Unintelligent Design - What Happens when A Badly 'Designed' Process Goes Rogue - Cancer - Malevolent Design Or Evolution?

Dr. Alexandra Nusawardhana, the lead author of the study and who earned her doctorate in biomedical sciences this year from Penn State College of Medicine, conducts research to understand genomic instability and cancer treatment response.

Credit: Jason Plotkin / Penn State. Creative Commons

DNA repair protein gene gone rogue may unlock new cancer treatments | Penn State University

A characteristic of evolved biological systems, and one that distinguishes them from systems designed from first principles, is that they are often unnecessarily complex, vulnerable to failure and dependent on layers of patchwork compensation. This is what we should expect from systems produced by utilitarian, suboptimal compromises built from whatever was available at the time.

With no plan, no foresight and no predetermined objective, natural selection can only favour whatever leaves more descendants in a particular environment. The result is not an ideal solution, but merely a workable one — one that is better than what preceded it, even if it remains a very long way from perfection. An intelligent designer, such as the one proposed by advocates of intelligent design, would be under no such historical constraints and could, in principle, rebuild a system from scratch to arrive at the optimal solution.

To illustrate this, this post and the next will look at two recent papers that incidentally demonstrate how many human health problems arise from these over-complex, error-prone systems — systems that would not exist if the human body were the pinnacle of created perfection that creationists imagine it to be. Unless, of course, the designer intended us to suffer when its systems failed.

The first concerns a paper published in February 2026 in Nature Communications by researchers at Penn State College of Medicine. It shows how one component of the DNA repair machinery — a system needed because DNA replication and maintenance are themselves vulnerable to error and damage — can itself go wrong and produce a pattern of genomic instability resembling that seen when the BRCA1 and BRCA2 tumour-suppressor pathway is defective.

The culprit is EXO1, a gene that encodes an exonuclease involved in DNA processing and repair. In normal cells, EXO1 helps trim and process damaged or mismatched DNA so that repair can proceed. But when EXO1 is overexpressed, as the researchers found in a significant proportion of several cancers, including about 20–30% of breast and ovarian cancers as well as melanoma, testicular, cervical and hepatobiliary cancers, too much of this normally useful protein becomes destructive. Instead of helping to preserve genome integrity, excessive EXO1 activity can degrade newly synthesised DNA during replication stress, expanding single-stranded DNA gaps and degrading reversed replication forks.

The result is a BRCA-like pattern of genomic instability even in cells whose BRCA pathway is still functional. In other words, the cell behaves in some important respects like a BRCA-mutant tumour cell, not because BRCA1 or BRCA2 is mutated, but because too much EXO1 has overwhelmed the normal protective system. This matters clinically because such tumours may respond to some of the same treatments used against BRCA-mutant cancers, including drugs that target DNA repair vulnerabilities.

So, we have a DNA replication and maintenance system that needs elaborate repair machinery because the genome is constantly vulnerable to damage; then we have the catastrophic consequences when that repair machinery itself goes rogue. Compare that with the simpler, more robust system we might expect from an intelligent designer endowed with foresight and unconstrained by evolutionary history. Complexity is not the hallmark of intelligent design that creationists claim it to be. In biology, it is very often the accumulated consequence of failure-prone, suboptimal compromises produced by evolutionary tinkering without a predetermined objective.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Cultivated Cotton - No Magic Required

Wild cotton, on left, has short, brown, and coarse fibers, while modern domesticated cotton has white, fine and abundant fibers. A new study led by Iowa State University scientists identified the northwestern Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico as the original source of domesticated cotton.

Photo: Corrinne Grover/Iowa State University.

Cotton’s roots trace to Yucatan Peninsula, where wild gene pool runs deepest - News Service

My last blog post looked at the evolution of the strawberry and how the evidence of multiple whole-genome duplications and speciation by hybridisation refutes several basic creationist, counter-evidential myths and articles of faith.

This post deals with the evolution and cultivation of the cotton plant, which again refutes the childish notion of divine creation, perfectly suited for use by the creator god's favourite creation, humankind, as well as the creationist article of faith that no new genetic information can arise without the direct intervention of a designer god, because this would supposedly violate the laws of thermodynamics.

As a recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), by a team of researchers including Professor Jonathan Wendel of Iowa State University, has shown, modern upland cotton, Gossypium hirsutum, is the result of thousands of years of human selection acting on naturally occurring genetic variation. The team traced its domestication to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, probably to the north-western Yucatán, where wild populations still retain the deepest gene pool. Cotton was first domesticated there about 5,000 years ago, which, if creationist chronology were taken seriously, places it before the supposed genocidal global flood, which it appears to have survived along with the people who cultivated it.

The researchers found that domestication transformed a wild, perennial shrub with small bolls and short, coarse, brown fibres into the modern crop with abundant, long, fine, white fibres. This was not the result of a single act of magical design, nor of a sudden, miraculous improvement, but of long-term selection acting on many mutations of relatively small effect, accumulated and filtered over many generations.

The team also showed that, while human selection produced fibres more useful to people, it did so at a cost. Useful traits present in wild populations, such as disease resistance and salt tolerance, were left behind as farmers selected repeatedly from a restricted subset of the original wild gene pool. Each generation of selection narrowed the genetic base still further, pushing cultivated cotton through a genetic bottleneck.

The researchers reached these conclusions by comparing the genomes of cultivated cotton with those of specimens collected from wild populations across the plant's native range. Their analyses showed that domesticated cotton is most closely related to wild cotton from north-western Yucatán, where two random wild plants still show, on average, about twice as much genetic difference as two random modern cultivars.

After cultivated upland cotton spread out of the Yucatán, it eventually became the dominant cotton crop worldwide, displacing or overshadowing other cotton species that had been independently domesticated in South America, Africa and India. Today, Gossypium hirsutum, or upland cotton, accounts for about 90% of the world's cotton crop.

Refuting Creationism - How The Strawberry Evolved - No Magic Needed

Wild starwberry, Fragaria vesca

By Jörg Hempel, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, Link

A genomic time machine traces how the modern strawberry came to be | EurekAlert!

Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did

Dr. William Butler, Physician - (1535–29 January 1618)
Talking of the strawberry.

This and my next blog post deal with essentially the same refutations of creationist mythology and pseudo-science. The mythology is the Bible’s unambiguous claim that a creator god made everything for its favourite creation, humankind; the pseudo-science is the creationist claim that no new genetic information can arise without the direct intervention of that creator god, because, so they tell us, new genetic information can only be produced by magic, otherwise it would violate the laws of thermodynamics [sic]. Both claims are demonstrable nonsense, of course.

The first example concerns a fruit now ripening in UK gardens and fields — the strawberry. If strawberries had been specially created for humans, we might expect them to have arrived fully formed, already perfect for our tastes and purposes. Instead, like other cultivated crops, they bear the marks of a long evolutionary history followed by recent human selection, breeding and improvement.

A May 2025 paper published in the journal Horticulture Research by researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and collaborating institutions, describes a new way to reconstruct the deep evolutionary history of the cultivated strawberry, Fragaria × ananassa. Their work helps explain how the modern strawberry acquired its complex octoploid genome — not by magic, but by ordinary, natural processes of genome duplication, hybridisation and subsequent evolutionary divergence.

Cultivated strawberries, like many crop plants, are polyploids. Humans are normally diploid, with two sets of chromosomes; cultivated strawberries are octoploid, with eight sets. In the notation used by geneticists, humans are 2n, while the cultivated strawberry is 2n = 8x = 56. This genomic complexity is the outcome of a series of ancient whole-genome duplication and hybridisation events in which entire chromosome sets from different ancestral lineages were brought together in one organism.

Whole-genome duplication does not require supernatural intervention. It is a well-known natural process, especially common in plant evolution. Initially, it duplicates existing genetic material, but those extra gene copies then provide raw material for mutation, altered regulation, divergence, subfunctionalisation and neofunctionalisation. In other words, duplicated genes can be retained, modified, silenced, repurposed or combined in new ways. Hybridisation adds another layer of novelty by bringing together different genomes, producing new combinations of genes and regulatory networks in a single evolutionary lineage.

The research team disentangled the strawberry’s complex polyploid genome by exploiting the evolutionary signatures left by long terminal repeat retrotransposons, or LTR-RTs. These mobile genetic elements accumulate in genomes over time and can act rather like molecular time stamps. By comparing patterns of similarity between these elements across chromosomes, the researchers were able to reconstruct the strawberry’s subgenome architecture and infer the timing of major genome-merging events.

Using this serial similarity matrix method, the researchers found evidence for three successive allopolyploidisation events in the evolutionary history of the cultivated strawberry genome: first between about 3.1 and 4.2 million years ago, then between about 1.9 and 3.1 million years ago, and finally between about 0.8 and 1.9 million years ago. The result is a genome composed of multiple subgenomes with different ancestry, interacting and evolving together over time.

What is perfectly clear from this research is that new genetic variation and genomic complexity can arise through entirely natural mechanisms. Polyploidy, hybridisation, mutation, transposable elements and selection are not gaps in biology into which a magic creator needs to be inserted; they are part of the normal machinery of evolution. The cultivated strawberry is not evidence of special creation, but of a long, traceable evolutionary history later shaped by human cultivation.

Creationism Refuted - Why Science Works While Religions Ignore Failures

Credit: Tobias Baur / Pexels

Credit: Tobias Baur / Pexels

Dark diversity helped solve Darwin’s 160-year-old puzzle | University of Tartu

A paper recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) by an international team that included researchers from the University of Tartu, Estonia, offers a solution to a conundrum in evolutionary ecology first identified by Charles Darwin more than 160 years ago: Darwin’s naturalisation conundrum.

The problem concerns why some introduced species successfully establish themselves in a new environment while others fail. Darwin recognised two apparently contradictory possibilities, both of which make sense in evolutionary terms. On the one hand, a newcomer closely related to local species might succeed because its relatives show that the environment is suitable for that general way of life. In other words, similarity to the local community could be a sign of pre-adaptation. On the other hand, a newcomer might be more successful if it is unlike the resident species, because it avoids direct competition and exploits resources the local community is not already using.

So which is it? Should a successful immigrant species resemble the local species, or should it be different from them? That is Darwin’s naturalisation conundrum.

These are the sorts of paradoxes science thrives on because they expose a gap in understanding and invite investigation. They are not waved aside as mysteries, nor protected from scrutiny by declaring them ineffable. They are problems to be solved by evidence.

That is in stark contrast to religion, where glaring contradictions are often preserved rather than resolved. Christianity, for example, asks its followers to believe simultaneously in an omniscient god and in human free will. Yet the contradiction can be exposed with a simple question: if God has always known that you will eat fish for dinner tomorrow, can you choose steak instead? If yes, then God did not know after all; if no, then you were never free to choose. Either answer undermines a central plank of Christian theology, because without free will there can be no meaningful original sin, no need for salvation, and no coherent reason for the Jesus story.

Another awkward question is why an omniscient god supposedly waited until about 2,000 years ago to arrange the sacrifice of Jesus as the mechanism for saving humanity. If this god had always known that a blood sacrifice would be needed, why wait through countless generations of human suffering before arranging it? Why not solve the alleged problem at the beginning? Did God simply stand by while millions died without that supposed salvation, or did it merely take until the first or second century CE for priests to invent a theological explanation for the Jesus story?

And so the list goes on. Can an omnipotent god create an object too heavy for it to lift? Can God lie? If God claims to be omniscient, how can it know that there is nothing it does not know? And if it is aware of not knowing something, then it is not omniscient. Such questions are usually met not with answers but with evasion, because religions have no neutral referee. They have only opinion, assertion and authority.

Science is different because evidence can arbitrate between competing explanations. This is why science tends to converge on a single answer while religions fragment into sects, denominations and, sometimes, mutually hostile factions.

In the case of Darwin’s naturalisation conundrum, the team, including Wen-gang Zhang and Professor of Botany Meelis Pärtel of the University of Tartu, examined the evidence in the form of a remarkable 340-year dataset from Swedish lakes, recording both successful and unsuccessful fish introductions. This allowed the researchers to test, with unusual precision, what determines whether an introduced species establishes itself.

Malevolent Design - We Have The Ability To Regenerate An Amputated Limb - But It's Turned Off And Hidden

A conceptual graphic shows how growth factors BMP2 and FGF2 are applied to the injury site to stimulate tissue regeneration, highlighting new research into restoring damaged digits.

Credit: Melissa Bristow/Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences

A–C Representative longitudinal sections and μCT images (insets) of control and FGF2 treated digits 21 days post treatment (DPT). A Control BSA treated digits do not display a regenerative response and are truncated. B The majority of FGF2 treated digits are truncated without displaying a regenerative response. C A minority of FGF2 treated digits produce an ectopic skeletal element distal to the amputation that articulates with the stump bone.

Yu, L., Yan, M., Scaturro, K.Z. et al. (2026).

What if humans could regrow tissue? Texas A&M study moves science closer – Texas A&M Stories.

Although the Discovery Institute and its Fellows who advocate for Intelligent Design are usually careful not to identify their putative “intelligent designer” explicitly with the God of the Christian Bible, the dog-whistle signals they use leave their target audience in little doubt. The designer is understood to be the Christian god, merely relabelled for legal and tactical convenience. That being so, and if that god were actively interfering in the design and evolution of living systems — with humans as the supposed pinnacle of creation and occupying a special place in it — we might reasonably expect humans to have been given the best design available.

Instead, nature looks exactly as an unplanned evolutionary process would lead us to expect: a patchwork of compromises, contingencies and inherited limitations. As I describe in my book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, humans are remarkable in some respects, particularly in our relatively large brains and consequent cognitive abilities, but in most other respects we are not especially impressive. We are not the strongest animals, nor the fastest. Birds of prey have far better eyesight; barn owls and dogs have far better hearing in relevant ranges; dogs have a vastly superior sense of smell; elephants and some other long-lived animals have evolved impressive cancer-resistance mechanisms; and the immune systems of many bats are tuned in ways that make our own look distinctly ordinary.

But perhaps the most striking contrast is in the ability of some animals to regenerate lost or damaged body parts. Several species can regenerate structures that humans simply cannot replace. Salamanders can regrow limbs; fish can replace fins and repair tissues that would leave mammals permanently damaged; and some invertebrates can regenerate astonishing portions of the body. Yet, noticeably, all the prayers, incantations and appeals to divine mercy have never once been shown to regrow an amputated human limb, replace a lost eye, repair a severed spinal cord, or restore dead heart muscle after an infarction. Nor do we see cancerous sections of colon removed by surgery obligingly regrowing as healthy tissue in answer to prayer. These are not impossible biological feats in principle; they are just things our lineage cannot normally do.

Now researchers from Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences (VMBS) have found something that should be even more disturbing for Intelligent Design creationists. In a paper recently published in Nature Communications, they report that non-regenerating mouse digit wounds can be induced to move part-way towards regeneration. In other words, the relevant mammalian cells may not be entirely incapable of regeneration; their capacity appears to be suppressed or obscured by the normal wound-healing response. Creationists who reject the evolutionary explanation now need to explain why an intelligent, omnibenevolent designer would leave mammals, including humans, with a latent capacity for regeneration, while allowing that capacity to be overridden by scarring.

The researchers’ explanation makes perfect sense as the outcome of a utilitarian, unplanned evolutionary process. In mammals, rapid wound closure by scar-forming fibroblasts can be life-saving. A quick patch reduces blood loss, closes a route for infection and gives the injured animal a better chance of surviving long enough to reproduce. Regeneration, by contrast, is slower and more complex. Evolution has no foresight and no obligation to produce perfection; it merely preserves what works well enough under the circumstances. The injury is patched up with a near-enough-is-good-enough solution, and the animal lives to pass on its genes.

That, of course, should not have been beyond the wit of an intelligent designer to improve upon. A competent designer could have given us both abilities: rapid wound closure to prevent fatal bleeding and infection, followed by orderly regeneration of the missing structures. Instead, we have the familiar evolutionary compromise: survival first, elegance later — and often not at all.

The problem centres on fibroblast cells, which can follow different developmental routes. In ordinary mammalian wound-healing, they rapidly close the wound and form scar tissue. In strongly regenerative animals, similar cells can organise into a blastema — a temporary structure that seals the wound while also providing the cellular basis for rebuilding missing tissues. The Texas A&M team showed that, after the wound had first closed, applying fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2), followed later by bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP2), could redirect the response. The result was imperfect regeneration, but it included bone, tendon, ligament and joint-like structures.

The conclusion is not that humans are about to start regrowing limbs, nor that a mouse digit is the same as a human arm or leg. It is more interesting than that. The potential for regeneration in mammals may not have vanished completely. It may still be there, hidden beneath the faster, rougher, scar-forming response that natural selection has favoured. For creationists, that raises the awkward question of why their supposed designer would equip other animals with regenerative abilities, leave traces of the same capacity in mammals, and then arrange matters so that, when humans most need it, the system normally fails.

Refuting Creationism - How Modern Humans Benefitted from Meeting Denisovans

AI-generated Image (Chat GPT 5.5 Thinking)

Image provided by Tucci Lab

Genomes from Oceania offer new clues to human evolution | Yale News

A paper recently published by a Yale University-led team in the journal Science shows how Denisovan genes in the people of Near Oceania have contributed especially to their immune systems, and so have continued to influence human evolution for tens of thousands of years.

Who would be a creationist? It must be galling to wait so eagerly for that great day when biologists finally announce the collapse of evolutionary theory and admit that a better explanation of the observable evidence is one involving unevidenced magic entities doing conjuring tricks with chemistry and physics. That would make biology the first science to abandon natural explanations, ignore Occam’s Razor, and adopt magic as a basic principle. Sadly for creationists, that long-promised day shows no sign of arriving, despite having been predicted any day now for more than half a century.

But then, what would creationism be without a dogged refusal to change its mind when the evidence demands it, and the childish belief that the evidence itself must be part of some vast conspiracy to test the strength of faith? That is not science; it is apologetics dressed up in a lab coat.

The problem, as always, is that reality refuses to conform. The universe continues to produce evidence contradicting creationism and confirming the complex evolution of humans over deep time: migration, isolation, adaptation, bottlenecks, and repeated remixing with genes from other archaic human lineages, themselves the products of long evolutionary histories.

The real-world evidence written into our genomes is that most non-African human populations carry remnants of Neanderthal DNA, while Denisovan ancestry is especially marked in Near Oceanians and in some Asian populations. There is also evidence that Neanderthals and Denisovans themselves met and interbred in central Asia. Human evolution was not a simple ladder, still less a single act of special creation, but a branching, merging, reticulated history of populations moving, separating, adapting and sometimes meeting again.

Some of these archaic genes appear to have mattered because they were useful. In particular, they are often associated with immune responses to pathogenic bacteria and viruses. This makes evolutionary sense: Denisovan-like populations had already adapted to environments outside Africa, including their local burden of pathogens. When the ancestors of present-day Near Oceanians inherited some of that genetic variation through introgression, beneficial variants could be retained by natural selection, even while many other archaic variants were gradually lost.

The Yale-led team filled an important gap in our understanding of human evolution by sequencing the genomes of 177 individuals from 12 distinct populations in different parts of Near Oceania — the southwestern Pacific region that includes Papua New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands — and analysing them alongside 1,284 previously published genomes from individuals worldwide.

They found evidence that the ancestors of Near Oceanian populations interbred with at least three distinct Denisovan-like groups. They also identified thousands of archaic variants that affect how genes are switched on or off, with a notable concentration in immune and antiviral pathways. In other words, Denisovan DNA is not merely a fossil remnant in the genome; in some populations, it is still helping to shape biology today.

Unintelligent Design - Evolution By Viral Infection

Pomacea canaliculata egg clusters above the water line.

Apple Snail, Pomacea canaliculata

By KENPEI, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Lingnan University joint research analyses genome of global agricultural pest ‘apple snail’: Ancient viral gene-driven evolution of ‘terrestrial oviposition’ ability - Press Release | Lingnan University

A paper recently published in the journal Advanced Science, by researchers including Assistant Professor Jack Chi-Ho Ip, from Lingnan University, Hong Kong, is deeply problematic for creationists, not only because it describes a process that took place over an immense period of time incompatible with the biblical narrative, but also because it deals with a mechanism for evolution that cannot be waved aside as mere "variation within a kind", or something creationists like to dismiss as "micro-evolution".

Creationists continue to insist that large-scale evolution does not happen, so everything must have been specially created more or less as it is, with only limited variation within the "kind" — a term always left conspicuously undefined, so the goalposts can be moved whenever the evidence becomes inconvenient. This is despite the well-attested mechanisms by which biodiversity arises, including classical Darwinian natural selection acting on inherited variation, and genetic drift, in which chance changes in allele frequencies can lead to a neutral mutation becoming fixed in, or eliminated from, a population gene pool.

There is also the founder effect, where a non-representative sample of a population becomes isolated from the parent population, usually by a physical or ecological barrier. The new population therefore begins with a different allele-frequency profile from the population from which it came. Then there is hybridisation, where hybrid offspring can, in some circumstances, become reproductively isolated from both parent species, forming a new genetically distinct population or species.

And lastly, we have horizontal gene transfer, where an organism acquires genetic material from another biological lineage in its environment. This is especially familiar in bacteria, but it also occurs in animals, often through viruses. Retroviruses are particularly important in this respect because they insert a DNA copy of their genome into that of their host. Over time, the viral sequence may be disabled by mutation, or the host may evolve a defence against it. Either way, the remnant of the virus can become part of the host genome, where it is free to mutate over time. Occasionally, such inherited viral DNA is exapted for a new function, creating useful new genetic information without the slightest need for supernatural assistance. One well-known example is syncytin, derived from ancient retroviral genes, now involved in the formation and function of the mammalian placenta.

Now researchers at Hong Kong's Lingnan University and their collaborators have shown that a viral-derived gene in apple snails is probably involved in their ability to lay eggs out of water — a key adaptation in the evolution of aerial egg-laying and one reason some apple snails have become such successful invasive pests. The gene, associated with the perivitelline fluid surrounding the developing embryo, was probably acquired by the ancestor of the Ampullariidae during the Jurassic. It would be interesting to see a creationist explain how acquiring a gene from an entirely unrelated viral lineage can be described as "variation within a kind". It would also be interesting to see them explain why an intelligent designer would need to borrow viral genetic material to equip a snail to lay eggs above the waterline.

Refuting Creationism - Evolving Millipedes Crawl All Over Creationism

Hirudicryptus canariensis

Photo by Rafael Garcia and Paul Marek, Virginia Tech

Hirudicryptus canariensis (left) Siphoniulus neotropicus (microscopic image at right) are the two rare millipedes whose DNA helped researchers complete the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders.

Photos by Rafael Garcia and Paul Marek for Virginia Tech.

Ancient millipedes still had secrets to tell | EurekAlert!

A paper published today (12 June 2026) in Current Biology is almost guaranteed to upset any creationists with the courage to read it and the ability to understand it. Written by an international team led by Associate Professor Paul Marek and Dr Luisa F. Vasquez-Valverde of Virginia Tech, it reports the completion of the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders, including two rare groups whose DNA had never previously been included in a phylogenetic analysis.

Millipedes were amongst the earliest animals to colonise the land, arriving long before vertebrates had made the transition from water to land. According to the researchers, they beat vertebrates onto land by more than 80 million years. As detritivores, they helped to establish early terrestrial ecosystems by breaking down decaying organic matter and recycling nutrients, gradually helping to create soils in which later plant communities could develop.

For more than a century, biologists have known that two rare groups of millipedes — Siphoniulida and Siphonocryptida — existed, but without fresh specimens it was impossible to analyse their DNA and confirm where they belonged in the millipede family tree. One of the groups includes species barely a centimetre long that spend their entire lives underground; the other is known from only a few locations.

Members of the team therefore travelled to Los Tuxtlas, Mexico, and the Spanish Canary Islands to collect Siphoniulus neotropicus and Hirudicryptus canariensis, the two millipedes whose DNA had not previously been included in an evolutionary analysis. By sequencing DNA from these groups, comparing hundreds of genes across 82 millipede species, and combining those results with evidence from 29 fossils, the researchers were able to determine where the groups fit into millipede history and when their lineages emerged.

The result was especially interesting because one of the supposed “orders”, Siphonocryptida, appears not to be a separate order after all, but part of an existing lineage. The other, Siphoniulida, could finally be placed among its closest relatives on the millipede evolutionary timeline. The analysis also pushed the likely origin of millipedes back to nearly 460 million years ago — roughly 35 million years earlier than the oldest known millipede fossils.

This is bad news for creationists for at least three reasons:

• It shows these arthropods had their origin hundreds of millions of years before their mythical “Creation Week”.
• It shows a long history of descent from a common origin, just as the Theory of Evolution predicts.
• It shows the researchers were entirely dependent on evolutionary theory to frame the question, predict relationships, interpret the DNA and fossil evidence, and explain the results — with no hint that they found evolution inadequate and no need to invoke magic, special creation, or the long-promised “collapse of Darwinism” that creationists have been assuring their followers is imminent, and has been for more than half a century.

Refuting Creationism - No Sex Please, We're Ediacaran

A lack of sex held back life’s diversity for millions of years | University of Cambridge

Try debating with a creationist on social media and before long you will be challenged to explain how sexual reproduction evolved, because there must have been a first male and a first female. A regular form of this, betraying the abysmal ignorance of the creationist, is the childish attempt at a "Gotcha!" with, "How long did the first man have to wait for the first woman to evolve?"

Like so many creationist preconceptions about what evolution is and what evolutionary biologists claim, this assumes that each species somehow evolves without ancestry, so everything about it must have arisen spontaneously in a single individual or, in this case, in a single couple. There is no awareness of inheritance from common ancestors, nor of the slow accumulation and honing of traits over time. Presumably, the questioner thinks adult men and women being magicked into existence without parents is a perfectly rational belief.

In reality, sexual reproduction did not begin with men and women. A form of sex almost certainly arose long before animals, among single-celled eukaryotes, and need not have involved anything recognisable as male and female. At its simplest, sex is the mixing of genetic material from different individuals. The interesting question, from the point of view of evolutionary biology, is not where the first man and first woman came from, but what advantage genetic mixing had over cloning or other asexual forms of reproduction, such that it became the predominant, although far from exclusive, method of reproduction among complex organisms.

Now two researchers from the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, UK, believe they have part of the answer, and have just published their findings in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The paper, by Dr Emily G. Mitchell and Professor Andrea Manica, examines how reproductive mode affected competition, dispersal and diversity among Ediacaran animal communities. It is accompanied by a research news item from the University of Cambridge.

The Ediacaran Period, roughly 635-539 million years ago, saw some of the earliest known large animals. Many of them would look nothing like any modern animal: they were sessile, lacked mouths and obvious digestive systems, and probably absorbed nutrients directly from the surrounding seawater. In the relatively benign conditions of the Ediacaran oceans, with limited predation and reduced competition, there was less pressure for rapid diversification. As a result, these early animal communities appear to have changed only slowly for millions of years before the later burst of diversity that preceded and fed into the Cambrian radiation.

But, as they began to colonise the shallower seas and coastal regions, the Ediacaran biota would have encountered increasingly unstable conditions with tides, storms and fluctuating temperatures and nutrient levels, so there would have been competition and selection pressure to adapt to these more hostile conditions. And this is what we see in the fossil record as the Ediacaran biota produced a second wave of more diverse forms, leading eventually to the 'Cambrian Explosion'.

Previous work has shown that some of these Ediacaran organisms reproduced asexually by sending out stolons or runners, rather like strawberry plants do today. Their offspring were clones, physically connected to the parent colony and genetically very similar. That can work well in a stable environment, but it has a serious evolutionary limitation: it restricts the mixing of genes from different lineages. Beneficial mutations that arise in separate clonal lines cannot easily be combined in the same genome, so lineages compete with one another instead of pooling their evolutionary gains.

Sexual reproduction changes that. It does not create evolution by magic; it provides natural selection with more combinations on which to act. Beneficial alleles that arise in different lineages can be brought together in the same genome instead of being trapped in competing clonal lines. This is the Fisher-Muller advantage of recombination: sex can turn evolutionary change from a slow serial process into a more rapid parallel one.

How we Know The Bible Is Wrong - Evidence That wouldn't Be there if The Bible Myths Were True

Examples of different treatments and states of preservation of human remains at Vráble-Veľké Lehemby.

Furholt M, et al (2026).

Drone footage of the excavation site.

© Nils Müller-Scheeßel

Headless skeletons offer new insights into farming societies 7,000 years ago

A problem for biblical literalist creationists is that they are wedded to the absurd and demonstrably false notion that the Bible is a literal account of real history, including a catastrophic, genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago. Such a flood would have left a tell-tale, globally recognisable layer of flood sediment containing the jumbled remains of the animals and plants it had killed. It would also have destroyed, displaced or buried earlier human settlements beneath one unmistakable flood horizon.

This, of course, flies in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary. The predicted global layer of flood silt is not there, and the archaeological record continues, uninterrupted, through the very period in which creationists need their flood to have occurred. Practically every archaeological find older than the various creationist dates for Noah's Flood — from the pyramids at Giza to the less spectacular but more numerous Neolithic and Bronze Age burial grounds, field systems, settlements, tools and artefacts that litter the African and Eurasian landscape — should not be where it is, least of all in the Middle East, the supposed epicentre of the alleged catastrophe.

And yet archaeologists are regularly digging up evidence of human activity that long predates the creationist timescale. A recent example is the grim, 7,000-year-old evidence of headless human bodies at Vráble-Veľké Lehemby in Slovakia, reported in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. The refutation of creationist mythology is, of course, entirely incidental. The archaeological question is what this extraordinary find tells us about an Early Neolithic farming society. The indications so far are that the heads were not removed by violent decapitation as a form of execution — which might have suggested a society in crisis or conflict — but were skilfully removed around the time of death. That points instead to some form of social, ritual or funerary practice, although the precise meaning of that practice remains uncertain.

The site at Vráble-Veľké Lehemby comprises more than 300 house outlines arranged in three neighbourhoods, with up to 80 buildings inhabited at the same time. The settlement existed for several centuries, approximately between 5250 and 4950 BCE. One neighbourhood was enclosed by a ditch, probably marking a boundary, and it was in or around this ditch, especially near the entrance to the settlement, that archaeologists found the remains of at least 78 individuals. Of these, 77 lacked heads, the single exception being a child whose skull was still present.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Hagfish By LOSS of Eye Complexity

Feeding hagfish

Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Creationism Refuted - British Fallow Deer Have LOST Genetic Diversity - Over The Last 120,000 Years

Fallow deer, Dama dama

Photo credit: Jiří Nedorost.,
CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Fallow deer

Photo credit: Memurubu, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

UP News - University of Potsdam

A paper just published in iScience should, if they were aware of it, at least cause an honest creationist to question some basic assumptions. It reports that modern European fallow deer, Dama dama, retain only a fraction of the genetic diversity present in their Ice Age ancestors. This finding is based on ancient DNA recovered from the fossilised remains of ten, approximately 120,000-year-old fallow deer from Neumark-Nord in Germany, analysed by researchers from the University of Potsdam, the MONREPOS Research Center and Museum in Neuwied, and Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Creationism continues to take a battering in the world of real science, where yet another paper quite incidentally refutes several of its basic dogmas. Creationists, who are notoriously reluctant to read serious science and would probably struggle to understand it if they did, will no doubt remain blissfully unaware of this constant refutation of their core superstitions.

To ensure that ignorance is maintained, creationist disinformation sites expend considerable effort in spreading distrust of serious science amongst their followers. What cult leader would want his followers reading anything that exposes his claims as bogus?

However, ignoring the facts does not make them go away, and the facts this paper reveals go to the heart of creationist mythology. Firstly, this evidence should not exist at all if the Bible creation myth were real history: a magical creation just 6,000-10,000 years ago, followed by a catastrophic global genocide, would leave no room for a 120,000-year-old population of fallow deer preserved in an Eemian lake environment. Secondly, it undermines the creationist parody of evolution that they so often attack: the false claim that evolution must always mean increasing complexity, and that any loss of genetic information is invariably fatal.

The reduced genetic diversity of modern fallow deer is a clear example of evolution involving a loss of genetic variation within a population. So far as individual deer are concerned, there need be no immediate reduction in fitness; the problem comes when a population has less capacity to respond to environmental change, disease, or other selective pressures, and may then be more vulnerable to extinction. Evolution, of course, has no plan. Unlike intelligent design, or even guided evolution, it cannot foresee future conditions and prepare a species for them. A species can be driven towards extinction by the simple operation of mindless natural processes.

Refuting Creation - With Goethe's 40-Million-Year-Old Ant

Amber piece 1552.b showing bioinclusions. Arrow in a (top): inclusion of †Ctenobethylus goepperti; arrow in b (bottom): inclusion of the Sciaridae. Scale bar 5 mm.

Boudinot, B.E., Bock, B.L., Tröger, D. et al. (2026)

Exceptionally Well-Preserved Ant in Goethe’s Amber | Uni Jena

Some years ago, while staying for a few days in Berlin in a hotel just off Goethestraße, I made the mistake of telling a taxi driver that our hotel was just off “Go-eth Straße”. It took several minutes and a map to sort out the confusion.

“Nein! Goethe-Straße!” he laughed. Only then did I realise that “Go-eth” and “Goethe” were not two different German philosophers.

“Ach ja! Danke! Goethe! Ich bin ein Engländer!” I explained, in my best German.

“Ja! Is better we speak English,” he replied.

Goethestraße — Goethe Street — is, of course, named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832), the German writer, poet, novelist and playwright. He was also an administrator, scientist, geologist, botanist and philosopher. As a naturalist and collector, he left behind an extensive geological and mineralogical collection, including 40 pieces of Baltic amber, which have now been closely examined by biologists at Friedrich Schiller University Jena — appropriately enough, since Goethe and the playwright Friedrich Schiller were friends.

What they found was the subject of a paper in Scientific Reports, published in January 2026. It is not good news for creationists, since it concerns an approximately 40-million-year-old ant, preserved in exquisite detail and now visible using modern imaging techniques such as synchrotron micro-computed tomography. In addition to the ant, the scientists also found a fungus gnat and a blackfly in Goethe’s amber.

It is unlikely that Goethe knew these creatures were preserved in his amber, since the pieces are unpolished and the contents are barely visible to the untrained eye. He certainly could not have known that the amber was tens of millions of years old. Had he known, we can only speculate how that knowledge might have affected his view of nature, time and human origins. His famous work, Faust, draws deeply on Christian motifs, including the story of a man who makes a pact with the Devil; but Goethe was also a serious observer of nature, living at a time when geology, palaeontology and evolutionary thinking were still in their infancy.

In the early nineteenth century, Europeans had not yet accumulated the overwhelming evidence that Earth is billions of years old and that life has changed profoundly over vast periods of time. Many educated people still interpreted history, nature and morality through a biblical framework, even when their own thinking was more subtle than simple literalism. Goethe, despite his scientific curiosity, lived before Darwin, before modern stratigraphy was fully established, and long before modern imaging could reveal the hidden contents of an opaque piece of amber.

Now, of course, we know better, because of the tremendous scientific progress made over the last two centuries.

Refuting Creationism - Yet Another Gap Is Closing - No God Found

Illustration of the Qreiya 3 fauna.

Image credit: Ian Baylatry.

Fossil discovery fills in missing information about modern fish evolution | Michigan News

Complete skeleton of the oldest jack fish, part of the group that includes modern jacks and trevallies.

A close-up of sharp teeth in an early relative of modern tunas.

Images credit: Professor Hesham Sallam, Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center

There are only two things in the universe faster than light: monarchy and gods. When a monarch dies, the monarchy passes instantaneously to the sovereign’s heir, regardless of where either of them happens to be at the time; and when science shines a light into one of the gaps in which creationists have been hiding their god, the god has already departed. That, presumably, is why no god has ever been detected by science.

Creationist dependence on these god-shaped gaps has produced an ever-shrinking god as science fills one gap after another with evidence. The fallacy depends on the gamble that, unlike every previous gap closed by science, this one will turn out to require a supernatural creation event. It never does, of course, but that never seems to diminish creationist confidence that the next gap will be different.

True to form, science has now closed yet another gap with evidence, not magic. It is one few creationists are likely to know about, and fewer still would be willing to acknowledge, because it concerns a gap in the fossil record between the K–Pg mass extinction, which eliminated the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago, and about 56 million years ago. In other words, it is a 10-million-year interval in the very long pre-‘Creation Week’ history of life on Earth — a history no self-respecting creationist can honestly admit exists without conceding that the Bible’s creation myth is not real history. Specifically, it is a gap in the fossil record of fish evolution, from the devastation at the K–Pg boundary to the later appearance of many species that look markedly different from those that preceded it.

That gap, known to palaeontologists as “Patterson’s Gap”, has now been partly filled by the discovery of the earliest known examples of six modern fish groups by a research team led by Sanaa El-Sayed, a University of Michigan doctoral student and researcher at the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center. The fossils were found in the Qreiya 3 Lagerstätte, dated to 62.2 million years ago, in Egypt’s Eastern Desert. The discovery has just been reported in Science Advances.

Refuting Creationism - Wild Cattle Roamed The Grasslands Of Europe - 4 million Years Before Creation Week

Half-ton early Bovines roamed 4-million-year-old grasslands in Europe | EurekAlert!

Palaeoartistic reconstruction of the environment in the surrounding of Camp dels Ninots maar lake during the early Pliocene.

Artwork by Mauricio Antón.

Nowhere in the Bible will you find any mention of wild cattle roaming the land, nor any indication that domestic animals are highly modified descendants of wild species, reshaped by human selection because their wild ancestors were not conveniently suited to human use. Instead, we find the childish claim that all animals were created for the exclusive benefit of humankind — which raises the obvious question: did the creator not know what humans would later need, or did it simply get things wrong, leaving humans to correct the design by selective breeding?

This is easily explained once we recognise that the authors of Genesis had a narrow, parochial view of the world. They knew little or nothing of Earth’s history or of the origins of life on it, so they made up stories that conformed to their own cultural assumptions and superstitions, often borrowing from neighbouring cultures.

They were completely unaware of the rest of Eurasia beyond their limited view from the Canaanite hills, and equally unaware of the great age of the Earth or the cycles of glacial and interglacial periods that had characterised it for the previous several million years. Indeed, the concept of such deep time seems to have been far beyond their comprehension. They could therefore have had no concept of the early forms of cattle-like bovines that once roamed Europe, already fitted by evolution for life in the changing environments of the Pliocene.

One such animal was a large bovine species, weighing up to about half a ton, which lived in what is now north-eastern Iberia about 4.41 million years ago. The discovery and re-analysis of this animal has just been published in PLOS One by Leonardo Sorbelli of the Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Germany, and colleagues.

The fossils, from the Camp dels Ninots site in Catalonia, include remains from at least 14 individuals, among them eight nearly complete and partly articulated skeletons. The species, Parabos tigneresi, helps fill a gap in the evolutionary history of Eurasian bovines, including the wider lineage that eventually gave rise to modern cattle, bison and buffalo. Although smaller than many living domestic cattle, these animals were larger than comparable bovids of their time, suggesting an early stage in the increase in body size that later became characteristic of the bovine lineage.

The researchers suggest that this increase in size may have been associated with the climatic and environmental changes that characterised Pliocene Europe. The anatomy of Parabos tigneresi also indicates an animal adapted mainly to humid, vegetation-rich environments, consistent with the reconstructed setting of Camp dels Ninots as a water-rich maar lake ecosystem.

This incidental confirmation of an earlier reconstruction of the lake ecosystem at Camp dels Ninots is a good example of how independent strands of evidence converge on the same conclusion. It also illustrates the strength of Darwinian evolutionary theory: organisms are expected to show adaptations to the environments in which they lived, rather than appearing as arbitrary, ready-made forms. In this case, the anatomy of these bovids is consistent with animals adapted to a humid, vegetation-rich lakeside habitat, exactly as the geological and palaeoecological evidence had already indicated.

Refuting Creationism - The Evidence Shows How Wrong The Bronze Age Myths In The Bible Were

A crouched burial of a 40 year old man in Oostwoud, the earliest known Bell Beaker grave identified by the researchers.

Source: Provincial Depot for Archaeology Noord-Holland.

DNA study uncovers continental origins of Britain’s bronze age population

Leaving a side the long history of archaic hominins such as the Neanderthals and their ancestors inhabiting Western Eurasia for about 250,000 years before the arrival of large numbers of anatomically modern humans, which itself is deeply problematic for creationists, there is also the archaeological record of the complext history of modern humans going back at least 40,000 years which simply would not be there if the Bible narrative of a recent spontaneous magical origin and a later global genocidal flood were true.

As reported in a paper in Nature last February (2026), the history of Northwest Europe and the Bristic Isles is far mpre complex and interesting that the simple Bronze Age fairy tail in Genesis.

Of course, the arcahaeolgeneticists never set out to disprove the Bible. The facts they revealed did that as a matter of course, because unlike Genesis, the facts record real events.

The contrast could hardly be more stark. Genesis gives us a world populated from a single specially-created human pair, followed by a later repopulation of the world from Noah’s family after a global flood, and then the dispersal of peoples after Babel. That is a story of magical manufacture, catastrophic reset and sudden dispersal. The ancient DNA tells a completely different story: long-lived regional populations, gradual migration, intermarriage, cultural exchange, local ecological adaptation and no global genetic bottleneck compatible with a recent universal flood.

Creationism Refuted - The Theory of Evolution May Be Slightly Wrong - But It's No Comfort To Creationists

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Microscopic fungi, baker’s or brewer’s yeast, are used as probiotics to restore normal flora of intestine.

Image credit: Adobe Stock

A new theory of molecular evolution | University of Michigan News

A paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution last november (2025) by four evolutionary biologists from the University of Michigan might have caused a stir of excitement in creationists cirles if any of them ever read a science paper because it appears on first sight to question the basis of the Theory of Evolution - what creationists call 'Dawinism'. However, that excitement would have been short-lived if they had read the details.

This is not the long-awaited collapse of the Theory of Evolution that creationists have been confidently predicting since at least the middle of the last century. It is nothing of the sort. It is a normal example of science doing what science does: testing a model against evidence, finding that the model is incomplete, and adjusting the explanation accordingly.

The theory being challenged here is not evolution itself, nor common descent, nor natural selection, nor mutation, nor population genetics. It is the neutral theory of molecular evolution, a theory developed in the 1960s to explain why many genetic changes appear to spread through populations without obvious adaptive advantage. The new paper argues that this appearance of neutrality may be misleading. What looks neutral in the long term may, in fact, be the result of short-term adaptation to changing environments.

The researchers found that beneficial mutations are more common than the classic neutral theory assumes. The problem, then, is why these apparently useful mutations do not become fixed at the rate one might expect. Their answer is beautifully evolutionary: environments change. A mutation that helps in one set of conditions may be useless, or even harmful, in another. So populations are not marching steadily towards some perfect design; they are continually tracking a moving target.

That is what the authors mean by adaptive tracking with antagonistic pleiotropy. “Pleiotropy” means that one mutation can have more than one effect. “Antagonistic” means that those effects can pull in opposite directions: helpful here, harmful there; useful now, costly later. This is not magic. It is not supernatural intervention. It is the ordinary interaction between genes, organisms and environments.

Creationists often pretend that science is an orthodoxy in which biologists merely defend Darwin at all costs. This paper shows the opposite. Scientists have examined one of their own long-standing theories, compared it with new evidence, and proposed a better explanation. No sacred text was protected. No dogma was shielded from scrutiny. No conclusion was declared immune from revision.

The result is not less evolution, but more evolutionary detail. Mutation still supplies variation. Selection still acts on differences in reproductive success. Genetic drift still matters. Environments still shape which variants succeed and which fail. What has changed is the understanding of how molecular change can appear neutral over deep time while still being shaped by episodes of adaptation in shifting environments.

So, far from helping creationism, this paper undercuts one of creationism’s favourite caricatures of science. It shows evolutionary biology as a living, self-correcting science, not a rigid ideology. It also shows why no supernatural designer is needed. The process described is entirely natural: mutations arise, their effects depend on circumstances, environments change, and populations respond as best they can, without foresight, plan or purpose.

Refuting Creationism - Another Bizarre Dinosaur - From 70 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A reconstruction of Kank australis

Gabriel Díaz Yantén

A reconstruction of Kank australis

Gabriel Díaz Yantén.

Heron-like, fish-eating dinosaur from 70 million years ago discovered in Argentina - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

In my previous post, I wrote about Labrujasuchus expectatus, a bizarre distant relative of the crocodile line which walked on two legs, had tiny arms, and possessed a toothless mouth tipped with a beak. Although not a dinosaur, it looked superficially dinosaur-like — a neat example of convergent evolution. Because earlier and later shuvosaurids were already known from the region, palaeontologists predicted that a form occupying the gap between them should exist, and Labrujasuchus duly turned up in the right place and in the right rock formation.

That is how science works: evidence fits into a testable, predictive framework. Creationism, by contrast, has nothing to offer except hand-waving, misrepresentation and denial when confronted with a bizarre extinct archosaur from some 212 million years ago, just as it has nothing to offer in explanation of this almost equally bizarre dinosaur from about 70 million years ago.

The new species, Kank australis, is described by palaeontologist Dr Matías J. Motta, of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires (Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales “Bernardino Rivadavia”), and his colleagues in a paper published on 28 May 2026 in the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Kank australis was a paravian theropod — an unenlagiid, belonging to a group of small- to medium-sized raptor-like dinosaurs known from Late Cretaceous Gondwanan deposits. Its discoverers suggest that it may have lived rather like a large heron. Its long jaws, armed with teeth, suggest a fish-eating habit, while its cervical vertebrae show structures associated with muscle attachment and the protection of neck blood vessels, features comparable with those seen in modern birds that rely on rapid, precise neck movements. In other words, this was probably not the familiar pop-culture image of a raptor as a fast-running terrestrial predator, but a specialised animal exploiting the riverine and wetland ecosystems of southern Patagonia.

And, as so often with new fossil discoveries, Kank australis fills in yet another of those gaps so beloved of creationists looking for somewhere to hide their ever-shrinking little god. In this case, it helps bridge a distributional gap in the Late Cretaceous record of southern Patagonia, connecting better-known unenlagiid records from northern Patagonia with those from Antarctica, and adding more detail to the still-patchy evolutionary history of these South American paravian dinosaurs.

Refuting Creationism - Bizarre Creature From The Long History of Earth Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Labrujasuchus expectatus

Art by Jorge Gonzalez
© NHMLAC Dinosaur Institute.

Reconstruction of Labrujasuchus expectatus, a new species of Shuvosauridae from Late Triassic rocks of Ghost Ranch, New Mexico

Art by Jorge Gonzalez, © NHMLAC Dinosaur Institute.

New Species of Bizarre, Bipedal, Toothless Crocodile Relative from the Triassic Discovered | Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County

Evolution, proceeding without a plan and lacking any sense of direction, can produce some truly bizarre creatures which, despite their appearance, survived perfectly well in the environments in which they evolved. Indeed, it would be bizarre to suppose otherwise, given that natural selection favours those forms that work well enough to survive and reproduce over those less well fitted to do so. To suppose otherwise would rival creationism for irrationality.

In this post, I’ll deal with a bizarre distant relative of the crocodiles; in the next, I’ll write about a strange theropod dinosaur from 70 million years ago that comes close to what any creationist might imagine a transitional species between dinosaurs and birds should look like.

Creationism is, of course, itself the product of an evolutionary process, forced into ever more bizarre forms by the hostile environment of scientific evidence. Modern creationism has therefore, by a similar process, become almost as bizarre as the life forms it is forced to deny in order to survive.

The sad thing is that creationists are denied the wonder of the truth about our planet as revealed in increasingly astonishing detail by science, because the facts must be waved aside and denied in order to cling to the childishly simplistic belief in magic and a world full of evil conspirators diligently working to trick them into changing their minds.

Who, for example, could have predicted that a distant relative of the crocodiles walked on two legs, had tiny arms, and had a toothless mouth tipped with a beak? It is almost as bizarre as the mental gymnastics creationists need to perform to dismiss it and force-fit the evidence into the predetermined conclusion that it must have been magically created within the last few thousand years and then allowed to go extinct for no apparent purpose — or that the evidence must either have been forged, misinterpreted or planted to test or deceive us.

Nevertheless, this creature, Labrujasuchus expectatus, did exist about 212 million years ago, in the Late Triassic, and its description is the subject of a recent paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Its fossilised remains were unearthed in Late Triassic rocks at the Hayden Quarry, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, USA, by a team of palaeontologists led by Dr Alan H. Turner of Stony Brook University, New York, USA, with colleagues including Dr Nathan D. Smith of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, California, USA.

To add insult to injury for creationists, this find fills one of those beloved gaps into which creationists try to force fit their creator god. The gap was that between two earlier discovered shuvosaurs from the region. It's discovery was thus a predicted by the Theory of Evolution, not by a book of Bronze Age mythology.

Refuting Creationism - How Our Blood Cells Have Evolved From Our Single-Celled Ancestor from 700 Million Years Ago

The origin of blood cells can be traced back approximately 700 million years to when human ancestors were single-celled organisms. When these ancestors evolved into multicellular organisms (animals), macrophages emerged as the first blood cells. Over the course of subsequent evolution, various blood cells, such as mast cells, diversified.

KyotoU / Yosuke Nagahata

The 700-million-year history of our blood cells | EurekAlert!

In a stunning, albeit unwitting, rebuttal of creationist claims, a team of researchers at Kyoto University is due to publish, on 29 May 2026, the results of their investigation into the evolutionary history of animal blood cells in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The paper, entitled "Animals have expanded the evolutionary legacy of unicellular ancestors in blood cells", is unlikely to please those creationists who keep assuring their dupes that biomedical scientists are about to abandon 'Darwinism' and adopt creationism instead.

It will also disappoint those who insist there is no evidence for the evolution of complex multicellular organisms from single-celled ancestors — what they like to caricature as the 'microbes-to-man hypothesis', as though humans, preferably modern Americans, were the preordained end-point of the entire history of life. That, of course, is creationist teleology masquerading as biology: the assumption that evolution must have been aiming at us because Bronze Age religion says humans are the central purpose of creation.

What the Kyoto University team found was not a sudden, magical appearance of blood cells, but a deep evolutionary continuity. They developed a new method for comparing gene-expression profiles across different animal cell lineages and species, and included unicellular organisms in the comparison in order to trace the possible origin of blood cells back to our single-celled animal ancestors.

Among human blood-cell lineages, macrophages showed the closest resemblance to unicellular organisms. This is hardly surprising, since macrophages still behave in a remarkably cell-autonomous way: they move through tissues, detect targets, engulf bacteria, clear dead cells and remove unwanted material — behaviour strongly reminiscent of free-living phagocytic cells.

The team then traced the gene FOS, commonly expressed in blood cells across animal species, back to a single-celled ancestor that lived about 700 million years ago, around the time when the first animals were evolving. The implication is that the earliest animal blood cells did not appear from nowhere. They arose when early multicellular animals repurposed genetic programmes inherited from their unicellular predecessors.

From there, the researchers were able to reconstruct a family tree of blood-cell lineages spanning roughly 700 million years. Their analysis suggests that early blood cells were macrophage-like, that mast cells later branched from that macrophage lineage, and that prototypic T cells and red blood cells subsequently branched from mast cells. Prototypic B cells, meanwhile, appear to have branched from the macrophage lineage after mast cells had already diverged.

In other words, the blood and immune cells circulating in our bodies today are not isolated, specially-created structures with no history. They are modified descendants of ancient cellular systems, inherited, repurposed and diversified during the evolution of animals from unicellular ancestors.

So, far from supporting the creationist claim that there is no evidence for the evolution of complex life from single-celled ancestors, the evidence is literally circulating in our blood. It is also circulating in the blood and immune systems of other animals, carrying with it a molecular and cellular legacy hundreds of millions of years older than the creation myths of the Bronze Age.

And, as usual, the Theory of Evolution provides the only coherent explanation for the observable facts. The research does not point to separate acts of creation, nor to a sudden magical appearance of blood cells fully formed and without ancestry. It shows descent with modification, inherited genetic programmes, divergence of cell lineages, and the repurposing of ancient biological mechanisms — exactly the pattern evolutionary theory predicts, and exactly the pattern creationism cannot explain without special pleading.