How Science Works - Biologists Might Need To Rethink A Detail Of Evolutionary Biology

Details of the surface of two sheet-like colonies of the ‘Berenicea’ type: (A) In Hyporosopora dilatata, the colony surface is relatively flat, save for the slightly convex zooids and faint growth lines (Upper Callovian or Lower Oxfordian, Oxford Clay; Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire); and (B) Well-defined transverse ridges cross the colony surface in Rugosopora enstonensis (Bathonian, Hampen Marly Beds; Enstone, Oxfordshire). Scale bars are 500µm.

Source: Bryozoans in the British Jurassic

New Study Reveals Berenicea Zooid Size Reduction Over 200 Million Years Contradicts Cope's Rule----Chinese Academy of Sciences

The discovery that a group of organisms has, contrary to “Cope’s Rule,” undergone a steady reduction in body size over the past 200 million years is a useful reminder of how science works — and why religion so often falters.

A cornerstone of the scientific method is its willingness to acknowledge error. Real intellectual strength lies not in clinging to discredited beliefs as though doing so were a test of character, but in facing up to mistakes, learning from them, and changing one’s mind. That is how knowledge advances.

Religion, by contrast, remains shackled to the dogmas of its ancient founders. To alter those fundamental beliefs is, in effect, to abandon the religion itself. This is why, while science has sent probes into deep space and placed human beings on the Moon, faith — despite lofty claims of being able to “move mountains” — has yet to lift so much as a feather a millimetre off the ground.

The new finding was just reported in the journal Palaeontology by Associate Professor MA Junye of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) and collaborators. They found that Berenicea, a genus of cyclostome bryozoans, has experienced a continuous reduction in zooid size over the past 200 million years. This runs counter to “Cope’s Rule,” which describes a tendency for body size to increase during the evolution of many lineages.

Cope’s Rule was formulated by the American palaeontologist Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897). There are, of course, well-known exceptions — such as the “island effect,” where animals isolated on small islands often evolve into miniature versions of their mainland relatives — but these are localised adaptations to particular environments. Cope’s Rule, by contrast, applies to long-term, broad-scale evolutionary trends.

Creationism in Crisis - A Transitional Lizard-Snake - From 167 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

[left caption]

[right caption]

a, Life reconstruction of Breagnathair elgolensis based on measured proportions of NMS G.2023.7.1. b, Digital render of the bones as originally preserved in NMS G.2023.7.1, using information from the pilot scan (Supplementary Data 1 and 2). c–f, Digital renders of cervical vertebra (CEb in Extended Data Fig. 5) in left lateral (c), ventral (d), anterior (e) and posterior (f) views. g–i, Caudal vertebra (CAa in Extended Data Fig. 5) in left lateral (g), ventral (h) and anterior (i) views. Scale bars: 50 mm (b), 2 mm (c–i). Life reconstruction reproduced with permission from Mick Ellison (American Museum of Natural History).

Benson, R.B.J., Walsh, S.A., Griffiths, E.F. et al. (2025)

New Species of Ancient Hook-toothed Reptile Discovered | AMNH

A newly described Jurassic fossil from the Isle of Skye, Scotland, has revealed a remarkable “missing link” between lizards and snakes. The find, named Breugnathair elgolensis, provides important evidence of snake evolution and further undermines creationist claims that no transitional forms exist. The research has just been published in Nature and reported by the American Museum of Natural History.

For creationists, this week must feel much like any other, as science continues to produce paper after paper that refutes their beliefs, while not a single one provides a shred of evidence in support of creationism — whether young-Earth or old-Earth, whether invoking an interventionist deity who micro-manages every detail of the universe, or a distant creator who merely lit the blue touch-paper and now sits back to watch the results.

Science, of course, concerns itself only with material reality. It has no use for evidence-free superstitions or fairy tales of the supernatural — notions born of human imagination and the desire for narrative to fill the gaps in our knowledge and understanding. Creationists, therefore, must rely on self-delusion and the irrational belief in a false dichotomy of “facts versus faith”, where even the slightest perceived flaw in science supposedly means total failure and victory for faith by default.

Sadly for creationists, that long-dreamed-of day when science collapses and their god descends triumphantly from the skies in a chariot — looking for all the world like a Bronze Age tribal despot — seems increasingly remote. Science continues to validate the scientific method and to build knowledge upon verifiable evidence, always willing to revise and refine its understanding in light of new discoveries. One such discovery is that of a transitional Jurassic reptile showing a mosaic of lizard and snake features — exactly what we would expect if snakes and lizards share a common ancestor. The problem with pinning one’s hopes on a false dichotomy that depends on science failing is that every new discovery only strengthens science and renders the alternative ever more irrelevant and untenable.

The troublesome fossil for creationists was discovered about ten years ago on the Isle of Skye, in the Inner Hebrides off Scotland’s west coast, by Roger Benson, Macaulay Curator of the American Museum of Natural History, and his colleagues. Named Breugnathair elgolensis — a Latinised form of the Scots Gaelic for “false snake of Elgol” — it has now been described in an open-access paper in Nature.

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.

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.

Refuting Creationism - Adapting to Climate Change - 56 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Ancient soils preserved in the rock, known as paleosols, in the Willwood Formation, Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, are rich fossil sites.

Fossil studies of the extinct predator Dissacus praenuntius offer clues as to how ancient animals responded to environmental changes. The ancient omnivore was about the size of a jackal or a coyote.

ДиБгд, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

An Ancient Predator’s Shift in Diet Offers Clues on Surviving Climate Change | Rutgers University

Long before the supposed "Creation Week" — when creationists claim Earth was magicked into existence just a few thousand years ago — our planet was already teeming with life and undergoing dramatic changes. Around 56 million years ago, a mere tick in geological time, Earth experienced a sharp and rapid rise in global temperatures known as the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). This event had a profound effect on ecosystems and the species that lived through it. Many, of course, did not survive, but those that did, adapted to the new, harsher conditions.

One such survivor was an early mammal, Dissacus praenuntius, a member of the now-extinct Mesonychidae order. D. praenuntius was an omnivore that resembled a hyena, but with small hooves on each toe, and like a hyena, it likely lived as an opportunistic scavenger and predator. Now, a team of palaeontologists has revealed how its behaviour changed during the PETM: it began consuming more bone, presumably because its usual prey had become scarce or disappeared altogether. In this respect, D. praenuntius serves as a record of the environmental pressures of the PETM and how some species responded to survive.

It paints a picture of an Earth that is far removed from the idealised, "perfect" planet imagined in creationist mythology — a planet supposedly fine-tuned for life. Instead, the fossil record tells the story of a world that can quickly become hostile, where survival depends not on divine design but on the ability to adapt — or perish.

Abiogenesis News - Organic Precursors to Life Detected In Deep Space.

Planet-forming disc around V883 Orionis. This star is currently in outburst. The dark ring midway through the disc is the point where the temperature and pressure dip low enough for water ice to form.
Orbits of the planet Neptune and dwarf planet Pluto in our Solar System are shown for scale.

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/L. Cieza

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This artist’s impression shows the planet-forming disc around the star V883 Orionis. In the outermost part of the disc volatile gases are frozen out as ice, which contains complex organic molecules. An outburst of energy from the star heats the inner disc to a temperature that evaporates the ice and releases the complex molecules, enabling astronomers to detect it. The inset image shows the chemical structure of complex organic molecules detected and presumed in the protoplanetary disc (from left to right): propionitrile (ethyl cyanide), glycolonitrile, alanine, glycine, ethylene glycol, acetonitrile (methyl cyanide).

© Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/T. Müller (MPIA/HdA) (CC BY 4.0)

The evolution of life may have its origins in outer space

If you listen to creationists, you might be persuaded to believe that the formation of inorganic chemicals—often deliberately conflated with 'life' to evoke an emotional reaction—is, for all practical purposes, impossible without the intervention of a supernatural intelligence. This is, of course, nothing more than the familiar creationist fallback: the god of the gaps argument, coupled with a false dichotomy, and dressed up with a spurious veneer of mathematical ‘proof’.

But this tactic suffered yet another fatal blow recently with the publication of a study led by Abubakar Fadul of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), which reported the discovery of organic molecules in the protoplanetary disc surrounding the young star V883 Orionis. This finding provides compelling evidence that the formation of prebiotic molecules can begin even before planets form—suggesting that Earth may have developed with a complement of organic compounds already present in the accretion disc from which it emerged.

An alternative, but equally plausible, hypothesis is that these molecules could have been delivered by meteorites or other interplanetary bodies.

Refuting Creationism - Ancient Viruses Hidden in Bird Genomes Reveal Evolution in Action

Phylogenomics Unveils the Complex Evolution of Retroviruses in Birds | Molecular Biology and Evolution | Oxford Academic

Information about endogenous retroviruses is normally unwelcome news for creationists because they form phylogenies which exactly map onto the evolution of different species from common ancestry. This is no less true of a new research paper published by four researchers from the College of Life Sciences, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China, published in Molecular Biology & Evolution.

Endogenous retroviruses for part of the 'junk' (non-coding/non-regulatory) DNA, but some of it have been exapted for other functions over the years and some of it has placed an evolving taxon onto a new evolutionary trajectory. For example, one exapted retrovirus with immuno-suppressive qualities has made placental mammals possible without the growing embryo being treated as a parasite and attacked by the mother's immune system.

The researchers have uncovered the complex evolutionary history of retroviruses in birds by analysing their genetic “fossils” — endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) — embedded in bird genomes. They scanned the genomes of 758 bird species and identified more than 470,000 ERV sequences, revealing a vast and previously underestimated diversity of retroviruses. These sequences are the remnants of ancient viral infections that became part of the host DNA, passed down from generation to generation.

Creationism Refuted - Scientists Got It Wrong About Coelacanths - But Not About Evolution

One of the authors of the study, Professor Aléssio Datovo, poses next to a coelacanth specimen on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History (photo: personal archive)

New examination of fish considered a ‘living fossil’ changes our understanding of vertebrate skull evolution

Here is something that will cause creationists to jump for joy – until they read beyond the headline (if they ever do). Scientists have announced that they were wrong about the evolution of the vertebrate skull, including that of mammals.

However, beneath that headline lie some disappointing facts for creationists:

• The error was uncovered by re-examining the 400-million-year-old skull of a coelacanth.
• The mistake concerns details of how the vertebrate skull evolved – not whether it evolved.
• The paper directly contradicts the common creationist claim that scientists are only permitted to publish research that conforms to the scientific consensus. This study openly challenges the prevailing view.
• The discovery enhances our understanding of how the vertebrate skull evolved from that of ancestral lobe-finned fishes – precisely the kind of evidence creationists would rather didn’t exist.

Still, creationists can enjoy the headline and may even use it to 'prove' to their audience that science is unreliable because scientists sometimes make mistakes. Of course, they’ll likely ignore the fact that the fossil in question is 400 million years old, and gloss over the reality that – unlike religious dogma – science is a process of continuous refinement. Science allows for doubt, re-examination, and re-evaluation. When the evidence changes, scientists change their minds. In contrast, religious dogma is fixed and unchanging, usually despite the evidence, not because of it, hence the widening gap between what creationists are required to believe and what science reveals.

Upon re-examining the cranial musculature of the African coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae), the researchers found that only 13% of the previously identified evolutionary muscle innovations in major vertebrate lineages were accurate. They also identified nine new evolutionary transformations related to innovations in feeding and respiration.

The researchers, Professor Aléssio Datovo from the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil and the late David Johnson from the Smithsonian Institution in the United States, who sadly died when the paper was in review, have just published their findings in Science Advances.

Creationism Refuted Again - Neanderthal Footprints in Portugal - 68,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

General view of the main tracksite with hominin trackways located in the northern cliff of Monte Clérigo beach

de Carvalho, et al. (2025)

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Gibraltar National Museum scientists participate in a major new international study - 505/2025

Reconstituted scenario of Monte Clérigo tracksite, generated by AI tools following the guidance, and final artworks of J.M. Galán (ChatGPT-4 was used to select the prompts, at https://openai.com/index/gpt-4/; Image Generator Pro to generate various versions, at https://imagegeneratorpro.com; DALL-E3 for the nuances and quality of the image, at https://openai.com/index/dall-e-3/; Photoshop 26.4.1 (www.adobe.com) and digital pencil of Procreate for iPad version 5.3.14, at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/procreate/id425073498, for drawing over the selected image version).

de Carvalho, et al. (2025)

The discovery of 78,000-year-old Neanderthal footprints on a Portuguese beach is yet another blow to creationist pseudoscience. Preserved in the ancient sands of Monte Clérigo, the tracks of an adult male, a child, and a toddler walking together paint a vivid picture of Neanderthal life — not as brutish subhumans, but as highly social beings living in complex family groups, navigating diverse coastal environments long before modern humans entered Europe. Such findings are not only consistent with the evolutionary timeline but utterly irreconcilable with young-Earth creationist beliefs.

According to mainstream geological dating techniques, these footprints were made tens of thousands of years before the supposed biblical date of creation (around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, depending on interpretation). For creationists who insist that all of Earth’s history must be crammed into a few millennia, these kinds of discoveries are profoundly inconvenient. Worse still, the clarity of the evidence — physical impressions in sediment, dated using well-established methods like optically stimulated luminescence — makes them difficult to hand-wave away.

Faced with such a challenge, creationists will likely fall back on a familiar toolkit of denial strategies. Some will try to cast doubt on the dating methods, resorting to pseudoscientific critiques of OSL or claiming unknown “contamination” skewed the results. Others may assert that the footprints were made after Noah’s Flood — an idea that stretches credulity beyond breaking point given the age and geological context. And, of course, some will simply ignore the evidence altogether, pretending it doesn’t exist or insisting that Neanderthals were just humans who lived in “post-Babel dispersion” times, despite the overwhelming fossil, genetic, and archaeological data to the contrary.

The discovery has been reported recently in the journal Scientific Reports by a team of researchers which includes experts from the Gibraltar National Museum and the University of Lisbon, Portugal.

Creationism Refuted - Astonomers Witness The Birth Of An Earth-Like Planet

HOPS-315, a baby star where astronomers have observed evidence for the earliest stages of planet formation.

This image shows jets of silicon monoxide (SiO) blowing away from the baby star HOPS-315. The image was obtained with the with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner.

For the first time, astronomers witness the dawn of a new solar system | ESO

One of the more dishonest tactics employed by creationist grifter Ken Ham is his infamous question: "Were you there?" As though the only valid form of evidence is eye-witness testimony. The implication is clear—if you didn’t personally observe a species evolving, then you have no grounds to claim that evolution occurred. And by extension, Ham suggests that his own creationist claims are equally valid and deserve the same consideration as scientific explanations, despite the fact that he wasn't there either.

Of course, this deliberately ignores the many well-documented instances of observed evolution and the overwhelming fossil evidence showing gradual transitions over time.

He applies the same fallacious reasoning to cosmology, dismissing scientific accounts of Earth’s and the solar system’s origins on the grounds that no one was there to witness them. As though this somehow makes the biblical Bronze Age myth—a magical spontaneous assembly in response to divine incantation—equally plausible.

In a typically cynical move, Ham teaches children to parrot this question as a way to shut down scientific discussion. Rather than encouraging curiosity with the far more constructive question, "How do you know that?" — a gateway to learning about observation, extrapolation, and logical reasoning — he arms them with a slogan designed to obstruct inquiry and preserve ignorance, while making them feel smugly superior to the scientists having exposed the 'flaw' in their reasoning.

But now, thanks to cutting-edge astronomical research, science has delivered something akin to “being there” at the birth of a planet.

An international team of researchers, using the ALMA telescope (operated in part by the European Southern Observatory) and the James Webb Space Telescope, have observed what appears to be the formation of an Earth-like planet in the accretion disk of a young star. This is direct evidence supporting the scientific model of planetary formation — the very process that explains the origins of Earth and the solar system.

Predictably, this discovery will require some creative misrepresentation from creationists to dismiss it. No doubt we’ll hear claims that it’s not really the same process that formed Earth, or that it doesn’t disprove Genesis — because defending ancient mythology apparently requires ignoring any modern evidence that makes it look absurdly naive.

Creationism Refuted - What Dinosaur Teeth Tell Us About Life 150 million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Original skull of the Giraffatitan from Tanzania.

Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, MB.R.2223

For details, see below.

What Dinosaur Teeth Reveal About Life 150 Million Years Ago | Leibniz Institute

Some 150 million years before the mythical events of ‘Creation Week’—give or take a few thousand years—our distant ancestors were small, nocturnal, rodent-like mammals eking out an existence in a world dominated by colossal reptiles. Among these dominant life forms were the dinosaurs, thriving in a variety of ecosystems and feeding on plants or other animals, depending on their species.

As they ate, they unwittingly left behind a record of their diet etched into the microscopic wear patterns on the enamel of their teeth. Today, with the help of sophisticated analytical techniques, palaeontologists can read these patterns like a diary of prehistoric meals. And with each new discovery, such as the one published by a team led by Dr Daniela E. Winkler of Kiel University, the yawning gap between ancient mythology and modern science widens ever further. Their findings provide yet another decisive refutation of the simplistic narrative crafted by Bronze Age storytellers—later compiled into what some still insist is the inerrant word of an omniscient creator.

This latest blow to creationist pseudoscience comes in the form of an open-access paper, Dental microwear texture analysis reveals behavioural, ecological and habitat signals in Late Jurassic sauropod dinosaur faunas, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The team focused on the teeth of sauropods—long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs such as Camarasaurus, Brachiosaurus, and Diplodocus — from the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation in North America and the Lusitanian Basin in Portugal. Using a method called Dental Microwear Texture Analysis (DMTA), they examined the microscopic wear patterns caused by feeding, revealing a fascinating spectrum of dietary strategies and environmental adaptations among different species.

What they found demolishes the notion of sauropods as a homogenous group of giant leaf-munchers. Instead, the microwear textures show distinct differences in feeding behaviour, likely linked to differences in available vegetation and habitat. For example, Camarasaurus appears to have consumed tougher, more fibrous plant material—perhaps conifers—while others such as Diplodocus may have specialised in softer vegetation like ferns or aquatic plants. These variations not only suggest niche partitioning, where species avoid direct competition by diversifying their diets, but also point to distinct ecological zones across the ancient landscapes they inhabited.

Even more telling is the comparison between North American and European sauropods. Despite being closely related, the differences in their dental microwear suggest adaptations to different environmental pressures and available flora, implying behavioural flexibility and evolutionary divergence shaped by their respective habitats.

Such complexity and diversity, preserved for over 150 million years in the microscopic textures of fossilised teeth, are a world away from the simplistic narratives of static 'kinds' created in a single week. Instead, we see a dynamic, evolving biosphere responding to ecological challenges—exactly what we’d expect in a world governed by natural selection and deep time.

Refuting Creationism - The Cultural Delusion That Causes Creationism In The USA

Why many Americans still think Darwin was wrong, yet the British don’t

In an era when scientific literacy is not just desirable—but essential—the question of why large swathes of the American public still reject Darwin’s theory of evolution is both troubling and revealing. Edward White's recent article in The Conversation, "Why many Americans still think Darwin was wrong, yet the British don’t", reproduced below under a Creative Commons license, shines a stark light on this divide.

White argues that in the U.S., disbelief in Darwin often stems less from engagement with scientific evidence and more from a pre‑emptive rejection rooted in religious conviction. Here, many fundamentalists begin with a conclusion — evolution must be false because it contradicts the Bible — and then marshal arguments to fit that view. By contrast, the British tend to approach Darwin’s legacy with curiosity rather than hostility, allowing evidence and inquiry to guide their conclusions.

This isn’t just a cultural quirk. It’s a profound divergence in how societies value knowledge, method, and truth. Where curiosity and empirical rigour flourish, science thrives. Where ideological certainty undermines inquiry, progress stalls. The difference is a profound example of the harm religious fundamentalism can do and the control it can exercise over the behaviour and opinions of those affected by it. In his article, Edward White explores what drives the American creationist impulse, why the British public’s more accepting stance offers a blueprint, and why standing firm on the side of science matters now more than ever.

Malevolent Designer - Does The Designer Favour Zebrafish Or Just Hate Humans?

Two zebrafish genes hold the key to regenerating inner ear cells, offering hope for future human therapies.

Stowers Institute for Medical Research

Regrowing hearing cells: New… | Stowers Institute for Medical Research

It's more bad news for Intelligent Design (ID) creationists who believe their putative designer is the anthropophilic, omnibenevolent God of the Bible. Hot on the heels of the discovery that some lemurs do not suffer from the age-related degenerative conditions that cause such misery for humans, comes the news that zebrafish can regenerate lost hair cells—cells that, in humans, enable hearing but cannot be replaced once lost.

These hair cells, located in the human inner ear, detect vibrations and are crucial for hearing. They can be destroyed through prolonged exposure to loud noise, resulting in permanent deafness. However, zebrafish possess homologous cells in their lateral lines—structures that allow them to detect vibrations in water, effectively functioning as a form of hearing. Remarkably, these cells can regenerate under the control of two specific genes.

It doesn't take a genius to realise that, if we accept the intelligent design argument that a divine designer deliberately created these genes, then the same designer could have endowed its supposed special creation—humans—with this regenerative ability too. Within the ID framework, the only possible conclusion is that the designer god chose *not* to give humans this ability, and instead preferred us to go deaf.

The problem for creationists deepens when one considers that these genes exemplify what William A. Dembski of the Discovery Institute cites as evidence of intelligent design: they are complex and specified, containing the genetic information to produce a defined result. Dembski insists that such "complex specified information" can only originate from an intelligent designer.

Creationists, of course, are compelled to reject the notion that these differences are simply the result of evolutionary processes. But if they also refuse to accept that this zebrafish trait—clearly underpinned by "complex specified genetic information"—constitutes evidence of intelligent design (and therefore points to a deliberate *absence* in humans), they are also undermining Dembski's single defining argument for intelligent design.

This striking discovery was made by researchers at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research and has just been published open access in Nature Communications.