Malevolent Design - How Creationism's 'Designer' Favoured The Naked Mole Rat

DNA repair mechanisms help explain why naked mole-rats live a long life

News that scientists have discovered what enables the naked mole-rat to live for up to 37 years — around ten times longer than relatives of a similar size — raises a troublesome question for creationists. The findings were reported recently in Science by a team of researchers from the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Maternal Fetal Medicine.

Creationists like to flatter themselves with the notion that they are the favoured creation of their putative designer god and the ultimate expression of design perfection. So, when evidence emerges of other species surpassing humans in some way — bats with more robust immune systems, elephants and sharks being almost completely immune to cancers, peregrine falcons with far superior vision — it is typically ignored, met with incredulity, or dismissed as an ineffable mystery and part of some divine plan which in no way diminished the unique position of humans in the grand scheme.

Now, to add to their woes, comes the discovery that the secret of the naked mole-rat’s extraordinary longevity may be traced to changes in just four amino acids. This alone undermines creationist claims that mutations are always harmful and incapable of generating new genetic information.

Malevolent Designer News - A Newly-Designed Way To Increase Suffering Is Having Major Success in Southern China

Chikungunya Virus Replication Cycle

BioRender Science Templates

Guangdong faces largest chikungunya outbreak on record | EurekAlert!

An open-access report in the journal Biocontaminant [PDF] describes a sudden, large increase in the number of infections with the chikungunya virus in southern China, with more than 4,000 cases in Foshan City, Guangdong Province, and over 3,600 cases in Shunde District. The initial spread of the outbreak was observed in this region and quickly escalated into a major public health concern. These cases have not only been documented in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Yangjiang, and Zhanjiang within Guangdong Province but have also emerged in Macao and Hong Kong.

Let’s pretend for a moment that Intelligent Design Creationism accurately describes reality — that a supernatural entity, indistinguishable from the supposedly omnibenevolent god of the Bible, is continually intervening in living organisms to ensure they conform to a divine plan for the world, particularly for human life.

Let’s also assume that William A. Dembski, Michael J. Behe, and other “CDesign proponentsists” are correct in asserting that the presence of “irreducible complexity” and particularly “complex specified genetic information” is evidence of the work of this putative designer.

How, then, does this announcement about the increase in cases of chikungunya in southern China fit into that worldview?

Chikungunya is a virus transmitted to humans only through the bite of a female Aedes mosquito when she takes a blood meal — in much the same way that Zika, yellow fever, and malaria are transmitted. Once infected, a person develops a sudden-onset fever with painful joints and acts as a reservoir for the virus, enabling the next mosquito to pick it up and continue the chain of infection.

The recent increase in cases is believed to be due to two main factors:

• More viruses circulating in the population
• More Aedes mosquitoes, with a northward spread driven by global warming

The genetic information in the chikungunya virus genome is clearly enabling the virus population to increase in response to environmental change. If this doesn’t qualify as “complex specified information”, it’s difficult to imagine what would.

Furthermore, the feeding strategy of the Aedes mosquito is a striking example of a finely tuned process: if any part of it fails, the entire transmission cycle collapses. By Michael J. Behe’s own definition, this appears to meet the criteria for “irreducible complexity” and, within that framework, would be touted as conclusive evidence of “intelligent design”.

The inescapable conclusion, then — if we accept the Intelligent Design worldview, in which a divine intelligence is the only possible explanation for such genetic information and irreducibly complex systems — is that both the virus and the mosquito have been intelligently designed to cause human suffering. They seem to have no other purpose than to reproduce themselves and increase infection levels within the population. In other words, according to the logic of ID creationism, this virus was designed with malevolent intent.

Creationism Refuted - Inclusions In 112 Million-Year-Old Amber Show A Diverse Ancient Ecosystem

Diptera: Chironomidae

Scientists unearth a 112-million-year-old time capsule filled with ancient insects | ScienceDaily

A rich source of amber from the Genoveva quarry in the Napo Province of Ecuador is revealing information about life in a dense, tropical rainforest 112 million years ago, requiring the most convoluted of mental gymnastics for creationists to ignore or deny. This newly described deposit, part of the Hollín Formation in the Oriente Basin, represents the first Mesozoic amber deposit with preserved insects ever discovered in South America — and one of the largest known anywhere on the former Gondwanan supercontinent.

Unlike rock fossils, where finer detail is often lost through mineralisation and geological processes, amber frequently preserves plant and animal life with exquisite microscopic precision. This makes the Ecuadorian deposit, produced at a time when Gondwana was on the verge of splitting into Africa and South America, a rare and invaluable window into the humid, densely vegetated ecosystem of an equatorial rainforest during the Cretaceous Period.

Amber is the solidified resinous sap of trees — often conifers such as araucariaceans — and can originate from branches, trunks or even roots, preserving both aerial and subterranean organisms. Almost all known amber deposits come from the northern hemisphere, particularly from Eurasia and North America, so this southern hemisphere deposit provides an unprecedented opportunity to study an ancient Gondwanan ecosystem at a crucial time in Earth’s evolutionary history.

The contrast between this rich, 112-million-year-old ecosystem and the simplistic biblical creation myth is as stark as it could be. Even if we had no other fossils, the life forms trapped in this amber — representing at least five insect orders, spider silk, and an abundance of pollen and spores from ferns, cycads, conifers and early angiosperms — would comprehensively refute the notion of a young Earth created in its present form.

Another strength of amber as a fossil medium is that it is always contemporaneous with the bioinclusions it preserves — organisms became trapped while the resin was still liquid — removing the additional uncertainties sometimes introduced when dating fossils embedded in sedimentary matrices.

Unintelligent Design - The Needless Complexity That Produces Orchids

Cremastra variabilis

Cremastra variabilis

Deadwood brings wild orchids to life | Kobe University News site

An interesting open-access paper, recently published in the journal, Functional Ecology, by two researchers from Kobe University, Japan, explains the complex, symbiotic relationship between an orchid and a wood-decomposing fungus, not only between the fungi and the adult plants that depend on the fungi to provide the orchid with nutrients, but also for the orchid seed to germinate.

This complex relationship appears to benefit the orchid because it can live in otherwise nutrient-poor conditions. However, from an intelligent design perspective, it makes no sense at all because an omnipotent, omniscient designer could have endowed the orchid with the genetic machinery to do what the fungus does.

The relationship between the seeds and the fungus is even more bizarre. The seeds, unlike those of other plants, are devoid of nutrients and therefore need the fungus to supply some. Orchid seeds are notoriously small, being almost invisible to the naked eye. Contrary to Jesus’s bizarre reputed claim in the Bible that the mustard seed is the smallest seed, orchid seeds are orders of magnitude smaller.

Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.

Matthew 13: 31–32

The mustard seed is not only not the smallest of seeds but also doesn’t grow into a tree!

Contrary to what creationists have been conditioned to believe, one of the hallmarks of good, intelligent design is minimal complexity because the simpler a process is, the fewer opportunities there are for it to go wrong.

The converse is true for evolved organisms and processes because there is no plan or foresight in evolution, which can only build on what is already present, and natural selection prioritises utility, based solely on what is better than what preceded it. Consequently, evolved organisms are a collection of suboptimal compromises, and there is selection pressure to minimise failures with another layer of complexity.

This has led to confusion in creationist thinking, which associates complexity with intelligent design as they try to force-fit what can be observed with their need to have a role for their particular deity — especially in their own ‘design’ — giving them a sense of importance that being ‘merely’ the product of evolution doesn’t give them.

Creationism Refuted - Blood suckers Were Around Long Before Creationist Frauds - Leeches are 200 Million Years Older Than We Thought

Macromyzon siluricus Ancient leech, 473 million years old

Rare fossil reveals ancient leeches weren’t bloodsuckers | UCR News | UC Riverside

Artist's reconstruction of the ancient Macromyzon siluricus leech.

EK Chan.

Unlike creationist frauds, leeches haven’t always been blood-sucking parasites. Around 473 million years ago, they were probably marine predators preying on small creatures.

It had previously been assumed that leeches evolved around 150–200 million years ago, but this fossil, found in the Waukesha biota — a geological formation in Wisconsin —might more than double that timeline to 473 million years, if confirmed. This extended timescale makes sense, as the complex adaptations required for a blood-sucking lifestyle would have had longer to evolve. However, the classification is disputed and may be an example of convergent evolution. This fossil shows the large posterior sucker that modern leeches still possess, but lacks the anterior suctorial mouthparts used by leeches today to pierce their victims’ skin and suck blood.

The fossil was discovered by researchers from Ohio State University, but was initially unrecognised for what it was until it was identified by Karma Nanglu, a palaeontologist with the University of California, Riverside, during the early pandemic years. Nanglu collaborated with researchers from the University of Toronto, the University of São Paulo, and Ohio State University on a paper describing the fossil, which is now published in PeerJ.

Refuting Creationism - A Tiny Fish Ancestor of Catfish and Carp - From 70 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Photograph of Acronichthys maccagnoi fossil (with scale), which was discovered in Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park.

Royal Tyrrell Museum

View of Dry Island Buffalo Leap.

New tiny prehistoric fish species unlocks origins of catfish and carp

A newly discovered fossil fish from the Late Cretaceous has filled a key gap in the evolutionary record of two major freshwater groups – catfish and carp. The fossil was found by researchers from Western University, Ontario, Canada, the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, and international collaborators. Its discovery is bound to send creationists into another bout of denial as they struggle to cope with the cognitive dissonance between reality and their preferred mythology.

When every fossil is transitional, each new find becomes harder for creationists to ignore—unless they retreat to one of their childish parodies of evolution and pretend it means one species instantly transforming into another, as though a ‘species’ consists of a single individual rather than a population, and evolution is a sudden event rather than a gradual process over time. This caricature allows them to dismiss every transitional fossil as a ‘complete species’ with ‘no evidence of intermediates’. From there, they retreat to Bible literalism, invoking vague categories of ‘kinds’ and imagining evolution as one taxon spontaneously giving rise to another—cats turning into dogs, or amoebas becoming humans—something that, if it ever occurred, would indeed defy any scientific explanation.

Hence their constant demands that science provide evidence for their straw-man version of evolution, while they ignore the overwhelming evidence that actually supports evolutionary theory—arguments deliberately crafted to mislead those ignorant of basic biology and to give them spurious reasons to feel smugly superior to ‘elitist scientists’ with their ‘big words’, as though ignorance were a shortcut to expertise.

So they cling to their childish mythology despite the growing number of fossils showing clear mosaic features linking different taxa—exactly what we would expect from ancestral stem species from which two groups diverged. This newly discovered fossil fish from the Late Cretaceous, displaying a mosaic of catfish and carp characteristics, exemplifies that pattern and sheds light on the evolutionary origins of these two major groups of freshwater fish.

Creationism In Crisis - How Fungi Created The Conditions For Land Plants - A Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Top L. Chicken of the woods (Laetiporus sulphureus)

Top R. Sulphur tufts (Hypholoma fasciculare)

Bottom L. Common mould (Penicillium)

Bottom R. Mucor (microscopic view)

Fungi set the stage for life on land hundreds of millions of years earlier than thought | Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology OIST

In that vast expanse of pre-‘Creation Week’ history, when 99.9975% of Earth’s story had already unfolded, a pivotal event occurred that would set the planet on a path towards the astonishing diversity of life we see today. According to researchers led by scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan, that turning point was the evolution of multicellular fungi.

Unlike animals and plants, in which multicellularity appears to have arisen only once, fungi seem to have achieved it independently on at least five separate occasions, between 1.4 and 0.9 billion years ago.

This innovation allowed fungi to colonise land and begin transforming bare rock and rock debris into soil. That process, in turn, created the conditions that later enabled plants to establish themselves on land.

In addition to shedding light on how multicellularity evolved in fungi — a process that involved horizontal gene transfer — this research significantly extends the known timeline of fungal evolution, pushing it back by hundreds of millions of years.

Of course, the authors of Genesis, unaware of the distinction between plants and fungi and apparently thinking all plants were angiosperms, made no mention of fungi at all. Their myth betrays no understanding that plants are living organisms or that green plants depend on sunlight for photosynthesis, since it describes them as being created the day before the sun (Genesis 1:15-17). It names only angiosperms while ignoring ferns, mosses, and algae (Genesis 1:11-12), and later claims that “every living substance” outside the Ark was destroyed (Genesis 7:4), as though plants, like rocks, would somehow have survived unscathed, to provide food for the animals afterwards, despite no mention of their preservation during the flood genocide.

Science, as ever, tells a very different story — one based not on gap-filling tales but on evidence written in fungal DNA and preserved in the fossil record. It is a story of awe and wonder, not at the supposed magical powers of an imagined creator, but at the relentless processes of evolution: variation, natural selection, and the exploitation of opportunity, producing the extraordinary biodiversity we see today.

Uninteligent Design - How The Process of Germ Cell Production Goes Wrong And Creates Genetic Defects.

Paired chromosomes showing crossovers in a mouse oocyte.

Hunter lab

Left panel: short green irregular lines arranged in pairs. Right: Close up of one pair shows that the two strands form a cross shape. Paired chromosomes showing crossovers in a mouse oocyte.

Hunter lab.

Landmark Discovery Reveals How Chromosomes Are Passed From One Generation to the Next | UC Davis

This article continues my series exploring the many ways in which the human body demonstrates unintelligent design. Far from being the perfect handiwork of a benevolent creator, our anatomy and physiology are full of flaws, inefficiencies, and dangerous vulnerabilities. Each of these makes sense in light of evolution by natural selection—an opportunistic, short-term process that tinkers with existing structures—but they make no sense at all if we are supposed to be the product of an all-wise designer.

Creationists often argue from a position of ignorant incredulity, claiming that complexity implies intelligent design, when in fact the opposite is true. The hallmark of good, intelligent design is simplicity, for two very simple reasons: first, simple things are easier to construct and require fewer resources; and second, simple structures and processes have fewer potential points of failure, making them more reliable.

In short: complexity is evidence against intelligent design and in favour of a mindless, utilitarian, natural process such as evolution.

In addition to being minimally complex, another characteristic we would expect of something designed by an omniscient, maximally intelligent, and benevolent designer is that the process should work perfectly, every time, without fail.

The problem for creationists is that their favourite example of supposed intelligent design — the human body — is riddled with complexity in both its structures and processes. This complexity provides countless examples of systems that fail to perform adequately, or fail altogether, with varying frequency. Many failures occur in the layers of complexity needed to control or compensate for the inadequacies of other systems, and when those compensatory mechanisms themselves fail, the result can be a cascade of dysfunctions or processes running out of control. The consequences manifest as diseases, defects, and disabilities — hardly the work of an all-wise designer.

They are, however, exactly what we would expect from a mindless, utilitarian process like evolution, which prioritises short-term survival and reproduction, selecting only what is better — sometimes only marginally better — than what preceded it, rather than seeking optimal solutions. I have catalogued many such suboptimal compromises in the anatomy and physiology of the human body, and the problems that arise from them, in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design, one of my Unintelligent Design series.

Just yesterday, I wrote about research suggesting that autism may be a by-product of the rapid evolution of intelligence in humans. Now we have another striking example of extreme biological complexity which, when it goes wrong, can have catastrophic consequences: the production of eggs in women and sperm cells in men.

Refuting Creationism - How Autism May Be The Result Of Compromise In The Evolution Of Human Intelligence

Trump 'fact checking' his autism claim

How evolution explains autism rates in humans | EurekAlert!

If the human genome had been intelligently designed by an omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent supernatural deity, as creationists insist, it should be perfect and free from defects of any sort. In fact, it is difficult to see why there would be any variance in such an intelligently designed genome, let alone variance that causes genetic defects—unless those were intentionally included by the designer, who then cannot reasonably be described as omnibenevolent or omniscient.

If, however, the human genome is the product of hundreds of millions of years of gradual evolutionary processes — processes that prioritise survival and reproduction, with all the sub-optimal compromises that a utilitarian form of ‘design’ entails — then variance and defects are exactly what we would expect.

Creationists traditionally ignore questions about the origin of variance in a supposedly ‘perfect’ intelligently designed genome. The existence of genetic defects is usually explained away by resorting to Bible-literalist mythology about ‘The Fall’ — an abandonment of the Discovery Institute’s Wedge Strategy, which seeks to present creationism as real science rather than a fundamentalist religion dressed in a lab coat. News that autism may in fact be a by-product of the evolution of intelligence in humans will therefore be an even greater problem for creationists, who insist that our high intelligence sets us apart as the special creation of a perfect god.

Ironically, as well as possessing high intelligence, humans — unlike any other primates — also have autism and schizophrenia. It is this correlation that provides a clue to their shared evolutionary origins.

My book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design, lists lots of examples of how the human body is the result of these sub-optimal evolutionary compromises with all the problems that has produced. This example is just another instance and more evidence of the lack of intelligence in the process.

Refuting Creationism - An Ichthyosaur from 200 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Artist’s interpretation of Eurhinosaurus mistelgauensis on 'belemnite battleground'.

Credit: Andrey Atuchin.

Eurhinosaurus mistelgauensis specimen from the Urwelt-Museum Oberfranken on a belemnite battleground. The fossil plate is about 4 m long.

Credit: Spicher et al (2025).

New Jurassic ichthyosaur species discovered in Mistelgau

It's shaping up to be another bad week for creationism, with the evidence for evolution on an old Earth continuing to accumulate, and evidence against any intelligence being involved in its evolution growing unabated. There is even a paper describing how and when Earth was really formed, and the contrast between that reality and the Bible’s version could hardly be greater.

This article looks at just one of these developments (more will follow). From the perspective of evolutionary biology, it is not especially remarkable—simply the description of a new species of extinct ichthyosaur, Eurhinosaurus mistelgauensis, from the Lower Jurassic (around 200 million years ago).

But for creationism, it serves as yet another stark reminder of how wrong the biblical creation story and timeline are. To put it bluntly, this fossil would not exist if the Bible’s story were true. It doesn’t take a genius to see how the fact of its existence bears on debates about the truth or falsity of Genesis—though creationists appear to struggle with this basic deductive logic.

Malevolent Designer News - How Candida Albicans (Thrush) Is Cleverly Designed to Infect Your Mouth - Evolution Or Malevolent Design?

The yeast fungus Candida albicans (blue) breaks out of human immune cells (red) by forming long thread-like cells called hyphae. The part of the hypha that has already left the immune cells is coloured yellow.

© Erik Böhm, Leibniz-HKI

The dose makes the difference - Leibniz-HKI

As has often been pointed out in these blog posts, the "evidence" offered by Discovery Institute fellows William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe for an intelligent designer can, by the same logic and using the same evidence, be interpreted as pointing to a theologically awkward malevolent designer. This is a line of reasoning routinely ignored by the "Cdesign proponentcists", who prefer to overlook the many examples of parasites and pathogens—and the evolutionary traits that make them so successful at invading and surviving within their hosts.

A fresh example that creationists will either have to ignore or blame on "The Fall" comes from researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology. They have shown that the fungus Candida albicans, which causes thrush, has evolved a highly sophisticated and "finely tuned" mechanism for infecting the human mouth while evading the immune system.

The stock creationist response is to shift responsibility onto the biblical myth of "The Fall," retreating into Bible literalism. Yet this is precisely the kind of literalism the Discovery Institute has been at pains to insist is not essential to the notion of intelligent design, which it markets as a scientific alternative to evolutionary theory—or "Darwinism," as they prefer to call it. This rhetorical sleight of hand was central to the Institute’s "Wedge Strategy," devised after the 1987 US Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard, which confirmed that teaching creationism in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

The new research reveals that C. albicans produces a toxin called candidalysin in carefully regulated doses that allow it to infiltrate the mucous lining of the mouth. Too little candidalysin, and the fungus would fail to establish itself; too much, and it would trigger an immune response strong enough to destroy it. Normally, C. albicans exists in a round, yeast-like form, but under the "right" conditions it can switch into the filamentous hyphal form typical of fungi. This transformation allows it to penetrate host tissues and, in immune-compromised patients, become life-threatening. It is in this invasive hyphal state that C. albicans produces candidalysin.

The production of hyphae, and therefore candidalysin, is controlled by the gene EED1. By any definition, EED1 would qualify as an example of "complex specified information" according to Dembski’s own formulation — evidence, according to the Discovery Institute, of supernatural intelligent design.

Refuting Creationism - Scientists Might Have Got Something Wrong - But Not As Wrong As The Bible's Authors Did.

Cross-section of an egg-shaped iron oxide stone: It holds information about the amount of organic carbon in the sea millions of years ago, much like a time capsule.

Image: Nir Galili /ETH Zurich

Minute witnesses from the primordial sea | ETH Zurich

Scientists at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich have discovered evidence that may force us to rethink how Ice Ages and complex life began. By studying tiny iron oxide grains called ooides, they found that dissolved carbon dioxide in the oceans between 1000 and 541 million years ago was 90–99 percent lower than today — far too low to have triggered an Ice Age or the rise of multicellular organisms.

For creationists, this creates a dilemma. Whatever did cause these events, it happened hundreds of millions of years earlier than their literal reading of the Bible allows. Science may revise its conclusions when new evidence emerges, but it is nowhere near as wrong as the Bible’s authors—who missed the truth by billions of years.

This difference highlights the contrast between science and religion. Science asks, “What does the evidence show?” and adapts accordingly. Religion demands blind faith, treating doubt as a weakness.

Creationists boast that their “truth” never changes, but the reality is that what doesn't change is the mind of a creationist who is immune to evidence, deductive logic and analytical reasoning. Refusing to change your mind in the light of evidence is intellectual bankruptcy - the hallmark of dogma, not wisdom.

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.