Uninteligent Design - How The Process of Germ Cell Production Goes Wrong And Creates Genetic Defects.

Paired chromosomes showing crossovers in a mouse oocyte.

Hunter lab

Left panel: short green irregular lines arranged in pairs. Right: Close up of one pair shows that the two strands form a cross shape. Paired chromosomes showing crossovers in a mouse oocyte.

Hunter lab.

Landmark Discovery Reveals How Chromosomes Are Passed From One Generation to the Next | UC Davis

This article continues my series exploring the many ways in which the human body demonstrates unintelligent design. Far from being the perfect handiwork of a benevolent creator, our anatomy and physiology are full of flaws, inefficiencies, and dangerous vulnerabilities. Each of these makes sense in light of evolution by natural selection—an opportunistic, short-term process that tinkers with existing structures—but they make no sense at all if we are supposed to be the product of an all-wise designer.

Creationists often argue from a position of ignorant incredulity, claiming that complexity implies intelligent design, when in fact the opposite is true. The hallmark of good, intelligent design is simplicity, for two very simple reasons: first, simple things are easier to construct and require fewer resources; and second, simple structures and processes have fewer potential points of failure, making them more reliable.

In short: complexity is evidence against intelligent design and in favour of a mindless, utilitarian, natural process such as evolution.

In addition to being minimally complex, another characteristic we would expect of something designed by an omniscient, maximally intelligent, and benevolent designer is that the process should work perfectly, every time, without fail.

The problem for creationists is that their favourite example of supposed intelligent design — the human body — is riddled with complexity in both its structures and processes. This complexity provides countless examples of systems that fail to perform adequately, or fail altogether, with varying frequency. Many failures occur in the layers of complexity needed to control or compensate for the inadequacies of other systems, and when those compensatory mechanisms themselves fail, the result can be a cascade of dysfunctions or processes running out of control. The consequences manifest as diseases, defects, and disabilities — hardly the work of an all-wise designer.

They are, however, exactly what we would expect from a mindless, utilitarian process like evolution, which prioritises short-term survival and reproduction, selecting only what is better — sometimes only marginally better — than what preceded it, rather than seeking optimal solutions. I have catalogued many such suboptimal compromises in the anatomy and physiology of the human body, and the problems that arise from them, in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design, one of my Unintelligent Design series.

Just yesterday, I wrote about research suggesting that autism may be a by-product of the rapid evolution of intelligence in humans. Now we have another striking example of extreme biological complexity which, when it goes wrong, can have catastrophic consequences: the production of eggs in women and sperm cells in men.

Background^ How Humans Produce Eggs and Sperm. Egg production (oogenesis)

• In females, all the eggs a woman will ever have are formed before birth. During foetal development, cells in the ovaries undergo meiosis (a special type of cell division that halves the number of chromosomes).
• These immature egg cells (oocytes) remain “frozen” in an early stage until puberty, when hormones begin to stimulate their monthly maturation.
• Usually, only one egg completes development and is released each month during ovulation.
• Because oocytes are stored for decades, they accumulate damage and errors over time, which explains why fertility declines and the risk of genetic disorders rises with age.

Sperm production (spermatogenesis)

• In males, sperm are produced continuously from puberty onwards in the testes.
• Specialised stem cells divide by meiosis to create sperm cells with half the normal number of chromosomes.
• Each cell division cycle produces millions of sperm every day, but the process is intricate and vulnerable to errors.
• Defective sperm are common, though usually filtered out, and sperm quality can decline with age, illness, or environmental factors.

Why it matters
Both processes rely on precise chromosome sorting and pairing. Even small mistakes—such as an extra or missing chromosome—can lead to infertility, miscarriage, or genetic disorders such as Down syndrome. The complexity and fragility of gamete production underline how far these processes fall short of “perfect design”.

In addition, as this article exposes, the eggs are maintained in a state of partial meiosis, 'frozen' at a critical point, sometimes for several decades, until just before ovulation, requiring special processes to conserve them in that state. If this stage fails then it can result in miscarriage, or birth defects.

This research, led by Professor Neil Hunter of the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at the University of California, Davis, has been published open access in Nature and summarised in a UC Davis news article by Douglas Fox.

Landmark Discovery Reveals How Chromosomes Are Passed From One Generation to the Next

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Critical Event Guides Accurate Distribution of Chromosomes To Eggs and Sperm

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When a woman becomes pregnant, the outcome of that pregnancy depends on many things — including a crucial event that happened while she was still growing inside her own mother’s womb. It depends on the quality of the egg cells that were already forming inside her fetal ovaries. The DNA-containing chromosomes in those cells must be cut, spliced and sorted perfectly. In males, the same process produces sperm in the testes but occurs only after puberty.

If that goes wrong, then you end up with the wrong number of chromosomes in the eggs or sperm. This can result in infertility, miscarriage or the birth of children with genetic diseases.

Professor Neil Hunter, corresponding author
Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics
University of California Davis
Davis, CA, USA.

In a paper published Sept. 24 in the journal Nature, Hunter’s team reports a major new discovery about a process that helps safeguard against these mistakes. He has pieced together the choreography of proteins that connect matching chromosome pairs — ensuring that they are sorted correctly as egg and sperm cells develop and divide.

Hunter’s discoveries required methods to watch the molecular events of chromosome recombination unfold with unprecedented detail. This involved genetic engineering in budding yeast — a model organism that has been used for decades to discover how fundamental cellular processes work.

The chromosome structures that we studied have changed very little across evolution. Every protein that we looked at in yeast has a direct counterpart in humans.

Professor Neil Hunter.

His findings could improve our understanding of fertility problems and how they are diagnosed and treated in humans.

Forming chromosome crossovers for strong connections

Humans have 46 chromosomes in each of our cells, made up of 23 pairs of matching, “homologous” chromosomes, with one of each pair inherited from each parent. Early in the process of making sperm or eggs, those chromosome pairs line up, and the parental chromosomes break and rejoin to each other. These chromosome exchanges, called “crossovers,” serve two important functions.

First, they help ensure that each chromosome that is passed on to the offspring contains a unique mixture of genes from both parents. Crossovers also keep the chromosomes connected in matching pairs. These connections guide the distribution of chromosomes when cells divide to produce eggs and sperm. Maintaining crossover connections is especially crucial in females, Hunter said.

As chromosomes pair up in developing egg or sperm cells, matching DNA strands are exchanged and twined together over a short distance to form a structure called a “double Holliday junction.” DNA strands of this structure are then cut to join the chromosomes forming a crossover.

Left panel: short green irregular lines arranged in pairs. Right: Close up of one pair shows that the two strands form a cross shape. Paired chromosomes showing crossovers in a mouse oocyte.

Hunter lab.

In males, developing immature sperm cells then immediately divide and distribute chromosomes to the sperm. In contrast, egg cells developing in the fetal ovary arrest their development after crossovers have formed. The immature egg cells can remain in suspended animation for decades after birth, until they are activated to undergo ovulation.

Only then does the process lurch back into motion: The egg cell finally divides, and the chromosome pairs that were connected by crossovers are finally separated to deliver a single set of chromosomes to the mature egg.

Maintaining the crossover connections over many years is a major challenge for immature egg cells.

Professor Neil Hunter.

If chromosome pairs aren’t connected by at least one crossover, they can lose contact with each other, like two people separated in a jostling crowd. This causes them to segregate incorrectly when the cell finally divides, producing egg cells with extra or missing chromosomes. This can cause infertility, miscarriage or genetic conditions such as Down syndrome, in which a child is born with an extra copy of chromosome 21, leading to cognitive impairment, heart defects, hearing loss and other problems.

From yeast to humans

Hunter has spent years trying to understand how crossovers form and how this process can fail and cause reproductive problems. By studying this process in yeast, researchers can directly visualize molecular events of double-Holliday junction resolution in synchronized populations of cells.

Researchers have identified dozens of proteins that bind and process these junctions. Hunter and then-postdoctoral fellow Shangming Tang (now an assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Virginia) used a technique called “real-time genetics” to investigate the function of those proteins. With this method, they made cells degrade one or more specific proteins within the junction-associated structures. They could then analyze the DNA from these cells, to see whether the junctions were resolved and if they formed crossovers. In this way, they built up a picture in which a network of proteins function together to ensure that crossovers are formed.

This strategy allowed us to answer a question that previously wasn’t possible.

Professor Neil Hunter.

They identified key proteins such as cohesin that prevent an enzyme called the STR complex (or Bloom complex in humans) from inappropriately dismantling the junctions before they can form crossovers.

They protect the double Holliday junction. That is a key discovery.

Professor Neil Hunter.

This years-long research project in yeast is broadly relevant for human reproduction because the process has changed very little during evolution. Failure to protect double-Holliday junctions may be linked to fertility problems in humans.

In addition to Tang, the postdoc, seven undergraduates in the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences contributed to this work, including Jennifer Koo, Mohammad Pourhosseinzadeh, Emerald Nguyen, Natalie Liu, Christopher Ma, Hanyu Lu and Monica Lee.

Additional authors on the paper include Sara Hariri, Regina Bohn and John E. McCarthy, all members of the Hunter lab.

Publication:

Tang, S., Hariri, S., Bohn, R. et al.
Protecting double Holliday junctions ensures crossing over during meiosis.
Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09555-1

Protecting double Holliday junctions ensures crossing over during meiosis Shangming Tang, Sara Hariri, Regina Bohn, John E. McCarthy, Jennifer Koo, Mohammad Pourhosseinzadeh, Emerald Nguyen, Natalie Liu, Christopher Ma, Hanyu Lu, Monica Lee & Neil Hunter

Abstract
Chromosomal linkages formed through crossover recombination are essential for the accurate segregation of homologous chromosomes during meiosis¹. The DNA events of recombination are linked to structural components of meiotic chromosomes². Imperatively, the biased resolution of double Holliday junction (dHJ) intermediates into crossovers^3,4 occurs within the synaptonemal complex (SC), the meiosis-specific structure that mediates end-to-end synapsis of homologues during the pachytene stage^5,6. However, the role of the SC in crossover-specific dHJ resolution remains unclear. Here we show that key SC components function through dependent and interdependent relationships to protect dHJs from aberrant dissolution into non-crossover products. Conditional ablation experiments reveal that cohesin, the core of SC lateral elements, is required to maintain both synapsis and dHJ-associated crossover recombination complexes (CRCs) during pachytene. The SC central region transverse-filament protein is also required to maintain CRCs. Reciprocally, the stability of the SC central region requires the continuous presence of CRCs effectively coupling synapsis to dHJ formation and desynapsis to resolution. However, dHJ protection and CRC maintenance can occur without end-to-end homologue synapsis mediated by the central element of the SC central region. We conclude that local ensembles of SC components are sufficient to enable crossover-specific dHJ resolution to ensure the linkage and segregation of homologous chromosomes.

Main
During meiotic prophase I, cohesin complexes connect sister chromatids and mediate their organization into linear arrays of chromatin loops tethered to a common axis^2,5,7,8,9. These cohesin-based axes define interfaces for the pairing and synapsis of homologous chromosomes that culminates in the formation of SCs. An SC is a tripartite structure comprising the two juxtaposed homologue axes, now called lateral elements, connected by a central lattice of transverse filaments^5,6. Extension of this lattice to achieve full synapsis requires an additional central element complex^5,6,10 (Extended Data Fig. 1a). Meiotic recombination facilitates pairing and synapsis between homologous chromosomes and then connects them through crossing over. These connections are necessary for accurate segregation during the first meiotic division1. To this end, the DNA events of recombination are physically and functionally linked to underlying chromosome structures2. The protein complexes that catalyse DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) and subsequent strand exchange are tethered to homologue axes. The ensuing joint molecule intermediates and their associated recombination complexes interact with the central region of the SC. A subset of recombination events is assigned a crossover fate with a tightly regulated distribution to ensure that each chromosome pair receives at least one². At designated sites, nascent joint molecules mature into dHJs that then undergo biased resolution specifically into crossovers^3,4. These steps occur in the context of the SC central region and associated CRCs. The post-synapsis roles of SC components in crossing over remain unclear, particularly whether the SC functions after dHJ formation to facilitate crossover-specific resolution.

Tang, S., Hariri, S., Bohn, R. et al.
Protecting double Holliday junctions ensures crossing over during meiosis.
Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09555-1

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

This study highlights how even the fundamental processes of human reproduction are fragile, failure-prone, and riddled with inefficiencies. The intricate mechanisms required to produce eggs and sperm—the most basic requirement for life to continue—are full of potential points of breakdown. These flaws make perfect sense in light of evolution, a blind tinkerer that cobbles together workable solutions from existing parts, but they are utterly inconsistent with the idea of an intelligent, purposeful designer.

Who in their right mind would consider designing a critical function such as the production of reproductive gametes, that needs to be suspended at a critical point for decades, requiring more complexity to minimise the risk of it failing - and then designing that process so it sometimes fails with serious, even fatal consequences for the resulting child?

Gamete production is just one of many such examples: from reproductive bottlenecks to skeletal weaknesses and brain vulnerabilities, our bodies bear the unmistakable stamp of compromise and accident, not foresight or perfection. This is the reality I explore in detail in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design, part of my Unintelligent Design series.

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Malevolent Designer News - How Candida Albicans (Thrush) Is Cleverly Designed to Infect Your Mouth - Evolution Or Malevolent Design?

The yeast fungus Candida albicans (blue) breaks out of human immune cells (red) by forming long thread-like cells called hyphae. The part of the hypha that has already left the immune cells is coloured yellow.

© Erik Böhm, Leibniz-HKI

The dose makes the difference - Leibniz-HKI

As has often been pointed out in these blog posts, the "evidence" offered by Discovery Institute fellows William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe for an intelligent designer can, by the same logic and using the same evidence, be interpreted as pointing to a theologically awkward malevolent designer. This is a line of reasoning routinely ignored by the "Cdesign proponentcists", who prefer to overlook the many examples of parasites and pathogens—and the evolutionary traits that make them so successful at invading and surviving within their hosts.

A fresh example that creationists will either have to ignore or blame on "The Fall" comes from researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology. They have shown that the fungus Candida albicans, which causes thrush, has evolved a highly sophisticated and "finely tuned" mechanism for infecting the human mouth while evading the immune system.

The stock creationist response is to shift responsibility onto the biblical myth of "The Fall," retreating into Bible literalism. Yet this is precisely the kind of literalism the Discovery Institute has been at pains to insist is not essential to the notion of intelligent design, which it markets as a scientific alternative to evolutionary theory—or "Darwinism," as they prefer to call it. This rhetorical sleight of hand was central to the Institute’s "Wedge Strategy," devised after the 1987 US Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard, which confirmed that teaching creationism in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

The new research reveals that C. albicans produces a toxin called candidalysin in carefully regulated doses that allow it to infiltrate the mucous lining of the mouth. Too little candidalysin, and the fungus would fail to establish itself; too much, and it would trigger an immune response strong enough to destroy it. Normally, C. albicans exists in a round, yeast-like form, but under the "right" conditions it can switch into the filamentous hyphal form typical of fungi. This transformation allows it to penetrate host tissues and, in immune-compromised patients, become life-threatening. It is in this invasive hyphal state that C. albicans produces candidalysin.

The production of hyphae, and therefore candidalysin, is controlled by the gene EED1. By any definition, EED1 would qualify as an example of "complex specified information" according to Dembski’s own formulation — evidence, according to the Discovery Institute, of supernatural intelligent design.

Malevolent Design - A Paradox Creationists Pretend Not to See

The ancient city of Jerash, Jordan, epicentre of the Justinian Plague

Progress of the Black Death in Europe

By Flappiefh - Own work from:Natural Earth  Cesana, D.; Benedictow O.J., Bianucci R. (2017). "The origin and early spread of the Black Death in Italy: first evidence of plague victims from 14th-century Liguria (northern Italy)". Anthropological Science 125 (1): 15–24. DOI:10.1537/ase.161011. ISSN: 0918-7960. (page 17),
CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

USF, FAU researchers solve 1,500-year-old mystery: The bacterium behind the first pandemic

The notion of intelligent design — the current flagship of creationism’s attempt to replace scientific realism with magical superstitions and Bible literalism dressed up as “alternative science” — contains a blatant paradox its advocates must ignore: the very same “logic” used to argue that the God of the Bible created living organisms can just as easily be used to argue that any such designer is a malevolent sadist who deliberately increases suffering in the world while ignoring countless ways to reduce it.

The theological problems this raises are never discussed in polite creationist circles, except for the lazy fallback of blaming everything on “The Fall.” But this move exposes intelligent design for what it really is — Bible-literalist religion in disguise. And that sits awkwardly against over half a century of insistence by the Discovery Institute that ID is not a religious idea, but rather a scientific one that should be taught in American public schools at taxpayer expense — a direct violation of the Establishment Clause and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987).

The paradox lies in the fact that the very same so-called evidence — Michael J. Behe’s “irreducible complexity” and William A. Dembski’s “complex specified genetic information” — can be found in the genomes, structures, and processes of parasites and pathogens, making them devastatingly effective at exploiting and destroying their hosts. In fact, Behe himself has, probably without realising it, used precisely such examples. The bacterial flagellum he highlights enables E. coli to move efficiently through our gut, causing sometimes fatal food poisoning. And his example of resistance to anti-malarial drugs in Plasmodium parasites illustrate how evolution equips them to continue killing hundreds of thousands of children every year while condemning millions more to cycles of malarial fever.

Now, new research has highlighted another gruesome example. The bacterium Yersinia pestis — responsible for multiple waves of plague throughout the Middle Ages — has been shown to have evolved into its highly lethal form only in relatively recent human history. Beginning with the “Plague of Justinian” about 1,500 years ago, Y. pestis unleashed pandemics that killed between 30% and 50% of Europe’s population.

An interdisciplinary team at the University of South Florida (USF) and Florida Atlantic University (FAU), with collaborators in India and Australia, has now confirmed genomically that the Justinian plague was indeed caused by Y. pestis, as long assumed. Analysing DNA from plague victims buried in a mass grave at the ancient city of Jerash, Jordan — the epicentre of that pandemic — one group identified the culprit, while another team traced the bacterium’s evolutionary changes that made it one of history’s most notorious killers.

Malevolent Design - How 'Intelligent Design' Exposes Divine Malevolence

Schistosoma mansoni

Schistosoma mansoni

Parasitic Worms Evolved to Suppress Neurons in Skin - AAI News

It gets tedious repeating this point so often, but so long as creationists keep using what they claim is irreducible complexity and/or complex specified genetic information as evidence for intelligent design, they need to be reminded that the same argument can also be used as evidence of their putative designer’s malevolence.

Creationists, of course, ignore the fact that parasites are no less “designed” than humans and have structures and processes that are “irreducibly complex” and depend on “complex specified information” in order to succeed in their environments. Yet their existence, and how they interact with and even manipulate their hosts, inevitably increases suffering in the world – a theological problem that creationist disinformation organisations such as the Discovery Institute avoid like the plague.

Parasite–host relationships also inevitably involve evolutionary arms races – the antithesis of intelligence if both “sides” are supposedly designed by the same designer.

So, to keep reminding them: if their justification for designating their god as the designer of living systems holds true, then it is also justification for designating the same god as the cause of suffering. Here is another example of a parasite that falls within their definition of an organism “designed” to do what it does and to participate in an arms race with its host in order to do so. This concerns the discovery that the parasitic worm Schistosoma mansoni, which causes schistosomiasis, is able to suppress neurons in the skin to evade detection as it burrows into its victim’s body (usually the leg).

Refuting Creationism - Just How Wrong Could The Bible's Authors Be?

The Cosmic Horseshoe gravitational lens.

Credit: NASA/ESA (CC BY 4.0)

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

'Most massive black hole ever discovered' is detected | The Royal Astronomical Society

The authors of Genesis got so much so badly wrong that it’s difficult to find anything they got right — but the hardest place to find even a sliver of accuracy is their description of the universe. With their naïve attempt to explain the existence of different kinds of animals, they at least recognised that there were different species. Their notion of magical creation out of nothing, without ancestry, was of course laughably wrong, but at least they knew there were distinct organisms requiring explanation.

By contrast, in their picture of the cosmos — centred on a small, flat world with a solid dome (the “firmament”) over it—about the only things they got right were the existence of Earth, the Sun and Moon, and “the stars”. Everything else was subsumed into that one word: “stars”, a bucket that included the visible planets, distant suns, and entire galaxies, all imagined as lights fixed to the dome, with the Sun and Moon set within it.

In short, almost everything in that description is wrong—not just what things are, but where they are. They spoke about light, but knew nothing of its nature. That they noticed that light comes from luminous bodies is probably the only thing they got right.

Black Holes: Nature’s Most Extreme Objects. A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so intense that nothing—not even light—can escape. They form when a massive star collapses under its own gravity or through the merger of smaller black holes.

Event Horizon

The vent horizon is the “point of no return” surrounding a black hole. Once anything crosses it, escape is impossible. From outside, the event horizon appears as a dark sphere; it’s not a physical surface but a boundary defined by relativity.

Singularity

At the very centre, according to general relativity, lies a singularity — a point where density and spacetime curvature become infinite, and the known laws of physics break down. In reality, quantum effects are expected to smooth out this infinity, but a complete theory of quantum gravity is needed to describe it properly.

Relativity vs Quantum Physics

Black holes are unique because they combine two regimes of physics:

• Einstein’s general relativity describes how they warp spacetime.
• Quantum mechanics governs the behaviour of particles and energy at extremely small scales.

The crossover between these domains lies deep inside the black hole, in a region near the singularity sometimes called the quantum gravity zone, where spacetime curvature reaches the Planck scale and neither theory works alone. This is not the event horizon, as is sometimes said; the event horizon is still very much part of the Relativity domain.
The Firewall Hypothesis

Stephen Hawking and others noted a paradox: quantum theory predicts that information cannot be destroyed, yet anything crossing an event horizon seems lost forever. One proposed resolution is the firewall hypothesis: instead of passing smoothly through, anything hitting the horizon would be incinerated by a burst of high-energy radiation. This “firewall” would break relativity’s expectation that crossing the horizon is uneventful (for a large black hole) but would preserve quantum theory’s rules.

Open Questions

• Does the singularity really exist, or is it replaced by something else in a quantum theory of gravity?
• Do firewalls exist, or is there a different resolution to the black hole information paradox?
• Can Hawking radiation—tiny energy leaks predicted by quantum field theory—eventually cause black holes to evaporate completely?

Black holes remain one of physics’ most powerful testing grounds, where the deepest laws of nature are pushed to their limits.

And of course, they could have known nothing about black holes, or about the relationship between mass and gravity that explains them and governs the motions of the “stars”.

A point I’ve made here before — worth making again — is that we can be certain the Bible was not written by a creator god by seeing how much of it is flatly wrong. Much of it can’t even be rescued as meaningful metaphor or allegory—the standard apologetic for obvious falsehoods. It is simply, unarguably, and unambiguously wrong on multiple levels.

If a creator god had written it as a vital message to humankind, why did it not include anything unknown at the time in unmistakable terms, as proof of divine authorship and omniscience? Why, for example, did it not tell us about atoms, germs, or galaxies; that Earth is an oblate spheroid orbiting the Sun along with other planets; or explain the relationship between mass and gravity and why black holes exist?

Why not? Because the authors of the Bible were ignorant of these things. They were not creator gods, but ancient Near Eastern writers doing their best to invent plausible narratives within their cultural preconceptions — of a spirit-filled world that ran on magic — when everything they knew lay within a few days’ walk of home in the hills of Canaan.

So, compare their description of the universe as they imagined it with what science now shows us: in this case, an ultramassive black hole revealed by how its gravity bends light from a background galaxy into an “Einstein ring”, a phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

The description comes from the Royal Astronomical Society news release and the open-access paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

First, let's see how the Bible's author described the entire universe as they saw it without the benefit of scientific instruments or theoretical physics:

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1.6-10)

And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.(Genesis 1.16-18)

Now compare that to this image of a tiny fragment of it that astronomers at the Royal Astronomical Society have just released. It shows the gravity lensing effect and the resulting Einstein ring. Ber in mind that this is a tiny fragment of the universe that would be entirely hidden by a grain of rice held between the thumb and forefinger of your outstretched arm. There is absolutely nothing to compare it with in the Bible, obviously.

'Most massive black hole ever discovered' is detected

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Astronomers have discovered potentially the most massive black hole ever detected.

The cosmic behemoth is close to the theoretical upper limit of what is possible in the universe and is 10,000 times heavier than the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy.

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The Cosmic Horseshoe gravitational lens.
The newly discovered ultramassive blackhole lies at the centre of the orange galaxy. Far behind it is a blue galaxy that is being warped into the horseshoe shaped ring by distortions in spacetime created by the immense mass of the foreground orange galaxy.

Credit: NASA/ESA (CC BY 4.0)

It exists in one of the most massive galaxies ever observed – the Cosmic Horseshoe – which is so big it distorts spacetime and warps the passing light of a background galaxy into a giant horseshoe-shaped Einstein ring.

Such is the enormousness of the ultramassive black hole’s size, it equates to 36 billion solar masses, according to a new paper published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

It is thought that every galaxy in the universe has a supermassive black hole at its centre and that bigger galaxies host bigger ones, known as ultramassive black holes.

This is amongst the top 10 most massive black holes ever discovered, and quite possibly the most massive. Most of the other black hole mass measurements are indirect and have quite large uncertainties, so we really don't know for sure which is biggest. However, we’ve got much more certainty about the mass of this black hole thanks to our new method.

Professor Thomas Collett, co-author
Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation
University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK.

Researchers detected the Cosmic Horseshoe black hole using a combination of gravitational lensing and stellar kinematics (the study of the motion of stars within galaxies and the speed and way they move around black holes).

The latter is seen as the gold standard for measuring black hole masses, but doesn't really work outside of the very nearby universe because galaxies appear too small on the sky to resolve the region where a supermassive or ultramassive black hole lies.

[Adding in gravitational lensing helped the team] push much further out into the universe. We detected the effect of the black hole in two ways – it is altering the path that light takes as it travels past the black hole and it is causing the stars in the inner regions of its host galaxy to move extremely quickly (almost 400 km/s). By combining these two measurements we can be completely confident that the black hole is real.

Professor Thomas Collett.

This discovery was made for a 'dormant' black hole – one that isn’t actively accreting material at the time of observation. Its detection relied purely on its immense gravitational pull and the effect it has on its surroundings. What is particularly exciting is that this method allows us to detect and measure the mass of these hidden ultramassive black holes across the universe, even when they are completely silent.

Carlos Melo-Carneiro, lead author.
Instituto de Física
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Another image of the Cosmic Horseshoe, but with the pair of images of a second background source highlighted.
The faint central image forms close to the black hole, which is what made the new discovery possible.

NASA/ESA/Tian Li (University of Portsmouth) (CC BY 4.0).

The Cosmic Horseshoe black hole is located a long way away from Earth, at a distance of some 5 billion light-years.

Typically, for such remote systems, black hole mass measurements are only possible when the black hole is active. But those accretion-based estimates often come with significant uncertainties. Our approach, combining strong lensing with stellar dynamics, offers a more direct and robust measurement, even for these distant systems.

Carlos Melo-Carneiro.

The discovery is significant because it will help astronomers understand the connection between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies.

We think the size of both is intimately linked, because when galaxies grow they can funnel matter down onto the central black hole. Some of this matter grows the black hole but lots of it shines away in an incredibly bright source called a quasar. These quasars dump huge amounts of energy into their host galaxies, which stops gas clouds condensing into new stars.

Professor Thomas Collett.

Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, hosts a 4 million solar mass black hole. Currently it's not growing fast enough to blast out energy as a quasar but we know it has done in the past, and it may will do again in the future.

The Andromeda Galaxy and our Milky Way are moving together and are expected to merge in about 4.5 billion years, which is the most likely time for our supermassive black hole to become a quasar once again, the researchers say.

An interesting feature of the Cosmic Horseshoe system is that the host galaxy is a so-called fossil group.

Fossil groups are the end state of the most massive gravitationally bound structures in the universe, arising when they have collapsed down to a single extremely massive galaxy, with no bright companions.

It is likely that all of the supermassive black holes that were originally in the companion galaxies have also now merged to form the ultramassive black hole that we have detected. So we're seeing the end state of galaxy formation and the end state of black hole formation.

Professor Thomas Collett.

The discovery of the Cosmic Horseshoe black hole was somewhat of a serendipitous discovery. It came about as the researchers were studying the galaxy’s dark matter distribution in an attempt to learn more about the mysterious hypothetical substance.

Now that they’ve realised their new method works for black holes, they hope to use data from the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope to detect more supermassive black holes and their hosts to help understand how black holes stop galaxies forming stars.

Publication:

Carlos R Melo-Carneiro, Thomas E Collett, Lindsay J Oldham, Wolfgang Enzi, Cristina Furlanetto, Ana L Chies-Santos, Tian Li, Unveiling a 36 billion solar mass black hole at the centre of the Cosmic Horseshoe gravitational lens, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 541, Issue 4, August 2025, Pages 2853–2871, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staf1036

ABSTRACT
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are found at the centre of every massive galaxy, with their masses tightly connected to their host galaxies through a co-evolution over cosmic time. For massive ellipticals, the SMBH mass (\(\small ⁠M_\text{BH}\)⁠) strongly correlates with the host central stellar velocity dispersion (⁠\(\sigma_e\)⁠), via the relation. However, SMBH mass measurements have traditionally relied on central stellar dynamics in nearby galaxies (⁠\(\small z \lt 0.1\)⁠), limiting our ability to explore the SMBHs across cosmic time. In this work, we present a self-consistent analysis combining 2D stellar dynamics and lens modelling of the Cosmic Horseshoe gravitational lens system (⁠\(z_l = 0.44\)⁠), one of the most massive lens galaxies ever observed. Using MUSE integral-field spectroscopy and high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope imaging, we simultaneously model the radial arc – sensible to the inner mass structure – with host stellar kinematics to constrain the galaxy’s central mass distribution and SMBH mass. Bayesian model comparison yields a \(\small 5\sigma\) detection of an ultramassive black hole with \(\small \log _{10}(M_\text{BH}/{\rm M}_{\odot }) = 10.56^{+0.07}_{-0.08} \pm (0.12)^\text{sys}\)⁠, consistent across various systematic tests. Our findings place the Cosmic Horseshoe \(\small 1.5\sigma\) above the \(\small M_\text{BH}-\sigma_e\) relation, supporting an emerging trend observed in brightest cluster galaxies and other massive galaxies, which suggests a steeper \(\small M_\text{BH}-\sigma_e\) relationship at the highest masses, potentially driven by a different co-evolution of SMBHs and their host galaxies. Future surveys will uncover more radial arcs, enabling the detection of SMBHs over a broader redshift and mass range. These discoveries will further refine our understanding of the \(\small M_\text{BH}-\sigma_e\) relation and its evolution across cosmic time.

1 INTRODUCTION
Most massive galaxies are believed to host a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at their centre. More importantly, host galaxies and their SMBHs exhibit clear scaling relations, pointing to a co-evolution between the galaxy and the SMBH (Kormendy & Ho 2013). The SMBH mass (⁠\(\small M_{\text{BH}\)⁠) has been shown to correlate with various galaxy properties, such as the bulge luminosity (e.g. Magorrian et al. 1998; Marconi & Hunt 2003; Gültekin et al. 2009), stellar bulge mass (e.g. Laor 2001; McLure & Dunlop 2002), dark matter (DM) halo mass (e.g. Marasco et al. 2021; Powell et al. 2022), number of host’s globular clusters (e.g. Burkert & Tremaine 2010; Harris, Poole & Harris 2014), and stellar velocity dispersion (e.g. Gebhardt et al. 2000; Beifiori et al. 2009.1). Notably, the \(\small M_\text{BH}-\sigma_e\) relation, which links SMBH mass to the effective stellar velocity dispersion of the host (⁠\(\small \sigma_e\)⁠), remains tight across various morphological types and SMBH masses (van den Bosch 2016). None the less, when SMBHs accrete mass from their neighbourhoods, they can act as active galactic nuclei (AGNs), injecting energy in the surrounding gas in a form of feedback. This feedback can be either positive, triggering star formation (Ishibashi & Fabian 2012; Silk 2013.1; Riffel et al. 2024), or negative quenching galaxy growth (e.g. Hopkins et al. 2006; Dubois et al. 2013.2; Costa-Souza et al. 2024.1).

It is expected that the most massive galaxies in the Universe, such as brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs), host the most massive SMBHs. Indeed, so-called ultramassive black holes (UMBHs; \(\small M_\text{BH} \ge 10^{10}M_\odot\)⁠) have been found in such systems (e.g. Hlavacek-Larrondo et al. 2012.1). Most of these UMBHs have been measured through spatially resolved dynamical modelling of stars and/or gas. For instance, the UMBH in Holm 15A at \(\small z=0.055\) \(\small M_\text{BH} = (4.0 \pm 0.80) \times 10^{10}M_\odot\) (⁠⁠; Mehrgan et al. 2019) and the UMBH in NGC 4889 at \(\small z = 0.021\) (⁠\(\small M_\text{BH} = (2.1 \pm 1.6) \times 10^{10}M_\odot\)⁠; McConnell et al. 2012.2) were both determined using stellar dynamical modelling. However, despite the success of this technique in yielding hundreds of SMBH mass measurements, the requirement for high-quality spatially resolved spectroscopy poses significant challenges for studies at increasing redshift (see e.g. Kormendy & Ho 2013, Suplemental Material S1).

None the less, the significance of these UMBHs lies in the fact that many of them deviate from the standard linear \(\small M_\text{BH} - \sigma_e\) relation (e.g. Kormendy & Ho 2013; den Bosch 2016). This suggests either a distinct evolutionary mechanism governing the growth of the largest galaxies and their SMBHs (McConnell et al. 2011), leading to a significantly steeper relation (Bogdán et al. 2018), or a potential decoupling between the SMBH and host galaxy co-evolution. Populating the high-mass end of the \(\small M_\text{BH} - \sigma_e\) relation, particularly through direct \(\small M_\text{BH}\) measurements, could help resolve this ongoing puzzle.

Recently, Nightingale et al. (2023), by modelling the gravitationally lensed radial image near the the Abell 1201 BCG (⁠\(\small z=0.169\)⁠), was able to measure the mass of its dormant SMBH as \(\small M_\text{BH} = (3.27 \pm 2.12) \times 10^{10}M_\odot\)⁠, therefore an UMBH. This provides a complementary approach to other high-z probes of SMBH mass, such as reverberation mapping (Blandford & McKee 1982; Bentz & Katz 2015) and AGN spectral fitting (Shen 2013.3). Unlike these methods, which require active accretion and depend on local Universe calibrations, the lensing technique offers a direct measurement independent of the SMBH’s accretion state.

In this paper, we analyse the Cosmic Horseshoe gravitational lens system (Belokurov et al. 2007), where the lens galaxy is one of the most massive strong gravitational lenses known to date. The lens galaxy is an early-type galaxy (ETG) at redshift \(\small z_i = 0.44\)⁠, possibly part of a fossil group (Ponman et al. 1994), and is notable for lensing one of its sources into a nearly complete Einstein ring (the Horseshoe). Additionally, a second multiply imaged source forms a radial arc near the centre of the lens galaxy. Due to the radial image formed very close to the centre, the inner DM distribution of the Cosmic Horseshoe can be studied in detail, as done by Schuldt et al. (2019.1). By simultaneously modelling stellar kinematics from long-slit spectroscopy and the positions of the lensed sources, Schuldt et al. (2019.1) found that the DM halo is consistent with a Navarro–Frenk–White (NFW; Navarro, Frenk & White 1997) profile, with the DM fraction within the effective radius (⁠\(\small R_e\)⁠) estimated to be between 60 per cent and 70 per cent. Moreover, their models include a point mass at the galaxy’s centre, reaching values around \(\small \sim 10^{10} M_\odot\)⁠, which could represent an SMBH; however, they did not pursue further investigations into this possibility. Using new integral-field spectroscopic data from the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) and imaging from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), we conducted a systematic modelling of the Cosmic Horseshoe system to reassess the evidence for an SMBH at the heart of the lens galaxy. We performed a self-consistent analysis of both strong gravitational lensing (SGL) and stellar dynamics, which demonstrated that the presence of an SMBH is necessary to fit both data sets simultaneously. This paper is structured as follows: In Section 2, we present the HST imaging data and MUSE observations, along with the kinematic maps used for the dynamical modelling. Section 3 briefly summarizes the lensing and dynamical modelling techniques, including the multiple-lens-plane formalism, the approximations adopted in this work, and the mass profile parametrization. In Section 4, we present the results from our fiducial model and alternatives models, which we use to address the systematics on the SMBH mass. In Section 5 we discuss our results and present other astrophysical implications. Finally, we summarize and conclude in Section 6. Unless otherwise, all parameter estimates are derived from the final sampling chain, with reported values representing the median of each parameter’s one-dimensional marginalized posterior distribution, with uncertainties corresponding to the \(\small 16^\text{th}\) and \(\small 84^\text{th}\) percentiles. Furthermore, throughout this paper, we adopt the cosmological parameters consistent with Planck Collaboration XIII (2016.1): \(\small \Omega _{\Lambda ,0} = 0.6911\)⁠, \(\small \Omega _{\text{m},0} = 0.3089\)⁠, \(\small \Omega _{\text{b},0} = 0.0486\)⁠, and \(\small H_0 = 67.74\) \(\small \text{km}\ \text{s}^{-1}\ \text{Mpc}^\text{-1}\).

Carlos R Melo-Carneiro, Thomas E Collett, Lindsay J Oldham, Wolfgang Enzi, Cristina Furlanetto, Ana L Chies-Santos, Tian Li, (2025)
Unveiling a 36 billion solar mass black hole at the centre of the Cosmic Horseshoe gravitational lens,
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 541(4), 2853–2871, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staf1036

Copyright: © 2025 The Royal Astronomical Society.
Published by Oxford University Press. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

The discovery and analysis of black holes, and phenomena such as Einstein rings, would have been utterly incomprehensible to the authors of the Bible. These were people with no concept of galaxies, the vastness of the universe, or even that Earth is a sphere orbiting the Sun. Their worldview was of a flat Earth covered by a solid dome, with the Sun, Moon, and “stars” fixed to it. The very idea of light being bent by gravity, or of objects so massive that even light cannot escape, would have been as far beyond their imagination as quantum mechanics itself.

When we compare their primitive cosmology with what modern science reveals—billions of galaxies, relativistic spacetime, the quantum-scale behaviour of matter, and black holes bending light into perfect circles—the contrast could not be more stark. The biblical description is not merely simplified; it is wrong on almost every measurable level. It has Earth at the centre, the stars as small lights, and the sky as a hard surface holding back water. Science, by contrast, uncovers a cosmos governed by consistent natural laws, tested and confirmed through observation and mathematics.

This is compelling evidence that an omniscient creator god did not write the Bible. If it had done, it could have contained truths about the nature of the cosmos that were unknown at the time, expressed in terms clear enough to be recognisable today—atoms, germs, the vastness of space, or even the basic structure of the solar system. Instead, what we find are the assumptions of scientifically illiterate Bronze Age people, drawing on local myths and imagination. The difference between their errors and the precision of modern astrophysics is not a matter of interpretation—it is a matter of fact.

Refuting Creationism - Scientists Create An 'Evolution Engine' Based on The Theory of Evolution

A creationists carefully checks the facts

AI generated image (ChatGPT4o)

Scientists build an “evolution engine” to rapidly reprogram proteins | Scripps Research
In a groundbreaking stride for synthetic biology, researchers at Scripps Research have unveiled T7-ORACLE, a revolutionary platform that functions as an “evolution engine,” accelerating protein evolution thousands of times faster than in nature. Published in Science on 7 August 2025, this system enables continuous, hypermutated protein evolution inside E. coli, providing a transformative leap over traditional methods that require laborious, week-long cycles of DNA modification and testing (scripps.edu).

Unlike conventional directed evolution, which works in stop-start fashion, T7-ORACLE embeds an orthogonal T7 replisome — a virus-derived DNA replication machine—into bacteria. This replisome copies only a special plasmid carrying the gene to be evolved and does so at an error rate about 100,000 times higher than the host’s own DNA polymerase. With each bacterial division—roughly every 20 minutes—this system produces an enormous variety of mutant gene versions.

Selection is built into the process by linking the protein’s desired property to the bacterium’s survival or a measurable output. If the goal is to create an enzyme with a new function, the bacteria are grown under conditions where only those producing a beneficial version can thrive, allowing natural selection to occur at high speed. Alternatively, variants can be screened for specific traits—such as binding strength or fluorescence—and the best performers isolated. In both cases, the familiar Darwinian mechanism of mutation and selection drives the improvement, just as it does in nature.

Creationists often leap on examples like this to declare, “See! It took intelligence to make it work!” — missing the point entirely. The role of scientists here is like that of a farmer planting seeds: they set up the conditions, but they do not design each mutation or dictate which variants survive. Those outcomes arise from the same blind, automatic process of mutation and selection that occurs in nature. Building a racetrack does not create the laws of motion; it simply gives you a place to watch them in action.