Refuting Creationism - How A Crocodile's Bite Could Have Caused Creationism - 3.2 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Photo credit: Tyler Stone, University of Iowa.

Researchers name, describe new crocodile that hunted iconic Lucy’s species - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

How does the discovery of an ancient crocodile in the Afar Region of Ethiopia help us to understand why creationists cling so tenaciously to their patently wrong beliefs? The discovery has just been reported by a team led by Professor Christopher A. Brochu of the University of Iowa, in the Taylor & Francis Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.

It is often said that you cannot reason someone out of a belief they were not reasoned into. This is especially true of religions and, as is becoming increasingly clear, of fundamentalist creationism, in which rejecting evidence and reason is often treated as a badge of ideological commitment. So how did creationists, almost without exception, acquire their fundamental beliefs?

One of the causes of religion is memetic inheritance from parents and authority figures during early childhood. As Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit Catholic order, is reputed to have said, “Give me the boy until he is seven and I will give you the man.” As can readily be seen from any map showing the global distribution of religions, if a creationist had been born in India, they would probably have been a Hindu; if born in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey or Afghanistan they would most likely have been a Muslim; and in Japan perhaps a Shintoist or Buddhist. The probability is, however, that those encountered online were born into a Christian family, most probably somewhere in the American Bible Belt.

The puzzle is why children accept, without evidence, the opinions of their parents as established fact beyond questioning and not requiring proof.

The answer lies in the psychological process of childhood naïvety, which raises a deeper question: how and why did this trait evolve? What advantage could there be in accepting what parents and authority figures say without independently verifying it?

Discussing this problem some years ago on the now-defunct CompuServe SciMath Forum, I suggested that the explanation lies in a “safety-first” strategy. For example, a child who accepts the warning not to go alone to the waterhole because their parents say it is dangerous will survive with no loss or detriment. A child who decides to check for themselves might instead end up eaten by a crocodile. Over time, natural selection would favour children inclined to trust parental warnings. This mechanism allowed the accumulated knowledge of previous generations to be passed quickly and efficiently to the next generation with little resistance — a classic example of memetic evolution.

However, the same mechanism that helps transmit practical survival knowledge also makes children vulnerable to religious beliefs and other superstitions, just as the need to breathe makes us vulnerable to airborne viruses.

So it is interesting to see that researchers led by Professor Christopher A. Brochu from the University of Iowa’s School of Earth, Environment and Sustainability, working with colleagues from several American universities, the Ethiopian Heritage Authority in Addis Ababa, and the University of Cambridge, UK, have discovered the fossil of an ancient crocodile that lived in the Afar Region of Ethiopia at roughly the same time as “Lucy” (Australopithecus afarensis), who, if not a direct ancestor of the genus Homo, was at least a close relative.

The crocodile, which the team have named Crocodylus lucivenator (“Lucy’s hunter”), would have been the apex predator in the area and would certainly have preyed on any hominins who came too close to its waterhole without exercising great caution.

Refuting Creationism - First Reconstruction of the Face of 'Little Foot' - From 3.6 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

"Little Foot" in an African woodland

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Auto)

The original skull (left), digital copy (middle) and reconstructed face of « Little Foot ».

© Amélie Beaudet

The first digital reconstruction of the face of « Little Foot » | CNRS.

Creationists refuse to recognise early hominins such as the australopithecines because they stubbornly refuse to conform to the creationist dogma that says there are no fossils showing the transition from a common ancestor with chimpanzees. Therefore, in the arrogant way creationists often deal with reality, because their stated dogma says otherwise, these fossils can't exist, and ad hoc explanations for their existence have to be invented — the dates are wrong; the scientists lied; Satan planted them to mislead us, etc., etc.

However, they do exist, and now scientists at the Centre national de recherche scientifique (CNRS), France, have succeeded in reconstructing the face of the australopithecine known as 'Little Foot', which was badly crushed and fragmented by the pressure and movement of the sediment in which it was buried. 'Little Foot', discovered at Sterkfontein, South Africa, is the most intact skeleton of an Australopithecus so far found, and this reconstruction helps place it in the evolutionary tree of the hominins as they diverged from the other African great apes. Their findings are published, open access, in the journal Comptes Rendus Palevol.

This reconstruction reveals a number of transitional features, just as one would expect of an early hominin roughly halfway in time between the split from the common ancestor with chimpanzees some 6 million years ago and the emergence of anatomically modern humans. But it also raises an intriguing question, because it appears to be closer to the East African australopithecines than to the South African australopithecines, raising questions about the evolutionary relationship between these two groups and the chronology of the evolution of the modern human face.

'Little Foot' was originally assigned to the species Australopithecus prometheus and later to Au. africanus, but is a school of thought that argues it is sufficiently different to other Australopiths to justify assigning it to a new species altogether.

Refuting Creationism - Evolutionary History of New Zealand Geese.

A reconstruction of the St Bathans goose, Metechen luti.

Artwork by Sasha Votyakova,
© Te Papa CC BY 4.0

New Zealand Giant Geese (Cnemiornis)

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

‘Old Mother Goose’ adds to history of NZ birds | University of Otago

This paper is another of those that will probably excite creationists initially, but then set up more cognitive dissonance because the timeline is utterly inconsistent with their preferred Biblical narrative. It will excite them because it suggests biologists might have been wrong about something; the dissonance then comes from the fact that the scientists involved have no doubts at all that the Theory of Evolution explains the facts, and that what they may have got wrong is merely the exact timing of events that happened many millions of years ago.

The possible mistake concerns the assumption that the ancestors of the extinct giant flightless geese of the Cnemiornis genus arrived in New Zealand about 14 million years ago. New evidence suggests that this may instead have been only about 7 million years ago, providing another example of the rapid evolution that can occur through the so-called 'island effect'.

The usual creationist response to the inevitable cognitive dissonance is either to ignore the findings altogether or to claim, with no evidence whatsoever, that the scientists got the dates wrong or invented figures to support a preconceived 'Darwinian' narrative.


But of course, what the paper actually demonstrates is the self-correcting nature of science, the contingency of scientific knowledge, and the willingness to change conclusions when the facts change — features of the scientific method that reflect the intellectual integrity of scientists and that give science its great power to determine the truth. This stands in stark contrast to creationism, which cannot move beyond the primitive superstitions of Bronze Age pastoralists, and which depends on intellectual bankruptcy — and the arrogance to believe one's opinions trump the evidence — in order to maintain belief in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The paper in question was recently published in the journal Historical Biology by members of an international collaboration between scientists from Otago University, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and the University of Cambridge (UK), led by Alan J. D. Tennyson of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

So what exactly did the researchers discover that prompted this revision of the timeline? The answer lies in new fossil material and a re-examination of the evolutionary relationships of these remarkable birds. By comparing skeletal features and analysing their place within the broader family tree of waterfowl, the team were able to reassess when the ancestors of New Zealand’s giant flightless geese first arrived on the islands. Their results suggest that these birds colonised New Zealand far more recently than previously thought, after which they rapidly evolved into the large, flightless forms known from the fossil record.

This kind of rapid evolutionary change is a well-known phenomenon on islands, where isolation, the absence of mammalian predators, and new ecological opportunities can drive dramatic shifts in body size and behaviour. In the case of Cnemiornis, the descendants of ordinary flying waterfowl appear to have evolved into large, heavy, ground-dwelling birds in a relatively short geological time.

Refuting Creationism - Why There Are No fossils Of The Early Sponges From 650 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Sponges in the Ediacaran

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

A giant barrel sponge from Indonesia. Sponges were the first reef builders and maintain a fundamental role in modern marine ecosystems.

January: Bristol scientists discover early sponges were soft | News and features | University of Bristol

Creationists have a massive gap to try to close; a gap so wide it makes the Grand Canyon look like a mere ditch. It is the gap between the earliest signs of life in the fossil record and the timeline a literal reading of the Bible allows. And that gap just got a lot wider.

Creationists could once take comfort from the fact that there was little solid fossil evidence of multicellular life much before the Cambrian, when organisms with hard body parts that fossilise begin to appear in the record. That gap was closed, not by fossils as we normally understand the term, but by chemical fossils contained in ancient rocks, as I explained in my last blog post. This evidence, together with genetic evidence from other work, shows that the common ancestors of multicellular animal life were very probably sea sponges.

But to a creationist, conditioned to believe that the Theory of Evolution is a theory about fossils—so that any gaps in the fossil record must be fatal for the theory—there is still some comfort in the fact that whatever left these chemical fingerprints in ancient rocks left no tangible fossils.

Now a team of palaeontologists, led by the University of Bristol, have shown that the lack of fossil evidence of these ancestral sponges has a simple explanation: they were soft-bodied, having yet to evolve the characteristic skeletons composed of millions of microscopic glass-like spicules. These did not evolve until about 560 million years ago. The team have recently published their findings, open access, in the journal Science Advances.

The Bristol-led team have now pushed back the evolution of these soft-bodied sponges to between 615 and 600 million years ago by using a combination of genetic evidence from 133 protein-coding genes and fossil evidence. This approach also showed that the spicules evolved independently in different sponge groups by convergent evolution.

Refuting Creationism - Humans were recording information 30,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'.

The Adorant figurine from Geißenklösterle Cave, approximately 40,000 years old, consists of a small ivory plate bearing an anthropomorphic figure and multiple sequences of notches and dots. The application of these marks suggests a notational system, most notably in the rows of dots on the back of the plate.

© Landesmuseum Württemberg / Hendrik Zwietasch, CC BY 4.0

Signs on Stone Age objects: Precursor to written language dates back 40,000 years | Universität des Saarlandes

Creationists have to be increasingly inventive in their attempts to explain away the inconvenient facts emerging from science — facts showing that complex life existed on Earth long before their chronology allows there to have been an Earth at all. That difficulty was not eased today with the discovery that humans were recording information at least 40,000 years ago — some 30,000 years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’.

This discovery, by linguist Professor Christian Bentz at Saarland University and archaeologist Dr. Ewa Dutkiewicz at the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte (Museum of Prehistory and Early History) in Berlin, is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. By analysing more than 3,000 geometric patterns recorded on 260 figurines and tools, the authors showed that these markings contain information densities comparable to the earliest proto-cuneiform scripts from around 3000 BCE in Mesopotamia.

This points to a level of cultural sophistication — and a need to communicate and preserve ideas — among some of the earliest anatomically modern humans to colonise Eurasia, tens of thousands of years before Bronze Age pastoralists in the Middle East began writing down their imaginative origin myths to fill the gaps in their knowledge and understanding of the world.

Refuting Creationism - Nosey Secrets of Triceratops Reveal Advanced Evolution - 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Triceratops skull. Seishiro Tada (left) standing next to an awe-inspiring Triceratops skull, with its enormous nasal cavity visible at the front.

©2026 Tada CC-BY-ND

Why Triceratops has such a big nose | The University of Tokyo

Once upon a time, in that ancient world during the 99.975% of Earth’s history that elapsed before creationism’s small god supposedly conceived the idea of creating a small flat plane with a dome over it in the Middle East, there lived a dinosaur that had evolved a horned head and a wide protective frill to shield its vulnerable neck from the jaws of the large predators that ruled the land some 100 million years ago. Carrying those horns and that protective neck shield required a large head — and a large head is difficult to keep cool.

The solution, according to researcher Seishiro Tada of the University of Tokyo Museum, was a large nasal cavity containing turbinate bones to mix incoming air, together with a plentiful blood supply to dissipate excess heat. Tada and colleagues from various Japanese research institutions have recently published their findings in The Anatomical Record.

This is not a fairy story, but what palaeontology is revealing.

From an evolutionary perspective, this research shows that Triceratops was the product of a long evolutionary process in which predation drove the development of large defensive structures, which in turn created new physiological challenges — in this case, the risk of overheating. Those challenges then drove further evolutionary adaptations. In other words, the solution to one problem generated another problem to be solved, all as part of a predator–prey arms race. This dynamic makes no sense as the work of an intelligent designer, but it is precisely what evolutionary theory predicts.

Creationism In Crisis - What Caused Homo Floresiensis (The 'Hobbit') To Go Extinct - 40,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'?

Homo floresiensis hunting a Stegodon

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Reconstruction of Homo floresiensis

By Cicero Moraes et al, Arc-Team Research
CC BY 4.0, Link

The ‘hobbits’ mysteriously disappeared 50,000 years ago. Our new study reveals what happened to their home

Long before anatomically modern Homo sapiens took their first tentative steps out of Africa and established themselves in Eurasia, an archaic hominin, Homo erectus, had already done so about a million years earlier, spreading across Asia into what is now the Indonesian archipelago and diversifying into a number of species and regional variants along the way.

One lineage settled on the island of Flores, where they encountered a miniature species of elephant, Stegodon florensis insularis, which probably became one of their principal sources of meat. By a process known to evolutionary biologists as Foster's Rule or the “island effect”, the descendants of these hominins also became smaller, eventually evolving into Homo floresiensis, popularly known as “The Hobbit” on account of their diminutive stature. Then, quite suddenly, they disappeared from history some 50,000 years ago.

Now an international team of archaeologists, including scientists from the University of Wollongong (UOW), Australia, believe they have found evidence explaining their extinction. It appears to have coincided with the disappearance of Stegodon florensis insularis and to have been driven by extensive climate change that began about 76,000 years ago, culminating in severe summer droughts between 61,000 and 50,000 years ago. The researchers reached this conclusion through analysis of the chemical record preserved in stalagmites from Flores caves, alongside isotopic data from the teeth of Stegodon. Their paper has just been published open access in Communications Earth & Environment.

In addition to the University of Wollongong news release explaining the study, four of the authors have written an article in The Conversation. Their article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Refuting Creationism - A Dinosaur With Spikes - 125 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Haolong dongi in a Cretaceous forest setting

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Artistic reconstruction of a juvenile Haolong dongi from the Early Cretaceous of China (125 million years ago).

© Fabio Manucci.

A dinosaur with spikes exhibiting unprecedented properties discovered in China | CNRS

Almost eight weeks into the New Year and not a single scientific paper has emerged in support of creationism—or its pseudo-scientific variant, Intelligent Design. Not even a speculative hint of the long-predicted collapse of ‘Darwinism’, nor any sign that Intelligent Design is making inroads into biomedical science. Instead, the steady flow of research continues to do precisely the opposite: quietly and methodically reinforcing evolutionary biology as the indispensable framework through which palaeontology, cell biology, virology and the rest of modern life sciences make coherent, testable sense of the evidence.

Today brings yet another example. An international team led by researchers from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), working at the Université de Rennes, has identified a new species of iguanodontian dinosaur that lived in what is now China around 125 million years ago. Their paper, recently published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, reports that this species was probably covered in hollow spikes, somewhat reminiscent of porcupine quills. The team have named the new species Haolong dongi in honour of Dong Zhiming, a pioneer of Chinese palaeontology.

Using X-ray scans and high-resolution histological sections, the researchers were able to identify preserved skin structures, revealing hollow cutaneous spikes over much of the animal’s body. Although herbivorous, this dinosaur lived in an environment where predation pressure from small carnivores would have been significant, and the spikes likely provided a degree of protection comparable to that of modern porcupines. The structures may also have played roles in thermoregulation and/or sensory perception.

Malevolent Design - More Evidence Of Intelligently Designed Cancer?

Pancreatic cancers co-opt nerve cells to assist them to develop.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Let’s get on pancreatic cancer’s nerves | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Creationists seem to have pinned all their hopes of justification for their evidence-free beliefs on a false dichotomy and a classic “god of the gaps” fallacy: the claim that complex specified information and irreducible complexity are proof of design by an intelligent entity. This argument relies heavily on the parochial ignorance of its intended audience, who are expected to assume that this “designer” must be the Christian god of the Bible — or, depending on geography and cultural background, the god of the Qur’an — and that therefore those holy books must be the inerrant word of the supposed creator.

However, the problem this raises for creationists is an obvious one: who or what, within their framework, designed all the many examples of irreducible complexity and complex specified information that cause suffering, sickness, and death?

Another striking example has just been published in Cancer Discovery by Professor Jérémy Nigri and colleagues from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, USA.

In this paper, the researchers use advanced 3D imaging to show how, even before tumours form, tumour-promoting fibroblasts — known as myCAFs — send out signals that attract nerve fibres. The myCAFs and nerve cells then work together within pancreatic lesions to create a microenvironment favourable for cancer growth. Embarrassingly for Intelligent Design advocates, this system depends entirely on the genetic capacity of myCAFs to send the correct molecular signals, and for nerve fibres to respond appropriately — a finely tuned interaction requiring precisely the sort of “irreducible complexity” they insist can only arise through intentional design.

Within the ID paradigm, these facts should be indisputable evidence of their god’s involvement — but only when the outcome is something they find beneficial, such as eyes, blood clotting, or a brain capable of abstract thought. When the very same logic points instead to cancers, parasites, and congenital diseases, it is suddenly no evidence at all, and certainly not evidence of malevolent intent on the part of the designer. The argument collapses into childish special pleading: design is invoked when convenient, but denied when morally awkward.

Creationism Refuted - Why We Need Our Gut Microbiome To Keep Us Healthy

Gut microbiome - AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Electron microscopic image of rod-shaped gut bacteria.

© Bacteria in the gut. NIH Image Gallery/Donny Bliss, NIH

What gut bacteria like

An open access paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) is a stunning example of the ludicrous complexity evolution has produced — the exact antithesis of what an intelligent designer would create, if such a designer were anything more than grossly incompetent. As I explain in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax, and as I have pointed out repeatedly on this blog, the hallmark of intelligent design should be minimal complexity and maximal efficiency. And yet what we find in humans — and in just about every other bilaterian animal with a gut — is a vast, intricate symbiotic microbiome supplying functions that could far more simply have been provided directly, with even a little forethought on the part of any competent designer.

Instead, in the sort of convoluted complexity that creationists like to attribute to their putative designer god, but which is in reality a hallmark of evolved systems, we see yet another example of a biological arrangement that betrays not intelligence, but its absence.

The paper, by an international team led by Professor Victor Sourjik and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, the University of Ohio, and Philipps-University Marburg, describes how an interdependent gut microbiome helps to keep both the microorganisms and their host healthy. They show that this complex and dynamic community is governed by countless chemical interactions — not only among the microorganisms themselves, but also between microbes and host tissues. The perception of nutrients and signalling molecules by gut bacteria is therefore crucial in maintaining these relationships.

One key role of this microbiome is in deterring and combating pathological species which would otherwise find the gut — with its warmth and steady supply of pre-digested nutrients — an ideal environment to colonise. This must have been a problem even for the earliest animals with a digestive tract: a vulnerability effectively built into the body plan. The solution, in the form of beneficial commensal organisms, is therefore probably as old as the first tube-like bilaterians themselves.

The problem the human gut faces in this respect can be gauged from the fact that some studies have shown that 50-55% or more of the dry weight of human faces is bacteria, dead and alive[1] , with populations of bacteria in the order of 10¹¹ bacteria per gram![2] Imagine then the opportunities this presents to a potentially pathological bacteria with a generation time in minutes. With a population exploding exponentially, the potential to overwhelm the host in a few days is enormous. This is the scale of the problem, and of the selection pressure to overcome it, that has produced this massively complex solution, because it wasn't solved in the initial 'design' stage.

Since it worked well enough, there has been no evolutionary pressure to replace it with a less vulnerable gut, or one better equipped to cope with infection without relying on an entire ecosystem of different microorganisms to maintain health. In other words, what we have today is the result of more than half a billion years of evolutionary history since this basic body plan first emerged in the Cambrian.

Refuting Creationistm - An Evolutionary Trap That No Intelligent Designer Would Blunder Into

Sceptobius beetles in an ant colony

The evolutionary trap that keeps rove beetles alive

A new study reported in Cell describes an extraordinary example of evolutionary adaptation unfolding right under our noses — and it will make uncomfortable reading for anyone still clinging to the creationist fantasy that living systems were neatly “designed” in their present form a few thousand years ago.

Researchers from the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, CA. USA, investigating the symbiotic relationship between certain rove beetles and their ant hosts have shown how these beetles have evolved the ability to infiltrate ant colonies by chemically disguising themselves as ants. Far from being “created” to live harmoniously together, this is an evolutionary arms-race in miniature: ants have evolved sophisticated chemical recognition systems to detect intruders, while the beetles have evolved equally sophisticated counter-measures to bypass those defences.

And the details are exactly the sort of thing intelligent design advocates never seem to anticipate. The beetles do not simply possess some magical, pre-installed “ant colony access” trait. Instead, evolution has shaped them into something far stranger and far less tidy: they suppress their own scent production and acquire the colony’s chemical signature directly from the ants themselves. In effect, they become living imposters — accepted not because the ants were “meant” to host them, but because natural selection has honed the beetles’ ability to exploit a biological loophole.

Creationism Refuted - Domestic Dogs Began to Diversify At Least 1,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Modern dog skull used for the photogrammetric reconstruction of 3D models in the study.

Image credit: C. Ameen (University of Exeter)

Variations in skulls of modern dogs.

Extensive dog diversity millennia before modern breeding practices - University of Exeter News

There is, of course, no let-up in the steady stream of bad news for creationists to ignore in 2026, and today is no exception. This time the problem comes from archaeology and concerns events taking place toward the end of the very long span of Earth’s history that preceded creationism’s so-called *Creation Week*. The news is that the diversification of domestic dogs, descended from domesticated wolves, had already begun at least 11,000 years ago — long before anything resembling the modern concept of dog “breeds”.

The evidence is presented in a paper published in Science by a team led by palaeontologists from the University of Exeter and France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). The researchers analysed 643 modern and archaeological canid skulls—including recognised breeds, village dogs, and wolves—spanning the last 50,000 years. In both geographical scope and time depth, it is the largest and most comprehensive study of its kind to date.

Using a technique known as geometric morphometrics, the team demonstrated that by the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods dogs already displayed a striking range of shapes and sizes. This diversity almost certainly reflects their varied roles in early human societies, from hunting and herding to guarding and companionship, rather than anything resembling systematic modern breeding.

All of this directly contradicts the claim in Genesis that animals were created fully formed for mankind’s exclusive use by an omnipotent and omniscient creator. Had that been the case, dogs would not require modification to make them fit for different purposes, nor would the archaeological record preserve clear evidence of their gradual evolutionary divergence from an ancestral wolf population. Instead, the evidence shows — unambiguously — that modern dogs are the product of an evolutionary process in which human-mediated selection played a central role, carried out by people who themselves existed long before the biblical timeline allows.

Creationism Refuted - A 'Transitional Species' That is Probably Another Ancestral Hominin

Dr Jesse Martin of LaTrobe University thinks Little Foot could be a whole new branch of the human family tree.

Photograph: La Trobe University

Iconic fossil may be new type of human ancestor, News, La Trobe University

A brief communication, published last November in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology may, if creationists never read past the title (as usual), have produced a frisson of excitement in those circles. It questioned the taxonomic status of one of the most complete fossil skeletons of an early ancestral hominin, Australopithecus prometheus, popularly known as “Little Foot”.

However, reading even a little further would have turned that excitement into disappointment — assuming, of course, that they understood what they were reading. The authors were not questioning whether the fossil was ancestral at all, but whether it had been assigned to the correct position in the hominin family tree, or whether it should instead be recognised as a distinct ancestral hominin species. In other words, this was a discussion about how many transitional species there are, not whether transitional species exist at all.

The only crumb of comfort available to creationists is the familiar claim that this demonstrates how science “keeps changing its mind”, something they take as evidence that science is fundamentally unreliable—presumably including even those parts they routinely misrepresent as supporting their beliefs.

For anyone who understands the scientific method, and the importance of treating all knowledge as provisional and contingent on the best available evidence, this paper represents the principle functioning exactly as it should. Far from being a weakness, this willingness to revise conclusions in the light of new information is what makes science self-correcting and progressively more accurate over time.

The authors of the paper — a team led by La Trobe University adjunct Dr Jesse Martin—carried out a new analysis of the “Little Foot” fossils and concluded that the specimen was probably placed in the wrong taxon when first described on the basis that it does not share the same “unique suite of primitive and derived features” as Australopithecus africanus. Since that initial assessment, additional fossils of A. prometheus have been discovered, and it has become clear that “Little Foot” also differs from those specimens. At the same time, it remains sufficiently distinct from A. africanus that reassignment to that species is not justified. In short, it possesses its own unique combination of primitive and derived traits and should therefore be recognised as a separate species.

Naturally, there is no real comfort here for creationists. The phrase “suite of primitive and derived features” is simply palaeontological shorthand for evidence of descent with modification—what Darwin referred to as transitional forms. It follows that the researchers involved have no doubt whatsoever that the species under discussion evolved from earlier ancestors, and there is no hint that they believe it was spontaneously created, without ancestry, by magic.

Creationism Refuted - Evolution of Parasitic Plants by LOSS of Complexity

Balanophora

Photo credit: Ze Wei, Plant Photo Bank of China

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.

© Kobe University (CC BY)

How parasitic, asexual plants evolve and live | Kobe University News site

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.

Unintelligent Design - Something Any Intelligent Designer Could Have Done, If It Was Real

The figure depicts the NFR5 kinase structure and juxtamembrane motif

Discovery of a Key Protein Motif Essential for Root Nodule Symbiosis

Scientists at Aarhus University, Denmark, have discovered that barley can be induced to form a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria through a simple substitution of two amino acids in a single protein. This tweak enables barley to initiate the same sort of symbiosis that legumes use to “self-fertilise”. They have published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

This is yet another case where we can legitimately ask: if scientists can do it, why didn’t creationism’s supposed intelligent designer do it, if its intent were truly to create a world optimised for human existence? The question remains unanswered, often provoking threats and hysteria on social media, as creationists scramble to cover their confusion with guesses rooted in Christian fundamentalism and Biblical tales of “The Fall”. It’s a core theological patch, while the forlorn Discovery Institute and its fellows remain as silent on this issue as they are on parasites and pathogens—still struggling to sustain the pretence that ID creationism is real science rather than Bible-literalist creationism dressed in a grubby lab coat.

The Aarhus researchers found that a highly conserved protein, present across plant species, plays a crucial role in plant–microbe interactions—presumably as part of the plant’s defence against pathogens. However, in legumes the same protein must be suppressed, because its normal activity prevents formation of the root nodules that act as low-oxygen refuges for the nitrogen-fixing bacteria on which legumes depend. A simple mutation in this protein allows nodule formation in barley, enabling the crop to produce its own nitrogen fertiliser, increasing yields without the expense of artificial fertilisers and without the ecological harm they cause when they leach into waterways.

Refuting Creationism - How Butterfly Genomes Confirm Darwin's Conclusion

[Body]

1,000 butterfly and moth genomes to investigate evolution, climate change resilience, and tackle food security issues

Geneticists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute have just completed the sequencing of 1,000 European butterflies and moths. Their results are already feeding into research papers, such as that by Asia E. Hoile, Peter W. H. Holland & Peter O. Mulhair, in BMC Genomics. The Wellcome Sanger team have published their results in Trends in Ecology & Evolution

In 1858, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection, or as they described it, the origin of species by the preservation of favoured races. Darwin then elaborated on that central idea and concluded that the ‘tree of life’ would branch in ways consistent with diversification from common origins.

Creationists, on the other hand, claim all species were created by magic in their present form just a few thousand years ago, with no evolution and no common ancestry.

Darwin's Tree of Life sketch

Neither Darwin nor Wallace knew anything about DNA or genomes, or that mutations in DNA would become ‘favoured’ in particular environmental niches, driving diversification. They developed their ideas purely from the observable morphological and behavioural similarities and differences among species.

So, if the creationists are right, what should we see in these 1,000 genome sequences?

Creationism Refuted - Unlike Creationists Chimpanzees Change Their Mind When the Evidence Changes

Ngamba Island Chimpanzees, Uganda

Photo: Sabana Gonzalez, UC Berkeley

New psychology study suggests chimpanzees might be rational thinkers | Letters & Science

A recent study has shown that chimpanzees, unlike creationists, are capable of rationally revising their beliefs when presented with new information – another trait they share with most humans.

Creationists, by contrast, tend to take pride in refusing to change their minds. For them, admitting error would be a sign of weakness: a capitulation to the supposedly corrupting influence of scientific evidence that threatens to lure them away from the ‘truth’. In their circular logic, it must be true because they believe it, and they believe it because it is true - a circular logic designed to make intellectual bankruptcy look like a virtue called 'faith'.

Chimpanzees, unburdened by irrational superstition or egos in need of constant reinforcement, appear far more interested in being right than in demonstrating unwavering devotion to a demonstrably wrong belief system.

Interestingly, the chimpanzees can do something human children do by the age of about 4. The ability to asses evidence and base opinions on it, is, of course, the basis of science - which may be the reason creationists struggle to understand it and reject evidence as the basis of opinion, believing themselves to be capable of simply knowing the truth, like a child below the age of 4. So we have a continuum of increasing intellectual ability and integrity from toddlers and creationists through chimpanzees and 4-year-old humans to human adults. The study, carried out by a large research team that included UC Berkeley Psychology Postdoctoral Researcher Emily Sanford, UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Jan Engelmann, and Utrecht University Psychology Professor Hanna Schleihauf, has just been published in Science and is summarised in a University of California Berkeley news item.

Creationism Refuted - 40,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth RNA

One of Yuka’s legs, illustrating the exceptional preservation of the lower part of the leg after the skin had been removed, which enabled recovery of ancient RNA molecules.

Photo: Valeri Plotnikov.

The world’s oldest RNA extracted from woolly mammoth - Stockholm University

Scientists led by researchers from Stockholm University, Denmark, have just announced that they have successfully extracted RNA from 40,000-year-old mammoth remains — the oldest RNA ever obtained. This shows that not only DNA but also RNA can persist for extraordinary lengths of time under the right conditions, adding yet more to the mountain of evidence that undermines creationist claims. With preserved RNA, researchers can even reconstruct the DNA that originally served as its template, effectively giving scientists two independent avenues for recovering genetic information.

One of the joys of debunking creationism — a childish superstition when set beside the rigour of evolutionary biology — is the sheer abundance of evidence. Almost every peer-reviewed paper in biology, geology, palaeontology, cosmology, and the other natural sciences demonstrates, in one way or another, the reality of evolution and the age of the Earth, and presents verifiable results that creationism simply cannot accommodate.

Even psychology lends its weight. Not only does it support an evolutionary account of human cognition and intelligence, but it also helps explain why creationists cling so tightly to demonstrably false beliefs. For many, rejecting evidence becomes a test of loyalty or personal strength, with scientific data treated as part of a supposed conspiracy designed to shake their faith. If they can cling to their faith despite the overwhelming contrary evidence, then they must really believe it.

Adding this new discovery to the existing evidence is rather like tossing a pebble onto Mount Everest and expecting creationists to accept the mountain’s existence because a pebble lies on it. Such acceptance is impossible for the committed creationist, since that would mean yielding to the ‘evil conspiracy’ and admitting that their favourite holy book is not a perfect, divinely authored scientific text, but a compilation of Bronze Age and Early Iron Age mythology, created by people doing their best to explain a world they did not yet understand.

Creationism Refuted - Doggy Dos For Creationists

Dogs 10,000 years ago roamed with bands of humans and came in all shapes and sizes

This is the second article in The Conversation which incidentally refutes creationism and shows us why the Bible must be dismissed as a source book for science and history on the basis that, when compared to reality, it's stories are not just wrong; they're not even close.

This one deals with essentially that same subject as my last past - the evolution of all the different dog varieties since wolves were first domesticated some 11,000 years ago. Together with all the other canids that creationists insist are all dog 'kind', including several foxes, several subspecies of wolf, coyotes, jackals, and African wild dogs, the hundreds of different recognised breeds of dog could not conceivably have arisen from a single pair and the resulting genetic bottleneck just a few thousand years ago. Moreover, we are expected to believe that in that short space of time, all the canids evolved from being vegetarian (with canine teeth, meat-cutting incisors and bone-crushing molars, apparently) to being obligate carnivores.

As well as the paper that was the subject of my last blog post, this The Conversation article mentions another paper, also published in Science by palaeontologists led by Shao-Jie Zhang from the Kunming Institute of Zoology, China. This paper draws on DNA evidence from ancient Eastern Eurasian dogs.

The article by Kylie M. Cairns, a Research Fellow in Canid and Wildlife Genomics, UNSW Sydney, Australia and Professor Melanie Fillios of the Department of Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology, University of New England, USA. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative |Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

How Science Works - Not Abandonning Evolution - Refining Our Understanding Of It

This article is best read on a laptop, desktop, or tablet

A new theory of molecular evolution | University of Michigan News

A new paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution by a research team at the University of Michigan, led by evolutionary biologist, Professor Jianzhi Zhang, comprehensively, but incidentally, refutes several common creationist claims — such as that mainstream biologists are abandoning evolution because it supposedly cannot explain the evidence, that all mutations are harmful, so cannot underpin evolution, and that scientists are prevented from publishing findings that challenge orthodoxy.

The study examines a key assumption of the Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution — namely that most amino-acid substitutions are neutral (neither beneficial nor strongly deleterious) and fix by drift rather than selection. The authors report experimental data showing that in mutational-scanning assays of over 12,000 amino-acid-altering mutations across 24 genes, >1 % of mutations were beneficial, implying a far higher beneficial-mutation rate than is conventionally assumed.

To reconcile that finding with the fact that comparative genomic data appear consistent with many substitutions being neutral, Zhang’s team propose a new model — “adaptive tracking with antagonistic pleiotropy” — in which beneficial mutations are frequently environment-specific, and when the environment changes the same mutation may become deleterious, hence failing to fix. In this way, although beneficial mutations are common, they rarely reach fixation when environments shift, and substitution patterns can appear neutral.

The paper operates fully within the framework of evolutionary theory by natural selection: it does not challenge evolution itself, but refines a subsidiary theoretical model about molecular changes. Thus, it strengthens the broader evolutionary paradigm rather than undermines it.