Unintelligent Design - Flatworms Can Regenerate Body Parts - So Why Can't Humans?

The planarian Schmidtea mediterranea

Credit: FLI / Anna Schroll

Schmidtea mediterranea

New research shows a tiny, regenerative worm could change our understanding of healing Stowers Institute for Medical Research

Researchers at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have uncovered new details explaining how the planarian flatworm, Schmidtea mediterranea, can regenerate not just a missing body part, but an entire organism from a tiny tissue fragment. Their findings have just been published in Cell Reports and represent a major advance in our understanding of regeneration at the cellular and genetic level.

This little worm continues to surprise scientists. Remove its head? It grows a new one. Slice it into pieces? Each piece becomes a complete worm. Such astonishing powers naturally prompt two very different kinds of questions – one scientific, one theological.

If one temporarily accepts creationist premises for the sake of argument, we are forced into a series of uncomfortable and contradictory conclusions.

Why would a supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent designer grant a humble flatworm the ability to regenerate an entire body, yet deny this life-saving ability to humans and virtually all other organisms? If this designer could abolish suffering, disease, and limb loss – and knowingly chose not to – what does that imply about its nature?

Creationists are left defending a worldview in which their designer appears either: unwilling to prevent suffering; unable to create beneficial traits consistently; or deliberately designing suffering into its creation. None of these options are theologically tidy – and they certainly do not align with the claim of a universally benevolent designer. The creationist framework produces contradictions, apologetics acrobatics, and moral dilemmas rather than answers.

By contrast, when we ask the evolutionary question – “How did this ability evolve?” – the picture becomes coherent.

Planarians have followed a unique evolutionary trajectory in which extreme regeneration conferred a significant survival advantage. Natural selection acted on stem-cell behaviour, gene regulation, and patterning networks over deep time, refining a mechanism that happens to be far beyond the needs of most other species.

Other organisms have regenerative abilities too – salamanders, zebrafish, sea stars, even humans to a limited extent – but the selective pressures and biological constraints differed. Regeneration is complex, energetically costly, and evolution works from what already exists. Most lineages simply did not follow that path. To borrow Michael Behe’s favourite term, planarian regeneration may appear “irreducibly complex” – and yet, as usual, complexity proves to be a testament to gradual evolutionary refinement, not evidence for supernatural assembly.

Refuting Creationism - Dinosaurs Thrived Until Disaster Struck - 66 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Small primitive mammals live alongside a Triceratops, pre-extinction. A softshell turtle climbs up a log, unaware that its freshwater surroundings will shelter it from the asteroid.

Illustration © Henry Sharpe.

Dinosaurs were on the up before asteroid downfall | News | The University of Edinburgh

This, the second paper, published in 2022 that utterly refutes creationism on several different levels, reports evidence that particularly undermines their claim that an omnibenevolent god created a world fine-tuned for life.

This belief arises from a deeply ignorant, rose-tinted view of the world — one that conveniently ignores history and habitually attributes anything bad to something else: sin, free will, or other theological constructs that, by their own narrative, could only have applied after some supposed “fall”.

In reality, even a superficial understanding of Earth’s history — 99.9975 % of which took place before creationism’s legendary “Creation Week” — reveals that the planet is anything but fine-tuned for life. Life on Earth has repeatedly been subjected to mass extinctions triggered by geological and cosmological catastrophes that wreaked havoc on the environment, often at a pace too rapid for most species to adapt.

One of the most famous of these events was the meteor impact in what is now the Yucatán Peninsula, 66 million years ago. This strike plunged the planet into a “nuclear winter” as atmospheric dust blotted out the Sun. Within weeks, almost all large species were exterminated, leaving only the avian dinosaurs — likely shielded by insulating feathers — and early mammals, protected by their insulating fur.

But as this recent paper shows, the dinosaurs were thriving in a healthy, biodiverse environment in which they were the dominant species right up until the moment the meteor struck. Had they shared the creationists’ mindset, they might well have concluded that Earth was “fine-tuned” for them too.

The evidence for this comes from an international team of palaeontologists and ecologists, including researchers from University of Oulu (Finland), Universidade de Vigo (Spain), University of Washington (Seattle, USA), University College London (UK), New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (USA), and University of Edinburgh (UK).

How Science Works - Biologists Might Need To Rethink A Detail Of Evolutionary Biology

Details of the surface of two sheet-like colonies of the ‘Berenicea’ type: (A) In Hyporosopora dilatata, the colony surface is relatively flat, save for the slightly convex zooids and faint growth lines (Upper Callovian or Lower Oxfordian, Oxford Clay; Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire); and (B) Well-defined transverse ridges cross the colony surface in Rugosopora enstonensis (Bathonian, Hampen Marly Beds; Enstone, Oxfordshire). Scale bars are 500µm.

Source: Bryozoans in the British Jurassic

New Study Reveals Berenicea Zooid Size Reduction Over 200 Million Years Contradicts Cope's Rule----Chinese Academy of Sciences

The discovery that a group of organisms has, contrary to “Cope’s Rule,” undergone a steady reduction in body size over the past 200 million years is a useful reminder of how science works — and why religion so often falters.

A cornerstone of the scientific method is its willingness to acknowledge error. Real intellectual strength lies not in clinging to discredited beliefs as though doing so were a test of character, but in facing up to mistakes, learning from them, and changing one’s mind. That is how knowledge advances.

Religion, by contrast, remains shackled to the dogmas of its ancient founders. To alter those fundamental beliefs is, in effect, to abandon the religion itself. This is why, while science has sent probes into deep space and placed human beings on the Moon, faith — despite lofty claims of being able to “move mountains” — has yet to lift so much as a feather a millimetre off the ground.

The new finding was just reported in the journal Palaeontology by Associate Professor MA Junye of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) and collaborators. They found that Berenicea, a genus of cyclostome bryozoans, has experienced a continuous reduction in zooid size over the past 200 million years. This runs counter to “Cope’s Rule,” which describes a tendency for body size to increase during the evolution of many lineages.

Cope’s Rule was formulated by the American palaeontologist Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897). There are, of course, well-known exceptions — such as the “island effect,” where animals isolated on small islands often evolve into miniature versions of their mainland relatives — but these are localised adaptations to particular environments. Cope’s Rule, by contrast, applies to long-term, broad-scale evolutionary trends.

Refuting Creationism - A Tiny Fossil From New Zealand Is Another Huge Problem For Creationism

A male satin bowerbird by his highly decorated avenue bower.

Photo by Daniel J. Field

Tiny fossil bone helps unlock history of the bowerbird | University of Otago
Apart from the fact that this fossil is a million years old, there is nothing in this discovery that creationists will struggle to dismiss with one of their well-worn stock phrases — “It was just a bird ‘kind’,” “It wasn’t transitional,” and so on. This is despite the fact that their Bible is remarkably vague about how many bird ‘kinds’ there were, includes bats as birds, and says absolutely nothing about anything outside a few square miles of the Middle East.

And of course, the date — like the entire fossil record — will be casually brushed aside as forged, fabricated, or “wrongly dated using proven false carbon dating” [sic].

But to anyone who actually values evidence and truth, and is not intent on proving their strength by clinging to demonstrably false beliefs in defiance of all contrary evidence, this find is genuinely fascinating. It provides strong evidence that the bowerbirds, today confined to Australia and New Guinea, were once far more widespread. This conclusion is based on the fact that the fossil was discovered in New Zealand. It is also suggested that climate change may have brought about its extinction in New Zealand and driven the bowerbirds' range back to its present distribution.

The discovery is reported in the journal Historical Biology by researchers from University of Cambridge, University of Otago, and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. A [news release from the University of Otago]() explains the significance of the find and four of the authors have also written an article about the find in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Refuting Creationism - Eating Carrion Made Us Human

Factors influencing scavenging behavior in humans.

Carmen Cañizares (@canitanatura).

Eating carrion made us human | CENIEH

One of the most telling weaknesses of creationism is how heavily it depends on piling assumption upon assumption to sustain its narrative. As Stephen Hawking observed in The Grand Design, the more assumptions a theory requires, the less likely it is to be true. This is simply the reverse of Occam's razor, the principle that the simplest explanation consistent with the evidence is usually the most plausible.

Creationists take the simplistic story of human origins from the Bible and build layers of speculation upon it — not derived from scripture or evidence, but from the circular reasoning of “this must have been true, or my beliefs are wrong.”

A classic example is their claim that there could have been no death before Eve’s supposed sin, because death is ‘evil’ and evil only entered the world after the Fall. From this, they conclude that Adam and Eve — and indeed all animals — must have been vegetarian. To prop up this contrivance, they add yet another assumption: that plants aren’t really ‘alive’ in the same way as animals, so eating them doesn’t count as causing death.

This is a textbook case of a weak theory being shored up by multiplying entities and assumptions — the very opposite of sound scientific reasoning. It also collapses under biological scrutiny. There is no evidence in the Bible to support it, and human anatomy and physiology clearly reveal that we are omnivores with a long evolutionary history of meat consumption.

And now, a team of evolutionary anthropologists led by Ana Mateos of Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) has published a research paper in the Journal of Human Evolution, in which they argue that before early hominins developed the technology to hunt large game for themselves, they were probably dependent on scavenging carrion—often from the kills of apex predators.

An important advantage of scavenging is that it provides a reliable source of high-protein food with relatively low energy expenditure. Carcasses can also sustain a population through periods of drought, when prey is scarce and some animals die from natural causes. Early hominins could have used sticks and stones to drive off predators, while their highly acidic stomachs minimised the risk of disease from decaying meat. Later, cooking provided additional protection against pathogens.

After what was likely a brief evolutionary phase as scavengers, humans developed the tools and cooperative strategies to become apex predators themselves. This reliance on carrion may even have been one of the critical factors that set our lineage on a different path from the other African apes, driving both physical and physiological changes.

Unintelligent Design - How Wheat Could Have Been Designed To Give Tripple The Yield

A spike of wheat showing three grains clustered within each spikelet, where there is ordinarily just one.

Credit: Vijay Tiwary,
University of Maryland

Wheat monoculture - but it could have been better designed!

Scientists Discover a Gene that Could Triple Wheat Production | College of Agriculture & Natural Resources at UMD

News that a single mutant gene could triple wheat yields raises some uncomfortable questions for Bible-literalist creationists, and indeed for anyone who believes their god created the Earth and all life on it exclusively for humans — its supposed favoured species, for whom “all of creation” was made.

This belief has profoundly shaped Western attitudes towards the planet and its resources. One consequence of this selfish worldview has been the destruction of vast areas of the Earth, its ecosystems, and the countless species that depend on them. In the relentless search for mineral wealth, cropland, and grazing land, humans have transformed immense regions into effective monocultures which, to anything not adapted to those particular crops, might as well be deserts. Moreover, the same belief — coupled with the idea that brown and black people were inferior to whites and therefore “created” to serve Europeans — helped justify imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade.

One question that creationists, in my experience, consistently shy away from is this: if an omniscient god truly created our domestic animals for our use, why have we almost always had to modify them through selective breeding to make them more useful? It’s as though this god didn’t actually know what we would need or how we would use these animals. Which leads to the obvious follow-up question: why didn’t this supposedly omniscient being create ideal domestic plants and crops in the first place?

How Science Works - Revising Our Knowledge Of Plant Dispersal

Plants colonising volcanic tepha on Surtsey

Credit: Pawel Wasowicz (CC BY)

Plants colonising lava field on Surtsey island.

Credit: Pawel Wasowicz (CC BY)

New study overturns long-held assumptions about how plants spread to islands | EurekAlert!

Plants that successfully leave more offspring are those with traits that allow their seeds to spread widely. That usually involves two key factors: tolerance or adaptability to new environments, and an effective way of reaching them. Over time, evolution has produced a variety of dispersal strategies—seeds can float on the wind, stick to animals, or pass through birds and end up deposited somewhere new.

Crossing the sea, though, adds another layer of difficulty. Seeds must survive what amounts to a small ocean voyage. For a long time, scientists assumed birds were the main way plants made these crossings. The idea was straightforward: birds eat fruit, fly to new islands, and excrete the seeds.

But new evidence has challenged that view. A recent open-access paper in Ecology Letters examines how plants have colonised Surtsey, the volcanic island that emerged off Iceland in 1963. This unique setting has allowed researchers to watch ecological colonisation unfold in real time.

Their findings were unexpected: most of the 78 vascular plant species that established themselves on the island weren’t fruit-bearing plants spread by birds, but grasses. While birds like geese and gulls did contribute to dispersal, most of the colonising species lacked the traits typically linked with long-distance dispersal.

Creationism Refuted - How Science Works - A Fossil Fly That Challenged Evolution.

A 150-million-year-old fossil with a singular adaptation may unlock the origin of quironomids | Estación Biológica de Doñana - CSIC

In a striking example of how science, in contrast to creationism, starts from the evidence and builds understanding accordingly, a newly discovered fossil fly has led scientists to revise their view on a seemingly minor detail of insect evolution.

Creationism, by contrast, starts with the conclusion and either distorts the evidence or ignores it altogether when, as is usually the case, it contradicts what they believe. To a creationist, the belief is sacred, so facts must comply—or be disregarded.

In my last blog post, I explained how psychologists view this behaviour as a perceived test of strength: creationists see challenges to their beliefs as threats that would make them appear weak if they accepted and adapted to the evidence. They respond by setting their faces like flint against any contradiction.

Science, by contrast, sees a refusal to change one’s mind when the evidence demands it as a mark of intellectual dishonesty. A willingness to revise one’s views shows a desirable strength of character — the hallmark of a good scientist. To a scientist, facts are sacred; opinions must flow from them. In any scientific debate, facts are neutral.

The discovery in question involves a Jurassic fossil midge from Australia — Telmatomyia talbragarica, the oldest known member of the Chironomidae (non-biting midge) family in the Southern Hemisphere. The fossil shows a mechanism for attaching to rocks using suction pads on its feet. This trait was previously thought to have evolved in marine species, but this insect lived in freshwater. That detail suggests the family did not originate in Siberia, as once believed, but in Gondwana before it broke apart.

Not the most dramatic scientific breakthrough, perhaps, but this is precisely how science advances — especially evolutionary biology: one careful step at a time, with constant re-examination and revision as new evidence emerges. It’s like working on a million-piece jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the box.

Creationism Refuted - Time For A Bible Re-Write

A Palaeolithic handaxe with a broken distal end, discovered during the Ayvalık survey

Early humans may have walked from Türkiye to mainland Europe, new groundbreaking research suggests - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

A phrase much loved by journalists (and creationists) is “the history/science books will need to be re-written”. It’s a convenient bit of lazy journalistic rhetoric — but in this case, the book that actually needs to be re-written is the Bible.

The discovery in question concerns the migration of early Homo sapiens, who may have spread from the Levant across Asia Minor (modern-day Türkiye) and then into Greece via a northern Aegean land bridge, exposed when sea levels were much lower during the last Ice Age — between 115,000 and 11,700 years ago.

This new evidence challenges some existing models of early human migration routes. However, it represents only a refinement of the broader, well-established story of humanity’s dispersal out of Africa, not a challenge to it. What it does completely undermine, however, is the Biblical narrative claiming that all humans descended from a single, ahistorical couple created without ancestors some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago — followed by a supposed global “reset” just 4,000 years ago when a genocidal flood left only eight related survivors.

The evidence for this Ice Age land bridge comes from the recovery of 138 stone tools at ten sites within a 200 km² area around Ayvalık in north-west Türkiye, opposite the Greek island of Lesbos.

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.