Refuting Creationism - Confirmation of A Denisovan Skull - Homo longi

A reconstruction of Homo longi from the ancient Harbin skull found in China.

Image credit: John Bavaro Fine Art
Science Photo Library

Figure 1 The geographic locations and proteomic profiles for the Pleistocene hominin individuals with palaeoproteomic data.

The Middle Pleistocene cranium recovered in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, northeastern China.

Key Evidence Links Harbin Individual's Nearly Complete Skull to a Denisovan--Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.

One of the enduring problems with the Denisovans has been the lack of substantial physical evidence. Although their existence was first confirmed through DNA analysis of a finger bone discovered in the Denisova Cave in Siberia, and genetic traces of interbreeding with Homo sapiens are widespread throughout Southeast Asia and Melanesia—suggesting a remarkably adaptable and far-ranging hominin—fossil evidence has remained frustratingly scant. Beyond the Siberian finger bone, we have only a few bone fragments from a cave on the Tibetan Plateau and a jawbone dredged up by fishermen off the coast of Taiwan. These scattered remnants were insufficient to assign a clear taxonomic identity, so the group remained simply ‘the Denisovans’.

That gap in the fossil record now appears to have been dramatically narrowed. A near-complete skull, dubbed the 'Harbin skull'—also known as 'Dragon Man' or Homo longi—has now been identified as belonging to a Denisovan. This remarkable specimen, found in northeastern China, may finally give the Denisovans a face and, by the conventions of biological nomenclature, the name Homo longi. Since it is the most complete and morphologically distinct fossil now associated with the group, Homo longi may become the formal species name, superseding the informal label ‘Denisovan’.

Of course, Denisovans pose an even greater challenge to creationist dogma than they ever did to palaeoanthropology. Their existence is fundamentally at odds with the belief that all humans descend from a single ancestral couple who committed the so-called Original Sin, for which redemption is supposedly possible only through accepting the mythologised sacrifice of Jesus. The evidence now shows not only that there was no original couple, but that there wasn’t even a single founding species. Modern non-African humans are the product of complex interbreeding events between at least three archaic human lineages—thousands of years before the Earth was allegedly created, according to young-Earth creationist timelines.

The identification of the Harbin skull as Denisovan has just been published by researchers from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China. Their findings appear in papers in Cell and Science, and in a news release from the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.

Creationism Refuted - How The Survivors of a Mass Extinction Evolved Into Dinosaurs

Euparkeria capensis, a small, 60 cm long reptile from the early Triassic period (245 - 237 million years ago).

Credit: Taenadoman, 2011
via Wikimedia Commons
CC A-SA 3.0

Triassic reptiles took 10,000 mile trips through “hellish” conditions, study suggests - University of Birmingham

Contrary to the child-like naivety and carefully cultivated ignorance of creationists, Earth is not — and never has been — a paradise perfectly designed for life, let alone tailor-made for humans. In reality, the vast majority of Earth's history — around 99.9975% of it — took place long before creationists believe the planet even existed, during which time the environment has frequently become so hostile that mass extinctions wiped out the majority of living species. Life as we know it today descends from the lucky few that managed to survive and adapt to radically altered conditions.

One of the most devastating of these extinction events was the end-Permian climate catastrophe, during which one group of reptiles — the archosauromorphs — managed to endure. From this resilient lineage emerged the dinosaurs, who would go on to dominate the planet until they too were annihilated by a cataclysmic meteor impact 66 million years ago.

While palaeontologists have long known about the survival and evolutionary significance of archosauromorphs, a lingering mystery remained: how did they manage to disperse across vast "dead zones" of the tropics, where temperatures were thought to be lethally high? A new study by researchers from the University of Birmingham and the University of Bristol has now shed light on this question. Their findings have been published, open access, in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Refuting Creationism - How One Of Our Ancestral Species Travelled Across Eurasia

Simulations show Neanderthals likely traveled over 2,000 miles in just 2,000 years using natural corridors like rivers.

Credit: Shutterstock

Computer simulated paths of Neanderthal dispersals demonstrate they could have reached the Altai Mountains in Siberia within 2,000 years during warm climatic conditions in one of two ancient time periods—MIS 5e (approximately 125,000 years ago) or MIS 3 (approximately 60,000 years ago)—as demonstrated by the three different possible paths shown here. These paths follow a northern route through the Ural Mountains and southern Siberia, often intersecting with known archaeological sites from the same time periods.

Image: Emily Coco and Radu Iovita.

Anthropologists Map Neanderthals’ Long and Winding Roads Across Europe and Eurasia

One of the ancestral species of all non-African Homo sapiens, the Neanderthals, migrated across Eurasia from Central Europe to Central Asia between 120,000 and 60,000 years ago. In the Altai Mountains of Siberia, they encountered the Denisovans and interbred with them—just as they would later interbreed with Homo sapiens migrating northwards out of Africa some 20,000 years later.

This is the fascinating history of our cousin species, now being brought to light by researchers at New York University’s Centre for the Study of Human Origins.

It almost goes without saying that this, along with the very existence of Neanderthals and their interbreeding with Eurasian Homo sapiens, is entirely incompatible with basic creationist beliefs and a literal reading of the Bible. Like all scientific discoveries, however, it fits seamlessly with what we already know and further enriches our understanding of both Neanderthal life and our own evolutionary history.

The discovery also addresses one of the long-standing mysteries surrounding Neanderthal dispersal during the Ice Age—namely, how they migrated from their central European ‘homelands’ to the Altai Mountains in Central Asia, where they interbred with Denisovans in what was likely the northern limit of the Denisovans’ range. Until now, their migration route had remained unclear due to a lack of archaeological evidence.

The breakthrough comes from computer simulations, which reveal a network of habitable valleys that connected Central Europe to Central Asia during a warmer period lasting some 2,000 years—long enough for Neanderthals to have reached within 600 kilometres of the Altai Mountains. The New York anthropologists have recently published their findings in the journal PLOS One.

Refuting Creationism - Yes, It's Another Of Those 'Non-Exitent' Transitional Fossils!

Reconstruction of the Burgess Shale concilitergan Helmetia expansa.

Artwork by Marianne Collins.

Holotype of Helmetia expansa USNM 83952, dorsal view. Cross polarized light.

Losso, S. R., Caron, J. B., & Ortega-Hernández, J. (2025).

Ancient fossil sheds big light on evolution mystery: solving a 100-year arthropod mystery | Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology

A fundamental problem with creationism is that it depends on wilfully ignoring the vast and ever-growing body of contrary evidence. The intellectual dishonesty required to sustain this belief system makes its adherents the subject of ridicule—not just among scientists, but even among many fellow theists. Its prominent proponents, often elevated to near-prophetic status by their followers, are notorious for misrepresenting or outright lying about scientific findings. Unsurprisingly, they are treated with contempt by the scientific community.

One of the more blatantly counterfactual claims in the creationist repertoire is the assertion that there are no transitional fossils, and no evidence supporting the evolution of species from common ancestors. This denialism is essential to preserve belief in the spontaneous, magical creation of all species a few thousand years ago, without any ancestral lineage.

Accordingly, the creationist industry will need to deploy its usual strategies of misdirection and denial in response to a fascinating Cambrian stem arthropod, first discovered in 1918 in the Burgess Shale of Canada. Initially described from a single specimen, this enigmatic fossil has now been thoroughly reclassified thanks to the work of a team of Harvard researchers led by Dr Sarah Losso, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. Their analysis, based on 36 newly examined specimens, sheds significant light on early arthropod evolution.

Their findings are detailed in an open-access paper published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, and summarised in a Harvard University news article.

Creationism Refuted - Something From Nothing - Let There Be Light!

Normalised ellipticity across the transverse plane for the Gaussian scenario.

Illustration of photon-photon scattering in the laboratory. Two green petawatt lasers beams collide at the focus with a third red beam to polarise the quantum vacuum. This allows a fourth blue laser beam to be generated, with a unique direction and colour, which conserves momentum and energy.

Credit: Zixin (Lily) Zhang

Oxford physicists recreate extreme quantum vacuum effects | University of Oxford Department of Physics

As Sam Harris once remarked, “When religions are right, they are right by accident.” His point highlights the lack of empirical grounding in religious claims, which are typically non-falsifiable and therefore beyond the scope of scientific validation.

Ironically, this may mean that the authors of Genesis were accidentally correct in one of their most iconic assertions: that the universe began with the creation of light (Genesis 1:3). While the biblical writers lacked any scientific understanding, modern physics now suggests that under extreme quantum conditions, something akin to this could indeed occur — light arising from an apparent vacuum.

This is an area where creationists normally tie themselves up in knots, claiming on the one hand that you can't get something out of nothing because it contravenes the laws of thermodynamics and on the other hand that a god made of nothing created the universe out of nothing with some magic words.

The truth, of course, is rather more rational and subject to scientific analysis and testing.

Researchers at the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford have successfully simulated a remarkable prediction of quantum electrodynamics: the spontaneous emergence of photons from empty space. Their work, published in Communications Physics, demonstrates how light can be generated from the quantum vacuum — a phenomenon that, until now, had only existed as a theoretical possibility.

Refuting Creationism - More Than the Bible's Authors Could Ever Have Imagined

The Milky Way hovers in the clear skies over the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, with graduate student Nicole Firestone in silhouette. Astrophysicist Eric Gawiser and his group conduct many studies using its facilities.

Nicole Firestone

Looking Deeply Into the Universe’s Past, Scientists Detect Bursts of New Stars | Rutgers University

Back in the Bronze Age — a period Christopher Hitchens once described as "the fearful infancy of our species" — people gazed up at the sky and imagined a dome over a small, flat Earth. In the absence of scientific knowledge, they filled the gaps in their understanding with stories that reflected their assumptions about how the world worked: a small, teleological world governed by invisible agents or spirits who made things happen. These stories were eventually written down in ancient texts and, over time, compiled into a book that was later declared to be the holy word of an omnipotent, omniscient god.

One such story recounts how this god spoke magic words that caused the entire universe — including that small, flat planet with a dome overhead — to spring forth out of nothing just a few thousand years ago. This same god then populated the Earth with a handful of species and two fully formed humans, all without ancestry, who supposedly gave rise to the entire diversity of life and the global human population within the last 6,000 to 10,000 years.

Curiously, despite how wildly this tale diverges from what we now know about the formation of the universe and the evolutionary history of life on Earth — from a common ancestor through divergence and speciation — some people continue to insist that the version crafted by scientifically illiterate Bronze Age storytellers is correct, and that the evidence painstakingly uncovered by generations of scientists must somehow be mistaken, or even the false claims of sinister conspirators.

They dismiss even the most robust, verifiable evidence — such as recent findings on the formation of galaxies like the Milky Way, home to our own planet, which formed roughly 3–4 billion years after the Big Bang. That event, the beginning of space and time, is thought to have arisen from a quantum fluctuation in a non-zero energy field.

This evidence of how galaxies formed in the 'Cosmic Noon' was recently published in an open-access paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters, authored by a team of astrophysicists led by Professor Eric Gawiser of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA.

Refuting Creationism - That Ever-Shrinking Little Creationist God Just Got Even Smaller

Liquid brine veins, where RNA molecules can replicate, surround solid ice crystals in water ice, as seen with an electron microscope.

Credit: Philipp Holliger, MRC LMB

Chemists recreate how RNA might have reproduced for first time | UCL News - UCL – University College London

The problem with having a god who exists merely to fill gaps in human knowledge and understanding — as the god of creationism does — is that science has been steadily shrinking those gaps ever since the scientific method emerged and the Church lost its power to persecute scientists for discovering inconvenient truths. Today, only a few small gaps remain, scattered throughout the body of scientific knowledge —particularly in biology, which holds special interest for creationists.

Creationism persists because there are still people with such a poor understanding of science that they believe the authors of ancient religious texts — written during the Bronze Age, when humanity's knowledge gaps encompassed nearly everything in their small world — had access to some deeper, divine insight. Although what they wrote is often naively simplistic and demonstrably wrong in almost every respect, creationists insist that it somehow surpasses anything modern science has produced in terms of accuracy and reliability.

One of the few remaining gaps where creationists attempt to place their god — the abiogenesis gap — has just shrunk further. Predictably, this will be ignored, dismissed, or misrepresented by creationist frauds who exploit carefully maintained ignorance to preserve their cult followings and income streams.

This discovery by chemists at University College London and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology reveals how a simple RNA molecule can self-replicate under conditions thought to have existed on prebiotic Earth. Many scientists believe this marks the origin of RNA-based life, which eventually gave rise to the more complex protein- and DNA-based life we see today. A self-replicating RNA molecule, competing for limited resources, will naturally evolve to become more efficient — leaving more copies of itself than rival variants. This is classic Darwinian evolution, operating in a context Darwin himself could scarcely have imagined, knowing nothing of RNA or DNA.

The new research is published open access in Nature Chemistry.

Creationism Refuted - Fossil Euarthropod - From 444 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'!

Keurbos susanae, close-up of segments

Gabbott, S.E., et al. (2025)

Keurbos susanae, close-up of segments

Gabbott, S.E., et al. (2025)

Marine fossil found in South Africa is one of a kind, thanks to unusual preservation

In the face of overwhelming evidence contradicting the creationist view of reality, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that such beliefs are rooted in a deep-seated psychological need—one that drives wilful ignorance and a denial of the observable world.

Consider, for example, the mountain of data showing that Earth is not a few thousand years old, nor was life magically created in its present form within days. Instead, the planet is over four billion years old, and the diversity of life we see today is the product of a long, gradual evolutionary process, shaped by environmental change and punctuated by countless extinctions.

One small yet compelling piece of that vast evolutionary puzzle comes in the form of an exquisitely preserved, 444-million-year-old fossil, discovered some 25 years ago in a South African quarry. Only recently has it been identified as a stem-group arthropod by Professor Sarah Gabbott of the University of Leicester. She outlines her findings in an article for The Conversation and a detailed research paper published in *Papers in Palaeontology.

Professor Gabbott's article in The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Our Galaxy - The Milky Way - Like You've Never Seen It Before

“Boot Arch Perseids”
Alabama Hills, CA, USA

Credit: Mike Abramyan
2025 Milky Way Photographer of the Year
Daniel Zafra Portill

17 dazzling images from Milky Way Photographer of the Year 2025 awards | Popular Science

Stars died and because they died, you live. You are made by stars out of stardust and in a very real sense; because you are made of the same stuff the Universe is made of and are a part of it, there is something even more wonderful about you. Through you, though not just through you, and maybe not just here on this small planet, the Universe has gained self–awareness and can begin to understand itself.

Through you it can stand on the surface of this beautiful little jewel in the cosmos, can look up in awe at itself and think "Wow!"

Rosa Rubicondior - What Make You So Special? From the Big Bang To You, page 152

“Diamond Beach Emerald Sky”
Great Ocean Road, Australia

Credit: Brent Martin / 2025 Milky Way Photographer of the Year Daniel Zafra Portill

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Creationism Refuted - How Mammalian Cold Adaptation Evolved - Starting 2.6 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Musk Ox, Ovibos moschatus

Arctic fox, Vulpes lagopus

Study reveals different phases of evolution during ice age | Bournemouth University

Creationists have yet another inconvenient science paper to ignore, misrepresent, or distort. A new study led by Professor John Stewart of Bournemouth University, UK, and published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, presents compelling evidence that environmental change—specifically the climatic fluctuations of the Ice Age—has been a major driver of evolution.

By examining both fossil and palaeogenetic data in the context of glaciation records, the research team has shown that adaptations to cold climates began emerging around 2.6 million years ago. This evolutionary process significantly accelerated about 700,000 years ago, when glacial cycles shifted and cold periods began lasting twice as long. During warmer interglacial phases, cold-adapted species appear to have retreated into climatic refugia, only to expand again as the ice returned.

The main, but not the only, cause of these periods of alternating glaciation and warmer climate were the Milankovitch cycles. For details, see the AI information panel.

Reindeer, Rangifer tarandus

This study aligns closely with Darwinian evolutionary theory, and, contrary to claims by creationists that biologists are abandoning Darwinian evolution in favour of creationism, not with the metaphysical claims of intelligent design. Unsurprisingly, the researchers make no appeal to supernatural forces or pseudo-scientific conjecture. Instead, their work builds on and reinforces the evolutionary framework that has repeatedly proven its explanatory and predictive power.

Perhaps most damning to creationist dogma, the evolutionary events described took place hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of years before young-Earth creationists claim the planet was even formed. Depending on which apologetic is in play, creationists must now choose between proposing ludicrously accelerated post-Flood evolution or invoking the second law of thermodynamics in ways physicists and biologists would find baffling, using it to try to argue that events which can be observed could not have happened due to a fundamental law of physics.

How Can We Tell The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People? - Compare It To Reality!

A Brightest Group Galaxy (BGG) seen as it was 3 billion years ago, located about 2.7 billion light-years away

How the Bible's authors saw the Universe.

Astronomers observe largest ever sample of galaxies up to over 12 billion light years away | Aalto University

More stunning images of deep space have been released, once again highlighting the vast and awe-inspiring reality of the universe—one that stands in stark contrast to the ancient cosmology described in the Book of Genesis.

According to that account, the universe was a small, flat Earth covered by a solid dome, fixed and immobile at the centre of creation. The sun, moon, and stars were imagined as small lights affixed to the underside of this dome. Surrounding it all, above and below, were the primordial waters—and somewhere within or beyond this structure lay a magical, supernatural realm inhabited by divine beings bearing a striking resemblance to capricious, tribal warlords, and winged men (Genesis 1:1–18).

And, according to the Bible narrative, it has only existed for 6-10,000 years!

Since the invention of the telescope, and as our instruments have grown ever more sophisticated, our understanding of the universe has revealed a reality far removed from the one imagined by the authors of Genesis. The cosmos is not only vastly older than they could have conceived, but also incomprehensibly immense. Earth itself is far larger and older than they believed, a spherical planet orbiting the Sun—which is just one of perhaps half a trillion stars in our own galaxy. And that galaxy is, in turn, just one among perhaps a trillion others. Altogether, this vast universe is nearly 14 billion years old.

The most recent images are from the James Webb Space Telescope, of a region of deep space, between twelve billion and one billion lightyears away, so showing how the universe has evolved since it was about one billion years old - younger than Earth is now.

Malevolent Design News - How An 'Irreducibly Complex' Jumping Gene Survives To Cause Cancer

Credit: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Study Reveals Details of Process Driving Evolution & Major Diseases | NYU Langone News

A recent study by researchers at NYU Langone Health and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München has shed new light on how certain genetic elements, known as "jumping genes," contribute to both human evolution and the development of disease [1.1].

Intelligent Design (ID) proponents, such as Discovery Institute fellow William A. Dembski, claim that any genetic information which is both complex and specific can only originate from an intelligent designer. Similarly, Michael J. Behe argues that any complex biological structure or process requiring all its parts to function could not have evolved gradually and therefore must have been deliberately designed.

These arguments rest on little more than the fallacies of argument from incredulity and the God-of-the-gaps. Worse still, they inevitably raise troubling theological implications: if such "complex specified information" leads to harmful outcomes—such as diseases, congenital disorders, or parasitism—then their supposed designer must be incompetent, indifferent, or malevolent. In the case at hand, the study focuses on a type of "jumping gene," or retrotransposon, which is known to cause genetic diseases including cancers.

Proponents of ID consistently sidestep these issues, as they conflict with their effort to portray the Bible as a scientifically accurate text describing a benevolent, human-centred creator.

Refuting Creationism - More Pterrible News For Creationists As Scientists Track The Evolution of Terrestrial Pterosaurs

Quetzalcoatlus northropi (artist's impression)

Witton MP, Naish D (2008),
CC BY 3.0, Link

Ptero Firma: footprints pinpoint when ancient flying reptiles conquered the ground | News | University of Leicester

False-colour depth map revealing the shape and pressure of each step, showing that these creatures bore more weight on their hands while walking.

Most people—apart, perhaps, from creationists who deny such creatures ever existed—are aware that a group of reptiles evolved the ability to fly and took to the skies long before birds and bats emerged to exploit this medium.

What many people don’t know, however, is that some members of this group, including larger species, later returned to land and adopted a coastal wading lifestyle. We know this because their fossilised tracks have been found preserved in what was once coastal mud.

Young Earth creationists routinely point to geological formations derived from coastal or estuarine mud as 'evidence' of a supposed global flood, yet they consistently fail to explain how such a flood could have preserved so many footprints—left by waders such as ducks, geese, redshanks, and sandpipers—as well as delicate raindrop impressions. Even harder to explain is the evidence showing that these footprints were made at different times, spanning several million years, up until the mass extinction caused by an asteroid impact 66 million years ago.

And disconcertingly for creationists, a team of palaeontologists led by Robert Smyth, a doctoral researcher in the Centre for Palaeobiology and Biosphere Evolution (School of Geography, Geology and the Environment) at the University of Leicester, has demonstrated that these fossil footprints can be used to trace the evolutionary history of the pterosaurs that made them.

Refuting Creationism - A 'Hell Ant' For The Science Deniers

Vulcanidris cratensis (Scale bar, 2 mm.)

Figure 2 Photographs depicting details of Vulcanidris cratensis gen. et sp. nov. Holotype (MZSP-CRA-0002).

• (A) Head and anterior portion of mesosoma. Scale bar, 1 mm.
• (B) Mesosoma. Scale bar, 1 mm.
• (C) Left forewing. Scale bar, 1 mm.
• (D) Right forewing. Scale bar, 1 mm.
• (E) Detail of head. Scale bar, 0.5 mm.
• (F) Detail of petiole. Scale bar, 0.5 mm.
• (G) Metasoma. Scale bar, 1 mm. Arrowheads indicate key characters mentioned in the text.

Ancient ‘Hell Ant’ Discovery Is Also The Oldest Ant Fossil Ever Unearthed | StudyFinds

Most dedicated creationist advocates will already be familiar with the mental gymnastics required to assert that a coelacanth allegedly remaining unchanged for tens of millions of years somehow disproves evolution, therefore life must have been magically created ex nihilo just a few thousand years ago.

Now they have a new specimen to test their contortions even further: a beautifully preserved 113-million-year-old ant fossil from Brazil—the oldest ant fossil discovered to date. Remarkably, by 113 million years ago, this now-extinct species was already highly specialised as a predator, equipped with distinctive scythe-like mandibles. These formidable features have earned it the informal nickname "hell ant."

The exquisitely preserved limestone fossil clearly reveals detailed wings and wing veins, characteristic of the insect order Hymenoptera, confirming ants' close evolutionary relationship with wasps and bees. Since wings are typically absent in worker ants, the presence of fully developed wings strongly suggests that this specimen represents a reproductive female—likely a queen.

This remarkable ant fossil was identified within a collection originating from the Crato Formation in northern Brazil, housed in the Museu de Zoologia da Universidade de São Paulo. The Crato limestone was deposited in a shallow lake environment approximately 113 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous period, at a time when the ancient southern supercontinent Gondwana had not yet fully separated into what would become modern-day Africa and South America.

Creationism Refuted - Isolated Evolution of a Curious Butterfly

The Curiously Isolated Hairstreak, Satyrium curiosolus.

A freshly eclosed S. curiosolus on silvery lupine (Lupinus argenteus).

Curious isolation: new butterfly species discovered | Blog

If creationists had even a basic understanding of scientific evidence, they could hardly fail to recognise how thoroughly it refutes creationism. This may help explain why creationist advocates work so hard to ensure their followers remain ignorant of that evidence—or only encounter a distorted version of it. It's also why many creationists willingly participate in their own deception by avoiding fact-checking and reading genuine scientific literature, preferring instead to consume misinformation circulated within their echo chambers.

Foremost among the misconceptions is the claim that mainstream biologists are increasingly finding evolutionary theory inadequate and are therefore turning to Intelligent Design (ID) creationism as a superior alternative.

A close second is the notion that there is no evidence to support the scientific view that species have diverged from common ancestors through evolutionary processes. These processes include environmental selection acting on genetic variation—differentially favouring some alleles while eliminating others—thereby shifting the gene pool over time towards greater reproductive fitness in a given environment.

If they were able to comprehend this, and if they had the intellectual honesty to accept it, creationists would realise that recent findings—such as the discovery of a new butterfly species that appears to have been isolated in a small region of the Canadian Rockies for around 40,000 years—completely undermine these two core dogmas.