Malevolent Design - How Ovarian Cancer Looks Intelligently Designed to Spread Rapidly

Creationism's intelligent designer at work

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Cancer cells (red) stick to mesothelial cells (green) and form hybrid spheres that cut into surrounding abdominal tissue.

Credit: Uno et al., 2026

Scientists now know why ovarian cancer spreads so rapidly in the abdomen | Nagoya University

If intelligent design advocates were honest enough to follow the logic of their own arguments and apply it consistently to the real world, they ought to be acutely embarrassed by the deity they are presenting to the public. Their putative designer god, judged by the evidence they themselves cite, looks less like a benevolent engineer and more like the author of suffering, disease, and death.

That uncomfortable reality is illustrated by yet another research paper showing that pain and mortality can be the direct result of the very things ID proponents celebrate as hallmarks of design: irreducible complexity and “complex specified information”.

This latest example comes from scientists at Nagoya University, Japan, who have shown how ovarian cancer forms an alliance with healthy cells that enables it to spread rapidly to other organs in the abdomen. Their paper has just been published in Science Advances.

As regular readers will be aware, a recurring theme of this blog is that ID advocates conspicuously ignore the vast number of examples from parasitology, oncology, and genetics where the very evidence they cite for an intelligent designer applies just as readily to diseases caused by parasites, pathogens, and genetic malfunctions. Applying ID’s own logic, these are not signs of benevolent craftsmanship but evidence of something far darker — a malevolent intent behind the supposed designer.

The paper in Science Advances is yet another case in point, and doubtless there will be many more soon.

The authors discovered that ovarian cancer cells gather clusters of mesothelial cells from the peritoneum and form hybrid spheres. These protect the cancer cells, help them invade other organs, and create a pathway for metastasis throughout the abdomen. Worse still, these hybrid spheres resist chemotherapy more effectively than cancer cells alone.

If something this complex resulted in something beneficial for humans, Discovery Institute fellows Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski would doubtless have produced one or more books about it, written magazine articles, and embarked on television tours explaining how the finding devastates “Darwinism” and constitutes scientific proof of an intelligent designer — leaving their audiences in no doubt that the locally favoured god is the only entity capable of producing such complexity.

As it is, we can expect only a deafening silence from the Discovery Institute, while their hapless supporters cast about for a fundamentalist religious excuse such as “the Fall”, or perhaps invoke some other evil agent — anything, in fact, except the god of the Bible, who is apparently only credited with designing good things.

Refuting Creationism - Conflict and Ritual Killings In Europe - Evidence That Wouldn't Be There If The Bible Tales Were True

Locations of the massacres.

From: Teresa Fernández-Crespo et al. (2025).

New research reconstructs the identity of victims from one of the earliest victory celebrations in Europe. | School of Archaeology

Of course — and this is a really strong draft already: clear, punchy, and very much in your usual style. I’ve just smoothed the grammar, corrected spelling, tightened a few phrases, and made the flow a little more polished while keeping your voice intact. Evidence revealed in a paper just published in Science Advances tells a grim story of ritualised killings in Europe about 6,000 years ago. The paper is the work of a team led by Dr Teresa Fernández-Crespo of the University of Valladolid, a Research Associate at Oxford’s School of Archaeology, together with Professor Rick J. Schulting of Oxford University. The killings appear to have been carried out as a victory celebration or demonstration of power, and they speak of conflict and struggles for regional dominance between rival Neolithic groups.

Two things about this research should trouble creationists who cling to patently absurd beliefs despite the vast array of evidence showing them to be wrong.

Firstly, this ritual slaughter took place at a time when, according to the biblical narrative, there would supposedly have been too few people on the planet to form rival groups competing for power and territory in Europe.

Secondly, none of this evidence ought to exist at all if the genocidal Flood described in Genesis had really occurred just a few thousand years ago, because it would either have been swept away entirely or, at best, buried beneath a thick layer of flood-deposited silt containing the fossils of all the dead animals and plants such a catastrophe would have produced.

The isotopic analysis of the remains tells a story of conflict on two levels: rivalry between local groups, in which severed left arms were collected as war trophies, and conflict with outsiders, prisoners from whom were ritually slaughtered in grim victory celebrations.

Refuting Creationism - How The Evidence Refuses To Comply With Creationist Requirements

Reconstruction of life in the Matjes River Rock Shelter, South Africa, 100,000 years ago

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Ten-thousand-year-old genomes from southern Africa change picture of human evolution – Uppsala University

The story emerging from the latest palaeogenomic research reads like a science fiction epic — only it’s real, deep, and immutably ancient. A new study published in Nature reports that prehistoric humans in southern Africa lived in virtual genetic isolation for tens of thousands of years, diverging so far from other branches of Homo sapiens that their genomes fall “outside the range of genetic variation” seen in any living people. These weren’t minor differences; the DNA of individuals who lived south of the Limpopo River for much of the last 100,000–200,000 years retains an astonishing reservoir of variation, some of which has since vanished from other populations.

This isn’t an update to a dusty side-note in human history. It’s a profound rewriting of our origin story. Instead of a simple, uniform lineage emerging neatly from a single place and time, the evidence shows a complex mosaic of populations, genomes and adaptations evolving in parallel, sometimes in long-term isolation, sometimes intermingling. What we once thought of as the “standard” range of human genetic diversity was simply a tiny slice of a much richer prehistoric past.

For those committed to a literal reading of ancient texts like the Bible, discoveries like this pose a stark challenge. The creationist narrative — anchored in a literal six-day creation a few thousand years ago, followed by the dispersion of humankind from a single family — simply cannot grapple with human populations that were genetically distinct for hundreds of millennia before any traditionally assumed timeline. And yet, even here, one predictable excuse will surface: “God planted the evidence as a test of faith.”

That response, however, collapses under the very theological claims it purports to defend. The Bible repeatedly asserts that God is truthful and incapable of deceit — that “God cannot lie” (Titus 1:2; Numbers 23:19; Hebrews 6:18). If we accept those texts at face value, it follows that the Creator would not embed misleading evidence in the earth’s deepest strata as a cosmic trap for intellect. Instead, what we see in the genetic record is precisely what natural processes — mutation, isolation, selection, drift and admixture — predict and what evolutionary theory models with remarkable fidelity.

Refuting Creationism - How A Chance Mutation Allowed The Evolutionary Transition From Invertebrates To Vertebrates

Sea squirt, Ciona intestinalis

Credit: Shunsuke Sogabe

New discovery sheds light on evolutionary crossroads of vertebrates | University of St Andrews news

Researchers from the University of St Andrews, working with colleagues from the University of Aberdeen and the University of Oxford, have identified a pattern of gene evolution that appears to have been crucial to the origin and subsequent diversification of vertebrates from their common ancestry with invertebrates. They have just published their findings in BMC Biology.

This discovery will be a major disappointment for creationists who cling to the notion that there is no evidence for what they call “macroevolution” — a term so ill-defined that it can be stretched to mean whatever a creationist happens to need at the time. Sometimes it is invoked to mean the origin of a new species, at other times a new genus, an entire new order, or even the biologically absurd idea of one species giving birth to an individual belonging to a completely different order. More often, though, “macroevolution” is said to mean the origin of entirely new anatomical structures.

Even that definition collapses immediately under scrutiny. Asked what novel structure humans possess that chimpanzees lack, “macroevolution” abruptly becomes the evolution of anything creationists choose to label a “kind” — another conveniently nebulous term, defined precisely nowhere and flexibly everywhere.

Yet if the origin and diversification of vertebrates does not qualify as “macroevolution”, it is difficult to imagine what possibly could. The St Andrews–led team has shown that this transition was enabled by gene evolution — that is, mutation acted upon by natural selection — affecting the genetic control of cell signalling during embryonic development. These changes influence when and where new cell types arise as a developing embryo progresses from a single-celled zygote to a complex multicellular organism, complete with differentiated tissues and specialised organs.

As this gene regulatory system evolved, it allowed the vertebrate phylum to diversify into the many classes and orders that now dominate marine and terrestrial ecosystems. No doubt this will require yet another round of misrepresentation by creationists, along with further blurring of the already elastic definitions of “macroevolution” and “kinds”.

Creationism Refuted - How The Fossil Record Tracks Climate Change

Tata Aka (CC BY 2.0)
via Wikimedia Commons

The climate in Catalonia was much rainier 10 million years ago - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - UAB Barcelona

A paper published a few days ago in the Journal of Mammalian Evolution describes how the climate in Catalonia was much wetter 10 million years ago than it is today, with rainfall roughly twice the present rate, and how this was reflected in the evolution of mammals in the region. The study was conducted by palaeontologists at the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP-CERCA), in association with colleagues from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).

This must be deeply frustrating for creationists because, no matter how much they ignore the evidence, misrepresent it, or shout abuse at scientists, the evidence stubbornly refuses to support creationism and invariably supports evolution over deep time on an ancient Earth. The findings presented in this paper are, of course, no exception.

Scientists have previously established a close link between rainfall and the composition of mammalian communities, with wetter conditions favouring insectivores. Increased rainfall promotes the development of forests, which in turn provide abundant niches for insects and other invertebrates—the primary food source of insectivorous mammals. This relationship between small mammals and climate was first studied in detail by Jan van Dam, an associate researcher at the ICP. Van Dam developed equations that allow both average annual rainfall and its seasonal distribution to be estimated from fossil assemblages of small mammals.

Building on that earlier work, the present study analyses the abundant fossil record of small mammals to reconstruct populations that changed dynamically through time in response to shifting climatic conditions—exactly as predicted by the Theory of Evolution. There is, unsurprisingly, no evidence of spontaneous creation of species, nor of a global biological reset caused by a genocidal flood a few thousand years ago.

Malevolent Design - How Complex Specified Genetic Information and Irreducible Complexity Cause Pancreatic Cancer

Study reveals protein linked to spread of pancreatic cancer through nerves

A paper just published in Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology shows how precisely the sort of complex specified information and irreducible complexity that Discovery Institute fellows William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe proclaim as evidence of intelligent design can instead combine to ensure that pancreatic cancer survives, metastasises, and ultimately kills its victims.

This, of course, is true of many diseases, which simply would not exist unless the right combination of genetic information were present and functioning correctly for the disease itself. Yet creationists routinely compartmentalise their beliefs so that harmful “designs” are excluded and blamed on something else, while only those features that appear to benefit humans are credited to a designer.

In the case of parasites, what is harmful to humans is often beneficial to the parasite, but once again the presence of harm causes the logic of creationist arguments to shift. No longer is this evidence of intelligent design, but of something called “sin”, which appears to operate as an autonomous entity capable not only of corrupting creation but of designing living organisms and manipulating their genomes. The formerly omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient designer god now seems strangely impotent, indolent, or indifferent in the face of this alternative “designer”.

This theology also sits uncomfortably alongside another core fundamentalist belief: that God has a plan for everyone, and that everything that happens in a person’s life occurs as part of this divine plan. Presumably, then, that plan must include any diseases they suffer from, including cancer.

It is therefore difficult to see how creationists can escape the conclusion that their god designs and causes cancer as part of this plan, while continuing to cling to the claim that intelligent design is inherently benevolent.

Refuting Creationism - Stone Tool Sophistication and Multiple Hominin Species in East Asia - 150,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Stone tool manufacture in China

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Discovery challenges long-held beliefs on early human technology in East Asia - Griffith News

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with palaeoanthropologist Michael Petraglia of Griffith University, have just published an open-access paper in Nature Communications presenting evidence of advanced stone-tool technology dating to between 160,000 and 72,000 years ago in China.

This represents a significant shift in our understanding of the development and diversity of stone-tool technologies in East Asia. For many years it was assumed that stone technology in China lacked complexity and sophistication because bamboo provided a more versatile alternative — the so-called “Bamboo Hypothesis”. Archaeologists now have compelling reasons to revise that view.

If there is one thing calculated to excite creationists, it is the fact that scientists frequently change their minds when the evidence changes — an essential feature of the scientific method. In the simplistic binary worldview common to creationism, however, science is either right or wrong. Any revision of conclusions is therefore taken as proof that science is “wrong”, and that creationism wins by default, without needing to provide any supporting evidence of its own.

From this it follows, in the creationist imagination, that if scientists were wrong about stone-tool technology in China, they must also be wrong about human evolution and the age of the Earth. Consequently, the very evidence that caused scientists to revise their views — sophisticated tools securely dated to 160,000–72,000 years ago — must itself also be wrong. Few creationists seem to notice the paradox of arguing that science must be wrong because evidence corrected it, while simultaneously insisting that the correcting evidence is also wrong. Within the confines of the creationist rabbit hole, believing six impossible things before breakfast merely requires practice.

Nevertheless, the evidence from Xigou, in the Danjiangkou Reservoir region of central China, shows that stone-tool manufacture was not only an advanced skill but may also have been practised by more than one species of hominin. By this time, humans had already diversified into several relatively large-brained species, well before modern Homo sapiens had migrated into Eurasia in significant numbers.

The tools themselves show clear evidence of hafting — the fitting of handles to stone implements — representing the earliest known composite tools in East Asia. This implies an ability to plan ahead and to understand how tool performance could be enhanced, combined with a high level of technical skill and craftsmanship.

Refuting Crationism - How Climate Change Shaped the Evolution of Kangaroos And Wallabies

Red-necked wallaby

QUT - Study maps climate-related evolution of modern kangaroos and wallabies

In a clear example of how evolution is driven by environmental change, a study by scientists at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), led by Professor Matthew J. Phillips, has shown how closely the evolution of Australia’s kangaroos and wallabies maps onto the continent’s long-term climate history. Their findings are published in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.

By tracing the climate record over the last 18 million years and comparing it with the fossil record, the team showed that increasing aridity and habitat variability around 7–9 million years ago coincided with the emergence of the macropodines — the group to which most modern kangaroos and wallabies belong. This was followed by the appearance of incipient grasslands around 5–4.5 million years ago, a period that saw a major diversification of kangaroo and wallaby species.

As expected, there is no evidence of sudden creation without ancestors 6,000–10,000 years ago, nor of a wholesale biological reset following a global flood a few thousand years ago. Instead, the record is one of gradual evolution over deep time, driven by environmental change. The long-predicted failure of the Theory of Evolution to explain and make sense of the evidence once again failed to materialise, as it has every time creationists have claimed it was imminent over the past half-century.

Rather than contradicting evolutionary theory, the evidence fits it like a hand in a glove, adding yet another piece to the growing mountain of supporting data. Once again, the underpinning theory of modern biology is shown to be supported by independent lines of evidence from geology, climatology, and palaeontology, all converging on the same conclusion: life has evolved on an ancient planet responding continuously to changing environments.

Refuting Creationism - How The Transitional Ediacaran Biota Slowly Evolved Into The Cambrian Biota

Ediacaran fossils

How Did These Strange, Ancient Organisms Turn into Such Remarkable Fossils? | GSA News Release 26-01

A recent paper published in the journal Geology by three geologists from Yale, led by Dr Lidya G. Tarhan, explains how the soft-bodied Ediacaran biota came to be preserved in such exquisite detail, while the transition to the (mostly) soft-bodied Cambrian biota and the Cambrian diversification are so poorly represented in the fossil record. It turns out that this was due to the particular chemistry of Ediacaran seawater, which enabled dead organisms to be coated and encased in a fine layer of clay that protected and preserved their structure. As ocean chemistry changed, this fortuitous process became progressively less effective.

Creationists love few things more than a gap in scientific knowledge as somewhere to position their favourite god, presumably having been fooled into believing a false dichotomy — either science can currently explain it or God did it — or at least expecting their target audience to be fooled by it. Sadly for creationists, this has created an ever-decreasing number of places in which to force-fit their ever-shrinking little god, as science, with relentless, unstoppable efficiency, fills one gap after another.

One such gap which creationists regularly trot out and misrepresent is the so-called “Cambrian Explosion”, which they have been fooled into believing was a sudden event occurring at an instant in time, before which there were no multicellular organisms and after which a myriad diverse body plans all appeared overnight without ancestry.

This conveniently ignores two important facts: the pre-existing Ediacaran biota, and the fact that the Ediacaran biota transitioned into the Cambrian biota over a period of some 30 million years.

In reality, of course, there is no such gap — it exists only in the minds of those ignorant enough to believe the misrepresentation. However, there is, or rather was, a gap, and one which creationists would probably prefer not to think about. It was the lack of a good explanation for how the soft-bodied Ediacaran biota came to be preserved in the fossil record in such exquisite detail, while the Cambrian “explosion” only looks like a sudden event because so few of the (soft-bodied) transitional forms were preserved.

Certainly, once it began, the Cambrian was a period of exponential diversification during which hard body parts evolved as defensive structures such as shells, spines, and hard exoskeletons; offensive structures such as jaws; and organs of mobility such as limbs and fins. Also evolving were sense organs and nervous systems. It would have been astonishing almost beyond credibility if every step of a rapid diversification of initially soft-bodied organisms had contrived to leave a fossil record of every stage, so all we really have is an infrequent series of snapshots at discrete locations, each capturing a brief moment in a global evolutionary history lasting about 55 million years.

Refuting Creationism - The Unintelligently Designed Ancestral Potato and How Humans Improved It

S. jamesii tubers in a ceremonial basket.

Credit: Alastair Bístoí

S. jamseii flowers

Credit: Tim Lee/NHMU

This wild potato may change the agricultural story in the American Southwest – @theU

Anthropologists at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah have traced the anthropogenic spread and cultivation of a relative of the potato, Solanum jamesii (the Four Corners potato). Their findings are published in PLOS ONE. This plant has been a culinary, medicinally and culturally important food crop across the Colorado Plateau for millennia.

Until now, despite its long history, the extent to which indigenous people domesticated S. jamesii has been unknown. Genetic evidence has shown that it had been transported and cultivated far from its natural range and had acquired frost resistance, longer dormancy and sprouting resilience, all of which made it more suitable for cultivation in its anthropogenic range. The Utah team have now shown how it arrived on the Colorado Plateau from its origins in the south-west USA, probably through a trading network.

A problem which I have found impossible to get a creationist to address without them running for the bolt-hole of ‘mysterious ways’ is the fact that, with only a very few exceptions, every domesticated animal and cultivated plant has been considerably improved on the wild stock and is always the result of a human-mediated evolutionary process. The result is often almost unrecognisable as the same species as their wild ancestor.

Yet according to the Bible, all animals and plants were created for the sole benefit of humankind by a supposedly omnipotent, omniscient god. Had that been so, we could expect them to have been created fit for purpose and perfectly suited to the uses to which we put them. The fact that we have had to adapt them and change them so drastically to make them fit for purpose gives the lie to claims of intelligent design by an omniscient designer.

This relative of the potato therefore serves as an illustration of how humans, unwittingly or otherwise, have modified and changed the distribution of cultivated plants by inadvertently mimicking the process of evolution — mutation → selection → reproduction. S. jamesii is native to the Mogollon Rim, a region spanning south-central Arizona and into the Mogollon Mountains of New Mexico. The researchers were able to build a picture of how this plant was transported from there to the Four Corners region of southern Utah, south-west Colorado and north-west New Mexico by extracting the characteristic starch granules embedded in the stone tools used to process the tubers, recovered from 14 archaeological sites within and beyond the tuber’s natural range.

This research adds to the growing body of evidence that indigenous people in the south-western USA actively cultivated crops of their own and did not just acquire them from other peoples. It had previously been believed that they relied primarily on crops domesticated in Mesoamerica, such as maize, beans or squash. It also adds another species to the long list of plants and animals that have had to be modified from their wild type, and for which creationists are at a loss to explain why their supposed omniscient designer god did not do a very good job of it to begin with.

Creationism Refuted - Messages From Nearly 70,000 Years Ago.

Adhi Agus Oktaviana illuminating a hand stencil.

Max Aubert

Humanity’s oldest known cave art has been discovered in Sulawesi.

There's nothing quite like leaving a message behind to tell future generations that you were here.

Creationists, of course, have a message from about 5,000 years ago telling them that there were ignorant Bronze Age storytellers living in the Middle East — but sadly the only truth in their stories was the one they didn’t explicitly state: that they were making things up to explain what they didn’t know, which meant a great many stories to invent. They couldn’t have guessed, of course, that their tales would later be written down, bound up in a book, and then proclaimed to be the inerrant word of a creator god; otherwise they might have made more of an effort to get it right, or at least admitted they didn’t know. As it is, all we really learn from them is just how ignorant they were, and how vivid their imaginations must have been.

To be fair, it may not have been their intention to mislead and misinform, but that has been the result — mostly, it has to be said, through the fault of those who later declared their tales to be the authentic word of a god, because that conveniently suited their political agenda.

People living much earlier, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, left a much clearer and more honest message in the form of cave art, and particularly hand stencils. All they really say is, “Hi there! I was here!” — with no attempt to elevate themselves to a special status or claim to know things they didn’t know. Where they depicted the animals around them, they showed them just as they saw them: wild and free.

This cave art, which precedes the celebrated art of the French and Spanish caves by tens of thousands of years, has now been identified as the oldest known cave art, telling an unambiguous story of people living there around 70,000 years ago — long before anatomically modern humans made their presence felt in Western Eurasia. The discovery and the methods used to date the art were published in Nature, in a paper that marks a defining moment in our understanding of early symbolic behaviour.

Four of the researchers — Maxime Aubert, Professor of Archaeological Science, Griffith University; Adam Brumm, Professor of Archaeology, Griffith University; Adhi Oktaviana, Research Centre of Archeometry, Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional (BRIN), Jakarta, Indonesia; and Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Professor of Geochronology and Geochemistry, Southern Cross University, New South Wales, Australia — have also written an article in The Conversation that explains the significance of the find in accessible terms. Their piece is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Adding A Little Bit More To The Human Evolutionary Story

Top: Multiple views of MLP-3000-1, the newly discovered Paranthropus partial left mandible and molar crown. Bottom: MLP-3000-1 in side-by-side comparison with mandible fossils from other species — Australopithecus afarensis (A.L. 266-1), Paranthropus aethiopicus (OMO-57/4-1968-41 and OMO-18-1967-18), and early Homo (LD 350-1).

Alemseged Research Group

Two fragments of the newly discovered mandible specimen in the location they were originally found.

Alemseged Research Group.

New 2.6-million-year-old Paranthropus fossil reshapes understanding of early hominins | Biological Sciences Division | The University of Chicago

Research published two days ago in Nature by a team led by University of Chicago paleoanthropologist Professor Zeresenay Alemseged will dismay and delight creationists in about equal measure — especially those who manage to rationalise a fossil dating from about 2.6 million years before they believe Earth and everything on it was created — because it shows that scientists were wrong about something.

It is the news that the jawbone of an archaic hominin, Paranthropus, has been found in Ethiopia some 200 miles further north than the previously believed northern limit of these hominins.

Normally, to a binary-thinking creationist, science being wrong about even the most minor and unimportant detail is “proof” that science is wrong about everything. This childish belief probably stems from them having a single source-book which has been deemed to be inerrant, so even the slightest falsehood in it renders that claim untenable. They assume it is the same with science: that what scientists believe comes from supposedly inerrant textbooks written by “prophets” such as Charles Darwin, serving as the source-books from which all scientists get their information. So, if scientists are ever wrong, all the books from the science libraries of the world can be thrown in the waste bin, leaving creationism’s book of “inerrant” origin myths as the winner.

What they find hard to comprehend, apparently, is that scientific knowledge is cumulative, with current thinking always provisional, pending further confirmation or in need of revision in the light of new information, and that facts are neutral in any dispute, so can be objective referees. They fail to realise that because science works this way, scientists from all over the world will eventually converge on a single answer. Religions, by contrast, because they are not based on evidence but on the tenuous thread of interpretation of an ancient book which itself presents no evidence for its claims, continue to diversify into ever smaller sects, each claiming to have the one true answer but having no evidence to referee the dispute.

But of course, in the best scientific tradition, this jawbone simply adds richness to the hominin evolutionary story and raises the possibility that Paranthropus, like Australopithecus and Homo, was present in the Afar region of Ethiopia. And that opens up the intriguing possibility — given the propensity of hominins to diverge and then hybridise — that modern Homo sapiens could have some Paranthropus ancestry.

Creationism Refuted - An Elephant Bone Tool from 470,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Map of Lower Paleolithic sites with published elephant-bone tools.

Simon A. Parfitt, Silvia M. Bello (2026).

Ancient humans made elephant bone tools in Europe half a million years ago | Natural History Museum

The problems for creationists deepened today with news that two scientists, Simon Parfitt of the UCL Institute of Archaeology and a Scientific Associate at the Natural History Museum, London, and Silvia M. Bello of the Natural History Museum, have discovered an elephant bone tool dating from roughly half a million years ago — the oldest such tool discovered in Europe, from a time before anatomically modern hominins had left Africa. They published their findings in Science Advances.

Of course, most creationists will be blissfully unaware of this discovery, as with all such archaeology, because there is no point in being a creationist if you are going to read the latest scientific discoveries. How is that going to help you cling to patently absurd beliefs despite all the evidence against you? Best just ignore it and dismiss it all as some sort of Satanic conspiracy aimed at making you show weakness and change your mind.

Nevertheless, the fact is that this elephant bone tool exists and has been dated to about 490,000 years before creationism’s favourite book of Bronze Age superstitions says Earth existed. It was used by archaic hominins, probably to sharpen dulled flint tools by gently knapping the cutting edges. It was discovered at Boxgrove, Kent, England, in the early 1990s but was not recognised as a tool until recently, when finds from the Boxgrove site were studied in detail using new technology such as 3D scans and scanning electron microscopy, which revealed impact notches with embedded flint fragments.

Bone, being softer than flint, would have been the material of choice for work where precision was important, and elephant bone, with its hard outer layer of compact bone making it more durable, would have been the bone of choice. However, elephants and mammoths were rare in what is now southern England 500,000 years ago, so these tools would have been valuable objects.

It is not clear which archaic hominins used these tools in southern England, but at 500,000 years ago it was probably one of the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans, which form the “muddle in the middle” of the human evolutionary story. Here the problem is not a lack of fossils but an abundance of them, showing varying mixtures of primitive and derived features typical of transitional species, coming somewhere between Homo erectus and Neanderthals. Candidates are H. heidelbergensis and H. antecessor.

The stone tools from Boxgrove are part of the widespread Acheulean technology, which originated in East Africa about 1.95 million years ago and spread across Africa and into western Eurasia after about 1.5 million years ago, persisting until between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago.

Refuting Creationism - An Evolutionary Arms Race In Space - No Intelligence Involved

This article is best read on a laptop, desktop, or tablet

In this illustration, a phage — a type of virus that infects bacteria — rests on the surface of a host cell. Researchers at UW–Madison designed an experiment for the International Space Station to study how phage-bacteria interactions affect the health of the gut microbiome.

Microbes mutated in space hint at biomedical benefits to humans on Earth – UW–Madison News

In a striking demonstration of the theory of evolution in practice — and something that will have creationists once again insisting on redefining evolution as a theory about one creature turning into an entirely unrelated taxon — an experiment aboard the International Space Station has shown how subtle changes in the environment can dramatically alter an evolutionary trajectory. It also illustrates another major embarrassment for Intelligent Design creationists: evolutionary arms races. Arms races are, of course, utterly incompatible with the idea of an intelligent designer, since running to stand still in a race with yourself is a neat definition of insanity.

Unlike the creationist parody of evolution — carefully engineered to be unprovable because it does not describe what actually happens and what no biologist has ever claimed — the real scientific definition of evolution is simply a change in the frequency of different alleles in a population over time. A definition that creationists know to be irrefutable, hence their persistent attempts to redefine it so that they have something to attack.

The experiment, which had a parallel control on Earth, was designed to observe how bacteriophage viruses that parasitise bacteria and their hosts co-evolved in the microgravity environment of space.

The results have just been published in PLOS Biology. They show that both the T7 phage virus and the E. coli bacteria developed marked genomic differences compared with the Earth-bound populations. The space-station phages gradually accumulated specific mutations that enhanced infectivity or improved their ability to bind receptors on bacterial cells. Meanwhile, the space-station E. coli accumulated mutations that improved resistance to phages and enhanced survival in near-weightless conditions. In other words, what was observed was a genuine evolutionary arms race — and because the environments differed between the space-station populations and the Earth-bound populations, the divergence can be attributed directly to differences in gravity.

The results highlighted another intriguing angle: the mutations that phages and bacteria acquire in space don’t just reveal fundamental evolutionary dynamics, they can also have practical applications for human health on Earth. After 25 days aboard the ISS, both organisms returned with novel mutations not commonly seen under terrestrial gravity, including changes to bacterial surface proteins and corresponding phage adaptations to bind those altered surfaces.

Researchers then engineered phages carrying these space-derived mutations and tested them against bacterial pathogens responsible for urinary tract infections — many of which are now resistant to antibiotics — finding the space-influenced phages were notably effective at killing these otherwise resistant strains. This suggests that the unique selection pressures of microgravity may reveal evolutionary pathways that could be harnessed to design improved therapies for antibiotic-resistant infections back on Earth.

Abiogenesis News - How a Deadly Poison Could Have Created Pre-Biotic Organic Molecules

Frozen hydrogen cyanide ‘cobwebs’ offer clues to origin of life - American Chemical Society

Dedicated creationists will need to find yet another way to dismiss new research by three scientists from the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Their work shows that, under the right conditions, the deadly poison hydrogen cyanide (HCN) could have provided a medium in which pre-biotic organic molecules accumulated on the early Earth. The findings have been published in the journal ACS Central Science.

The difficulty this presents for creationists arises largely from their habitual black-and-white thinking. Abiogenesis must, in their view, either have occurred via some fully specified, preconceived mechanism or be declared “impossible”. Since the only process they are prepared to accept is supernatural intervention by a magic creator, the conclusion is predetermined: any natural explanation must be rejected out of hand.

That claim, however, is trivially easy to refute. Assertions of impossibility collapse as soon as a single plausible natural mechanism is demonstrated. It is not necessary to establish beyond doubt that a particular hypothetical process is exactly what happened on the early Earth; it is sufficient to show that such a process could have occurred without violating known chemistry or physics.

What the Gothenburg team have demonstrated is that, when frozen, the surfaces of hydrogen cyanide crystals become highly reactive and can catalyse chemical reactions that are not possible at higher temperatures. These reactions could have triggered a cascade of further processes, ultimately producing some of the molecular building blocks of proto-cells.

Nor do pre-biotic chemicals necessarily have to originate on Earth itself. Space is also a viable candidate environment: hydrogen cyanide is abundant in interstellar space, as is water, and the low temperatures required for these crystals to form are commonplace. In the presence of water, HCN can polymerise and give rise to amino acids and nucleobases.

How Science Works - Why Did The Woolly Rhino Go Extinct 4,000 Years Before Creation Week?

Woolly rhinoceros, Coelodonta antiquitatis
Grotte Chauvet, Ardèche, France

Source

Woolly rhinoceros, Coelodonta antiquitatis

By Mr Langlois10 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

DNA from wolf pup’s last meal reveals new facts about woolly rhino’s extinction

A new research paper published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, by a team led by palaeogeneticists from the Centre for Palaeogenetics, Stockholm, Sweden, may make uncomfortable reading for any creationists with the courage to read it.

Firstly, it deals with events from that long period of pre-“Creation Week” history — evidence which would not exist if the biblical Flood myth were true. Secondly, it illustrates how, in contrast to the claim that scientists are only permitted to publish findings that conform to a rigid scientific orthodoxy, researchers are perfectly willing to revise established ideas when new evidence demands it. In this case, the study shows that one aspect of what palaeobiologists thought they understood about the evolutionary history of Eurasian megafauna may be wrong.

Unintelligent Design - A Brain 'Designed' for Memory Loss in Old Age

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New Mega-Analysis Reveals Why Memory Declines With Age | Hebrew SeniorLife

A paper published last November in Nature Communications by an international team lead by scientists from the University of Oslo, is just the sort of evidence against intelligent design and for evolution that creationists normally misrepresent, lie about or ignore, because it illustrates the stark difference between what ID creationism predicts and what we see, and of course, what we see is exactly what the Theory of Evolution predicts. And it's another superb example of how the human body refutes the childish notion of intelligent design by a magic invisible designer, many more of which I have included in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design.

There is a persistent tendency among creationists and Intelligent Design advocates to imagine biology as if it were the product of a competent, benevolent engineer, optimised for lifelong performance and reliability. Real organisms, however, stubbornly refuse to behave like that. Evolution does not design for comfort, longevity, or even cognitive elegance; it shapes traits that maximise reproductive success in the environments in which our ancestors actually lived. Once reproduction has occurred and offspring are independent, the force of natural selection weakens dramatically. From that point on, biological systems are increasingly free to accumulate compromises, trade-offs, and outright failures — not because they are useful, but because there is little evolutionary incentive to eliminate them.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the ageing human brain. Memory, learning, and cognitive flexibility are exquisitely tuned for early and mid-life, precisely when they matter most for survival, social navigation, and reproduction. Later in life, however, those same systems reveal a striking lack of long-term maintenance. This is not a mystery, nor is it a design flaw crying out for a supernatural explanation. It is exactly what evolutionary theory predicts under mechanisms such as antagonistic pleiotropy, mutation accumulation, and the diversion of finite biological resources away from indefinite repair and towards reproduction. In short, evolution produces brains that are *good enough* for long enough — not brains that are guaranteed to remain intact into old age.

That expectation is strongly reinforced by the paper in Nature Communications, which combines large-scale neuroimaging and cognitive data to examine why memory reliably declines with age even in otherwise healthy adults. Rather than pointing to a single failing component or a neatly isolated genetic “defect”, the study reveals a diffuse pattern of structural brain change, with memory loss emerging from the cumulative erosion of multiple interconnected regions. This kind of widespread, variable vulnerability is exactly what an evolutionary framework anticipates — and exactly the opposite of what Intelligent Design would lead us to expect. What follows is not evidence of poor design, but evidence of no design at all: only the predictable consequences of evolution’s ruthless focus on reproductive success early in life, and its indifference to what happens long after that job is done.

Creationism Refuted - What Was Happening In Australia Long Before 'Creation Week'

An ancient Australian landscape shaped by millions of years of slow erosion, Kalbarri National Park, Western Australia.

Maximilian Dröllner

Binocular microscopic images of zircon crystals separated from various studied rocks: (a) gabbro A1: P4, A2: S20; (b) porphyritic granite, B1: S1, B2: L1, B3: S5, B4: S6; (c) fine-grained granite, C1: L3, C2: S12, C3: S7, C4: S12; (d) mylonitic granite, D1: S4, D2: S5, D3: L5, D4: P2; (e) leucocratic granitoid, E1: S3, E2: L5, E3: G1, E4: P2; bars: 100 m.

Shahbazi, Hossein; et al. (2014)

A ‘cosmic clock’ in tiny crystals has revealed the rise and fall of Australia’s ancient landscapes

The Bronze Age creation myths preserved in the Bible assert that Earth is only some 6,000–10,000 years old, depending on how the text is interpreted. The difficulty for those who insist on treating the Bible as literal history is that these claims are casually and repeatedly refuted by real-world evidence. That leaves creationists with few options other than bearing false witness against scientists or asserting that the physical evidence itself must be deceptive—despite their own scripture reassuring them that the god it describes “cannot lie” (Titus 1:2).

The problem is compounded by the fact that scientists are continually improving their ability to measure the age of things, including the histories of entire continents. We can now say, with a high degree of confidence and with abundant supporting evidence, that Earth is billions of years old and has undergone profound changes over that vast span of time. These include the movement of tectonic plates, the rise and erosion of mountain ranges, repeated fluctuations in sea level, major climate shifts, and the appearance, spread, and extinction of forests and entire orders of animal and plant life.

That ability has now taken another significant step forward. A team of scientists from Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and the University of Cologne in Germany has developed a technique that not only allows rocks to be dated, but also reveals what has happened to them over immense spans of time—recorded in microscopic zircon crystals as they were exposed at Earth’s surface, buried, and later re-exposed. Their findings have just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Three members of the team have also published an open-access article in The Conversation, which I will reproduce below under a Creative Commons licence, formatted for stylistic consistency. Before that, however, here is an explanation of how this remarkable technique works, and why it allows scientists to reconstruct the deep-time history of entire landscapes.

Refuting Creationism - Earth - A Planet Fine Tuned For Nematodes

Michael Werner collects water and soil samples while hunting nematodes on Great Salt Lake’s east shore between Fremont and Antelope islands.

Photo credit: Julie Jung.

Great Salt Lake roundworm gets Shoshone name – @theU

Representative microbialite mounds at Site 6 from which nematodes were extracted.

News recently published in the Journal of Nematology should give pause for thought to any creationist who imagines that a magical creator made Earth perfectly suited for human life. The report describes the discovery of a new species of nematode — a group of roundworms, some of which are little more than a millimetre long — living under the extreme conditions found in the Great Salt Lake in northern Utah, USA. The species is believed to be endemic to that lake.

Nematodes are the most abundant animal phylum on Earth in both aquatic and terrestrial environments, with around 250,000 described species. It is estimated that roughly 80% of all animal life in terrestrial soils, and about 90% of that on the ocean floor, consists of nematodes. They occur in virtually every environment, from polar ice to deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and, as this newly discovered species demonstrates, in conditions of extreme salinity.

If Earth can be said to be ideally suited for any group of organisms, nematodes would be strong contenders. Humans, by contrast, require a very narrow range of terrestrial conditions in order to survive without specialised technology; consequently, much of the planet is unsuitable for — and often actively hostile to — human life.

Genetic analysis indicates that there may be two distinct populations of this nematode within the lake, raising intriguing questions for biologists: how did they arrive there, and what role do they play in the lake’s ecosystem? This species represents only the third metazoan known to inhabit the lake, the other two being brine shrimp and brine flies. Together, these organisms support vast populations of migratory birds, making the Great Salt Lake a vital feeding ground during migration.

Creationism Refuted - Why Cosmic Ray Storms Make C14 Dating So Accurate - Running Rings Around Creationists

Pencil marks note specific years along tree rings from a Japanese cedar.

Tomozo Yagi/AP Images for American Association for the Advancement of Science (“AAAS”); publisher of Science

A cosmic carbon spike
Cosmic rays from solar flares or other extraterrestrial sources collide with gas molecules in our atmosphere, spawning neutrons. When a free neutron knocks a proton out of a nitrogen atom, it forms the radioisotope carbon-14 (¹⁴C). The more energetic the event, the higher the ratio of ¹⁴C to stable carbon isotopes. Trees breathe in these isotopes as carbon dioxide (CO₂)

Marking time: Cosmic ray storms can pin precise dates on history from ancient Egypt to the Vikings | Science | AAAS

As though 2026 hadn't started badly enough for creationism, it just got a whole lot worse, with news that geochronologists have a method with which they can pinpoint carbon-14 dates to exact years, removing virtually all sources of error and, devastatingly for creationists, one of their traditional ways to dismiss evidence they don't like has evaporated. But this isn't new information; it's something creationists have either been kept ignorant of, have been pretending not to know about it, or, more likely, did not understand the subject well enough to realise it refuted their claims. It was actually published in Science in April 2023

One of the most persistent fall-back positions in creationist rhetoric is not to deny individual discoveries outright, but to retreat into claims that scientific dating methods are too uncertain to be trusted. Radiocarbon dating, in particular, is routinely portrayed as vague, circular, or endlessly “adjusted” to fit preconceived evolutionary timelines. This claim relies heavily on the idea that dates come with wide error bars that can supposedly be stretched, compressed, or reinterpreted to accommodate a much younger history.

Creationists also rely on the unsupported assertion that radioactive decay rates were much higher once upon a time - a process that coincidentally stopped as soon as we developed the technology to measure it accurately. This claim also sits uncomfortably with another creationist claim - that the Universe is so fine-tuned that altering any of its parameters by even the smallest an=mount would make life impossible. The inconsistency of these two claims is lost on those who have no understanding of how radioactive decay depends on nuclear forces and altering those would make the formation of atoms impossible, so high decay rates when they believe life was created would mean not even Earth could exist, let alone organic molecules.

But perhaps the most amusing accusations against science is that carbon-14 dating assumes a constant ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere, but in fact it is variable, depending on solar activity. Not only is this known and is routinely compensated for using dendrochronology because tree rings contain an accurate record of these changes, but it forms the very basis of this devastating rebuttal of creationist claims - we can accurately pinpoint spikes in carbon-14 production and correlate them with known events in history, thus removing any reasonable margin of error.