Refuting Creationism - How Spiders Got Their Fangs - 518 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Artist’s impression of Urokodia.

Credit: Xiaodong Wang

UROKODIA! 518-million-year-old fossil shows beginning of spider’s bite | News | University of Leicester

The World Spider Catalog currently recognises more than 54,000 living species of spider, and tens of thousands more may remain undiscovered. Every one of them possesses a pair of specialised mouthparts called chelicerae, each of which terminates in a fang. In most spiders, these fangs inject venom, although a few lineages have lost their venom glands and subdue their prey by other means.

Chelicerae are not, however, unique to spiders. They are the defining appendages of the Chelicerata, the major arthropod group that also includes scorpions, mites, ticks, harvestmen and horseshoe crabs. Scorpions possess small, pincer-like chelicerae near the mouth; their conspicuous claws are modified pedipalps, while their venom is delivered through a sting at the end of the tail. In other chelicerates, the same basic pair of appendages has been modified into pincers, piercing mouthparts or other feeding structures.

This shared anatomy strongly suggests that chelicerae were inherited from a common ancestor and subsequently modified as the different chelicerate lineages evolved. But what did the ancestral appendage look like, and when did it first appear?

Such questions inevitably involve gaps in the fossil record—gaps that creationists routinely misrepresent as evidence against evolution. Their argument depends upon portraying evolutionary theory as little more than a story constructed from fossils and therefore requiring an unbroken succession of specimens linking every species to its ancestors. Evolutionary theory requires no such thing. Fossilisation is an exceptionally rare event, and evolutionary relationships are reconstructed from multiple independent lines of evidence, including comparative anatomy, embryology, genetics and the fossils that happen to have survived.

Nevertheless, creationists will be disappointed to learn that another important part of this particular gap has now been bridged. A paper published in Nature by a Chinese-British research team led by Yu Liu and Lorenzo Lustri of Yunnan University describes the remarkably preserved anatomy of Urokodia aequalis, a small marine arthropod recovered from the famous Chengjiang fossil site in Yunnan Province, southern China. The rock formation containing it dates from approximately 518 million years ago.

Urokodia was not a spider, nor can it be identified as the literal common ancestor of modern chelicerates. Instead, phylogenetic analysis places it on the chelicerate stem lineage—as an early evolutionary relative close to the line from which true chelicerates arose. Crucially, it possessed a pair of pincer-like “short great appendages” that appear intermediate between the multi-segmented grasping appendages of earlier Cambrian arthropods and the true chelicerae of later chelicerates.

Using X-ray microtomography, the researchers examined anatomical structures hidden inside the surrounding rock. They reconstructed much of the exceptionally preserved soft anatomy of this 2–3-centimetre-long animal, including its stalked eyes, segmented body, jointed limbs and the pair of pincer-like appendages immediately behind its eyes. Features of its trunk limbs also support the hypothesis that the book gills of aquatic chelicerates evolved from the limb structures of earlier arthropods.

Urokodia lived during the early Cambrian, a period creationists habitually misrepresent as one in which complex animals appeared suddenly and without evolutionary ancestry. In reality, the Cambrian radiation was an extended episode of evolutionary diversification in which increasing mobility, new feeding strategies and escalating predator–prey arms races helped produce an extraordinary range of defensive and offensive adaptations. Many of the fundamental body plans associated with the major animal groups were assembled and modified during this evolutionary experimentation.

Creationism in Crisis - Speciation in Progress? - Genetic Isolation In A British Dolphin.

Risso's dolphin Grampus griseus.

Credit: Nicola Hodgins

Risso's dolphin, Grampus griseus

© Nicola Hodgins.

British Risso’s dolphins belong to single population - University of Exeter News

According to newly published research in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom (JMBA), Risso’s dolphins, Grampus griseus, around the British Isles appear to form a single, genetically connected population. At the same time, their mitochondrial DNA distinguishes them from dolphins sampled elsewhere in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, suggesting that the British population has experienced relatively little genetic exchange with more distant populations.

The research was conducted by an international team whose joint first authors were Nicola K. Hodgins, a visiting researcher at the University of Exeter, UK, and Ing Chen of National Taiwan Normal University, with Michael Krützen of the University of Zurich as corresponding author.

At first sight, describing the British dolphins as both a single population and genetically distinct might seem contradictory, but the two findings concern different geographical scales. Within British waters, the dolphins appear to interbreed freely enough to prevent significant regional genetic divisions from developing. Compared with populations farther afield, however, reduced gene flow has allowed the British population to acquire a distinctive genetic signature.

Malevolent Design - More Evidence That Malaria Was 'Designed' By Creationism's Putative Designer God? - Or Just Evolution Again?

A daughter parasite forms through budding from the mother cell.

As budding of the daughter parasite progresses and membrane protrusion increases (yellow), the molecular safety rope (blue) lengthens.

The images were created based on electron microscopy data and processed using AI.

© UKHD

Figure EV1: Blood-stage immunofluorescence expression profile of PfSFA2 and ultrastructure expansion microscopy (U-ExM) of PfSFA1 localization.

(A) IFA of PfSFA2-smV5 expression across the asexual blood stages, stained with an anti-V5 antibody (green), an anti-PfGAP45 antibody (magenta), and Hoechst (DNA, blue). “Ring” stage with one nucleus, trophozoite stage (“Troph”) with 2, and several stages throughout schizogony, including segmentation, are shown with the number of nuclei. The minimum and maximum displayed values for the PfSFA2-V5 and PfGAP45 channels follow the “Reset” values of the first segmentation image. Scale bars: 2 µm. (B) U-ExM of PfSFA1-smV5 schizonts stained with an anti-V5 antibody (cyan), an anti-CrCen antibody (outer-CP, magenta), SYTOX (DNA, blue), and an NHS ester-conjugated dye (grayscale). Sub-z-slices of a 7-nuclei (top) and a 14-nuclei (bottom) schizont are maximally projected and shown to the left. Representative centriolar plaque regions are numbered and shown as insets to the right. Z-depth of each maximum projection is shown to the right. Scale bars: 5 µm for full schizont; 1 µm for inset.

He, B., Ali, I., Dorner, L.P. et al. (2026).

News - Research in Germany

Creationists insist that certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved. If several interacting components are required for a system to function, they label it “irreducibly complex”; if genes encode proteins that perform a particular function, they call the DNA “complex specified information”. Both are then presented as evidence that the system must have been deliberately designed by an intelligent agent.

Curiously, however, this supposedly reliable design-detection method tends to be applied only to systems that creationists find impressive or beneficial. When comparable complexity enables a parasite to invade its host, evade its defences, reproduce rapidly and cause suffering and death, the inference to design is quietly abandoned. The parasite is instead blamed on “the Fall”, “genetic degeneration” or some other evidence-free theological excuse.

But a method that gives different answers according to whether its conclusion is theologically convenient is not a method at all. If molecular complexity, functional interdependence and genetically encoded organisation really demonstrate intelligent design, then they must do so just as reliably in a malaria parasite as in a bacterial flagellum, an eye or a blood-clotting system. And that would make them evidence not merely of intelligent design, but of intelligent malevolent design.

Two recent studies have now uncovered more of the extraordinarily elaborate machinery by which malaria parasites multiply. Instead of dividing into two daughter cells in the familiar way, Plasmodium parasites repeatedly copy their DNA and multiply their nuclei within a shared cell before producing numerous daughter parasites more or less simultaneously. The process must ensure that each viable daughter receives a nucleus and the cellular structures required to invade another host cell.

Creationism In Crisis - After Darwin's Finches It's Darwin's Daisies - Evolution In Progress

Serrated leaves of Scalesia affinis (radiate-headed scalesia)

Photo: Michael Martin, NTNU University Museum

Botany’s answer to Darwin’s finches shows evolution in real time

The Galápagos Islands occupy an iconic place in the history of evolutionary biology. The animals and plants Darwin encountered there during the voyage of HMS Beagle contributed important evidence to the theory he developed after returning to England: that living species are not fixed and immutable but are the products of a long historical process.

Darwin eventually realised that natural selection acting upon inherited variation could produce organisms that appeared designed for their environments, without foresight, planning or divine intervention. Individuals possessing variations that gave them an advantage in their particular circumstances tended to leave more descendants, causing those variations to become more common over successive generations.

Like the uniformitarian geologists—particularly Charles Lyell—Darwin recognised that the world as we see it is not a fixed unchangeable result of a single act of perfect creation, but is the product of natural processes operating over immense periods of time. The processes that shaped the past are still operating today and will continue to shape the future.

The familiar story that Darwin saw the Galápagos finches and immediately conceived his theory is, however, an oversimplification. During the voyage, he believed he had collected birds belonging to several different groups, including finches, grosbeaks, blackbirds, wrens and warblers. Only after the ornithologist John Gould examined the specimens in England did it become apparent that these apparently disparate birds belonged to a distinctive group of closely related species—what we now call Darwin’s finches, although taxonomically they are members of the tanager family.

Darwin then appreciated the evolutionary significance of their shared characteristics and striking differences. Their varied body sizes and beaks could be understood as modifications of a common ancestral form, associated with different diets and ecological niches throughout the archipelago. One ancestral population had diversified into numerous related forms: a process now known as adaptive radiation.

The standard creationist response is to dismiss Darwin’s finches as evidence for evolution because they remain recognisably finch-like. This objection depends upon the childish parody of evolution in which one species should turn suddenly into an entirely different and supposedly unrelated species. Such an event would not demonstrate evolution; it would contradict the branching process of descent with modification. Descendants necessarily remain related to their ancestors and inherit modified versions of ancestral structures.

This misconception lies behind such familiar creationist “Gotchas!” as “Why do we never see evolution happening?” and “Why has evolution stopped?” Evolution has not stopped. What creationists demand to see is not evolution but an instantaneous transformation that evolutionary biology neither predicts nor requires.

Darwin knew nothing of Mendelian genetics or DNA, of course. Modern genomic research has confirmed the common ancestry of his finches while revealing a history more complicated than a simple, neatly branching tree. Rapidly diverging lineages can retain genetic variants inherited from their common ancestor and can occasionally exchange genes through hybridisation.

Now, genomic research into a family of plants—the genus Scalesia, commonly known as the Galápagos giant daisies—has provided a botanical counterpart to Darwin’s finches. In only about one million years, the founding lineage has diversified into 15 recognised species occupying habitats ranging from dense, humid highland forests to hot, dry and exposed lowlands. They vary from low-growing shrubs to trees, with leaves ranging from large and unlobed to small, deeply lobed and intricately serrated.

Refuting Creationism - The Complex Origins of Modern Humans - No Just A Single Couple - Not Even A Single Species

Interwoven Human ancestry

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

New technique pinpoints human DNA inherited from ‘ghost’ ancestors - Berkeley News

Using genealogical relationships in DNA, UC Berkeley researchers have uncovered hidden contributions from extinct human populations that left no sequenced genomes.

Meaghan Marohn

The evolutionary ancestry of modern Homo sapiens is far more complex than anything the authors of the Bible’s absurdly simplistic origin myths could have imagined. We already know that populations of our species migrating out of Africa interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans, and that these two archaic lineages also exchanged genes with one another. Consequently, most people with ancestry outside Africa carry some Neanderthal DNA, while many Asian and especially Oceanian populations also carry Denisovan DNA.

Now, according to a paper just published in Science, our ancestry is even more complicated. A team led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, with colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and 54Gene, has identified genetic material inherited from two previously unknown archaic hominin lineages. These are described as “ghost” lineages because no sequenced genome from either population is available: their existence must be inferred from the traces they left in the genomes of living people.

The researchers developed a computational method called TRACE — TRacking Archaic Contributions via ARG Estimation — which reconstructs genealogical relationships among segments of DNA. By identifying regions whose ancestry extends unusually far back in time, TRACE can detect contributions from extinct populations without requiring DNA recovered from their bones.

Creationism Refuted - Humans Were Carving Birds Out Of Mammoth Ivory 30,000 years Before 'Creation Week'

Mammoth ivory carving of a bird, approximately 40,000 years old, from Hohle Fels, Germany

Photo: Ralf Ehmann

Figure of a bird from the Ice Age site of Hohle Fels, approximately 40,000 years old.

Credit: Ralf Ehmann

Two bird figurines found in World Heritage Site of Hohle Fels are declared „Find of the Year” | University of Tübingen

Young Earth creationists insist that Earth—and everything upon it—was created only about 6,000–10,000 years ago, with the entire human population subsequently reduced to eight survivors of a global flood. Unfortunately for that mythology, archaeologists continue to uncover abundant evidence that humans were living, thinking and creating art tens of thousands of years before the supposed “Creation Week”, within cultures whose archaeological remains show no trace of having been interrupted by a planet-drowning flood.

The latest examples are two tiny bird figurines discovered in Hohle Fels Cave in the Swabian Jura of south-western Germany. Carved from mammoth ivory approximately 40,000 years ago, during the Aurignacian period, they were recovered in 2025 from the cave’s well-documented archaeological sequence by a University of Tübingen team led by Professor Nicholas Conard.

Each figurine is scarcely larger than a thumbnail, yet both display remarkable anatomical and behavioural detail. One appears to represent a resting or possibly brooding bird, with its head drawn close to its body and its legs tucked beneath it. The other has its wings spread and its neck extended, perhaps depicting a bird in flight, landing, threatening a rival or displaying during courtship. At just two centimetres long and weighing about 0.7 grams, the latter is the smallest known piece of Ice Age figurative art from the Swabian Jura World Heritage region.

Creationism Refuted - Most Complete Fossil Early Canid - From 30 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Mesocyon coryphaeus in its natural setting

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Mesocyon coryphaeus hunting.

Image credit: Roger Witter

Most complete skeleton of 30 million-year-old dog discovered | University of Michigan News

My last blog post concerned a 210-million-year-old, gap-filling dinosaur from Zimbabwe that is helping palaeontologists to reconstruct the early evolution and dispersal of dinosaurs.

This post concerns another gap-filling fossil, although one from much closer to the present—just 30 million years ago. It is a remarkably complete skeleton of the early canid Mesocyon coryphaeus, one of the most complete pre-Ice Age canid skeletons yet found in North America.

This specimen fills a different sort of gap. Mesocyon coryphaeus, first named in 1879, is relatively common in the John Day Formation of Oregon, but it was previously known principally from skulls and teeth. Its postcranial skeleton—the bones behind the skull—had remained almost entirely unknown. The new specimen therefore fills an important anatomical gap in our understanding of how early canids moved, hunted and responded to the changing environments of Oligocene North America.

The fossil itself has had a curious history. It was collected during the late 1980s from land administered by the Bureau of Land Management near what is now the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. Encased in a protective plaster jacket, it entered the monument’s collection after initially being mistaken for an oreodont—an extinct North American even-toed ungulate sometimes loosely described as resembling a mixture of sheep, camel and pig.

During the 1990s, the skull was separated from the surrounding rock for display, whereupon its teeth and cranial anatomy revealed that it was actually a canid. Park palaeontologists began exposing the remainder of the skeleton in 2012, but preparation continued intermittently for years. By the time the fossil was fully uncovered in 2022, more than 500 hours of painstaking preparation had been devoted to it.

University of Michigan palaeontologist Anne E. Kort, together with Jennifer Cavin of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument and Xiaoming Wang of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, formally described the specimen in a paper published online in the Journal of Paleontology on 29 May 2026.

Known as JODA 3366, the specimen includes a complete cranium, an almost complete vertebral column in front of the sacrum, all the major limb bones and parts of both the forefeet and hindfeet. Only the tail and portions of the hands and feet are missing. It even preserves part of the baculum, or penis bone, establishing beyond reasonable doubt that the animal was male.

Creationism Refuted - Another Gap Is Closed by Science - With A Dinosaur From 210 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Musango matusadonaensis in its natural setting

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)
Based on an illustration by Mark Witton.

When Musango matusadonaensis was alive, it would have lived alongside ancient rivers and streams.

© Mark Witton 2026

New Zimbabwean dinosaur species named by Museum scientist reveals Africa’s hidden history | Natural History Museum

It is gap-filling time again — not because palaeontologists have discovered some predetermined evolutionary “missing link”, but because another conspicuous blank on the palaeontological map is being filled. This time, the new evidence comes from Africa and concerns a dinosaur that lived about 210 million years ago, during the Late Triassic.

The discovery sheds new light on the early diversification and geographical distribution of dinosaurs, when they were still only a relatively minor component of terrestrial ecosystems. Over the following millions of years, they diversified into an extraordinary range of forms and became the dominant large land animals of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

Gaps in the fossil record are, of course, eagerly seized upon by creationists desperate to find somewhere to insert their god. Their enthusiasm tends to diminish markedly whenever palaeontologists recover new evidence from one of those gaps. Each such discovery removes another supposed refuge for the ever-shrinking god of the gaps, so the evidence must be dismissed as misidentified, incorrectly dated or merely another example of “evolutionary storytelling”.

No matter how many gaps science fills, creationists continue to assure themselves that the next one will be different: that it will finally be the gap that science cannot investigate and into which their preferred creator can safely be inserted. Unfortunately for that strategy, palaeontologists continue to discover fossils, dating methods continue to improve, and previously neglected regions continue to be explored.

This latest discovery consists of a partial skeleton excavated from exposures of the Late Triassic Pebbly Arkose Formation on the shore of Lake Kariba in northern Zimbabwe. An international team of Zimbabwean, South African and British scientists has named the animal Musango matusadonaensis. The study was led by Professor Paul M. Barrett of the Natural History Museum, London, while the expeditions during which the fossils were collected were led by Professor Jonah Choiniere of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Evolutionary Studies Institute.

Musango was an early sauropodomorph — a member of the lineage that later produced the enormous, long-necked sauropods such as Diplodocus. Unlike those gigantic four-legged descendants, however, Musango was a relatively lightly built, predominantly bipedal animal. It measured an estimated 4.5 metres in length but weighed only about 222 kilograms. Its skull has not been recovered, so its diet cannot be established with certainty, although comparisons with related dinosaurs suggest that it was probably herbivorous or omnivorous.

The fossil record of early dinosaurs is extremely uneven. Europe, North America and parts of South America have been studied far more intensively than much of Africa, leaving large gaps caused not necessarily by the absence of dinosaurs but by the scarcity of sustained palaeontological exploration. Musango is only the fifth dinosaur formally named from Zimbabwe, following the description in 2024 of another sauropodomorph from the same formation, Musankwa sanyatiensis.

Phylogenetic analysis places Musango and Musankwa as close relatives within Unaysauridae, a group whose fossils are known from Africa, India and South America — landmasses that were then joined within Gondwana. Together, these discoveries support an emerging picture in which Late Triassic southern Africa contained several distinct ecosystems with their own dinosaur communities, rather than a single uniform fauna extending across the region. Africa was therefore not a peripheral spectator in early dinosaur evolution; its still-underexplored rocks may preserve crucial evidence about how dinosaurs diversified and spread before their later ecological dominance.

Creationism Refuted - How Humans Modified Wild Rice - Because 'The Creator' Didn't Know What We Needed?

Paddy fields in Vietnam with people transplanting rice.

Dave Mckay/Alamy Stock Photo

Different varieties of rice grown today

By IRRI Images - originally posted to Flickr as IMG_2039-77,
CC BY 2.0, Link

One grain to rule them all: the history of rice as a global food

A point made several times in these blog posts is that the creationist interpretation of Genesis presents the living world as having been deliberately created for human use. That raises an obvious question: why have humans needed to modify virtually every domesticated animal and cultivated plant to make it more useful?

In many cases, selective breeding has altered organisms so extensively that modern breeds and crop varieties are barely recognisable as descendants of their wild ancestors. Did the supposed creator fail to anticipate how humans would use them, or was it simply incapable of finishing the job and obliged to leave the improvements to us?

Creationists have never produced a satisfactory, evidence-based answer. Instead, they appeal to “mystery”, “unknowable intentions” or some other form of theological evasion — ways of avoiding the question while pretending to have answered it. Alternatively, they simply ignore the problem and continue asserting that Genesis provides an accurate account of history and the origins of living species.

Rice, of course, doesn't get a mention in the Bible, the cultural origins of whose authors were primarily the Tigris-Euphrates rivers of Mesopotamia and later the Nile in Egypt, where wheat and barley were the staple crops, so they knew nothing of the origins or cultivation of rice, nor of India or China for that matter. Wheat by contrast is mentioned in the Bible 51 times and barley, 37.

Science, by contrast, allows us to reconstruct increasingly detailed and testable histories of domesticated animals and cultivated plants. Genetics, archaeology and the study of ancient plant remains show how humans selected heritable variations and gradually changed wild populations through artificial selection, hybridisation and the movement of crops between regions. One particularly fascinating example is the origin and cultivation of Asian rice, Oryza sativa, which now provides sustenance for more than 3.5 billion people.

The evidence traces this history across a timescale wholly incompatible with the creationist belief in a 6,000–10,000-year-old Earth. Wild rice ancestral to modern cultivated rice was growing in the lower Yangtze region of China about 100,000 years ago. Humans began gathering and processing it approximately 24,000 years ago, and evidence of pre-domestication cultivation appears about 13,000 years ago. By around 11,000 years ago, plant remains show a rapid increase in characteristics associated with domestication, as generations of human selection transformed wild rice into a recognisably cultivated crop.

There is also evidence of rice cultivation in the Ganges valley of northern India as early as 6500 BCE—about 8,500 years ago. The details remain a subject of legitimate scientific debate, particularly whether Indian rice was domesticated independently and how much the eventual development of indica rice owed to hybridisation between local rice and japonica introduced from China. What is not in dispute is that modern rice emerged through a prolonged history of cultivation, selection, migration and hybridisation — not through an instantaneous act of creation.

The history of rice is the subject of an article in The Conversation by Garritt C. Van Dyk, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. His article is reprinted below under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency:

How Evolution Works - The Founder Effect

The brown tree snake, Boiga irregularis

Photo: USGS

Photo: USGS

Study: Hidden genetic diversity may have helped inbred brown tree snakes take over Guam - University at Buffalo

Biological invasions present evolutionary biologists with an apparent paradox. A newly established population may begin with only a handful of individuals and therefore contain only a small sample of the genetic variation present in its parent population. The resulting population bottleneck should increase inbreeding, reduce its capacity to adapt and expose harmful recessive mutations to natural selection. In extreme cases, the population should succumb to what population geneticists call an “extinction vortex”, in which declining genetic diversity and declining population size reinforce one another.

And yet some introduced species do precisely the opposite. They survive, proliferate and overwhelm the ecosystems into which they have been introduced. Few examples are more spectacular—or more ecologically destructive—than the brown tree snake, Boiga irregularis, on the Pacific island of Guam.

Native to Australia, Papua New Guinea and other parts of the western Pacific, brown tree snakes probably reached Guam as accidental stowaways in military cargo sometime after the Second World War. The invading population is believed to have been founded by only a handful of snakes. Nevertheless, their descendants multiplied until, in some parts of the island, densities reached an extraordinary 30,000 snakes per square mile.

The consequences for Guam’s wildlife have been catastrophic. As nocturnal, generalist predators encountering abundant prey that had evolved without such a snake, they devastated the island’s native birds, causing several species to disappear from the wild on Guam. They have also disrupted food webs, preyed upon reptiles and small mammals and caused hundreds of power cuts by climbing electricity infrastructure.

But how did a population founded by so few individuals avoid collapsing under the burden of inbreeding?

A new paper in Science Advances by Christopher A. Osborne of the University at Buffalo and colleagues from Buffalo and the US Geological Survey suggests that the answer lies partly in a form of genetic variation that earlier sequencing methods tended to miss.

The snakes did not, in fact, avoid the bottleneck. Their genomes retain compelling evidence of it. The researchers found that roughly half of each snake’s genome consisted of long “runs of homozygosity”—regions in which the copies inherited from the mother and father were almost identical. This is a genomic signature of intense inbreeding, comparable with that seen in some endangered species of conservation concern.

However, genetic diversity is not confined to changes in individual DNA letters. Using long-read sequencing, which can detect much larger differences, the researchers found nearly 19,000 structural variants. These included sections of DNA that had been duplicated, deleted, inserted or rearranged. Together, these structural variants affected almost eight times as much of the genome as the single-nucleotide variants upon which conventional estimates of genetic diversity have largely relied.

More importantly, the surviving variation was not distributed randomly. Structural variants were especially abundant around gene promoters and in genes associated with adaptive immunity and olfaction. Variation in immune genes could help the snakes respond to pathogens, while variation affecting their highly developed sense of smell could influence their ability to recognise prey, exploit different foods and distinguish closely related snakes from potential prey. In other words, a population can be genetically impoverished overall while retaining disproportionately important variation in precisely those parts of its genome that influence survival and adaptability.

Creationism Refuted - Another Gap Closed with a 23-Million-Year-Old Fossil - Just as The Theory Of Evolution Predicted

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Reconstruction of Miyumba chrisdickmani in its natural setting.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Australia’s most diverse marsupial predators have been hiding their origins for millions of years

To a palaeontologist, a gap in the fossil record is an unanswered question and an invitation to keep looking. To a creationist, it is more often treated as a convenient space in which to insert a supernatural explanation. The difficulty for creationism is that scientists have an inconvenient habit of finding the missing evidence, whereupon the gap becomes smaller, the evolutionary history becomes clearer, and creationists must quietly move their supernatural explanation somewhere else.

A particularly neat example is provided by a paper just published in Australian Zoologist by Timothy J. Churchill, Michael Archer, Suzanne J. Hand and Roy M. Farman. As Churchill explains in an article in The Conversation, a handful of tiny fossil jaws from north-western Queensland has supplied a previously missing opening chapter in the evolutionary history of Australia’s most diverse family of marsupial predators.

The family Dasyuridae contains almost 80 living species, including Tasmanian devils, quolls, dunnarts, planigales and antechinuses. They range from insect-eaters weighing only a few grams to the much larger Tasmanian devil, and occupy environments extending from the tropical rainforests of New Guinea to Australian deserts, grasslands and alpine woodland. Yet, despite this modern diversity, their early fossil history had remained frustratingly obscure.

Molecular studies indicated that dasyurids had diverged from their closest relatives millions of years before the earliest unambiguous fossils then known. Almost all accepted dasyurid fossils were younger than about five million years, leaving what palaeontologists call a “ghost lineage”: a branch whose existence was indicated by evolutionary relationships, but whose earlier fossil representatives had not yet been found. The animal once thought to fill that gap, Barinya wangala, was subsequently shown to belong to an entirely different family of peculiar, probably snail-eating marsupials called malleodectids.

Creationists sometimes present such gaps as evidence against evolution, apparently assuming that unless every organism that ever lived has obligingly become fossilised, been exposed at the surface and been discovered, the evolutionary history can be dismissed. But incompleteness is not inconsistency. Fossilisation is rare, suitable rocks are unevenly distributed, and tiny, fragile animals are especially unlikely to leave recognisable remains. Evolution nevertheless predicted that earlier dasyurids had existed. The question was whether any of them would eventually be found.

The new species, named Miyumba chrisdickmani, is known from six partial lower jaws recovered from Early Miocene deposits in the Riversleigh World Heritage Area on Waanyi Country. It lived about 23 million years ago and probably weighed only about 30 grams, making it comparable in size to a modern antechinus or large dunnart. It is now the oldest confirmed member of Dasyuridae, extending the family’s recognised fossil history by more than five million years.

Its significance, however, lies in much more than its age. The teeth of Miyumba possess a particular arrangement in which the third lower premolar is smaller than the first and second. This appears to be a shared derived characteristic, or synapomorphy, identifying dasyurids as a natural evolutionary group. At the same time, Miyumba retains several ancestral dental features expected in an animal close to the base of that group’s family tree.

That combination is precisely what evolutionary theory predicts: an early member of a lineage should possess the defining innovations inherited by its descendants while retaining features inherited from more distant ancestors. It should not look exactly like a modern Tasmanian devil, quoll or dunnart because those specialised forms had not yet evolved. Nor should it be unrelated to them. It should display a mosaic of ancestral and newly evolved characteristics — and that is exactly what Miyumba does.

How Evolution Works - Shell Shock For Creationists

Steinkern (internal mould) of Maclurites neritoides containing cryptic fauna cornulitids, bryozoans, and graptolites (arrows).

Credit: Vinn, O., Wilson, M.A., Tinn, O. et al. (2026)

Empty seashells became new habitats 470 million years ago | University of Tartu

A paper just published in Scientific Reports by an international team led by Olev Vinn of the University of Tartu, Estonia, provides a lovely illustration of the opportunistic nature of evolution.

Some 470 million years ago — almost 470 million years before creationists’ mythical ‘Creation Week’ — a seemingly modest ecological innovation occurred in the oceans: animals began using the sheltered interiors of empty mollusc shells as habitats. This happened during the Middle Ordovician, following the Cambrian radiation, and helped to establish a new ecological niche that remains important in marine ecosystems today.

Creationists like to misrepresent the Cambrian radiation as the sudden appearance of complex, multicellular animals without ancestors. In reality, it was neither instantaneous nor without an evolutionary prehistory. It unfolded over tens of millions of years and grew out of changes already under way among the preceding Ediacaran biota, including increasing mobility, burrowing and ecological interaction.

As animals became more mobile, predation intensified and defensive structures became increasingly advantageous. Mineralised skeletons and shells evolved independently in several lineages, probably under several interacting pressures, including protection, structural support and changing ocean chemistry. Molluscs were among the groups that acquired shells, and their subsequent diversification produced such familiar forms as gastropods, bivalves and shelled cephalopods.

One consequence was the growing accumulation of empty shells on the seabed. Each dead mollusc left behind a hard surface and a sheltered cavity that other organisms could potentially exploit. Yet the researchers found that, throughout the Cambrian, the interiors of mollusc shells and other skeletal remains remained free of encrusting animals, even though organisms capable of living on surfaces inside other cavities already existed.

That changed during the Middle Ordovician, when attached animals began colonising the relatively large, spacious shells of nautiloid cephalopods. They later spread into the empty shells of gastropods and bivalves. No foresight or planning was required: once organisms capable of settling inside these shells gained access to a protected surface supplied with food-bearing water, any heritable tendency that improved their ability to exploit it could be favoured by natural selection.

Creationism Refuted - How The Building Blocks Of Life Can be Made Without Magic

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Cosmic dust analogue seen through a microscope created by experiment by Linda Losurdo.

This student made cosmic dust in her lab. What she found could help us understand how life started on Earth - The University of Sydney

Creationist objections to abiogenesis often smuggle in the long-discredited idea of vitalism: the belief that living matter contains some special ingredient or “vital force” absent from non-living matter. This appears to lie behind the familiar creationist refrain that “life cannot come from non-life”, as though “life” were a substance that must be added to matter by a supernatural agent.

The word “life”, however, is rarely defined in this argument. Scientists can devise operational definitions for particular purposes, but life is not a single substance possessed by some molecules and absent from others. It is a collection of properties displayed by sufficiently organised chemical systems. By leaving the term undefined, creationists turn their assertion into a slogan that can neither be tested nor falsified.

The distinction between organic and inorganic chemistry is useful, but partly conventional and historical. Organic chemistry deals broadly with carbon compounds, although some carbon-containing substances—including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and carbonates—are traditionally classified as inorganic. There is no fundamental physical boundary between the two categories: both obey precisely the same laws of physics, chemistry and quantum mechanics.

Carbon’s extraordinary chemical versatility follows from its atomic structure. A carbon atom has six protons and six electrons, four of which are valence electrons in its outer shell. Its small size and ability to form strong covalent bonds with itself and with elements such as hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen allow it to form stable chains, rings, branches and extensive molecular networks. Depending on how it is bonded, carbon can adopt tetrahedral, trigonal-planar or linear arrangements and can form single, double or triple bonds. All this follows from quantum chemistry; no vital spark, magical ingredient or special rule is required.

None of that proves that the origin of life was inevitable, and science does not yet possess a complete account of every stage of abiogenesis. What it does show is that there is no known chemical or physical barrier preventing non-living chemistry from becoming progressively more complex. Under suitable conditions, chemical systems can acquire such properties as compartmentalisation, catalysis and molecular replication. Once populations of replicating systems existed with heritable variation, natural selection could favour those that survived longer, reproduced more reliably and used available resources more efficiently.

One important question is where the organic raw materials involved in this prebiotic chemistry came from. Some could have formed on the early Earth, but organic compounds are also widespread throughout the Solar System and interstellar space. They have been detected in comets and asteroids and regularly occur in meteorites. Earth may therefore have received substantial quantities of organic material from several extraterrestrial sources. This raises another scientific question: what natural chemical and physical processes produced and modified that material in space?

Linda Losurdo, a PhD candidate in materials and plasma physics in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, Australia, has investigated part of that question with her supervisor, Professor David McKenzie. They recreated some of the energetic, near-vacuum conditions associated with stars and other astrophysical environments inside glass tubes. After evacuating the tubes, they introduced nitrogen, carbon dioxide and acetylene and subjected the mixture to an electrical potential of about 10,000 volts for approximately an hour, producing a plasma known as a glow discharge.

Refuting Creationism - Death More Than 66 Million Years Before Mythical 'Sin'

A Tyrannosaur stalking an edmontosaurus

AI-Generated Image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

"The Bite"

Paleoartist Jenn Hall.

Rare fossil at Montana State’s Museum of the Rockies records Tyrannosaurus attack

A paper published on 17 February 2026 in PeerJ by Taia C.A. Wyenberg-Henzler of la of Montana State University, USA, reports on a remarkable fossil from the Hell Creek Formation of eastern Montana: a nearly complete, articulated skull of an adult Edmontosaurus annectens with the broken tip of a tyrannosaur tooth still embedded in its left nasal bone.

The fossil dates from the closing stages of the Late Cretaceous, roughly 66 million years ago, shortly before Edmontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus and all other non-avian dinosaurs disappeared during the Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction. The bone surrounding the embedded tooth shows no evidence of healing or remodelling, indicating that the bite occurred at, very near or shortly after the death of the Edmontosaurus.

In other words, this is physical evidence of a violent interaction between predator and prey tens of millions of years before humans existed—precisely the sort of evidence that creationists are conditioned to reject because it cannot be accommodated within their mythology. According to young-Earth creationism, there was supposedly no death, predation or suffering before human ‘sin’ allowed evil to enter the world and ruin their omnipotent creator’s previously perfect creation—apparently without that omnipotent creator either foreseeing or preventing it. And all this supposedly happened only 6,000–10,000 years ago, shortly after ‘Creation Week’.

The doctrine that no animal died before ‘the Fall’ is not stated explicitly anywhere in the Bible. It is a theological inference imposed upon the text because young-Earth creationism requires it. It belongs to the category of reasoning that says: ‘This must be true for the rest of my beliefs to be true; my beliefs cannot be wrong; therefore, this must also be true.’

Having granted themselves this assumption of infallibility, creationists must then protect it from every fact that contradicts it. The belief cannot be mistaken, so the evidence must somehow be misunderstood, fraudulent, planted by Satan, created with the appearance of age or otherwise unworthy of consideration. Anything, in fact, is preferable to the intellectually honest admission that the belief itself has been falsified.

In almost every other field of human endeavour, such a supremely arrogant claim to personal infallibility would be laughed at and its proponent told to grow up. Yet, when packaged as religious faith, it is not merely tolerated but frequently treated with respect. Its advocates demand—and often receive—special privileges and social status: ‘You must listen to me, allow me to make laws governing your life and let me shape society according to my beliefs because I have an invisible friend and wear special robes.’

And so creationism staggers on, obliged to deny a veritable deluge of scientific evidence rather than concede that its mythology bears no resemblance to the history of life on Earth.

Refuting Creationism - How Physics Constrained The Evolution Of Flight in Flies

High-resolution stacked image of the blowfly wing and thorax. The translucent wing attaches via an intricate hinge system to the muscular thorax that powers rapid wingbeats.

Carlos Faulquier

Why most flies fly alike | WUR

Carlos Faulquier

As a child growing up in the relative silence of a North Oxfordshire hamlet, I could sometimes hear bats overhead. On a still summer night, lying in the quiet of my bedroom, I could also make out the distinctive, high-pitched whine of a mosquito as it approached an exposed arm, guided at close range by body heat as well as by carbon dioxide and human odours. Both sounds now lie beyond what my ageing ears can detect. The relevance of that mosquito’s whine will become apparent shortly.

A paper published on 9 July 2026 in PLOS Biology by scientists from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and Aix-Marseille Université in France explains how aerodynamic constraints have channelled the evolution of flight across the Diptera — the order of insects that includes houseflies, fruit flies, mosquitoes, midges and crane flies.

The researchers examined the body and wing morphology of 133 species and recorded the hovering flight of 46 of them using high-speed stereoscopic cameras. They then used computational fluid dynamics to reconstruct the aerodynamic forces and energy costs associated with their wing movements.

They found that wing shape varied considerably and was strongly influenced by evolutionary ancestry, but that wingbeat movements were broadly conserved across most of the order. Despite the enormous diversity of dipterans in size, appearance, habitat and ecology, most have evolved strikingly similar flight mechanics because the physical requirements of remaining airborne restrict the range of workable solutions.

Evolution, of course, depends upon heritable variation, but not every imaginable variation is viable or advantageous. A change that demands more energy without providing some compensating benefit is unlikely to spread through a population. Natural selection therefore tends to channel evolution towards a comparatively narrow range of effective solutions. In this case, the need to generate sufficient lift while limiting aerodynamic power consumption has produced a broadly shared flight pattern across most dipterans.

It must be galling for those few creationists who can read and understand scientific papers, yet are still eagerly awaiting the long-promised day when biologists abandon “Darwinism” and embrace creationism, to encounter paper after paper such as this one. Once again, evolutionary theory provides the accepted framework within which the observations make sense, without so much as a hint that the researchers are preparing to replace it with supernatural magic.

An enterprising creationist might nevertheless seize upon the apparent exceptions. Mosquitoes and their close relatives, the midges, do not follow the usual energy-saving pattern. Mosquitoes can beat their wings as many as 1,000 times each second, using almost three times as much aerodynamic power as similarly sized fruit flies. Crane flies also depart from the general pattern, although in the opposite direction, having evolved unusually economical flight.

Surely, the creationist might argue, if aerodynamic constraints channelled the evolution of the other flies, mosquitoes should have been constrained in precisely the same way. If an exception exists, perhaps there is something wrong with the theory.

But this objection rests on the mistaken assumption that natural selection must optimise every characteristic for a single purpose. Evolution does not produce organisms in which each structure is independently perfected. It produces compromises between competing demands, with reproductive success ultimately determining which combination of costs and benefits persists.

The researchers found that mosquitoes and midges produce disproportionately powerful sounds for insects of their size. Their rapid, low-amplitude wingbeats generate increased aerodynamic drag and require enlarged flight muscles, making flight more energetically expensive. That apparent inefficiency, however, may provide a substantial reproductive advantage because acoustic communication plays an important part in their courtship.

Creationism Refuted - Earth Is 'Fine-Tuned' For Disasters And Mass Extinctions

Researchers confirm cause of Earth’s biggest mass extinction | Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability

Studying the metabolism of living brachiopods like these collected from San Juan Island, Washington, allowed Stanford researchers to understand how the physiology of the modern fauna and Paleozoic fauna may have differed and how these groups would have been differentially impacted by oxygen and temperature changes during the Permian–Triassic mass extinction.

Image credit: Erik Sperling.

Many of Earth's climatic, geological and biological processes behave as complex, nonlinear systems, resembling systems in chaos. In this context, “chaotic” does not mean random. It means that small differences in starting conditions can sometimes be amplified until they produce very different outcomes — the phenomenon popularly known as the “butterfly effect”. The butterfly is not literally responsible for a distant storm; it merely illustrates how a tiny disturbance can cascade through a sufficiently complex system.

This is not the picture of a planet engineered to remain permanently benign or perfectly “fine-tuned” for life — still less for human life in the United States. Earth is habitable, but its habitability is contingent and sometimes precarious. The same interacting atmospheric, oceanic, geological and biological processes that sustain life can, when pushed beyond critical thresholds, drive abrupt environmental change, ecological collapse and mass extinction.

At several points in Earth's history, reinforcing feedbacks have transformed relatively small initial disturbances into rapid and profound environmental changes. Organisms adapted to the previous conditions were then confronted with combinations of heat, cold, acidification, oxygen loss or other stresses occurring too quickly for most populations to adapt. The result was widespread extinction.

What has been less well understood is why some groups were devastated while others living in the same changing environment survived. This is an important question for us because every organism alive today is descended from lineages that somehow survived every previous mass extinction.

Research by a Stanford University-led team, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), now offers an experimentally supported explanation for one of the most striking patterns associated with the end-Permian mass extinction — the “Great Dying” of about 252 million years ago.

Creationism Refuted - Why The Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design And Supports Mindless Evolution.

The human body isn’t a masterpiece of design – it’s a patchwork of evolutionary compromise

Back in December 2024, I published The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design as part of my Unintelligent Design series. In it, I argued that:

Looked at objectively, beneath the superficial appearance of design, the human body, with its inefficiencies, vulnerabilities and vestigial features, is best explained through the lens of evolution.

Far from reflecting intelligent design, our anatomy and physiology reveal a history of incremental changes shaped by natural selection and constrained by pre-existing structures. These imperfections underscore the reality of evolution as a tinkering process, producing functional but far-from-perfect outcomes.

In this light, the human body stands as a powerful testament to our evolutionary heritage and tells a story far more impressive than the childish notion of it all being made by magic by a super-intelligent yet invisible and undetectable designer.

It is therefore gratifying to see those conclusions independently reinforced by Lucy E. Hyde, a Lecturer in Anatomy at the University of Bristol. In a recent article in The Conversation, she makes essentially the same case, drawing upon many of the same examples that I used.

This is not because anatomists and evolutionary biologists have agreed upon a preferred story and then set out to make the evidence fit it. It is because people who understand evolution and possess more than a superficial knowledge of human anatomy and physiology can examine the same evidence and independently reach the same broad conclusion: the human body is not the product of foresightful engineering but a historical patchwork of inherited structures, evolutionary compromises and modifications to what already existed.

Evolution explains not only why the human body works as well as it does, but also why it so often fails, why some of its structures follow absurdly circuitous routes, why others are poorly suited to their present functions and why still others persist despite having little or no remaining usefulness. “Intelligent design”, by contrast, explains none of this without retreating into the scientifically worthless claim that an unknowable designer must have wanted things that way.

Lucy Hyde’s article is reproduced below under a Creative Commons licence, with its formatting adapted for consistency with this blog:

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.