Creationism Refuted - Earth Not Finely Tuned but the Result of Dynamic And Unstable Forces That we Ignore At Our Peril

56 million years ago, the Earth suddenly heated up – and many plants stopped working properly

56 million years ago, in that vast expanse of pre–‘Creation Week’ history when 99.975% of Earth’s story unfolded — long before creationists imagine the Universe even existed — an event occurred that gives the lie to the claim that their putative designer created Earth as a safe and stable planet, finely tuned for the existence of (human) life. Earth’s temperature rose by roughly 6 °C as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere increased dramatically.

The cause of this, the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), lay in the disruption of one of Earth’s major feedback systems. Plants sequester carbon through photosynthesis and lock it into their tissues, but that system was pushed out of balance until a new equilibrium eventually formed. It took some 70,000–100,000 years for the planet to recover.

The problem was that higher temperatures caused many plants to fail because they had evolved for cooler conditions, and evolution proceeds far too slowly to cope with rapid environmental change. As plant productivity collapsed, less carbon was sequestered, which in turn drove temperatures higher — a classic positive feedback loop, triggered by a relatively small initial shift.

The worrying parallel today is that the current rate of anthropogenic warming is around ten times greater than at the onset of the PETM.

How we know this — and how the PETM reshaped climate and the terrestrial biosphere — is explored in a paper by an international team of scientists, published open access (in unedited form) in Nature Communications.

Two of the authors have also written a summary of their research in The Conversation. Their article is republished here under a Creative Commons licence, with formatting adjusted for consistency.

Published: November 30, 2025 11.02pm GMT

56 million years ago, the Earth suddenly heated up – and many plants stopped working properly

Forest life in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT 5.1)

Vera Korasidis, The University of Melbourne and Julian Rogger, University of Bristol
Around 56 million years ago, Earth suddenly got much hotter. Over about 5,000 years, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere drastically increased and global temperatures shot up by some 6°C.

As we show in new research published in Nature Communications, one consequence was that many of the world’s plants could no longer thrive. As a result, they soaked up less carbon from the atmosphere, which may have contributed to another interesting thing about this prehistoric planetary heatwave: it lasted more than 100,000 years.

Today Earth is warming around ten times faster than it did 56 million years ago, which may make it even harder for modern plants to adapt.

Rewinding 56 million years

Plants can help regulate the climate through a process known as carbon sequestration. This involves capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via photosynthesis and storing it in their leaves, wood and roots.

However, abrupt global warming may temporarily impact this regulating function.

Investigating how Earth’s vegetation responded to the rapid global warming event around 56 million years ago – known formally as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (or PETM) – isn’t easy.

To do so, we developed a computer model simulating plant evolution, dispersal, and carbon cycling. We compared model outputs to fossil pollen and plant trait data from three sites to reconstruct vegetation changes such as height, leaf mass, and deciduousness across the warming event.

The three sites include: the Bighorn Basin in the United States, the North Sea and the Arctic Circle.

We focused our research on fossil pollen due to many unique properties.

First, pollen is produced in copious amounts. Second, it travels extensively via air and water currents. Third, it possesses a resilient structure that withstands decay, allowing for its excellent preservation in ancient geological formations.

56-million-year-old fossilised palm pollen from the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, United States.

Vera Korasidis

A shift in vegetation

In the mid-latitude sites, including the Bighorn Basin – a deep and wide valley amidst the northern Rocky Mountains – evidence indicates vegetation had a reduced ability to regulate the climate.

Pollen data shows a shift to smaller plants such as palms and ferns. Leaf mass per area (a measure of leaf density and thickness) also increased as deciduous trees declined. Fossil soils indicate reduced soil organic carbon levels.

The data suggest smaller, drought-resistant plants including palms thrived in the landscape because they could keep pace with warming. They were, however, associated with a reduced capacity to store carbon in biomass and soils.

In contrast, the high-latitude Arctic site showed increased vegetation height and biomass following warming. The pollen data show replacement of conifer forests by broad-leaved swamp taxa and the persistence of some subtropical plants such as palms.

The model and data indicate high-latitude regions could adapt and even increase productivity (that is, capture and store carbon dioxide) under the warmer climate.

A glimpse into the future

The vegetation disruption during the PETM may have reduced terrestrial carbon sequestration for 70,000-100,000 years due to the reduced ability of vegetation and soils to capture and store carbon.

Our research suggests vegetation that is more able to regulate the climate took a long time to regrow, and this contributed to the length of the warming event.

Global warming of more than 4°C exceeded mid-latitude vegetation’s ability to adapt during the PETM. Human-made warming is occurring ten times faster, further limiting the time for adaptation.

What happened on Earth 56 million years ago highlights the need to understand biological systems’ capacity to keep pace with rapid climate changes and maintain efficient carbon sequestration.
Vera Korasidis, Lecturer in Environmental Geoscience, The University of Melbourne and Julian Rogger, Senior Research Associate, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

Abstract
The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) around 56 million years ago was a 5–6°C global warming event that lasted for approximately 200 kyr. A warming-induced loss and a 70–100 kyr lagged recovery of biospheric carbon stocks was suggested to have contributed to the long duration of the climate perturbation. Here, we use a trait-based, eco-evolutionary vegetation model to test whether the PETM warming exceeded the adaptation capacity of vegetation systems, impacting the efficiency of terrestrial organic carbon sequestration and silicate weathering. Combined model simulations and vegetation reconstructions using PETM palynofloras suggest that warming-induced migration and evolutionary adaptation of vegetation were insufficient to prevent a widespread loss of productivity. We conclude that global warming of the magnitude as during the PETM could exceed the response capacity of vegetation systems and cause a long-lasting decline in the efficiency of vegetation-mediated climate regulation mechanisms.

Rogger, J., Korasidis, V.A., Bowen, G.J. et al.
Loss of vegetation functions during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum.
Nat Commun (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-66390-8

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Events like the PETM expose the fragility of the systems that sustain life and demonstrate how easily they can be tipped into new and often hostile states. Far from being the work of an infallible designer fine-tuning a planet for a single favoured species, Earth’s history shows a world continually shaped by feedback loops, chance events and the slow, directionless process of evolution. When those systems are pushed too far or too fast, life suffers — and it takes tens of thousands of years for the planet to recover.

What makes the comparison with today so stark is the rate at which we are forcing change. The PETM was a natural carbon-cycle disturbance that unfolded over millennia. Our own contribution has taken place in a geological instant, yet it is already driving shifts comparable in magnitude to that ancient warming pulse. If slow change overwhelmed ecosystems then, the acceleration humanity has produced is even more concerning.

Understanding the PETM is not simply an academic exercise. It is a reminder, written in deep time, that there are limits to what living systems can endure and that “business as usual” can push Earth into states incompatible with the world we inherited. The past cannot tell us exactly what will happen next, but it does show that the consequences of inaction are neither abstract nor remote. The warning signs are etched in the rocks; whether we heed them is up to us.

One thing we know is that there is no watching sky daddy who's going to come and rescue us from our folly.

Refuting Creationism - Why Would a Creator Create Life Around Hydrothermal Vents?

Discovery in the Deep Sea: Unique Habitat at Hydrothermal Vents

Here is something for creationists to run away from: why would a creator god who supposedly made the entire universe as a place for humans – especially American humans – to live, and arranged everything else for their benefit, create creatures in an environment so hostile that no human could survive there without specialised modern equipment? And how exactly did Noah collect two of each of the countless species that live there in great profusion, only to place them on the Ark and somehow maintain the extreme conditions they require?

The simple answer, as underscored by these discoveries, is that the whole tale is a childish fairy story. The organisms inhabiting the extreme conditions of deep-ocean trenches evolved to live there over millions of years, entirely independent of any usefulness to humans, whose existence is of supreme indifference to them.

The conditions described come from an open-access paper in Scientific Reports by an international team of oceanographers and marine biologists led by the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany. They detail a unique environment 1,300 metres below the surface on a flank of Conical Seamount in the western Pacific, off Lihir Island in Papua New Guinea. What makes it unique is not simply that it is a hydrothermal vent, but that it is coupled with a cold methane seep from deep sediment layers. Hot, mineral-rich water and cold, hydrocarbon-rich methane gas rise along the same pathways, producing vent fluids filled with bubbles of cold methane.

The result is a unique ecosystem comprising dense fields of the mussel Bathymodiolus, along with tube worms, shrimp, amphipods, and striking purple sea cucumbers coating the rocks so completely that the underlying surfaces are entirely concealed.

Before methane-producing sediments accumulated, the hydrothermal fluids were even hotter, leaving behind tell-tale deposits of gold and silver, as well as antimony, mercury, and arsenic. The various lifeforms have adapted to thrive amid these chemicals, some of which are highly toxic.

Hydrothermal vents are among the most extraordinary environments on Earth — geochemical oases on the seafloor where life thrives without sunlight, fuelled instead by chemical energy. They overturn several once-assumed “rules” of biology and offer important clues about evolution, extremophiles, and possibly even the origins of life.~

Malevolent Designer News - Stunning 3D Images of the Yellow Fever Virus Reveal It's Irreducible Complexity - Malevolent Design or Evolution

High-resolution imaging of yellow fever virus reveals structural secrets that could power next-generation vaccines.

UQ scientists uncover secrets of yellow fever - News - The University of Queensland
Scientists at the University of Queensland, Australia, have produced near atomic-level 3D images of the yellow fever virus. These reveal the remarkable complexity that Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski of the Discovery Institute insist constitutes evidence of intelligent design – a theme almost universally endorsed by creationists and forming the central plank of their advocacy for creationism.

They have recently published their findings, open access, in the journal Nature Communications.

So, the obvious question for intelligent design advocates is this: is the irreducible complexity and complex specificity of the yellow fever virus evidence that it was intelligently designed to kill people? Or, when complex specified information and irreducible complexity do harm to humans, do these supposed ‘evidences’ for the existence of an intelligent designer (i.e. a god) somehow cease to apply, even though they benefit the virus? If so, how can a supposedly scientific definition change its meaning depending on the subjective judgement of what is being specified and how much or how little it benefits humans?

Unintelligent Design - The Design Blunder That Causes Many Diseases - Malevolence or Incompetence?

Glutathionylated mtDNA

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.1)

New type of DNA damage found in our cells’ powerhouses | UCR News | UC Riverside

Scientists led by the University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside) have identified a previously unknown form of DNA damage in mitochondria that may underlie a wide range of disorders linked to mitochondrial dysfunction. Their findings have just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Mitochondria contain their own DNA (mtDNA), which is essential for the proper functioning of these organelles that convert glucose into ATP, supplying cells with the energy needed to power metabolic processes.

The culprit is a large molecule, glutathionylate, which attaches to DNA and, if left unrepaired, can cause mutations. Researchers at UC Riverside, working with colleagues at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, found that glutathionylated mtDNA accumulates in mitochondria at levels up to 80 times higher than in the cell nucleus. In short, the nuclear DNA repair system is vastly more efficient than its mitochondrial counterpart.

For advocates of Intelligent Design (ID), this discovery—if they understood it rather than dismissing it as part of an imagined conspiracy to undermine their faith—creates an acute theological problem. If we temporarily grant the core assumption of ID creationism, that a supernatural designer indistinguishable from the allegedly omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent god of the Bible and Qur’an is responsible for the design of mitochondrial DNA and its replication machinery, then only two coherent conclusions follow:

• the designer is incompetent, having failed to produce fault-free mtDNA and an adequate repair mechanism, despite supposedly managing this for nuclear DNA; or
• the designer could have produced fault-free mtDNA but chose instead to create error-prone mtDNA and a weak repair process, thereby intentionally designing disease and suffering—in other words, malevolence.

Moreover, the very need for a repair system betrays the absence of omnipotent, intelligent engineering. It is characteristic instead of the layered complexity produced by cumulative, unplanned evolutionary processes, which inevitably yield sub-optimal compromises.

The notion of an omniscient designer also rules out the excuse that the harmful consequences were unforeseeable. An all-knowing creator would have foreseen them; yet, according to ID logic, the designer implemented them regardless—designing mitochondrial DNA to fail and cause disease.

Thus, a biological phenomenon that fits seamlessly within the framework of evolutionary theory becomes an insurmountable theological obstacle for ID advocates, who must contort the evidence to suit a predetermined conclusion while catering to a scientifically illiterate and credulous audience.

Refuting Creationism - 'Lucy' Had a Cousin Species Who Lived Alongside Her

The Burtele Foot with its elements in the anatomical position.

Photo by Yohannes Haile-Selassie/ASU

New research by ASU paleoanthropologists: 2 ancient human ancestors were neighbors | ASU News.

According to new open-access research just published in Nature by a team led by Arizona State University palaeoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie, ‘Lucy’ (Australopithecus afarensis) was not the only hominin living on the Ethiopian Highlands 3.4 million years ago. This was part of the vast span of human evolutionary history that occurred long before creationists believe Earth was made as a small, flat world with a dome over it somewhere in the Middle East. Living alongside ‘Lucy’ was another species, now named Australopithecus deyiremeda.

However, A. deyiremeda differed from A. afarensis in several important ways — differences that reflect how two species can coexist in the same region by adapting to distinct ecological niches. A. deyiremeda, for instance, had an opposable big toe suited to climbing, indicating a more arboreal lifestyle than A. afarensis. Isotope analysis of A. deyiremeda’s teeth also shows that it had a different diet.

The first indication that another species might be present came in 2009 with the discovery of foot bones, announced publicly in 2012. In palaeontology, it is standard practice not to name a new species based on such fragmentary remains, especially when cranial bones are absent. Although teeth were also found in the same area, there was initially insufficient evidence to link them definitively to the foot bones.

Then, in 2015, the team had enough material to announce and name the new species, though they were still unable to demonstrate that the foot bones belonged to it. Now, ten years on, they believe they finally have sufficient fossil evidence to make that connection.

This news is unlikely to trouble creationists, who already have a ready supply of scientifically baseless excuses for dismissing ‘Lucy’: that it was forged; that scientists fabricated the evidence; that it was assembled from scattered bones found six miles apart; that ‘carbon dating’ was used (despite not being applicable at that age); or that radioactive decay rates have changed in the last 6,000–10,000 years, making 6,000 years only appear to be 3.4 million.

For those with the intellectual honesty and humility to form opinions based on evidence, however, the discovery offers a fascinating example of how multiple ancient hominins coexisted — and, in evolutionary terms, how two species sharing a common ancestor can diverge to occupy different ecological niches.

Unintelligent Design - Higher Yielding Wheat - If Humans Can Do it, Why Didn't Creationism's 'Desiger'?

By kallerna - Own work CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Wheat That Makes Its Own Fertilizer | UC Davis

Scientists at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) have developed a strain of wheat capable of producing its own nitrate fertiliser, thereby increasing yields and reducing the amount of artificial nitrate that needs to be applied to fields. They achieved this by harnessing the nitrogen-fixing abilities of common soil bacteria that convert atmospheric nitrogen into nitrates in a form plants can absorb. Their research is published, open access, in the Plant Biotechnology Journal.

We seem to have been here before, observing how a food crop or domesticated animal could have been far more productive or better suited to human needs had it been given a more efficient “design” to begin with. In fact, virtually all our cultivated plants and domesticated animals have been profoundly reshaped by human selection, using the same biological principles as natural selection: favouring advantageous genes and eliminating those that are less so.

The new wheat strain produces nutrients that support anaerobic bacteria similar to those found in the root nodules of legumes such as peas and beans. These bacteria thrive in the low-oxygen environment of specialised nodules, where they fix nitrogen for the host plant. Wheat, however, lacks such nodules, and attempts to transfer nodule-forming genes from legumes have so far been unsuccessful. Instead, this new approach encourages nitrogen-fixing bacteria to live in close association with the wheat root system, effectively bypassing the need for nodules altogether.

This raises an awkward question for Intelligent Design creationists who equate their designer deity with the allegedly omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent god of the Bible, Torah, and Qur’an. Why didn’t this deity simply give crops like wheat and other staple foods the genes the bacteria use, or at least give them the genes required to host nitrogen-fixing bacteria directly, rather than devising an unnecessarily complex symbiosis only some plants can use? And if, for some reason, these were impossible, why didn’t it create a system resembling the one now designed by the UC Davis researchers?

As with so much in nature that ID proponents like to cite as evidence of complexity—and therefore design—closer inspection typically reveals solutions that are suboptimal, needlessly intricate, and often wasteful. As I point out in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax, these are not hallmarks of intelligent engineering, which should aim for minimal complexity and maximal efficiency. Instead, they are entirely consistent with an undirected evolutionary process that tinkers with what already exists, with no foresight and with success measured solely by reproductive output.

The simple fact is that humans, using intelligence, can and do devise more efficient, sensible solutions than those found in nature—as the UC Davis team has demonstrated. Such solutions ought to have been obvious to any genuinely omniscient designer.

This leaves creationists with a stark dilemma: must they conclude that their designer god is incompetent, unable to anticipate future needs, or malevolent in withholding solutions that would benefit humanity? Or is it more plausible that these biological systems arose through the natural evolutionary processes they insist “don’t work”?

Refuting Creationism - Kissing Goodbye to Childish Superstitions

[left caption]

[right caption]

Ape ancestors and Neanderthals likely kissed, new analysis finds | University of Oxford

Researchers have shown that kissing emerged early in the human evolutionary lineage, and that Neanderthals, along with other close relatives in our tangled family tree, almost certainly kissed as well.

Kissing is an intriguing behaviour, widely assumed to serve important social functions that outweigh the obvious drawbacks of exchanging microbes and viruses.

The team, led by Dr Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist in Oxford University’s Department of Biology, based their conclusion on the principle that when two species on separate branches of the primate family tree share a behaviour, it was likely present in their common ancestor. This approach indicates that kissing arose among the ancestors of the great apes between 21.5 and 16.9 million years ago. Their findings were published very recently in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

Creationists who insist that evolutionary biologists are abandoning the Theory of Evolution—a framework on which this analysis directly relies—may be alarmed to find no evidence of such a retreat. Quite the opposite: the observation that a trait with both costs and benefits will persist when the benefits outweigh the costs neatly explains the evolutionary retention of kissing across several related species.

How We Know The Bible Was Wrong - Creationists Dogged by DNA And Fossil Evidence

Sharma the Wolf

From The Girl and the Wolf,
By Bill Hounslow

Dogs 10,000 years ago roamed with bands of humans and came in all shapes and sizes

This is the first of two articles published in The Conversation concerning the origins of domestic dogs and the myriad different breeds that have been developed under human agency since wolves were first domesticated. Neither of them is good news for creationists for several reason.

Firstly, the DNA evidence points to a history much older that the simple tale origin tale in the Bible allows for - a history stretching back some 11,000 years or more to before creationists believe anything existed.

Secondly, and this is something that I have found creationists will always run away from - if God supposedly created all animals for the benefit of humans, why have we had to modify them to such an extent that in many cases they are scarcely recognisable from their wild ancestors? Did God not know what we would use them for or what designs would be best suited for different purposes?

The answer of course, is that the Bible stories are just that - stories. They were never intended to be written down and bound together in a book later declared, by people with a personal stake who needed a spurious 'God-given' authority to take control of society, to be the inerrant word of a creator god and therefore definitive history and science textbooks. Their complete misalignment with observable reality should be more than a clue that the latter is wrong.

This article by two of the authors involved in the first study - Carly Ameen, a lecturer in Bioarchaeology, University of Exeter and Allowen Evin, CNRS Research Director, Bioarchaeology, Université de Montpellier. Together with a large group of colleagues they have just published their study in Science. Their article in The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Creationism Refuted - Neanderthals Didn't Disappear - They Became Us

A simple analytical model for Neanderthal disappearance due to genetic dilution by recurrent small-scale immigrations of modern humans | Scientific Reports

One of the enduring myths cherished by creationists is that humans appeared suddenly, as a distinct and immutable species, untouched by the messy processes of evolution. Yet study after study continues to reveal just how fluid and interconnected the human story really is. The latest comes from three researchers - Andrea Amadei, Giulia Lin, and Simone Fattorini - who have just published a fascinating analytical model in Scientific Reports explaining how the Neanderthals did not simply “vanish,” but were gradually absorbed into the expanding population of early modern humans.

This idea is not new, as I have reported before in this blog here and here, but what is new is this analytical model that shows how easily it happened. The model shows that repeated, small-scale migrations of Homo sapiens into Neanderthal territories would have resulted in gradual genetic dilution over time, without any need for violent extermination or sudden extinction events. Their DNA lives on in our genomes today — in Europeans, Asians, and other non-African populations — a genetic signature of our shared ancestry.

This finding adds yet another layer to the mounting evidence that humanity is not the product of divine design without ancestry but of evolutionary blending and adaptation. The neat, separate categories that creationists like to imagine simply never existed. Instead, what we see is a continuum of populations interacting, interbreeding, and shaping one another’s evolutionary fate. Rather than distinct “kinds,” humans and Neanderthals were part of a dynamic, interconnected lineage shaped by migration and time — the very processes that creationist dogma denies.

Far from the simplistic tale of a single miraculous creation, the history of our species is one of mixture, movement, and gradual transformation — precisely what evolution predicts, and precisely what the fossil and genetic evidence confirms.

Refuting Creationism - The Universe Doesn't Need a God to Program It

In the film The Matrix, about a computer-simulated world, the red and blue pills symbolize a choice the hero must make between illusion and the truth of reality.

Photo by ANIRUDH on Unsplash.

UBCO study debunks the idea that the universe is a computer simulation - UBC's Okanagan News

Creationists who want to believe that science and theology are compatible often resort to a pantheistic-style argument: that although the universe clearly operates according to the laws of physics, those laws must have been set by a creator deity of some kind. A modern twist on this theme is the claim that the universe, and everything within it, is in fact a vast computer simulation — and that “God” is the programmer. This is, of course, an argument that challenges science to prove a negative: to demonstrate that the universe *isn’t* a simulation.

What creationists are doing here is trying to prise open a gap — any gap — into which they can insert their god.

Now, four scientists at the University of British Columbia believe they have effectively closed that gap by putting the “simulation hypothesis” to the test against the null hypothesis. One of the them is the renowned atheist physicist Dr Lawrence M. Krauss, author of several books and articles debunking creationist ideas, including A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, which dismantles the notion that there had to be a ‘prime mover’ for the universe to exist.

Refuting Creationism - Ancient Teeth Show Mixed Origins Of A Transitional Hominin - 2 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Paranthropus robustus

Parathropus robustus (Artist's impression)

Bary Davies, RCA

New clues from 2 million-year-old tooth enamel tell us more about an ancient relative of humans

Human evolution isn’t a tidy staircase; it’s a branching, tangled tree full of transitional forms. And now, cutting-edge protein analysis from two-million-year-old teeth has revealed that Paranthropus robustus — one of our distant cousins — carried mixed ancestry, adding powerful new evidence to the evolutionary story creationists work so hard to deny.

If there is anything guaranteed to send a creationist into a fit of denial — desperately trying to redefine basic terms such as “transitional”, “species”, and “evolution”, and, as a last resort, claiming palaeontologists must have faked the evidence — it is the discovery of a transitional species in human evolutionary history.

But the hominin fossil record, like the evolutionary record for most living species, is absolutely packed with transitional forms. In fact, there are so many in human palaeontology that it can be difficult to single out one that is clearly more ‘transitional’ than the rest, because they form a fairly smooth continuum from the australopiths through to the genus Homo, just as we would expect of a slow process unfolding over tens of thousands or millions of years.

However, one species, Paranthropus robustus, stands out for its mosaic of features consistent with a lineage intermediate between the common ancestor of chimpanzees and hominins and the australopiths that followed.

And this mosaic has now been expanded to include genetic-level evidence, thanks to advances in palaeoproteomics. Proteins can persist far longer than DNA, yet they retain a direct correspondence to DNA via RNA, which encodes their amino-acid sequences. Once ancient proteins have been recovered and analysed, researchers can work backwards to reconstruct the RNA, and therefore the DNA, that produced them.

Using proteins extracted from the tooth enamel of four P. robustus fossils, researchers led by the University of Copenhagen have shown that these individuals themselves had mixed ancestry — indicating interbreeding with contemporaneous relatives, just as we now know happened among later hominin species, and almost certainly among the australopiths too.

Refuting Creationism - A Frightening Image for Batty Creationists on Halloween

RCW 94, RCW 95

European Southern Observatory

This chart shows the location of the RCW 94 and RCW 95 nebulae between the Circinus and Norma constellations. This map shows most of the stars visible to the unaided eye under good conditions. The location of the nebulae is marked with a red circle.

ESO, IAU and Sky & Telescope

New image captures spooky bat signal in the sky | ESO

For Bible literalists who insist on clinging to the absurd and demonstrably false belief that the Bible is an inerrant science textbook, the latest image from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Survey Telescope (VST) in Chile may induce a bout of cognitive dissonance — and fittingly so, given that it's Halloween. The image shows an immense ‘bat’ shape appearing to hover ominously in space.

But fear not — this ‘bat’ is simply a striking example of pareidolia. In reality, it’s a vast cloud of interstellar gas. And even if it *were* a cosmic creature flapping its wings across the heavens, it’s about 100,000 light-years away, meaning we’re seeing it as it appeared when our early African ancestors were honing the physical and social capabilities that would one day enable them to successfully migrate into colder Eurasian environments. Or, if you prefer the creationist timeline, roughly 90,000 years before ‘Creation Week’.

The so-called ‘bat’, properly known as the RCW 94/95 nebulae, is a stellar nursery. The young stars forming within it emit intense, ionising radiation that excites the hydrogen atoms in the surrounding gas, causing them to glow a vivid red.

If they could see it, which they couldn't, of course, because they lacked the technology, imagine the terror the Bronze Age authors of the Genesis tales would have felt seeing an image like that hovering over the Middle Eastern night sky. They cowered in a demon-haunted world in which natural phenomena were attributed to supernatural gods, so something like that might well have started a new religion.

Refuting Creationism - Earth - Fine-Tuned for Disaters

Scientists find proof that an asteroid hit the North Sea over 43 million years ago | Heriot-Watt University

According to new findings reported in a paper in Nature Communications, a mere 43 million years before creationists believe their god created a small flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle East and fine-tuned it for (human) life, an event occurred which, had it happened today, would have been an almost unimaginable global catastrophe.

A 160-metre-wide asteroid or comet struck what is now the southern North Sea, about 80 miles off the coast of Yorkshire, creating Silverpit crater — a 3 km-wide impact crater surrounded by a 20 km zone of concentric faults. The resulting tsunami, exceeding 100 metres in height, would have swamped the coastal regions bordering the North Sea: the Low Countries (the Netherlands and Belgium), northern France, Denmark, Norway, and much of eastern England and Scotland.

If such an impact were to occur today, it would devastate major population centres and send massive tidal waves surging up major European rivers such as the Rhine and Thames. The death toll would be in the tens of millions, and the resulting economic and infrastructural collapse would almost certainly tip Europe and the UK into terminal decline.

Just 23 million years earlier, another impact event at Chicxulub crater, on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, had exterminated 75 % of all species, including all but the avian dinosaurs. This catastrophe plunged the world into a prolonged global winter, radically reshaping the trajectory of life on Earth and enabling mammals and birds to supplant reptiles as the dominant vertebrate groups.

And all this, on a planet in a universe which creationists insist — in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary — was created perfect for human life by a benevolent god who wanted the best possible world for his “special creation”. That comforting narrative seems curiously blind to the frequent natural disasters inherent to a tectonically active planet orbiting in a cosmic shooting gallery of drifting rocks and icy bodies.

The origins of the Silverpit Crater have been debated since its discovery in 2002. Early hypotheses suggested that movement of subsurface salt or volcanic collapse of the seabed might explain its structure. Now, a research team led by Dr Uisdean Nicholson, a sedimentologist at Heriot-Watt University, together with Dr Tom Dunkley Jones of University of Birmingham, believe they have finally settled the debate: the crater was formed by the impact of an extraterrestrial body.

What Were the Chances of Abiogenesis? - Prempting Creationist Misrepresentations

What Were the Chances of Abiogenesis? - Universe Today

One of the oldest and most persistent tactics in creationist and intelligent design (ID) rhetoric is to invoke vast “improbabilities” to suggest that life could not have arisen naturally. The argument usually goes something like this: the odds of complex life emerging by chance are astronomically low, therefore it must have been designed. This is a textbook example of a false dichotomy — and it often rests on simplistic, outdated models of how abiogenesis is understood. A recent preprint by Robert G. Endres, reported by Universe Today, has already begun to circulate in ID circles as supposed “evidence” of just such improbability. But when read carefully, the paper does something very different: it provides a mathematical framework for understanding how life could arise, where the real constraints lie, and why the old “pure chance” caricature of abiogenesis is scientifically untenable.

In the abstract to his paper in arXiv, Enders says:

Abstract
The origin of life on Earth via the spontaneous emergence of a protocell prior to Darwinian evolution remains a fundamental open question in physics and chemistry. Here, we develop a conceptual framework based on information theory and algorithmic complexity. Using estimates grounded in modern computational models, we evaluate the difficulty of assembling structured biological information under plausible prebiotic conditions. Our results highlight the formidable entropic and informational barriers to forming a viable protocell within the available window of Earth’s early history. While the idea of Earth being terraformed by advanced extraterrestrials might violate Occam’s razor from within mainstream science, directed panspermia—originally proposed by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel—remains a speculative but logically open alternative. Ultimately, uncovering physical principles for life’s spontaneous emergence remains a grand challenge for biological physics.

Because we can guarantee that this article will be misrepresented by creationists who will make claims not supported by the paper, I asked ChatGPT for an objective evaluation of the article in Universe Today and Endres arXiv paper:

The following article looks suspiciously like a creationist argument based on notional improbabilities* Can you produce an objective evaluation of it, please.
https://www.universetoday.com/articles/what-were-the-chances-of-abiogenesis

Here is an objective evaluation of the article “What Were the Chances of Abiogenesis?” (by Mark Thompson, published on Universe Today) and the underlying pre-print paper by Robert G. Endres (arXiv:2507.18545). I’ll identify what the article does well, where it is weaker, and how one might interpret it in light of your interest (refuting creationism / intelligent-design arguments).

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

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

Illustration © Henry Sharpe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creationism Refuted - Now It's A Transitional Dinosaur - Khankhuuluu The Dragon Prince

An artist's impression of Khankhuuluu mongoliensis

Masato Hattori

An artist's impression of the newly discovered dinosaur

Julius Csotonyi

Paleontologists from the University of Calgary identify closest-known ancestor to Tyrannosaurs | EurekAlert!

Two new papers announced today will have creationists scratching their heads as they try to decide which technique for dismissing them will meet with the most approval from their fellow cultists.

The first, in Nature, concerns yet another of those supposedly non-existent transitional fossils which, because Charles Darwin predicted they would be found, must be dismissed at all costs. It comes in the form of an 86-million-year-old dinosaur fossil from Mongolia that is intermediate between the small, fleet-footed predatory dinosaurs and the larger apex predators — the tyrannosaurs.

The usual creationist response is to declare that these intermediate fossils are “not transitional; they are fully formed, created species.” Of course, that doesn’t explain why species that are intermediate between ancestral and descendant species show a mosaic of features from both. Presumably, given their parody of evolution — in which evolution is imagined as a single event where one species suddenly turns into another — they expect an intermediate to be half one and half the other: the equivalent of the “crocoduck” or a chimpanzee with a human head. In reality, this discovery shows exactly what we would expect from the fossil record of tyrannosaur evolution 86 million years ago.

It's also important to creationism that the so-called 'missing link' stays missing. It is only ever referred to in the singular and refers to some supposed link between apes and humans, and it is definitely not one of the many archaic African hominins. But of course, every fossil is the 'link' or transitional form between its parents and its offspring because evolution is a process, not the parody event of creationism, evolving species form a continuum, and this discovery from Mongolia is no exception.

Refuting Creationism - Waving Goodbye To Childish Superstitions

The Milky Way.

ESA - Gaia discovers our galaxy’s great wave

Astronomers, using data from the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Gaia space telescope, have discovered a vast wave passing through the Milky Way Galaxy, spreading out from the centre like ripples in a pond but with a wave length of about 13,000 light-years. The origins of this wave are still a matter for speculation and will require further data before they can be determined.

With evidence such as this, only a creationist eager to prove that they’re too tough to be persuaded by mere facts could believe that the description of the universe in Genesis is a complete and accurate account of reality, far surpassing in accuracy and reliability anything that science can produce. And only someone desperate to believe it could imagine that the description in Genesis is some sort of metaphor or allegory with a deeper meaning, rather than a hopelessly bad guess made by ignorant Bronze Age storytellers.

How our knowledge of the Milky Way has improved over time is a measure of the extraordinary progress cosmology has made in just over a century. When Albert Einstein was writing his papers on relativity, it was widely assumed that the Milky Way *was* the universe. Then, about a hundred years ago, astronomers discovered that the galaxy rotates around a centre, and in the 1950s it was found to be warped. Meanwhile, Edwin Hubble demonstrated that the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies and that the universe is vastly larger than previously imagined — and still expanding. Now, we can detect the motions of stars within the galaxy that reveal this ripple spreading outwards.

Meanwhile, Bible literalists are stuck with an understanding that has not advanced since the Bronze Age, based on a book which says Earth is fixed and immobile at the centre of everything, and that the stars are tiny lights attached to a dome over the world. Until around 600 years ago, the Church vigorously persecuted anyone who argued otherwise, desperate to preserve its power based on the claim that its holy book was the inerrant word of God. It was not until 1992 that the Catholic Church finally admitted that Galileo Galilei was right — 41 years after it had accepted the evidence for the Big Bang. Such is the muddle that religious dogma based on ancient, evidence-free superstitions creates.

The news of the wave spreading across the Milky Way comes in the form of a paper in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and a news release from ESA.

Refuting Creationism - Eating Carrion Made Us Human

Factors influencing scavenging behavior in humans.

Carmen Cañizares (@canitanatura).

Eating carrion made us human | CENIEH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creationism Refuted - Why Creationists Cling To Easily Disproven Claims - It's All About Weak People Needing To Appear Strong

Winning with misinformation: New research identifies link between endorsing easily disproven claims and prioritizing symbolic strength

Anyone who values facts as the foundation of rational opinion will quickly grow frustrated trying to reason creationists out of their infantile beliefs with information. The problem, according to a paper recently published in the Journal of Social Psychology, is that creationists—like antivaxxers, conspiracy theorists, climate change deniers, flat-earthers, and those who believe Donald Trump will “make America great again”—see it as a weakness to ‘give in’ to reason. For them, it is a sign of strength to resist facts and cling defiantly to beliefs that can be easily disproven.

This reflex stems from an underlying sense of vulnerability in the face of complex information and a perception that science is attempting to manipulate them into conforming to mainstream knowledge. For such individuals, the priority is not to hold factually correct, verifiable beliefs—anyone can do that—but to assert symbolic strength by being contrary.

And what better evidence of that superior strength is there than persuading someone else to agree with you - by any means available?

Unfortunately, the full journal article is behind a paywall. However, two of the four authors have also written an accessible article in The Conversation, which is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Tracking Dinosaurs In Oxfordshire - 166 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Aerial view of the trackway at Dewars Farm Quarry, Oxfordshire

Credit: Richard Butler,
University of Birmingham.

Oxford researchers return to the Jurassic Highway | University of Oxford

Members of the 2025 excavation team

One of the sauropod trackways.

Photos: Emma Nicholls.

Oxfordshire, where I was born and spent the first twenty-odd years of my life, is steeped in fossil history. Notably, the lower jaw of the very first named dinosaur — Megalosaurus bucklandii — was discovered in Stonesfield, in the quaintly named valley, Bag's Bottom, the centre of the former Stonesfield slate industry, just about a mile and a half from my childhood home in the hamlet of Fawler.

About 166 million years ago, in the Middle Jurassic, much of the region now known as Oxfordshire lay under a warm, shallow sea. A sandbar separated it from the open ocean, forming a tranquil lagoon. Sediment slowly accumulated, forming limestone that preserved innumerable small molluscs. Even today, you can spot their fossilised shells in the drystone walls built from that same limestone — a subtle but constant reminder of deep time.

When I was a teenager, I would take the grandsons of the renowned palaeoanthropologist and former President of the Royal Society, Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, on fossil-hunting excursions. One disused quarry, rich in fossil mussels, coiled snails and bivalves, became a familiar haunt. But nothing we ever uncovered then compares to what has just been unearthed at Dewars Farm Quarry, between Middleton Stoney and Ardley. Dubbed the “Oxfordshire Dinosaur Highway,” this newly announced discovery appears to be the longest dinosaur trackway known in Europe, at 220 metres.

The work was conducted by a team of palaeontologists co-led by Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH) and The University of Birmingham. Unsurprisingly, this find challenges certain creationist narratives and casually refuted the Bible creation myth. The announcement was recently made in an Oxford University news release.