Rosa Rubicondior: Creationism Refuted

Showing posts with label Creationism Refuted. Show all posts

Monday, 19 January 2026

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

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.

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

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

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'

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

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

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.

773,000-year-old mandible ThI-GH-1 from Thomas Quarry in Morocco.

Early hominins from Thomas Quarry I (Morocco) reveal an African lineage near the root of Homo sapiens

The discovery and dating (of which more later) of hominin remains in a Moroccan quarry, reported recently in Nature, has provided further confirmation that the origin of Homo sapiens lies in Africa, not Eurasia, contrary to an alternative hypothesis that has occasionally been proposed. The material consists of mandibles and other fragmentary remains, and also sheds light on the evolutionary origins of Neanderthals and Denisovans.

That is not to say that any serious palaeoanthropologists believed humans evolved wholly in Eurasia. Rather, some suggested that the final stages of Homo sapiens evolution may have occurred there, derived from descendants of earlier African migrants such as H. erectus, H. rhodesiensis, or H. antecessor. Others have argued that the so-called ‘muddle in the middle’ of the hominin family tree may represent a single, widely distributed species exhibiting regional variation across both Africa and Eurasia.

However, the Moroccan specimens display a clear mosaic of primitive and derived features — precisely the pattern that creationists call ‘transitional species’ and insist don't exist. These fossils combine traits seen in African sister lineages with features associated with H. antecessor, a pre-Neanderthal/Denisovan European species whose remains are being excavated at the Sima de los Huesos (Cave of Bones) site at Atapuerca, Spain.

The fossils are also exceptionally valuable for palaeoanthropology for another reason. The sediments in which they were found preserve the unmistakable signature of the Matuyama–Brunhes geomagnetic reversal, which occurred around 773,000 years ago when Earth’s magnetic poles flipped. This provides an unusually robust chronological anchor, as the timing of this reversal has been independently verified from multiple, entirely separate lines of evidence.

There is therefore a great deal here for creationists to attempt to dismiss. First, there is the mosaic of primitive and derived features that identify these fossils as genuinely transitional — something creationism insists does not exist. Second, there is the age of the material, securely dated to approximately 763,000 years (±4,000 years) before creationists insist Earth was magicked out of nothing, placing ancestral hominins hundreds of thousands of years before the Bronze Age biblical story of a single, ancestor-free human couple. Finally, and perhaps most inconveniently of all, the dating does not rely on radiometric methods at all, but on geomagnetic reversal stratigraphy, verified beyond any reasonable doubt. The biblical timeline is therefore wrong by many orders of magnitude.

Unintelligent Design - An Arms Race Between a Parasitic Beetle And a Parasitic Fungus

Adult spruce bark beetles in their galleries in the bark of a Norway spruce tree. The beetle in the middle is infected with the fungus Beauveria bassiana.

Fungus turns bark beetles’ defenses against them

A paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) has raised the spectre of evolutionary arms races for creationism. Evolutionary arms races are something of a nightmare for creationists because, within the paradigm of intelligent design by a single designer, having an arms race with yourself makes no sense at all.

Evolutionary arms races are among the strongest arguments against intelligent design, as I point out in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax. They epitomise stupidity. What on Earth is the point of designing a solution to a problem for one species, only to treat that solution as a problem to be solved for another? It is almost exactly as if two organisms are evolving in response to changes in their environments, of which their predator or prey is a key component. It makes less sense than a dog chasing its own tail – at least the dog gets some exercise.

The arms race reported in this paper, by a research team at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, is between the spruce bark beetle, Ips typographus, and the pathogenic fungus Beauveria bassiana.

In fact, there are two arms races at work here. The first is between the Norway spruce, Picea abies, and its microbial environment. The tree produces antimicrobial phenolic compounds as a defence. The spruce bark beetle has evolved the ability to convert these compounds into an even more toxic derivative, which helps protect the beetle and enables it to successfully colonise the spruce.

The clever twist is that the fungus Beauveria bassiana has evolved a countermeasure. It converts the beetle’s toxic compound by binding a sugar molecule to it and adding a methyl group. This modification effectively neutralises the beetle’s antifungal defence, making it more susceptible to fungal infection.

Translated into creationist terms, a designer first designed a defence for the spruce that can be exploited by a parasitic beetle to protect itself from microbes, including a pathogenic fungus. The same designer then designed a pathogenic fungus capable of neutralising the beetle’s defences, allowing it to infect the beetle more efficiently.

Bible Blunder - Archaeologists Find Evidence For a Creation Myth - But NOT the Bible Version.

Extracting drilled sediments.

Origins of Ancient Egypt’s Karnak Temple revealed – Uppsala University

An international team of archaeologists led by Dr Angus Graham of Uppsala University has shown that the temple to Amun-Ra at Karnak Temple Complex was originally built more than 3,000 years ago on an island formed when the Nile split into eastern and western channels. Their findings were published last October in the journal Antiquity.

One can easily imagine the jubilation with which Christian circles would greet the discovery of any credible archaeological evidence for Adam and Eve or Noah’s Ark. In practice, judging by the regular declarations of “proof” that appear on social media, almost any claim — no matter how tenuous or poorly authenticated — that can be retro-fitted to a biblical story is enthusiastically celebrated. It is hard to avoid the impression that this eagerness betrays a certain underlying insecurity.

Yet when archaeological discoveries appear to lend support to the origin myths of other cultures, the reaction is very different. The usual response is indifference, outright dismissal, or an appeal to the tentative nature of the evidence and the dangers of confirmation bias—precisely the same grounds on which much supposedly “biblical” evidence can be rejected, of course.

It will therefore be interesting to observe the reaction in Christian circles to this research from Karnak and its relevance to ancient Egyptian creation mythology, in which the land is caused to rise from the primordial waters by the creator. This bears an obvious resemblance to the later biblical motif of land being divided from the waters. The relatively high ground at Luxor is the only plausible candidate in the region for such a formation, and during periods of high Nile flood it would indeed have appeared as an island within a lake—an environment readily imbued with sacred significance by the temple builders.

Such parallels are not especially surprising. The ancient Near East was a densely interconnected cultural landscape in which ideas, myths, and cosmological frameworks circulated freely over centuries. Egyptian conceptions of creation—particularly the emergence of land from primeval waters—pre-date the composition of the Hebrew Bible by many centuries and would have been well known, directly or indirectly, throughout the eastern Mediterranean. When the authors of Book of Genesis framed their own creation narrative, they were not writing in a cultural vacuum, but drawing upon a shared mythological vocabulary that had long been established in the region.

The team also uncovered evidence that the eastern Nile channel was deliberately infilled with sand, accelerating a silting process that was already under way. These conclusions are based on detailed analysis of 61 sediment cores taken from in and around the temple complex, along with thousands of ceramic fragments recovered from the site.

Refuting Creationism - Fine Tuned For Catastrophe

Source: Canadian Geographic.

Researchers find evidence of cosmic impact at classic Clovis archaeological sites | The Current

A new paper in PLOS One presents compelling evidence that a comet exploding in Earth’s atmosphere around 13,000 years ago played a major role in the extinction of megafauna such as mammoths and mastodons across Eurasia and North America, and in extinguishing the Clovis Culture, the archaeological sites of which provided the evidence for the impact. The study was led by James Kennett, Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, working with an international team of collaborators.

The findings cut directly across a familiar creationist trope: the claim that Earth is “finely tuned” to be a benign and stable haven, perfectly suited for human life. This notion, often promoted by parochial American creationists, quietly assumes that the wider world is a trivial backdrop where nothing of consequence ever happens. It ignores the obvious realities of earthquakes, floods, famines, volcanic eruptions and climate shocks—realities that dominate both human history and the deep geological record.

That record tells a very different story. Earth’s past is marked by repeated catastrophes, ranging from abrupt climate shifts to mass extinctions, many triggered by astronomical or geological events. Impacts from space, massive volcanism, plate tectonics and cascading ecosystem failures have repeatedly reshaped life on this planet. Far from being a delicately balanced paradise, Earth is a dynamic and often hostile environment in which survival has always depended on adaptation—and, frequently, sheer luck.

Refuting Creationism - Now It's Evidence of Bipedalism in a Hominin From 7 Million Years Ago

S. tchadensis fossils (TM 266) compared to a chimpanzee and a human.

Anthropologists Offer New Evidence of Bipedalism in Long-Debated Fossil Discovery

We are only three days into 2026 and already creationism is facing an avalanche of new evidence against it and in favour of evolution on an ancient Earth in a vastly older Universe — directly contradicting the Bronze Age origin myths that creationists cling to with the desperation of a drunk clutching a lamppost.

The latest blow comes from the New York University Department of Anthropology, where a team of researchers led by Associate Professor Scott Williams, working with colleagues from the University of Washington, Chaffey College, and the University of Chicago, have carried out a detailed re-examination of fossil remains attributed to Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Their analysis provides strong evidence that this species was bipedal and shared several key skeletal characteristics with later bipedal hominins, including the australopithecines and members of the genus Homo.

Sahelanthropus tchadensis was discovered in the early 2000s, and its place in human evolution has been debated ever since. Some researchers argued it might represent an extinct ape rather than a stem hominin. Evidence for habitual bipedalism, however, strongly favours the latter interpretation, making S. tchadensis the earliest known human ancestor currently identified in the fossil record.

As such, it becomes yet another example of the transitional species that creationists continue to insist do not exist, often under the mistaken belief that Charles Darwin — whom they treat as the final authority on all matters evolutionary — admitted that the absence of transitional forms was a serious problem for his theory. In reality, Darwin explicitly predicted that such fossils would eventually be found, and the subsequent century and a half of palaeontology has repeatedly confirmed that prediction.

The discovery is of a point of attachment on the femur of a ligament only found in bipedal hominins. The importance of bipedalism in human evolution cannot be overstated. Habitual upright walking is one of the defining characteristics that separates hominins from other apes, reflecting a fundamental shift in anatomy, locomotion, and behaviour. It requires extensive reorganisation of the skeleton, including changes to the position of the foramen magnum, the curvature of the spine, the shape of the pelvis, the proportions of the limbs, and the structure of the feet. Because these adaptations are complex, interdependent, and leave clear signatures in fossilised bones, bipedalism is not a trivial or ambiguous trait. Evidence for it in Sahelanthropus tchadensis therefore places this species firmly on the human lineage and pushes the origin of upright walking — and with it the human evolutionary trajectory — back far earlier than creationist models allow.

Scott Williams’ team have now published their findings, open access, in Science Advances.

Creationism Refuted - Scientists Show What Earth Was Like When Life Got started - 3.5 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Ancient African bedrock reveals the violent beginnings of life on our blue planet

One reliable way to recognise that the Bible is the product of ancient ignorance is simply to compare its claims with what science has since revealed. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Genesis, which turns out to be a ludicrously simplistic attempt to explain the origins of the universe and life on Earth. Its compressed timescale cannot possibly accommodate what we now know about the age of the universe, the age of our planet, the deep history of life, or—most conspicuously—the emergence of human cultures and the migration of humans across every continent except Antarctica, as revealed by the archaeological record.

The gap between biblical mythology and reality is so vast that it cannot plausibly be rescued as allegory or metaphor, and the evidence continues to accumulate relentlessly, with nothing being discovered that remotely validates the biblical account. The year 2025 ended badly for creationism with the discovery of a 37-million-year-old transitional snake fossil from southern England, and 2026 has begun no better. A new book, The Oldest Rocks on Earth, by Simon Lamb, Associate Professor of Geophysics at Victoria University of Wellington, describes the surface conditions on Earth when life first emerged more than 3.5 billion years ago—conditions utterly incompatible with the biblical creation narrative. The research behind this book is summarised in an article in The Conversation, also by Associate Professor Lamb. That article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Ancient African bedrock reveals the violent beginnings of life on our blue planet

Simon Lamb, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

You have probably seen the images of the surface of Mars, beamed back by NASA’s rovers. What if there were a time machine capable of roaming Earth during its remote geological past, perhaps even going right back to its beginnings, beaming back pictures of similar quality?

This is not science fiction. In remote corners of the world, geologists have found tiny relics of Earth’s very ancient surface.

I have been part of this scientific endeavour, looking at the treasure trove of information in the bedrock of the Makhonjwa Mountains in South Africa and the adjacent small kingdom of Eswatini.

These rocks reach back more than three quarters of the way through our planet’s long history of nearly 4.6 billion years. In my new book, The Oldest Rocks on Earth, I describe the graphic images “beamed back” by this geological time machine.

Beneath the remote and rugged landscape of the Makhonjwa Mountains, in Eswatini, is a bedrock that holds a record of Earth’s surface from 3.2 to 3.5 billion years ago, when our planet was about a quarter of the way through its history.

World of oceans

The ancient rocks reveal a world with extensive oceans and intense volcanic activity on the sea floor.

Deep beneath the crust, Earth was much hotter than today, giving rise to an unusual white-hot magma, rich in elements from its interior. Huge volumes of super-heated water continually gushed out of underwater cracks, building up chimneys of valuable metals. And life was thriving around these undersea vents.

Volcanic islands rose up from the ocean depths. These were dangerous places. Pools of hot bubbling mud dotted their shores, and clouds of volcanic ash periodically exploded from volcanic craters.

Life was already there, forming microbial mats in the sheltered nearshore waters.

Periodically, large earthquakes violently shook the bedrock, triggering submarine avalanches that cascaded down into the deep ocean, creating vast jumbles of rock on the sea floor. Giant asteroid impacts disturbed this world, but crucially, did not extinguish it.

Deep-seated forces were pushing up new land, creating the early continents.

Ocean waves moved back and forth on sandy beaches along coastlines with bays, lagoons, inlets and estuaries, with tides similar to those today.

During floods, large rivers brought muddy water from the continental interior. Farther in the distance, their headwaters drained a mountainous terrain, often enveloped in thick cloud.

It was a blue planet because, like today, the oceans scattered light in the blue part of the colour spectrum.

But the atmosphere contained a lethal cocktail of gases, including high concentrations of methane and carbon dioxide. These greenhouse gases kept the surface at the right temperature for liquid water, at a time when astrophysicists calculate the Sun was much weaker. But there was no oxygen.

The earliest life forms were anaerobic microbes, although brightly coloured – pink or purple have been proposed.

Oceania today

Oceania, in the southwestern Pacific, may illustrate best what this early world was like. Here, the ocean is peppered with volcanic islands and small continents, rocked by great earthquakes where tectonic plates rub against each other. There are even clues to how life began.

The 2022 eruption of the Hunga volcano, near Tonga, created a mushroom cloud of ash that burst out of the ocean and reached up into space with an estimated energy of a 60-megaton atomic bomb. It generated more than 200,000 lightning strikes and left behind a deep underwater crater filled with a chemical soup derived from numerous underwater hot vents.

Experiments show that lightning strikes can trigger the synthesis of basic organic molecules needed by living organisms. Millions of Hunga-like eruptions on early Earth would have created myriad opportunities to kick start the chemistry of life in underwater volcanic craters – life was born out of extreme geological violence.

Staying blue

Going back in time beyond the Makhonjwa Mountains, we still find evidence for oceans, life and, I argue, plate tectonics. Earth became blue within the first tenth of its history.

Mars and Venus may have started this way, too. But our planet uniquely lies in the so-called Goldilocks Zone, receiving just the right amount of solar energy to avoid becoming a boiling Venusian hell or freezing Martian world.

It is also big enough to have a magnetic field and pull of gravity sufficient to retain its atmosphere. And right at the start, a dramatic collision with a Mars-sized asteroid spalled off our Moon, stabilising Earth’s spin axis so that day and night were less extreme.

Finally, the biochemistry of living organisms may have played a key role in keeping Earth this way by helping the bedrock absorb greenhouse gases in the face of a steadily warming Sun.

We must not be the first to let Earth lose its distinctive life-giving blue, a colour so wonderfully referred to in the Siswati language of Eswatini as luhlata lwesibhakabhaka, literally “green like the sky”.

Simon Lamb, Associate Professor in Geophysics, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

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

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

What emerges from this work is not a minor disagreement over interpretation, nor a gap that can be papered over with metaphor or selective reading. The world described by geology, geochemistry and planetary science is fundamentally incompatible with the universe imagined by the authors of Genesis. Earth was not a gentle, pre-prepared garden awaiting life, but a violent, unstable planet shaped by impacts, volcanism and relentless geological recycling over billions of years. Life did not appear suddenly by decree, but clawed its way into existence under conditions that would have been lethal to almost anything alive today.

This matters because creationism depends on the claim that its sacred text offers a privileged insight into reality. Yet when examined against the physical evidence locked into Earth’s oldest rocks, Genesis is not merely wrong in detail—it is wrong in kind. Its authors had no conception of deep time, planetary formation, plate tectonics, or the chemical and physical constraints under which life emerged. Their account reflects the worldview of Bronze Age pastoral societies, not hidden wisdom awaiting modern confirmation.

As discoveries like these continue to accumulate, the creationist position becomes ever more untenable. There is no convergence, no narrowing of the gap, no sense in which science is “catching up” with scripture. Instead, each new insight into Earth’s early history widens the chasm between myth and reality. The Bible does not describe the world we inhabit, the planet on which life evolved, or the processes that made our existence possible—and no amount of reinterpretation can change that.

Creationism Refuted - A Terrible End to a Bad Year for Creationism - a 37-Million-Year-Old Transitional Fossil Snake

The most commonly found bones of fossil snakes are their vertebrae, which contain traits that scientists can use to identify the species.

“Weird” new species of ancient fossil snake discovered in southern England | Natural History Museum

2026 is shaping up to be yet another dreadful year for the creationist cult, as palaeontology, archaeology, geochronology, and genetics continue to uncover facts that do not merely show creationism to be a divinely inspired allegory or metaphor, but demonstrate that it is simply and unequivocally wrong at every level.

At times it seems like an unfair contest between myths invented by Bronze Age pastoralists—without the slightest benefit of scientific understanding—and the cumulative output of modern science. It is rather like a chess match between a pigeon and a powerful computer, in which the pigeon’s concept of chess is to knock the pieces over, then strut about on the board declaring victory. This tactic is known in creationist circles as “debate”, and everywhere else as “pigeon chess”.

As usual, the closing months of the year have brought yet more palaeontological evidence that creationism cannot accommodate. This latest find dates to around 37 million years before creationists believe Earth was magicked into existence, bears the unmistakable fingerprints of one of those supposedly “non-existent” transitional forms, and displays the familiar mosaic of archaic and modern features that are commonplace in the fossil record. It also fits precisely into the established timeline of reptilian evolution and was discovered in southern England, in deposits that align exactly with the known geological and climatological history of the region.

The fossil was discovered in 1981 at Hordle Cliff, England, and donated to the Natural History Museum in London, where it has now been identified as a new species. The identification was made by Professor Georgios L. Georgalis of the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków, currently a visiting researcher at the Natural History Museum. His paper, co-authored with Dr Marc E. H. Jones, curator of fossil reptiles and amphibians, has recently been published open access in Comptes Rendus Palevol.

Hordle Cliff, Geology. Hordle Cliff is one of the most important and intensively studied fossil-bearing coastal exposures in southern England. Its significance lies in the exceptional sequence of Eocene marine sediments exposed by continual coastal erosion along the western Solent.

Geological setting

Hordle Cliff lies on the coast of Hampshire, west of Milford-on-Sea, forming part of the Hampshire Basin, a large sedimentary basin that accumulated marine and marginal-marine deposits during the early Cenozoic. The strata exposed here date mainly to the Late Eocene, approximately 41–34 million years ago, a time when southern England lay beneath a warm, shallow sea.

Stratigraphy

The cliff exposes a classic succession of Eocene formations, including:

Barton Group (upper Eocene)

Dominated by clays, silts, and fine sands
Deposited in shallow marine conditions
Exceptionally fossil-rich

Barton Clay Formation

The most famous unit at Hordle Cliff
Known for abundant molluscs, sharks’ teeth, rays, fish remains, turtles, crocodilians, birds, and reptiles (including snakes)
Indicates warm, subtropical seas with nearby coastal and estuarine environments

These sediments accumulated gradually, layer upon layer, in calm marine settings—exactly the opposite of the chaotic, high-energy deposition required by flood-geology models.

Depositional environment

During the Late Eocene, this region experienced:

**Warm greenhouse climates
High sea levels
Low-energy marine sedimentation

Fine-grained clays settled slowly out of suspension, allowing delicate fossils to be preserved intact. Many beds show bioturbation, shell beds, and orderly fossil assemblages—clear evidence of stable ecosystems persisting over long periods.

Fossil significance

Hordle Cliff is internationally important because it preserves:

Highly diverse faunas spanning multiple ecological niches
Mosaic evolutionary forms, including transitional reptiles
Fossils preserved in situ, not reworked or mixed from different ages

This makes the site particularly valuable for reconstructing Eocene ecosystems and tracing evolutionary change through time.

Structural and erosional features

The cliffs themselves are relatively soft and unstable:

Frequent slumping and landslips continually expose fresh material
Ongoing erosion has made Hordle Cliff productive for over two centuries
The geology is simple and undisturbed, with gently dipping strata—no folding, overturning, or tectonic chaos

Why this matters for creationist claims

The geology of Hordle Cliff presents multiple, independent problems for young-Earth creationism:

The sediments record millions of years of gradual deposition
Fossils are ordered, local, and ecological, not globally mixed
Climatic signals match global Eocene warming trends
The strata fit seamlessly into the wider regional and global geological record

There is no evidence whatsoever of rapid, catastrophic deposition, let alone a single global flood. Instead, Hordle Cliff is a textbook example of slow geological processes operating exactly as modern geology predicts.

The discovery and its broader significance were explained in a recent Natural History Museum news item by James Ashworth.

“Weird” new species of ancient fossil snake discovered in southern England
An extinct snake has slithered its way out of obscurity over four decades after its discovery.

The newly described species of reptile, Paradoxophidion richardoweni, is offering new clues in the search for the origin of ‘advanced’ snakes.
In 1981, the backbones of an ancient snake were uncovered at Hordle Cliff on England’s south coast. They’ve now been revealed as the remnants of a previously unknown species.

Research published in the journal Comptes Rendus Palevol has identified that the vertebrae belong to a new species named Paradoxophidion richardoweni. This animal would have lived around 37 million years ago, when England was home to a much wider range of snakes than it is now.

While little is known about this animal’s life, it could shed light on the early evolution of biggest group of modern snakes. This is because Paradoxophidion represents an early-branching member of the caenophidians, the group containing the vast majority of living snakes.

The new species is so early in the evolution of the caenophidians that it has a peculiar mix of characteristics now found in different snakes throughout this group. This mosaic of features is summed up in its genus name, with Paradoxophidion meaning ‘paradox snake’ in Greek.

Its species name, meanwhile, honours Sir Richard Owen. Not only did he name the first fossil snakes found at Hordle Cliff, but this scientist was also instrumental in establishing what’s now the Natural History Museum where the fossils are cared for, giving the name multiple layers of meaning.

Lead author Dr Georgios Georgalis, from the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow, says that being able to describe a new species from our collections was ‘a dream come true’.

It was my childhood dream to be able to visit the Natural History Museum, let alone do research there, so, when I saw these very weird vertebrae in the collection and knew that they were something new, it was a fantastic feeling. It’s especially exciting to have described an early diverging caenophidian snake, as there’s not that much evidence about how they emerged. Paradoxophidion brings us closer to understanding how this happened.

Dr Georgios Georgalis, lead author
Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals
Polish Academy of Sciences
Krakow, Poland.

The most commonly found bones of fossil snakes are their vertebrae, which contain traits that scientists can use to identify the species.

© Georgalis and Jones.

What’s been discovered at Hordle Cliff?

Hordle Cliff, near Christchurch on England’s south coast, provides a window into a period of Earth’s history known as the Eocene that lasted from around 56 to 34 million years ago.

Dr Marc Jones, our curator of fossil reptiles and amphibians who co-authored the research, says that this epoch saw dramatic climatic changes around the world.

Around 37 million years ago, England was much warmer than it is now, though the Sun was very slightly dimmer, levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were much higher. England was also slightly closer to the equator, meaning that it received more heat from the Sun year round.

Dr Marc E.H. Jones, co-author
Curator of fossil reptiles and amphibians.
Natural History Museum
London, UK.

Fossils were first uncovered at Hordle Cliff around 200 years ago. In the early 1800s Barbara Rawdon-Hastings, the fossil-hunting Marchioness of Hastings, collected the skulls of crocodile relatives from the site, one of which Richard Owen would later name after her.

Since then, a variety of fossil turtles, lizards and mammals have also been uncovered at Hordle Cliff. There are also abundant snake fossils, including some particularly important species.

The fossil snakes found at Hordle Cliff were some of the first to be recognised when Richard Owen studied them in the mid-nineteenth century. They include Paleryx, the first named constrictor snake in the fossil record. Smaller snakes from this site, however, haven’t been as well investigated. Paradoxophidion’s vertebrae are just a few millimetres long, so historically they’ve not had a lot of attention.

Dr Georgios Georgalis.

To get a better look at these fossils, Marc and Georgios took CT scans of the bones. In total, they identified 31 vertebrae from different parts of the spine of Paradoxophidion.

We used these CT scans to make three dimensional models of the fossils. These provide a digital record of the specimen which we’ve shared online so that they can be studied by anyone, not just people who can come to the museum and use our microscopes.

Dr Marc E.H. Jones.

The scans show that the fossils are all slightly different shapes and sizes, as the snake’s spine bones gradually taper from head to tail. However, they share some features that show they all belong to one species.

Georgios estimates that Paradoxophidion would have been less than a metre long, but other details about this animal’s life are hard to say. The lack of a skull makes it difficult to know what it ate, while the vertebrae don’t have any sign of being adapted for a specialised lifestyle, such as burrowing.

The backbones of Paradoxophidion are surprisingly similar to those of Acrochordus snakes.

© Smacdonald via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

A living link to the past?

Though the vertebrae don’t give much away about Paradoxophidion’s lifestyle, they are strikingly similar to a group of snakes known as the Acrochordids. These reptiles are known as elephant trunk snakes due to their unusually baggy skin.

Today, only a few species of these snakes can be found living in southeast Asia and northern Australia. But they’re among the earliest branches of the caenophidian family tree, with a fossil record extending back over 20 million years.

As Paradoxophidion is really similar to the acrochordids, it’s possible that this snake could be the oldest known member of this family. If it was, then it could mean that it was an aquatic species, as all Acrochordids are aquatic. On the other hand, it might belong to a completely different group of caenophidians. There’s just not enough evidence at the moment to prove how this snake might have lived, or which family it belongs to.

Dr Georgios Georgalis.

Finding out more about Paradoxophidion and the early evolution of the caenophidians means that more fossils will need to be studied. Georgios hopes to continue his work in our fossil reptile collections in the near future, where he believes more new species might be waiting.
I’m planning to study a variety of snake fossils in the collection, including those originally studied by Richard Owen. These include the remains of the giant aquatic snake Palaeophis, which were first found in England in the nineteenth century. There are also several bones with differing morphology that haven’t been investigated before that I’m interested in looking at. These might represent new taxa and offer additional clues about snake evolution.

Dr Georgios Georgalis.

Publication:
Georgalis G.L. & Jines M.E.H. (2025).
A new peculiar early diverging caenophidian snake (Serpentes) from the late Eocene of Hordle Cliff, England, in Georgalis G.L., Zaher H. & Laurin M. (eds), Snakes from the Cenozoic of Europe – towards a macroevolutionary and palaeobiogeographic synthesis.
Comptes Rendus Palevol 24 (25): 505-530. https://doi.org/10.5852/cr-palevol2025v24a25

A novel caenophidian serpent (Serpentes) peculiar to early divergence from the late Eocene of Hordle Cliff, England

We describe here a new genus and species of snake, based on several trunk and caudal vertebrae, from the late Eocene (MP 17a) of Hordle Cliff, England. We studied the fossil material using both visual microscopy and computed tomography (μCT), focusing on its intracolumnar variation and comparing it extensively with other Paleogene snake taxa from England and continental Europe. The new small taxon is characterized by a set of bizarre and distinctive vertebral features that may differentiate it from all other snakes. Its morphology is somewhat similar to that of russellophiids; however, some of its anatomical features are radically different from those seen in the latter group and thus defy such placement at the family level. Furthermore, the new English taxon bears a striking resemblance to extant acrochordids, particularly the species Acrochordus granulatus (Schneider, 1799). Consequently, we consider the new taxon to most likely represent an early divergent caenophid, possibly even a member of the Acrochordidae Bonaparte, 1831, well outside the stratigraphic and geographic distribution known to date for the latter group. It further adds to the astonishing diversity of vertebral morphologies in European Paleogene snakes.

Appendix 1. — Flythrough video of the μCT of the holotype trunk vertebra NHMUK PV R 10795.

Appendix 2. — Flythrough video of the μCT of the caudal vertebra NHMUK PV R 10796.

Georgalis G.L. & Jines M.E.H. (2025).
A new peculiar early diverging caenophidian snake (Serpentes) from the late Eocene of Hordle Cliff, England, in Georgalis G.L., Zaher H. & Laurin M. (eds) Snakes from the Cenozoic of Europe – towards a macroevolutionary and palaeobiogeographic synthesis.
Comptes Rendus Palevol 24 (25): 505-530. https://doi.org/10.5852/cr-palevol2025v24a25

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

Taken together, the geology of Hordle Cliff leaves no room for creationist evasions. The sediments accumulated slowly in warm, shallow Eocene seas, preserving stable marine ecosystems over millions of years. The fossils are local, ordered, and ecologically coherent, embedded within undisturbed strata that fit seamlessly into the wider geological history of southern England and the global Eocene record. None of this resembles the chaotic aftermath of a recent global catastrophe; all of it is exactly what conventional geology predicts.

The newly identified fossil from this site simply adds to the embarrassment. It is neither out of place nor out of time, but sits precisely where evolutionary theory says it should—both stratigraphically and anatomically—displaying the familiar mosaic of ancestral and derived features that creationists insist do not exist. Hordle Cliff has been yielding such transitional forms for over two centuries, and every one of them tells the same story.

For creationism, this presents a recurring and insoluble problem. Each new discovery must be dismissed, distorted, or ignored, not because it is anomalous, but because it fits too well. Hordle Cliff is not an exception to the rule; it is the rule itself—one more quietly devastating reminder that the natural world records its own history with remarkable consistency, and that history bears no resemblance whatsoever to a Bronze Age flood myth.

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