bird need to be a direct ancestor of living species to preserve evidence of the evolutionary history they share. There is also a useful lesson here about adaptation. A feature that works adequately in one environment may become a liability when conditions change. Evolution has no foresight: natural selection cannot prepare organisms for an asteroid impact millions of years in the future. Survival depends on the circumstances organisms encounter and the characteristics they already possess, with chance also playing its part. What makes this discovery particularly telling is how an apparently unpromising object can yield evidence against which explanations can be tested. Scientists can investigate both the history of feathers and the unresolved details of extinction without invoking a designer. The uncertainty concerns which natural factors mattered most — and further fossils may help resolve it. Even a dinosaur’s discarded meal can contribute to that process.