Normally, creationists seize on any concentration of animal fossils that can be attributed to flooding as supposed “evidence” for their favourite Bronze Age myth of a global genocide. On that basis, they should be delighted by recent news from Romania describing a rich deposit of dinosaur fossils that appears to have accumulated as a result of flooding in the Hațeg Basin.
There is, however, a serious snag. These fossils occur in deposits dated to around 72 million years ago — tens of millions of years before creationists believe the Earth even existed — and the evidence points clearly to repeated local flooding events, not a single global catastrophe.
The discovery of the fossil site is reported in the journal PLOS ONE by the Valiora Dinosaur Research Group, a collaboration of Hungarian and Romanian palaeontologists co-led by Gábor Botfalvai and Zoltán Csiki-Sava of the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Department of Palaeontology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
This paper will have creationists searching for reasons to dismiss evidence that would, if they were prepared to accept it honestly, force them to concede that their beliefs are wrong. It reports a discovery by researchers at Stellenbosch University showing that dinosaur eggshells can be dated with a high degree of precision using an already well-established technique: uranium–lead (U–Pb) radiometric dating.
Until now, U–Pb dating has been most famously applied to zircon crystals in volcanic ash, where the age can be determined by measuring the ratio of radioactive uranium isotopes to the stable lead isotopes produced by their decay. In this study, however, the same underlying principles are applied to calcite crystals preserved in dinosaur eggshells.
Among flowering plants, few groups look as alien as Balanophora. These strange, tuberous parasites lack leaves, lack roots in any conventional sense, and contain no chlorophyll. They spend almost their entire lives embedded within the roots of other plants, emerging only briefly to flower. To a casual observer, they barely resemble plants at all — and that superficial oddity has sometimes been exploited by creationists as evidence that they represent a fundamentally distinct “kind”.
In reality, Balanophora are not evolutionary outliers. They are a textbook example of what happens when natural selection acts over long periods on a parasitic lineage.
Where Balanophora fit in the plant kingdom
Molecular phylogenetics places Balanophora firmly within the angiosperms, in the order Santalales. This is the same order that includes mistletoes, sandalwood, and a range of hemi- and holoparasitic plants. Their closest relatives are photosynthetic or partially parasitic species, providing a clear evolutionary gradient from free-living autotrophs to obligate parasites.
This placement is not controversial. It is supported by nuclear, mitochondrial, and plastid gene sequences, as well as by reproductive and developmental traits. Balanophora are deeply nested within the flowering plant family tree, not perched mysteriously at its base.
They are not an early-diverging angiosperm lineage. They sit well within the eudicots, inside an order dominated by parasitism. This is exactly what evolution predicts for a lineage that became parasitic rather than being created as such.
Creationism would expect either:
A distinct, isolated “kind”, or
No consistent phylogenetic signal at all
Instead, Balanophora fall precisely where descent with modification says they should.
Transitional relatives exist
Within Santalales you can trace a graded series:
Fully photosynthetic plants
Root parasites that still photosynthesise
Plants with reduced photosynthesis
Fully holoparasitic forms like Balanophora
This gradient is phylogenetic, not just ecological. It maps cleanly onto the tree.
Plastid phylogeny seals the case
Even though Balanophora plastids are massively reduced, the genes that remain:
Cluster with chloroplast genes of Santalales
Show derived mutations consistent with long-term loss of photosynthesis
Cannot be explained as independently created organelles
In other words, the plastids themselves remember their ancestry.
Creationism, which insists on fixed, separately created categories, has no principled way to explain why these plants fall exactly where evolution predicts they should.
Species of Balanophora are parasitic plants that live underground and emerge above ground only during the flowering season — and some species even reproduce exclusively asexually. This collage shows species studied to establish how the plants of that group relate to each other, how they modified their plastids and how their reproduction fits into their ecology.
A recently published paper in New Phytologist on the biology of the parasitic plants *Balanophora*, by three botanists from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan, together with Kenji Suetsugu of Kobe University, should cause consternation in creationist circles — if only they were not so practised at dismissing any evidence that contradicts their superstition.
Not only does the study highlight the well-known problem of parasitism, which creationists typically attempt to wave aside by invoking “The Fall” — thereby exposing any claim that creationism is a genuine science rather than a form of Christian fundamentalism as a lie — it also reveals that the evolution of this group of plants has involved a loss of complexity, coupled with the repurposing of redundant structures. The result is what creationists themselves would describe as irreducible complexity, accompanied by precisely the kind of “complex specified genetic information” that William A. Dembski insists should be regarded as evidence for intelligent design.
Then there is the problem of an overly complex solution, in that, instead of simply giving the plants the genes they need, some essential genes have been included in cell organelles These are clearly repurposed chloroplasts that no longer perform photosynthesis, produced by an evolutionary process that creationists deny - leaving them to explain why an intelligent designer opted for such an overly complex solution.
Finally, the findings rely entirely on the Theory of Evolution to explain and make sense of the observations, with no hint of any need to invoke the supernatural magic upon which creationism depends — despite repeated assurances from creationist cult leaders to their followers that such a moment is imminent, a promise they have been making for over half a century.
Dugongs and manatees — the surviving members of the order Sirenia — are among the most revealing mammals when it comes to understanding evolution. Fully aquatic yet air-breathing, specialised yet constrained by their ancestry, they provide one of the clearest examples of how complex organisms arise through gradual modification rather than sudden creation.
Unlike whales, which are now well known as a textbook evolutionary transition, sirenians are less familiar to the public. That makes them especially valuable, because their fossil record is remarkably complete, their evolutionary trajectory is straightforward, and their genetic relationships were discovered independently of their anatomy. Taken together, they present a problem for creationism that cannot be explained away.
Terrestrial origins.
The earliest known sirenians lived around 50 million years ago and were unmistakably terrestrial or semi-aquatic mammals.
An artistic reconstruction of a herd of ancient sea cows foraging on the seafloor
Alex Boersma
Fossils of Salwasiren qatarensis, a newly described 21-million-year-old ancient sea cow species found in Al Maszhabiya [AL mahz-HA-bee-yah], a fossil site in southwestern Qatar.
Scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, together with collaborators at Qatar Museums, have just announced the discovery of 20-million-year-old fossils of a sea cow that was a miniature version of living dugongs, and which almost certainly lived in the same seagrass meadows as modern dugongs.
If there is one thing that has creationists scraping the bottom of their barrel for reasons to dismiss evidence, it is news of fossils that are tens of millions of years older than they believe the universe is — simply because Bronze Age authors of their favourite source book, the Bible, said so.
In their determination to show the world that nothing can make them change their belief in the demonstrably absurd, creationists will resort to false accusations of lying against scientists, claim they are incompetent, or insist that they used dating methods they claim (incorrectly) to have been proven false, all in an attempt to preserve their beliefs. It is as though they imagine the entire global scientific community, and all the research institutions within it, exist solely to disprove the Bible in order to make creationists change their minds.
For rational people without such an egocentric view of the world, however, discoveries such as these miniature dugongs help to paint a fascinating picture of how species — and the ecosystems of which they are a part — have evolved over time. The fossils were found about 10 miles from a bay of seagrass that is prime habitat for modern dugongs.
As I’ve pointed out many times, 99.9975% of Earth’s history took place before the period in which creationists—treating the Bible as literal historical truth—believe the planet itself existed. It is remarkable how effectively biblical literalists manage to ignore, distort, or otherwise dismiss almost the entire body of geological, archaeological, and palaeontological evidence in order to cling to the easily refuted notion of a 6,000–10,000-year-old Earth and a global genocidal flood supposedly occurring about 4,000 years ago.
Unsurprisingly, discoveries such as the one below make no impression whatsoever on committed creationists.
Now archaeologists from Aarhus University, working with colleagues from the National Museum of Denmark as well as teams from Germany, Sweden, and France, have uncovered yet another piece of evidence destined for creationist dismissal: blue pigment on a stone artefact dating from around 13,000 years ago. Their findings were recently published in Antiquity.
Not only should this archaeology not exist at all if the biblical timeline were correct, but even if it had somehow escaped the supposed global flood, it would necessarily be buried beneath a thick, worldwide layer of sediment containing a chaotic mixture of fossil plants and animals from disconnected continents. No such layer has ever been found anywhere on Earth. A truly global flood, as described in Genesis, would have left unmistakable and ubiquitous geological signatures. It did not.
The blue pigment was discovered on a shaped, concave stone originally thought to be an oil lamp but now believed to have served as a mixing palette. Until now, only black and red pigments had been identified on Palaeolithic artefacts, leading archaeologists to assume these were the only colours available. The presence of blue pigment suggests something more nuanced: selective use of colours for different purposes, with blue likely used primarily for body decoration or dyeing clothing—activities that rarely leave direct archaeological traces.
You might not realise it, but, if you just played that audio file, according to researchers at the Université de Genève, Switzerland, a region of your brain - the auditory cortex - just 'lit up'.
This region is responsible for voice recognition, and it responds not only to human voices but also to the calls of common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Notably, the same response is not seen with the calls of bonobos (Pan paniscus) or rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). Their findings have been published open access in eLife.
This discovery presents creationists with yet another problem to be ignored, misrepresented or lied about.
Using William A. Dembski’s so-called “proof of intelligent design” — complex specified genetic information, widely cited by creationists as evidence for design and against evolution — we are entitled to ask an obvious question. Why would an intelligent designer create genetic information for a supposedly “too complex to have evolved by random chance” region of the human brain that responds selectively to chimpanzee calls?
What, precisely, was this ability designed for?
By contrast, the evolutionary explanation is straightforward. If humans and chimpanzees share a relatively recent common ancestor, we would expect some neural processing traits to be retained, particularly where there has been no strong selection pressure to eliminate them.
The finding does, however, raise an interesting secondary question: why do we not respond in the same way to bonobo calls?
The answer is likely to come from evolutionary biology. Chimpanzees and bonobos diverged fairly recently, and there may have been a selective advantage for bonobo calls not to be recognised by chimpanzees. Chimpanzees are known to kill and eat bonobos if given the opportunity, so selection may have favoured divergence in vocal signals — with the consequence that humans also lost sensitivity to bonobo calls.
Once again, we encounter a feature of nature that is difficult to reconcile with the notion of an intelligent designer, yet entirely consistent with evolutionary processes acting on shared ancestry, divergence, and selection pressures.
Scientifically, the work is also of considerable interest, as it may shed light on how human speech recognition and language development arise in children. For the creationist, however, it is merely one more inconvenient piece of evidence — to be filed under “not wanted — reject” or “evidence of a Satanic conspiracy — ignore”.
Researchers at Cedars-Sinai have developed a synthetic RNA molecule that can help repair DNA in damaged tissues such as the myocardium following a myocardial infarction (MI). Their research is the basis for a paper just published in Science Translational Medicine
This raises a troubling question for ID creationists: if scientists can do it, why couldn’t their putative omniscient, omnipotent and, above all, omnibenevolent designer god do it? There are only a limited number of possibilities if we grant the ID proponents their designer god for the sake of argument:
It lacks the ability — in other words, it isn’t omnipotent.
It didn’t know it would be needed — in other words, it isn’t omniscient.
It doesn’t care — in other words, it isn’t omnibenevolent.
It doesn’t want us to repair damaged DNA so we continue to suffer the consequences — in other words, it is malevolent.
This is, of course, just another example of science discovering something that any intelligent, benevolent designer would have anticipated and provided, if such an entity had really designed us.
So, apart from those explanations — none of which flatter their putative designer — the only option left to creationists is that the absence of this DNA repair mechanism is the result of an unintelligent natural process in which their supposed designer played no part, such as evolution.
Unfortunately for them, creationists would have to abandon creationism and admit to being wrong if they accepted the naturalistic explanation. Sadly for them, creationists don’t see admitting being wrong as the intellectually honest thing to do, but as a sign of weakness and giving in to scientists and the physical evidence all ganging up to test their resolve.
This should trouble any creationist who understands the implications, so their cult leaders need to work hard to ensure none of their followers know about these things or develop the intellectual sophistication to appreciate the consequences.
The venomous stinger of an Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia). The venom injected by this stinger can cause sharp, intense pain as well as local tissue damage and systemic effects such as destruction of red blood cells and cardiac dysfunction, which may even be fatal.
Yes. As I’ve observed myself, the common pond frog eats wasps apparently with impunity. I once watched a frog in our garden pond consume three wasps within a few minutes as they came down to drink. These frogs have, of course, evolved in the presence of wasps.
Now, according to research by Shinji Sugiura at Kobe University, Japan, published today, open access, in the journal Ecosphere, frogs that have evolved alongside an even more dangerous member of the wasp family – the Asian giant hornet – have also evolved resistance to venom that is toxic, even lethal, to many other creatures.
Creationists, however, insist that evolution does not happen and that wasps, frogs, and hornets were all intelligently designed by a supernatural deity synonymous with the god of the Bible and Qur’an. This leaves us wondering why an allegedly omnipotent, omniscient, supremely intelligent designer would equip wasps and hornets with a sting to defend themselves against predators, only then to design predators with resistance to that sting.
Creationists normally ignore this question, of course. Even their stock excuse – 'The Fall' – cannot be applied here. Neither frog nor hornet is parasitic on the other, except in the trivial sense that any predator is a “parasite” on its prey. But in this case, the frog appears to be the beneficiary: it gains a meal at no cost, while the wasp or hornet loses its life. And it is difficult to imagine that the genes conferring this immunity do *not
fall within William A. Dembski’s definition of “complex, specified information”. If they do not, then nothing producing a beneficial outcome can be so classified, and his argument for the existence of an intelligent designer collapses.
As the outcome of an evolutionary arms race, both the sting and the resistance in frogs make perfect sense—no need to invoke some forgetful designer who cannot recall what it supposedly created yesterday and treats it as a problem to be solved today.
In the case of these frogs, there may even be two distinct forms of immunity: resistance to pain and resistance to toxicity. It is already known that some hymenopterans deliver an excruciating sting with low toxicity, while others deliver a highly toxic sting with little or no pain.
56 million years ago, in that vast expanse of pre–‘Creation Week’ history when 99.975% of Earth’s story unfolded — long before creationists imagine the Universe even existed — an event occurred that gives the lie to the claim that their putative designer created Earth as a safe and stable planet, finely tuned for the existence of (human) life. Earth’s temperature rose by roughly 6 °C as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere increased dramatically.
The cause of this, the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), lay in the disruption of one of Earth’s major feedback systems. Plants sequester carbon through photosynthesis and lock it into their tissues, but that system was pushed out of balance until a new equilibrium eventually formed. It took some 70,000–100,000 years for the planet to recover.
The problem was that higher temperatures caused many plants to fail because they had evolved for cooler conditions, and evolution proceeds far too slowly to cope with rapid environmental change. As plant productivity collapsed, less carbon was sequestered, which in turn drove temperatures higher — a classic positive feedback loop, triggered by a relatively small initial shift.
The worrying parallel today is that the current rate of anthropogenic warming is around ten times greater than at the onset of the PETM.
How we know this — and how the PETM reshaped climate and the terrestrial biosphere — is explored in a paper by an international team of scientists, published open access (in unedited form) in Nature Communications.
Two of the authors have also written a summary of their research in The Conversation. Their article is republished here under a Creative Commons licence, with formatting adjusted for consistency.
56 million years ago, the Earth suddenly heated up – and many plants stopped working properly
Forest life in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
As we show in new research published in Nature Communications, one consequence was that many of the world’s plants could no longer thrive. As a result, they soaked up less carbon from the atmosphere, which may have contributed to another interesting thing about this prehistoric planetary heatwave: it lasted more than 100,000 years.
Today Earth is warming around ten times faster than it did 56 million years ago, which may make it even harder for modern plants to adapt.
Rewinding 56 million years
Plants can help regulate the climate through a process known as carbon sequestration. This involves capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via photosynthesis and storing it in their leaves, wood and roots.
However, abrupt global warming may temporarily impact this regulating function.
Investigating how Earth’s vegetation responded to the rapid global warming event around 56 million years ago – known formally as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (or PETM) – isn’t easy.
To do so, we developed a computer model simulating plant evolution, dispersal, and carbon cycling. We compared model outputs to fossil pollen and plant trait data from three sites to reconstruct vegetation changes such as height, leaf mass, and deciduousness across the warming event.
The three sites include: the Bighorn Basin in the United States, the North Sea and the Arctic Circle.
We focused our research on fossil pollen due to many unique properties.
First, pollen is produced in copious amounts. Second, it travels extensively via air and water currents. Third, it possesses a resilient structure that withstands decay, allowing for its excellent preservation in ancient geological formations.
56-million-year-old fossilised palm pollen from the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, United States.
Vera Korasidis
A shift in vegetation
In the mid-latitude sites, including the Bighorn Basin – a deep and wide valley amidst the northern Rocky Mountains – evidence indicates vegetation had a reduced ability to regulate the climate.
Pollen data shows a shift to smaller plants such as palms and ferns. Leaf mass per area (a measure of leaf density and thickness) also increased as deciduous trees declined. Fossil soils indicate reduced soil organic carbon levels.
The data suggest smaller, drought-resistant plants including palms thrived in the landscape because they could keep pace with warming. They were, however, associated with a reduced capacity to store carbon in biomass and soils.
In contrast, the high-latitude Arctic site showed increased vegetation height and biomass following warming. The pollen data show replacement of conifer forests by broad-leaved swamp taxa and the persistence of some subtropical plants such as palms.
The model and data indicate high-latitude regions could adapt and even increase productivity (that is, capture and store carbon dioxide) under the warmer climate.
A glimpse into the future
The vegetation disruption during the PETM may have reduced terrestrial carbon sequestration for 70,000-100,000 years due to the reduced ability of vegetation and soils to capture and store carbon.
Our research suggests vegetation that is more able to regulate the climate took a long time to regrow, and this contributed to the length of the warming event.
Global warming of more than 4°C exceeded mid-latitude vegetation’s ability to adapt during the PETM. Human-made warming is occurring ten times faster, further limiting the time for adaptation.
What happened on Earth 56 million years ago highlights the need to understand biological systems’ capacity to keep pace with rapid climate changes and maintain efficient carbon sequestration.
Vera Korasidis, Lecturer in Environmental Geoscience, The University of Melbourne and Julian Rogger, Senior Research Associate, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
Published by The Conversation. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
Abstract
The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) around 56 million years ago was a 5–6°C global warming event that lasted for approximately 200 kyr. A warming-induced loss and a 70–100 kyr lagged recovery of biospheric carbon stocks was suggested to have contributed to the long duration of the climate perturbation. Here, we use a trait-based, eco-evolutionary vegetation model to test whether the PETM warming exceeded the adaptation capacity of vegetation systems, impacting the efficiency of terrestrial organic carbon sequestration and silicate weathering. Combined model simulations and vegetation reconstructions using PETM palynofloras suggest that warming-induced migration and evolutionary adaptation of vegetation were insufficient to prevent a widespread loss of productivity. We conclude that global warming of the magnitude as during the PETM could exceed the response capacity of vegetation systems and cause a long-lasting decline in the efficiency of vegetation-mediated climate regulation mechanisms.
Rogger, J., Korasidis, V.A., Bowen, G.J. et al. Loss of vegetation functions during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. Nat Commun (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-66390-8
Events like the PETM expose the fragility of the systems that sustain life and demonstrate how easily they can be tipped into new and often hostile states. Far from being the work of an infallible designer fine-tuning a planet for a single favoured species, Earth’s history shows a world continually shaped by feedback loops, chance events and the slow, directionless process of evolution. When those systems are pushed too far or too fast, life suffers — and it takes tens of thousands of years for the planet to recover.
What makes the comparison with today so stark is the rate at which we are forcing change. The PETM was a natural carbon-cycle disturbance that unfolded over millennia. Our own contribution has taken place in a geological instant, yet it is already driving shifts comparable in magnitude to that ancient warming pulse. If slow change overwhelmed ecosystems then, the acceleration humanity has produced is even more concerning.
Understanding the PETM is not simply an academic exercise. It is a reminder, written in deep time, that there are limits to what living systems can endure and that “business as usual” can push Earth into states incompatible with the world we inherited. The past cannot tell us exactly what will happen next, but it does show that the consequences of inaction are neither abstract nor remote. The warning signs are etched in the rocks; whether we heed them is up to us.
One thing we know is that there is no watching sky daddy who's going to come and rescue us from our folly.
Here is something for creationists to run away from: why would a creator god who supposedly made the entire universe as a place for humans – especially American humans – to live, and arranged everything else for their benefit, create creatures in an environment so hostile that no human could survive there without specialised modern equipment? And how exactly did Noah collect two of each of the countless species that live there in great profusion, only to place them on the Ark and somehow maintain the extreme conditions they require?
The simple answer, as underscored by these discoveries, is that the whole tale is a childish fairy story. The organisms inhabiting the extreme conditions of deep-ocean trenches evolved to live there over millions of years, entirely independent of any usefulness to humans, whose existence is of supreme indifference to them.
The conditions described come from an open-access paper in Scientific Reports by an international team of oceanographers and marine biologists led by the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany. They detail a unique environment 1,300 metres below the surface on a flank of Conical Seamount in the western Pacific, off Lihir Island in Papua New Guinea. What makes it unique is not simply that it is a hydrothermal vent, but that it is coupled with a cold methane seep from deep sediment layers. Hot, mineral-rich water and cold, hydrocarbon-rich methane gas rise along the same pathways, producing vent fluids filled with bubbles of cold methane.
The result is a unique ecosystem comprising dense fields of the mussel Bathymodiolus, along with tube worms, shrimp, amphipods, and striking purple sea cucumbers coating the rocks so completely that the underlying surfaces are entirely concealed.
Before methane-producing sediments accumulated, the hydrothermal fluids were even hotter, leaving behind tell-tale deposits of gold and silver, as well as antimony, mercury, and arsenic. The various lifeforms have adapted to thrive amid these chemicals, some of which are highly toxic.
Hydrothermal vents are among the most extraordinary environments on Earth — geochemical oases on the seafloor where life thrives without sunlight, fuelled instead by chemical energy. They overturn several once-assumed “rules” of biology and offer important clues about evolution, extremophiles, and possibly even the origins of life.~
High-resolution imaging of yellow fever virus reveals structural secrets that could power next-generation vaccines.
UQ scientists uncover secrets of yellow fever - News - The University of Queensland
Scientists at the University of Queensland, Australia, have produced near atomic-level 3D images of the yellow fever virus. These reveal the remarkable complexity that Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski of the Discovery Institute insist constitutes evidence of intelligent design – a theme almost universally endorsed by creationists and forming the central plank of their advocacy for creationism.
So, the obvious question for intelligent design advocates is this: is the irreducible complexity and complex specificity of the yellow fever virus evidence that it was intelligently designed to kill people? Or, when complex specified information and irreducible complexity do harm to humans, do these supposed ‘evidences’ for the existence of an intelligent designer (i.e. a god) somehow cease to apply, even though they benefit the virus? If so, how can a supposedly scientific definition change its meaning depending on the subjective judgement of what is being specified and how much or how little it benefits humans?
Scientists led by the University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside) have identified a previously unknown form of DNA damage in mitochondria that may underlie a wide range of disorders linked to mitochondrial dysfunction. Their findings have just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Mitochondria contain their own DNA (mtDNA), which is essential for the proper functioning of these organelles that convert glucose into ATP, supplying cells with the energy needed to power metabolic processes.
The culprit is a large molecule, glutathionylate, which attaches to DNA and, if left unrepaired, can cause mutations. Researchers at UC Riverside, working with colleagues at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, found that glutathionylated mtDNA accumulates in mitochondria at levels up to 80 times higher than in the cell nucleus. In short, the nuclear DNA repair system is vastly more efficient than its mitochondrial counterpart.
For advocates of Intelligent Design (ID), this discovery—if they understood it rather than dismissing it as part of an imagined conspiracy to undermine their faith—creates an acute theological problem. If we temporarily grant the core assumption of ID creationism, that a supernatural designer indistinguishable from the allegedly omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent god of the Bible and Qur’an is responsible for the design of mitochondrial DNA and its replication machinery, then only two coherent conclusions follow:
the designer is incompetent, having failed to produce fault-free mtDNA and an adequate repair mechanism, despite supposedly managing this for nuclear DNA; or
the designer could have produced fault-free mtDNA but chose instead to create error-prone mtDNA and a weak repair process, thereby intentionally designing disease and suffering—in other words, malevolence.
Moreover, the very need for a repair system betrays the absence of omnipotent, intelligent engineering. It is characteristic instead of the layered complexity produced by cumulative, unplanned evolutionary processes, which inevitably yield sub-optimal compromises.
The notion of an omniscient designer also rules out the excuse that the harmful consequences were unforeseeable. An all-knowing creator would have foreseen them; yet, according to ID logic, the designer implemented them regardless—designing mitochondrial DNA to fail and cause disease.
Thus, a biological phenomenon that fits seamlessly within the framework of evolutionary theory becomes an insurmountable theological obstacle for ID advocates, who must contort the evidence to suit a predetermined conclusion while catering to a scientifically illiterate and credulous audience.
According to new open-access research just published in Nature by a team led by Arizona State University palaeoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie, ‘Lucy’ (Australopithecus afarensis) was not the only hominin living on the Ethiopian Highlands 3.4 million years ago. This was part of the vast span of human evolutionary history that occurred long before creationists believe Earth was made as a small, flat world with a dome over it somewhere in the Middle East. Living alongside ‘Lucy’ was another species, now named Australopithecus deyiremeda.
However, A. deyiremeda differed from A. afarensis in several important ways — differences that reflect how two species can coexist in the same region by adapting to distinct ecological niches. A. deyiremeda, for instance, had an opposable big toe suited to climbing, indicating a more arboreal lifestyle than A. afarensis. Isotope analysis of A. deyiremeda’s teeth also shows that it had a different diet.
The first indication that another species might be present came in 2009 with the discovery of foot bones, announced publicly in 2012. In palaeontology, it is standard practice not to name a new species based on such fragmentary remains, especially when cranial bones are absent. Although teeth were also found in the same area, there was initially insufficient evidence to link them definitively to the foot bones.
Then, in 2015, the team had enough material to announce and name the new species, though they were still unable to demonstrate that the foot bones belonged to it. Now, ten years on, they believe they finally have sufficient fossil evidence to make that connection.
This news is unlikely to trouble creationists, who already have a ready supply of scientifically baseless excuses for dismissing ‘Lucy’: that it was forged; that scientists fabricated the evidence; that it was assembled from scattered bones found six miles apart; that ‘carbon dating’ was used (despite not being applicable at that age); or that radioactive decay rates have changed in the last 6,000–10,000 years, making 6,000 years only appear to be 3.4 million.
For those with the intellectual honesty and humility to form opinions based on evidence, however, the discovery offers a fascinating example of how multiple ancient hominins coexisted — and, in evolutionary terms, how two species sharing a common ancestor can diverge to occupy different ecological niches.
Scientists at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) have developed a strain of wheat capable of producing its own nitrate fertiliser, thereby increasing yields and reducing the amount of artificial nitrate that needs to be applied to fields. They achieved this by harnessing the nitrogen-fixing abilities of common soil bacteria that convert atmospheric nitrogen into nitrates in a form plants can absorb. Their research is published, open access, in the Plant Biotechnology Journal.
We seem to have been here before, observing how a food crop or domesticated animal could have been far more productive or better suited to human needs had it been given a more efficient “design” to begin with. In fact, virtually all our cultivated plants and domesticated animals have been profoundly reshaped by human selection, using the same biological principles as natural selection: favouring advantageous genes and eliminating those that are less so.
The new wheat strain produces nutrients that support anaerobic bacteria similar to those found in the root nodules of legumes such as peas and beans. These bacteria thrive in the low-oxygen environment of specialised nodules, where they fix nitrogen for the host plant. Wheat, however, lacks such nodules, and attempts to transfer nodule-forming genes from legumes have so far been unsuccessful. Instead, this new approach encourages nitrogen-fixing bacteria to live in close association with the wheat root system, effectively bypassing the need for nodules altogether.
This raises an awkward question for Intelligent Design creationists who equate their designer deity with the allegedly omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent god of the Bible, Torah, and Qur’an. Why didn’t this deity simply give crops like wheat and other staple foods the genes the bacteria use, or at least give them the genes required to host nitrogen-fixing bacteria directly, rather than devising an unnecessarily complex symbiosis only some plants can use? And if, for some reason, these were impossible, why didn’t it create a system resembling the one now designed by the UC Davis researchers?
As with so much in nature that ID proponents like to cite as evidence of complexity—and therefore design—closer inspection typically reveals solutions that are suboptimal, needlessly intricate, and often wasteful. As I point out in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax, these are not hallmarks of intelligent engineering, which should aim for minimal complexity and maximal efficiency. Instead, they are entirely consistent with an undirected evolutionary process that tinkers with what already exists, with no foresight and with success measured solely by reproductive output.
The simple fact is that humans, using intelligence, can and do devise more efficient, sensible solutions than those found in nature—as the UC Davis team has demonstrated. Such solutions ought to have been obvious to any genuinely omniscient designer.
This leaves creationists with a stark dilemma: must they conclude that their designer god is incompetent, unable to anticipate future needs, or malevolent in withholding solutions that would benefit humanity? Or is it more plausible that these biological systems arose through the natural evolutionary processes they insist “don’t work”?
Researchers have shown that kissing emerged early in the human evolutionary lineage, and that Neanderthals, along with other close relatives in our tangled family tree, almost certainly kissed as well.
Kissing is an intriguing behaviour, widely assumed to serve important social functions that outweigh the obvious drawbacks of exchanging microbes and viruses.
The team, led by Dr Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist in Oxford University’s Department of Biology, based their conclusion on the principle that when two species on separate branches of the primate family tree share a behaviour, it was likely present in their common ancestor. This approach indicates that kissing arose among the ancestors of the great apes between 21.5 and 16.9 million years ago. Their findings were published very recently in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
Creationists who insist that evolutionary biologists are abandoning the Theory of Evolution—a framework on which this analysis directly relies—may be alarmed to find no evidence of such a retreat. Quite the opposite: the observation that a trait with both costs and benefits will persist when the benefits outweigh the costs neatly explains the evolutionary retention of kissing across several related species.
This is the first of two articles published in The Conversation concerning the origins of domestic dogs and the myriad different breeds that have been developed under human agency since wolves were first domesticated. Neither of them is good news for creationists for several reason.
Firstly, the DNA evidence points to a history much older that the simple tale origin tale in the Bible allows for - a history stretching back some 11,000 years or more to before creationists believe anything existed.
Secondly, and this is something that I have found creationists will always run away from - if God supposedly created all animals for the benefit of humans, why have we had to modify them to such an extent that in many cases they are scarcely recognisable from their wild ancestors? Did God not know what we would use them for or what designs would be best suited for different purposes?
The answer of course, is that the Bible stories are just that - stories. They were never intended to be written down and bound together in a book later declared, by people with a personal stake who needed a spurious 'God-given' authority to take control of society, to be the inerrant word of a creator god and therefore definitive history and science textbooks. Their complete misalignment with observable reality should be more than a clue that the latter is wrong.
This article by two of the authors involved in the first study - Carly Ameen, a lecturer in Bioarchaeology, University of Exeter and Allowen Evin, CNRS Research Director, Bioarchaeology, Université de Montpellier. Together with a large group of colleagues they have just published their study in Science. Their article in The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
One of the enduring myths cherished by creationists is that humans appeared suddenly, as a distinct and immutable species, untouched by the messy processes of evolution. Yet study after study continues to reveal just how fluid and interconnected the human story really is. The latest comes from three researchers - Andrea Amadei, Giulia Lin, and Simone Fattorini - who have just published a fascinating analytical model in Scientific Reports explaining how the Neanderthals did not simply “vanish,” but were gradually absorbed into the expanding population of early modern humans.
This idea is not new, as I have reported before in this blog here and here, but what is new is this analytical model that shows how easily it happened. The model shows that repeated, small-scale migrations of Homo sapiens into Neanderthal territories would have resulted in gradual genetic dilution over time, without any need for violent extermination or sudden extinction events. Their DNA lives on in our genomes today — in Europeans, Asians, and other non-African populations — a genetic signature of our shared ancestry.
This finding adds yet another layer to the mounting evidence that humanity is not the product of divine design without ancestry but of evolutionary blending and adaptation. The neat, separate categories that creationists like to imagine simply never existed. Instead, what we see is a continuum of populations interacting, interbreeding, and shaping one another’s evolutionary fate. Rather than distinct “kinds,” humans and Neanderthals were part of a dynamic, interconnected lineage shaped by migration and time — the very processes that creationist dogma denies.
Far from the simplistic tale of a single miraculous creation, the history of our species is one of mixture, movement, and gradual transformation — precisely what evolution predicts, and precisely what the fossil and genetic evidence confirms.
In the film The Matrix, about a computer-simulated world, the red and blue pills symbolize a choice the hero must make between illusion and the truth of reality.
Creationists who want to believe that science and theology are compatible often resort to a pantheistic-style argument: that although the universe clearly operates according to the laws of physics, those laws must have been set by a creator deity of some kind. A modern twist on this theme is the claim that the universe, and everything within it, is in fact a vast computer simulation — and that “God” is the programmer. This is, of course, an argument that challenges science to prove a negative: to demonstrate that the universe *isn’t* a simulation.
What creationists are doing here is trying to prise open a gap — any gap — into which they can insert their god.
Now, four scientists at the University of British Columbia believe they have effectively closed that gap by putting the “simulation hypothesis” to the test against the null hypothesis. One of the them is the renowned atheist physicist Dr Lawrence M. Krauss, author of several books and articles debunking creationist ideas, including A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, which dismantles the notion that there had to be a ‘prime mover’ for the universe to exist.
