The discovery that ancient rodents evolved a thumbnail in place of a claw helps explain why they are the most successful mammalian order on the planet. That small anatomical change opened up a whole new range of ecological niches, triggering an explosive radiation of new rodent species.
This fact alone should worry creationists who cling to a child-like understanding of science. Their favourite avoidance tactic—when pressed for an example of evolution—is to retreat hastily down their rabbit hole with the familiar cry: “Ah! But that’s not real, ‘macro’-evolution. That’s just variation within a ‘kind’.”
Of course, creationists are consistently reticent about defining what they mean by “macro-evolution,” or explaining how the processes that supposedly produce it differ from those of normal evolution. In scientific terms, evolution is simply a change in allele frequencies in a population over time. There is no separate mechanism for “macro” versus “micro.”
So here’s the awkward question for them: was the evolution of the thumbnail from a claw a case of “macro-evolution” or not?
According to the new research, led by Rafaela Missagi of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, with collaborators from the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago, USA), Northwestern University (Chicago, USA), and the Natural History Museum (London, UK), this change was pivotal. It allowed rodents to diversify into countless species—just as the elongation of bat fingers into wings enabled bats to radiate into hundreds of species. Crucially, in both cases no “new structures” were created from nothing; existing ones were repurposed.
This sort of question usually sends creationists scurrying for cover, chanting Bible verses as they go.
Unlike creationist dogma, which collapses under this kind of scrutiny, the new findings provide yet another vindication of evolutionary theory. Evolution predicts that when a new function arises, it can open up new ecological opportunities, leading to rapid diversification. Not because there is a plan, but because natural selection now has something new to work on.
This post is a bit of a change from my usual fare, where I’m busy pulling apart the pseudo-science of creationism with its reliance on magic and one ancient book of myths from a small Bronze Age tribe. Today, instead, I want to share something more uplifting: a glimpse of the rich and colourful life thriving in Britain’s coastal waters.
The footage comes from the Isles of Scilly, a protected area lying just off the tip of Cornwall in the far southwest of Britain. Thanks to the Gulf Stream, these islands enjoy a climate that feels almost Mediterranean — a rare treat for the UK!
A team from the University of Exeter’s Centre for Ecology and Conservation set up remote cameras around the islands to see what they could capture. This was a proof-of-concept project designed to test new ways of monitoring coastal ecosystems. The results didn’t disappoint. Their findings have just been published open-access in the Ecological Society of America’s journal Ecological Applications.
Scientists have found a textbook example of evolution in progress—in the very mould used to mature cheese in caves.
“Show me an example of witnessed evolution!” is one of the stock demands from creationists in online debates. But it’s a trick request. No sooner is an example given than they hurriedly shift the goalposts, redefining evolution into a childish caricature. Instead of the real scientific process, they demand to see a cow turn into a whale overnight, or a mouse suddenly grow wings—some grotesque parody of “macro-evolution” that no biologist has ever claimed happens. Ironically, if such nonsense did occur, it would actually falsify the theory of evolution rather than confirm it.
This intellectual dishonesty is the lifeblood of creationist rhetoric. Their arguments only work by preying on scientific illiteracy in their audience, peddling strawmen and false definitions to cover the absence of any evidence for their own claims.
Meanwhile, science continues as it always has, with evolution properly defined as a change in allele frequency in a population’s gene pool over time. And right on cue, another clear demonstration has just been published in Current Biology.
The researchers studied the fungus Penicillium solitum, which is used to ripen cheese, by following its population over eight years in the controlled cave environment of Jasper Hill Farm. By comparing samples collected in 2016 with those taken more recently, they were able to track both visible and genetic changes in the mould over time.
What they found was striking. The rind colour, once a leafy green, had shifted to a chalky white. Genetic analysis showed this was due to repeated mutations in a pigment-producing gene called alb1, which is responsible for melanin production. In the dark, cave-like conditions, melanin offered no advantage, so natural selection favoured lineages that conserved energy by not producing it. The loss of pigment arose independently several times, through different mutations—including both point mutations and the disruption of the gene by mobile DNA elements.
This is evolution at its most direct: heritable changes in the genetic make-up of a population, producing visible differences in response to environmental conditions. It illustrates a well-known principle called relaxed selection—when a trait is no longer useful, natural selection no longer preserves it, and the trait may fade away. In this case, the shift also altered the appearance and sensory qualities of the cheese, underlining how evolutionary change can have immediate, practical consequences.
How Cheese Rinds Form.
The rind of a cheese is not just a protective skin — it’s a living ecosystem. During the ageing process, the outer layer of the cheese is colonised by microbes, most often fungi and bacteria, that thrive in the controlled conditions of cheese cellars or caves.
In bloomy cheeses (like Brie or Camembert), surface-ripening moulds such as Penicillium camemberti are deliberately introduced. These fungi grow across the surface, forming the familiar white, velvety rind. In washed-rind cheeses, the surface is repeatedly brushed or washed with brine, beer, or spirits, encouraging the growth of reddish or orange bacteria such as Brevibacterium linens. In natural-rind cheeses, the surface flora develops spontaneously from microbes present in the environment, including caves, maturing rooms, and even the cheesemaker’s own tools and hands.
As these microbial communities grow, they break down proteins and fats, softening the texture beneath the rind and shaping the flavour profile of the cheese. In the case of the cave-aged cheeses studied in the Tufts research, Penicillium solitum was the dominant mould, producing a rind that initially appeared green but, through evolution, shifted to white.
The rind, then, is not just decorative: it’s an edible record of microbial activity — and, as this research shows, a window into evolution itself.
The story of how this discovery was made is outlined in an article by Mike Silver in TuftsNow — the online news magazine of Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, USA.
‘These Cheeses Have a Life, They Have a Story’Color changes in fungi on cheese rinds point to specific molecular mechanisms of genetic adaptation—and sometimes a tastier cheese
Many scientific discoveries are serendipitous—the result of chance. Seeing evolution in action in a cheese cave turned out to be exactly that for Benjamin Wolfe, associate professor of biology, and his colleagues.
Back in 2016, Wolfe convinced his former post-doc advisor to drive with him to Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont to get samples of a special cheese called Bayley Hazen Blue, a ruse for her boyfriend to propose marriage at the spot where they first met. Wolfe ended up keeping that cheese in the freezer in his lab.
I’m notorious for not throwing samples away just in case we might need them.
Benjamin E. Wolfe, Corresponding author.
Department of Biology
Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA.
But when graduate student Nicolas Louw picked up recent samples of Bayley Hazen Blue from the Jasper Hill caves—large, damp rooms built into the side of steep hills—he discovered the cheese, previously coated with a leafy green layer of fungus, was now chalk white on the outside.
This was really exciting because we thought it could be an example of evolution happening right before our eyes. Microbes evolve. We know that from antibiotic resistance evolution, we know that from pathogen evolution, but we don’t usually see it happening at a specific place over time in a natural setting.
Benjamin E. Wolfe.
Wolfe and his colleagues reported the finding in Current Biology.
Understanding how fungi adapt to different environments can help us in areas of food security and health, too, says Louw.
Somewhere around 20% of staple crops are lost pre-harvest due to fungal rot, and an additional 20% are lost to fungi post-harvest. That includes the moldy bread in your pantry and rotting fruit on market shelves. The biggest threat to global food security is just rot from mold.
Nicolas L. Louw, first author.
Department of Biology
Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA.
Understanding how to control this problem while preventing fungal adaptation is an agricultural priority.
A Small but Key Mutation
When wheels of cheese are placed to ripen in natural or artificial cave environments, they form microbial rinds on their surface made up of communities of bacteria, yeast, and filamentous fungi (molds). These wild microbes are picked up from soil, plant, and marine environments and end up colonizing and adapting to the environments of the cheese caves.
What caused the Penicillium solitum fungi on the Jasper Hill cheeses to change color? A student in one of Wolfe’s advanced microbiology laboratory courses on microbiomes found the answer. Jackson Larlee, A24, discovered that the change was prompted by the disruption of a gene called alb1.
Alb1 is involved in producing melanin. You can think of melanin as an armor that organisms make to protect themselves from UV damage. For the fungi, it creates the green color that absorbs UV light. If you are growing in a dark cave and can get by without melanin, it makes sense to get rid of it, so you don’t have to expend precious energy to make it. By breaking that pathway and going from green to white, the fungi are essentially saving energy to invest in other things for survival and growth.
Nicolas L. Louw.
It’s a process called “relaxed selection,” when an environmental stressor is removed, and that happens to many organisms when they adapt to dark conditions, from Mexican cave fish to salamanders to some insects. It’s almost always a loss of pigments and melanin. Some creatures become blind, then increase their ability to sense food in other ways.
The fungi gave the Wolfe lab an opportunity to identify the genetic mechanisms that led to a small evolutionary change.
We found that the change was not just one mutation that swept through the whole colony, but the color shift came about through many types of mutations independently.
Nicolas L. Louw.
Some of the fungi had point mutations—single DNA base pair changes—at different locations in the genome. Others had a large insertion of DNA caused by something called a transposable element. Transposable elements, once called “jumping genes,” pop out of one location and insert themselves into another in the genome.
In this case, transposable elements were inserting themselves ahead of the alb1 gene, which disrupted its expression, effectively knocking it out. Transposable elements can cause a lot of damage, but this time, it was an advantage for the fungi to forego production of melanin—allowing it more energy to grow. Thus, the white wheels of cheese in the Jasper Hill cave.
Aspergillus fungi are in the same family as Penicillium. They are found in the soil, on decaying plants, in household dust and ventilation systems and in massive quantities in the air. Most of the time they are harmless, but some strains can cause severe lung infections. Understanding how they become locally adapted and lodged in the lung environment could help researchers understand and prevent these infections.
For now, the Wolfe lab, in collaboration with Jasper Hill Farm, is exploring another benefit of evolving and domesticating fungi—creating new types of cheese with improved aesthetics, taste, and texture. They inoculated fresh brie cheese with the novel white mold and let it grow and ripen the cheese for two months.
The result:
It’s slightly nuttier and less funky. I think it’s delicious.
Nicolas L. Louw.
Based on a taste testing panel, the new cheese has promising attributes that will be further fine-tuned in future batches of cheese at Jasper Hill Farm.
Seeing wild molds evolve right before our eyes over a period of a few years helps us think that that we can develop a robust domestication process, to create new genetic diversity and tap into that for cheesemaking.
A Penicillium solitum population has shifted from green to white in a cheese cave
Multiple mutations in a melanin biosynthesis gene (alb1) are found in white strains
White P. solitum strains outcompete green strains, but only in the dark
This local adaptation may be part of a fungal domestication process
Summary
Previous comparative and experimental evolution studies have suggested how fungi may rapidly adapt to new environments, but direct observation of in situ selection in fungal populations is rare due to challenges with tracking populations over human time scales. We monitored a population of Penicillium solitum over eight years in a cheese cave and documented a phenotypic shift from predominantly green to white strains. Diverse mutations in the alb1 gene, which encodes the first protein in the dihydroxynaphthalene (DHN)-melanin biosynthesis pathway, explained the green-to-white shift. A similar phenotypic shift was recapitulated with an alb1 knockout and experimental evolution in laboratory populations. The most common genetic disruption of the alb1 genomic region was caused by putative transposable element insertions upstream of the gene. White strains had substantial downregulation in global transcription, with genetically distinct white strains possessing divergent shifts in the expression of different biological processes. White strains outcompeted green strains in co-culture, but this competitive advantage was only observed in the absence of light. Our results illustrate how fermented food production by humans provides opportunities for relaxed selection of key fungal traits over short time scales. The local adaptation we observed may be part of a domestication process that could provide opportunities to generate new strains for innovation in fermented food production.
So here we have it: evolution, witnessed in real time, written not in fossils but in the rind of a cheese. No sudden monster hybrids, no overnight miracles, just the steady, measurable genetic change that defines evolution.
It’s a reminder that evolution doesn’t need to be spectacular to be real. Most of the time, it works quietly, generation by generation, gene by gene, adapting life to its environment with ruthless efficiency. In this case, it stripped away an unnecessary pigment because, in the darkness of a cave, producing it was a waste.
And that’s the point creationists can’t face: evolution is not a matter of belief, but of evidence. It can be seen in the lab, in the field, and now, even in the cheese on your plate. So the next time a creationist demands to see “witnessed evolution,” you can simply tell them to check their dinner.
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Creationism is rooted in Bronze Age mythology and rests on a single source, the Bible, whose only claim to authority is its own demonstrably false assertion that it is the inerrant word of a creator god.
This is a claim anyone could make, and it collapses when its statements are compared with the observable world.
For example, biblical genealogies, beginning with a mythical first couple created from dust without ancestors, imply that Earth is only a few thousand years old. In reality, geological and astronomical evidence shows that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and the fossil record demonstrates that life was flourishing hundreds of millions of years before the Bible implies creation began.
One striking piece of evidence comes from an analysis of mastodon DNA, which shows that between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago mastodons in North America had already diversified into several genetically distinct populations.
Creationists often imagine the human body as the handiwork of a supreme intelligence, carefully engineered for optimal function. Yet the reality revealed by biology is far messier. Our anatomy and physiology are riddled with compromises, inefficiencies, and vulnerabilities that make far more sense as the outcomes of evolutionary processes than as the products of intelligent design. I give multiple examples of the results of these sub-optimal evolutionary compromises in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design. One striking example lies in the complex relationship between mother and foetus during pregnancy, where cooperation and conflict are locked in an evolutionary arms race.
In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Associate Professor Kshitiz of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Connecticut, together with postdoctoral fellows Yasir Suhail and Wenqiang Du, Gunter Wagner of Yale, and Junaid Afzal of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), have shown how the interface between mother and foetus in the placenta is the product of evolutionary arms races—not the result of intelligent design, as creationists like to imagine.
Firstly, there is the need for the developing foetus to obtain an adequate supply of nutrients, which requires its placental cells to penetrate into the lining of the mother’s uterus.
Secondly, there is the need for the mother to defend herself against invasion by what her body recognises as a ‘foreign’ organism, part of her evolved immune response. Finally, there is the overarching evolutionary imperative of successful reproduction, which entails the birth of healthy offspring.
What the team discovered is that the inevitable evolutionary compromise involves the foetus’s placental cells producing a protein that suppresses the mother’s immune response. This suppression works only because the mother’s cells have evolved to cooperate, allowing the foetal protein to function.
In other words, the mother’s cells have evolved a strategy for permitting the foetus to dampen her immune system—an immune system that itself evolved in the ancestors of placental mammals. This situation can hardly be credited to the act of a supreme intelligence.
Photo of teeth in a jaw section of Giraffatitan from Tanzania (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, MB.R.2180.20.5). The light-coloured area is the dentin, which has been exposed by tooth wear.
Image Credit: Jan Kersten, Freie Universität Berlin, Fachrichtung Paläontologie.
An international team of researchers, led by Dr Daniela E. Winkler (postdoctoral researcher at Kiel University), Dr Emanuel Tschopp (visiting scientist at the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change and research associate at Freie Universität Berlin), and André Saleiro (PhD student at NOVA University Lisbon), has shed new light on the diet and movements of the 150-million-year-old long-necked dinosaur, Giraffatitan.
By using high-resolution microscopy to examine patterns of microscopic wear on fossilised teeth, the team could reconstruct not only what Giraffatitan ate, but also how it foraged and where it roamed. The results show that these enormous sauropods fed on a wide range of vegetation, from soft leaves to tougher plant material, indicating a flexible feeding strategy. The wear patterns also suggest that the animals migrated across different habitats, rather than remaining in one area, allowing them to exploit seasonal changes in plant availability. This paints a picture of a highly adaptable browser, capable of sustaining its gigantic size by ranging widely across the Jurassic landscape.
In many ways, their lifestyle resembles that of today’s elephants or giraffes, which travel long distances to reach food and switch between different types of vegetation depending on what is available. Like elephants stripping branches or giraffes plucking leaves from the tops of trees, Giraffatitan used its immense neck to access food that other animals could not, helping to reduce competition and maintain the balance of its ecosystem.
They also represent an interesting example of convergent evolution where two unrelated species, in this case a dinosaur and giraffes, converge on the same solution to the same environmental problem - how to reach the leaves at the top of tall trees, so avoiding competition with other browsing animals - long necks and long front legs.
As ever, such discoveries are impossible to reconcile with creationist notions of a young Earth, supposedly only 6,000–10,000 years old. Yet this is merely one more example of the widening gulf between the reality uncovered by science and the superstitions preserved in ancient texts. These texts, after all, were written by Bronze Age pastoralists who imagined the universe as a flat disc beneath a dome, bounded by the few square miles they could walk in a couple of days across the Canaanite hills.
Geographic location of the Nuwayrat cemetery (red dot) and the previously sequenced Third Intermediate Period individuals from Abusir el-Meleq20 (purple diamond).
Round about the time when the Bible’s timeline claims there was a global genocidal flood deep enough to cover the highest mountains, the body of a man was being interred in a large earthenware pot in a tomb in Egypt. If there had been a flood such as that described in the Bible, this burial would have been swept away or at least buried under a deep layer of sediment containing the jumbled remains of animals and plants killed in the flood — including species from disconnected landmasses, since there would have been no barriers to how far they could have been transported by the floodwaters.
Yet none of this appears to be true. Egyptian civilisation, which can trace its origins back to around 5,500 BCE, continued unbroken, with no record of a flood other than the annual Nile inundations on which their agriculture depended, until Egypt was absorbed first into the Greek Empire of Alexander and then into the Roman Empire. There is quite simply no record of a global flood in any Egyptian sources, and no evidence that the country was repopulated by people radiating out from a centre somewhere in the Middle East who could miraculously read and write in the hieroglyphics used by pre-“Flood” Egyptians.
Instead, we now have the genetic evidence of the man’s DNA, which tells a story of Egyptian origins that includes both North African and Mesopotamian ancestry.
How the remains of this pot burial were discovered and analysed is the subject of an open-access paper in Nature by an international team of archaeologists led by Dr Adeline Morez Jacobs, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padua, Italy, and a visiting lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, UK.
Dr Morez has also described the research and its significance in an open-access article in The Conversation, in the form of an interview. This article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
Parasite–host relationships are a nightmare for creationists. Their usual escape hatch is “The Fall”, but that undermines the Discovery Institute’s claim that intelligent design is science rather than Bible-literalist dogma in a lab coat. It also raises the obvious question: if parasites only appeared 6,000–10,000 years ago, how did they spread so quickly—and why do we find fossil evidence of parasitism millions of years old?
Creationists cope by dismissing science as a conspiracy, waving away radiometric dating, or pushing myths such as dinosaur fossils being “carbon-dated” [sic] to a few thousand years old. So creationism persists, despite the vast amount of evidence against it, by a combination of wilful ignorance, disinformation and a lack of critical thinking skills.
Now creationists must also ignore new research from Stockholm University, where scientists isolated bacterial DNA from the teeth of woolly and steppe mammoths. They showed these bacteria evolved into the ancestors of those infecting modern elephants—evidence of parasites a million years before “Creation Week”, and of co-evolution continuing right up to today’s elephants, the descendants of those mammoths.
Incidentally, neither mammoths nor modern elephants are mentioned in the Bible, reflecting the parochial ignorance of its authors - a fact often overlooked in depictions of animals boarding Noah's Ark, which usually includes a pair of elephants!
Researchers at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences (East Boothbay, Maine, USA) have recently quantified a remarkable evolutionary process: a typical marine microorganism acquires and retains approximately 13% of its genes per million years through horizontal (lateral) gene transfer. This rate corresponds to roughly 250 genes exchanged and retained per litre of seawater each day
These transferred genes include those that provide either a selective advantage or are sufficiently neutral to persist via genetic drift—both well-established mechanisms of evolutionary change.
Some creationist arguments misapply Shannon Information Theory, claiming that gaining new genetic information violates the laws of thermodynamics. However, such arguments disregard key biological realities: cells are open systems capable of energy and material exchange; genome duplication and horizontal transfer are well-documented evolutionary processes; and substituting one nucleic acid for another does not create matter ex nihilo - facts of which any qualified biological scientists should be aware.
Furthermore, the successful retention and spread of horizontally acquired genes within microbial genomes provide clear, empirical evidence of Darwinian evolution in action. Although Charles Darwin formulated his theory without the concept of genes — speaking instead of 'heritable traits' — his mechanism of natural selection precisely explains how heritable variations can spread through populations over time.
This study also highlights that microorganisms can evolve not only through mutation and selection but also by acquiring pre-adapted genes from their environment, often from distantly related organisms. Consequently, these newly acquired genes can propagate rapidly within the recipient lineage.
The findings further challenge traditional microbial taxonomy, blurring species boundaries at the genetic level: horizontally transferred genes may function just as effectively in their new hosts as they did in their original genomes, thanks to the universality of underlying molecular machinery (e.g., replication and translation systems).
When we think of leaf mimicry, we usually picture modern insects like stick insects or katydids blending seamlessly into their surroundings. But new fossil discoveries show that this evolutionary trick is far older than we might imagine. In fact, insects were already disguising themselves as leaves 165 million years ago, during the Jurassic, long before flowering plants even appeared.
Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have uncovered an astonishing fossil example of close mimicry between three species of orthopteran insects—a group that includes grasshoppers, crickets, and katydids — and the leaves of an extinct cycad-like seed-bearing plant, almost certainly the very plant on which they lived. These fossils come from the 165-million-year-old Daohugou Biota of Inner Mongolia, northeastern China.
Instances of defensive mimicry or camouflage are exactly what one would expect from evolution by natural selection. In fact, it would be more surprising if potential prey species hadn’t evolved some form of defence. To an intelligent design advocate, however, such examples are awkward to explain—unless one imagines a forgetful designer who repeatedly undermines his own work. Why design predators that rely on a given prey species for food, and then deliberately design prey that are difficult for those predators to find? An arms race against oneself is hardly the hallmark of an intelligent mind.
And yet, arms races are precisely what we observe throughout the natural world — whether in competition for resources, the struggle for the fittest mate, parasite–host dynamics, or, as in this case, the evolutionary contest between predator and prey.
The Balearic shearwater (Puffinus mauretanicus, above) and the Mediterranean shearwater (Puffinus yelkouan, below) are two shearwater taxa that are genetically similar despite displaying morphological and migratory differences. The new study shows that these two taxa have undergone recurrent episodes of divergence and hybridization during the Pleistocene glacial and interglacial cycles, respectively. This serves as a key example of how hybridization can help preserve genetic diversity and evolutionary potential in threatened taxa.
Like the story of human evolution, that of two seabirds in the shearwater family living in the Mediterranean shows a history of divergence, followed by episodes of hybridization and genetic remixing. Normally, from a conservation perspective, hybridization is considered a problem because it can erode the distinctiveness of threatened species, diluting unique traits.
However, in the case of the Mediterranean shearwater (Puffinus yelkouan) and the critically endangered Balearic shearwater (Puffinus mauretanicus), hybridization has had the opposite effect. By introducing genetic diversity into the Balearic shearwater, it may have improved the species’ chances of survival, potentially making the difference between persistence and extinction.
This evolutionary story sits uneasily with the worldview of Bible-literalist creationists. The very fact of species interbreeding undermines the notion of fixed, separately created “kinds.” It also contradicts the idea that a few thousand years ago all life was destroyed in a global flood, followed by a period of hyper-rapid diversification into the species we see today—a process which, according to creationist claims, left no trace in the fossil record. If hybridization had occurred during that supposed burst of post-Flood diversification, it would simply have blurred the lines between “kinds,” creating variation within species rather than producing the multitude of distinct species we observe today. In other words, the evidence shows that life’s history is one of gradual divergence, occasional genetic exchange, and long-term adaptation—not sudden, discrete acts of “special creation.”
A recent study led by Professors Julio Rozas, Marta Riutort, and Jacob González-Solís of the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute of the University of Barcelona (IRBio), together with Joan Ferrer Obiol of the University of Milan, has revealed how this evolutionary pattern unfolded. Using genomic analysis, they showed that the two shearwater species have gone through repeated cycles of divergence and hybridization, largely driven by the glacial–interglacial rhythms of the Pleistocene. Each cycle of isolation and secondary contact left genetic signatures that are still visible today.
The researchers found a clear gradient of genetic differentiation across the Mediterranean, with hybrid populations becoming increasingly common as one moves westwards, culminating in the Balearic Islands of Ibiza and Formentera. Intriguingly, the shearwater population on Menorca is genetically closer to P. yelkouan than to P. mauretanicus, reflecting its history of admixture. Far from being detrimental, this interbreeding has enriched the Balearic shearwater’s genome, reducing inbreeding risks and helping to preserve adaptive traits that may otherwise have been lost.
The tRNA ensures the cohesion of the polymerase and the associated factors; without it, they would not arrange themselves in this way.
Image: Clemens Grimm.
Researchers at Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg (JMU) have discovered that poxviruses have developed a unique strategy to multiply rapidly after infecting a host cell. They achieve this by assembling a large protein complex with the help of a transfer RNA (tRNA) molecule. Remarkably, this is the first known example of a ‘chaperone’ function being carried out by a tRNA rather than a protein. Each component of the assembly plays a specific role in the production of new poxviruses. Crucially, the complex only functions when all parts are correctly assembled, and the tRNA is indispensable for this construction.
In other words, the tRNA provides the essential element of the complex, which some might describe—using the Discovery Institute’s own terms—as containing “complex specified information” and forming an “irreducibly complex” system essential to the virus’s success.
By that same logic, it follows that the viruses responsible for smallpox and mpox (monkeypox) must have been intelligently designed. This leaves creationists with an unenviable dilemma:
Accept the Discovery Institute’s definitions and admit their designer created deadly viruses — theologically awkward.
Claim another intelligence designs life, beyond their god’s control — even more awkward.
Abandon the Institute’s “evidence” for intelligent design — politically awkward.
Palaeontologists led by Professor Sam Giles of Birmingham University, UK, have discovered the earliest known example of a ray-finned fish, Platysomus parvulus, with extra teeth deep inside its mouth. It lived around 310 million years before creationists believe Earth was created. Aside from that insurmountable problem for creationist mythology, there are other difficulties for their childish beliefs:
Creationists insist that death only “entered the world” as a result of “Eve’s sin”. Before that supposed event, some 6,000–10,000 years ago, nothing ever died. Taken literally, this would mean that every mouthful of food remained alive throughout the entire digestive process, only to be excreted still living at the other end. Alternatively, humans and animals didn’t eat at all, somehow running on an unidentified, miracle source of energy. Either way, the claim collapses into absurdity.
An additional disappointment for creationists is that this team of evolutionary biologists show no hint of the widely predicted (in creationists circles) abandonment of the Theory of Evolution in favour of creationism, that two generations of creationists have been told will happen, like the second coming of Jesus, "Any day now, real soon. You'll see!".
From an evolutionary biology perspective, this fossil sheds light on the diversification of ray-finned fish following the End-Devonian mass extinction and represents a transitional stage in the evolution of tongue-biters from simple jawed fish. It also shows that advanced forms evolved relatively quickly in ecosystems dominated by predator-prey relationships.
According to creationist dogma — though not explicitly stated in the Bible but added later to patch over awkward evidence — death did not enter the world until Eve’s sin somehow allowed it to. Along with death, so the story goes, came parasites, pathogens, and anything else creationists find inconvenient. And, of course, all of this supposedly happened just 6,000–10,000 years ago.
The problems with that are two-fold:
Firstly, there is the question of what Adam and Eve, and the animals allegedly created for their use, ate. Did the plants they consumed remain alive as they passed through the digestive system, nutrients extracted but the plant cells excreted still living? Or did none of them eat anything at all? Obviously, the myth’s authors didn’t understand that plants are just as alive as animals.
Secondly, the entire narrative collides with the fossil record, which shows long-dead animals preserved in strata dated to tens or even hundreds of millions of years before the mythical ‘Creation Week’—during the 99.9975% of Earth’s history that creationism simply erases. Those animals had metabolisms dependent on consuming living or dead tissues, and their fossils often show evidence not only of death, but of predation, parasitism, and disease. Many evolved armour plating, spines, and other defences that make sense only in the presence of predators and pathogens.
And here’s a paradox creationists often tie themselves in knots over: did God design humans with an immune system, or was it a post-Fall upgrade? If it was there from the start, then God was already planning for parasites and pathogens—hardly the “perfect” world creationists claim. If it was added later, then God wasn’t omniscient, as he failed to foresee a future need. Either way, the story collapses under its own contradictions.
It is therefore no surprise that researchers from the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) and the Regional University of Cariri (URCA) in Crato, Ceará, Brazil, have found evidence of dinosaurs being infected—and killed—by osteomyelitis around 80 million years before ‘Creation Week’. Fossils of sauropod dinosaurs show clear signs of active osteomyelitis, with no signs of healing, indicating that the disease proved fatal.
The notion of intelligent design — the current flagship of creationism’s attempt to replace scientific realism with magical superstitions and Bible literalism dressed up as “alternative science” — contains a blatant paradox its advocates must ignore: the very same “logic” used to argue that the God of the Bible created living organisms can just as easily be used to argue that any such designer is a malevolent sadist who deliberately increases suffering in the world while ignoring countless ways to reduce it.
The theological problems this raises are never discussed in polite creationist circles, except for the lazy fallback of blaming everything on “The Fall.” But this move exposes intelligent design for what it really is — Bible-literalist religion in disguise. And that sits awkwardly against over half a century of insistence by the Discovery Institute that ID is not a religious idea, but rather a scientific one that should be taught in American public schools at taxpayer expense — a direct violation of the Establishment Clause and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987).
The paradox lies in the fact that the very same so-called evidence — Michael J. Behe’s “irreducible complexity” and William A. Dembski’s “complex specified genetic information” — can be found in the genomes, structures, and processes of parasites and pathogens, making them devastatingly effective at exploiting and destroying their hosts. In fact, Behe himself has, probably without realising it, used precisely such examples. The bacterial flagellum he highlights enables E. coli to move efficiently through our gut, causing sometimes fatal food poisoning. And his example of resistance to anti-malarial drugs in Plasmodium parasites illustrate how evolution equips them to continue killing hundreds of thousands of children every year while condemning millions more to cycles of malarial fever.
Now, new research has highlighted another gruesome example. The bacterium Yersinia pestis — responsible for multiple waves of plague throughout the Middle Ages — has been shown to have evolved into its highly lethal form only in relatively recent human history. Beginning with the “Plague of Justinian” about 1,500 years ago, Y. pestis unleashed pandemics that killed between 30% and 50% of Europe’s population.
An interdisciplinary team at the University of South Florida (USF) and Florida Atlantic University (FAU), with collaborators in India and Australia, has now confirmed genomically that the Justinian plague was indeed caused by Y. pestis, as long assumed. Analysing DNA from plague victims buried in a mass grave at the ancient city of Jerash, Jordan — the epicentre of that pandemic — one group identified the culprit, while another team traced the bacterium’s evolutionary changes that made it one of history’s most notorious killers.
