How Science Works - Correcting A Mistake But Still Refuting Creationism

Ediacaran microbial mats

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Visible to the naked eye, fossilized bacteria or algae were found in an ancient seabed that emerged in the current Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul

Photo: Bruno Becker-Kerber/Harvard University

Microfossils interpreted as animal traces were actually algae and bacteria

A paper in Gondwana Research, recently highlighted in a FAPESP press release, helps illustrate one of the great strengths of science and one of the fatal weaknesses of creationism as a means of discovering the truth.

It reports the results of a reassessment of microscopic fossil evidence from the late Ediacaran, previously interpreted as evidence of burrowing, worm-like animals — possibly the earliest known meiofauna, a type of tiny animal life otherwise securely associated with the Cambrian fossil record.

The earlier interpretation also carried a secondary implication: that oxygen levels in those late Ediacaran marine environments may already have been high enough to support active, motile, multicellular animals. That conclusion now looks much less secure, because the structures appear not to be animal burrows at all, but fossilised communities of algae and bacteria.

That is where the real lesson lies. One of the attractions of creationism is that it offers a spurious sense of certainty to people who value certainty more than truth and accuracy — the so-called “certainty embracers”. To them, the fact that science sometimes corrects itself, and that scientists change their minds when new evidence becomes available, is misrepresented as a weakness. Creationism, by contrast, is treated as an unchanging, eternal truth precisely because it is protected from correction by refusing to submit itself to evidence.

Religion = unreasonable certainty
Science = Reasonable uncertainty

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Religion offers unreasonable certainty; science works with reasonable uncertainty. The difference is that science is amenable to reason, evidence and correction, while creationism survives by rejecting them whenever they become inconvenient.

So creationists often seize on cases where one team of scientists re-evaluates evidence relied upon by an earlier team and concludes that the original interpretation was wrong. But this is not science failing; it is science working. It is exactly what makes science such a powerful tool for discovering what is true: it can change its collective mind when better evidence, better techniques and better analysis point in a different direction.

Sadly for creationists, however, this improved understanding rarely, if ever, turns out to support their beliefs. They may derive a few crumbs of comfort from the familiar refrain that “Darwinists got it wrong again”, but there can surely be little comfort in discovering that the structures in question were still made by living organisms some 540 million years before creationist dogma says Earth existed.

The corrected interpretation does not rescue creationism; it simply replaces one natural explanation with a better-supported natural explanation. The fossils are still ancient. They are still biological. They are still part of a deep-time history of life that creationism cannot accommodate without special pleading. The only thing that has changed is the identity of the organisms responsible for them.

The reassessment was led by Dr Bruno Becker-Kerber as part of his post-doctoral research at the Institute of Geosciences at the University of São Paulo (USP) and the Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM), supported by a fellowship from FAPESP — Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, the São Paulo Research Foundation.

Unintelligent Design - Newts Show Evolution Is About Compromise And Trade-Off

Paedomorph of Lissotriton helveticus

From Denoël, M., Mathiron, A.G., Baouch, S. et al (2026).

The aquatic paedomorph (of Lissotriton helveticus) (a) retains gills at the adult stage whereas the metamorph (b) is a metamorphosed adult that is adapted for life on land.

Photographs by M. Denoël.
From Oromi, N., Michaux, J. & Denoël (2016)

The cost of metamorphosis in amphibians

A paper recently published in BMC Biology on metamorphosis in the palmate newt, Lissotriton helveticus, illustrates something creationists rarely acknowledge: evolution is not a process of perfection, but of compromise. Adaptations come with costs as well as benefits, and the balance between the two can be so finely poised that it varies not only between environments, but even between the sexes of the same species.

For any creationist who understands the subject, that should be disturbing, because it is not what creation by an omnipotent, omniscient designer should lead them to expect. A designer supposedly capable of creating a universe from nothing should have no difficulty creating a benefit without a penalty attached. Yet, throughout nature, we see trade-offs, constraints and compromises — exactly what we should expect from an unintelligent, natural process working with what already exists, not from a perfect designer producing optimal solutions from scratch.

The paper, by Mathieu Denoël, Anthony G. E. Mathiron and Sarah Baouch, from the University of Liège, Belgium, with Jean-Paul Lena, from Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France, shows that metamorphosis in the palmate newt carries a measurable cost in the form of weight loss, with likely consequences for survival and reproductive fitness. In this species, metamorphosis is facultative — in other words, optional depending on environmental conditions. Some individuals retain their gills and aquatic lifestyle into reproductive adulthood, a condition known as paedomorphosis, while others undergo metamorphosis, lose their gills, and become capable of leaving the water for a terrestrial phase before returning to breed.

Metamorphosis has usually been regarded in terms of its advantages: it allows an animal to exploit different habitats and escape deteriorating aquatic conditions, such as falling water levels. But the Liège-led team has shown that this transition is not free. By experimentally manipulating water level and temperature in 80 adult paedomorphic palmate newts, and tracking individual body mass over 85 days, the researchers found that newts which metamorphosed lost significant weight, whereas those which remained paedomorphic did not show net weight loss. The weight loss was not simply the result of bodily reorganisation; the metamorphosing newts also reduced their food intake, even when food was freely available.

The study also found an important sex difference. Females began losing weight earlier, lost more weight overall, and completed metamorphosis later than males. This supports the so-called “male escape hypothesis”, which suggests that males may be more likely to metamorphose in natural populations because the transition is proportionally less costly for them. For females, remaining aquatic and paedomorphic may often be the less costly option.

So, far from showing the work of a designer optimising every feature for the benefit of the organism, the palmate newt shows the messy reality of evolution: alternative developmental pathways, each with advantages and disadvantages, shaped by environmental pressure, reproductive strategy, energy reserves and sex-specific costs. It is exactly the sort of compromise-laden system that evolutionary biology predicts — and exactly the sort of system intelligent design has to explain away.

Creationism Refuted - A Common Protist In An Oxford Pond Refutes Common Design

A ciliated protist, Oligohymenophorea, found in an Oxford pond, has a unique genetic code.

The end of genes: routine test reveals unique divergence in genetic code | Earlham Institute

When working as a Senior Medical Research Technician for Oxford University, one of my pleasures on a sunny Summer day was to take a lunch break walking in the University Parks with colleagues, where we could watch first class cricket free, or, more interestingly, explore the ponds and banks of the Cherwell. Little did we know that almost 60 years later, an organism living in one of those ponds would yield up such compelling evidence that life is the result of an evolutionary process, with no evidence of divine intervention.

Creationists often cite the near-universality of the genetic code as evidence of a single designer using the same system for all life. Of course, the more obvious scientific explanation is common ancestry: all living organisms inherited the same basic translation system from a remote common ancestor, with later lineages modifying it in small but revealing ways. But even on creationist terms, the argument is a hostage to fortune, because if the same code supposedly points to the same designer, then differences in that code raise the obvious question: why would the same designer do the job in different ways?

That awkward question is neatly illustrated by research from the Earlham Institute, published in PLOS Genetics. The research concerns a single-celled ciliate, Oligohymenophorea sp. PL0344, found in a pond in Oxford University Parks, which has done something highly unusual with its genetic code. Codons that normally act as full stops in genes have been reassigned so that, instead of telling the cell to stop making a protein, they now code for amino acids.

This is not a trivial detail. The genetic code is the rulebook by which DNA and RNA sequences are translated into proteins. In most organisms, three particular codons act as stop signals, marking the end of a gene’s protein-coding sequence. Altering those signals might be expected to cause chaos, yet here is an organism in which evolution has tinkered with one of biology’s most fundamental systems and produced a viable alternative arrangement.

For creationists, this creates a familiar problem. The genetic code is invoked when it appears convenient to claim common design, but its exceptions are quietly ignored because they point instead to historical contingency, descent with modification, and evolutionary experimentation. Biology is not showing us the work of an omniscient engineer standardising a perfect system; it is showing us inherited systems being modified, repurposed and patched by evolution.

Creationism Refuted - Butterfly Speciation - 180,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Top Heliconius elevatus
Left: Heliconius pardalinus   Right: Heliconius melpomene

Heliconius elevatus, a hybrid between Heliconius melpomene and Heliconius pardalinus

New butterfly species created 200,000 years ago by two species interbreeding - News and events, University of York

About 200,000 years ago, in the Amazon rainforest of South America, something happened that creationists claim cannot happen. Not only did it happen long before the world existed according to creationist mythology, but a new species arose without the intervention of a supernatural entity, and without the magical creation of a new species without ancestors.

As reported in the journal Nature, a new species of butterfly, Heliconius elevatus, arose through hybridisation involving the ancestors of two related Heliconius species, Heliconius melpomene and Heliconius pardalinus. Today, all three species coexist in the Amazon rainforest.

But that is not the only problem for creationists who continually demand evidence of a “speciation event”, as though speciation were a single moment involving a single individual, rather than the population-level process explained by the Theory of Evolution. This example shows that speciation can be rapid in evolutionary terms, yet still go completely unnoticed. A single hybrid, even if found, would not be regarded as a new species, but as the product of a chance mating between two related species. It is only if hybridisation produces a population that remains distinct over generations, with its own ecological niche, mating preferences and genetic identity, that taxonomists are justified in recognising it as a new species.

In plants, hybrid speciation often involves polyploidy — a doubling of chromosome number — which can prevent hybrids from breeding with either parent species while allowing them to breed with one another. But Heliconius elevatus is a much rarer example of homoploid hybrid speciation, in which a new species arises without a change in chromosome number. The picture is complicated by the fact that, over time, there has been continuing gene flow from one of the parent lineages, H. pardalinus, which has homogenised about 99% of the genome. However, the remaining small islands of DNA introgressed from H. melpomene control traits that help maintain H. elevatus as a distinct species: colour pattern, wing shape, host plant preference, sex pheromones, mate choice and flight behaviour. It is this distinctive combination of traits that enables the new species to coexist with both parent species rather than being absorbed back into either of them.

Creationism Refuted - How Evolution Works

Mimicry in Butterflies Is Seen here on These Classic “Plates” Showing Four Forms of H. numata, Two Forms of H. melpomene, and the Two Corresponding Mimicking Forms of H. erato.

Source - Repeating Patterns of Mimicry. Meyer A, PLoS Biology, Vol. 4/10/2006, e341 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040341, CC BY 2.5, Link

Evolution has reused the same genes for 120 million years, study shows - News and events, University of York

The great day creationists have been assuring themselves is imminent — and have been doing so for at least half a century — when evolutionary biologists finally announce that they have abandoned the Theory of Evolution because it fails to explain the evidence, seems to recede even further with almost every new research paper. Instead of being replaced by creationism, complete with unproven supernatural entities, magic, “unknowable mysteries” and evidence-free Biblical folklore treated as real history, evolution remains the basic framework within which modern biology makes sense of the evidence, formulates hypotheses and interprets results.

Almost invariably, research that appears at first sight to question some aspect of evolution is doing nothing of the sort. It is refining the details. That is the case with a new paper in PLOS Biology by a team led by scientists at the University of York, the University of Sheffield and the Wellcome Sanger Institute, which suggests that, in some circumstances, evolution may be more predictable than a simple caricature of random mutation filtered by natural selection would lead us to expect.

The team analysed the genomes of seven species of Ithomiini and Heliconius butterflies, together with the day-flying moth Chetone histrio. These lineages diverged between about 1 million and 120 million years ago, yet they have evolved remarkably similar wing colour patterns as members of neotropical mimicry rings. These warning patterns signal to predators that the insects are toxic or distasteful, so different species benefit by converging on similar “do not eat me” designs.

What the researchers found was striking. In several butterfly lineages, similar colour-pattern switches were associated with the same two genes, ivory and optix. More precisely, the important changes were not usually in the protein-coding parts of those genes themselves, but in nearby regulatory regions — the genetic switches that determine when and where those genes are turned on and off during wing development. In other words, natural selection has repeatedly arrived at similar visible results by acting on the same underlying developmental toolkit.

This is not evolution being refuted; it is evolution being understood in greater detail. What looks like simple convergence from the outside turns out, at the genomic level, to be a repeated use of the same limited set of viable routes. Evolution is still contingent, still dependent on mutation, recombination, selection and inheritance, but it is not infinitely free to do anything at all. Developmental systems constrain what variations are available, and those constraints can make some evolutionary outcomes more likely than others.

One particularly awkward aspect for creationists such as Stephen Meyer, who insist that new “information” must be intelligently inserted by some unknown mechanism, is that the study shows how major changes in form and appearance can arise from changes in the regulation and arrangement of existing DNA. In the moth Chetone histrio, colour-pattern variation is associated with a large inversion — a section of DNA flipped in orientation — closely resembling the inversion-based “supergene” architecture seen in one of the co-mimetic butterflies, Heliconius numata. No designer is required; ordinary genomic processes, filtered by selection, are enough.

It is also worth noting the timescale. These same genetic routes appear to have been available to lepidopterans since deep in the Mesozoic, around the time of the dinosaurs. The predators, environments and ecological communities have changed enormously since then, but the evolutionary principle remains the same: when similar selective pressures act on organisms with similar developmental machinery, evolution can repeatedly find similar solutions.

Refuting Creationisn - How An Evolutionary Arms Race Made Us What We Are

Graphic representation of the impact of malaria on the formation of the human niche

© Michela Leonardi

Malaria Shaped Distribution of Early Human Populations

A powerful and predictable result of an arms race between a host and a parasite is that the host population will evolve in ways that make it better able either to resist the parasite or to survive despite its presence. In other words, the presence of a parasite can be a strong environmental selector and a major driver of evolutionary change. And, of course, parasite-host arms races make no sense in terms of intelligent design, still less when the designer is supposed to be omnibenevolent.

One well-known example of this evolutionary pressure is the persistence of the sickle-cell allele in parts of the world where malaria is, or has been, common. Carrying one copy of the sickle-cell mutation provides a degree of protection against the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum. Carrying two copies, however, causes sickle-cell disease, which can be severely debilitating and sometimes fatal. The result is a classic example of balancing selection: in malarial regions the allele can be maintained in the population, despite its harmful effects in those who inherit two copies, while in populations not exposed to malaria it tends not to persist at high frequency.

Now scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Cambridge, with colleagues, believe they have shown that Plasmodium falciparum malaria was a significant factor in the deep history of Homo sapiens in Africa. Their study suggests that malaria helped shape where early human populations could live between about 74,000 and 5,000 years ago, fragmenting populations across the landscape and influencing patterns of contact, separation and genetic exchange long before recorded history. This was the crucial period before humans dispersed widely beyond Africa and before agriculture dramatically altered patterns of malaria transmission.

They have recently published their findings, open access, in the journal Science Advances.

The irony, of course, is that this study shows modern humans not as the product of an intelligent designer’s magic, but as the outcome of deep evolutionary history, shaped in part by parasite-host arms races — one of the strongest arguments against any intelligent, benevolent agency being involved in the process.

Creationism Refuted - Crabby Creationists Scuttle Off

Some of the true crab species included in the study.

Clockwise from top left: Two photographs of Tuerkayana hirtipes; Cardisoma carnifex (by Tsubasa Inoue); and Ocypode sinensis (by Junya Taniguchi)

European shore crab, Carcinus maenas

By © Hans Hillewaert, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Study suggests crabs’ iconic sideways walk evolved from common ancestor | For the press | eLife

Unlike real intelligent design, evolution has no plan, no foresight and no ability to review progress and start again. It is a non-sentient, reactive process, constrained by what already exists, and able to respond to changing conditions only by favouring advantageous variations in the inherited material available to it. The result is that future generations always carry traces of earlier generations — not merely for a few years, but for millions of years.

This simple consequence of descent with modification explains why living organisms can be grouped into clades, and why the descendants of earlier taxa remain members of those taxa. These nested hierarchies are themselves confirmation of the Theory of Evolution because they are exactly what the theory predicts. Conversely, they are evidence against intelligent design, which, if it were real, should show no such inherited constraint, but rather repeated innovation, clean design solutions and optimal responses to environmental change.

For a good example, look no further than the familiar sideways scuttle of a shore crab (Carcinus maenas). This distinctive form of locomotion is characteristic of true crabs, although not universal among them, and a research team led by Associate Professor Yuuki Kawabata of the Graduate School of Integrated Science and Technology, Nagasaki University, Japan, has shown that it probably arose once, in a common ancestor, around 200 million years ago. Their findings have just been published as a Reviewed Preprint in eLife.

Creationism Refuted - A 'Living Fossil' - from 275 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Tanyka amnicola grazing

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(after an illustration by Vitor Silva

Fossils of jaw bones of Tanyka amnicola

Pardo, J.D; Marsicano, C.A; Smith, R.; et al (2026)

This ancient plant-eater had a twisted jaw and sideways-facing teeth - Field Museum

Creationists love so-called ‘living fossils’ because they imagine they show evolution has not happened and that Earth is only a few thousand years old. Of course, by the twisted logic of creationism, the vast number of species that have changed over time somehow do not prove the opposite: that evolution does happen and that Earth is vastly older than a few thousand years.

Their argument also ignores the scientific definition of evolution: change in allele frequencies in a population over time. Without DNA from earlier members of the same lineage, it is impossible to say whether evolution has or has not occurred within that lineage. Superficial resemblance is not genetic stasis. But then, the creationist ‘definition’ of evolution is not the scientific one. It is a childish straw man parody, designed to be easier to attack.

So this latest ‘living fossil’, reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society B by a team led by Dr Jason D. Pardo of the Field Museum, Chicago, is bound to set up cognitive dissonance in creationists. That will probably result in their usual coping strategy: ignoring it altogether, or blaming scientists for trying to make them change their minds.

The fossil belongs to a new species, Tanyka amnicola, an archaic stem tetrapod from the Early Permian of Brazil, about 275 million years ago. It belonged to a lineage that had been thought to have disappeared much earlier, making it a “living fossil” even in its own time. The fossils were found in a dry riverbed in north-eastern Brazil, in the Pedra de Fogo Formation, one of the few windows scientists have into Gondwanan animal life during this period.

What the team found was not a complete skeleton but a set of fossil lower jaws — nine in all — each showing the same extraordinary feature: the jaw was twisted, with some teeth pointing sideways, while the inside of the jaw was lined with numerous small denticles that appear to have formed a grinding surface. Since all the jaws show the same structure, this was not a deformity or fossilisation artefact, but part of the animal’s normal anatomy.

The researchers suggest that this strange arrangement may have allowed Tanyka to process food in a highly unusual way. The Field Museum describes it as probably eating aquatic plants, while the paper itself leaves open the possibility that the jaw was adapted either for processing plant material or for specialised feeding on small invertebrates. Either way, this was not a static remnant of a bygone age, but a member of an ancient lineage still exploring new ecological possibilities in Permian Gondwana.

Refuting Creationism - The Giant 50 Foot Snake Deity, Vasuki, of Hindu Mythology - The Fossil Evidence?

Vasuki indicus,
Nāgarāja (Serpent King) of Hindu mythology

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A colossal prehistoric snake, Vasuki indicus, may have rivaled the largest snakes in history, stretching up to 50 feet long. Fossils from India suggest it was a slow-moving ambush predator and part of a widespread ancient snake lineage.

Credit: AI/ScienceDaily.com.

50-foot ancient snake discovered in India may be one of the largest ever | ScienceDaily

An open access paper published in Scientific Reports in 2024 describes an astonishing giant snake from India which, in life, may have reached up to about 50 feet in length. Ignoring, for the moment, the inconvenient age of the fossils, its existence bears an eerie superficial resemblance to the mythical Hindu serpent king, Vasuki.

Imagine the unbounded joy and celebration there would be if creationists were finally presented with fossil evidence that appeared to confirm one of their favourite myths, giving them something more tangible than the written-down stories of Bronze Age pastoralists.

Strangely, though, there have been no such celebrations over evidence which, superficially at least, appears to echo Hindu mythology. It is almost as though creationists understand perfectly well that religious myths are just that — myths — and that any evidence which appears to support someone else’s mythology can be dismissed without a second thought. Unless, of course, it happens to be their own mythology, in which case coincidence, metaphor and wishful thinking are suddenly promoted to “evidence”.

Named by its discoverers Vasuki indicus, the snake is estimated to have been between about 11 and 15 metres long, making it one of the largest snakes ever known. The genus name comes from Vasuki, the great serpent king of Hindu mythology, often depicted coiled around the neck of Shiva. Vasuki is one of the mythological nāgas associated with serpent worship, including the Hindu festival of Naga Panchami.

However, as a supposed source of the Vasuki myth, there is one small snag: Vasuki indicus lived about 47 million years ago, in the early Middle Eocene, a mere 19 million years after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction that ended the reign of the non-avian dinosaurs. That is long before humans, long before language, long before writing, and long before any culture capable of inventing and transmitting religious mythology existed. Like all religious mythology, the stories of Vasuki arose much later in human history — not in the Eocene swamps of India, and certainly not as a folk memory of a snake that had vanished tens of millions of years before there were any people to remember it.

The fossil vertebrae of Vasuki indicus were discovered in the Panandhro Lignite Mine in Kutch, Gujarat State, western India, and described by Debajit Datta and Sunil Bajpai of the Department of Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India. The remains consist of 27 mostly well-preserved vertebrae, some still articulated, from what appears to have been a fully grown animal. The authors identify it as a member of the extinct madtsoiid snake family and suggest that it represents a distinctive Indian lineage of large-bodied snakes. ([EurekAlert!][2])

The accompanying Springer Nature news release, reproduced by EurekAlert!, is available here. The original Springer Nature press release is accessible to accredited journalists only.

Refuting Creationism - Why Neanderthals Went Extinct - 30,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Neanderthal family

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The study shows that regions favourable to Homo sapiens were found to be more highly connected than those of Neanderthals.

Why did the Neanderthals disappear? - UdeMnouvelles

A recent paper in Quaternary Science Reviews by a team led by Professor Arianne Burke of the Department of Anthropology at Université de Montréal, and head of the Quebec-based Hominin Dispersals Research Group, offers fresh insight into why Neanderthals disappeared from Europe around 40,000 years ago.

The timeframe alone should be enough to send any self-respecting creationist reaching deep into the catalogue of prepared excuses for dismissing inconvenient facts. What we will not see, of course, is any acknowledgement that science has once again produced evidence that flatly contradicts their beliefs, or even the faintest shadow of doubt about the Bible’s usefulness as a textbook of history or science.

Archaic hominins have always been a major problem for creationists, whose responses range from outright denial, through misrepresentation of the science, to the extraordinary mental gymnastics needed to shoehorn the evidence into a childish Bible narrative of a single ancestral human couple living some 6,000–10,000 years ago.

A recent example is Ken Ham’s assertion, through Answers in Genesis, that Adam and Eve were the ancestors not only of modern humans but also of Neanderthals and Denisovans. That would make Adam and Eve something like Homo heidelbergensis, H. antecessor, or whichever Middle Pleistocene hominin eventually proves to have been the last common ancestor of these lineages. It also neatly ignores the African fossil record and raises the obvious question — even if we ignored the evidence for the age of these archaic humans for the sake of argument — of how their descendants could have spread so widely, diversified so markedly, and then partly disappeared, all within a few thousand years.

Of course, it is nonsense, and is clearly aimed at people who are either unaware of the evidence but vaguely aware of these archaic hominins, or are so eager to clutch at straws that any apologetic will do, however absurd it becomes when placed beside the facts.

“Primitive” people were actually just humans like you and me. pic.twitter.com/NXGQm0sYCW

— Answers in Genesis (@AiG) April 13, 2026

Yes, there are still unanswered questions about the common ancestry of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans, but one thing we can be certain of is that their common ancestor did not live within the absurdly compressed timeframe allowed by the Bible narrative. That is just one of the many ways in which we know the Bible story is wrong — which is precisely why Ken Ham does not want his followers to think too carefully about it.

But if the question of origins is awkward for creationists, the question of extinction is no less so. Why did the Neanderthals disappear, and why did Homo sapiens survive and expand? There are several competing explanations, and, as so often in science, they are not mutually exclusive. Did Neanderthals succumb to climate instability? Were they weakened by inbreeding and low population density in small, scattered groups? Were they outcompeted by H. sapiens, with their wider social networks, more flexible technology and perhaps, eventually, dogs? Or were some Neanderthal populations simply absorbed into the larger and expanding population of H. sapiens through interbreeding?

Now, modelling by Professor Burke’s team suggests that the answer was not a single, simple cause. Climate change and interspecific interaction with H. sapiens were factors, but their importance varied across Europe. The study suggests that a significant difference may have been the resilience of social networks. In regions favourable to H. sapiens, populations appear to have been more strongly connected than Neanderthal populations, giving them a better safety net when climate, resources or local demography became unstable.

This does not mean Neanderthals were isolated, unintelligent or incapable of maintaining relationships between groups. Archaeological evidence shows that they had interregional connections too. But, according to the models, those networks appear to have been more fragile, especially in parts of Central and Eastern Europe. In a world of rapid climatic swings, that difference may have mattered. A better-connected population can share information, exchange partners, move temporarily into allied territories, and recover after local shocks. A more weakly connected population can be left isolated, vulnerable and demographically brittle.

Creationism Refuted - The Complex Origins of Modern Humans Revealed - No Magic Required

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View of the village of Kuboes, on the border of South Africa and Namibia. DNA samples were collected from Nama individuals who have historically lived in the region.

Brenna Henn/UC Davis.

New UC Davis Research Using DNA Changes Origin of Human Species | College of Biological Sciences

Research first published in Nature in 2023 shows just how wide of the mark the Bronze Age authors of the Bible’s origin myths were when they guessed at human origins. Of course, in the absence of any knowledge or understanding of the true age of Earth, the history of life on it, or the existence of deep human ancestry, their guesses were no better than we would expect from people trying to explain the world with folklore rather than evidence.

In fact, as the evidence in the 2023 paper by a team co-led by Professor Brenna Henn of the University of California, Davis, and Simon Gravel of McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, shows, modern humans did not emerge from a single founding couple, or even from one simple, isolated ancestral population. Instead, our origins lie in a complex, dynamic network of human groups that diversified within Africa, evolved in partial isolation, and later exchanged genes as populations moved and merged.

In that respect, human evolution resembles other cases in nature where populations diverge, remain partly distinct, and yet continue to exchange genes — such as the carrion crow/hooded crow Corvus complex, the Eurasian complex of the great tit (Parus major) and its related forms, and the circumpolar herring gull/lesser black-backed gull Larus complex. These examples show evolution not as a neat ladder or a set of separately created “kinds”, but as a branching, reticulating process in which boundaries can be blurred by gene flow.

This process of diversification and later remixing continued in Eurasia, where Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals, Denisovans and, possibly, other human populations. Neanderthals eventually disappeared as a distinct population, or were partly absorbed into expanding Homo sapiens populations, around 40,000 years ago.

Far from the single ancestral couple that may have seemed intuitive to parochial Bronze Age pastoralists, modern humanity emerged from a population history that looks less like a single line of descent and more like a tangled bush with cross-linking branches.

The researchers reached this conclusion by analysing DNA sequenced from saliva samples from 44 modern Nama individuals from southern Africa, an Indigenous population known to carry exceptionally high levels of genetic diversity compared with many other modern groups. From that genetic data, the team developed a model suggesting that the earliest detectable split among ancestral human populations occurred between 120,000 and 135,000 years ago, after two or more weakly differentiated Homo populations had already been interbreeding for hundreds of thousands of years.

Even after that split, migration continued between the populations, producing what the researchers describe as a “weakly structured stem” for modern human origins in Africa. Rather than a single stem from which humanity simply sprouted, human evolution is better understood as a reticulated process: branching, merging, and branching again.

Creationism Refuted - A Newly-Discovered Mammal That LIve Alongside Dinosaurs - 75 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

An illustration of Cimolodon desosai on the tree with a fruit in its mouth. It was about the size of a golden hamster. It likely scampered on the ground and in the trees and ate fruits and insects.

Photo: Andrey Atuchin.

Researchers discover the fossil of a new hamster-sized mammal that lived alongside dinosaurs on the Pacific Coast – UW News

Although the catastrophe at the end of the Cretaceous exterminated about 75% of life on Earth, including all the non-avian dinosaurs, some small mammals survived. Among them were rodent-like multituberculates: not rodents, but an extinct and highly successful group of mammals that had already lived alongside dinosaurs for more than 100 million years. One newly identified member of that group was a small mammal, about the size of a golden hamster, described in a recent paper published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The people who made up the creation myths in the Bible could have known nothing of this, of course. As their stories show, theirs was a narrow, parochial view of the world, centred on a small part of the Middle East and on the folk history of one people. Their modern legacy is a movement of equally incurious believers who treat those ancient stories as real history and their creation fantasy as real science. Consequently, the evidence revealed by palaeontologists is almost invariably too awkward for them to acknowledge honestly.

Sadly, creationists continue trying to boost their dwindling numbers, and soothe their fragile egos, by demanding the right to indoctrinate children at public expense. Behind that demand lies the curious belief that falsehoods become less false if enough people can be persuaded to believe them. The facts themselves are of little consequence. What matters is recruitment: encouraging ignorance, anti-science conspiracism and belief in magic, while leaving children ill-equipped to evaluate evidence, understand complex data, or perhaps become the scientists society will need in the future.

Nevertheless, the facts remain what they are, regardless of who accepts them. In this case, a research team led by the University of Washington has identified a new 75-million-year-old species of Cimolodon from a fossil discovered at a research site in Baja California, Mexico. The species, named Cimolodon desosai, was about the size of a golden hamster and probably scampered both on the ground and in trees, feeding on fruit and insects.

Creationism Refuted - Why Snakes, Like Creationists, Don't Have A Leg To Stand On - Evolution

Najash rionegrina

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Najash rionegrina

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

An ancient snake's cheekbone sheds light on evolution of modern snake skulls | Faculty of Science

Creationism is the art of ignoring evidence while pretending to be interested in it. Creationists continually demand that science provide supporting evidence for their childish parodies of evolution, abiogenesis, the Big Bang, and other scientific explanations; then, when the evidence is provided, they either ignore it, misrepresent it, or move the goalposts.

This is neatly illustrated by a paper published in Science Advances in 2019 by an international team of palaeontologists, including researchers from Argentina, the University of Alberta and McGill University. The paper provides creationists with something they are forever pretending to ask for — a transitional fossil — while also undermining another of their favourite assertions: that evolutionary change must always involve adding something new, and that loss or reduction cannot contribute to evolution.

The fossil in question belongs to Najash rionegrina, a rear-limbed fossil snake from Argentina. The presence of hind limbs is striking enough, but it is not the most important point of the paper. The fossil also shows that, during snake evolution, legs were not the only structures to be reduced or lost. The skull of Najash still retained a cheekbone — the jugal bone — which has almost entirely disappeared in living snakes.

That matters because it helps refine our understanding of how the modern snake skull evolved. Rather than appearing suddenly, fully formed and magically snake-like, the snake body plan was assembled over time through a series of anatomical changes, including elongation of the body, reduction of limbs, modification of the skull, and the loss or reduction of bones that were present in earlier ancestors. In other words, this is exactly the kind of transitional evidence creationists claim not to have seen, and exactly the kind of evolutionary reduction they claim cannot happen.

Evolution In Progress - How Honey Bees Are Evolving - Another Move In The Arms Race

Southern California hybrid honeybee hive hanging from a tree in the wild.

Boris Baer/UCR

Varroa destructor on a honeybee

Jon Gascoyne/Flickr

SoCal honeybees can fend off deadly mites | UCR News | UC Riverside

A new paper in Scientific Reports by Genesis Chong-Echavez and Boris Baer of the University of California, Riverside, casually refutes creationism by showing evolution in progress. It describes how honeybees, Apis mellifera, are evolving to survive in the presence of a serious parasite, the Varroa mite, Varroa destructor. And, no doubt to the consternation of any creationists who understand the implications, it also illustrates how evolutionary arms races are a major driver of adaptation. Both parasites and arms races are deeply embarrassing for creationism because they make little sense as the products of an intelligent designer. Indeed, parasites conform to the Discovery Institute’s supposed “proof” of intelligent design only if that designer is malevolent; yet if parasites are dismissed as evidence of design, creationists are simply abandoning one of their own favourite arguments.

In other words, a parasite-host arms race is a paradox that creationism cannot resolve, whereas evolutionary theory not only explains it, but is strengthened by it. The paper concerns a Southern Californian hybrid population of honeybees with ancestry from Western European, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and African lineages. These bees are showing resistance to the Varroa mite, a parasite that has played a major role in the catastrophic losses of managed honeybee colonies in the United States, where beekeepers reported losses of up to 62% in 2025.

The researchers monitored 236 colonies over four years and found that the Californian hybrid colonies consistently had lower mite infestation rates than colonies headed by commercial queens. In the UCR summary of the work, the hybrid colonies are described as having about 68% fewer mites on average and as being more than five times less likely to cross the treatment threshold at which chemical control becomes necessary. Laboratory experiments also showed that the mites were less attracted to larvae from these hybrid bees, especially at the stage when mites would normally be most likely to invade brood cells.

The usual creationist response to examples like this is to retreat into a parody definition of evolution involving a change in “kind”, with “kind” carefully left undefined, or to fall back on Bible-literalist theology and explain parasites as the result of “sin”, by some unexplained mechanism against which their creator appears curiously powerless. But the problem of arms races remains. On that view, creationism’s single designer seems to be competing with itself, continually redesigning solutions to problems of its own making, ad infinitum. Evolutionary biology, by contrast, has no such difficulty. It predicts exactly this kind of reciprocal adaptation between parasite and host.

Refuting Creationism - How Complex Organs Evolve

Using the placenta to understand how complex organs evolve

Recently, a new creationist member of a Facebook group resorted to the familiar tactic of presenting the placenta as a complex organ that could not possibly have evolved. As so often with creationist arguments, this was little more than an argument from personal incredulity dressed up as a challenge. In place of scientific evidence, he relied on a god-of-the-gaps argument and a false dichotomy, implying that if he could not imagine a natural explanation, the only alternative must be magic performed by his preferred deity.

The new member appears to have left the group soon after replies began to appear in the comments, complete with links to articles and papers explaining exactly how the problem can be approached scientifically.

This paper in Nature by Oliver W. Griffith and Günter P. Wagner of Yale University provides precisely the sort of answer that exposes the weakness of this common creationist tactic on social media. Their argument amounts to little more than: “I do not know how this could have evolved, therefore God did it.” That is not an explanation; it is simply ignorance masquerading as evidence, and tells us more of the parochial ignorance of the creationist than they probably intended. The paper uses the evolution of the placenta to explain some basic principles of how complex organs evolved. Needless to say, no magic is involved anywhere in the process.

One of the authors, Oliver W. Griffith, has also written an article in The Conversation explaining their research and what it tells us about the evolution of complex organs in vertebrates. His article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

First, a short explanation of the role of the placental in placental mammals:

Refuting Creationism - Neanderthals And Modern Humans Lived Together - 120,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals shared technology and behavior

Credit: Efrat Bakshitz

Archaeological examination of the Tinshemet Cave floor.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Neanderthal and Homo sapiens Interactions in the Mid-Middle Palaeolithic (130,000–80,000 years ago) | EUROPEAN FRIENDS OF THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY

Neanderthals are a persistent thorn in the side of creationism because they show that human origins are far older, messier and more interesting than the simplistic creation myths in the Bible. Genetic evidence shows that people outside Africa still carry a small but significant inheritance from Neanderthals, demonstrating that human ancestry was shaped not by descent from a single primordial couple, but by repeated episodes of migration, divergence and interbreeding between distinct human populations. There is even evidence that early Homo sapiens were interbreeding with Neanderthals as long as 100,000 years ago.

Now, new research by archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University, excavating at Tinshemet Cave in central Israel, suggests that the relationship between Neanderthals and early modern humans in the Levant, between about 130,000 and 80,000 years ago, involved far more than occasional contact. Their evidence indicates sustained interaction, shared technologies, similar hunting strategies and parallel ritual behaviour, including formal burial practices. The team have just published their findings in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. What emerges is a picture of different human groups living in close contact, exchanging ideas and behaviours to such an extent that their cultural differences became increasingly blurred.

The researchers reached this conclusion by integrating evidence from four main areas: stone-tool production, hunting strategies, symbolic behaviour and social complexity. Particularly striking is the clustering of burials at Tinshemet Cave, which suggests that the cave may have served as a repeated burial site, perhaps even an early cemetery. The placement of objects such as stone tools, animal bones and pieces of ochre in graves points to shared ritual practices and symbolic behaviour, hinting at a level of social and cultural complexity that creationist caricatures of early humans simply cannot accommodate.

Creationism Refuted - Earliest Domestic Dogs - 6,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Cover picture for The Girl and the Wolf

Oldest genetic evidence for domestic dogs identified in Europe and Türkiye | University of Oxford

Artistic reconstruction of Pınarbaşı c. 15,800 years ago based on evidence from archaeological excavations by University of Liverpool.

(c) Kathryn Killackey

This is the first of two blog posts on a pair of recent papers published in Nature on the earliest known domestic dogs and what they tell us about when grey wolves first entered into a domestic relationship with humans. Together, these studies push the earliest firm genetic evidence for dogs back[1] about 10,900 years ago, showing that dog populations were already present in western Eurasia during the Late Upper Palaeolithic. For creationists committed to a young Earth and to the simplistic Bronze Age origin myths of the Bible, that is yet another awkward fact: dogs were already on their way to becoming humanity’s first domestic animal long before their preferred chronology even allows for the Earth to exist. [1.1]

Since then, of course, dogs have been systematically modified by selective breeding to suit the many roles humans have found for them. That alone sits uneasily with the claim that a perfect creator made all animals ready-made for human benefit. But what makes these papers especially interesting to me is not only that they create yet another problem for creationist superstition, but that they touch directly on the background to two novels I have recently published, in which the domestication of wolves forms part of the story.

The first of these books, The Girl and the Wolf, tells the story of Almora, a child of the Drognai clan, who is raised alongside a wolf cub, Sharma, who becomes her inseparable companion. When Almora meets one of the last Neanderthals, Tanu, and they fall in love, Sharma plays a crucial part in bringing them together. The kindness of Almora’s mother, Shana, in rescuing and raising the starving cub becomes the small act from which a much larger change in human history begins.

In the sequel, The Way of The Wolf: A Stone Age Epic, Almora and Sharma have become the stuff of legend, their story spreading far beyond the lands of the Drognai. When Almora’s daughter, Shana — herself of mixed Neanderthal and modern human ancestry — chooses to leave the clan because of the tensions her family’s presence has caused, Almora, Tanu and a small band of Drognai go with her to a distant land. There they discover a people who have taken the legend of Almora and Sharma to heart and formed a close relationship with a pack of tame wolves, a relationship that has helped carry them through hardship into a period of hunting success and prosperity.

These books are fiction, of course, because we cannot know exactly how wolves became domesticated. What we can say is that the current evidence points to a long and complex process rather than a single moment of “invention”. The broad consensus is that some wolves probably began by exploiting scraps around human camps, while humans gradually came to recognise their value as sentinels, scavengers and hunting partners. The rest, as they say, is history.

And according to the first of these two new papers, that history was already under way deep in the Late Ice Age. One study generated nuclear and mitochondrial genomes from canid remains from Pınarbaşı in Türkiye, dated to 15,800 years ago, and from Gough’s Cave in Somerset, dated to 14,300 years ago, and concluded that a genetically homogeneous dog population was already widely distributed across Europe and Anatolia by at least 14,300 years ago. The second study analysed 216 canid remains from Europe and found its oldest dog genome in a 14,200-year-old specimen from Kesslerloch in Switzerland, showing that European dogs were already genetically distinct by then. [1.1]

Refuting Creationism - How Humans Caused 'Warrior' Wheat to Evolve.

Early farming unintentionally bred highly competitive "warrior" wheat, study finds | Biosciences | The University of Sheffield

One of the more embarrassing questions you can ask a creationist is this: if an omniscient, perfect god created all living things for the benefit of humankind, as the biblical creation myth claims, why have humans had to modify almost all our domesticated animals and cultivated crops to make them fit for purpose? In many cases, we have altered them so extensively that they are barely recognisable as the same species as their wild ancestors.

The story of how humans domesticated wild species and gradually modified them is, in effect, a textbook example of evolution in progress. Sometimes this happened through conscious selective breeding, but often it was an unintended consequence of domestication itself. Wheat, for example, evolved grains that were more firmly attached to the stalk. This meant fewer grains were lost when harvested and carried back to camp for communal use, so the plants whose seeds stayed attached were more likely to have those seeds planted again, whether deliberately or accidentally, around early hunter-gatherer encampments.

Another example in wheat is the evolution of taller plants with more upright leaves. As humans began planting wheat more densely, they created an environment in which the more aggressive plants literally overshadowed their neighbours and captured a greater share of the sunlight. In this struggle for existence, the plants best suited to the human-made environment were the ones most likely to survive and become the parents of the next generation.

That is the conclusion of a research group led by Dr Yixiang Shan and Professor Colin Osborne of the University of Sheffield, working in collaboration with colleagues from the Autonomous University of Madrid, Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain, and Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Their findings are published in Current Biology.

Refuting Creationism - Origin Of Western Europeans - Thousand Of Years Before The Mythical Flood

The Hunter-gatherer life-style persisted in Netherlands and Belgium until about 2,500 BCE

AI-Generated Image (ChatGPT Latest)

Map indicating hunter-gatherer ancestry proportions across Europe 4500–2500 BCE. Darker is more.

New research into ancient DNA sheds light on key phase in European prehistory - University of Huddersfield

This second post on discoveries made by international teams of palaeontologists and geneticists, including scientists from the University of Huddersfield’s Archaeogenetics Research Group, examines the genetic evidence for the ancestry of modern western Europeans. As so often happens in research into human origins and archaeology, the findings are not what creationists keep hoping for: not a scrap of evidence that the creation myths in the Bible contain even a grain of historical truth. Instead, the team’s findings, published in Nature, add yet more evidence for a deep, complex and thoroughly non-biblical human past.

As usual, the evidence sits squarely at odds with those childish fairy tales of magical creation and a recent global population reset caused by a genocidal flood. The study shows that farming practices were reaching parts of western Europe long before biblical chronology allows for such events, and that there is no sign of the extreme genetic bottleneck such a story would require. On the contrary, both the archaeological and genetic evidence point to continuity across the period, with farming introduced unevenly into the region and with women of Early European Farmer ancestry from the Near East marrying into local hunter-gatherer communities.

Nor are these findings any comfort to far-right white supremacists who fantasise about Europeans as some sort of ancient “pure race”. Research led by scientists including Dr Maria Pala, Professor Martin B. Richards and Dr Ceiridwen J. Edwards of the University of Huddersfield shows that modern Europeans carry ancestry from multiple distinct populations: indigenous hunter-gatherers, Neolithic farmers ultimately derived from the Near East, and later pastoralist groups associated with the Eurasian steppe. In other words, the population history of Europe is one of movement, mixture and cultural exchange, not racial purity.

The team also found that the hunter-gatherer way of life persisted in what are now Belgium and the Netherlands for thousands of years longer than in most other parts of Europe. Rather than being rapidly replaced, these communities retained high levels of hunter-gatherer ancestry well into the Neolithic, apparently because the wetland, riverine and coastal environments allowed them to adopt some farming practices without abandoning their existing lifeways.

Refuting Creationism - Modern Humans Reached Australia 50,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-Generated imaginative reconstruction of first humans arriving in Sahul

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The migration of the first settlers to Sahul 60,000 years ago.

Photo: Helen Farr and Erich Fisher.

New genetic research supports “long chronology” for first settlement of Sahul - University of Huddersfield

Two recent papers by teams that included members of the Archaeogenetics Research Group at the University of Huddersfield, UK, show how modern DNA extraction and sequencing techniques are adding yet another independent line of evidence in support of the Theory of Evolution and against creationism. Together, they reveal the ancient and complex origins of modern humans, in stark contradiction to the simplistic Bronze Age origin myths of the Bible.

The first of these papers, published last November (2025), and available open access in Science Advances, examines human migration into Australia and lends support to the ‘long chronology’ hypothesis for the earliest settlement of Sahul, the Ice Age landmass that united Australia, New Guinea and nearby islands.

The second paper examines the more recent population history of Western Europe. That will be the subject of my next blog post.

According to the long chronology hypothesis, humans first reached Sahul around 60,000 years ago, whereas the short chronology hypothesis places their arrival between about 45,000 and 50,000 years ago. Either date is, of course, utterly incompatible with the childish notion of magical creation just 6,000-10,000 years ago. And unlike geochronological dating methods, which creationists routinely dismiss as fraudulent, flawed or unreliable whenever the results embarrass them, this evidence comes from genetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Because mtDNA is inherited through the female line, it can be used to reconstruct maternal ancestry in remarkable detail.