Creationism Refuted - How Humans Acquired Their Pathogens From Their Animals - No Magic 'Sin' Involved

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

We’ve long suspected that the transition to farming and animal husbandry opened the door to a new era of disease – now DNA shows us that it happened at least 6,500 years ago,” says Professor Eske Willerslev, author of the new study.

Illustration: William Brøns Petersen

Large-scale DNA study maps 37,000 years of disease history – University of Copenhagen

Young Earth creationist mythology has it that sin, shortly after the magical creation of two adult humans, caused death and disease to enter the world. Until then, so we are expected to believe, there had been no disease and nothing ever died — not even, apparently, the plants Adam, Eve and the other animals ate.

Reality, of course, is materially different from the mythology produced by scientifically ignorant ancient pastoralists and later scribes who knew nothing of bacteria, viruses, parasites, epidemiology or evolution, and who interpreted misfortune in magical terms. Disease was not a supernatural punishment introduced at a single moment by a talking snake, a disobedient couple and an irritable god. It was, and remains, a biological process involving organisms evolving, spreading, adapting and, sometimes, crossing from one host species into another.

And the evidence now shows that at least 6,500 years ago, diseases were passing from animals into the humans who lived alongside them. The domestication of animals, the growth of settled farming communities and the rise of pastoralism brought humans, livestock, waste, parasites and pathogens into much closer proximity than before. This has long been thought to explain why humans suffer from so many infectious diseases. It is also a point Jared Diamond made in Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies, where he argued that Eurasia’s abundance of domesticable animals, and Europeans’ long exposure to the diseases associated with them, helped Europeans to dominate other populations, often with their pathogens acting as an advance guard against peoples with no previous exposure or immunity.

That view of the zoonotic origin of many human diseases has now been strongly supported by the work of researchers led by Professor Eske Willerslev, of the University of Copenhagen and the University of Cambridge, in a study published open access in Nature in July 2025. The team analysed DNA from more than 1,300 prehistoric individuals, some up to 37,000 years old. Their bones and teeth provided an extraordinary archive of ancient microbial DNA, revealing traces of bacteria, viruses and parasites that infected humans across deep Eurasian history.

The results suggest that close cohabitation with domesticated animals, together with large-scale migrations of pastoralists from the Pontic Steppe, played a major role in the spread of zoonotic diseases. The researchers found that identifiable zoonotic pathogens first appear in their data from around 6,500 years ago, became more widespread after about 6,000 years ago, and peaked roughly 5,000 years ago — precisely the sort of pattern expected if lifestyle, animal husbandry, mobility and population contact were driving disease transmission.

This is especially awkward for creationists because the evidence does not point to a sudden, supernatural transformation of the world’s biology. It does not show disease appearing overnight as the result of a mythical “Fall”. Instead, it shows a long, historical and evolutionary process, unfolding through early Eurasian human history as changing human behaviour created new ecological opportunities for pathogens.

Refuting Creationism - Population Collapse And Migration in Neolithic Europe - And No Evidence Of A Genocidal Flood

The researchers have conducted DNA analyses of the skeletons from a burial site like this one in France and found traces of several different diseases.

Photo: Getty Images / Michal Boubin

Stone age population collapse revealed by DNA study in France – University of Copenhagen

A paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution by a large international team led by researchers at the University of Copenhagen, reports evidence that simply should not exist if the Bible creation myth, and its later global genocidal flood myth, had any basis in reality. The evidence shows a significant population collapse among Neolithic farming communities in what is now northern France about 5,000 years ago, followed by migration into the depopulated area by people with strong genetic links to southern France and the Iberian Peninsula.

The study is based on ancient DNA from 132 individuals buried in the allée sépulcrale at Bury, a large megalithic tomb about 50 kilometres north of Paris. The site was used during two distinct burial phases, separated by a hiatus associated with the wider Neolithic decline around 3000 BC. The researchers found that the people buried before and after this decline were not simply later descendants of the same local population, but belonged to largely discontinuous genetic groups. In other words, this was not merely a change in burial custom; it was a major population turnover.

The problems this presents for creationism are multiple. First, there is the evidence of established farming populations in northern Europe at a time when, according to Young Earth Creationist chronology, the world had only recently been magicked into existence. Secondly, there is the embarrassing survival of archaeological and genetic evidence which, under the same mythology, should either have been destroyed in a global flood a few centuries later, or buried beneath a distinctive, worldwide layer of fossil-bearing flood silt — a layer which is conspicuous by its absence. Thirdly, there is the evidence that the human population of Europe had already diversified into regionally distinct genetic populations by about 3000 BC, with enough structure for ancient DNA to distinguish northern French and German-like Neolithic farmers from later migrants with strong southern French and Iberian affinities.

None of this, of course, will cause creationists to reconsider the mythology. We can confidently predict that it will instead be treated as another test of faith: one more opportunity to demonstrate the strength of their determination never to let evidence change their minds. In creationist apologetics, refusal to learn is often mistaken for intellectual victory. The more compelling the evidence, the greater the achievement in ignoring it.

The reason for the population decline is not yet clear. The human remains contained genetic traces of pathogens, including the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, and the louse-borne relapsing fever bacterium, Borrelia recurrentis, but the evidence does not support plague as the sole cause of the collapse. The more likely explanation is a combination of disease, environmental stress, demographic disruption and social breakdown. Earlier burials contained multiple generations from the same extended families, suggesting stable, kin-based communities. Later burials were more selective and were dominated by a single male lineage, indicating a marked change in social organisation after the population turnover.

This adds to the growing picture of the so-called Neolithic decline as a widespread phenomenon affecting much of northern and western Europe, not just Scandinavia and northern Germany. It also offers a plausible explanation for the abrupt disappearance of megalithic tomb-building and other monumental traditions across parts of Europe at about the same time. The people who built those monuments did not merely change their minds about architecture; in places such as the Paris Basin, the population itself appears to have collapsed and been replaced.

Refuting Creationism - Humans And Wolves Share A Long Evolutionary History

View from the Stora Förvar cave on Stora Karlsö. The cave was explored between 1888 and 1893. The limestone-rich bedrock has contributed to the skeletal material found there being very well preserved.

Photo: Jan Storå

Ancient wolves on remote Baltic Sea island reveal link to prehistoric humans - Stockholms universitet

A point I have made several times in these blog posts, and one that creationists typically prefer not to address, is that the Bible presents living things as part of a world made for human use and dominion. Yet the history of animal and plant domestication tells a very different story. The domesticated forms often bear little resemblance to their wild ancestors, not because they were created perfectly fitted for human needs, but because humans altered them by selective breeding over many generations.

For an honest creationist, the question should be obvious: why did an allegedly omniscient creator god fail to anticipate human needs and create animals and plants already ideally suited to them? Why did humans need to do the improving? But, as so often, creationists appear to prefer belief in an incompetent designer to the simpler conclusion that their creation myth is wrong.

No domestic animal illustrates this better than the dog. Domestic dogs are descended from wolves, yet the vast range of dog forms, behaviours and abilities shows what prolonged selection, human preference and cultural need can do. Herding dogs, guard dogs, hunting dogs, sled dogs, lapdogs and companion animals are not the result of a single act of perfect creation; they are the result of human-managed evolution.

Now, new research by scientists from the Francis Crick Institute, Stockholm University, the University of Aberdeen and the University of East Anglia, published online in November 2025 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), shows that human relationships with wolves were more varied and complex than a simple tale of fear, hunting or eventual dog domestication. The researchers report wolf remains from the isolated Baltic island of Stora Karlsö, in a context strongly suggesting that prehistoric people were managing, feeding or otherwise controlling wolves thousands of years ago.

This research resonates with me because two of my books, The Girl and the Wolf and The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic, are fictional accounts of how wolf domestication might have begun. In those stories, the process is initiated by a single act of compassion: a woman raises an abandoned wolf cub alongside her own child. That act becomes a legend, and the legend later inspires another tribe to form a relationship with wolves, helping them to survive hardship and setting humanity on a path that would eventually produce the many varieties of domestic dog, each shaped for different human purposes.

The stories are also framed to illustrate the hardships of Ice Age life for our ancestors, and the same social forces that still shape human societies: conservatism versus progress, suspicion of novelty, and the struggle to be different in a culture that demands conformity. In both stories, teenage girls must negotiate those pressures and, in doing so, help change the future.

Creationism Refuted - Common Origin Of Human And Other Ape Laughter.

Apes & humans have been sharing a laugh for 15 million years

A stunning example of how science incidentally refutes creationism has just been published in Communications Biology by researchers at the University of Warwick, UK. This is not merely another example of biologists continuing, despite creationist predictions, not to abandon “Darwinism” in favour of creationist magical thinking — the event that creationists have been confidently expecting any day now for more than half a century. It is also a discovery for which evolution provides the obvious and coherent explanation.

Nor is this one easily dismissed by creationists as the result of “The Fall”, Satanic interference, or any of the other routine excuses used when nature refuses to look intelligently designed. Resorting to “common design” merely makes their putative designer god look as though it deliberately created evidence, which is exactly what the Theory of Evolution predicts, apparently in order to mislead us. As Francis Collins pointed out in The Language of God, this image of God as a cosmic trickster is the ultimate admission of defeat for creationists, and shows Young Earth Creationism to be both theologically and scientifically bankrupt.

The shocking thing is how few Christians ever take their co-religionists to task on social media for being prepared to portray their god in this way, rather than having the moral and intellectual integrity to admit that they are wrong. Even their own god is sacrificed on the altar of their implacable vanity.

So, what is this finding by the University of Warwick group?

Quite simply, it is evidence that humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans share a similar rhythmic pattern in laughter, suggesting that this feature was already present in the last common ancestor of all living great apes, including humans, about 15 million years ago. The finding also offers clues to the evolution of human speech.

The researchers analysed laughter recordings from four orangutans, two gorillas, three bonobos, four chimpanzees and four human children. Across 140 laughter bouts, they found the same basic pattern: all species produced laughter with evenly spaced rhythmic intervals between successive sounds. In other words, great ape laughter is not random noise, but has a conserved rhythmic structure.

However, while this basic rhythm has remained remarkably conserved, human laughter has become faster, more variable and more sensitive to social context. Humans are the only great apes in the study shown to vary the timing of laughter according to context — for example, the difference between involuntary laughter when tickled, polite laughter in a social setting, nervous laughter after a mistake, or infectious laughter in a group. This suggests that the increasing ability to control the timing and rhythm of vocalisations may have contributed to the evolution of speech.

A useful way to frame this is that no single feature “proves” common ancestry on its own. The strength of the evidence lies in the way many independent features — anatomy, genetics, development, physiology and behaviour — all point to the same branching pattern of descent.

Malevolent Design - The Complex Mechanism That Helps Bacteria Make Us Sick

Clockwise: A bacterium retracts its pili, reeling in a piece of DNA in the environment. This action facilitates “natural transformation,” a process by which bacterium acquire new genetic traits, including antibiotic resistance.

Image courtesy the Dalia Lab, Indiana University

IU biologists uncover a molecular mechanism that helps bacteria spread antibiotic resistance genes: College of Arts + Sciences : Indiana University

Creationists have a problem of their own making. The same evolutionary processes they try to rebrand as evidence for a creator god are also the processes that produce parasites, pathogens and the molecular machinery by which they exploit their hosts. If Michael J. Behe wants to claim “irreducible complexity” as evidence of design, and William A. Dembski wants to claim “complex specified information” as the signature of an intelligent designer, then they cannot confine those arguments to the parts of biology they find theologically convenient. The same kinds of complexity and genetic information are also found in organisms that make us sick and increase the suffering in the world.

Although professional creationists, including fellows of the Discovery Institute such as Behe and Dembski, are careful to avoid naming their putative designer, their audience invariably identifies it with the supposedly omnibenevolent god of the Bible, Torah and Qur’an. But that creates an obvious problem: using their own criteria, this creator god must be credited not only with designing humans and other animals, but also with designing the bacteria, viruses, parasites and molecular mechanisms that infect, disable and kill them.

The significance of this is often lost on creationists because it requires a basic understanding of biology and a willingness to follow an argument to its logical conclusion. When they cite Behe’s favourite examples, such as the E. coli flagellum or anti-malarial drug resistance in Plasmodium falciparum, as evidence for their god, they are in effect crediting that god with designing mechanisms that help microbes move, invade, survive and evade our attempts to stop them. Point this out, however, and the same evidence that was allegedly scientific evidence for intelligent design is suddenly reinterpreted as evidence for “The Fall” and “Original Sin”. The pretence that creationism is science is abandoned in a hasty retreat into fundamentalist theology, where the same facts are repurposed to reach a more comfortable conclusion.

In addition to the two examples I recently discussed here and here, another example has now been reported — and this one involves a powerful molecular motor that should, by creationist standards, look very much like the sort of thing they would normally call “designed”. It is the type IV pilus retraction system, recently reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), which many bacteria use to retract tiny hair-like surface structures called pili. These pili act like microscopic grappling hooks, helping bacteria attach to surfaces and tissues, form antibiotic-resistant biofilms, and pull in fragments of DNA from their surroundings, including genes for drug resistance acquired from other bacteria.

Refuting Creationism - Humans Were Living In A West African Rain Forest 140,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Life in a West African rain forest 150,000 years ago

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

Scientists find earliest evidence that our ancestors lived in rainforests 150,000 years ago | News | The University of Sheffield

Stone Tool

Credit: Jimbob Blinkorn, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology

According to the findings of an international team led by the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, with contributions from the University of Sheffield, published in February 2025 in Nature, humans were living in the wet tropical forests of what is now Côte d’Ivoire about 150,000 years ago — more than 140,000 years before creationists imagine their mythical “Creation Week”, when they believe the single ancestral couple of all modern humans was created by magic somewhere in the Middle East.

The date itself is no surprise to anyone who understands the real evolutionary history of our species. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens had emerged in Africa by about 300,000 years ago, and the evidence increasingly points not to a single cradle, but to a pan-African process involving populations adapted to different regions and environments. What is striking about this discovery is not that humans were present in Africa 150,000 years ago, but that they were living in a tropical rainforest — an environment long assumed to have played only a minor, late role in human evolution.

That older assumption fitted neatly with the simplified “savannah hypothesis”, in which the ancestors of humans were thought to have diverged from the lineage leading to chimpanzees and bonobos as climatic change fragmented African forests and created more open grassland and woodland habitats. In that view, rainforest was more of a barrier than a formative environment. But the emerging picture is far more interesting: early H. sapiens were not simply creatures of open savannahs, coasts or grasslands, but members of a flexible, adaptable species able to exploit a wide range of African habitats long before the later dispersals into Eurasia.

Part of the reason rainforest environments have been under-represented in accounts of human evolution is that they are poor places for preserving bones, artefacts and organic remains. Acidic soils, heavy rainfall, dense vegetation and rapid biological decay all work against the survival of the archaeological record. That makes the Bété I site in southern Côte d’Ivoire especially important. Using optically stimulated luminescence and electron spin resonance dating methods, the researchers constrained the onset of human occupation there to around 150 ka. Plant-wax biomarkers, stable isotope data, phytoliths and pollen from the associated sediments then showed that the environment at the time was wet tropical forest.

This pushes the earliest known secure evidence of human occupation of a rainforest environment back by about 80,000 years. It also suggests that tropical forests were not late, marginal or forbidding habitats into which modern humans only ventured after acquiring some special new cultural trick, but part of the ecological range within which H. sapiens was already living during the Middle Pleistocene.

The finding was made possible because modern dating and environmental reconstruction techniques could be applied to sediments associated with stone tools first found at the site in the 1980s. In other words, once again, patient science has extracted a coherent, evidence-based history from the ground — a history that would not exist at all if there had been a recent global genocidal flood churning the world’s sediments into the chaotic mess required by creationist mythology.

Malevolent Design - A Brilliantly 'Designed' Process For Spreading Influenza - Malevolence or Evolution?

Dead cells after the self-destruction and fragmentation process. The large green areas are the “eat me” signals which alert immune cells to kick-start clean-up and recycling process, while the small green circles are the “Footprint of Death” F-ApoEVs left behind by the dying cell.

’Footprint of Death’ gives new clues to cell life, News, La Trobe University

My previous post was about the discovery, reported in Cell Host & Microbe in May 2026, that a single amino-acid change in a coronavirus protein can alter how a bat-related coronavirus interacts with the immune systems of bats and humans. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, such changes help to explain how a virus that may be relatively benign in its natural host can become a serious pathogen when it crosses the species barrier into humans. By creationists' own criteria, this should qualify as intelligent design.

This post concerns another example which, if creationists applied their criteria for intelligent design consistently, would be further evidence of malevolent design. It is the finding, reported in Nature Communications, that influenza A virus can exploit part of the normal process of programmed cell death to help infect neighbouring cells.

Applied consistently, these discoveries would portray creationists' putative designer god as a malevolent entity that designs ways to increase suffering. But, since creationists need to portray this alleged designer as the omnibenevolent god of the Bible, this supposed 'evidence of intelligent design' somehow ceases to be evidence of design at all and becomes evidence of 'Sin' and 'The Fall', as creationists abandon any pretence of science and retreat into Biblical mythology to explain away inconvenient facts.

The discovery, by a team led by PhD candidate Stephanie Rutter in Professor Ivan Poon’s lab at the La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science (LIMS), shows how each step in the process of cell death and renewal is important in helping a dying cell break down and be cleared away by the body’s immune system. The team found that, as cells self-destruct, they change shape, lift away from their surroundings, and leave behind a residue which the researchers dubbed the 'footprint of death'. This contains a previously undescribed type of extracellular vesicle (EV). EVs are small packages used by cells to transport proteins, lipids, DNA and RNA to other cells, acting as an important means of communication between cells.

These new vesicles, known as FOOD-derived apoptotic extracellular vesicles, or F-ApoEVs, normally mark the site of a dead cell and help the immune system identify and clear away the remaining fragments, preventing inflammation and other harmful consequences. But this useful clean-up process can also be turned into a weakness. The researchers found that, when dying cells are infected with influenza A virus, viral proteins and even virus particles can be carried in these F-ApoEVs, providing another route by which infection can spread to neighbouring cells.

Had this process been beneficial to humans, rather than to influenza viruses, creationists would doubtless hail it as a marvel of intelligent design by their god. Yet, because the benefit is to a virus and the result can be disease, suffering and death, the same kind of complexity somehow ceases to count as evidence of design and is quietly reclassified as a mysterious consequence of 'The Fall'.

Creationists get into this bind because they are trying to force the evidence into their preferred mythology. Science has no such problem. The immune system, cell-death pathways and the pathogens that exploit them are all products of evolutionary history, not foresight. They are parts of a continuing arms race in which every useful biological process presents opportunities for parasites, viruses and other pathogens to exploit. An influenza virus that stumbles upon a weakness in a host system does not need to understand it, plan it, or design it; it merely needs to leave more copies of itself than viruses that did not.

Malevolent Design - How SARS-CoV-2 Was Cleverly Designed to Jump From Bats To Humans - Evolution Or Malevolence

A Single Molecular Change May Help Viruses Jump from Bat to Human | UC San Francisco

Two recent papers should delight admirers of creationism's putative intelligent designer, because both show the sort of biochemical ingenuity they normally rush to claim as evidence of design. One, published in Cell Host & Microbe in May 2026 and reported by UCSF in June, shows how a single molecular change can alter the way a coronavirus interacts with bat and human immune systems, helping to explain how viruses related to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, can cross the species barrier. The other, published in October 2025 in Nature Communications, which will be the subject of my next blog post, shows how influenza A virus can exploit the remnants of dying cells to help spread infection to neighbouring healthy cells.

However, that excitement is likely to be tempered somewhat when it dawns on them that, if these systems are the products of intelligent design, their designer can only be regarded as malevolent, since the result is an increase in the sum total of suffering in the world. But this does not seem to trouble ID proponents who cite Michael J. Behe's favourite examples — the Escherichia coli flagellum and anti-malarial drug resistance in Plasmodium falciparum — as evidence of irreducible complexity and hence of intelligent design, while ignoring the awkward fact that these supposed examples of design help microorganisms survive, move, infect, or evade human attempts to control them.

This puts creationists in a familiar bind. On the one hand, they like to claim any useful biological complexity as evidence of their Biblical god. On the other, when the same logic points to a designer of pathogens, parasites, immune evasion, drug resistance and viral spread, they retreat into vague claims about 'Sin', 'The Fall', or some mysterious corruption of nature, thereby absolving their god of responsibility for the very mechanisms they were praising as designed only moments earlier.

The first paper, in Cell Host & Microbe, was by a large team of researchers from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Quantitative Biosciences Institute, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the Institut Pasteur and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. It showed that a single amino-acid change in a viral protein can alter how coronaviruses interact with bat and human immune systems, changing the host's response to infection.

Bats are important viral reservoirs because their immune systems and physiology can allow them to tolerate viruses that might cause serious disease in other mammals. They can therefore harbour viruses for long periods, providing opportunities for viral lineages to persist, diversify and acquire mutations that may matter greatly when those viruses encounter a new host species. The UCSF-led study helps to explain how relatively small genetic differences can make the difference between a virus that remains associated with a bat reservoir and one that is better able to evade human immune defences.

This is precisely the sort of thing creationists should, by their own logic, have to call 'complex specified information'. The change is functional; it affects a specific biological outcome; and it is beneficial from the point of view of the viral lineage. The problem, of course, is that creationists usually smuggle in the assumption that 'beneficial' must mean beneficial to humans. If it benefits a virus, a bacterium, a parasite or a cancer cell, they suddenly decide it does not count.

Comparing SARS-CoV-2 with a related bat coronavirus, RaTG13, the researchers found that a viral protein called ORF9b was a key factor. The SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 versions of ORF9b are very similar, but behave very differently. In human cells, the SARS-CoV-2 version helped disable an innate immune alarm system, allowing the virus to multiply more effectively. In bat cells, the RaTG13 version interacted with a restriction factor that helped suppress infection.

The team found that changing just one of ORF9b's roughly 100 amino acids reversed its ability to evade the immune response. In creationist thinking, if the phrase is to mean anything at all, this would be new functional genetic information. Yet the actual explanation requires no magic, no designer and no supernatural intervention: a mutation changed an amino acid; that change altered protein interactions; and the result affected viral fitness in different host-cell environments. In other words, ordinary chemistry and physics, operating through mutation, selection and host-virus interaction, produced exactly the kind of functional change creationists insist cannot happen naturally.

The paper in Cell Host & Microbe was accompanied by a news item from UCSF by Levi Gadye:

Refuting Creationism - Observed Evolution In A South African Leopard Population

The elusive Cape leopard.

Jana Ohrner/iNaturalist, CC BY-NC

Leopards adapted to South Africa’s Cape so successfully that they’re genetically unique – study

This paper will have creationists hurriedly trying to redefine evolution so that it no longer means what biologists mean by it — change in allele frequencies in a population over time — but instead becomes some childish parody of the idea, carefully constructed to exclude the scientific definition and so safely miss the point. The paper, published last January (2026) in Heredity, shows that a small, isolated population of leopards (Panthera pardus) in South Africa’s Cape Floristic Region is a striking example of incipient allopatric divergence, and possibly early speciation, in progress. The population, estimated at fewer than 1,000 individuals, has developed a distinctive genome and includes small leopards, some with only about half the body mass of leopards elsewhere in Africa.

In what will also disappoint those creationists who are still eagerly awaiting the abandonment of “Darwinism” by mainstream biologists and its replacement by magic-based creationism, the authors — an international group of leopard conservationists and evolutionary biologists — interpret their findings wholly within the framework of evolutionary theory. By comparing whole-genome data from 43 leopards, including 10 from the Western Cape province (WCP), the team found that the WCP leopards diverged from those of northern South Africa about 20,000–24,000 years ago — in other words, many thousands of years before creationists’ mythical “Creation Week”. They found no obvious evidence that genetic drift alone was responsible for this divergence, and concluded instead that it is more likely to reflect the population’s demographic history, long-term isolation and adaptation to the Cape’s distinctive environmental conditions, including low prey availability.

Their conclusion is that the leopards of the Western Cape can be regarded as an evolutionarily significant unit (ESU): a genetically distinctive population representing a unique component of the species’ evolutionary history and therefore one that should be managed and conserved as such.

One of the team, and first author of the paper, Assistant Professor Laura Tensen of the University of Greifswald, has written an article in The Conversation describing the research and its findings. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Unintelligent Design - The DNA In A Developing Brain Gets Broken And Has To Be Repaired - Incompetent Design Or Evolution?

Neurons migrating through dense tissue in the developing brain (green) frequently undergo DNA damage (magenta).

DNA in neurons is damaged and repaired during brain cortex formation | News | Kyoto University iCeMS

Like my last post, this post illustrates how the human body, far from being the perfect design of the omnipotent, omniscient designer creationists would have us believe in, is the result of a utilitarian evolutionary process. Layers of complexity arise, not from divine brilliance, but from evolved solutions to problems created by suboptimal earlier solutions to other problems — which were themselves the result of imperfect evolution.

In the previous post we saw how DNA replication is sufficiently imperfect that it requires mechanisms to repair the resulting DNA damage. However, these repair processes are themselves potentially dangerous and need control systems to maintain a careful balance between too little and too much repair. When this control process fails, it can lead to cancers that mimic those caused by the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which are associated with increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer.

In this post we see how newborn neurons in the developing brain need to squeeze through tight spaces in dense tissue, past other cells and between fibres, in order to reach their final positions and form neural circuits in the cerebral and cerebellar cortices. This process is such a physical struggle that the DNA in these neurons can suffer double-strand breaks and must be repaired quickly to ensure normal brain development. This is the finding of a research team from Kyoto University, the University of Tokyo, Osaka University, the National University of Singapore and the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, led by Professor Mineko Kengaku who have just published their findings in Nature.

Mostly, this repair is quick and successful. However, the research team also found striking similarities between the development of mice in which the repair process failed and human genome-instability syndromes that affect the cerebellum.

Another important point is that this repair process appears to be much more successful in damaged neuronal DNA than in similar damage that can occur when some cancer cells migrate through narrow channels. The difference seems to lie in where the DNA breaks occur. In neurons, they tend to occur in regions of the genome that are not actively being transcribed, whereas in cancer cells the damage can involve essential genes. That suggests there is some biological bias in where these breaks occur in neurons, rather than the process being simply random mechanical shattering.

This raises the obvious question for creationists: why create a process that breaks DNA in developing brain cells, only to require another process to repair it, with the inherent risk that the repair process might be incomplete or imperfect? It also raises the possibility that the resulting small differences in the genomes of individual neurons could contribute to neuronal individuality and perhaps to some neurodevelopmental or neurodegenerative diseases.

The emerging picture, from this and from the rogue repair-control process that can mimic cancers caused by the BRCA genes, is not of a human body designed by an omniscient engineer. It is more like a William Heath Robinson contraption: improvised, overcomplicated, dependent on compensatory mechanisms, and always vulnerable to the failure of the very systems needed to keep it working.

Unintelligent Design - What Happens when A Badly 'Designed' Process Goes Rogue - Cancer - Malevolent Design Or Evolution?

Dr. Alexandra Nusawardhana, the lead author of the study and who earned her doctorate in biomedical sciences this year from Penn State College of Medicine, conducts research to understand genomic instability and cancer treatment response.

Credit: Jason Plotkin / Penn State. Creative Commons

DNA repair protein gene gone rogue may unlock new cancer treatments | Penn State University

A characteristic of evolved biological systems, and one that distinguishes them from systems designed from first principles, is that they are often unnecessarily complex, vulnerable to failure and dependent on layers of patchwork compensation. This is what we should expect from systems produced by utilitarian, suboptimal compromises built from whatever was available at the time.

With no plan, no foresight and no predetermined objective, natural selection can only favour whatever leaves more descendants in a particular environment. The result is not an ideal solution, but merely a workable one — one that is better than what preceded it, even if it remains a very long way from perfection. An intelligent designer, such as the one proposed by advocates of intelligent design, would be under no such historical constraints and could, in principle, rebuild a system from scratch to arrive at the optimal solution.

To illustrate this, this post and the next will look at two recent papers that incidentally demonstrate how many human health problems arise from these over-complex, error-prone systems — systems that would not exist if the human body were the pinnacle of created perfection that creationists imagine it to be. Unless, of course, the designer intended us to suffer when its systems failed.

The first concerns a paper published in February 2026 in Nature Communications by researchers at Penn State College of Medicine. It shows how one component of the DNA repair machinery — a system needed because DNA replication and maintenance are themselves vulnerable to error and damage — can itself go wrong and produce a pattern of genomic instability resembling that seen when the BRCA1 and BRCA2 tumour-suppressor pathway is defective.

The culprit is EXO1, a gene that encodes an exonuclease involved in DNA processing and repair. In normal cells, EXO1 helps trim and process damaged or mismatched DNA so that repair can proceed. But when EXO1 is overexpressed, as the researchers found in a significant proportion of several cancers, including about 20–30% of breast and ovarian cancers as well as melanoma, testicular, cervical and hepatobiliary cancers, too much of this normally useful protein becomes destructive. Instead of helping to preserve genome integrity, excessive EXO1 activity can degrade newly synthesised DNA during replication stress, expanding single-stranded DNA gaps and degrading reversed replication forks.

The result is a BRCA-like pattern of genomic instability even in cells whose BRCA pathway is still functional. In other words, the cell behaves in some important respects like a BRCA-mutant tumour cell, not because BRCA1 or BRCA2 is mutated, but because too much EXO1 has overwhelmed the normal protective system. This matters clinically because such tumours may respond to some of the same treatments used against BRCA-mutant cancers, including drugs that target DNA repair vulnerabilities.

So, we have a DNA replication and maintenance system that needs elaborate repair machinery because the genome is constantly vulnerable to damage; then we have the catastrophic consequences when that repair machinery itself goes rogue. Compare that with the simpler, more robust system we might expect from an intelligent designer endowed with foresight and unconstrained by evolutionary history. Complexity is not the hallmark of intelligent design that creationists claim it to be. In biology, it is very often the accumulated consequence of failure-prone, suboptimal compromises produced by evolutionary tinkering without a predetermined objective.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Cultivated Cotton - No Magic Required

Wild cotton, on left, has short, brown, and coarse fibers, while modern domesticated cotton has white, fine and abundant fibers. A new study led by Iowa State University scientists identified the northwestern Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico as the original source of domesticated cotton.

Photo: Corrinne Grover/Iowa State University.

Cotton’s roots trace to Yucatan Peninsula, where wild gene pool runs deepest - News Service

My last blog post looked at the evolution of the strawberry and how the evidence of multiple whole-genome duplications and speciation by hybridisation refutes several basic creationist, counter-evidential myths and articles of faith.

This post deals with the evolution and cultivation of the cotton plant, which again refutes the childish notion of divine creation, perfectly suited for use by the creator god's favourite creation, humankind, as well as the creationist article of faith that no new genetic information can arise without the direct intervention of a designer god, because this would supposedly violate the laws of thermodynamics.

As a recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), by a team of researchers including Professor Jonathan Wendel of Iowa State University, has shown, modern upland cotton, Gossypium hirsutum, is the result of thousands of years of human selection acting on naturally occurring genetic variation. The team traced its domestication to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, probably to the north-western Yucatán, where wild populations still retain the deepest gene pool. Cotton was first domesticated there about 5,000 years ago, which, if creationist chronology were taken seriously, places it before the supposed genocidal global flood, which it appears to have survived along with the people who cultivated it.

The researchers found that domestication transformed a wild, perennial shrub with small bolls and short, coarse, brown fibres into the modern crop with abundant, long, fine, white fibres. This was not the result of a single act of magical design, nor of a sudden, miraculous improvement, but of long-term selection acting on many mutations of relatively small effect, accumulated and filtered over many generations.

The team also showed that, while human selection produced fibres more useful to people, it did so at a cost. Useful traits present in wild populations, such as disease resistance and salt tolerance, were left behind as farmers selected repeatedly from a restricted subset of the original wild gene pool. Each generation of selection narrowed the genetic base still further, pushing cultivated cotton through a genetic bottleneck.

The researchers reached these conclusions by comparing the genomes of cultivated cotton with those of specimens collected from wild populations across the plant's native range. Their analyses showed that domesticated cotton is most closely related to wild cotton from north-western Yucatán, where two random wild plants still show, on average, about twice as much genetic difference as two random modern cultivars.

After cultivated upland cotton spread out of the Yucatán, it eventually became the dominant cotton crop worldwide, displacing or overshadowing other cotton species that had been independently domesticated in South America, Africa and India. Today, Gossypium hirsutum, or upland cotton, accounts for about 90% of the world's cotton crop.

Refuting Creationism - How The Strawberry Evolved - No Magic Needed

Wild starwberry, Fragaria vesca

By Jörg Hempel, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, Link

A genomic time machine traces how the modern strawberry came to be | EurekAlert!

Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did

Dr. William Butler, Physician - (1535–29 January 1618)
Talking of the strawberry.

This and my next blog post deal with essentially the same refutations of creationist mythology and pseudo-science. The mythology is the Bible’s unambiguous claim that a creator god made everything for its favourite creation, humankind; the pseudo-science is the creationist claim that no new genetic information can arise without the direct intervention of that creator god, because, so they tell us, new genetic information can only be produced by magic, otherwise it would violate the laws of thermodynamics [sic]. Both claims are demonstrable nonsense, of course.

The first example concerns a fruit now ripening in UK gardens and fields — the strawberry. If strawberries had been specially created for humans, we might expect them to have arrived fully formed, already perfect for our tastes and purposes. Instead, like other cultivated crops, they bear the marks of a long evolutionary history followed by recent human selection, breeding and improvement.

A May 2025 paper published in the journal Horticulture Research by researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and collaborating institutions, describes a new way to reconstruct the deep evolutionary history of the cultivated strawberry, Fragaria × ananassa. Their work helps explain how the modern strawberry acquired its complex octoploid genome — not by magic, but by ordinary, natural processes of genome duplication, hybridisation and subsequent evolutionary divergence.

Cultivated strawberries, like many crop plants, are polyploids. Humans are normally diploid, with two sets of chromosomes; cultivated strawberries are octoploid, with eight sets. In the notation used by geneticists, humans are 2n, while the cultivated strawberry is 2n = 8x = 56. This genomic complexity is the outcome of a series of ancient whole-genome duplication and hybridisation events in which entire chromosome sets from different ancestral lineages were brought together in one organism.

Whole-genome duplication does not require supernatural intervention. It is a well-known natural process, especially common in plant evolution. Initially, it duplicates existing genetic material, but those extra gene copies then provide raw material for mutation, altered regulation, divergence, subfunctionalisation and neofunctionalisation. In other words, duplicated genes can be retained, modified, silenced, repurposed or combined in new ways. Hybridisation adds another layer of novelty by bringing together different genomes, producing new combinations of genes and regulatory networks in a single evolutionary lineage.

The research team disentangled the strawberry’s complex polyploid genome by exploiting the evolutionary signatures left by long terminal repeat retrotransposons, or LTR-RTs. These mobile genetic elements accumulate in genomes over time and can act rather like molecular time stamps. By comparing patterns of similarity between these elements across chromosomes, the researchers were able to reconstruct the strawberry’s subgenome architecture and infer the timing of major genome-merging events.

Using this serial similarity matrix method, the researchers found evidence for three successive allopolyploidisation events in the evolutionary history of the cultivated strawberry genome: first between about 3.1 and 4.2 million years ago, then between about 1.9 and 3.1 million years ago, and finally between about 0.8 and 1.9 million years ago. The result is a genome composed of multiple subgenomes with different ancestry, interacting and evolving together over time.

What is perfectly clear from this research is that new genetic variation and genomic complexity can arise through entirely natural mechanisms. Polyploidy, hybridisation, mutation, transposable elements and selection are not gaps in biology into which a magic creator needs to be inserted; they are part of the normal machinery of evolution. The cultivated strawberry is not evidence of special creation, but of a long, traceable evolutionary history later shaped by human cultivation.

Creationism Refuted - Why Science Works While Religions Ignore Failures

Credit: Tobias Baur / Pexels

Credit: Tobias Baur / Pexels

Dark diversity helped solve Darwin’s 160-year-old puzzle | University of Tartu

A paper recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) by an international team that included researchers from the University of Tartu, Estonia, offers a solution to a conundrum in evolutionary ecology first identified by Charles Darwin more than 160 years ago: Darwin’s naturalisation conundrum.

The problem concerns why some introduced species successfully establish themselves in a new environment while others fail. Darwin recognised two apparently contradictory possibilities, both of which make sense in evolutionary terms. On the one hand, a newcomer closely related to local species might succeed because its relatives show that the environment is suitable for that general way of life. In other words, similarity to the local community could be a sign of pre-adaptation. On the other hand, a newcomer might be more successful if it is unlike the resident species, because it avoids direct competition and exploits resources the local community is not already using.

So which is it? Should a successful immigrant species resemble the local species, or should it be different from them? That is Darwin’s naturalisation conundrum.

These are the sorts of paradoxes science thrives on because they expose a gap in understanding and invite investigation. They are not waved aside as mysteries, nor protected from scrutiny by declaring them ineffable. They are problems to be solved by evidence.

That is in stark contrast to religion, where glaring contradictions are often preserved rather than resolved. Christianity, for example, asks its followers to believe simultaneously in an omniscient god and in human free will. Yet the contradiction can be exposed with a simple question: if God has always known that you will eat fish for dinner tomorrow, can you choose steak instead? If yes, then God did not know after all; if no, then you were never free to choose. Either answer undermines a central plank of Christian theology, because without free will there can be no meaningful original sin, no need for salvation, and no coherent reason for the Jesus story.

Another awkward question is why an omniscient god supposedly waited until about 2,000 years ago to arrange the sacrifice of Jesus as the mechanism for saving humanity. If this god had always known that a blood sacrifice would be needed, why wait through countless generations of human suffering before arranging it? Why not solve the alleged problem at the beginning? Did God simply stand by while millions died without that supposed salvation, or did it merely take until the first or second century CE for priests to invent a theological explanation for the Jesus story?

And so the list goes on. Can an omnipotent god create an object too heavy for it to lift? Can God lie? If God claims to be omniscient, how can it know that there is nothing it does not know? And if it is aware of not knowing something, then it is not omniscient. Such questions are usually met not with answers but with evasion, because religions have no neutral referee. They have only opinion, assertion and authority.

Science is different because evidence can arbitrate between competing explanations. This is why science tends to converge on a single answer while religions fragment into sects, denominations and, sometimes, mutually hostile factions.

In the case of Darwin’s naturalisation conundrum, the team, including Wen-gang Zhang and Professor of Botany Meelis Pärtel of the University of Tartu, examined the evidence in the form of a remarkable 340-year dataset from Swedish lakes, recording both successful and unsuccessful fish introductions. This allowed the researchers to test, with unusual precision, what determines whether an introduced species establishes itself.

Refuting Creationism - How Modern Humans Benefitted from Meeting Denisovans

AI-generated Image (Chat GPT 5.5 Thinking)

Image provided by Tucci Lab

Genomes from Oceania offer new clues to human evolution | Yale News

A paper recently published by a Yale University-led team in the journal Science shows how Denisovan genes in the people of Near Oceania have contributed especially to their immune systems, and so have continued to influence human evolution for tens of thousands of years.

Who would be a creationist? It must be galling to wait so eagerly for that great day when biologists finally announce the collapse of evolutionary theory and admit that a better explanation of the observable evidence is one involving unevidenced magic entities doing conjuring tricks with chemistry and physics. That would make biology the first science to abandon natural explanations, ignore Occam’s Razor, and adopt magic as a basic principle. Sadly for creationists, that long-promised day shows no sign of arriving, despite having been predicted any day now for more than half a century.

But then, what would creationism be without a dogged refusal to change its mind when the evidence demands it, and the childish belief that the evidence itself must be part of some vast conspiracy to test the strength of faith? That is not science; it is apologetics dressed up in a lab coat.

The problem, as always, is that reality refuses to conform. The universe continues to produce evidence contradicting creationism and confirming the complex evolution of humans over deep time: migration, isolation, adaptation, bottlenecks, and repeated remixing with genes from other archaic human lineages, themselves the products of long evolutionary histories.

The real-world evidence written into our genomes is that most non-African human populations carry remnants of Neanderthal DNA, while Denisovan ancestry is especially marked in Near Oceanians and in some Asian populations. There is also evidence that Neanderthals and Denisovans themselves met and interbred in central Asia. Human evolution was not a simple ladder, still less a single act of special creation, but a branching, merging, reticulated history of populations moving, separating, adapting and sometimes meeting again.

Some of these archaic genes appear to have mattered because they were useful. In particular, they are often associated with immune responses to pathogenic bacteria and viruses. This makes evolutionary sense: Denisovan-like populations had already adapted to environments outside Africa, including their local burden of pathogens. When the ancestors of present-day Near Oceanians inherited some of that genetic variation through introgression, beneficial variants could be retained by natural selection, even while many other archaic variants were gradually lost.

The Yale-led team filled an important gap in our understanding of human evolution by sequencing the genomes of 177 individuals from 12 distinct populations in different parts of Near Oceania — the southwestern Pacific region that includes Papua New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands — and analysing them alongside 1,284 previously published genomes from individuals worldwide.

They found evidence that the ancestors of Near Oceanian populations interbred with at least three distinct Denisovan-like groups. They also identified thousands of archaic variants that affect how genes are switched on or off, with a notable concentration in immune and antiviral pathways. In other words, Denisovan DNA is not merely a fossil remnant in the genome; in some populations, it is still helping to shape biology today.

Refuting Creationism - A Vast Global Fungal Plant-Support System - Unintelligently 'Designed' Over 480 Million Years [Updated]

Mycorrhizal fungi under the microscope at AMOLF biophysics institute in Amsterdam. The circular structures are spores. Color is altered for legibility.

Credit: Tomás Munita

New global research maps underground fungal infrastructure for the first time - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

An international team of researchers, led by ecologist Justin Stewart of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, has announced the creation of the first global map of the vast underground infrastructure formed by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. The team has published its findings in Science.

These are not fungi in the familiar sense of mushrooms, but microscopic, thread-like filaments, or hyphae, which form intimate partnerships with plant roots. The figures involved are astonishing. The researchers estimate that the upper layer of the world’s soils contains about 110 quadrillion kilometres of these fungal filaments — enough to stretch from Earth to the sun nearly three-quarters of a billion times, or there and back about 368 million times. The networks also transport roughly 4 billion tonnes of CO₂-equivalent into soils each year, about 11% of annual human-caused CO₂ emissions.

This is not a new evolutionary phenomenon. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are part of an ancient plant-fungal symbiosis that appears to date back roughly 475–480 million years, close to the origin of the first land plants. That does not mean, of course, that the individual fungal filaments mapped today are hundreds of millions of years old, but that this type of mutualistic relationship has been evolving since the early colonisation of land by plants.

One sure way to tell that biological systems are not intelligently designed is not simply that they are complex, but that they are historically contingent. They carry the marks of accumulated compromises, improvised workarounds and layered dependencies. Evolution can only modify what already exists; it cannot scrap an imperfect arrangement and begin again with a clean sheet. Its only test is whether a change works well enough, in a particular environment, to leave more descendants than the alternatives.

None of these constraints would apply to an intelligent designer, still less to the omnipotent, omniscient, perfect designer imagined — though rarely named explicitly — by creationists trying to disguise fundamentalist creationism as science. A designed global life-support system would not be expected to emerge through countless local bargains between plants and fungi, mediated by nutrient stress, carbon demand, soil chemistry, competition, disturbance and natural selection.

So we can be as sure as it is possible to be that this vast, intricate and globally important biological infrastructure was not intelligently designed. It evolved because both partners gained from the exchange: plants provided carbon fixed by photosynthesis; fungi extended the reach of plant roots, supplying water and mineral nutrients, especially phosphorus and nitrogen. Over deep time, those local mutual advantages became part of the living fabric of terrestrial ecosystems.

The paper in Science is accompanied by a news release from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, which includes a link to an interactive map of this global fungal infrastructure.

Unintelligent Design - Evolution By Viral Infection

Pomacea canaliculata egg clusters above the water line.

Apple Snail, Pomacea canaliculata

By KENPEI, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Lingnan University joint research analyses genome of global agricultural pest ‘apple snail’: Ancient viral gene-driven evolution of ‘terrestrial oviposition’ ability - Press Release | Lingnan University

A paper recently published in the journal Advanced Science, by researchers including Assistant Professor Jack Chi-Ho Ip, from Lingnan University, Hong Kong, is deeply problematic for creationists, not only because it describes a process that took place over an immense period of time incompatible with the biblical narrative, but also because it deals with a mechanism for evolution that cannot be waved aside as mere "variation within a kind", or something creationists like to dismiss as "micro-evolution".

Creationists continue to insist that large-scale evolution does not happen, so everything must have been specially created more or less as it is, with only limited variation within the "kind" — a term always left conspicuously undefined, so the goalposts can be moved whenever the evidence becomes inconvenient. This is despite the well-attested mechanisms by which biodiversity arises, including classical Darwinian natural selection acting on inherited variation, and genetic drift, in which chance changes in allele frequencies can lead to a neutral mutation becoming fixed in, or eliminated from, a population gene pool.

There is also the founder effect, where a non-representative sample of a population becomes isolated from the parent population, usually by a physical or ecological barrier. The new population therefore begins with a different allele-frequency profile from the population from which it came. Then there is hybridisation, where hybrid offspring can, in some circumstances, become reproductively isolated from both parent species, forming a new genetically distinct population or species.

And lastly, we have horizontal gene transfer, where an organism acquires genetic material from another biological lineage in its environment. This is especially familiar in bacteria, but it also occurs in animals, often through viruses. Retroviruses are particularly important in this respect because they insert a DNA copy of their genome into that of their host. Over time, the viral sequence may be disabled by mutation, or the host may evolve a defence against it. Either way, the remnant of the virus can become part of the host genome, where it is free to mutate over time. Occasionally, such inherited viral DNA is exapted for a new function, creating useful new genetic information without the slightest need for supernatural assistance. One well-known example is syncytin, derived from ancient retroviral genes, now involved in the formation and function of the mammalian placenta.

Now researchers at Hong Kong's Lingnan University and their collaborators have shown that a viral-derived gene in apple snails is probably involved in their ability to lay eggs out of water — a key adaptation in the evolution of aerial egg-laying and one reason some apple snails have become such successful invasive pests. The gene, associated with the perivitelline fluid surrounding the developing embryo, was probably acquired by the ancestor of the Ampullariidae during the Jurassic. It would be interesting to see a creationist explain how acquiring a gene from an entirely unrelated viral lineage can be described as "variation within a kind". It would also be interesting to see them explain why an intelligent designer would need to borrow viral genetic material to equip a snail to lay eggs above the waterline.

Refuting Creationism - Evolving Millipedes Crawl All Over Creationism

Hirudicryptus canariensis

Photo by Rafael Garcia and Paul Marek, Virginia Tech

Hirudicryptus canariensis (left) Siphoniulus neotropicus (microscopic image at right) are the two rare millipedes whose DNA helped researchers complete the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders.

Photos by Rafael Garcia and Paul Marek for Virginia Tech.

Ancient millipedes still had secrets to tell | EurekAlert!

A paper published today (12 June 2026) in Current Biology is almost guaranteed to upset any creationists with the courage to read it and the ability to understand it. Written by an international team led by Associate Professor Paul Marek and Dr Luisa F. Vasquez-Valverde of Virginia Tech, it reports the completion of the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders, including two rare groups whose DNA had never previously been included in a phylogenetic analysis.

Millipedes were amongst the earliest animals to colonise the land, arriving long before vertebrates had made the transition from water to land. According to the researchers, they beat vertebrates onto land by more than 80 million years. As detritivores, they helped to establish early terrestrial ecosystems by breaking down decaying organic matter and recycling nutrients, gradually helping to create soils in which later plant communities could develop.

For more than a century, biologists have known that two rare groups of millipedes — Siphoniulida and Siphonocryptida — existed, but without fresh specimens it was impossible to analyse their DNA and confirm where they belonged in the millipede family tree. One of the groups includes species barely a centimetre long that spend their entire lives underground; the other is known from only a few locations.

Members of the team therefore travelled to Los Tuxtlas, Mexico, and the Spanish Canary Islands to collect Siphoniulus neotropicus and Hirudicryptus canariensis, the two millipedes whose DNA had not previously been included in an evolutionary analysis. By sequencing DNA from these groups, comparing hundreds of genes across 82 millipede species, and combining those results with evidence from 29 fossils, the researchers were able to determine where the groups fit into millipede history and when their lineages emerged.

The result was especially interesting because one of the supposed “orders”, Siphonocryptida, appears not to be a separate order after all, but part of an existing lineage. The other, Siphoniulida, could finally be placed among its closest relatives on the millipede evolutionary timeline. The analysis also pushed the likely origin of millipedes back to nearly 460 million years ago — roughly 35 million years earlier than the oldest known millipede fossils.

This is bad news for creationists for at least three reasons:

• It shows these arthropods had their origin hundreds of millions of years before their mythical “Creation Week”.
• It shows a long history of descent from a common origin, just as the Theory of Evolution predicts.
• It shows the researchers were entirely dependent on evolutionary theory to frame the question, predict relationships, interpret the DNA and fossil evidence, and explain the results — with no hint that they found evolution inadequate and no need to invoke magic, special creation, or the long-promised “collapse of Darwinism” that creationists have been assuring their followers is imminent, and has been for more than half a century.

Refuting Creationism - No Sex Please, We're Ediacaran

A lack of sex held back life’s diversity for millions of years | University of Cambridge

Try debating with a creationist on social media and before long you will be challenged to explain how sexual reproduction evolved, because there must have been a first male and a first female. A regular form of this, betraying the abysmal ignorance of the creationist, is the childish attempt at a "Gotcha!" with, "How long did the first man have to wait for the first woman to evolve?"

Like so many creationist preconceptions about what evolution is and what evolutionary biologists claim, this assumes that each species somehow evolves without ancestry, so everything about it must have arisen spontaneously in a single individual or, in this case, in a single couple. There is no awareness of inheritance from common ancestors, nor of the slow accumulation and honing of traits over time. Presumably, the questioner thinks adult men and women being magicked into existence without parents is a perfectly rational belief.

In reality, sexual reproduction did not begin with men and women. A form of sex almost certainly arose long before animals, among single-celled eukaryotes, and need not have involved anything recognisable as male and female. At its simplest, sex is the mixing of genetic material from different individuals. The interesting question, from the point of view of evolutionary biology, is not where the first man and first woman came from, but what advantage genetic mixing had over cloning or other asexual forms of reproduction, such that it became the predominant, although far from exclusive, method of reproduction among complex organisms.

Now two researchers from the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, UK, believe they have part of the answer, and have just published their findings in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The paper, by Dr Emily G. Mitchell and Professor Andrea Manica, examines how reproductive mode affected competition, dispersal and diversity among Ediacaran animal communities. It is accompanied by a research news item from the University of Cambridge.

The Ediacaran Period, roughly 635-539 million years ago, saw some of the earliest known large animals. Many of them would look nothing like any modern animal: they were sessile, lacked mouths and obvious digestive systems, and probably absorbed nutrients directly from the surrounding seawater. In the relatively benign conditions of the Ediacaran oceans, with limited predation and reduced competition, there was less pressure for rapid diversification. As a result, these early animal communities appear to have changed only slowly for millions of years before the later burst of diversity that preceded and fed into the Cambrian radiation.

But, as they began to colonise the shallower seas and coastal regions, the Ediacaran biota would have encountered increasingly unstable conditions with tides, storms and fluctuating temperatures and nutrient levels, so there would have been competition and selection pressure to adapt to these more hostile conditions. And this is what we see in the fossil record as the Ediacaran biota produced a second wave of more diverse forms, leading eventually to the 'Cambrian Explosion'.

Previous work has shown that some of these Ediacaran organisms reproduced asexually by sending out stolons or runners, rather like strawberry plants do today. Their offspring were clones, physically connected to the parent colony and genetically very similar. That can work well in a stable environment, but it has a serious evolutionary limitation: it restricts the mixing of genes from different lineages. Beneficial mutations that arise in separate clonal lines cannot easily be combined in the same genome, so lineages compete with one another instead of pooling their evolutionary gains.

Sexual reproduction changes that. It does not create evolution by magic; it provides natural selection with more combinations on which to act. Beneficial alleles that arise in different lineages can be brought together in the same genome instead of being trapped in competing clonal lines. This is the Fisher-Muller advantage of recombination: sex can turn evolutionary change from a slow serial process into a more rapid parallel one.