Another day, another paper refuting creationism and the Bible narrative.
Creationism suffered yet another body blow a few days ago with the announcement that a Tel Aviv University (TAU)-led international team has concluded that 140,000-year-old fossilised remains of a child, found 90 years ago in the Skhūl Cave on Mount Carmel, show unmistakable evidence of being a hybrid between a modern Homo sapiens and a Neanderthal.
Whether this news will penetrate the impervious defences of creationists — who resemble a brain-dead boxer long since counted out, the crowd gone home, yet still convinced he is winning — remains to be seen.
Not only does this timeline, which places anatomically modern humans outside Africa living alongside another hominin species, utterly contradict the Bible’s creation myth, but so does the very fact that there were multiple hominin species at all. The problem for Bible literalists is not just the incompatibility of dates, but the clear evidence of human evolution and divergence — evidence that rules out the notion of a single ancestral couple committing an “original sin” that supposedly condemns all their descendants to seek “salvation” from the wrath of an eternally unforgiving creator god.
To make matters worse for creationism, this fossil was found in the very region that later became central to the Bronze Age mythology of the Bible.
From a scientific perspective, this discovery — confirming what has long been suspected — shows that there were several earlier, ultimately unsuccessful migrations of H. sapiens out of Africa. During these early dispersals, modern humans met and interbred with Neanderthals, introducing *H. sapiens
DNA into Neanderthal populations long before the successful migration around 60,000–40,000 years ago, when further interbreeding occurred.
Here’s one of those discoveries in biological science that should have ID creationists jumping up and down yelling, "Told you so!". It’s news that the parasite that causes malaria shows both what they call 'irreducible complexity' and 'complex specified genetic information'. According to Discovery Institute fellows Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski, that would mean it is intelligently designed and, by implication, designed to do exactly what it does — by the Christian God.
But, for reasons which can only be guessed at — and probably not a million miles from the fact that this conclusion would mean the Christian god is actively designing ways to kill people, particularly children, and especially in Africa — creationists tend to ignore it. After all, that’s the very antithesis of the compassionate, benevolent, loving god of the Bible.
Instead, they quietly sidestep the inconvenient reality that examples of their supposed 'proof of intelligent design' are found just as often in parasites and pathogens as in their hosts. This is precisely what evolutionary biology predicts: a host–parasite relationship invariably leads to an evolutionary arms race, producing sophisticated and complex systems that equip the parasite to survive in the host and to infect new victims.
And, true to form, we now have another such example in the major cause of malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, which killed some 569,000 people in Africa in 2023:
Key Facts:
Globally in 2023, there were an estimated 263 million malaria cases and 597,000 malaria deaths in 83 countries.
The WHO African Region carries a disproportionately high share of the global malaria burden.
In 2023, the WHO African Region was home to 94% of malaria cases (246 million) and 95% (569,000) of malaria deaths (432,400 children under 5).
Children under 5 accounted for about 76% of all malaria deaths in the Region.
(A) Illustration showing the different stages of polymer vesicle growth leading to the action of expulsion of amphiphiles. (B) Illustration showing the formation of new vesicles from the reorganization through self-reproduction of amphiphiles expelled into the bulk.
The frequent creationist assertion that abiogenesis is impossible without invoking supernatural intervention has taken another significant blow with the recent open‑access publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The study, Self‑reproduction as an autonomous process of growth and reorganization in fully abiotic, artificial and synthetic cells, demonstrates, for the first time, the successful laboratory creation of simple, non‑biochemical self‑reproducing vesicle‑like systems exhibiting Darwinian evolution: each generation varies slightly in traits that influence their ability to replicate.
This breakthrough indicates that such self‑sustaining systems could plausibly arise through natural processes, and gradually—through Darwinian mechanisms—evolve into the first simple biological life forms, from which all life subsequently diversified. It also lends empirical support to the principle that when self‑replication with small variation occurs in a selective environment, evolution in the direction of increased fitness is inevitable.
An artistic rendering of an evening approximately 252 million years ago during the late Permian in the Luangwa Basin of Zambia. The scene includes several saber-toothed gorgonopsians and beaked dicynodonts.
Gabriel Ugueto
Another day, and another clutch of transitional fossils from millions of years before “Creation Week” for creationists to lie about, misrepresent, or simply ignore in order to cope with the resulting cognitive dissonance. This time, it’s not just a single research paper, but a series of 14 published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The fossils are the result of 15 years of excavation at three sites in Africa and cover the 47-million-year Permian era, which ended with the “Great Dying” 252 million years ago — the mass extinction at the end of the Permian in which an estimated 70% of species became extinct. Not only is that timeline fatal to those creationists who like to imagine the Earth and life on it are just 6,000 to 10,000 years old, but the fact of a mass extinction raises insurmountable problems for intelligent design advocates. They would need to explain the intelligence behind designing species only to have them wiped out by a climate catastrophe — one which should have been anticipated by an omniscient designer and could have been prevented by an omnipotent god.
And of course, another problem for creationists is the abundance of these transitional fossils, which, according to creationist dogma, should not exist at all.
One of the most glaring flaws in creationist reasoning — among the many — is its desperate reliance on gaps in knowledge as hiding places for their putative god. It’s a strategy that ensures their god grows ever smaller and often vanishes entirely as science steadily closes those gaps. This “god of the gaps” approach is ultimately doomed—either to complete collapse or to a never-ending scramble for new gaps, real or imagined, in the forlorn hope that this time, unlike every other, the gap will contain the one thing they crave: a god that cannot be explained away.
One such gap — of which creationists so far seem blissfully unaware, or we would never hear the end of it — is the evolutionary transition between the flying ancestors of penguins and the modern, flightless penguins whose skeletons have adapted from an aerial to a marine existence. This transformation involved all the changes needed to turn wings into powerful flippers for ‘flying’ underwater, a more upright gait, and feathers adapted for life in the water and for the cold of the Antarctic environment where most species now live.
That gap has just been substantially filled by the discovery of a large collection of ancient penguin fossils in the Waipara Greensand Formation in New Zealand, north of Canterbury. This formation spans roughly 62.5 to 58 million years ago—a period of some 4.5 million years, beginning only a few million years after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. With every such discovery, the supposed “mystery” shrinks a little more—and the god wedged into it fades further into irrelevance.
How these fossils fill the gap in our knowledge of penguin evolution is the subject of an article in The Conversation by two palaeontologists from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand: Vanesa De Pietri, Senior Research Fellow in Palaeontology, and Paul Scofield, Adjunct Professor in Palaeontology. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
First, some background information on the Waipara Greensand Formation:
The enduring mystery is why, when they can read the first few verses of the Bible and compare it to what science reveals about the universe, or planet and the life on it, do so many people still insist it is inerrant historical and scientific truths reveal by an inerrant, omniscience creator god?
There must be some deep psychological need to believe that absurdity to perform the necessary mental gymnastics required to dismiss the science and stick with the evidence free superstitions that the science overthrows, which can only be guessed at? A personal stake, as with the priests and grifters who wring a living out of their credulous followers, maybe? A justification for holding otherwise unacceptable prejudices for which an excuse can be found in the Bible, with careful scrutiny and maybe changing the meanings of a few words here and there, or by applying the brutal tribal social norms that the Bible prescribes? Whatever the cause, the self-delusion needed to retain belief against the deluge of counter-evidence, often caries kudos in religious societies such as in America's 'Bible Belt' states and inner city ghettos where admitting to doubt or even hinting at accepting the science can carry a heavy social penalty.
So, the tidal wave of scientific evidence keeps breaking on the rocks of ignorant stupidity reinforced by sea wall of social coercive control and psychological fear akin to an acute anxiety disorder or theophobic psychosis.
A scene from a star-forming factory shines in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week. This Hubble picture captures incredible details in the dusty clouds in a star-forming region called the Tarantula Nebula. What’s possibly the most amazing aspect of this detailed image is that this nebula isn’t even in our galaxy. Instead, it’s in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is located about 160 000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa.
The Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the dozens of small satellite galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. The Tarantula Nebula is the largest and brightest star-forming region not just in the Large Magellanic Cloud, but in the entire group of nearby galaxies to which the Milky Way belongs.
The Tarantula Nebula is home to the most massive stars known, some of which are roughly 200 times as massive as our Sun. The scene pictured here is located away from the centre of the nebula, where there is a super star cluster called R136, but very close to a rare type of star called a Wolf–Rayet star. Wolf–Rayet stars are massive stars that have lost their outer shell of hydrogen and are extremely hot and luminous, powering dense and furious stellar winds.
This nebula is a frequent target for Hubble, whose multiwavelength capabilities are critical for capturing sculptural details in the nebula’s dusty clouds. The data used to create this image come from an observing programme called Scylla, named for a multi-headed sea monster from the Greek myth of Ulysses. The Scylla programme was designed to complement another Hubble observing programme called ULLYSSES (Ultraviolet Legacy Library of Young Stars as Essential Standards). ULLYSSES targets massive young stars in the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, while Scylla investigates the structures of gas and dust that surround these stars.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray, N. Bartmann (ESA/Hubble) Music: Stellardrone - Ascent.
So, here is another wave of facts that might just dislodge a tenacious limpet of ignorance:
Creationists will likely dismiss the recent paper in Current Biology because, as is common in creationist psychology, any scientific evidence contradicting their fundamental beliefs is either ignored, misrepresented, or actively denied—particularly if it suggests their views should be reconsidered.
The study by Andre J. Rowe and Emily J. Rayfield of the University of Bristol (UK) demonstrates that, during the long stretch of Earth’s history predating creationist timelines, giant carnivorous dinosaurs evolved markedly different jaw mechanics to tackle prey—leading to distinct ecological roles. For example, crushers such as Tyrannosaurus rex developed jaws optimised for forceful crushing, akin to crocodilians, whereas slashers - other large theropods such as allosaurids or spinosaurs - developed weaker jaws tailored to ripping and slashing flesh, like modern Komodo dragons [1.1].
This divergence in feeding mechanics underscores a fundamental principle in evolutionary biology: adaptive radiation and allopatric speciation — whereby offspring inheriting intermediate jaw characteristics (neither fully adapted for crushing nor ripping) would likely be at a disadvantage, reducing their reproductive success. Over time, this selective pressure fosters reproductive barriers and drives lineages apart.
What if we could peer back through deep time and see what single-celled organisms looked like—not just thousands, but hundreds of millions of years ago—and compare them to their living descendants? It would be a revelation for science… and a nightmare for creationists.
That’s precisely what geobiologist Karen Lloyd and her team at the University of Southern California (USC) are uncovering. They study microorganisms that have made an incredible journey: born in the depths of the ocean, slowly buried under a relentless rain of sediment, and then carried by plate tectonics into the deep Earth, where subduction dragged them beneath continental crust. There, cut off from oxygen and sunlight, they survived for millions of years in a slow-motion existence, drawing nutrients from the surrounding rock. Their metabolic rates became so low they could no longer replicate, yet they endured by “breathing”—in the biochemical sense—through redox reactions, extracting energy from electrons provided by whatever electron donors the rocks could supply. Some have even evolved the ability to “breathe” carbon dioxide, something unknown among terrestrial life.
These organisms’ existence is a direct challenge to creationist dogma—not only because they have persisted for timescales far beyond the Bible’s allowance, but because they reveal how even apparently simple single-celled organisms can diverge and adapt over geological epochs. Environmental pressures have driven them into extraordinary evolutionary niches, each defined by what they have learned to “breathe.” Moreover, they exist in environments in which life as we know it couldn't survive, yet creationists insist that Earth was intelligently created, perfect for life, which begs the question, which life? The life that breathes using arsenic, lives for millions of years deep underground with almost no metabolic activity and survive in the heat and acidity of volcanic hot springs, or life the breathes oxygen and needs a regular supply of water and a narrow range of ambient temperatures in which to survive without special equipment?
A recent discovery by palaeoanthropologists, led by researchers from Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA, highlights the stark difference between how a teleological thinker—such as a creationist—imagines evolution works and how it actually proceeds. The study found that the teeth of ancient hominins evolved over a period of some 700,000 years in response to the increasing availability of soft, starchy foods, which began to replace the coarse, fibrous plant matter they had previously consumed.
A teleological thinker—someone who sees purpose and agency in natural processes—would assume that something *caused* the teeth to evolve in order to better process the new food. However, as the theory of evolution predicts, any variation that improves efficiency in food processing or reduces the now-unnecessary cost of growing and maintaining large teeth will be favoured by natural selection. Over evolutionary time, such traits become more common. In the case of archaic hominins, this meant their teeth gradually became smaller.
Teleological thinkers often make the mistake of believing that asking, "Who or what told the teeth they needed to change?" or "How did the teeth know they had to evolve?" is a meaningful challenge to evolutionary theory. To them, it seems reasonable to assume a supernatural intelligence must be involved.
This simplistic view of evolution is actively encouraged by creationist pseudo-scientists such as William A. Dembski and his colleagues at the Discovery Institute, who claim that the genetic information resulting from such optimisation must have been intelligently designed because it is "specified" for a purpose. Of course, at every stage of human evolution, the genetic information that produced a particular tooth shape was necessarily "specified" for that outcome. Dembski never discloses this to his audience, nor does he attempt to correct the teleological bias on which his movement depends.
An interesting aspect of this discovery is that the evolutionary change in this case was driven not so much by environmental change - the starch foods had always been there - as by a change in behaviour - a case of meme-gene co-evolution, using the term 'meme' in the original sense as coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, to mean a unit of cultural inheritance - the analogue of the gene in genetic inheritance.
(b) Scrumping of Pentadesma butyracea (Clusiaceae) by a western gorilla.
Photograph: MMR.
(c) Scrumping of Gambeya albida (syn. Chrysophyllum albidum; Sapotaceae) by an eastern chimpanzee.
Photograph: CH.
The human ability to consume and metabolise alcohol efficiently may trace back to our ape ancestors, who regularly ate overripe and fermented fruit with a naturally high alcohol content. This is according to researchers from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and Dartmouth College, USA.
The bad news for creationists is that this discovery strongly supports the common ancestry of modern apes and humans. The researchers are in no doubt that the Theory of Evolution explains the presence of the same genetic mutation in African apes — including humans — which allows us to metabolise alcohol around 40 times more efficiently than orangutans, which lack the mutation.
This mutation enables African apes to consume fermented fruit — often as a social activity — in a pattern of alcohol consumption strikingly similar to that seen in humans.
To describe this behaviour in wild chimpanzees, the researchers have borrowed the term scrumping — a familiar UK English word for the (often illicit) picking and eating of apples, particularly by children. The word derives from the Middle Low German schrimpen, meaning ‘shrivelled or shrunken’ (to describe over-ripe fruit). It also survives in the name of the traditional West Country cider known as scrumpy.
A study recently published in the Journal of Human Evolution reports the discovery of a mixture of archaic and modern traits in the dentition of 300,000-year-old hominin fossils unearthed at the Hualongdong site in Anhui Province, China.
These fossils predate the migration of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) out of Africa by around 250,000 years. They indicate that hominin populations in East Asia were already diversifying and possibly interbreeding with archaic humans, such as Homo erectus, to form lineages distinct from both Neanderthals and Denisovans.
The research, led by Professor Wu Xiujie, director of the Hualongdong excavations, is the result of a longstanding collaboration between scientists from the Dental Anthropology Group at CENIEH — María Martinón-Torres, Director of CENIEH and corresponding author of the paper, and José María Bermúdez de Castro, researcher ad honorem at CENIEH — and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing.
The findings reveal a rich and complex picture of human evolution in East Asia, wholly at odds with the simplistic biblical narrative still clung to by creationists. That account, written by ancient people with no knowledge of the broader world, reflects a worldview in which Earth was small, flat, covered by a dome, and located at the centre of the universe.
A group of Issa Valley chimpanzees navigate an open woodland crown to forage on new leaves.
Image by Rhianna C. Drummond-Clarke/Greater Mahale Ecosystem Research and Conservation (GMERC)
A new study published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution delivers yet more evidence for the Theory of Evolution and decisively contradicts Bible-literalist creationism. By closely studying wild chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Issa Valley—an environment that mirrors the mixed woodland–savannah habitats of our early ancestors—researchers found that these apes still spend most of their time in trees and conduct over 85 % of their bipedal movements arboreally. This finding strongly supports the evolutionary view that human bipedalism did not emerge from a sudden exodus from trees but evolved gradually while our ancestors still relied heavily on arboreal habitats.
What is particularly striking is the complete absence of any doubt among the scientists that evolution, driven by natural selection, is the correct framework for interpreting these observations. At no point do they resort to supernatural explanations or even hint that evolution might be insufficient to explain the data. On the contrary, their conclusions seamlessly integrate with the existing evolutionary narrative, demonstrating how behaviours seen in modern chimpanzees provide a living window into the adaptations of our shared ancestors. This directly undermines the creationist claim that mainstream biologists are “abandoning” evolution in favour of unproven religious explanations—a claim that has no basis in reality.
Creationist dogma insists on static, unchanging “kinds” and appeals to unverifiable supernatural causes. Yet, studies like this show that every aspect of our evolutionary past—anatomical, genetic, and behavioural—can be explained through natural processes, without the need for divine intervention. The evidence for a shared ancestry between humans and other primates grows with every new study, while creationism remains stuck with no predictive power and no scientific methodology.
In short, this research reinforces the power and universality of the Theory of Evolution. The scientists involved didn’t set out to “disprove creationism”; they simply applied rigorous observation and analysis, and the results—once again—fell squarely on the side of evolution. Far from being abandoned, the ToE continues to thrive as the backbone of modern biology, while creationism, with its untestable supernatural entities, offers no explanation at all.
Excavation at the Neumark-Nord 2 in central Germany.
Photo: Professor Wil Roebroeks, Leiden University
125,000-year-old Neanderthal ‘fat factory’ discovered in Germany - Leiden University
More evidence has emerged that Neanderthals were far from the slow-witted, lumbering brutes of popular myth. In fact, they were highly organised, culturally sophisticated, and capable of processing food on what can only be described as an industrial scale.
This latest insight comes from a team of archaeologists led by researchers from MONREPOS (Leibniz Centre for Archaeology, Germany) and Leiden University (The Netherlands), in collaboration with the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt (Germany). Their findings were recently published in Science Advances.
At a site known as Neumark-Nord 2 in central Germany, dating back 125,000 years, the researchers have discovered compelling evidence of a bone-processing ‘factory’. Here, Neanderthals systematically broke up the massive bones of straight-tusked elephants and other large mammals—including deer, horses, and aurochs—to extract fat from the marrow by steeping the fragments in hot water. The straight-tusked elephant, which could weigh up to 13 tonnes, would have yielded enough meat to feed 2,000 adult humans their daily caloric needs.
This site predates the arrival of modern humans in Europe by tens of thousands of years, placing it firmly within the Neanderthal era. At the time, Europe was enjoying an interglacial period with a climate comparable to today's.
From an early age, the human brain interprets patters and sees faces everywhere. Draw two large black discs on a white sheet of paper and show it to a human baby of just a few weeks old and you will probably make the baby smile, just as they smile when they look at your face. Their brain has perceived the dots as the eyes of a face. This is the phenomenon of human perception known as pareidolia.
Some religious people, in an effort to justify holding irrational beliefs, often attribute these appearances of 'Jesus' or 'Mary', as miracles with some deep religious significance. For example, this anti-Atheist Gotcha, which appeared on Quora a couple of years ago:
Atheists, if there is no God, then why does Jesus' face sometimes appear on toast?
Imagine walking through the woods and briefly believing you're seeing a face in a knot of moss—only to realise seconds later that it’s just a tree. That flicker of recognition is your brain’s face-detection machinery springing into action. In a recent experiment at the University of Surrey, researchers used gaze-cueing techniques to show that when people perceive a face-like arrangement in inanimate objects, their attention is captured even more powerfully than by the averted gaze of a real face. These face-like patterns don’t need eyes, a nose, or even realistic features—just the right suggestion of symmetry and placement is enough for the brain to “see” a face where none exists.
This phenomenon, known as face pareidolia, is a by-product of evolution, not evidence of design. From an evolutionary standpoint, it's safer to wrongly detect a face in a shadow than to miss a predator or an ally. But while this trait once had clear survival value, it now fuels more curious beliefs. Religious individuals, for instance, often interpret pareidolic faces—especially when perceived in burnt toast, water stains, or tree bark—as miraculous signs from divine figures like Jesus or the Virgin Mary. What neuroscience tells us is that these “visions” are false positives produced by a brain primed to find patterns and assign meaning, even when none exists. Evolution has given us a perceptual system that’s fast, but not always accurate—and our cultural context then fills in the rest.
How the human brain interprets so many things as faces is the subject of a recent open access paper in i-Perception by researchers led by Dr Di Fu of the University of Surrey, with colleagues from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
A spiral galaxy with a disc made up of several swirling arms. Patchy blue clouds of gas are speckled over the disc, where stars are forming and lighting up the gas around them. The core of the galaxy is large and shines brightly gold, while the spiral arms are a paler and faint reddish colour. Neighbouring galaxies - from small, elongated spots to larger swirling spirals - can be seen across the black background.
Take a grain of rice and hold it between your thumb and forefinger at arm’s length while looking up at the night sky. The patch of sky hidden behind that tiny grain of rice probably contains thousands of galaxies—each with around half a trillion stars. Some of these stars are ancient, nearing the end of their tens-of-millions-of-years lifespans; others are just beginning to form from clouds of gas and debris left behind by older stars that exploded as supernovae.
What lies behind that grain of rice is a tiny fragment of a dynamic, evolving, ever-changing, and expanding universe. A universe of which our ancient prophets were completely unaware as they crafted imaginative descriptions of its origins—descriptions written just a few thousand years ago that portrayed it as a small, unchanging cosmos, with a flat Earth at the centre covered by a dome.
But let’s not be too hard on them. As they stood in their Canaanite pastures, the Earth must indeed have looked flat and small, and the sky would have seemed like the roof of a great tent, adorned with tiny lights and with the sun and moon suspended from it. To them, the Earth appeared fixed and immobile while the dome overhead turned slowly, or perhaps invisible spirits moved the lights across the heavens each night. They didn’t know where the sun went after sunset and imagined the moon might hide in a deep valley during the day.
In that long stretch of Earth’s history before it was supposedly "created," according to creationist mythology—a span covering 99.9975% of the planet’s existence—a remarkable geophysical event occurred. Around 41,000 years ago, during a time when modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans coexisted in Eurasia, a major disturbance in Earth’s magnetic field likely influenced human behaviour and may have hastened the disappearance of the Neanderthals.
This event, known as the Laschamps Excursion, was not a typical magnetic pole reversal, which Earth undergoes roughly every 100,000 years. Instead, the planet's magnetic field entered a chaotic state, weakening dramatically to around 10% of its usual strength and breaking into multiple, unstable poles.
Earth’s magnetic field normally shields the surface from ionising radiation by deflecting much of it towards the poles. With that protective barrier severely weakened, the planet would have been exposed to much stronger levels of ultraviolet radiation. The usual deflection of charged particles also produces the auroras, which during this period would have appeared across much of the night sky, including at lower latitudes—perhaps even near the equator—due to the multiple and shifting magnetic poles.
Although the Laschamps Excursion lasted only a few years, the environmental changes it triggered may explain behavioural shifts visible in the archaeological record. This is discussed in an article in The Conversation by Raven Garvey, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan; Agnit Mukhopadhyay, Research Scholar at the University of Alberta and Research Affiliate at Michigan; and Sanja Panovska, a Research Scientist at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences. Together with their colleagues, they have published their findings—open access—in Science Advances.
Incidentally, the archaeological evidence discussed here should not exist at all if the biblical flood narrative were true. Such a flood would have obliterated or buried this material beneath a chaotic layer of silt, destroying the stratified layers of sediment by which these finds are reliably dated—dating that is wholly inconsistent with the timeline of human history as derived from biblical mythology. Moreover, the Laschamps Excursion undermines any creationist claim that the Earth was created and fine-tuned especially for human life. If something as fundamental as magnetic polarity—and the UV protection it affords—can fail naturally due to processes in Earth’s core, then the idea of a specially designed planet collapses under its own absurdity.
The article from The Conversation is reproduced below under a Creative Commons licence and has been reformatted for stylistic consistency.
Imaginative reconstruction of Novaculadon mirabilis. Likely this animal would have been a little larger than a mouse.
Picture credit: Hamzah Imran.
(L-R) Dr Roy Smith and University of Portsmouth student Ben Weston by the flint bed in Durlston Bay near Swanage, which is the layer of rock which the mammal fossil came out of.
When someone grows up being threatened with divine punishment for merely entertaining doubts about the literal truth of the Bible, it's hardly surprising that real-world evidence struggles to break through the psychological defences they've built to protect themselves. This phenomenon is what atheist author and philosopher, Professor Peter Boghossian refers to as doxastic closure — a mental state in which contrary ideas are shut out before they can even be considered.
Former young-Earth creationist and now science advocate and geologist Glenn Morton once described it as like having a “gatekeeper demon” perched on the edge of your consciousness—filtering out any facts or logical arguments that challenge creationist beliefs, while admitting only those misrepresentations of science that appear to support them.
In this mindset, inconvenient realities — such as the discovery of a 145-million-year-old fossil of an early mammal — are unlikely to dent the conviction that the Earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old, and that all animals were created in a single supernatural event. In this view, evolution is simply an illusion, no matter how well the evidence supports it.
Even so, for any creationist with the courage and intellectual honesty to read this far, the story of that inconvenient little fossil is well worth exploring. It was discovered by a palaeontology student from the University of Portsmouth, along the Dorset coast of England, and is the subject of a recent paper in Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association.
This find marks the first discovery of a multituberculate jaw at Swanage since Victorian times. Its distinct size and shape confirmed it as a completely new species.
According to creationist superstition, humans were specially created by a perfect, anthropophilic, omnibenevolent creator god. If that were true, it would be reasonable to expect humans to be perfectly designed—free from defects or anything likely to cause long-term suffering.
However, the facts do not support this view. For example, as humans age, they increasingly suffer from a condition known as inflammaging — low-grade, chronic inflammation that contributes to a range of health problems, including heart disease, strokes, diabetes, cancer, and osteoarthritis.
Properly understood, this should give creationists cause for concern. The same designer god apparently gave some other primates—most notably, certain species of lemur—the ability to avoid this consequence of ageing. In fact, these lemurs even show a reduced tendency toward inflammatory conditions as they grow older.
This raises a serious question for Intelligent Design creationists: if the same designer god was capable of creating such a mechanism for lemurs, why did it not see fit to bestow the same gift upon its supposed favourite creation—humans? Or are these inflammatory conditions intended to cause suffering and disease as we age?
The discovery that some lemurs appear to have been specially favoured by a creator god—if we accept the ID creationist premise for the sake of argument—was made by a team of researchers led by Elaine Elizabeth Gomez Guevara, a biological anthropologist in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University, Durham, USA. As a scientist and biologist, however, she attributes the differences between lemurs and humans to evolution — not to indifference or malevolence on the part of a designer god.
The Cat's Paw Nebula in all its glory, as revealed by the JWST on its third anniversary of science operations.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
This is a zoomed-in portion of the JWST's Cat's Paw image. It shows a cavity surrounded by filaments and clumps of gas and dust. The cavity has been hollowed out by a hot young star which lights its surroundings up in blue.
To celebrate its third anniversary, astronomers used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to scratch beyond the surface of the Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334), a massive, local star-forming region.
This is what they saw. Compare it to the description of the universe in the Bible - a small flat planet with a dome over it at the center, with the sun and moon attached to the dome and stars stuck to its underside, able to be shaken lose in earthquakes.
Here is what the late great Carl Sagan had to say about how religions view the universe:
Here we have yet another example demonstrating that, if we apply Discovery Institute fellow William A. Dembski's criteria for proving intelligent design — namely the presence of complex specified genetic information — then we must conclude that creationism's supposed intelligent designer is, in fact, a malevolent force devising ever more sophisticated ways to inflict suffering on the world.
Once again, honest creationists are left with a stark dilemma: either complex specified information is indeed evidence of design, in which case the designer is malevolent, or it is not, in which case a central tenet of Intelligent Design creationism collapses. The dishonest ones, of course, will simply dismiss the evidence, likely misrepresent the science, and continue to bear false witness against scientists. In neither case should we expect creationists to admit that the theory of evolution fully accounts for the appearance of "malevolent" design, arising naturally without conscious intent or divine interference.
It’s a curious paradox that people who claim to worship the God of the Bible as an omnibenevolent, anthropophilic being are so often willing to see that deity cast in the role of a malevolent agent—so long as they can reject the theory of evolution. This strongly suggests that their opposition to evolution is not primarily theological, but political.
The latest example comes from the tick-borne pathogen Anaplasma, which causes anaplasmosis and contributes to Lyme disease. This bacterium hijacks the cellular machinery of ticks to ensure its own survival and transmission to new hosts, including humans. Although Dembski has famously avoided providing a rigorous, testable definition of "complex specified genetic information," any such definition would surely encompass genetic adaptations that promote survival and reproduction.
What information do you have on Anaplasma and the tick that transmits it?
Anaplasma is a genus of bacteria that includes several species capable of causing disease in humans and animals. The most medically relevant species is Anaplasma phagocytophilum, which causes anaplasmosis—a tick-borne disease that affects both humans and various mammals.
Overview of Anaplasma
Anaplasma are obligate intracellular bacteria in the family Anaplasmataceae.
They primarily infect white blood cells (especially neutrophils in the case of A. phagocytophilum).
Disease is often seasonal, peaking during the months of high tick activity (late spring to early autumn in temperate zones).
In severe cases: respiratory failure, organ failure, neurological symptoms
Incubation period: ~5–14 days after a tick bite.
Treatment: Responds well to doxycycline, especially if started early.
If untreated, it can lead to complications, especially in the elderly or immunocompromised.
Tick Vectors
The primary vector in the United States is the blacklegged tick (Ixodes scapularis), also called the deer tick.
In Europe, the main vector is the castor bean tick (Ixodes ricinus).
These are the same ticks that transmit Lyme disease (Borrelia burgdorferi) and Babesia (babesiosis), leading to frequent co-infections.
Hosts and Reservoirs
Main animal reservoirs include:
White-tailed deer
Rodents
Small mammals
Ticks acquire the bacteria when feeding on an infected host and then transmit it during subsequent feedings.
Biological Strategy of the Pathogen
Recent research (such as the 2025 WSU referenced) shows that Anaplasmacan:
Hijack the tick's cellular defence mechanisms, particularly its oxidative stress response, allowing the bacteria to survive within the tick's gut.
Manipulate the cell death pathways of tick cells, suppressing apoptosis (programmed cell death) to extend the viability of the cells it infects.
Modify gene expression in the tick to enhance its own survival and transmission potential.
These mechanisms qualify as highly sophisticated biological strategies—precisely the sort of adaptations that Intelligent Design proponents would struggle to explain without appealing to either special pleading or malevolent intent.
Ecological and Public Health Impact
Geographic spread is increasing, partly due to climate change, which expands the habitat range of ticks.
Public health monitoring is challenged by co-infections and misdiagnosis (HGA is often confused with Lyme disease or viral infections).
Preventative strategies include tick checks, repellents, and public awareness campaigns.
Bacteria hijack tick cell defenses to spread diseaseWashington State University researchers have discovered how the bacteria that cause anaplasmosis and Lyme disease hijack cellular processes in ticks to ensure their survival and spread to new hosts, including humans.
Based in the College of Veterinary Medicine, the team found that the bacteria can manipulate a protein known as ATF6, which helps cells detect and respond to infection, to support its own growth and survival inside the tick. The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could serve as a launching point for developing methods to eliminate the bacteria in ticks before they are transmitted to humans and other animals.
Most research has looked at how these bacteria interact with humans and animals and not how they survive and spread in ticks. What we have found could open the door to targeting these pathogens in ticks, before they are ever a threat to people.
Kaylee A. Vosbigian, lead author
Department of Veterinary Microbiology and Pathology
College of Veterinary Sciences
Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA.
Vosbigian and her advisor, Dana Shaw, the corresponding author of the study and an associate professor in the Department of Veterinary Microbiology and Pathology, focused their research on Ixodes scapularis, also known as the black-legged tick, which is responsible for spreading both Anaplasma phagocytophilum and Borrelia burgdorferi, the causative agents of anaplasmosis and Lyme disease. Both diseases are becoming increasingly common and can cause serious illness in humans and animals.
The team discovered that when ATF6 is activated in tick cells, it triggers the production of stomatin, a protein that helps move cholesterol through cells as part of a normal cellular processes. The bacteria exploit this process against their tick hosts, using the cholesterol — which they need to grow and build their own cell membranes but cannot produce themselves — to support their own survival and success.
Stomatin plays a variety of roles in the cell, but one of its key functions is helping shuttle cholesterol to different areas. The bacteria take advantage of this, essentially stealing the cholesterol they need to survive.
Kaylee A. Vosbigian
When the researchers blocked the production of stomatin, restricting the availability of cholesterol, bacterial growth is significantly reduced. The researchers believe this shows targeting the ATF6-stomatin pathway could lead to new methods for interrupting the disease cycle in ticks before transmission occurs.
As part of the study, Vosbigian also developed a new research tool called ArthroQuest, a free, web-based platform hosted by WSU that allows scientists to search the genomes of ticks, mosquitoes, lice, sand flies, mites, fleas and other arthropod vectors for transcription factor binding sites — genetic switches like ATF6 that control gene activity.
There aren’t many tools out there for studying gene regulation in arthropods. Most are built for humans or model species like fruit flies, which are genetically very different from ticks.
Kaylee A. Vosbigian
Using ArthroQuest, the team found that ATF6-regulated control of stomatin appears to be prevalent in blood-feeding arthropods. Since the hijacking of cholesterol and other lipids is common among arthropod-borne pathogens, the researchers suspect many may also exploit ATF6.
We know many other vector-borne pathogens, like Borrelia burgdorferi and the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium, rely on cholesterol and other lipids from their hosts. So, the fact that this ATF6-stomatin pathway exists in other arthropods could be relevant to a wide range of disease systems.
Assistant Professor Dana K. Shaw, corresponding author.
Department of Veterinary Microbiology and Pathology
College of Veterinary Sciences
Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA.
Significance
Infection dynamics for tick-borne pathogens like Anaplasma have primarily been studied in mammals. Comparatively less is known about tick–pathogen interactions. We found that Anaplasma activates the stress response receptor, ATF6, in ticks. Activated ATF6 functions as a transcriptional regulator. Using a custom script in R, we identified stomatin as an ATF6-regulated target that supports Anaplasma by modulating cholesterol trafficking. Our custom tool “ArthroQuest” revealed that the ATF6-regulated nature of stomatin is unique to arthropods. Given that lipid hijacking is common among arthropod-borne microbes, ATF6-mediated induction of stomatin may be exploited in many vector–pathogen relationships. In addition, our findings predict that there are many ATF6-regulated genes unique to ticks, highlighting that there is still much to be uncovered.
Abstract
How tick-borne pathogens interact with their hosts has been primarily studied in vertebrates where disease is observed. Comparatively less is known about pathogen interactions within the tick. Here, we report that Ixodes scapularis ticks infected with either Anaplasma phagocytophilum (causative agent of anaplasmosis) or Borrelia burgdorferi (causative agent of Lyme disease) show activation of the ATF6 branch of the unfolded protein response (UPR). Disabling ATF6 functionally restricts pathogen survival in ticks. When stimulated, ATF6 functions as a transcription factor, but is the least understood out of the three UPR pathways. To interrogate the Ixodes ATF6 transcriptional network, we developed a custom R script to query tick promoter sequences. This revealed stomatin as a potential gene target, which has roles in lipid homeostasis and vesical transport. Ixodes stomatin was experimentally validated as a bona fide ATF6-regulated gene through luciferase reporter assays, pharmacological activators, RNA interference transcriptional repression, and immunofluorescence microscopy. Silencing stomatin decreased A. phagocytophilum colonization in Ixodes and disrupted cholesterol dynamics in tick cells. Furthermore, blocking stomatin restricted cholesterol availability to the bacterium, thereby inhibiting growth and survival. Taken together, we have identified the Ixodes ATF6 pathway as a contributor to vector competence through Stomatin-regulated cholesterol homeostasis. Moreover, our custom, web-based transcription factor binding site search tool “ArthroQuest” revealed that the ATF6-regulated nature of stomatin is unique to blood-feeding arthropods. Collectively, these findings highlight the importance of studying fundamental processes in nonmodel organisms.
The North American deer tick, Ixodes scapularis, can transmit up to seven different pathogens that impact human and animal health including Anaplasma phagocytophilum (causative agent of anaplasmosis) and Borrelia burgdorferi (causative agent of Lyme disease) (1). The continuous rise in reported cases of tick-borne disease (2–10) underscores the need for novel intervention strategies. Although the intricacies of mammalian host–pathogen interactions have been well studied, comparatively little is known about tick–pathogen interactions.
Recently we have shown that A. phagocytophilum and B. burgdorferi activate the unfolded protein response (UPR) in ticks, which influences microbial colonization and persistence in the arthropod (11, 12). The UPR is a cellular response network that is initiated by three endoplasmic reticulum (ER) transmembrane receptors IRE1α, PERK, and ATF6. Each branch of the UPR initiates a signaling cascade and coordinates gene expression networks by activating specific transcription factors. We have shown that the IRE1α-TRAF2 pathway leads to microbe-restricting immune responses in arthropods by activating the NF-κB-like molecule, Relish (11). We have also demonstrated that stimulating PERK activates the antioxidant transcription factor, Nrf2, which facilitates pathogen persistence in ticks (12). Out of the three UPR receptors, ATF6 is the least understood (13). When activated, site-1 and site-2 proteases cleave the cytosolic portion of ATF6, which allows it to translocate to the nucleus and act as a transcriptional regulator (nATF6) (14). The role of ATF6 has never been explored in arthropod vectors.
Here, we demonstrate that Ixodes ATF6 is activated by tick-borne pathogens and supports A. phagocytophilum colonization in ticks. To determine how ATF6 impacts vector competence, we used protein modeling and a custom transcription factor binding site query to probe the ATF6 regulatory network in I. scapularis. Gene ontology (GO) and Reactome analyses identified Stomatin, a lipid homeostasis and vesical transport protein, as a potential gene regulated by ATF6 in ticks. Using pharmacological manipulations, RNA interference (RNAi), quantitative fluorescent assays, and immunofluorescence microscopy, we found that Stomatin supports pathogen colonization in ticks by facilitating cholesterol acquisition by the bacterium. These findings demonstrate that stomatin is induced during the arthropod-phase of the pathogen life cycle to enable survival and persistence in the vector.
Programs that predict transcription factor regulatory networks are generally restricted to model organisms, leaving out many arthropod vectors. We used our custom R script to develop a publicly available, web-based tool termed “ArthroQuest” that currently allows users to query 20 different arthropod vector genomes, in addition to Drosophila and humans. Queries with ArthroQuest revealed that the ATF6-regulated nature of stomatin appears to be unique to arthropods. Given that lipid hijacking and cholesterol incorporation is common in many arthropod-borne microbes (15), ATF6-mediated induction of stomatin may be a shared phenomenon among many vector–pathogen relationships that is exploited for the survival and persistence of transmissible pathogens.
This discovery poses a significant problem for proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) creationism because it challenges one of their core assertions: that complex specified information (CSI) within genetic material is a reliable indicator of an intelligent, purposeful designer. If we accept this premise, then we are compelled to ask why such intelligence would devote itself to crafting mechanisms that cause suffering, disease, and death—such as the ability of Anaplasma to hijack tick cell defences and ensure its own propagation at the expense of both ticks and mammalian hosts, including humans.
The usual ID response is to insist that their designer is benevolent — typically equated with the God of the Bible. But here, we are faced with a biological system so well-adapted to spreading infection that it must either be acknowledged as a product of evolutionary processes or attributed to a designer with malevolent intent. This is not a fringe example; it is one of many cases where nature reveals a level of intricate adaptation that ID advocates would normally cite as evidence for design, were it not so profoundly disturbing.
What this ultimately reveals is the theological inconsistency at the heart of ID creationism. The refusal to acknowledge the explanatory power of evolution, even when confronted with examples like Anaplasma, indicates that ID is not a scientific theory but a religious or ideological stance. The selective application of their own criteria — applauding "design" in butterflies but ignoring it in parasites — exposes the intellectual dishonesty behind the movement. Evolution, by contrast, provides a consistent and naturalistic framework that explains both the beautiful and the brutal features of the living world — without invoking a morally compromised designer.
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