Refuting Creationism - Eocene Footprints In Antarctica Trample Creationism In The Mud

Artist's impression of the small mammal that left its mark in Antarctica

Credit: Álvaro Medina

This is what the small mammal that left its mark in Antarctica might have looked like.

Credit: Álvaro Medina

First Terrestrial Mammal Footprint Discovered in Antarctica

Sometimes, a small footprint exposes an enormous problem for creationism. In this case, it is a partial impression preserved in approximately 55.5-million-year-old volcanic sediment on what is now King George Island, Antarctica. Its age alone places it far outside the few thousand years allowed by a literal reading of Genesis. But its setting tells an equally significant story: an Antarctic landscape capable of supporting terrestrial mammals, profoundly different from the frozen continent we know today.

The discovery, described by Héctor Mansilla-Vera and colleagues in Polar Biology, comprises a partial forefoot-and-hindfoot impression. The researchers interpret its maker as a small carnivorous mammal, possibly a sparassodont—an extinct relative of marsupials otherwise known from South America. That identification remains tentative: the incomplete trace cannot establish a particular species or confidently identify the group. Nevertheless, it records a mammal walking across an Antarctic substrate, providing evidence of its presence where it lived, rather than bones or teeth transported after death. Javier Gelfo’s account of the research explains both the interpretation and its limitations.

This animal inhabited a warmer, forested Antarctica that retained land connections with South America. Antarctica was already at high southern latitudes; its subsequent transformation cannot simply be explained as a warm continent drifting towards the pole. The larger story involves the breakup of Gondwana, the loss of connections between continents, changing ocean circulation and a changing atmosphere.

As tectonic movements opened and deepened southern ocean gateways, they altered the movement of water and heat around Antarctica. Falling atmospheric carbon dioxide also played a major role in the cooling that culminated in extensive Antarctic glaciation around 34 million years ago. Geography and climate interacted over geological time to transform the conditions under which life could survive. Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

The challenge to creationism is therefore more precise than simply showing that Earth has changed. Biblical literalists themselves invoke catastrophic change through their Flood narrative. What confronts them here is evidence belonging to a much longer, independently reconstructed history: continents separating, connections disappearing, climates shifting and ecosystems being transformed over tens of millions of years. An appeal to an originally “perfect” creation explains none of those details.

This tiny trace offers a glimpse of life on a planet whose geography and habitability have never been permanent fixtures. Understanding it requires geology, palaeontology and climate science working together—and the willingness to distinguish what the evidence demonstrates from what it merely suggests.

An account and discussion of this research by Antonio García was published in La Brújula Verde. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism Refuted - How LUCA Got It's Enzymes - No Magic Required

Shared protein folds in primordial sea

AI-generated image (ChatGPT-6 Astra)

Metabolic networks provide clues about the earliest stages of enzyme evolution | Science Tokyo

Metabolic Reactions Reveal Early Enzyme Evolution

One of creationism’s more persistent claims is that evolution cannot produce “new genetic information” because doing so would violate the second law of thermodynamics. The proposed escape from this imaginary prohibition is, inevitably, a supernatural information-provider. But the second law contains no ban on mutations producing new biological functions. It concerns entropy: the total entropy of an isolated system cannot decrease. Living organisms exchange energy and matter with their surroundings, and their activities increase the entropy of those surroundings. Building DNA, growing a leaf and evolving a new enzyme require no suspension of physics. The thermodynamic principles are explained here.

The argument also trades on treating genetic “information” as though it were a mysterious substance that only intelligence can manufacture. Genes are physical sequences of DNA, and those sequences can change, duplicate and recombine. Following duplication, one copy can retain an established function while the other accumulates changes that enable a different or more specialised activity. Natural selection can favour useful variants. A new biological capability need not require an entirely new molecular structure, still less a miraculous delivery of instructions.

This is what makes a study by Tatsuya Corlett and colleagues, published in PNAS, particularly relevant. The researchers combined metabolic-reaction networks with protein-fold data to infer the relative order in which enzyme structures emerged. Their model points to a prominent early role for α/β folds—structures containing both alpha helices and beta sheets—and suggests that most oxygen-using enzymes arose through the adaptation of existing folds as oxygen became available. Evolution could expand its biochemical repertoire by modifying structures already present.

The creationist demand for something wholly unprecedented therefore misses how evolution works. Novelty can reside in a changed activity, a different molecular target or a new regulatory relationship. Retaining an ancestral protein framework does not make a newly evolved function any less new. Nor does calling the result “information” establish a thermodynamic obstacle to its origin.

The research also extends the investigation of our shared biochemical ancestry towards the interval before LUCA, the last universal common ancestor of living organisms. LUCA was not necessarily the first life: its enzymes already had an evolutionary history. These results are model-based historical inferences, rather than recovered pre-LUCA proteins or a direct measurement of increasing genetic information. Nevertheless, they offer a way to investigate that earlier history through the organisation of metabolism itself.

Creationism Refuted - Complex Symbiosis Between Animals And Microbes - 550 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Ediacaran tubular fossil Conotubus (inset: symbiotic chemosynthetic bacteria)

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 6 Astra)

Ancient fossil from China reveals animal-microbe partnerships dating back 550 million years

Some 550 million years ago, long before the world existed according to a literal reading of Genesis, an early animal may already have been exploiting the biochemical abilities of bacteria. New research on the Ediacaran tubular fossil Conotubus suggests that animal–microbe partnerships have a history extending back towards the beginnings of animal life. For creationism, the inconvenience is twofold: the immense timescale, and a biological arrangement that makes excellent evolutionary sense but raises awkward questions about supposedly intelligent design.

The study, led by Zhenfei Wang and Yongbo Peng of Nanjing University and published in PNAS, examined sulphur and molybdenum isotope signatures in fossils from southern China. These suggest an association with sulphur-oxidising bacteria, potentially supplying nutrition and helping the animal tolerate toxic, sulphide-rich conditions. This is a geochemical inference, rather than the discovery of preserved bacterial partners. If the interpretation is correct, however, it extends the fossil evidence for animal–microbe symbiosis backwards by roughly 100 million years, as co-author Peter Crockford explains in his account of the research in an article in The Conversation.

Creationists often present such interdependence as evidence of design, as though two organisms benefiting from one another could only be the result of someone planning the arrangement. But this overlooks an obvious question: why would an omniscient designer make an animal dependent on another organism for a useful biochemical function? Why not equip the animal itself with the necessary machinery? A partnership introduces additional requirements: the organisms must encounter one another or maintain their association across generations, exchange useful substances, and sustain conditions in which both can function. Each dependency creates something else that can fail.

There is a qualification here. Giving an animal bacterial capabilities would not necessarily be as simple as inserting a few genes into its genome. Genes operate within cellular systems; useful metabolism also requires appropriate regulation, enzymes, transport mechanisms and chemical conditions. Division of labour between organisms can therefore be highly effective. Nevertheless, these are constraints facing organisms produced by evolution. An allegedly omnipotent designer, able to specify the entire system from the outset, cannot readily be excused by invoking the limitations of inherited cellular machinery. Complexity alone is no evidence of intelligent planning, especially when it includes dependence on a separate organism to supply an essential service.

As I argued in The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax complexity is not the evidence for intelligent design that creationists like to think since the hallmark of good, intelligent design is minimal complexity. Complexity is evidence of evolved systems where suboptimal solutions to problems often need additional layers of complexity to mitigate failures.

Malevolent Design - How The Success Of A Honey Bee Parasite Is Assured - Malevolent Design Or Evolution?

Varroa desructor female.
Dorsal view (top); ventral view (bottom)

By USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab from Beltsville, Maryland, USA - Varroa destructor, 1_2019-09-06-19.12.07 ZS PMax UDR, Public Domain, Link

Varroa mites on honey bee pupa.

By Unknown author - Kika De La Garza Subtropical Agricultural Research Center
Weslaco, Texas, USA, Public Domain, Link

Varroa mites escape the evolutionary trap of haplodiploidy | Nature Communications

Creationists like to portray living things as products of a single act of creation in which every species was equipped with its characteristic form and method of reproduction from the outset. In that view, reproductive systems should be fixed features of separately created “kinds”, not historically contingent arrangements that can be remodelled by natural selection.

Biology reveals something very different. Even such fundamental characteristics as sex determination, chromosome number and the balance between sexual and asexual reproduction can evolve. Existing developmental mechanisms are modified, discarded or repurposed according to whether the resulting variations leave more descendants. Evolution has no predetermined direction, no obligation to proceed from “simple” to “complex” and no rule forbidding a lineage from reacquiring a feature resembling one possessed by its ancestors.

An international team of researchers has now discovered an especially striking example in Varroa destructor, the globally invasive parasitic mite that feeds on honeybees and transmits damaging viruses between them. Its reproductive system appears to have reversed what was once regarded as an evolutionary one-way street.

Like many mites, bees, wasps and ants, Varroa was believed to be haplodiploid. In conventional haplodiploidy, females develop from fertilised eggs and possess two sets of chromosomes, while males develop from unfertilised eggs and possess only one. Consequently, a haploid male can transmit only the single copy of each gene inherited from his mother.

That should present Varroa with a serious evolutionary handicap. A female mite enters a honeybee brood cell shortly before it is sealed and produces one son followed by several daughters. The siblings mate with one another inside the cell, producing generation after generation of extreme inbreeding. Combined with the population bottlenecks associated with invading new hosts and new geographical regions, this should rapidly erode genetic diversity and limit the parasite’s ability to adapt.

However, by tracing genetic variants through three-generation pedigrees, Nurit Eliash and colleagues discovered that Varroa is not conventionally haplodiploid after all. Its females produce sons parthenogenetically, but those sons initially inherit both copies of their mother’s genome and are effectively genetic clones of her. Although DNA is subsequently eliminated from some of the males’ body cells, their reproductive lineage retains access to both maternal copies, either of which can be transmitted to a daughter.

Refuting Creationism - The Pages Of Gospels Record Evolution Over 3,500 Years

Created in Northumbria in the eighth century, this copy of the Epistles of St Paul is among the oldest books held in the Trinity College Cambridge Library.

Credit: the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge

DNA of the ancient virus was extracted from millennium old sheepskin Bible parchment, now in the collections of the University of Cambridge.

Credit: the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge.

Hidden DNA in medieval gospels reveal history of deadly livestock virus - University College Dublin

Sometimes history leaves two very different records on the same page. One was deliberately written in ink by medieval scribes, copying stories that religious authorities declared to be sacred truth. The other was written unintentionally in molecules: fragments of viral DNA preserved in the animal skin on which those stories were written.

Unlike the supernatural claims in the text, this second record does not depend on faith, revelation or ecclesiastical authority. It can be extracted, sequenced and compared with DNA recovered from other archaeological specimens and from viruses circulating today. Ironically, manuscripts intended to preserve the Christian message have also preserved independently verifiable evidence of evolution.

As reported in Science Advances, an international research team led by scientists at University College Dublin has now recovered DNA from sheeppox virus (Capripoxvirus sheeppox) in medieval parchment manuscripts, including the approximately 1,000-year-old York Gospels, the earlier Corpus Glossary and other codices from Britain and continental Europe. Because parchment was manufactured from the skins of sheep, goats and cattle, each sheet can retain a molecular record of the animal from which it came—including traces of pathogens infecting it when it died. In several manuscripts, viral DNA occurred on several pages, suggesting that the skins of infected animals had been used in their manufacture.

Creationism In Crisis - Scientists Witness How First Complex Cells May Have Formed

3D segmentation analysis of the tomogram showing the identified inner membrane (blue), outer layer (teal), putative ribosomes (gray), extracellular fibers (light orange), and intracellular filament (light green).

From: Nobs S, Johnson M, Williams T, et al. (2026)

A composite image of the Asgard archaeon (inset) found within the microbial mats of Shark Bay, Western Australia.

Image: Iain Duggin, Debnath Ghosal, Brendan Burns

‘First contact’ that may have led to complex life on Earth finally witnessed by scientists

The origin of the eukaryotic cell was one of the most consequential transitions in the history of life. Every animal, plant, fungus and protist is composed of eukaryotic cells—cells containing a nucleus and an elaborate internal organisation that is absent from bacteria and archaea. Without that ancient evolutionary innovation, there would have been no plants, no animals and, of course, no humans.

Yet eukaryotic cells appear not to have arisen through the sudden creation of an entirely new kind of organism. The evidence increasingly indicates that they emerged through an extended evolutionary association between previously independent microorganisms. An archaeal host formed a close relationship with at least one bacterium, and a descendant of an alphaproteobacterium eventually became the mitochondrion—the energy-processing organelle still present in almost every eukaryotic cell. Other cellular features evolved before, during or after this extraordinary merger.

Precisely how that relationship began remains one of evolutionary biology’s most difficult questions. The event occurred billions of years ago, microorganisms rarely leave informative fossils, and the organisms involved have long since disappeared. Scientists must therefore reconstruct the process by combining comparative genomics, cell biology, phylogenetics and observations of living microorganisms whose biology may preserve clues to those ancient interactions.

Now an international research team led by scientists at the University of New South Wales, the University of Technology Sydney and the University of Melbourne has observed something tantalisingly suggestive. As described in an open-access paper in Current Biology, the researchers cultivated a previously unknown member of the Asgard archaea from a microbial mat associated with the stromatolites of Gathaagudu, or Shark Bay, Western Australia.

Refuting Creationism - The Evolution of Complexity - No Magic Needed

Stomata on a leaf surface

Credit: Emilio Ermini, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Stomata on a leaf surface.

How plants evolved a molecular switch to cope with heat

Creationists routinely portray complex biochemical pathways as systems that must have been designed as complete working units. Remove one component, they argue, and the system ceases to function; therefore, by the presuppositional false dichotomy that characterises creationism, all the components must have been assembled simultaneously by an intelligent designer.

Evolution does not work by assembling entirely new systems from nothing, however. It modifies what is already present. Existing proteins acquire new interactions, mutations alter their stability or activity, and old signalling pathways are recruited for additional purposes. A comparatively small change can connect existing components and produce a new, environmentally responsive function.

An elegant example has now been described by Shao-Li Yang and colleagues from VIB, Ghent University, KU Leuven and collaborating institutions. Their study, published in Nature Plants, identifies a molecular pathway that helps Arabidopsis thaliana cool its leaves during heat stress. It also shows how evolution produced the regulatory switch by altering the electrical charge at a particular position in an existing protein.

Plants cannot escape into the shade when conditions become dangerously hot. One of their principal cooling mechanisms is transpiration: stomata—microscopic pores in the leaf surface—open, allowing water to evaporate and remove heat. This resembles sweating in animals, although excessive stomatal opening also risks dehydration. Plants must therefore regulate the process rather than simply leave their stomata permanently open.

The newly discovered pathway centres on UBP24, a protein belonging to a family of enzymes known as deubiquitylases. Ubiquitin molecules attached to a protein can help to determine its location, activity or destruction; deubiquitylases remove those molecular tags. Under high-temperature conditions, B4 RAF kinases activate another kinase, OPEN STOMATA 1, or OST1. OST1 then attaches a phosphate group to the amino acid serine at position 360 in UBP24.

Refuting Creationism - Refining The Details - How Did The Common Ancestor of Hominins And Chimps Climb Trees?

Speculative depiction of the last common ancestor of hominins and chimpanzees

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Researchers observed and confirmed with measurements that wild sooty mangabey monkeys in an Ivory Coast forest display foot bone flexibility that facilitates vertical climbing up skinny tree trunks to hide, forage or sleep.

Photo: W. Scott McGraw.

Last common ancestor, no matter its feet, could have been a vertical climber

One of the standard creationist tactics is to portray disagreement between scientists as evidence that the science itself is unreliable. Yet disagreement over the details of an evolutionary history is not disagreement over whether evolution occurred. On the contrary, it is often the means by which science advances: competing explanations are identified, their testable implications are examined, and evidence is gathered to determine which assumptions remain tenable.

A long-running example concerns the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, whose descendant lineages diverged some six to seven million years ago. Palaeoanthropologists agree that such an ancestor existed; the disagreement concerns what it looked like and how it moved. In particular, was its foot more like that of a modern African ape, with an ankle capable of substantial upward flexion during vertical climbing, or more like that of a monkey adapted principally to moving along branches?

That question matters because the evolution of habitual bipedalism cannot be understood without reconstructing the locomotion from which it developed. Fossilised foot and ankle bones preserve anatomical structure but not behaviour, so palaeoanthropologists must infer what their owners could do by comparing them with living primates. One influential assumption was that a primate needed a chimpanzee-like ankle to climb vertical tree trunks proficiently. A fossil with a more monkey-like foot might therefore be interpreted as evidence against frequent vertical climbing.

Luke D. Fannin, Carmen Pape and W. Scott McGraw have now tested that assumption with evidence from living animals. For their study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they recorded wild sooty mangabeys, Cercocebus atys, climbing trees in Côte d’Ivoire’s Taï Forest and measured the movements of their feet. Mangabeys lack the highly flexible ankle of a chimpanzee, yet they achieved an average of about 46 degrees of upward flexion through the middle of the foot—virtually the same range that chimpanzees achieve at the ankle.

In other words, two differently constructed feet can solve the same biomechanical problem in different ways. Chimpanzees flex chiefly at the ankle; mangabeys obtain comparable movement from the midfoot. This is a striking example of convergent evolution: similar selection pressures have produced functionally equivalent performances by modifying different parts of an inherited anatomical system.

Refuting Creationism - How Our Cells Communicate Was Inherited From Our Bacterial Ancestors

Ancient Calcium Signaling in Cyanobacterial Cells

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Even ancient bacteria possessed intercellular communication structures like humans today | CMFI News

The human body is not an organism assembled from newly invented components according to a unique design. It is the latest product of a continuous evolutionary history in which old molecules, old regulatory systems and old cellular capabilities have repeatedly been modified and recruited for new purposes.

Even something as fundamental to our existence as communication between neighbouring cells has roots extending far back into the microbial world.

Our tissues depend upon cells exchanging ions, metabolites and signals through specialised connections. In animals, structures known as gap junctions form channels between adjacent cells, allowing them to coordinate their activity. They are essential, for example, to the synchronised contraction of heart muscle. Calcium ions also serve as important intracellular signals controlling an enormous range of cellular processes.

It might be tempting to regard such coordinated communication as an innovation requiring the complexity of animals or, at the very least, nucleated eukaryotic cells. However, an international research team has shown that a strikingly similar functional principle operates in filament-forming cyanobacteria—organisms belonging to an ancient bacterial lineage.

As the researchers report in The EMBO Journal, the cyanobacterium Nostoc sp. PCC 7120 forms long filaments in which neighbouring cells are linked by structures called septal junctions. These pass through arrays of tiny pores in the peptidoglycan partitions between cells, permitting metabolites and signalling molecules to move along the filament.

Creationism Refuted - Eurasian Homo sapiens Stopped Eating Insects - Thousands Of Years Before 'Creation Week'

Insects in Chang Moi, Mueang Chiang Mai District, Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Credit: mohigan. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

European Homo sapiens ate fewer insects than Neanderthals and tropical populations - Institut de Biologia Evolutiva - CSIC UPF (UPF)

Humans are strange creatures. While we recoil at the thought of tucking into a dish of sautéed maggots, fried grasshoppers or other insects, we happily eat their close arthropod relatives, crabs, lobsters and prawns, and yet the evidence is that this has only been so for Northern Eurasians for about the last 9,000 year.

People are also strange in another way: despite all the evidence to the contrary and with no supporting evidence at all, there are people who believe the whole of history can be compressed into a few thousand years and that animals can be created by magic without ancestors.

For biblical literalists, every human who has ever lived must be squeezed into the few thousand years since the supposed creation of the first couple. Yet evidence preserved in something as commonplace as calcified plaque on ancient teeth tells a very different story: one of several human lineages, changing diets, inherited genetic variation and adaptation to contrasting environments over tens of thousands of years.

In a paper published in Science Advances, Manuel Piñero and Pablo Librado of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona combined two independent sources of evidence to investigate the history of human insect-eating, or entomophagy. They searched ancient dental calculus for insect DNA and examined genetic variants affecting our ability to digest chitin—the tough polysaccharide forming much of an insect’s exoskeleton.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution Of Immunity, Longevity And Cancer Resistance In Bats - No Magic Needed

Myotis bats

Little Brown Bat, Myotis lucifugus. Can live up to 35 years, immune to most viruses and rarely develops cancers

Photo © Michael Durham,
Illinois Department of Natural Resources

Clues to longevity may reside in the genomes of long-lived bats - Berkeley News

Creationists routinely claim that mutation cannot produce new genetic information and that complex biological systems must have been separately designed for their allotted purposes. Yet living genomes bear little resemblance to collections of independently engineered components. Genes are duplicated, deleted, rearranged and modified; the resulting variants are tested by natural selection; and the same molecular machinery is repeatedly recruited for several different functions. A new study of bats provides a particularly revealing example of this evolutionary improvisation.

Viruses and their hosts have been engaged in evolutionary arms races for hundreds of millions of years. Viruses evolve ways to enter cells, evade immune responses and appropriate cellular machinery for their own replication, while their hosts evolve countermeasures. From a creationist perspective, this requires an intelligent designer simultaneously to design the viruses, their means of attacking their hosts and the defensive systems needed to resist them. Evolution provides the far simpler explanation: each side imposes selection on the other, with no foresight, overall plan or concern for the suffering caused along the way.

In a paper published in Nature, an international team of researchers assembled near-complete genomes for eight closely related species of Myotis bat and established primary cell lines with which to test some of the genomic findings. The comparison revealed abundant structural variation—including inversions, translocations and gene duplications—within an otherwise strongly conserved arrangement of chromosomes.

The researchers found that bats have responded differently to different classes of virus. Proteins interacting with DNA viruses showed an unusually strong signature of positive selection, whereas genes interacting with RNA viruses were especially prone to gains and losses of copies. One antiviral gene, EIF2AK2, better known as PKR, occurs in one, two or, in one lineage, three copies. The original duplication appears to have arisen near the base of the Myotis radiation, with duplicated and unduplicated forms persisting across species for tens of millions of years. This is new genetic material arising through mutation and subsequently being retained, modified or lost according to its effects—not information supplied fully formed by an external intelligence.

Refuting Creationism - How We Know The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People - Sex Determination In Geckos

Various Geckos

Source: Wikipedia

XY or ZW? Geckos Reveal Evolution's Hidden Playbook

The simplest way to test the claim that the Bible is the inerrant work of an omniscient creator is to compare its account with observable reality. When that is done, its creation stories reflect the limited biological knowledge of their human authors, not omniscience. Genesis 1:27 presents “male and female” as divinely ordained categories for humans, while the wider biblical narrative assumes the familiar arrangement of sexually reproducing males and females among animals; indeed in Genesis 6:19 the Bible unambiguously states all the animals on the Ark were male and female.

Real biology is much less tidy. Many animal species are simultaneous or sequential hermaphrodites; some lineages consist entirely of females and reproduce by parthenogenesis; and many organisms reproduce without sex at all. The biblical authors displayed only the knowledge expected of people living in an ancient pastoral society. An omniscient creator would have known better.

Nor are the mechanisms that determine sex fixed systems established in a single act of creation, with organisms thereafter reproducing only “after their kind”. They are themselves products of evolution. The new gecko study indicates that different lineages have switched repeatedly between genetic sex determination and environmental sex determination, in which conditions such as egg-incubation temperature influence the offspring’s sex. Even genetic sex determination has repeatedly been reinvented, with different ordinary chromosomes recruited independently to become X and Y or Z and W chromosomes. Instead of one immutable system imposed by a designer, geckos exhibit an evolutionary patchwork assembled and repeatedly modified over millions of years.

The familiar mammalian arrangement in which females are XX and males XY is sometimes treated as though it were the inevitable—and therefore designed—way of determining sex. But nature displays no such uniformity. Birds generally use a ZW system, in which females are ZW and males ZZ, while many reptiles dispense with specialised sex chromosomes altogether and allow environmental conditions, particularly incubation temperature, to influence whether an embryo develops as male or female.

Geckos exhibit all three arrangements, sometimes among relatively closely related species. This extraordinary diversity makes them a natural experiment in how sex-determination mechanisms originate, change and disappear during evolution.

In a new study published in *Science*, Yang Zhou and colleagues compared chromosome-level genomes from geckos representing all seven living families. Their reconstruction indicates that gecko lineages have switched between environmental and genetic sex determination at least 23 times. The researchers identified 22 distinct sex-chromosome systems and traced them to 17 different chromosomes in the ancestral gecko genome. Some of those ancestral chromosomes were recruited independently on several separate occasions.

Refuting Creationism - Now It's A Transitional Early Insect - From 324 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Palaeoecological reconstruction of the Carboniferous stem-insect Chosha praecursor

From: Tihelka, E., Vásquez, C., Engel, M.S. et al (32026)

Amphibious stem-insect rewrites the evolutionary history of insect terrestrialization---- Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology Chinese Academy of Sciences

A favourite creationist debating tactic is to point to a gap in the fossil record and pretend that the absence of a known transitional form is evidence that no transition occurred. When a suitable fossil is eventually found, the manoeuvre simply creates two smaller gaps on either side of it—or the fossil is arbitrarily declared to be “fully formed” and therefore not transitional. A simple trick which exposes the ignorance and disingenuity of creationism, is to ask them to describe exactly what they would expect a transition fossil to look like. They tend to abruptly break off the debate, because to answer it would violate two unwritten rules of creationism - never consider being wrong and never state what evidence would cause you to change your mind in case it's produced.

This 'god of the gaps' rhetorical game depends upon treating an inevitably incomplete geological record as though it ought to contain a specimen from every generation of every evolving lineage - something that if it were true, would be hard for science to explain, given what we know of the circumstances in which fossils are formed, which actually predicts that the record will be discontinuous.

The early history of insects has offered particularly fertile ground for this tactic. Molecular-clock studies indicate that hexapods diverged from aquatic crustacean relatives hundreds of millions of years ago, yet their small, delicate bodies were poorly suited to fossilisation, especially in the environments through which they were making the transition onto land. Consequently, there has been a conspicuous interval—the so-called “hexapod gap”—between the earliest evidence of hexapods and the abundance of unmistakable insects in later Carboniferous rocks.

Now, an international team led by Erik Tihelka and Chenyang Cai has described a remarkable fossil that helps to narrow that gap while illustrating how the familiar insect body plan was assembled. The approximately 324-million-year-old animal, named Chosha praecursor, came from the Late Mississippian Tesnus Formation of western Texas. Collected in 1985 and long misidentified as a juvenile crustacean, it remained in a museum collection until examination under cross-polarised light revealed anatomical details that had previously been almost invisible. The findings are reported in Nature.

Refuting Creationism - A Road-Map Of Evolution Over 600 Million Years - From A Common Ancestor

The ever-branching tree of animal Evolution

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 SOL)

Roadmap of animal biodiversity: largest-ever comparison of chromosome-scale genomes

Words such as rules, pathways and highways can become treacherous when scientific findings pass through the hands of religious apologists. A rule, in ordinary speech, suggests someone who made it; a highway suggests an engineer who decided where it should lead. It is therefore easy to anticipate claims that a major new study of animal chromosomes has discovered evidence that evolution follows rules—and that rules must imply a rule-maker directing evolution towards a predetermined goal.

That, however, is not what the researchers have found.

In the largest comparison of chromosome-scale animal genomes yet undertaken, Darrin Schultz and colleagues analysed 5,821 genomes representing 4,454 species in 19 animal phyla. Their study, published in Science Advances, developed what they call “evolutionary genome topology”: a way of mapping the enormous variety of animal genomes according to the organisation and shared ancestry of their chromosomes. The results reveal recognisable, partly irreversible patterns extending back more than 600 million years to the common ancestor of living animals.

The accompanying University of Vienna press release describes these patterns as “evolutionary highways” and says that genomes evolve according to a limited set of “rules”. Those are useful metaphors, but they describe constraints and consequences—not commands, intentions or a plan.

Animal chromosomes can split, fuse and exchange material, but these processes are not free to produce every imaginable arrangement with equal probability. Existing chromosome structure limits what can happen next, while every change becomes part of the starting conditions inherited by subsequent generations. In particular, when ancestral chromosomes fuse and their genes subsequently become intermingled, the original arrangement cannot simply be reconstructed by reversing the fusion. The researchers call this process “fusion-with-mixing”. It makes chromosome evolution path-dependent: where a lineage can readily go next depends partly upon where it has already been.

This is what “rules” means in this context. It no more implies a supernatural rule-maker than the regular formation of crystals implies a crystal designer, or the course taken by a river implies that someone planned its route. Physical and chemical processes have consistent properties; biological structures impose constraints; and inherited history restricts the range of subsequent possibilities. Regular outcomes can emerge from those natural conditions without foresight or intention.

Nor does the statement that genomes “do not change at random” mean that their future has been prescribed. Mutations and chromosome rearrangements can occur without regard to what an organism needs, but randomness does not mean that every conceivable event is equally likely—or even physically possible. Some rearrangements are more readily produced than others; some are lethal or reduce fertility; some survive genetic drift or natural selection; and every surviving arrangement alters the possibilities available to its descendants. Chance operates within constraints, producing statistical patterns rather than fulfilling a programme.

Refuting Creationism - The Slow Evolution and Extinction Of African Megafauna - Over 23 Million Years

Modern African megafauna

A selection of extinct African megaherbivores

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Scarce emergence of new species drove the decline of African megaherbivores | Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales

Africa’s elephants, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses are surviving representatives of a much richer assemblage of giant herbivores that once included such animals as Deinotherium, an elephant relative with downward-curving tusks, and the pig-like anthracotheres, relatives of modern hippopotamuses. These animals were not merely conspicuous members of their ecosystems. As “ecosystem engineers”, megaherbivores—here defined as herbivorous mammals weighing at least one tonne—alter vegetation, disperse seeds, open pathways, create water holes and redistribute nutrients.

Why so much of this diversity disappeared has usually been approached as a question of extinction. Large animals reproduce slowly, require extensive habitats and comparatively large quantities of food, so it seems intuitively reasonable to assume that they must have been especially vulnerable when climates and environments changed. Human hunting has also figured prominently in explanations of the much more recent global disappearance of large mammals.

But the diversity of any group depends upon two processes, not one. Extinction removes species, while speciation produces new ones. Even a lineage with a comparatively modest extinction rate will decline if its species disappear faster than evolutionary divergence can replace them. Conversely, a group can withstand relatively frequent extinctions if new species continue to arise sufficiently rapidly.

A new study published open access in Nature Communications. has now examined both sides of that evolutionary balance. Juan L. Cantalapiedra and colleagues analysed 3,327 African fossil occurrences representing 396 species of herbivorous mammals. Using neural-network models, they reconstructed changes in speciation and extinction over the past 23 million years while considering body size, tooth-crown height, evolutionary relationships and environmental change. Their results challenge the apparently obvious assumption that Africa’s largest herbivores declined because they were inherently more prone to extinction.

In fact, the models indicate that extinction rates were generally somewhat lower among the largest species. High-crowned teeth, which better withstand abrasive diets, were also associated with a reduced risk of extinction. The underlying problem for megaherbivores was that their already low speciation rates could not compensate for the species that were lost.

The imbalance developed over millions of years. As Africa became increasingly arid from about 7.2 million years ago, both speciation and extinction initially accelerated as changing vegetation and expanding open habitats reorganised its ungulate communities. Speciation then levelled off after about 3.6 million years, while extinction continued to rise and increased sharply with the beginning of the Pleistocene, about 2.58 million years ago. During the driest intervals, smaller herbivores generated new species at substantially higher rates, whereas speciation among megaherbivores was suppressed still further. The resulting decline was already well under way long before humans possessed the technology needed to hunt such enormous animals systematically.

This does not mean that humans played no part in the most recent losses, nor that climate alone explains every extinction. Rather, it places recent events within a much longer evolutionary history in which changing climate, declining ecosystem productivity, extinction and unequal rates of speciation gradually transformed the African fauna.

Refuting Creationism - Why Sex Evolved

Recombination by sexual reproduction drives adaptive diversity in yeast

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

The why behind sex — Harvard Gazette

For creationists, who typically know little or nothing about evolution and so have no understanding that it is a process that takes place in a population, not an event that happens to individuals, sexual reproduction is a fertile source of disinformation and misunderstanding with which to attack the Theory of Evolution.

For instance, they frequently argue that the probability of the 'first man' and 'first woman' evolving together is so highly unlikely that their myth of the spontaneous creation out of dirt of a man and the cloning of a woman by magic is a far more rational alternative explanation. The science is attacked because when they try to force fit their childish myth of every species having a single ancestral male and female couple into the science of evolution, it doesn't fit well. The possibility of the myth being wrong must never be contemplated, because that would risk having to change their mind.

However, science works by addressing questions, not by throwing stones at infantile straw-man parodies of alternative ideas and declaring victory by default.

For science, sexual reproduction presents evolutionary biology with a different long-standing puzzle. An asexual organism can pass on its entire genome without finding a mate, competing for one or investing energy in courtship. In species with separate sexes, there is also the familiar “twofold cost of males”: only females produce offspring, whereas every member of an asexual population can potentially reproduce.

All else being equal, an asexual lineage should therefore increase more quickly than a sexual one, and indeed there are a few examples of where this is true - a single female vine weevil can quickly populate a window box or plant pot with devastating consequences for the owner as I have found to my cost; a single marbled crayfish can rapidly spread through a new river system, out-competing any native species.

Yet sexual reproduction is widespread among eukaryotes and has persisted for hundreds of millions of years. This does not imply that evolution requires foresight or that sex was introduced by a designer for some future purpose. It means that, under many circumstances, the descendants of organisms that exchange and recombine genetic material must acquire advantages sufficient to offset the immediate costs.

One important advantage is that sex reshuffles the genome. In an asexual lineage, genes are inherited together as a largely indivisible package. A beneficial mutation can therefore carry neighbouring neutral or mildly harmful mutations with it as it spreads through a population—a process known as genetic hitchhiking. Sexual reproduction and recombination can break up these associations, separating advantageous mutations from some of the damaging evolutionary baggage accompanying them.

Creationism Refuted - The Simple Mutation That Made Grasses So Successful - 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Joinvillea ascendans, a close relative of grass plants. Used in the Study

Photo: Sarah Friedrich.

Maeda and his collaborators sequenced the slow-growing Joinvillea ascendans plant, a close relative of grasses, to compare genomes and learn what makes grass plants unique.

Photo: Sarah Friedrich.

Molecular “bypasses” improve grass plants’ synthesis of lignin and starch, laying the early groundwork for evolutionary success – Department of Biology – UW–Madison

Creationists routinely claim that mutations can only damage genetic “information” and can never produce anything genuinely new. The claim depends partly upon leaving information conveniently undefined and partly upon ignoring the many well-understood processes by which genomes acquire new functions. Gene duplication, mutation and natural selection can preserve an existing function while a spare copy accumulates changes, sometimes enabling it to perform an additional task or participate in a new biochemical pathway.

A new study published in Science provides an unusually clear example. Rather than merely showing that related organisms possess different enzymes, Yuri Takeda-Kimura and colleagues reconstructed how two important metabolic innovations arose during the ancestry of grasses: additional routes for producing starch and lignin. They did this by comparing the genomes of grasses with those of several of their closest non-grass relatives, including Joinvillea, Ecdeiocolea, Pharus and Typha.

Unintelligent Design - The Evolutionary Compromises That Made The Human Female Pelvis - No Intelligence Involved

Virtual reconstructions of the Neanderthal pelvises of a 1.5-year-old infant from Dederiyeh Cave, Syria (left), and a young adult female from Sima de las Palomas de Cabezo Gordo, Spain (right). Age- and sex-matched modern human pelvises are superimposed in transparency to highlight form differences.

Image credit: Marcia Ponce de León
and Christoph Zollikofer
(University of Zurich)

A Neanderthal woman and Baby. Her Pelvis is the result of the same evolutionary processes as that of Homo sapiens women.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol).

Rethinking Birth and Bipedalism - School of Science University of Tokyo

The human pelvis is a particularly poor candidate for anyone wishing to argue that the human body was intelligently designed from scratch. It must support the upper body, anchor muscles used in standing and locomotion, protect internal organs, maintain the pelvic floor and— in females—provide a passage through which a large-bodied, large-brained infant can be born. The result is not an ideal solution to a single engineering problem, but an evolutionary compromise assembled by modifying an inherited structure while several competing selection pressures acted upon it.

For much of the past century, one influential explanation for its shape has been the “obstetrical dilemma”. According to the simplest version of this hypothesis, the female pelvis represents a compromise between a birth canal wide enough to accommodate a large-brained baby and hips narrow enough to permit efficient bipedal walking. Childbirth pushes pelvic evolution in one direction, in other words, while locomotion pushes it in the other.

That explanation has never been beyond dispute. Studies have questioned whether wider hips necessarily impose the assumed energetic penalty on walking or running, while alternative hypotheses have emphasised maternal metabolism, infant development and the need for a stable pelvic floor capable of supporting the abdominal organs. The pelvis is involved in too many functions for its evolution necessarily to be reduced to a single contest between walking and childbirth.

Refuting Creationism - Observed Evolution Of Live Birth in the European Common Lizard

European common lizard, Zootoca vivipara

Image credit: Meredith Kimble

European common lizard, Zootoca vivipara

By Ocrdu - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

University of Glasgow - University news - Scientists uncover the evolutionary process behind live birth in lizards

Live birth is not a simple characteristic that could be produced by switching a single gene on or off. Retaining embryos inside the mother until they are sufficiently developed to survive requires coordinated changes in gestation length, uterine physiology, eggshell formation, gas exchange, nutrient transfer, hormonal control and the maternal immune response. To creationists, this is just the sort of complex biological system that must supposedly have appeared complete and fully functional in a single act of creation.

But that is not what the genomes of living animals show.

In a study recently published in Current Biology, an international team led by Dr Hongxin Xie of the University of Glasgow has reconstructed how live birth evolved in the Eurasian common lizard, Zootoca vivipara. The transition did not depend upon one miraculous genetic leap, or even upon one or two mutations of exceptionally large effect. It arose through natural selection acting upon numerous genetic changes distributed across the genome and accumulated over an extended period.

Refuting Creationism - Denisovans Show Why Scepticism Is The Stuff Of Good Science, But Toxic To Creationism

The Harbin cranium

From: Fu Q, Cao P, Dai Q (2025)

Reconstruction of Homo longi from the Harbin cranium, now identified as that of a Denisovan.

© Nobu Tamura, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Were Denisovans tall compared to other ancient humans? We should be sceptical

One of the most important differences between science and creationism is not that science possesses absolute certainty while creationism does not. It is that science has procedures for recognising uncertainty, testing assumptions and preventing an interesting possibility from being promoted prematurely into an established fact. Creationism, by contrast, begins with an asserted certainty and then selects, distorts or dismisses the evidence according to whether it supports the required conclusion.

That distinction is illustrated particularly well by the recent suggestion that Denisovans may have been exceptionally tall. The claim originated in a preprint by Yousuke Kaifu and colleagues describing an incomplete femur and tibia recovered by dredging from the Penghu Channel between Taiwan and mainland China. Ancient proteins preserved in the bones identify them as Denisovan, giving scientists the first known Denisovan leg bones and potentially valuable information about the bodies of these enigmatic archaic humans.

Penghu 2 and Penghu 3 hominin leg bones.
Anterior (a), medial (b), and distal (c) views of the Penghu 2 right femoral shaft. Anterior (d), lateral (e) and distal (f) views of the Penghu 3 right tibia. Symbols: m=medial, p=posterior. Scale bar=10cm.

Kaifu, Y., et al.(2026)

Reconstructions suggest that the owner of the femur, known as Penghu 2, may have stood about 1.8 metres tall and weighed approximately 83 kilograms. The owner of the Penghu 3 tibia may have been about 1.9 metres tall and weighed around 91 kilograms. These were undoubtedly large individuals by Pleistocene standards, and their estimated dimensions compare with those of some of the largest ancient humans known from Africa and Europe.

But two large individuals do not establish that Denisovans as a population were exceptionally tall. Modern humans vary considerably in height, and no responsible anthropologist would attempt to calculate the average stature of the entire species from two people selected from a crowd. The problem is even greater when dealing with two incomplete bones recovered by trawling rather than from a documented archaeological excavation. Their exact discovery locations and original geological contexts are unknown, while large, robust bones are more likely than small or fragile ones to survive, become caught in fishing nets and be recognised as scientifically interesting.

This is the point made by palaeoanthropologist Sally Christine Reynolds in an article in The Conversation. The height estimates may be perfectly reasonable for the two individuals concerned, but extending those estimates to Denisovans generally would require a much larger and more representative sample. At present, “two Denisovans were tall” is a defensible conclusion; “Denisovans were a tall species” remains an intriguing but weakly supported generalisation.

This is evolutionary population thinking in practice. Species are not collections of identical specimens conforming to an ideal form. They are variable populations in which individuals differ because of their genes, sex, nutrition, health, environment and developmental history. Treating one or two specimens as definitive representatives of an entire species is a remnant of the typological thinking that sits much more comfortably with the creationist notion of separately manufactured and essentially unchanging “kinds”.

Creationists habitually misrepresent scientific disagreements about details as evidence that scientists are abandoning evolution. Nothing of the sort is happening here. Reynolds is not questioning whether Denisovans existed, whether they shared common ancestry with Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, or whether they interbred with the ancestors of some living people. She is questioning whether two bones provide sufficient evidence for one proposed characteristic of the Denisovan population.

Indeed, identifying these bones as Denisovan depended upon evolutionary science. Proteins change through inherited mutations, so similarities and differences in their amino-acid sequences retain evidence of common ancestry. Even when recoverable DNA and diagnostic skeletal features are unavailable, palaeoproteomics can place a fossil within an evolutionary family tree. Creationism supplies no corresponding method for predicting those nested molecular relationships and no explanation for why the history recorded by fossil proteins should agree with that reconstructed from DNA and anatomy.

One qualification should be added to the account in The Conversation. Reynolds states that neither bone has been dated directly. However, a companion preprint reporting radiocarbon and stable-isotope analyses gives Penghu 3 a direct radiocarbon age of approximately 45,575–44,522 calibrated years before the present. Penghu 2 remains undated, and the lack of stratigraphic provenance still prevents the two individuals from being assumed to have lived together or even during the same period. Both studies are also preprints and have yet to complete peer review.

Scientific scepticism therefore does not weaken the evolutionary account; it protects it from exaggeration. Scientists can accept that the bones belonged to two large Denisovans, recognise the importance of their molecular identification and direct dating, and nevertheless withhold judgement on whether Denisovans generally were unusually tall. That willingness to make the conclusion no larger than the evidence can support is one of the defining strengths of science—and the antithesis of a creationist doctrine in which the conclusion was declared infallible before any evidence was examined.

Sally Christine Reynolds's article in The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commone License, reformatted for stylistic consistency: