Creationism Refuted - Scientists Revisit Some Old Fossils, Extend Scientific Knowledge - And Casually Refute Creationism Again

296-Million-Year-Old Fossil Unearthed in Brazil Sheds Light on Ancient Plant Mystery Hidden for Over Half a Century - Notícia

In another of those regular events in science, a team of researchers led by the University of Vale do Taquari – Univates, Rio Grande, Brazil, through the Graduate Program in Environment and Development (PPGAD), re-examined material held in the Univates Palaeontological Collection. Using modern equipment that was not available when the fossils were first studied more than 50 years ago, they uncovered new information – and, without intending to, once again demonstrated the weakness of creationist claims. As usual, creationism is refuted by the evidence.

What the team discovered were plant spores preserved in situ in fossils dating to between 298.9 and 252.17 million years ago – long before dinosaurs appeared and well before flowering plants evolved. At that time, the most advanced land plants were spore-bearing, like today’s mosses and ferns. This showed that the original classification as Lycopodites was incorrect. Instead, the fossils belonged to a new genus, which the team named Franscinella, giving the newly described Upper Palaeozoic plant the species name Franscinella riograndensis.

The significance extends further: the spores, now positively linked to this species, are index microfossils found in Permian strata of the Paraná Basin. Yet creationists routinely dismiss the use of index fossils in geochronology as “circular reasoning.” The ability to tie these spores directly to a particular species undermines that objection and strengthens their role in stratigraphy.

Refuting Creationism - The Lengths Plants Will Go To Just To Get Pollinated - No Intelligence Needed

chloropid flies on a Vincetoxicum nakaianum flower.

The grass fly visiting the flowers (A) and kleptoparasiting spider hunting ant (B)

Press Releases - SCHOOL OF SCIENCE THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO

The driving force behind evolution is reproductive success, so in a broad sense every adaptation can be seen as a reproductive strategy. Few, however, are as peculiar as that of Vincetoxicum nakaianum, a dogbane species native to Japan. Rather than relying on nectar rewards or visual lures to attract pollinators, this plant enlists the services of kleptoparasitic chloropid flies — insects that usually home in on the scent of injured prey in order to steal a meal.

In a remarkable twist, the flowers of V. nakaianum release chemical signals that closely mimic the odour of ants under attack by predators, especially spiders. Drawn in by what they perceive as the scent of a potential victim to exploit, the flies inadvertently collect and deposit pollen as they move from flower to flower. This unusual strategy has now been documented in detail in a study led by Ko Mochizuki of the University of Tokyo, published in Current Biology, and described in a University of Tokyo School of Science press release.

What makes this particularly striking is how roundabout and intricate the mechanism is. If an intelligent designer had set out to ensure pollination, far simpler methods are available — from bright colours and nectar rewards to direct reliance on wind. Instead, V. nakaianum has evolved a convoluted route, exploiting the specialised behaviour of flies that themselves depend on the predation of ants by spiders. Such elaborate, contingent solutions are precisely what we expect from evolution by natural selection acting over countless generations, not from foresightful design.

Refuting Creationism - North American Mammoths Interbred - 30,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Columbian Mammoths, Mammuthus colimbi with other Ice Age mammals.

Beth Zaiken

Hybrid mammoths roamed North America following interspecies breeding | Natural History Museum

An open access paper published in Biology Letters by an international team of palaeontologists, led by Marianne Dehasque of the Department of Organismal Biology, Uppsala University, Sweden, will no doubt bring joy to creationists who prefer to see the world in simple black-and-white terms. It shows that one of the usual definitions of species—a group that can reproduce only with one another—needs revising. The paper reports that the two North American species of mammoth—the northern woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) and the southern Columbian mammoth (M. columbi)—regularly interbred where their ranges overlapped, and that the offspring were fertile.

In the black-and-white, science-vs-creationism world of creationist thinking, this will be taken to mean that if science is wrong, then creationism must be right, by default.

Creationist joy will be short-lived, however, once they realise that this interbreeding took place long before they believe Earth was created, and that the researchers explain the findings in terms of how mammoths evolved and diversified. Indeed, the evidence supports the theory that the Columbian mammoth itself evolved from a hybrid population—one of the mechanisms of evolution that creationist dogma insists does not occur. Not only is there not the slightest hint that biologists are abandoning the Theory of Evolution (ToE) in favour of creationism—as creationist leaders have claimed for at least half a century—but the ToE is used to explain the observable facts, and it does so with consummate ease.

Refuting Creationism - A Jewellery Factory in France, At Least 32,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Meticulous excavation work at La Roche-à-Pierrot

Late Neanderthals and early European Homo sapiens may have lived and worked together in southwest France.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5)

The oldest shell jewellery workshop in Western Europe | CNRS

The creationism cult took another blow yesterday with the publication of details of the oldest jewellery workshop yet found in Western Europe—dating to at least 32,000 years before the mythical six-day creation of everything from nothing. The site appears to have been used for the organised manufacture of shell ornaments, suggesting a society in which the production and trade of personal adornment already played an important role.

The discovery, made by a team of scientists from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Université de Bordeaux, the ministère de la Culture, and Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). It records the excavation of a Palaeolithic site in southwest France, dating from a period when Homo sapiens were spreading into the region and Neanderthals were in decline.

However, the evidence points to a more complex story — one of coexistence and cultural exchange, or even the absorption of Neanderthals into the expanding H. sapiens populations, with traditions and technologies merging. It also raises the possibility that H. sapiens had been established in the area far earlier, perhaps through an earlier migration wave.

Refuting Creationism - Why Consciousness Doesn't Need A God To Explain it

Major theories of consciousness may have been focusing on the wrong part of the brain

Spend a few days in a Creationism vs. Science group on social media and, before long, you’ll be told that science can’t explain consciousness—because, so the argument goes, matter can’t become self-aware, and consciousness can’t arise from nothing.

In other words, you’ll encounter yet another variation on the combined argument from incredulity, the “god of the gaps” fallacy, and the false dichotomy—presented as if they were sound logic against science, and, since only two possibilities are assumed, in favour of the locally popular version of a creator god.

The more fundamentalist creationists will, of course, also try to “prove” that only humans possess real consciousness, since this sets us apart from other animals and grants us the supposedly unique ability to worship their particular god.

But what creationists can never explain is this: if consciousness is not a function of neurophysiology — in other words, the product of chemistry and physics — why can it be abolished with chemicals such as anaesthetics, or by physical injury?

This makes it all the more interesting that a recent paper in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews by Peter Copple of the Consciousness and Cognition Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK, reviewing the sufficient conditions for consciousness, makes no suggestion that consciousness is divorced from neurophysiology or that it requires supernatural intervention to explain.

He makes similar points in an article in The Conversation, which is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence.

Refuting Creationism - A 108-Million-Year-Old Fossil From Mongolia Fills Another Gap.

Reconstruction of a pachycephalosaur

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5)

Young Zavacephale duel for territory along a lakeshore 108 million years ago.

Image: Masato Hattori

‘Teen’ Pachycephalosaur Butts Into Fossil Record | NC State News

Here we have another of those regular discoveries which, according to the press, supposedly means history will need to be “re-written” — something creationists, always looking for a stick to beat science with, will assume means the whole of history, because science has got everything wrong yet again. Unlike their religion, of course, which — so they claim — has never got anything wrong and is therefore eternally true, including the parts about a six-day creation 6,000–10,000 years ago, a global flood which left no evidence, and a universe consisting of a small, flat planet with a dome over it.

In reality, this is merely journalistic hyperbole designed to draw the reader in — or, in the case of creationists, to be seized upon as ‘scientific’ evidence that science is fatally flawed.

The “re-written” part of history is simply the bit about which we previously had no information. The process is not one of tearing up the past but of filling a gap in our knowledge and thereby arriving at an account closer to reality. In this case, “re-writing the history books” will mean telling a more complete history of a group of dinosaurs. The discovery in question is a 108-million-year-old adolescent pachycephalosaur fossil found in the Gobi Desert, Central Asia. Being both the oldest (by about 15 million years) and the most complete skeleton of this group of dinosaurs yet discovered, it provides crucial information about their origins.

Creationism Refuted - Evolutionary Divergence and A Hybrid Jay

A grue jay? Rare hybrid bird identified in Texas

(a) Blue Jay by Travis Maher (ML578309451). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Macaulay Library.

(b) Hybrid Jay by Brian R. Stokes.

(c) Green Jay by Dan O'Brien (ML390361871). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Macaulay Library.

An interesting example of hybridisation between two distantly related species of jay has been reported by two biologists at the University of Texas, Austin. The hybrid is a cross between a blue jay (Cyanocitta cristata) and a green jay (Cyanocorax yncas). Although both are jays — members of the crow (Corvid) family — these two belong to different genera that diverged some seven million years ago and, until recently, lived in non-overlapping ranges in North America. Climate change has allowed them to extend their ranges, bringing them into contact only within the past decade.

The reason this is scientifically significant is that it illustrates how divergent evolution proceeds, and why it does not always progress to complete reproductive isolation. Unlike many other vertebrates, the genomic arrangements of birds are remarkably stable. As long as alleles remain in the same chromosomal loci, interbreeding remains possible. This can be disadvantageous if it results in hybrids with reduced fitness. For example, one population may evolve a long, slender bill adapted for one type of seed, while another evolves a short, stout bill for harder seeds. A hybrid might inherit an intermediate bill suited to neither, creating obvious disadvantages. In such cases, natural selection favours the evolution of barriers to hybridisation.

In many organisms, this is achieved by genetic rearrangements that prevent a zygote from developing even when mating occurs—so-called post-zygotic barriers. Where genomes are stable, such rearrangements rarely arise, so species tend instead to evolve pre-zygotic barriers that prevent mating or fertilisation in the first place. Among birds, these often take the form of plumage differences, mating rituals, or song—hence their remarkable diversity.

Unitelligent Design - A Queen Ant Produces Two Different Species of Male Offspring!

Messor ibericus and Messor structor males hatched from eggs laid by the same queen.

Juvé, Y., Lutrat, C., Ha, A. et al (2025).

One queen ant, two species: the discovery that reshapes what ‘family’ means in nature

Creationists use a deliberately fuzzy and flexible definition of “kinds,” shifting its scope whenever it suits their argument. It can be narrowed down to the species level, broadened to a genus or family, or even stretched to encompass an entire order. On occasion, I’ve even seen it expanded to the absurdity of “animal kind,” depending on what the argument requires. This elasticity allows them to maintain the delusion that evolution never happens in the way biologists describe, and to caricature it instead as one species suddenly giving rise to a completely unrelated species in a single step — their parody of so-called “macro-evolution.”

But the case of the Iberian harvester ant (Messor ibericus) presents a real problem for this narrative. Here the definition of “kind” only needs to extend as far as members of a single genus. That still doesn’t rescue creationists, because this ant has evolved a remarkably complex reproductive strategy that undermines any notion of intelligent design and raises awkward questions about what a “kind” even is. Queens of M. ibericus can only reproduce successfully with males of a related species, Messor structor.

Such interspecies dependence is not unknown in either the animal or plant kingdoms, but M. ibericus takes it a step further. When a queen produces male offspring — instead of the usual sterile female workers — those males may be either M. ibericus or M. structor. In other words, she is doing precisely what creationists constantly demand as “evidence for evolution” - one species producing offspring of another species.

Refuting Creationism - 242-Million-Year-Old 'Transitional' Lizard Fossil

Agriodontosaurus helsbypetrae reconstruction

Image credit: Bob Nicholls

Agriodontosaurus helsbypetrae fossil (BRSUG 29950-14) in its sandstone matrix.

September: World's oldest lizard | News and features | University of Bristol

Here is yet another fossil that will give creationists a lot to think about. It’s a fossil of the earliest known lepidosaur — the group that includes lizards, snakes, and the tuatara of New Zealand. It is ∼242 million years old and was found in a sandstone deposit in Devon, in southwest Britain. It was picked up on a beach in Devon in 2015, and has been examined by a team from the University of Bristol.

At that age it is very close to the stem of the order Lepidosauria. However, it already displays some “advanced” features, and some of the assumed primitive features are already absent.

One of the primitive features often discussed is the lower temporal bar — a bony rod running between the cheek and the jaw hinge—which is present in the tuatara but absent (“open”) in modern lizards and snakes. This opening gives greater flexibility to the skull, allowing more motion for feeding. Also, many modern lizards have palatal teeth (teeth on the roof of the mouth) which help grip prey.

The fossil skull (from Agriodontosaurus helsbypetrae) has no skull hinge and no palatal teeth, but it does have an open lower temporal bar. In other words, this is a transitional species: it has a mosaic of primitive and derived traits—a pattern Darwin predicted, but which creationists generally dismiss. To creationists, fossils are often denied, mischaracterised, or claimed to be “just as they were created a few thousand years ago.” But this specimen is clear evidence of evolutionary change.

Meanwhile, the evidence of fossil ages—dating back hundreds of millions of years—refutes the idea of a young Earth (~ thousands of years), which cannot be reconciled with the geological, biological, and radiometric data.

None of that undermines the real discovery: an early lepidosaur with a mosaic of features lived in what is now Devon, UK, in the Middle Triassic, about 242 million years ago. As always, in rational enquiry, solid evidence must take priority over magical or mythological claims.

Refuting Creationism - How Rodent Thumbnails Allowed Them to Be So Successful.

Thumbnail of the kangaroo rat.

Rafaela V. Missagia et al. (2025)

Most rodents have thumbnails instead of claws. It might help explain how they took over the world. | EurekAlert!

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.

Wonderful Planet - Scilly Isles Cameras Reveal Life In UK Coastal Waters

Scilly Isles cameras give glimpse of ‘natural’ UK waters - News

Reef habitat type.

Photo: Dr Owen M. Exeter.

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.

Refuting Creationism - A Cheesy Tease For Creationists - Observed Evolution in Cheese-Rind Fungi

Original green mould.

Evolved white mould several years later.

Cheese Fungi Help Unlock Secrets of Evolution | Tufts Now

Bayley Hazen Blue

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.

Refuting Creationism - DNA Reveals How Mastodons Had Diversified in North America - A Hundred Thousand Years Before 'Creation Week'

Mastodons lived in Arctic and Subarctic North America during an interglacial period when the area was covered in forests and wetlands.

Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Ancient DNA reveals deeply complex Mastodon family and repeated migrations driven by climate change - Brighter World

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.

Refuting Creationism - How The Placenta is the Product of Sub-Optimal Evolutionary Compromise.

Cooperation and Competition: How Fetal and Maternal Cells Evolved to Work Together - UConn Today

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.

Refuting Creationism - What Dinosaur Teeth Tell Us About Life - From 150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Giraffatitan

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5)

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.

What Dinosaur Teeth Reveal About Life 150 Million Years Ago - Information for Media and Journalists | Freie Universität Berlin

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.

Refuting Creationism - A Potted History of Egypt Shows No Sign Of A Global Flood

Pottery vessel in which the Nuwayrat individual was discovered.

Morez Jacobs, A. et al. (2025). Nature (CC-BY 4.0)

We decoded the oldest genetic data from an Egyptian; a man buried around 4,500 years ago – what it told us

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.

Refuting Creationism - Scientists Recover Ancient Bacterial DNA - On Million-Year-Old Mammoth Teeth

Steppe Mammoths

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5)

Ancient mammoth remains yield the world's oldest host-associated bacterial DNA - Stockholm University

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!

Creationism Refuted - How Micro-oranisms Acquire New Genetic Information - Millions of Times A Day

AI generated image

ChatGPT 5

Researchers Quantify Rate of Essential Evolutionary Process - Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences

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).

Refuting Creationism - Why Plant-Mimicking Insects Make a Fool of ID Creationists

Paleoart illustration showing the two species' leaf mimicry
among Anomozamites in the Daohugou biota.

Image by NIGPAS.

Leaf-mimicking orthopteran fossils of Prophalangopsidae from the Daohugou biota.

Image by NIGPAS.

Scientists Discover 165-Ma Jurassic Orthopterans with Leaf Mimicry, First for Co-preserved Insect-Plant Fossils----Chinese Academy of Sciences

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.

Refuting Creationism - Evolutionary Divergence and Hybridization in Mediterranean Shearwaters

Critically endangered Balearic shearwater,
Puffinus mauritanicus

Credit: Kirk Zufelt

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.

Credit: Victor Paris

Hybridization between species has been crucial to the survival of Europe’s most threatened seabird - Current events - University of Barcelona

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.