The problems for creationists deepened today with news that two scientists, Simon Parfitt of the UCL Institute of Archaeology and a Scientific Associate at the Natural History Museum, London, and Silvia M. Bello of the Natural History Museum, have discovered an elephant bone tool dating from roughly half a million years ago — the oldest such tool discovered in Europe, from a time before anatomically modern hominins had left Africa. They published their findings in Science Advances.
Of course, most creationists will be blissfully unaware of this discovery, as with all such archaeology, because there is no point in being a creationist if you are going to read the latest scientific discoveries. How is that going to help you cling to patently absurd beliefs despite all the evidence against you? Best just ignore it and dismiss it all as some sort of Satanic conspiracy aimed at making you show weakness and change your mind.
Nevertheless, the fact is that this elephant bone tool exists and has been dated to about 490,000 years before creationism’s favourite book of Bronze Age superstitions says Earth existed. It was used by archaic hominins, probably to sharpen dulled flint tools by gently knapping the cutting edges. It was discovered at Boxgrove, Kent, England, in the early 1990s but was not recognised as a tool until recently, when finds from the Boxgrove site were studied in detail using new technology such as 3D scans and scanning electron microscopy, which revealed impact notches with embedded flint fragments.
Bone, being softer than flint, would have been the material of choice for work where precision was important, and elephant bone, with its hard outer layer of compact bone making it more durable, would have been the bone of choice. However, elephants and mammoths were rare in what is now southern England 500,000 years ago, so these tools would have been valuable objects.
It is not clear which archaic hominins used these tools in southern England, but at 500,000 years ago it was probably one of the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans, which form the “muddle in the middle” of the human evolutionary story. Here the problem is not a lack of fossils but an abundance of them, showing varying mixtures of primitive and derived features typical of transitional species, coming somewhere between Homo erectus and Neanderthals. Candidates are H. heidelbergensis and H. antecessor.
The stone tools from Boxgrove are part of the widespread Acheulean technology, which originated in East Africa about 1.95 million years ago and spread across Africa and into western Eurasia after about 1.5 million years ago, persisting until between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago.
A recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) reports the discovery that an ancestor of mammals, a cynodont called Thrinaxodon liorhinus, had ear structures derived from redundant jaw bones that probably gave it an acute sense of hearing some 250 million years ago — around 50 million years earlier than previously believed. As nocturnal animals, a well-developed sense of hearing would have been hugely advantageous.
The research, by palaeontologists from the University of Chicago, used CT scans of the skull and jawbones of Thrinaxodon to simulate the effects of different sound pressures and frequencies on its anatomy.
Transitional fossils such as this are a major source of embarrassment to creationists because their Bronze Age mythology insists that all species were created fully formed, without ancestry, so there should never be any examples of species evolving or of existing structures being exapted over time for new functions.
Sadly for creationists, the fossil evidence paints an entirely different picture. It is a record of everything creationism predicts should not be there and everything evolution predicts will be. To most normal people, that sort of evidence should strongly suggest that creationism is wrong and that the Theory of Evolution is right.
It is rather like someone who does not believe in gravity stating that if you throw a stone into the air it will stay there and never fall back to Earth. A simple demonstration will establish the falsehood of that claim, just as the fossil record establishes the falsehood of creationist claims.
Background^ Cynodonts and the Evolution of the Mammalian Middle Ear.
Cynodonts were a group of synapsid reptiles that lived from the Late Permian to the Early Jurassic and include the direct ancestors of mammals. Unlike true reptiles, cynodonts already showed many mammal-like features, including differentiated teeth, a more upright posture, a secondary palate, and increasingly complex jaw and skull anatomy. Fossils such as Thrinaxodon, Cynognathus, and later forms like Morganucodon document a clear, step-by-step transition from reptile-like synapsids to early mammals.
One of the most striking evolutionary changes recorded in this lineage is the origin of the mammalian middle ear. In reptiles, several small bones at the back of the lower jaw — notably the articular and quadrate — form part of the jaw joint. In mammals, these same bones are repurposed as the malleus and incus of the middle ear, joining the stapes to form the familiar three-bone hearing apparatus. This transformation did not occur suddenly; it unfolded gradually over tens of millions of years.
Fossil cynodonts preserve intermediate stages in which these jaw bones became progressively smaller, less involved in chewing, and increasingly specialised for sound transmission. Some transitional species even show a “double jaw joint,” with both the old reptilian joint and the new mammalian joint functioning simultaneously. This provides direct, physical evidence for exaptation — the evolutionary process in which structures originally evolved for one function are co-opted for a new one.
The result of this long transition was the highly sensitive mammalian middle ear, capable of detecting higher-frequency sounds far better than that of reptiles. This would have been particularly advantageous for small, nocturnal early mammals, allowing them to detect predators and prey in low-light conditions. Far from being a problem for evolutionary theory, the cynodont fossil record is one of its clearest and most elegant confirmations — and one of the most awkward facts for creationism to explain away.
Creationist Claim vs Reality: The Mammalian Middle Ear
Claim:
The mammalian middle ear is “irreducibly complex” and could not have evolved because all three bones — the malleus, incus, and stapes — must be present and perfectly arranged for hearing to work.
Reality:
The fossil record preserves multiple transitional stages showing exactly how the mammalian middle ear evolved from reptile-like jaw bones. In early synapsids and cynodonts, the articular and quadrate bones formed part of the jaw joint. Over time, these bones became progressively smaller and less involved in chewing, while increasingly specialised for transmitting sound.
Claim:
There are no transitional fossils showing this transformation.
Reality:
There are many. Fossils such as Thrinaxodon, Cynognathus, Diarthrognathus, and Morganucodon preserve intermediate anatomies, including species with a functioning “double jaw joint” — one reptilian and one mammalian — operating at the same time. This is exactly what gradual evolution predicts.
Claim:
Repurposing jaw bones for hearing would destroy their original function.
Reality:
It did not. For millions of years, both functions co-existed. As the new mammalian jaw joint (between the dentary and squamosal bones) took over the role of chewing, the old jaw joint bones were freed to specialise for sound transmission. This is a textbook example of exaptation, not a paradox.
Reality:
They do not. The step-by-step transformation of jaw bones into middle ear bones is one of the best-documented transitions in the entire fossil record. It is exactly the opposite of what creationism predicts — and exactly what evolutionary theory predicts.
Fossil study rewrites timeline of evolution of hearing in mammalsUChicago paleontologists use CT scanning and simulations to show how a 250-million-year-old mammal predecessor could hear like us
One of the most important steps in the evolution of modern mammals was the development of highly sensitive hearing.
The middle ear of mammals, with an eardrum and several small bones, allows us to hear a broad range of frequencies and volumes, which was a big help to early, mostly nocturnal mammal ancestors as they tried to survive alongside dinosaurs.
New research by paleontologists from the University of Chicago shows that this modern mode of hearing evolved much earlier than previously thought. Working with detailed CT scans of the skull and jawbones of Thrinaxodon liorhinus, a 250-million-year-old mammal predecessor, they used engineering methods to simulate the effects of different sound pressures and frequencies on its anatomy.
Their models show the creature likely had an eardrum large enough to hear airborne sound effectively, nearly 50 million years before scientists previously thought this evolved in early mammals.
For almost a century, scientists have been trying to figure out how these animals could hear. These ideas have captivated the imagination of paleontologists who work in mammal evolution, but until now we haven’t had very strong biomechanical tests. Now, with our advances in computational biomechanics, we can start to say smart things about what the anatomy means for how this animal could hear.
Alec T. Wilken, lead author
Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy
The University of Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA.
Fossil specimen of the Thrinaxodon skull and jaw used for the study.
Photo by Matt Wood.
Testing a 50-year-old hypothesis
Thrinaxodon was a cynodont, a group of animals from the early Triassic period with features beginning to transition from reptiles to mammals. They had specialized teeth, changes to the palate and diaphragm to improve breathing and metabolism, and probably warm-bloodedness and fur.
In early cynodonts, including Thrinaxodon, the ear bones—malleus, incus, stapes—were attached to their jawbones. Later, these bones separated from the jaw to form a distinct middle ear, considered a key development in the evolution of modern mammals.
Simulations showed that sound waves applied to the eardrum of "Thrinaxodon" (top) would have enabled it to hear much more effectively than through bone conduction alone (bottom).
Infographic courtesy of April I. Neander, Alec Wilken
Fifty years ago, Edgar Allin, a paleontologist at the University of Illinois Chicago, first speculated that cynodonts like Thrinaxodon had a membrane suspended across a hooked structure on the jawbone that was a precursor to the modern eardrum. Until then, scientists who studied mammal evolution mostly believed that early cynodonts heard through bone conduction, or via so-called “jaw listening” where they set their mandibles on the ground to pick up vibrations.
While the eardrum idea was fascinating, there was no way to definitively test if such a structure could work to hear airborne sounds.
Turning fossils into an engineering problem
Modern imaging tools like CT scanning have revolutionized the field of paleontology, allowing scientists to unlock a wealth of information that wouldn’t have been possible through studying physical specimens alone.
Wilken and his advisors, Zhe-Xi Luo and Callum Ross, both professors of organismal biology and anatomy, took a well-known Thrinaxodon specimen from the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, and scanned it in UChicago’s PaleoCT Laboratory. The resulting 3D model gave them a highly detailed reconstruction of its skull and jawbones, with all the dimensions, shapes, angles and curves they needed to determine how a potential eardrum might function.
Next, they used a software tool called Strand7 to perform finite element analysis, an approach that breaks down a system into smaller parts with different physical characteristics. Such tools are usually used for complex engineering problems, like predicting stresses on bridges, aircraft and buildings, or analyzing heat distribution in engines. The team used the software to simulate how the anatomy of Thrinaxodon would respond to different sound pressures and frequencies, using a library of known properties about the thickness, density and flexibility of bones, ligaments, muscles and skin from living animals.
The results were loud and clear: Thrinaxodon, with an eardrum tucked into a crook on its jawbone, could definitely hear that way much more effectively than through bone conduction. The size and shape of its eardrum would have produced the right vibrations to move the ear bones and generate enough pressure to stimulate its auditory nerves and detect sound frequencies. While it still would have relied on some jaw listening, the eardrum was already responsible for most of its hearing.
Once we have the CT model from the fossil, we can take material properties from extant animals and make it as if our Thrinaxodon came alive. That hasn’t been possible before, and this software simulation showed us that vibration through sound is essentially the way this animal could hear.
Professor Zhe-Xi Luo, corresponding author.
Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy
The University of Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA.
Wilken said the new technology allowed them to answer an old question by turning it into an engineering problem.
That’s why this is such a cool problem to study. We took a high concept problem—that is, ‘how do ear bones wiggle in a 250-million-year-old fossil?’—and tested a simple hypothesis using these sophisticated tools. And it turns out in Thrinaxodon, the eardrum does just fine all by itself.
Significance
The middle ear of modern mammals is detached from the mandible and has a soft-tissue eardrum, which allows airborne sound to be heard across a wide range of frequencies. A rich fossil record shows that the middle ear bones of mammals evolved from the jaw bones of their synapsid predecessors, but how this transformation was associated with changes in hearing function is unknown. Our finite element analysis (FEA) of the harmonic response of the mandibular ear bones and soft-tissue eardrum of the synapsid Thrinaxodon suggests that this 250-Mya-old mammal precursor was already capable of tympanic hearing similar to extant mammals and provides evidence that this functional transition occurred very early in mammal evolutionary history.
Abstract
The middle ear of mammals is a major functional innovation, distinctive in that it is detached from the mandible and has a tympanic membrane supported by a ring-like ectotympanic. These novelties of the middle ear have enabled modern mammals to develop more sensitive hearing than all other tetrapods, especially at higher frequencies. Fossils from recent decades have clarified the evolution of the detached middle ear from the jaw bones of Paleozoic therapsids and Mesozoic cynodonts, and the evolution of the tympanum. These discoveries make it possible to answer important questions about the functional significance of these features. Here, we evaluate the relative hearing efficacy of a well-known cynodont precursor to mammals, Thrinaxodon liorhinus. Using finite element analysis (FEA), we calculated the harmonic response of the Thrinaxodon ear to bone-conducted and airborne sound and estimated the sound pressure level (SPL) at the stapedial footplate across a broad range of frequencies. We provide evidence that airborne sound received at the tympanum was the most effective mode of sound reception in Thrinaxodon. In contrast, bone conducted sound through the mandibular bones barely met our estimated hearing threshold. Our findings suggest that, like modern mammals, cynodonts were already reliant on a soft tissue tympanum to receive airborne sound, albeit with limited sensitivity to high frequencies. This is a detailed biomechanical evaluation of tympanum function in the cynodont predecessors of mammals and yields insight into the sequence of functional innovations during the evolution of mammal hearing.
For creationists, this discovery is yet another reminder of how badly their Bronze Age mythology fails when confronted with real-world evidence. The evolutionary origin of the mammalian middle ear is no longer a theoretical reconstruction inferred from comparative anatomy; it is a physical, fossil-documented transition preserved in stone. The fact that Thrinaxodon already shows mammal-like hearing structures 250 million years ago simply pushes that transition even further back in time and fills in yet another gap that creationists like to pretend does not exist.
It also underlines a point that creationists have been trying to evade for decades: evolution does not require sudden leaps or the magical appearance of fully formed organs. What it requires is exactly what the fossil record shows — incremental modifications of existing structures, shaped by selection, and repurposed for new functions as circumstances change. Jaw bones that once transmitted bite forces gradually became exquisitely tuned instruments for transmitting sound. That is not a problem for evolutionary theory; it is one of its strongest empirical confirmations.
Worse still for Intelligent Design advocates, the researchers show no hesitation whatsoever in interpreting what they found within the framework of evolutionary biology. There is no hint of mystery, no appeal to unknown designers, and no suggestion that natural processes are inadequate to explain what is observed. Instead, the anatomy of Thrinaxodon fits neatly into a well-established evolutionary sequence that has been mapped out for decades and is now being refined in ever greater detail as new fossils and new technologies come to light.
So once again, we are left with a familiar contrast. Evolutionary biology makes clear, testable predictions about what we should find in the fossil record — and those predictions keep being confirmed. Creationism, by contrast, predicts that none of this should exist at all. When one worldview consistently matches the evidence and the other consistently fails, there is no honest ambiguity about which one is right.
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An international team of researchers led by scientists at the University of Sydney, NSW, Australia, have just published a paper in Communications Biology which reshapes our understanding of a widespread canine parasitic nematode, the heartworm, Dirofilaria immitis. It is also more bad news for creationists, and for the intelligent design cult in particular.
In particular, the team have shown that this parasite has probably been co-evolving with dogs since before they were domesticated. It had previously been assumed that human activity was responsible for the spread of these worms.
Applying all the criteria traditionally cited by ID creationists as ‘proof’ of intelligent design, any designer of this parasite emerges as a grotesque malevolence determined to make dogs suffer. There is also the problem, for ID creationists, of clear evidence of a co-evolutionary arms race — the hallmark of mindless evolution and the antithesis of intelligent design.
Heartworms are complex organisms, with a complex life cycle involving both the primary host — dogs — and a vector — mosquitoes — all of which must be present for the parasite to survive, thus conforming neatly to Michael J. Behe’s supposed ‘evidence for intelligent design’: irreducible complexity. There is also evidence of resistance both to the dog’s immune system and, more recently, to the veterinary drugs used to treat the infection, conforming equally well to William A. Dembski’s proposed ‘evidence for intelligent design’: complex specified genetic information. So, within the ID paradigm, the conclusion becomes unavoidable — heartworms have been intelligently designed and are being actively redesigned in order to continue making dogs suffer and to stay ahead in their arms race with veterinary science.
But of course, the biological evidence shows that these parasites are the product of a co-evolutionary process in which neither magic nor intent were involved. Nematode genes have no concern for the suffering they cause, nor for whether their host lives or dies, so long as it survives long enough to pass the parasites on to the next generation of dogs.
Although the evidence conforms exactly to what the Theory of Evolution predicts — and evolution remains the most parsimonious explanation, absolving any deities of responsibility — for some inexplicable reason the ID cult would prefer people to believe that these, and thousands of other parasites, were the handiwork of their favourite deity, who thus emerges as a divine malevolence; a complete contrast to the supposedly omnibenevolent god of the holy books that creationists worship.
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In this illustration, a phage — a type of virus that infects bacteria — rests on the surface of a host cell. Researchers at UW–Madison designed an experiment for the International Space Station to study how phage-bacteria interactions affect the health of the gut microbiome.
In a striking demonstration of the theory of evolution in practice — and something that will have creationists once again insisting on redefining evolution as a theory about one creature turning into an entirely unrelated taxon — an experiment aboard the International Space Station has shown how subtle changes in the environment can dramatically alter an evolutionary trajectory. It also illustrates another major embarrassment for Intelligent Design creationists: evolutionary arms races. Arms races are, of course, utterly incompatible with the idea of an intelligent designer, since running to stand still in a race with yourself is a neat definition of insanity.
Unlike the creationist parody of evolution — carefully engineered to be unprovable because it does not describe what actually happens and what no biologist has ever claimed — the real scientific definition of evolution is simply a change in the frequency of different alleles in a population over time. A definition that creationists know to be irrefutable, hence their persistent attempts to redefine it so that they have something to attack.
The experiment, which had a parallel control on Earth, was designed to observe how bacteriophage viruses that parasitise bacteria and their hosts co-evolved in the microgravity environment of space.
The results have just been published in PLOS Biology. They show that both the T7 phage virus and the E. coli bacteria developed marked genomic differences compared with the Earth-bound populations. The space-station phages gradually accumulated specific mutations that enhanced infectivity or improved their ability to bind receptors on bacterial cells. Meanwhile, the space-station E. coli accumulated mutations that improved resistance to phages and enhanced survival in near-weightless conditions. In other words, what was observed was a genuine evolutionary arms race — and because the environments differed between the space-station populations and the Earth-bound populations, the divergence can be attributed directly to differences in gravity.
The results highlighted another intriguing angle: the mutations that phages and bacteria acquire in space don’t just reveal fundamental evolutionary dynamics, they can also have practical applications for human health on Earth. After 25 days aboard the ISS, both organisms returned with novel mutations not commonly seen under terrestrial gravity, including changes to bacterial surface proteins and corresponding phage adaptations to bind those altered surfaces.
Researchers then engineered phages carrying these space-derived mutations and tested them against bacterial pathogens responsible for urinary tract infections — many of which are now resistant to antibiotics — finding the space-influenced phages were notably effective at killing these otherwise resistant strains. This suggests that the unique selection pressures of microgravity may reveal evolutionary pathways that could be harnessed to design improved therapies for antibiotic-resistant infections back on Earth.
Dedicated creationists will need to find yet another way to dismiss new research by three scientists from the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Their work shows that, under the right conditions, the deadly poison hydrogen cyanide (HCN) could have provided a medium in which pre-biotic organic molecules accumulated on the early Earth. The findings have been published in the journal ACS Central Science.
The difficulty this presents for creationists arises largely from their habitual black-and-white thinking. Abiogenesis must, in their view, either have occurred via some fully specified, preconceived mechanism or be declared “impossible”. Since the only process they are prepared to accept is supernatural intervention by a magic creator, the conclusion is predetermined: any natural explanation must be rejected out of hand.
That claim, however, is trivially easy to refute. Assertions of impossibility collapse as soon as a single plausible natural mechanism is demonstrated. It is not necessary to establish beyond doubt that a particular hypothetical process is exactly what happened on the early Earth; it is sufficient to show that such a process could have occurred without violating known chemistry or physics.
What the Gothenburg team have demonstrated is that, when frozen, the surfaces of hydrogen cyanide crystals become highly reactive and can catalyse chemical reactions that are not possible at higher temperatures. These reactions could have triggered a cascade of further processes, ultimately producing some of the molecular building blocks of proto-cells.
Nor do pre-biotic chemicals necessarily have to originate on Earth itself. Space is also a viable candidate environment: hydrogen cyanide is abundant in interstellar space, as is water, and the low temperatures required for these crystals to form are commonplace. In the presence of water, HCN can polymerise and give rise to amino acids and nucleobases.
Creationist dogma insists that new genetic information can only be created by their putative intelligent designer, so it should be deeply embarrassing for them to learn that certain stretches of our DNA lengthen as we age, that the rate at which this happens is influenced by genes, and that excessive expansion of these sequences can lead to serious liver or kidney diseases.
This was discovered by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the Broad Institute, and Harvard Medical School, who analysed whole-genome sequencing data from 490,416 UK Biobank participants and 414,830 participants in the All of Us Research Program. Their findings were published recently, open access, in Nature.
This research is particularly awkward for creationists because of their insistence on the supposedly ‘sacred’ principle that only their intelligent designer can add new information to a genome. If we concede that claim for the sake of argument, then this newly generated genetic information must have been created deliberately and designed to produce a specific outcome — unless creationism’s designer was simply fiddling about aimlessly. Having a specific outcome (as all genes do) is precisely what William A. Dembski of the Discovery Institute insists is evidence for intelligent design, by a neat process of circular reasoning that only creationists find persuasive.
We then have the additional fact that a high rate of expansion of these DNA sequences is controlled by genetic modifiers and does not occur if any of those genes is not functioning properly. In other words, the resulting liver and kidney diseases are due to what Michael J. Behe famously describes as proof of a designer god: ‘irreducible complexity’.
Still conceding creationist claims, then, Dembski’s and Behe’s own logic demonstrates that their intelligent designer deliberately causes these diseases of old age.
Creationists are further hoist by their own petard in that they traditionally blame disease on ‘The Fall’, thereby conceding that intelligent design creationism is a form of fundamentalist religion rather than science. At the same time, however, they insist that only their intelligent designer can produce the new genetic information responsible for the expansion of these DNA sequences, which neatly rules out the involvement of the vague, non-physical agency they refer to as ‘sin’.
This leaves creationists with an uncomfortable dilemma: either their designer god actively causes liver and kidney disease, or new genetic information can indeed be produced by natural processes in which their designer plays no part — in which case a major plank of creationism collapses. The alternative is to concede that their allegedly omnibenevolent god is directly responsible for serious diseases in elderly people.
It is scarcely worth pointing out the glaringly obvious fact that these outcomes are easily explained as the predictable result of an undirected evolutionary process that has no concept of perfection, inevitably settling for compromise and prioritising reproductive success early in life at the expense of longer-term health and wellbeing.
Recent research has shown that a metabolite of vitamin A, retinoic acid, can quietly inhibit the immune system, making it less responsive to tumours. It also reduces the effectiveness of a promising anti-cancer immunotherapy.
This work, carried out by scientists at the Princeton University branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, has resulted in two papers. The first, published in Nature Immunology, describes how retinoic acid produced by the immune system’s dendritic cells (DCs) alters their behaviour, inducing a dangerous tolerance of tumours. The second, published open access in iScience, outlines progress in developing drugs that inhibit retinoic acid production.
To anyone who understands evolution and how it proceeds through a series of sub-optimal “it’ll do” solutions — constrained by what is available at the time and lacking any foresight — it will come as no surprise that the human body’s dependence on vitamin A comes with a downside. These are the inevitable compromises of evolutionary history. What is inexplicable, however, is this vulnerability in terms of intelligent design by an omniscient, omnipotent designer, who should have foreseen such dangers and engineered a better solution — unless, of course, the creation of favourable conditions for cancer was itself part of the design. And that, of course, leads to the theological problems ID creationism leads inexorably to, but ID advocates routinely ignore - a god who is incompetent, indifferent, powerless, or worse still malevolent.
A new research paper published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, by a team led by palaeogeneticists from the Centre for Palaeogenetics, Stockholm, Sweden, may make uncomfortable reading for any creationists with the courage to read it.
Firstly, it deals with events from that long period of pre-“Creation Week” history — evidence which would not exist if the biblical Flood myth were true. Secondly, it illustrates how, in contrast to the claim that scientists are only permitted to publish findings that conform to a rigid scientific orthodoxy, researchers are perfectly willing to revise established ideas when new evidence demands it. In this case, the study shows that one aspect of what palaeobiologists thought they understood about the evolutionary history of Eurasian megafauna may be wrong.
A paper published last November in Nature Communications by an international team lead by scientists from the University of Oslo, is just the sort of evidence against intelligent design and for evolution that creationists normally misrepresent, lie about or ignore, because it illustrates the stark difference between what ID creationism predicts and what we see, and of course, what we see is exactly what the Theory of Evolution predicts. And it's another superb example of how the human body refutes the childish notion of intelligent design by a magic invisible designer, many more of which I have included in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design.
There is a persistent tendency among creationists and Intelligent Design advocates to imagine biology as if it were the product of a competent, benevolent engineer, optimised for lifelong performance and reliability. Real organisms, however, stubbornly refuse to behave like that. Evolution does not design for comfort, longevity, or even cognitive elegance; it shapes traits that maximise reproductive success in the environments in which our ancestors actually lived. Once reproduction has occurred and offspring are independent, the force of natural selection weakens dramatically. From that point on, biological systems are increasingly free to accumulate compromises, trade-offs, and outright failures — not because they are useful, but because there is little evolutionary incentive to eliminate them.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the ageing human brain. Memory, learning, and cognitive flexibility are exquisitely tuned for early and mid-life, precisely when they matter most for survival, social navigation, and reproduction. Later in life, however, those same systems reveal a striking lack of long-term maintenance. This is not a mystery, nor is it a design flaw crying out for a supernatural explanation. It is exactly what evolutionary theory predicts under mechanisms such as antagonistic pleiotropy, mutation accumulation, and the diversion of finite biological resources away from indefinite repair and towards reproduction. In short, evolution produces brains that are *good enough* for long enough — not brains that are guaranteed to remain intact into old age.
That expectation is strongly reinforced by the paper in Nature Communications, which combines large-scale neuroimaging and cognitive data to examine why memory reliably declines with age even in otherwise healthy adults. Rather than pointing to a single failing component or a neatly isolated genetic “defect”, the study reveals a diffuse pattern of structural brain change, with memory loss emerging from the cumulative erosion of multiple interconnected regions. This kind of widespread, variable vulnerability is exactly what an evolutionary framework anticipates — and exactly the opposite of what Intelligent Design would lead us to expect. What follows is not evidence of poor design, but evidence of no design at all: only the predictable consequences of evolution’s ruthless focus on reproductive success early in life, and its indifference to what happens long after that job is done.
It may come as a surprise to some that scientists at the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) at the University of Bremen, Germany, together with colleagues from the Transylvanian University of Brașov, Romania, have proposed a new theory of gravity, which they recently published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
Even flat-earthers do not attempt to deny gravity. No one who does not require medication doubts that gravity is the force that prevents us from floating off into space and causes objects to fall when dropped. No one seriously believes they can step off a tall building and come to no harm because gravity is “just a theory”.
And yet, despite its obvious and universal effects, gravity remains incompletely understood. Unlike evolution—which can be directly observed and whose underlying mechanisms have been well established for decades—we still lack a complete explanation of how gravity works. Newton described it mathematically as an attractive force between masses, proportional to those masses and obeying an inverse-square law, but he did not explain why masses attract one another. Einstein later recast gravity as the curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy, with objects following the shortest paths through that curved geometry. However, gravity has never been successfully reconciled with quantum mechanics and appears to be a phenomenon that belongs to the macroscopic domain of relativity. Although most physicists assume that relativity and quantum mechanics must ultimately be unified, a quantum theory of gravity remains elusive.
In other words, as with evolution, we know that gravity is real, and we understand its effects extremely well. But unlike evolution—where we possess a comprehensive and coherent explanatory framework—we currently have only incomplete and sometimes conflicting theories for gravity’s underlying cause.
Despite this, creationists never dispute the theory of gravity on the grounds of these gaps. The reason is obvious: their sacred collection of Bronze Age myths makes no claims about gravity at all. Its authors took gravity for granted, seeing no need to explain it, and therefore left no theological foothold for modern denial. There are no angels holding planets in orbit or magical forces suspending objects in mid-air, and so gravity is quietly accepted.
Representative microbialite mounds at Site 6 from which nematodes were extracted.
News recently published in the Journal of Nematology should give pause for thought to any creationist who imagines that a magical creator made Earth perfectly suited for human life. The report describes the discovery of a new species of nematode — a group of roundworms, some of which are little more than a millimetre long — living under the extreme conditions found in the Great Salt Lake in northern Utah, USA. The species is believed to be endemic to that lake.
Nematodes are the most abundant animal phylum on Earth in both aquatic and terrestrial environments, with around 250,000 described species. It is estimated that roughly 80% of all animal life in terrestrial soils, and about 90% of that on the ocean floor, consists of nematodes. They occur in virtually every environment, from polar ice to deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and, as this newly discovered species demonstrates, in conditions of extreme salinity.
If Earth can be said to be ideally suited for any group of organisms, nematodes would be strong contenders. Humans, by contrast, require a very narrow range of terrestrial conditions in order to survive without specialised technology; consequently, much of the planet is unsuitable for — and often actively hostile to — human life.
Genetic analysis indicates that there may be two distinct populations of this nematode within the lake, raising intriguing questions for biologists: how did they arrive there, and what role do they play in the lake’s ecosystem? This species represents only the third metazoan known to inhabit the lake, the other two being brine shrimp and brine flies. Together, these organisms support vast populations of migratory birds, making the Great Salt Lake a vital feeding ground during migration.
Illustrations of Ordovician, jawless vertebrates. Left is a Promissum conodont, ranging from 5 to 50 cm in length and named after unusual, cone-like teeth fossils, which are hypothesized to be ancestors of modern lampreys and hagfishes. On the right is a pair of Sacabambaspis, around 35 cm in length, which had distinct, forward-facing eyes and an armored head. Very few conodont species survived the Late Ordovician Extinction Event, and no fossils of animals like Sacabambaspis from after the event have been discovered.
A recent paper published in Science Advances by Wahei Hagiwara and Professor Lauren Sallan of the Macroevolution Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan, closes a long-standing gap in our understanding of the early radiation of vertebrates into jawed and jawless fishes following the Late Ordovician mass extinction, around ~445–443 million years ago. Their analysis shows that this radiation arose from a small number of fortunate survivors clinging on in ecological refugia. From those few lineages, of course, all modern marine and terrestrial vertebrates ultimately evolved.
This study neatly dismantles one of creationism’s favourite rhetorical fallbacks: the claim that Earth was deliberately “fine-tuned” to support complex life, and ultimately humans. The evolutionary pattern revealed here—near-annihilation followed by recovery from a few scattered refugia—is not the signature of foresight or optimisation, but of contingency and survival against the odds. Life does not flourish because conditions are perfectly arranged for it; rather, whatever happens to survive is forced to adapt to whatever conditions remain. The history of vertebrates, like that of life more generally, is therefore not one of careful planning, but of repeated catastrophe followed by opportunistic evolutionary radiation.
Creationists are notable for clinging to demonstrably false beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence, childishly mistaking stubbornness for intellectual strength, rather like a spoilt toddler refusing to accept that they have just lost a game of Snap!. Alongside the patently absurd claim that Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old sits the almost equally untenable belief that the planet was created exactly as it is, perfectly suited for human life. This notion is maintained despite abundant evidence for repeated mass extinctions driven by cosmic impacts, large-scale geological processes such as plate tectonics and associated seismic activity, major reorganisations of ocean circulation, and delicately balanced biogeochemical feedback systems involving oxygenation and carbon cycling that periodically spiral out of control, triggering catastrophic climate change.
What the evidence actually reveals is not a cosy, well-regulated world resembling some tranquil small town in Kansas, but a planet that is frequently so hostile to life that much of it is wiped out entirely. Most species go extinct, leaving only a handful of survivors to inherit the aftermath and radiate into new forms adapted to altered conditions—until they too are eliminated by some future catastrophe. The conclusion is unavoidable: Earth is not fine-tuned for human life, or for life in general. Instead, today’s species are the fortunate descendants of a few lucky survivors, shaped by natural selection to fit available ecological niches as neatly as a hand fits a glove.
