Creationism Refuted - Scientists Revisit Some Old Fossils, Extend Scientific Knowledge - And Casually Refute Creationism Again

296-Million-Year-Old Fossil Unearthed in Brazil Sheds Light on Ancient Plant Mystery Hidden for Over Half a Century - Notícia

In another of those regular events in science, a team of researchers led by the University of Vale do Taquari – Univates, Rio Grande, Brazil, through the Graduate Program in Environment and Development (PPGAD), re-examined material held in the Univates Palaeontological Collection. Using modern equipment that was not available when the fossils were first studied more than 50 years ago, they uncovered new information – and, without intending to, once again demonstrated the weakness of creationist claims. As usual, creationism is refuted by the evidence.

What the team discovered were plant spores preserved in situ in fossils dating to between 298.9 and 252.17 million years ago – long before dinosaurs appeared and well before flowering plants evolved. At that time, the most advanced land plants were spore-bearing, like today’s mosses and ferns. This showed that the original classification as Lycopodites was incorrect. Instead, the fossils belonged to a new genus, which the team named Franscinella, giving the newly described Upper Palaeozoic plant the species name Franscinella riograndensis.

The significance extends further: the spores, now positively linked to this species, are index microfossils found in Permian strata of the Paraná Basin. Yet creationists routinely dismiss the use of index fossils in geochronology as “circular reasoning.” The ability to tie these spores directly to a particular species undermines that objection and strengthens their role in stratigraphy.

Creationism Refuted - How Co-Evolution Gave Us Sleep - Courtesy of Our Gut Microbiome

Key to the riddle of sleep may be linked to bacteria | WSU Insider | Washington State University

For an astonishing example of co-evolution — not just involving two organisms but a whole host that have co-evolved over millions of years — you need look no further than your own body, as a paper in *Frontiers in Neuroscience* by Erika L. English and James M. Krueger of Washington State University (WSU) shows. It reports the finding that sleep may be a co-evolved condition in which gut micro-organisms play a central role.

The researchers showed that, in mice, there is a close relationship between sleep patterns and the cyclical presence in the brain of a substance known as peptidoglycan (PG), normally found in the mesh-like walls of gut bacteria. Although co-evolutionary relationships are a well-established concept in evolutionary biology, this example illustrates just how intimate such relationships can become — to the point where it is difficult to say, in biological terms, which organism is the “product” of the other. To what extent are we the product of our gut bacteria, and to what extent are they the product of us?

Of course, creationism has nothing to say about this kind of co-evolution because the Bible is silent on the matter of micro-organisms or evolution. It contains nothing that wasn’t visible to its Bronze Age authors with the naked eye, or that lived outside the narrow confines of their limited experience. It was written by people with no appreciation of the history of life on Earth or of how it has been shaped by environmental change and ecological balances over deep time.

Refuting Creationism - A Jewellery Factory in France, At Least 32,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Meticulous excavation work at La Roche-à-Pierrot

Late Neanderthals and early European Homo sapiens may have lived and worked together in southwest France.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5)

The oldest shell jewellery workshop in Western Europe | CNRS

The creationism cult took another blow yesterday with the publication of details of the oldest jewellery workshop yet found in Western Europe—dating to at least 32,000 years before the mythical six-day creation of everything from nothing. The site appears to have been used for the organised manufacture of shell ornaments, suggesting a society in which the production and trade of personal adornment already played an important role.

The discovery, made by a team of scientists from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Université de Bordeaux, the ministère de la Culture, and Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). It records the excavation of a Palaeolithic site in southwest France, dating from a period when Homo sapiens were spreading into the region and Neanderthals were in decline.

However, the evidence points to a more complex story — one of coexistence and cultural exchange, or even the absorption of Neanderthals into the expanding H. sapiens populations, with traditions and technologies merging. It also raises the possibility that H. sapiens had been established in the area far earlier, perhaps through an earlier migration wave.

Refuting Creationism - A Newly-Identified Dinosaur From About 220 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Newtonsaurus cambrensis in its natural setting

AI-generated (ChatGPT 5)

September: Newtonsaurus identification | News and features | University of Bristol

A newly-identified dinosaur from the Late Triassic of Wales has turned out to be hiding in plain sight. The fossil, discovered in 1899 and displayed for years in the National Museum of Wales, has only now been correctly recognised thanks to modern imaging technology unavailable to earlier researchers.

Originally described by Edwin Tully Newton in 1899 as Zanclodon cambrensis, the specimen has now been reclassified by a team of palaeontologists led by Owain Evans of Bristol University. Since the name Zanclodon is no longer used for early reptiles, the team have given it a new name: Newtonsaurus.

As always, discoveries like this present a problem for creationists. Fossils of species that lived tens or even hundreds of millions of years ago sit uneasily with their narrative that all life was magically created just a few thousand years ago. To preserve that story, they are forced into feats of mental gymnastics — whether by bearing false witness against scientists, rejecting well-established dating techniques, or simply dismissing the evidence outright as “wrong.”

The rocks, however, are not so easily ignored. Unlike ancient manuscripts, said to have been dictated by a god to prophets and accepted only on faith, the fossil record is physical, testable, and open to constant re-examination. Evidence can be checked, rechecked, and reassessed as methods improve — something faith alone cannot provide.

Refuting Creationism - Mummified Humans From 2,000 Years Before 'Creation Week' - Untouched By The Biblical Flood

Examples of Early and Middle Holocene human burials from southern China. This figure shows six human burials from Huiyaotian (A: M14, B: M19, C: M20) in Nanning and Liyupo (D: M23, E: M24, F: M28) in Long’an, both shell-midden sites located in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. All individuals are in flexed positions, with several exhibiting hyper-flexed postures (A and E: male, B–D and F: female).

H. Hung,Z. Deng,Y. (2025).

12,000-year-old smoked mummies reveal world’s earliest evidence of human mummification

They say that when you dig deep enough, the earth always tells a story—one that often clashes with stories written by humans. A recent archaeological discovery in southern China and Southeast Asia is one of those earth’s stories, and it’s a loud one. Scientists have found human remains, deliberately smoke-dried and ritually treated, dating back between 12,000 and 4,000 years ago. These mummified remains, buried in tight, crouched postures, were mummified by being exposed near low-oxygen smoky fires — not cremated, but preserved by ritual smoke-drying techniques.

A point I've made several times in these blog posts, but one which is worth repeating, is that any archaeology which predates the supposed date of the Biblical genocidal flood is irrefutable evidence that no such flood ever happened, because it simply wouldn’t be there—or at best would be buried under a thick, global layer of silt. Similarly, any archaeological evidence that predates the supposed 6-day creation of the universe is irrefutable evidence that no such creation event happened according to the Bible’s timeline.

Lastly, anything which refutes the Bible’s timeline, or contradicts the occurrence of events described in it, is irrefutable evidence that the Bible could not have been written by the omniscient, omnipotent creator god it claims to describe. So, this recent discovery, reported by a team of archaeologists from Australian, Chinese, and Japanese universities, in reported open access in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) is about as conclusive evidence as you could wish for that the Bible was not written by the god described in it. Any claim that it is an inerrant textbook of science and history is undoubtedly false. The lead author of the paper, Hsiao-chun Hung, Senior Research Fellow, School of Culture, History & Language, Australian National University, has explained the research and its significance in an article in The Conversation. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

The Ever-Shrinking Creationists' God - Closing The Genetic Code Origin God-Shaped Gap - No God(s) Found

Professor Gustavo Caetano-Anollés.

Photo illustration by Fred Zwicky.

U of I researchers trace genetic code’s origins to early protein structures | College of Agricultural, Consumer & Environmental Sciences | Illinois

Just published in the Journal of Molecular Biology is a paper by three research scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that will spread despondency among creationists—at least among those with the courage to read it and the understanding to grasp its significance. Another of their favourite god-shaped gaps has just been slammed shut.

The gap in question is the long-standing mystery of how the genetic code arose through natural processes, without the intervention of a supernatural intelligence. Creationists have long claimed that the genetic code is analogous to a computer program—something they assume must imply a programmer. They bolster this with the usual straw-man arguments and hand-waving about statistical impossibility, declaring that such complexity could not have arisen “by chance alone.”

Of course, that was never more than the familiar argument from ignorant incredulity coupled with the false dichotomy fallacy: because we don’t yet know something, it must have been their particular god. Not any of the other gods, of course—because those aren’t real.

What we do know is that the earliest forms of life appeared on Earth about 3.8 billion years ago, while the genetic code itself did not appear until some 800 million (0.8 billion) years later. Time, therefore, was not a limiting factor: there was no plan, no deadline, and no external programmer. That fact alone should give creationists cause for concern because any decent intelligent designer, especially an omniscient one, would not have taken 0.8 billion years to invent the genetic code.

Now, this team of researchers has produced a plausible explanation (and it only needs to be plausible to refute the claim that no explanation is possible). Their study is based on an analysis of 4.3 billion dipeptide sequences across 1,561 proteomes, representing organisms from all three domains of life: Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya. (Proteomes are the complete sets of proteins expressed in an organism.)

To rub salt into creationist wounds, the evidence points to the genetic code having emerged through an evolutionary “bootstrapping” process, in which improvements in the code itself led to improvements in the proteins that controlled the very process of coding — an elegant feedback loop with no need for divine intervention.

Refuting Creationism - How Earth Was Really Made - No God-Magic Needed

High-energy Venus Impacts

An SwRI-led team compared the early impact history of Venus and Earth, determining that Venus experienced higher-energy impacts that created a superheated core. Models show these conditions could create Venus’ extended volcanism and younger surface.

Evolution of Terrestrial Planets
A new SwRI-led paper highlights the scientific progress made in understanding the evolution of terrestrial planets, including the effects of late large impacts on pre-existing modes of tectonics. For instance, the Earth experienced transient subduction, when one tectonic plate slides beneath another. Because Venus’ surface is covered by a single plate, a high-velocity impact led to a superheated core and long-lived volcanism. On Mars, a large, low-velocity impact facilitated variations in its hemispheres. Impacts also modify the atmospheres of terrestrial planets in profound ways, including eliminating or supplementing existing gases.

SwRI-led paper summarizes notable progress in understanding the evolution of the terrestrial planets | Southwest Research Institute

Creationist myths describe Earth as a flat world under a dome at the centre of the Universe, made just a few thousand years ago. The real story is far more extraordinary: a fragile chain of chance events and natural forces that made life possible on this small rocky planet.

Earth orbits an ordinary star on the edge of the Milky Way, one of billions in one of trillions of galaxies. That it exists at all is down to gravity, physics, and luck. Out of this came a beautiful world teeming with life—including one species able to marvel at the Universe and ask how it all began, and in it's fearful, ignorant infancy, make up the myths to explain it that now pass for science in some scientifically backward cultures.

One early collision with a smaller planetoid gave us the Moon, tides, and seasons; this or a later impact may, according to this study, be responsible for tectonic plates, giving us a forever changing, dynamic planet, driving evolutionary divergence. While not required for life to appear, these events shaped the planet into the diverse, life-rich world we know today.

Refuting Creationism - Look How Wrong The Bible's Authors Were!

Fly through Gaia's 3D map of stellar nurseries

So that creationists can rehearse their excuses for dismissing science and retaining their childish delusion that Genesis is an accurate description of the universe, written or inspired by an omniscient creator god, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, here are some recent images and videos from the European Space Agency (ESA).

They were created from the most accurate three-dimensional map of star-formation regions in our Milky Way galaxy, based on data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope. The star-formation region that is mapped out (contoured by a circle) reaches out to 4000 light-years from our Sun. The Sun is located at the center of this region. The star-formation map is plotted on an artist impression of our Milky Way, based on Gaia data.. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, S. Payne-Wardenaar, L. McCallum et al (2025)

Refuting Creationism - Observed Evolution of Plants on A Volcanic Island

P. oleracea on Nishinoshima

Nishinoshima Island

Scientists trace origins of now extinct plant population from volcanically active Nishinoshima | EurekAlert!

Scientisst have a remarkable way to verify one of the fundamental principles of evolutionary biology - the 'founder effect' and how it contributes to allopatric speciation - a process that is hotly disputed by creationists who dogmatically refuse to accept any evidence for evolutionary diversification.

The great thing about science is that its theories can be tested and verified. Even better, they are frequently shown to be correct through evidence. This is in stark contrast to faith as a means of determining truth. Faith is not based on evidence, so it cannot be independently verified; in logical terms, it is unfalsifiable.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be falsified, but rather that there are no tests which, if failed, would demonstrate it false. Take, for example, the creationist claim that “God did it.” How could such a claim ever be tested? With no objective evidence beyond subjective feelings, anecdotes, or alleged personal experiences, there is nothing to examine. And if such a claim were challenged, it could always be shielded with further untestable assertions: “God is untestable,” “God is beyond science,” and so on.

By contrast, evolutionary biology offers theories that are not only testable but also repeatedly confirmed. One such theory is the founder effect. This occurs when a new habitat is colonised by only a small sample of a parent population. Two important factors follow:

1. The new sample is unlikely to perfectly represent the genetic diversity of the parent population, so it will begin with a different allele profile.
2. For the new colony to succeed, the founding individuals must already be somewhat pre-adapted to the environment. Those less well-suited are eliminated, while those better adapted survive and reproduce. Over successive generations, this natural selection creates a population increasingly fit for its new environment. The result is a wave of adaptation and divergence from the parent stock — the essence of allopatric speciation.

The natural “laboratory” for studying this process exists in the form of Nishinoshima, a remote Japanese island subject to frequent volcanic eruptions. Each eruption wipes the island clean of vegetation, effectively resetting the ecosystem and creating opportunities for colonisation by founder populations from elsewhere.

By careful genetic analysis of the, now extinct, Nishinoshima population of Portulaca oleracea, the team were able to show that the parent population was on nearby Chichijima, another volcanic island, however, the Nishinoshima population differed markedly from the parent population, and were derived from a very small founder population. In addition, there was evidence of genetic drift, which is much more significant in a small population than in a larger one - exactly as the Theory of Evolution predicts. Genetic drift is the process where, by chance alone, a neutral allele can increase or decrease in the population. The smaller the population the more quickly an allele can progress to fixation in the population or be eliminated. (for more detail on this, see the Introduction to my book, Twenty Reasons To Reject Creationism: Understanding Evolution (ISBN 13: ISBN-13 : 979-8306548166).

Now, researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have reported the results of this natural experiment, and they align precisely with what evolutionary theory predicts.

Refuting Creationism - Origins of the People of Papua New-Guinea

Male Huli tribe member in Tari area of Papua New Guinea in traditional clothes and face paint.

Image Credit: By Amy Nichole Harris / Shutterstock

New AI Study Clarifies the Origins of Papua New Guineans | University of Tartu

A team of researchers led by Dr. Mayukh Mondal of the Centre for Genomics, Evolution & Medicine, Institute of Genomics, University of Tartu, Estonia, have used AI-powered demographic modelling to estimate the genetic ancestry of the people of Papua New Guinea (PNG), whose origins have long been debated.

Papua New Guineans have physical features that differ noticeably from many Asian populations, and some superficial similarities to sub-Saharan Africans have led to speculation that they might descend from a very early migration out of Africa, predating most other non-African Homo sapiens. This new study strongly challenges that hypothesis: it attributes PNG’s genetic distinctiveness instead to a substantial Denisovan admixture followed by a prolonged period of isolation, a severe population bottleneck, and slower population growth.

According to the creationist mythologies, all human beings alive today descend from Adam and Eve—or, in some versions, from Noah and his family after a global flood. If that were literally true, then all living humans would share a very narrow genetic base: mitochondrial DNA (passed via the maternal line) would be limited to a very small number of variants, and all males would share essentially the same Y-chromosome (barring mutation) tracing back to the same male ancestor.

However, the observable facts are that human genetic diversity is much richer than those narratives predict. The mitochondrial DNA lineages in living people trace back to multiple distinct haplogroups with divergence times of tens to hundreds of thousands of years within Africa and beyond into archaic ancestors; similarly, Y-chromosome diversity indicates many lineages. Our human genome tells a far more complex story: long periods of evolution in isolation, multiple migrations, re-mixing, and interbreeding with related hominin species.

The same applies to other species which creationists mythology insists are the descendants of a small number of survivors of the same genocidal flood. Few living species show evidence of such a narrow genetic bottleneck, which would probably have resulted in far too much inbreeding resulting in extinction for most of them.

All non-African humans today are descended from the major “Out-of-Africa” (OOA) migration(s) of Homo sapiens. As populations moved into Eurasia, they interbred first with Neanderthals, then with Denisovans. Underlying all this, there is also the possibility of genetic contributions from even earlier human migrations (e.g. H. erectus) into the ancestors of Neanderthals, Denisovans, or earlier modern humans. Given the evidence that hominin populations often interbred when they came into contact, it would be surprising if there were no admixture between H. erectus (or similar early lineages) and the predecessors of Neanderthals and Denisovans (often thought to include H. heidelbergensis or H. antecessor).

Refuting Creationism - How Rodent Thumbnails Allowed Them to Be So Successful.

Thumbnail of the kangaroo rat.

Rafaela V. Missagia et al. (2025)

Most rodents have thumbnails instead of claws. It might help explain how they took over the world. | EurekAlert!

The discovery that ancient rodents evolved a thumbnail in place of a claw helps explain why they are the most successful mammalian order on the planet. That small anatomical change opened up a whole new range of ecological niches, triggering an explosive radiation of new rodent species.

This fact alone should worry creationists who cling to a child-like understanding of science. Their favourite avoidance tactic—when pressed for an example of evolution—is to retreat hastily down their rabbit hole with the familiar cry: “Ah! But that’s not real, ‘macro’-evolution. That’s just variation within a ‘kind’.”

Of course, creationists are consistently reticent about defining what they mean by “macro-evolution,” or explaining how the processes that supposedly produce it differ from those of normal evolution. In scientific terms, evolution is simply a change in allele frequencies in a population over time. There is no separate mechanism for “macro” versus “micro.”

So here’s the awkward question for them: was the evolution of the thumbnail from a claw a case of “macro-evolution” or not?

According to the new research, led by Rafaela Missagi of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, with collaborators from the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago, USA), Northwestern University (Chicago, USA), and the Natural History Museum (London, UK), this change was pivotal. It allowed rodents to diversify into countless species—just as the elongation of bat fingers into wings enabled bats to radiate into hundreds of species. Crucially, in both cases no “new structures” were created from nothing; existing ones were repurposed.

This sort of question usually sends creationists scurrying for cover, chanting Bible verses as they go.

Unlike creationist dogma, which collapses under this kind of scrutiny, the new findings provide yet another vindication of evolutionary theory. Evolution predicts that when a new function arises, it can open up new ecological opportunities, leading to rapid diversification. Not because there is a plan, but because natural selection now has something new to work on.

Refuting Creationism - DNA Reveals How Mastodons Had Diversified in North America - A Hundred Thousand Years Before 'Creation Week'

Mastodons lived in Arctic and Subarctic North America during an interglacial period when the area was covered in forests and wetlands.

Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Ancient DNA reveals deeply complex Mastodon family and repeated migrations driven by climate change - Brighter World

Creationism is rooted in Bronze Age mythology and rests on a single source, the Bible, whose only claim to authority is its own demonstrably false assertion that it is the inerrant word of a creator god.

This is a claim anyone could make, and it collapses when its statements are compared with the observable world.

For example, biblical genealogies, beginning with a mythical first couple created from dust without ancestors, imply that Earth is only a few thousand years old. In reality, geological and astronomical evidence shows that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and the fossil record demonstrates that life was flourishing hundreds of millions of years before the Bible implies creation began.

One striking piece of evidence comes from an analysis of mastodon DNA, which shows that between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago mastodons in North America had already diversified into several genetically distinct populations.

Refuting Creationism - Dinosaur Eggs From 85 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Egg clutch sampled for chronological studies.

Credit Dr. Bi Zhao

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Dinosaur egg fossil sampled for geochronology.

Credit: Dr Bi Zhao

Newly dated 85-million-year-old dino eggs could improve understanding of Cretaceous climate

The dating of a clutch of fossil dinosaur eggs will leave creationists scrambling for excuses to dismiss the evidence and cling to the childish notion that Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old, created ex nihilo by magic, with all extant and extinct species brought into existence without ancestors just a few days later. In other words, this discovery is yet another small addition to the mountain of evidence showing that the biblical creation story was the work of ignorant Bronze Age people trying to make sense of the world around them, not the word of an omniscient creator god who would have known better.

An added problem for creationists is that the research team used a new method of dating the eggs based on measuring when the eggshell itself formed, rather than relying solely on dating the rock in which the eggs were embedded. The difficulty with the latter approach is that, while it gives the age of the surrounding rock, the mineral grains in that rock may predate the eggs and could have been transported there by water or wind.

The new technique is conceptually similar to the uranium–lead (U–Pb) method used to date zircon crystals in volcanic tuff. Tiny amounts of uranium, which readily substitute into the crystal lattice, are incorporated when the zircon forms, but lead is excluded. Over time, uranium isotopes decay into stable isotopes of lead. Thus, any lead present within a zircon crystal must have come from radioactive decay, and by measuring the ratio of uranium to lead isotopes, scientists can calculate the crystal’s age with high precision.

A very similar process occurs in the carbonate of dinosaur eggshells: uranium is incorporated during formation, but lead is excluded. Measuring uranium–lead isotope ratios in the shell carbonate therefore provides a direct and highly accurate age for the eggs themselves, leaving little room for error.

Creationism Refuted - Scientists See A Planet Being Born - No God(s) Involved

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A growing baby planet photographed for first time in a ring of darkness | University of Arizona News

Astronomers led by University of Arizona’s Laird Close, alongside Leiden Observatory graduate student Richelle van Capelleveen, have directly observed a planet in the making — WISPIT 2b — nested within the rings of a protoplanetary disk around a young Sun-like star in the constellation Aquila, about 430 light-years away. The planet is confirmed to be about five times Jupiter’s mass, actively accreting gas, and clearing a prominent gap in the disk. This observation aligns almost perfectly with the long-standing scientific model of planet formation—and stands in stark contrast to the biblical narrative of instant land-mass creation, involving no orbit, disk, or extended evolutionary process.

This discovery will be depressing news for creationists, especially when contrasted with the biblical account of Earth’s creation — where magic words allegedly call a small, flat land mass into existence consisting of a few square miles of land around the Canaanite Hills, with no hint of orbiting a star or forming within a protoplanetary disk. The stark mismatch extends beyond metaphor — the actual physical process astronomers observe has no room for magic, and more importantly, aligns precisely with predictions from scientific theories of planetary formation.

Refuting Creationism - Scientists Recover Ancient Bacterial DNA - On Million-Year-Old Mammoth Teeth

Steppe Mammoths

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5)

Ancient mammoth remains yield the world's oldest host-associated bacterial DNA - Stockholm University

Parasite–host relationships are a nightmare for creationists. Their usual escape hatch is “The Fall”, but that undermines the Discovery Institute’s claim that intelligent design is science rather than Bible-literalist dogma in a lab coat. It also raises the obvious question: if parasites only appeared 6,000–10,000 years ago, how did they spread so quickly—and why do we find fossil evidence of parasitism millions of years old?

Creationists cope by dismissing science as a conspiracy, waving away radiometric dating, or pushing myths such as dinosaur fossils being “carbon-dated” [sic] to a few thousand years old. So creationism persists, despite the vast amount of evidence against it, by a combination of wilful ignorance, disinformation and a lack of critical thinking skills.

Now creationists must also ignore new research from Stockholm University, where scientists isolated bacterial DNA from the teeth of woolly and steppe mammoths. They showed these bacteria evolved into the ancestors of those infecting modern elephants—evidence of parasites a million years before “Creation Week”, and of co-evolution continuing right up to today’s elephants, the descendants of those mammoths.

Incidentally, neither mammoths nor modern elephants are mentioned in the Bible, reflecting the parochial ignorance of its authors - a fact often overlooked in depictions of animals boarding Noah's Ark, which usually includes a pair of elephants!

Refuting Creationism - Why Plant-Mimicking Insects Make a Fool of ID Creationists

Paleoart illustration showing the two species' leaf mimicry
among Anomozamites in the Daohugou biota.

Image by NIGPAS.

Leaf-mimicking orthopteran fossils of Prophalangopsidae from the Daohugou biota.

Image by NIGPAS.

Scientists Discover 165-Ma Jurassic Orthopterans with Leaf Mimicry, First for Co-preserved Insect-Plant Fossils----Chinese Academy of Sciences

When we think of leaf mimicry, we usually picture modern insects like stick insects or katydids blending seamlessly into their surroundings. But new fossil discoveries show that this evolutionary trick is far older than we might imagine. In fact, insects were already disguising themselves as leaves 165 million years ago, during the Jurassic, long before flowering plants even appeared.

Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have uncovered an astonishing fossil example of close mimicry between three species of orthopteran insects—a group that includes grasshoppers, crickets, and katydids — and the leaves of an extinct cycad-like seed-bearing plant, almost certainly the very plant on which they lived. These fossils come from the 165-million-year-old Daohugou Biota of Inner Mongolia, northeastern China.

Instances of defensive mimicry or camouflage are exactly what one would expect from evolution by natural selection. In fact, it would be more surprising if potential prey species hadn’t evolved some form of defence. To an intelligent design advocate, however, such examples are awkward to explain—unless one imagines a forgetful designer who repeatedly undermines his own work. Why design predators that rely on a given prey species for food, and then deliberately design prey that are difficult for those predators to find? An arms race against oneself is hardly the hallmark of an intelligent mind.

And yet, arms races are precisely what we observe throughout the natural world — whether in competition for resources, the struggle for the fittest mate, parasite–host dynamics, or, as in this case, the evolutionary contest between predator and prey.

Creationism Refuted - Fossil Record Of Fatal Pathogens In Brazil - 80 Million Years Before Creation Week

Arrows indicated by BL point to the lesion caused by osteomyelitis. HB is the unlesioned part, and MB is the bone marrow.

Tito Aureliano et al. (2025)

Fossils with signs of bone disease were from sauropods, of the same order as Tambatitanis

illustration: Palaeotaku/Wikimedia Commons.

Deadly bone disease wiped out long-necked dinosaurs in what is now the interior of the state of São Paulo, Brazil

According to creationist dogma — though not explicitly stated in the Bible but added later to patch over awkward evidence — death did not enter the world until Eve’s sin somehow allowed it to. Along with death, so the story goes, came parasites, pathogens, and anything else creationists find inconvenient. And, of course, all of this supposedly happened just 6,000–10,000 years ago.

The problems with that are two-fold:

• Firstly, there is the question of what Adam and Eve, and the animals allegedly created for their use, ate. Did the plants they consumed remain alive as they passed through the digestive system, nutrients extracted but the plant cells excreted still living? Or did none of them eat anything at all? Obviously, the myth’s authors didn’t understand that plants are just as alive as animals.
• Secondly, the entire narrative collides with the fossil record, which shows long-dead animals preserved in strata dated to tens or even hundreds of millions of years before the mythical ‘Creation Week’—during the 99.9975% of Earth’s history that creationism simply erases. Those animals had metabolisms dependent on consuming living or dead tissues, and their fossils often show evidence not only of death, but of predation, parasitism, and disease. Many evolved armour plating, spines, and other defences that make sense only in the presence of predators and pathogens.

And here’s a paradox creationists often tie themselves in knots over: did God design humans with an immune system, or was it a post-Fall upgrade? If it was there from the start, then God was already planning for parasites and pathogens—hardly the “perfect” world creationists claim. If it was added later, then God wasn’t omniscient, as he failed to foresee a future need. Either way, the story collapses under its own contradictions.

It is therefore no surprise that researchers from the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) and the Regional University of Cariri (URCA) in Crato, Ceará, Brazil, have found evidence of dinosaurs being infected—and killed—by osteomyelitis around 80 million years before ‘Creation Week’. Fossils of sauropod dinosaurs show clear signs of active osteomyelitis, with no signs of healing, indicating that the disease proved fatal.

The Universe Is Nothing Like The Description of it in The Bible 5

A planetary accretion disk forming around a star.

AI-generated (ChatGPT 5)

Unusual carbon dioxide-rich disk detected around young star challenges planet formation models - Stockholm University

This, the last in this series - at least for a while - is on the discovery made by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of a disk rich in carbon dioxide around a young star. Apart from again highlighting the yawning gap between the Bible's child-like description of the universe and the real thing, it also showcases how, contrary to creationist conspiracy theorists’ claims that scientists are not allowed to publish anything which challenges “scientific orthodoxy,” a discovery that challenges the current consensus is openly flagged to the scientific community in peer-reviewed publications.

The problem this raises for cosmology is that, in the standard model of planetary formation, icy grains from the colder outer regions of a disk drift inward. As they cross the so-called snow lines, the ice sublimates into gas: first carbon dioxide, then closer in, water vapour. Because both species are expected to follow this process, astronomers normally expect water vapour to be at least as abundant as, if not more abundant than, carbon dioxide in the warmer inner regions. Yet in the disk surrounding a young star in the star-forming region NGC 6357, JWST found the reverse of what models predict — little or no water, but a striking abundance of carbon dioxide.

Intriguingly, the observation may also help explain another puzzle: the unusual isotopic fingerprint found in meteorites and comets. The imbalance of gases could be linked to intense radiation altering chemical pathways in the disk.

For Bible literalists, however, such details have no bearing on their imagined universe of a small, flat Earth with a dome overhead and fixed, immovable stars. There is no recognition in their text of star formation, accretion disks, or the vastness and dynamism of a changing cosmos. The Bible’s universe doesn’t even contain planetary systems.

The Universe Is Nothing Like The Description of it in The Bible 4

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Figure 1. Image stamps of example very bright dropouts in F090W, F115W, F150W, and F200W, arranged from top to bottom. Two example objects are shown for each group. The stamps are 2″×2″ in size and are oriented with north being up and east being left. The images are from the HST ACS, JWST NIRCam, and JWST MIRI, with the passbands as noted. Most of the very bright dropouts are either disk-like (∼40%) or compact (∼45%) in morphology in F356W, and one each is shown for the F090W, F150W and F200W dropouts. The example F115W dropouts include a disk-like object and an irregular object. Only ∼15% of the very bright dropouts have irregular morphologies. The color stamps in the last column are constructed based on the NIRCam images, using F090W + F115W + F150W as blue, F200W + F277W as green, and F356W + F410M + F444W as red.

Sun, Bangzheng & Yan, Haojing (2025).(CC BY 4.0)

Early galaxies — or something else? Mizzou scientists uncover mysterious objects in the universe

In this fourth article in the series contrasting the real universe with the one described in the Bible, I look at the announcement that two cosmologists from the University of Missouri have discovered about 300 objects that are brighter than they should be if they are what researchers think they are – some of the first galaxies in the early universe. If that's what they turn out to be, it will require a reassessment of what cosmologists thought they knew about the formation of galaxies.

This highlights a frequently repeated contradiction in creationist claims: on the one hand, they insist scientists are only allowed to publish papers that conform to existing consensus, so "creationist science" never gets published; on the other hand, they complain that scientists keep changing their minds and rewriting the science books, unlike the Bible which never changes. They claim this means science is unreliable and not to be trusted. Obviously, both can't be right, but that doesn't stop creationists from claiming both simultaneously.

The other problem this paper highlights is the sheer scale of the universe and the timeline involved, which make the Bible's account look laughably naïve, even childish in its simplicity.

These mystery objects, discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope, are in the order of 13–14 billion light-years in look-back time, meaning we are seeing the light that left them when the universe was only a few hundred million years old. Because the universe has been expanding ever since, their actual present-day distance is much greater — probably 25–30 billion light-years away.

This doesn’t contradict the 13.8-billion-year age of the universe: the light has only been travelling for 13 billion years, but in that time the fabric of space itself has stretched. It’s a bit like two ants on a rubber band: one ant flashes a signal when it is 13 cm away, but by the time the other ant sees it, the band has stretched so much that they are now 30 cm apart. The signal only travelled 13 cm, but the current separation is larger because of the stretching. To suggest, as creationists must, that the well-established methods of cosmological distance measurement are so wrong that they confuse a universe a few thousand years old with one tens of billions of light-years across, is to cling to absurdity.

In fact, this paper shows science at its best. The researchers are effectively saying to their colleagues: “Look, we may have found a fundamental problem that could mean we were wrong all along. Let’s investigate further and be prepared to change our minds if the evidence demands it.” Now imagine a creationist announcing that they had discovered a contradiction in the Bible that forced them to question its divine authorship, or a Discovery Institute fellow admitting to evidence that could only be explained by Darwinian evolution. Such an admission would simply never happen — and certainly never be published in a creationist outlet.

Science is reasonable uncertainty; religion is unreasonable certainty.

The Universe Is Nothing Like The Description of it in The Bible 1

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Illustration of an accreting supermassive black hole shrouded by dust in
CAPERS-LRD-z9.

NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Artist representation of CAPERS-LRD-z9, home to the earliest confirmed black hole. The supermassive black hole at its center is believed to be surrounded by a thick cloud of gas, giving the galaxy a distinctive red color.

Image credit: Erik Zumalt, The University of Texas at Austin.

Meet the Universe’s Earliest Confirmed Black Hole: A Monster at the Dawn of Time - UT Austin News - The University of Texas at Austin

Creationists normally assume that scientists are all out to destroy their faith because they hate God and/or worship Satan, so to add to that paranoid delusion, this is the first of five blog posts about very recent discoveries in the fields of Astronomy and cosmology that illustrate the glaring contrast between the real universe and the universe described in Genesis. The Bible describes a small, flat planet fixed and immobile at the centre, covered by a solid dome, with water above and below and stars, sun and moon fixed to the dome as lamps and tiny lights that can shake lose and fall to Earth during earthquakes; the whole thing created just 6,000 - 10,000 years ago from nothing.

The first of these papers is by an international team of astronomers, led by The University of Texas at Austin’s Cosmic Frontier Center who have discovered the most distant black hole ever confirmed. It is in the galaxy CAPERS-LRD-z9 which formed 500 million years after the Big Bang. That places it 13.3 billion years into the past, when our universe was just 3% of its current age. A time line and distance completely off the Bible's scale.