Creationism Refuted - People Were Painting and Drawing On Cave Walls in France Thousands of Years Before 'Creation Week'

Cave paintings at Font-de-Gaume, Dordogne© Centre des monuments nationaux/Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France

Photo: Anne Maigret

VIS light photography of the selected panel at the “Carrefour” of the panels no. 13 and 14 composed of a reindeer and a horse as well as bison and possibly a deer, respectively, and the schematic Bison 15.

© Anne Maigret, C2RMF
From: Reiche, I., Coquinot, Y., Trosseau, A. et al. (2023)

First absolute dating of Palaeolithic paintings in the Dordogne | CNRS

For the first time, scientists have obtained direct radiocarbon dates for Palaeolithic paintings in the Grotte de Font-de-Gaume in what is now southwestern France. A black-line drawing of a bison was created between 13,461 and 13,162 calibrated years before present (cal BP), while two parts of a mask-like figure produced dates ranging from about 16,000 to 14,200 cal BP. In other words, people were producing accomplished works of art in France more than 3,000 years before even the upper limit of 10,000 years that young-Earth creationists commonly allow for the entire age of Earth.

Not that this evidence is likely to persuade many creationists to reconsider their beliefs, of course. Once a preferred conclusion has been declared infallible, any evidence that contradicts it can simply be dismissed as fraudulent, mistaken or somehow “wrong”. One stock evasion is the evidence-free suggestion that radioactive decay rates must once have been different. In the case of radiocarbon dating, even known variations in atmospheric carbon-14 are measured and incorporated into the calibration curves. But no amount of calibration can correct a chronology that is wrong by design.

For anyone more interested in discovering the truth than in finding excuses to protect a preordained conclusion, however, these paintings are fascinating glimpses into how members of our species perceived the world around them, with its bison, horses, cave lions, mammoths and other Ice Age animals. Having visited the Grotte du Pech Merle in the Lot and the Lascaux II faithful reproduction of the famous Lascaux cave in the Dordogne, I can testify to the breathtaking magnificence of these monumental works.

Their purpose can only be surmised. They may have formed part of rituals intended to influence or appropriate the power of the animals; they may have recorded stories, conveyed knowledge or helped to instruct younger members of the group. None of these interpretations can yet be demonstrated conclusively. A controversial paper published in 1998 compared certain features of Upper Palaeolithic cave art with drawings made by a young autistic child with exceptional artistic ability. It did not, however, establish that any particular Palaeolithic artist was autistic.

During my visit to Pech Merle, our guide suggested that one of the great animal friezes might have been drawn in a matter of hours by a single artist, using bold, confident lines in black pigment. That interpretation may remain speculative, but the powers of observation, memory and control evident in those sweeping lines are unmistakable.

The new dating study was carried out on paintings in the Grotte de Font-de-Gaume, near Les Eyzies in the Dordogne, by an interdisciplinary research team led by CNRS researcher Ina Reiche. Direct radiocarbon dating had previously been considered impossible because the black pigments used at Font-de-Gaume, Lascaux and other decorated caves in the region were assumed to consist solely of iron and manganese oxides, which contain no carbon. However, the absence of carbon had never actually been demonstrated.

Using non-invasive Raman microspectrometry and hyperspectral imaging, the researchers examined black-line drawings of a bison and a figure interpreted as a human or animal face, or “mask”. These techniques revealed that charcoal was distributed uniformly throughout the black lines, rather than occurring only in isolated patches, helping to rule out contamination from graffiti or tourist activity.

Creationism Refuted - How Humans Modified Wild Rice - Because 'The Creator' Didn't Know What We Needed?

Paddy fields in Vietnam with people transplanting rice.

Dave Mckay/Alamy Stock Photo

Different varieties of rice grown today

By IRRI Images - originally posted to Flickr as IMG_2039-77,
CC BY 2.0, Link

One grain to rule them all: the history of rice as a global food

A point made several times in these blog posts is that the creationist interpretation of Genesis presents the living world as having been deliberately created for human use. That raises an obvious question: why have humans needed to modify virtually every domesticated animal and cultivated plant to make it more useful?

In many cases, selective breeding has altered organisms so extensively that modern breeds and crop varieties are barely recognisable as descendants of their wild ancestors. Did the supposed creator fail to anticipate how humans would use them, or was it simply incapable of finishing the job and obliged to leave the improvements to us?

Creationists have never produced a satisfactory, evidence-based answer. Instead, they appeal to “mystery”, “unknowable intentions” or some other form of theological evasion — ways of avoiding the question while pretending to have answered it. Alternatively, they simply ignore the problem and continue asserting that Genesis provides an accurate account of history and the origins of living species.

Rice, of course, doesn't get a mention in the Bible, the cultural origins of whose authors were primarily the Tigris-Euphrates rivers of Mesopotamia and later the Nile in Egypt, where wheat and barley were the staple crops, so they knew nothing of the origins or cultivation of rice, nor of India or China for that matter. Wheat by contrast is mentioned in the Bible 51 times and barley, 37.

Science, by contrast, allows us to reconstruct increasingly detailed and testable histories of domesticated animals and cultivated plants. Genetics, archaeology and the study of ancient plant remains show how humans selected heritable variations and gradually changed wild populations through artificial selection, hybridisation and the movement of crops between regions. One particularly fascinating example is the origin and cultivation of Asian rice, Oryza sativa, which now provides sustenance for more than 3.5 billion people.

The evidence traces this history across a timescale wholly incompatible with the creationist belief in a 6,000–10,000-year-old Earth. Wild rice ancestral to modern cultivated rice was growing in the lower Yangtze region of China about 100,000 years ago. Humans began gathering and processing it approximately 24,000 years ago, and evidence of pre-domestication cultivation appears about 13,000 years ago. By around 11,000 years ago, plant remains show a rapid increase in characteristics associated with domestication, as generations of human selection transformed wild rice into a recognisably cultivated crop.

There is also evidence of rice cultivation in the Ganges valley of northern India as early as 6500 BCE—about 8,500 years ago. The details remain a subject of legitimate scientific debate, particularly whether Indian rice was domesticated independently and how much the eventual development of indica rice owed to hybridisation between local rice and japonica introduced from China. What is not in dispute is that modern rice emerged through a prolonged history of cultivation, selection, migration and hybridisation — not through an instantaneous act of creation.

The history of rice is the subject of an article in The Conversation by Garritt C. Van Dyk, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. His article is reprinted below under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency:

How Evolution Works - The Founder Effect

The brown tree snake, Boiga irregularis

Photo: USGS

Photo: USGS

Study: Hidden genetic diversity may have helped inbred brown tree snakes take over Guam - University at Buffalo

Biological invasions present evolutionary biologists with an apparent paradox. A newly established population may begin with only a handful of individuals and therefore contain only a small sample of the genetic variation present in its parent population. The resulting population bottleneck should increase inbreeding, reduce its capacity to adapt and expose harmful recessive mutations to natural selection. In extreme cases, the population should succumb to what population geneticists call an “extinction vortex”, in which declining genetic diversity and declining population size reinforce one another.

And yet some introduced species do precisely the opposite. They survive, proliferate and overwhelm the ecosystems into which they have been introduced. Few examples are more spectacular—or more ecologically destructive—than the brown tree snake, Boiga irregularis, on the Pacific island of Guam.

Native to Australia, Papua New Guinea and other parts of the western Pacific, brown tree snakes probably reached Guam as accidental stowaways in military cargo sometime after the Second World War. The invading population is believed to have been founded by only a handful of snakes. Nevertheless, their descendants multiplied until, in some parts of the island, densities reached an extraordinary 30,000 snakes per square mile.

The consequences for Guam’s wildlife have been catastrophic. As nocturnal, generalist predators encountering abundant prey that had evolved without such a snake, they devastated the island’s native birds, causing several species to disappear from the wild on Guam. They have also disrupted food webs, preyed upon reptiles and small mammals and caused hundreds of power cuts by climbing electricity infrastructure.

But how did a population founded by so few individuals avoid collapsing under the burden of inbreeding?

A new paper in Science Advances by Christopher A. Osborne of the University at Buffalo and colleagues from Buffalo and the US Geological Survey suggests that the answer lies partly in a form of genetic variation that earlier sequencing methods tended to miss.

The snakes did not, in fact, avoid the bottleneck. Their genomes retain compelling evidence of it. The researchers found that roughly half of each snake’s genome consisted of long “runs of homozygosity”—regions in which the copies inherited from the mother and father were almost identical. This is a genomic signature of intense inbreeding, comparable with that seen in some endangered species of conservation concern.

However, genetic diversity is not confined to changes in individual DNA letters. Using long-read sequencing, which can detect much larger differences, the researchers found nearly 19,000 structural variants. These included sections of DNA that had been duplicated, deleted, inserted or rearranged. Together, these structural variants affected almost eight times as much of the genome as the single-nucleotide variants upon which conventional estimates of genetic diversity have largely relied.

More importantly, the surviving variation was not distributed randomly. Structural variants were especially abundant around gene promoters and in genes associated with adaptive immunity and olfaction. Variation in immune genes could help the snakes respond to pathogens, while variation affecting their highly developed sense of smell could influence their ability to recognise prey, exploit different foods and distinguish closely related snakes from potential prey. In other words, a population can be genetically impoverished overall while retaining disproportionately important variation in precisely those parts of its genome that influence survival and adaptability.

Creationism Refuted - Another Gap Closed with a 23-Million-Year-Old Fossil - Just as The Theory Of Evolution Predicted

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Reconstruction of Miyumba chrisdickmani in its natural setting.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Australia’s most diverse marsupial predators have been hiding their origins for millions of years

To a palaeontologist, a gap in the fossil record is an unanswered question and an invitation to keep looking. To a creationist, it is more often treated as a convenient space in which to insert a supernatural explanation. The difficulty for creationism is that scientists have an inconvenient habit of finding the missing evidence, whereupon the gap becomes smaller, the evolutionary history becomes clearer, and creationists must quietly move their supernatural explanation somewhere else.

A particularly neat example is provided by a paper just published in Australian Zoologist by Timothy J. Churchill, Michael Archer, Suzanne J. Hand and Roy M. Farman. As Churchill explains in an article in The Conversation, a handful of tiny fossil jaws from north-western Queensland has supplied a previously missing opening chapter in the evolutionary history of Australia’s most diverse family of marsupial predators.

The family Dasyuridae contains almost 80 living species, including Tasmanian devils, quolls, dunnarts, planigales and antechinuses. They range from insect-eaters weighing only a few grams to the much larger Tasmanian devil, and occupy environments extending from the tropical rainforests of New Guinea to Australian deserts, grasslands and alpine woodland. Yet, despite this modern diversity, their early fossil history had remained frustratingly obscure.

Molecular studies indicated that dasyurids had diverged from their closest relatives millions of years before the earliest unambiguous fossils then known. Almost all accepted dasyurid fossils were younger than about five million years, leaving what palaeontologists call a “ghost lineage”: a branch whose existence was indicated by evolutionary relationships, but whose earlier fossil representatives had not yet been found. The animal once thought to fill that gap, Barinya wangala, was subsequently shown to belong to an entirely different family of peculiar, probably snail-eating marsupials called malleodectids.

Creationists sometimes present such gaps as evidence against evolution, apparently assuming that unless every organism that ever lived has obligingly become fossilised, been exposed at the surface and been discovered, the evolutionary history can be dismissed. But incompleteness is not inconsistency. Fossilisation is rare, suitable rocks are unevenly distributed, and tiny, fragile animals are especially unlikely to leave recognisable remains. Evolution nevertheless predicted that earlier dasyurids had existed. The question was whether any of them would eventually be found.

The new species, named Miyumba chrisdickmani, is known from six partial lower jaws recovered from Early Miocene deposits in the Riversleigh World Heritage Area on Waanyi Country. It lived about 23 million years ago and probably weighed only about 30 grams, making it comparable in size to a modern antechinus or large dunnart. It is now the oldest confirmed member of Dasyuridae, extending the family’s recognised fossil history by more than five million years.

Its significance, however, lies in much more than its age. The teeth of Miyumba possess a particular arrangement in which the third lower premolar is smaller than the first and second. This appears to be a shared derived characteristic, or synapomorphy, identifying dasyurids as a natural evolutionary group. At the same time, Miyumba retains several ancestral dental features expected in an animal close to the base of that group’s family tree.

That combination is precisely what evolutionary theory predicts: an early member of a lineage should possess the defining innovations inherited by its descendants while retaining features inherited from more distant ancestors. It should not look exactly like a modern Tasmanian devil, quoll or dunnart because those specialised forms had not yet evolved. Nor should it be unrelated to them. It should display a mosaic of ancestral and newly evolved characteristics — and that is exactly what Miyumba does.

Refuting Creationism - How Storms Created A Dinosaur Fossil Site - 80 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Graphical abstract

Fanti, Federico; Consorti, Lorenzo; Muscioni, Marco; et al (2026) (CC BY 4.0)

Tethyshadros insularis and crocodilians struggle against a violent monsoon storm.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Storms that built a graveyard: ancient monsoons created a spectacular dinosaur fossil site

Young-Earth creationists are fond of pointing out that a single flood or storm can deposit a layer of sediment very quickly, as though this somehow proves that the entire geological record could have been produced during the mythical year-long flood described in Genesis. But the speed with which an individual layer forms tells us nothing about the intervals between successive layers. When those layers contain regular, measurable cycles produced by processes operating daily, fortnightly and seasonally, they become a record of elapsed time—and that time cannot simply be waved away.

An article in The Conversation by palaeontologist Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza of University College London describes just such a record. It concerns the Villaggio del Pescatore fossil site near Trieste, north-eastern Italy, where dinosaurs, crocodilians, fish, shrimps, plants and other organisms were preserved with exceptional detail about 80 million years ago.

Chiarenza and his colleagues, led jointly with Federico Fanti of the University of Bologna, have published their findings in the journal Global and Planetary Change. Their evidence shows that the site was not, as previously proposed, a quiet lake or sinkhole. It was a tropical tidal flat on the edge of an ancient sea, repeatedly affected by powerful monsoon floods and tropical cyclones.

The fossil-bearing limestone consists of metre-thick packages containing thousands of discrete, paper-thin light and dark layers. These had previously been interpreted as annual deposits, or varves. However, high-resolution synchrotron X-ray scanning, microscopic and geochemical analyses, and statistical analysis of the repeating patterns revealed something still more remarkable: the layers are tidal microcouplets, laid down under a semidiurnal tidal regime—two tidal cycles each day.

Moreover, variations in the thickness of the layers follow the familiar fortnightly alternation between spring and neap tides. The rocks therefore contain not merely a succession of vaguely similar bands, but an ordered astronomical rhythm produced by the interaction of Earth’s rotation with the orbit of the Moon. By counting and analysing those layers, the researchers calculated that the fossil-bearing succession accumulated over approximately 40 years. In other words, the rock preserves an almost day-by-day record extending across four decades.

That presents creationists with a problem that cannot be dismissed by claiming that “floods can deposit sediment rapidly”. Of course they can; that is precisely what some of the layers record. But a single flood cannot manufacture 40 years’ worth of successive twice-daily tidal deposits, arranged in the correct fortnightly spring–neap pattern. Still less can the supposed year-long biblical flood accommodate a geological sequence that records some 40 years of tides within one small part of a vastly larger, 80-million-year-old succession.

How Evolution Works - Shell Shock For Creationists

Steinkern (internal mould) of Maclurites neritoides containing cryptic fauna cornulitids, bryozoans, and graptolites (arrows).

Credit: Vinn, O., Wilson, M.A., Tinn, O. et al. (2026)

Empty seashells became new habitats 470 million years ago | University of Tartu

A paper just published in Scientific Reports by an international team led by Olev Vinn of the University of Tartu, Estonia, provides a lovely illustration of the opportunistic nature of evolution.

Some 470 million years ago — almost 470 million years before creationists’ mythical ‘Creation Week’ — a seemingly modest ecological innovation occurred in the oceans: animals began using the sheltered interiors of empty mollusc shells as habitats. This happened during the Middle Ordovician, following the Cambrian radiation, and helped to establish a new ecological niche that remains important in marine ecosystems today.

Creationists like to misrepresent the Cambrian radiation as the sudden appearance of complex, multicellular animals without ancestors. In reality, it was neither instantaneous nor without an evolutionary prehistory. It unfolded over tens of millions of years and grew out of changes already under way among the preceding Ediacaran biota, including increasing mobility, burrowing and ecological interaction.

As animals became more mobile, predation intensified and defensive structures became increasingly advantageous. Mineralised skeletons and shells evolved independently in several lineages, probably under several interacting pressures, including protection, structural support and changing ocean chemistry. Molluscs were among the groups that acquired shells, and their subsequent diversification produced such familiar forms as gastropods, bivalves and shelled cephalopods.

One consequence was the growing accumulation of empty shells on the seabed. Each dead mollusc left behind a hard surface and a sheltered cavity that other organisms could potentially exploit. Yet the researchers found that, throughout the Cambrian, the interiors of mollusc shells and other skeletal remains remained free of encrusting animals, even though organisms capable of living on surfaces inside other cavities already existed.

That changed during the Middle Ordovician, when attached animals began colonising the relatively large, spacious shells of nautiloid cephalopods. They later spread into the empty shells of gastropods and bivalves. No foresight or planning was required: once organisms capable of settling inside these shells gained access to a protected surface supplied with food-bearing water, any heritable tendency that improved their ability to exploit it could be favoured by natural selection.

Creationism Refuted - The Unbroken History Of Egypt

Egyptian Middle Kingdom princesses at archery practice

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Warrior princesses of ancient Egypt? Skeletons show women used the weapons buried with them

The writers and editors who composed the Pentateuch clearly possessed some knowledge of Egypt. It was, after all, a powerful neighbouring civilisation with which the peoples of the Levant had interacted for centuries. But a sprinkling of Egyptian names, loanwords and geographical details does not turn a theological story into an accurate historical account. When the biblical narratives are compared with Egyptian records, chronology and archaeology, Egypt often appears less as a real country than as an exotic stage on which the authors could set their morality tales.

The biblical use of the word ‘Pharaoh’ illustrates the problem, although not for the reason sometimes claimed. ‘Pharaoh’ is not a Hebrew expression meaning ‘owner of an estate’. The Hebrew par‘ō was borrowed from the ancient Egyptian pr-ꜥꜣ, meaning ‘Great House’. It originally referred to the royal palace and only during the New Kingdom came to be used for the king himself. Its use as the personal designation of a ruler in Genesis, whose supposed events are conventionally placed centuries earlier, is therefore probably anachronistic.

More revealingly, the biblical authors never identify the rulers in the Joseph or Exodus stories by any of their regnal names. Egyptian kings possessed elaborate formal titles and names, yet the Bible gives us only an anonymous ‘Pharaoh’. This makes it impossible to place either story securely within Egyptian chronology and contrasts sharply with the detailed records left by the Egyptians themselves.

There is likewise no independent evidence for an Exodus on anything resembling the scale described in the Bible. No Egyptian record mentions ten devastating plagues, the death of the firstborn, the destruction of a substantial chariot force or the sudden flight of an enormous enslaved population. Egyptian royal inscriptions were selective and rarely advertised defeats, so their silence alone would not be conclusive. However, there is also no corresponding demographic, economic or archaeological disruption in Egypt, and no material trace in Sinai of the immense population demanded by a strictly literal reading of the story.

The narrative also contains striking internal difficulties. Exodus 9 describes a pestilence affecting the Egyptian livestock in the fields—including horses—and then declares that ‘all the livestock of the Egyptians died’. Yet the same chapter subsequently refers to more Egyptian livestock, while Exodus 14 has Pharaoh assembling 600 chosen chariots, together with his other chariots, all of which would have required teams of surviving horses. Apologists can invent unmentioned groups of sheltered or unaffected animals, but that is an attempt to repair the story, not a literal reading of what it says.

Nor is the geography as straightforward as the familiar Sunday-school version suggests. The Hebrew Yam Suph, traditionally translated as the Red Sea, more probably means the ‘Sea of Reeds’, and its intended location remains uncertain. Moreover, at the dates commonly proposed for an Exodus, Egypt maintained forts, roads and mining operations in Sinai and exercised imperial control over much of Canaan. Even after leaving Egypt proper, the Israelites would not necessarily have escaped Egyptian power.

Exodus 12:37 gives a figure of about 600,000 adult men, besides women and children. Read literally, that implies a total population of perhaps two or three million people, together with their animals. It is absurd to imagine such a population living and travelling in Sinai for 40 years without leaving campsites, hearths, tools, pottery, animal bones, human burials or any other archaeological footprint remotely commensurate with its supposed size.

An even greater problem for biblical literalists is the continuous archaeological record of Egypt itself. Young-Earth creationist chronologies commonly place their global Flood somewhere around the middle of the third millennium BCE, by which time Egypt had already been a unified state for centuries and the great pyramids of the Old Kingdom had been built. Egyptian society certainly underwent political and economic changes, but there is no point at which its entire population disappears and is replaced by descendants of eight survivors from Mesopotamia.

Nor is there a synchronous horizon of catastrophic erosion, inundation, mass death and repopulation throughout Egypt—or anywhere else—that could represent a global Flood. Instead, archaeologists find settlements, tombs, temples, administrative records and evolving cultural traditions extending through and beyond the period in which the Flood supposedly occurred. It is a vast body of mutually consistent evidence that simply could not exist in its present form if the biblical story were literal history.

Refuting Creationism - Last Nail In The Coffin Of Creationism's Thermodynamics Fallacy

Order From Disorder

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.5)

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

The Gravity from Entropy theory offers new clues for reconciling gravity with the second law of thermodynamics - Queen Mary University of London

Creationists have been claiming for decades that evolution must be impossible because it supposedly requires a decrease in entropy, in violation of the second law of thermodynamics. As with so many creationist arguments, this one depends upon misrepresenting the science, confusing several different meanings of “information” and “order”, and quietly omitting the conditions under which the law applies.

The second law does not say that entropy can never decrease anywhere. It says that the total entropy of an isolated system cannot decrease. Entropy may decrease in one part of a system provided that an equal or greater increase occurs elsewhere. A refrigerator, for example, reduces the entropy of its contents by transferring heat into the room, where its motor and cooling coils generate still more heat. The contents become colder and more ordered, but the total entropy of the refrigerator and its surroundings increases.

Strictly speaking, a “closed” system is one that can exchange energy, but not matter, with its surroundings. An “isolated” system exchanges neither. Earth is not isolated: it is continually receiving concentrated, high-temperature energy from the Sun and radiating more diffuse, low-temperature infrared energy into space. That energy flow powers weather systems, ocean currents, photosynthesis and almost every ecosystem on the planet. Organisms, meanwhile, are open systems that take in energy and matter and release heat and waste.

Consequently, the maintenance and growth of biological complexity do not require the entropy of the universe—or even that of Earth as a whole—to decrease. Organisms maintain their internal organisation by consuming free energy and exporting entropy into their surroundings. Every growing tree, developing embryo and reproducing bacterium does this without so much as inconveniencing the second law.

Nor is biological “information” simply the opposite of thermodynamic entropy. Genetic information refers to sequences and their biological effects, whereas thermodynamic entropy concerns the number and distribution of microscopic physical states available to a system. Treating the two as interchangeable because both employ the word “information” is not physics; it is wordplay.

Gravity makes the creationist caricature still less defensible. A diffuse cloud of gas can collapse under gravity to form a highly structured star and planetary system. To the unaided eye, this looks like disorder turning into order. Yet the collapse releases enormous quantities of heat and radiation, increasing the entropy of the wider system. Visible organisation and thermodynamic entropy are not simple opposites, especially when gravity is involved.

Now, a paper published in Physical Review D by Professor Ginestra Bianconi of Queen Mary University of London takes this relationship between gravity, information and thermodynamics much further. As Queen Mary University explains in its accompanying news release, Bianconi’s proposed “Gravity from Entropy” theory treats gravity as arising from information encoded in the interaction between matter and the geometry of spacetime.

Refuting Creationism - Death More Than 66 Million Years Before Mythical 'Sin'

A Tyrannosaur stalking an edmontosaurus

AI-Generated Image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

"The Bite"

Paleoartist Jenn Hall.

Rare fossil at Montana State’s Museum of the Rockies records Tyrannosaurus attack

A paper published on 17 February 2026 in PeerJ by Taia C.A. Wyenberg-Henzler of la of Montana State University, USA, reports on a remarkable fossil from the Hell Creek Formation of eastern Montana: a nearly complete, articulated skull of an adult Edmontosaurus annectens with the broken tip of a tyrannosaur tooth still embedded in its left nasal bone.

The fossil dates from the closing stages of the Late Cretaceous, roughly 66 million years ago, shortly before Edmontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus and all other non-avian dinosaurs disappeared during the Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction. The bone surrounding the embedded tooth shows no evidence of healing or remodelling, indicating that the bite occurred at, very near or shortly after the death of the Edmontosaurus.

In other words, this is physical evidence of a violent interaction between predator and prey tens of millions of years before humans existed—precisely the sort of evidence that creationists are conditioned to reject because it cannot be accommodated within their mythology. According to young-Earth creationism, there was supposedly no death, predation or suffering before human ‘sin’ allowed evil to enter the world and ruin their omnipotent creator’s previously perfect creation—apparently without that omnipotent creator either foreseeing or preventing it. And all this supposedly happened only 6,000–10,000 years ago, shortly after ‘Creation Week’.

The doctrine that no animal died before ‘the Fall’ is not stated explicitly anywhere in the Bible. It is a theological inference imposed upon the text because young-Earth creationism requires it. It belongs to the category of reasoning that says: ‘This must be true for the rest of my beliefs to be true; my beliefs cannot be wrong; therefore, this must also be true.’

Having granted themselves this assumption of infallibility, creationists must then protect it from every fact that contradicts it. The belief cannot be mistaken, so the evidence must somehow be misunderstood, fraudulent, planted by Satan, created with the appearance of age or otherwise unworthy of consideration. Anything, in fact, is preferable to the intellectually honest admission that the belief itself has been falsified.

In almost every other field of human endeavour, such a supremely arrogant claim to personal infallibility would be laughed at and its proponent told to grow up. Yet, when packaged as religious faith, it is not merely tolerated but frequently treated with respect. Its advocates demand—and often receive—special privileges and social status: ‘You must listen to me, allow me to make laws governing your life and let me shape society according to my beliefs because I have an invisible friend and wear special robes.’

And so creationism staggers on, obliged to deny a veritable deluge of scientific evidence rather than concede that its mythology bears no resemblance to the history of life on Earth.

We Can Tell The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People - Not Just By What's In It, But By What Isn't

Araucaria forest at sunrise.

Photo by Douglas Scortegagna (CC BY-SA 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons)

Araucaria augustifolia (Brazilian pine)

Brazil’s highland forest has been shaped by climate change and Indigenous people for 6,000 years

One of the clearest indications that the Bible was written by people with a severely limited knowledge of the world is, in addition to the factual errors in it, such as Earth being flat with a dome over it, there is the evidence of what is not in it. Its authors wrote as though the small part of the ancient Near East familiar to them was effectively the whole inhabited Earth, so there is nothing in the Bible from outside a small area around the Middle East. They had no conception of a southern hemisphere, knew nothing of continents such as South America, and had no awareness of the peoples, cultures and complex histories that had existed there for thousands of years.

That parochial view of the world is exposed every time archaeologists and palaeoecologists reconstruct the history of regions the Bible’s authors did not even know existed. Far from being a divinely inspired account of the whole planet, the Bible reflects the geographical horizons and cultural assumptions of the scientifically illiterate people who composed it.

The latest example comes from the cold highlands of southern Brazil, where an international team of researchers has reconstructed how climate, fire and Indigenous land management shaped the distinctive mosaic of Araucaria forest and campos grassland during the past 6,000 years. The research is described by Oliver J. Wilson, a lecturer in the School of Natural Sciences at the University of Lincoln, in an article in The Conversation and was published in Scientific Reports.

The researchers combined several independent sources of evidence: pollen and microscopic charcoal preserved in continuously accumulating bog sediments, radiocarbon-dated archaeological evidence, a rainfall record preserved in a cave speleothem, and ecological models showing how the forest should have responded to climatic change. Together, these sources reveal a detailed history of gradual climatic shifts, changing fire regimes, forest expansion and human modification of the landscape.

Refuting Creationism - How Physics Constrained The Evolution Of Flight in Flies

High-resolution stacked image of the blowfly wing and thorax. The translucent wing attaches via an intricate hinge system to the muscular thorax that powers rapid wingbeats.

Carlos Faulquier

Why most flies fly alike | WUR

Carlos Faulquier

As a child growing up in the relative silence of a North Oxfordshire hamlet, I could sometimes hear bats overhead. On a still summer night, lying in the quiet of my bedroom, I could also make out the distinctive, high-pitched whine of a mosquito as it approached an exposed arm, guided at close range by body heat as well as by carbon dioxide and human odours. Both sounds now lie beyond what my ageing ears can detect. The relevance of that mosquito’s whine will become apparent shortly.

A paper published on 9 July 2026 in PLOS Biology by scientists from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and Aix-Marseille Université in France explains how aerodynamic constraints have channelled the evolution of flight across the Diptera — the order of insects that includes houseflies, fruit flies, mosquitoes, midges and crane flies.

The researchers examined the body and wing morphology of 133 species and recorded the hovering flight of 46 of them using high-speed stereoscopic cameras. They then used computational fluid dynamics to reconstruct the aerodynamic forces and energy costs associated with their wing movements.

They found that wing shape varied considerably and was strongly influenced by evolutionary ancestry, but that wingbeat movements were broadly conserved across most of the order. Despite the enormous diversity of dipterans in size, appearance, habitat and ecology, most have evolved strikingly similar flight mechanics because the physical requirements of remaining airborne restrict the range of workable solutions.

Evolution, of course, depends upon heritable variation, but not every imaginable variation is viable or advantageous. A change that demands more energy without providing some compensating benefit is unlikely to spread through a population. Natural selection therefore tends to channel evolution towards a comparatively narrow range of effective solutions. In this case, the need to generate sufficient lift while limiting aerodynamic power consumption has produced a broadly shared flight pattern across most dipterans.

It must be galling for those few creationists who can read and understand scientific papers, yet are still eagerly awaiting the long-promised day when biologists abandon “Darwinism” and embrace creationism, to encounter paper after paper such as this one. Once again, evolutionary theory provides the accepted framework within which the observations make sense, without so much as a hint that the researchers are preparing to replace it with supernatural magic.

An enterprising creationist might nevertheless seize upon the apparent exceptions. Mosquitoes and their close relatives, the midges, do not follow the usual energy-saving pattern. Mosquitoes can beat their wings as many as 1,000 times each second, using almost three times as much aerodynamic power as similarly sized fruit flies. Crane flies also depart from the general pattern, although in the opposite direction, having evolved unusually economical flight.

Surely, the creationist might argue, if aerodynamic constraints channelled the evolution of the other flies, mosquitoes should have been constrained in precisely the same way. If an exception exists, perhaps there is something wrong with the theory.

But this objection rests on the mistaken assumption that natural selection must optimise every characteristic for a single purpose. Evolution does not produce organisms in which each structure is independently perfected. It produces compromises between competing demands, with reproductive success ultimately determining which combination of costs and benefits persists.

The researchers found that mosquitoes and midges produce disproportionately powerful sounds for insects of their size. Their rapid, low-amplitude wingbeats generate increased aerodynamic drag and require enlarged flight muscles, making flight more energetically expensive. That apparent inefficiency, however, may provide a substantial reproductive advantage because acoustic communication plays an important part in their courtship.

Creationism Refuted - Earth Is 'Fine-Tuned' For Disasters And Mass Extinctions

Researchers confirm cause of Earth’s biggest mass extinction | Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability

Studying the metabolism of living brachiopods like these collected from San Juan Island, Washington, allowed Stanford researchers to understand how the physiology of the modern fauna and Paleozoic fauna may have differed and how these groups would have been differentially impacted by oxygen and temperature changes during the Permian–Triassic mass extinction.

Image credit: Erik Sperling.

Many of Earth's climatic, geological and biological processes behave as complex, nonlinear systems, resembling systems in chaos. In this context, “chaotic” does not mean random. It means that small differences in starting conditions can sometimes be amplified until they produce very different outcomes — the phenomenon popularly known as the “butterfly effect”. The butterfly is not literally responsible for a distant storm; it merely illustrates how a tiny disturbance can cascade through a sufficiently complex system.

This is not the picture of a planet engineered to remain permanently benign or perfectly “fine-tuned” for life — still less for human life in the United States. Earth is habitable, but its habitability is contingent and sometimes precarious. The same interacting atmospheric, oceanic, geological and biological processes that sustain life can, when pushed beyond critical thresholds, drive abrupt environmental change, ecological collapse and mass extinction.

At several points in Earth's history, reinforcing feedbacks have transformed relatively small initial disturbances into rapid and profound environmental changes. Organisms adapted to the previous conditions were then confronted with combinations of heat, cold, acidification, oxygen loss or other stresses occurring too quickly for most populations to adapt. The result was widespread extinction.

What has been less well understood is why some groups were devastated while others living in the same changing environment survived. This is an important question for us because every organism alive today is descended from lineages that somehow survived every previous mass extinction.

Research by a Stanford University-led team, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), now offers an experimentally supported explanation for one of the most striking patterns associated with the end-Permian mass extinction — the “Great Dying” of about 252 million years ago.

Creationism Refuted - Giant Kangaroos In New Guinea - 1,500 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Impression of Protemnodon tumbuna

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

Giant kangaroos survived until 6,500 years ago on the New Guinea coast.

It is probably fair to say that no branch of science is a friend of creationism. That is presumably why creationists devote so much time and effort to trying to discredit science—often without the slightest appreciation of the irony of using computers and the Internet, both products of science and engineering, to tell the world that science does not work. Yet their attitude towards science is not merely hostile but opportunistic: whenever they encounter a scientific finding that they think can be misrepresented as supporting creationism, they suddenly become jubilant champions of ‘the evidence’.

Archaeology is one of the most persistent threats to literalist creationism. Far from confirming the biblical narrative, it repeatedly uncovers evidence of human cultures, environmental changes and extinct animals extending far beyond the few thousand years permitted by Young Earth Creationism. Nor does archaeology stand alone. Its findings repeatedly converge with those of genetics, palaeontology, geology and climatology to produce the same coherent history—a history in which neither a recent magical creation nor a global genocidal flood leaves the slightest trace.

True to form, a recently published paper in the journal npj Biodiversity, by an Australian-based team of archaeologists and palaeontologists, presents evidence from New Guinea that simply could not exist if the biblical narratives of a magical creation a few thousand years ago, followed by a global flood about 4,300 years ago, bore any resemblance to reality. The evidence indicates that a large extinct kangaroo relative—probably Protemnodon tumbuna—survived on the northern coast of New Guinea until the Middle Holocene, perhaps as recently as about 6,500 years ago.

This was tens of thousands of years after every known species of Protemnodon had disappeared from Australia, where the genus is thought to have become extinct by about 41,000 years ago, along with most of the continent’s other megafauna.

Protemnodon tumbuna was a stocky, muscular forest-dwelling kangaroo weighing an estimated 50–90 kilograms—roughly comparable in size to a modern red kangaroo. Unlike modern large kangaroos, however, it was probably predominantly quadrupedal, using its powerful forelimbs to move through dense forest and hopping only inefficiently and for short distances, if at all. It was one of seven currently recognised species of Protemnodon known collectively from Australia and New Guinea.

How Science Works - Challenging The Consensus

Artist's concept of an ancient quasar

ESA

Quasars discovered by Euclid

The earliest quasars yet observed are shedding light on the infancy of our cosmos | The Current

Creationists have to explain away why the long-predicted abandonment of 'Darwinism' by biomedical scientists has not yet taken place despite the almost daily assurance that this is imminent for the last half a century, by claiming without a shred of evidence that scientists are prohibited from publishing anything which challenges the current consensus, and that the peer-review process is designed to filter out these papers.

The irony appears to be entirely lost on creationists, many of whose own propaganda organisations openly impose exactly the doctrinal censorship they falsely attribute to science. Answers in Genesis (AiG) requires its employees and volunteers to accept its Statement of Faith, which declares in advance that Genesis 1–11 is a factual account of real events. AiG also requires full-time employees to reaffirm that statement annually and subjects everything it publishes to an editorial board charged with preventing any departure from its approved biblical position. Similarly, the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) explicitly states that, whenever scientific evidence appears to conflict with the Bible, “the Bible must govern”, and requires its faculty and board members to sign its doctrinal statement every year.

In other words, creationist organisations begin with conclusions that may not be questioned and permit evidence to be published only when it can be made to support those conclusions. Scientific peer review does the opposite: it scrutinises the evidence, methods and reasoning while leaving the conclusions open to revision. Accusing science of enforcing the very dogmatic censorship that creationist organisations practise openly looks less like criticism than projection.

The scientific literature is, in fact, full of discoveries that expose weaknesses in existing explanations and force researchers to reconsider accepted models. Creationist claims to the contrary are generally made in the safe expectation that their followers will neither read the relevant papers nor understand what those papers actually say.

One recent example is a paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics reporting the discovery of 31 previously unknown quasars in the early Universe using data from the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope. Twelve have redshifts of 7 or greater, more than doubling the number previously known from that period. The two most distant, with redshifts of approximately 7.69 and 7.77, are the earliest quasars yet observed, existing when the Universe was only about 670 million years old.

Creationism Refuted - How Humans Acquired Their Pathogens From Their Animals - No Magic 'Sin' Involved

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

We’ve long suspected that the transition to farming and animal husbandry opened the door to a new era of disease – now DNA shows us that it happened at least 6,500 years ago,” says Professor Eske Willerslev, author of the new study.

Illustration: William Brøns Petersen

Large-scale DNA study maps 37,000 years of disease history – University of Copenhagen

Young Earth creationist mythology has it that sin, shortly after the magical creation of two adult humans, caused death and disease to enter the world. Until then, so we are expected to believe, there had been no disease and nothing ever died — not even, apparently, the plants Adam, Eve and the other animals ate.

Reality, of course, is materially different from the mythology produced by scientifically ignorant ancient pastoralists and later scribes who knew nothing of bacteria, viruses, parasites, epidemiology or evolution, and who interpreted misfortune in magical terms. Disease was not a supernatural punishment introduced at a single moment by a talking snake, a disobedient couple and an irritable god. It was, and remains, a biological process involving organisms evolving, spreading, adapting and, sometimes, crossing from one host species into another.

And the evidence now shows that at least 6,500 years ago, diseases were passing from animals into the humans who lived alongside them. The domestication of animals, the growth of settled farming communities and the rise of pastoralism brought humans, livestock, waste, parasites and pathogens into much closer proximity than before. This has long been thought to explain why humans suffer from so many infectious diseases. It is also a point Jared Diamond made in Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies, where he argued that Eurasia’s abundance of domesticable animals, and Europeans’ long exposure to the diseases associated with them, helped Europeans to dominate other populations, often with their pathogens acting as an advance guard against peoples with no previous exposure or immunity.

That view of the zoonotic origin of many human diseases has now been strongly supported by the work of researchers led by Professor Eske Willerslev, of the University of Copenhagen and the University of Cambridge, in a study published open access in Nature in July 2025. The team analysed DNA from more than 1,300 prehistoric individuals, some up to 37,000 years old. Their bones and teeth provided an extraordinary archive of ancient microbial DNA, revealing traces of bacteria, viruses and parasites that infected humans across deep Eurasian history.

The results suggest that close cohabitation with domesticated animals, together with large-scale migrations of pastoralists from the Pontic Steppe, played a major role in the spread of zoonotic diseases. The researchers found that identifiable zoonotic pathogens first appear in their data from around 6,500 years ago, became more widespread after about 6,000 years ago, and peaked roughly 5,000 years ago — precisely the sort of pattern expected if lifestyle, animal husbandry, mobility and population contact were driving disease transmission.

This is especially awkward for creationists because the evidence does not point to a sudden, supernatural transformation of the world’s biology. It does not show disease appearing overnight as the result of a mythical “Fall”. Instead, it shows a long, historical and evolutionary process, unfolding through early Eurasian human history as changing human behaviour created new ecological opportunities for pathogens.

Refuting Creationism - Humans And Wolves Share A Long Evolutionary History

View from the Stora Förvar cave on Stora Karlsö. The cave was explored between 1888 and 1893. The limestone-rich bedrock has contributed to the skeletal material found there being very well preserved.

Photo: Jan Storå

Ancient wolves on remote Baltic Sea island reveal link to prehistoric humans - Stockholms universitet

A point I have made several times in these blog posts, and one that creationists typically prefer not to address, is that the Bible presents living things as part of a world made for human use and dominion. Yet the history of animal and plant domestication tells a very different story. The domesticated forms often bear little resemblance to their wild ancestors, not because they were created perfectly fitted for human needs, but because humans altered them by selective breeding over many generations.

For an honest creationist, the question should be obvious: why did an allegedly omniscient creator god fail to anticipate human needs and create animals and plants already ideally suited to them? Why did humans need to do the improving? But, as so often, creationists appear to prefer belief in an incompetent designer to the simpler conclusion that their creation myth is wrong.

No domestic animal illustrates this better than the dog. Domestic dogs are descended from wolves, yet the vast range of dog forms, behaviours and abilities shows what prolonged selection, human preference and cultural need can do. Herding dogs, guard dogs, hunting dogs, sled dogs, lapdogs and companion animals are not the result of a single act of perfect creation; they are the result of human-managed evolution.

Now, new research by scientists from the Francis Crick Institute, Stockholm University, the University of Aberdeen and the University of East Anglia, published online in November 2025 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), shows that human relationships with wolves were more varied and complex than a simple tale of fear, hunting or eventual dog domestication. The researchers report wolf remains from the isolated Baltic island of Stora Karlsö, in a context strongly suggesting that prehistoric people were managing, feeding or otherwise controlling wolves thousands of years ago.

This research resonates with me because two of my books, The Girl and the Wolf and The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic, are fictional accounts of how wolf domestication might have begun. In those stories, the process is initiated by a single act of compassion: a woman raises an abandoned wolf cub alongside her own child. That act becomes a legend, and the legend later inspires another tribe to form a relationship with wolves, helping them to survive hardship and setting humanity on a path that would eventually produce the many varieties of domestic dog, each shaped for different human purposes.

The stories are also framed to illustrate the hardships of Ice Age life for our ancestors, and the same social forces that still shape human societies: conservatism versus progress, suspicion of novelty, and the struggle to be different in a culture that demands conformity. In both stories, teenage girls must negotiate those pressures and, in doing so, help change the future.

Bible Blunder - NASA Provides Red, White & Blue Stars For 4th July - And A Reminder That The Bible Was Made Up By Ignorant People

NASA's Hubble Spies Stellar Sparkler for July 4th - NASA Science

By releasing a spectacular red, white and blue image of a globular star cluster almost as old as the universe itself, NASA has inadvertently provided yet another striking demonstration that the Bible’s cosmology was invented by people who knew nothing of the real universe beyond the limits of unaided human imagination.

A point that seems to be lost on creationists is that claims made in the Bible can be checked against reality, just like any other claim. And, like any other claim, they can be rejected when they bear little or no resemblance to the evidence. To take a deliberately silly example, imagine someone claiming that the Bible has only 120 pages. Simply by opening a Bible and counting the pages, we can see quickly and easily that the claim is false. In scientific terms, the claim is a hypothesis, and it is falsified by the experiment of looking at the evidence.

Similarly, when the Bible presents a universe consisting of a small, flat world beneath a solid dome, with the sun, moon and stars functioning as lights set in or associated with that dome, we can test that claim by doing the same simple thing: looking at reality. Curiously, when creationists do this, they often apply a special standard of reasoning that would be absurd in any other context, and possibly a sign of mental incompetence if applied to everyday life. They conclude, not that the ancient claim is wrong, but that reality itself must somehow be mistaken because the claim has been placed inside a book declared, in advance and without evidence, to be inerrant “scripture”.

Imagine applying that standard when deciding whether it is safe to cross a busy road, while clinging to the belief that cars cannot exist because someone in the Bronze Age said all wheeled transport was drawn by horses!

So, let us carry out that simple scientific experiment. Let us compare the biblical claim with reality, starting with the hypothesis that the Bible is inerrant truth and therefore contains an accurate description of the universe.

Malevolent Design - How Melanomas Are Cleverly 'Designed' To Stay Alive

Telomeres shown as white caps on the ends of the chromosome arms.

Pitt scientists discovered a key genetic step in melanoma’s race to live forever | University of Pittsburgh

Examples from nature in which, if creationist arguments for the existence of an intelligent designer are applied consistently, that designer can only be regarded as a malevolent entity intent on increasing suffering in the world, continue to accumulate. And the more examples there are, the more creationists need to ignore their own arguments, abandon any pretence that creationism is a genuine alternative science, and retreat instead into the fundamentalist biblical myths of 'The Fall' and 'Original Sin'. The evidence remains the same; only the interpretation is twisted to preserve the preferred narrative.

The latest such example concerns the genetics behind one of malignant melanoma's most dangerous properties: its ability to evade the normal cellular limit on repeated division. This had long been a missing piece in understanding how melanoma cells avoid the ordinary route to cellular senescence and continue to proliferate. Like Michael J. Behe's and William A. Dembski's supposed 'evidence' for intelligent design, it depends on a set of interacting components being in place and on genetic changes producing just the right molecular effect — precisely the kind of arrangement the Discovery Institute insists cannot arise by natural processes because, in its caricature of biology, evolution is merely 'random chance'. That claim, of course, ignores the elementary biological fact that natural selection makes evolution very much a non-random process.

The discovery, published in Science in November 2022 by Pattra Chun-on, Jonathan K. Alder and colleagues, concerns telomeres — the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes. In most normal somatic cells, telomeres gradually shorten with repeated cell division until the cell can no longer divide. This is one of the body's safeguards against uncontrolled proliferation. Cancer cells, however, often find ways to bypass this limit, and melanoma has long been known for having unusually long telomeres, even compared with many other cancers. What had not been fully understood was how melanoma achieved this.

The answer involves telomerase, the enzyme complex that lengthens telomeres. In most normal adult cells, telomerase activity is switched off or kept very low. Many melanomas carry mutations in the promoter region of TERT, the gene that encodes the catalytic component of telomerase, and these mutations increase telomerase activity. But that turned out to be only part of the story. When researchers introduced TERT promoter mutations into melanocytes, they did not reproduce the exceptionally long telomeres seen in melanoma tumours.

The missing component was TPP1, a member of the shelterin complex that helps regulate telomeres. The researchers found that mutations in the promoter region of ACD, the gene that encodes TPP1, can increase TPP1 production. When these TPP1-promoter mutations occur together with TERT promoter mutations, the two changes cooperate to produce the long telomeres characteristic of melanoma. In other words, melanoma's ability to evade normal cellular mortality depends on a coordinated interaction between altered telomerase activity and altered telomere regulation.

So, in intelligent-design creationist terms, we have a system requiring interacting molecular components, each specified by genetic changes in ordinary cellular genes, and each contributing to a result that benefits the cancer cell at the expense of the patient. If the same kind of molecular cooperation in a harmless or useful organism is to be paraded as evidence of design, then consistency demands the same conclusion here. Melanoma, on that argument, would be another product of the same intelligent designer — one whose ingenuity is directed towards helping cancer cells escape the body's normal restraints.

Of course, the scientifically honest conclusion is not that melanoma was designed, malevolently or otherwise. It is that cancer exploits the same evolved molecular machinery that normal cells use, and that mutations filtered by selection within the tumour can favour cells that divide faster, survive longer and outcompete their neighbours. The creationist problem is that the very mechanisms they claim as evidence for their designer are just as plainly at work in disease, parasitism and suffering.

Creationism Refuted - Common Origin Of Human And Other Ape Laughter.

Apes & humans have been sharing a laugh for 15 million years

A stunning example of how science incidentally refutes creationism has just been published in Communications Biology by researchers at the University of Warwick, UK. This is not merely another example of biologists continuing, despite creationist predictions, not to abandon “Darwinism” in favour of creationist magical thinking — the event that creationists have been confidently expecting any day now for more than half a century. It is also a discovery for which evolution provides the obvious and coherent explanation.

Nor is this one easily dismissed by creationists as the result of “The Fall”, Satanic interference, or any of the other routine excuses used when nature refuses to look intelligently designed. Resorting to “common design” merely makes their putative designer god look as though it deliberately created evidence, which is exactly what the Theory of Evolution predicts, apparently in order to mislead us. As Francis Collins pointed out in The Language of God, this image of God as a cosmic trickster is the ultimate admission of defeat for creationists, and shows Young Earth Creationism to be both theologically and scientifically bankrupt.

The shocking thing is how few Christians ever take their co-religionists to task on social media for being prepared to portray their god in this way, rather than having the moral and intellectual integrity to admit that they are wrong. Even their own god is sacrificed on the altar of their implacable vanity.

So, what is this finding by the University of Warwick group?

Quite simply, it is evidence that humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans share a similar rhythmic pattern in laughter, suggesting that this feature was already present in the last common ancestor of all living great apes, including humans, about 15 million years ago. The finding also offers clues to the evolution of human speech.

The researchers analysed laughter recordings from four orangutans, two gorillas, three bonobos, four chimpanzees and four human children. Across 140 laughter bouts, they found the same basic pattern: all species produced laughter with evenly spaced rhythmic intervals between successive sounds. In other words, great ape laughter is not random noise, but has a conserved rhythmic structure.

However, while this basic rhythm has remained remarkably conserved, human laughter has become faster, more variable and more sensitive to social context. Humans are the only great apes in the study shown to vary the timing of laughter according to context — for example, the difference between involuntary laughter when tickled, polite laughter in a social setting, nervous laughter after a mistake, or infectious laughter in a group. This suggests that the increasing ability to control the timing and rhythm of vocalisations may have contributed to the evolution of speech.

A useful way to frame this is that no single feature “proves” common ancestry on its own. The strength of the evidence lies in the way many independent features — anatomy, genetics, development, physiology and behaviour — all point to the same branching pattern of descent.