Malevolent Designer News - Stunning 3D Images of the Yellow Fever Virus Reveal It's Irreducible Complexity - Malevolent Design or Evolution

High-resolution imaging of yellow fever virus reveals structural secrets that could power next-generation vaccines.

UQ scientists uncover secrets of yellow fever - News - The University of Queensland
Scientists at the University of Queensland, Australia, have produced near atomic-level 3D images of the yellow fever virus. These reveal the remarkable complexity that Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski of the Discovery Institute insist constitutes evidence of intelligent design – a theme almost universally endorsed by creationists and forming the central plank of their advocacy for creationism.

They have recently published their findings, open access, in the journal Nature Communications.

So, the obvious question for intelligent design advocates is this: is the irreducible complexity and complex specificity of the yellow fever virus evidence that it was intelligently designed to kill people? Or, when complex specified information and irreducible complexity do harm to humans, do these supposed ‘evidences’ for the existence of an intelligent designer (i.e. a god) somehow cease to apply, even though they benefit the virus? If so, how can a supposedly scientific definition change its meaning depending on the subjective judgement of what is being specified and how much or how little it benefits humans?

Unintelligent Design - The Design Blunder That Causes Many Diseases - Malevolence or Incompetence?

Glutathionylated mtDNA

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.1)

New type of DNA damage found in our cells’ powerhouses | UCR News | UC Riverside

Scientists led by the University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside) have identified a previously unknown form of DNA damage in mitochondria that may underlie a wide range of disorders linked to mitochondrial dysfunction. Their findings have just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Mitochondria contain their own DNA (mtDNA), which is essential for the proper functioning of these organelles that convert glucose into ATP, supplying cells with the energy needed to power metabolic processes.

The culprit is a large molecule, glutathionylate, which attaches to DNA and, if left unrepaired, can cause mutations. Researchers at UC Riverside, working with colleagues at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, found that glutathionylated mtDNA accumulates in mitochondria at levels up to 80 times higher than in the cell nucleus. In short, the nuclear DNA repair system is vastly more efficient than its mitochondrial counterpart.

For advocates of Intelligent Design (ID), this discovery—if they understood it rather than dismissing it as part of an imagined conspiracy to undermine their faith—creates an acute theological problem. If we temporarily grant the core assumption of ID creationism, that a supernatural designer indistinguishable from the allegedly omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent god of the Bible and Qur’an is responsible for the design of mitochondrial DNA and its replication machinery, then only two coherent conclusions follow:

• the designer is incompetent, having failed to produce fault-free mtDNA and an adequate repair mechanism, despite supposedly managing this for nuclear DNA; or
• the designer could have produced fault-free mtDNA but chose instead to create error-prone mtDNA and a weak repair process, thereby intentionally designing disease and suffering—in other words, malevolence.

Moreover, the very need for a repair system betrays the absence of omnipotent, intelligent engineering. It is characteristic instead of the layered complexity produced by cumulative, unplanned evolutionary processes, which inevitably yield sub-optimal compromises.

The notion of an omniscient designer also rules out the excuse that the harmful consequences were unforeseeable. An all-knowing creator would have foreseen them; yet, according to ID logic, the designer implemented them regardless—designing mitochondrial DNA to fail and cause disease.

Thus, a biological phenomenon that fits seamlessly within the framework of evolutionary theory becomes an insurmountable theological obstacle for ID advocates, who must contort the evidence to suit a predetermined conclusion while catering to a scientifically illiterate and credulous audience.

Refuting Creationism - 'Lucy' Had a Cousin Species Who Lived Alongside Her

The Burtele Foot with its elements in the anatomical position.

Photo by Yohannes Haile-Selassie/ASU

New research by ASU paleoanthropologists: 2 ancient human ancestors were neighbors | ASU News.

According to new open-access research just published in Nature by a team led by Arizona State University palaeoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie, ‘Lucy’ (Australopithecus afarensis) was not the only hominin living on the Ethiopian Highlands 3.4 million years ago. This was part of the vast span of human evolutionary history that occurred long before creationists believe Earth was made as a small, flat world with a dome over it somewhere in the Middle East. Living alongside ‘Lucy’ was another species, now named Australopithecus deyiremeda.

However, A. deyiremeda differed from A. afarensis in several important ways — differences that reflect how two species can coexist in the same region by adapting to distinct ecological niches. A. deyiremeda, for instance, had an opposable big toe suited to climbing, indicating a more arboreal lifestyle than A. afarensis. Isotope analysis of A. deyiremeda’s teeth also shows that it had a different diet.

The first indication that another species might be present came in 2009 with the discovery of foot bones, announced publicly in 2012. In palaeontology, it is standard practice not to name a new species based on such fragmentary remains, especially when cranial bones are absent. Although teeth were also found in the same area, there was initially insufficient evidence to link them definitively to the foot bones.

Then, in 2015, the team had enough material to announce and name the new species, though they were still unable to demonstrate that the foot bones belonged to it. Now, ten years on, they believe they finally have sufficient fossil evidence to make that connection.

This news is unlikely to trouble creationists, who already have a ready supply of scientifically baseless excuses for dismissing ‘Lucy’: that it was forged; that scientists fabricated the evidence; that it was assembled from scattered bones found six miles apart; that ‘carbon dating’ was used (despite not being applicable at that age); or that radioactive decay rates have changed in the last 6,000–10,000 years, making 6,000 years only appear to be 3.4 million.

For those with the intellectual honesty and humility to form opinions based on evidence, however, the discovery offers a fascinating example of how multiple ancient hominins coexisted — and, in evolutionary terms, how two species sharing a common ancestor can diverge to occupy different ecological niches.

Unintelligent Design - Higher Yielding Wheat - If Humans Can Do it, Why Didn't Creationism's 'Desiger'?

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

Wheat That Makes Its Own Fertilizer | UC Davis

Scientists at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) have developed a strain of wheat capable of producing its own nitrate fertiliser, thereby increasing yields and reducing the amount of artificial nitrate that needs to be applied to fields. They achieved this by harnessing the nitrogen-fixing abilities of common soil bacteria that convert atmospheric nitrogen into nitrates in a form plants can absorb. Their research is published, open access, in the Plant Biotechnology Journal.

We seem to have been here before, observing how a food crop or domesticated animal could have been far more productive or better suited to human needs had it been given a more efficient “design” to begin with. In fact, virtually all our cultivated plants and domesticated animals have been profoundly reshaped by human selection, using the same biological principles as natural selection: favouring advantageous genes and eliminating those that are less so.

The new wheat strain produces nutrients that support anaerobic bacteria similar to those found in the root nodules of legumes such as peas and beans. These bacteria thrive in the low-oxygen environment of specialised nodules, where they fix nitrogen for the host plant. Wheat, however, lacks such nodules, and attempts to transfer nodule-forming genes from legumes have so far been unsuccessful. Instead, this new approach encourages nitrogen-fixing bacteria to live in close association with the wheat root system, effectively bypassing the need for nodules altogether.

This raises an awkward question for Intelligent Design creationists who equate their designer deity with the allegedly omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent god of the Bible, Torah, and Qur’an. Why didn’t this deity simply give crops like wheat and other staple foods the genes the bacteria use, or at least give them the genes required to host nitrogen-fixing bacteria directly, rather than devising an unnecessarily complex symbiosis only some plants can use? And if, for some reason, these were impossible, why didn’t it create a system resembling the one now designed by the UC Davis researchers?

As with so much in nature that ID proponents like to cite as evidence of complexity—and therefore design—closer inspection typically reveals solutions that are suboptimal, needlessly intricate, and often wasteful. As I point out in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax, these are not hallmarks of intelligent engineering, which should aim for minimal complexity and maximal efficiency. Instead, they are entirely consistent with an undirected evolutionary process that tinkers with what already exists, with no foresight and with success measured solely by reproductive output.

The simple fact is that humans, using intelligence, can and do devise more efficient, sensible solutions than those found in nature—as the UC Davis team has demonstrated. Such solutions ought to have been obvious to any genuinely omniscient designer.

This leaves creationists with a stark dilemma: must they conclude that their designer god is incompetent, unable to anticipate future needs, or malevolent in withholding solutions that would benefit humanity? Or is it more plausible that these biological systems arose through the natural evolutionary processes they insist “don’t work”?

Refuting Creationism - Kissing Goodbye to Childish Superstitions

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Ape ancestors and Neanderthals likely kissed, new analysis finds | University of Oxford

Researchers have shown that kissing emerged early in the human evolutionary lineage, and that Neanderthals, along with other close relatives in our tangled family tree, almost certainly kissed as well.

Kissing is an intriguing behaviour, widely assumed to serve important social functions that outweigh the obvious drawbacks of exchanging microbes and viruses.

The team, led by Dr Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist in Oxford University’s Department of Biology, based their conclusion on the principle that when two species on separate branches of the primate family tree share a behaviour, it was likely present in their common ancestor. This approach indicates that kissing arose among the ancestors of the great apes between 21.5 and 16.9 million years ago. Their findings were published very recently in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

Creationists who insist that evolutionary biologists are abandoning the Theory of Evolution—a framework on which this analysis directly relies—may be alarmed to find no evidence of such a retreat. Quite the opposite: the observation that a trait with both costs and benefits will persist when the benefits outweigh the costs neatly explains the evolutionary retention of kissing across several related species.

Creationism Refuted - Unlike Creationists Chimpanzees Change Their Mind When the Evidence Changes

Ngamba Island Chimpanzees, Uganda

Photo: Sabana Gonzalez, UC Berkeley

New psychology study suggests chimpanzees might be rational thinkers | Letters & Science

A recent study has shown that chimpanzees, unlike creationists, are capable of rationally revising their beliefs when presented with new information – another trait they share with most humans.

Creationists, by contrast, tend to take pride in refusing to change their minds. For them, admitting error would be a sign of weakness: a capitulation to the supposedly corrupting influence of scientific evidence that threatens to lure them away from the ‘truth’. In their circular logic, it must be true because they believe it, and they believe it because it is true - a circular logic designed to make intellectual bankruptcy look like a virtue called 'faith'.

Chimpanzees, unburdened by irrational superstition or egos in need of constant reinforcement, appear far more interested in being right than in demonstrating unwavering devotion to a demonstrably wrong belief system.

Interestingly, the chimpanzees can do something human children do by the age of about 4. The ability to asses evidence and base opinions on it, is, of course, the basis of science - which may be the reason creationists struggle to understand it and reject evidence as the basis of opinion, believing themselves to be capable of simply knowing the truth, like a child below the age of 4. So we have a continuum of increasing intellectual ability and integrity from toddlers and creationists through chimpanzees and 4-year-old humans to human adults. The study, carried out by a large research team that included UC Berkeley Psychology Postdoctoral Researcher Emily Sanford, UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Jan Engelmann, and Utrecht University Psychology Professor Hanna Schleihauf, has just been published in Science and is summarised in a University of California Berkeley news item.

Creationism Refuted - 40,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth RNA

One of Yuka’s legs, illustrating the exceptional preservation of the lower part of the leg after the skin had been removed, which enabled recovery of ancient RNA molecules.

Photo: Valeri Plotnikov.

The world’s oldest RNA extracted from woolly mammoth - Stockholm University

Scientists led by researchers from Stockholm University, Denmark, have just announced that they have successfully extracted RNA from 40,000-year-old mammoth remains — the oldest RNA ever obtained. This shows that not only DNA but also RNA can persist for extraordinary lengths of time under the right conditions, adding yet more to the mountain of evidence that undermines creationist claims. With preserved RNA, researchers can even reconstruct the DNA that originally served as its template, effectively giving scientists two independent avenues for recovering genetic information.

One of the joys of debunking creationism — a childish superstition when set beside the rigour of evolutionary biology — is the sheer abundance of evidence. Almost every peer-reviewed paper in biology, geology, palaeontology, cosmology, and the other natural sciences demonstrates, in one way or another, the reality of evolution and the age of the Earth, and presents verifiable results that creationism simply cannot accommodate.

Even psychology lends its weight. Not only does it support an evolutionary account of human cognition and intelligence, but it also helps explain why creationists cling so tightly to demonstrably false beliefs. For many, rejecting evidence becomes a test of loyalty or personal strength, with scientific data treated as part of a supposed conspiracy designed to shake their faith. If they can cling to their faith despite the overwhelming contrary evidence, then they must really believe it.

Adding this new discovery to the existing evidence is rather like tossing a pebble onto Mount Everest and expecting creationists to accept the mountain’s existence because a pebble lies on it. Such acceptance is impossible for the committed creationist, since that would mean yielding to the ‘evil conspiracy’ and admitting that their favourite holy book is not a perfect, divinely authored scientific text, but a compilation of Bronze Age and Early Iron Age mythology, created by people doing their best to explain a world they did not yet understand.

Creationism Refuted - Doggy Dos For Creationists

Dogs 10,000 years ago roamed with bands of humans and came in all shapes and sizes

This is the second article in The Conversation which incidentally refutes creationism and shows us why the Bible must be dismissed as a source book for science and history on the basis that, when compared to reality, it's stories are not just wrong; they're not even close.

This one deals with essentially that same subject as my last past - the evolution of all the different dog varieties since wolves were first domesticated some 11,000 years ago. Together with all the other canids that creationists insist are all dog 'kind', including several foxes, several subspecies of wolf, coyotes, jackals, and African wild dogs, the hundreds of different recognised breeds of dog could not conceivably have arisen from a single pair and the resulting genetic bottleneck just a few thousand years ago. Moreover, we are expected to believe that in that short space of time, all the canids evolved from being vegetarian (with canine teeth, meat-cutting incisors and bone-crushing molars, apparently) to being obligate carnivores.

As well as the paper that was the subject of my last blog post, this The Conversation article mentions another paper, also published in Science by palaeontologists led by Shao-Jie Zhang from the Kunming Institute of Zoology, China. This paper draws on DNA evidence from ancient Eastern Eurasian dogs.

The article by Kylie M. Cairns, a Research Fellow in Canid and Wildlife Genomics, UNSW Sydney, Australia and Professor Melanie Fillios of the Department of Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology, University of New England, USA. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative |Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

How Science Works - Not Abandonning Evolution - Refining Our Understanding Of It

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

A new theory of molecular evolution | University of Michigan News

A new paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution by a research team at the University of Michigan, led by evolutionary biologist, Professor Jianzhi Zhang, comprehensively, but incidentally, refutes several common creationist claims — such as that mainstream biologists are abandoning evolution because it supposedly cannot explain the evidence, that all mutations are harmful, so cannot underpin evolution, and that scientists are prevented from publishing findings that challenge orthodoxy.

The study examines a key assumption of the Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution — namely that most amino-acid substitutions are neutral (neither beneficial nor strongly deleterious) and fix by drift rather than selection. The authors report experimental data showing that in mutational-scanning assays of over 12,000 amino-acid-altering mutations across 24 genes, >1 % of mutations were beneficial, implying a far higher beneficial-mutation rate than is conventionally assumed.

To reconcile that finding with the fact that comparative genomic data appear consistent with many substitutions being neutral, Zhang’s team propose a new model — “adaptive tracking with antagonistic pleiotropy” — in which beneficial mutations are frequently environment-specific, and when the environment changes the same mutation may become deleterious, hence failing to fix. In this way, although beneficial mutations are common, they rarely reach fixation when environments shift, and substitution patterns can appear neutral.

The paper operates fully within the framework of evolutionary theory by natural selection: it does not challenge evolution itself, but refines a subsidiary theoretical model about molecular changes. Thus, it strengthens the broader evolutionary paradigm rather than undermines it.

Refuting Creationism - Cambrian Fossils Confirm The Bible Is Wrong.

Salterella in longitudinal section, showing biomineralized outer shell (blue arrow), agglutinated material (red arrow) and the boundary between the agglutinated layer and the shell near the apex (white arrows),

Vayda PJ, Xiao S, Keller ND, et al. (2025)

Interbedded fine-grained clastic and carbonate strata of the lower Illtyd Formation, Wind River, Yukon, Canada, that locally contain Salterella.

A skeleton and a shell? Ancient fossil finally finds home on the tree of life | Virginia Tech News | Virginia Tech

As though fossils from half a billion years before their mythical “Creation Week” weren’t awkward enough for creationists, this latest find slips neatly into the tree of life and closes a small but meaningful gap in our understanding of how protective shells evolved. In doing so, it undermines more creationist claims than they might care to consider.

A research team led by Prescott J. Vayda of Virginia Tech has shown that the enigmatic fossils Volborthella and Salterella, long puzzling palaeontologists, are in fact early cnidarians — members of the group that includes corals, jellyfish, and sea anemones. These organisms are united by their stinging cells, which they use to subdue prey. Even more troublesome for creationists, the structure of the earlier Volborthella shell strongly suggests a transitional relationship with the more complex shell of Salterella, hinting at an evolutionary sequence between the two.

The team’s findings have just been published in the Journal of Paleontology.

The Cambrian period was defined by the emergence of mobility and, with it, true predation. These new ecological dynamics sparked evolutionary “arms races”, driving rapid diversification in both offensive and defensive strategies: sensory structures, spines, shells, and behaviours such as burrowing. These early cnidarians provide an important glimpse into how some of the earliest protective shells came to be.

Such evolutionary arms races also offer yet another reason to dismiss the notion of an intelligent designer. No competent designer would turn yesterday’s solution into today’s problem — yet that is precisely what we see in nature, where improvements in predators prompt improvements in prey, and vice versa. It’s exactly what one would expect from an unguided evolutionary process with no foresight, driven solely by differential survival and reproduction.

Creationism Refuted - Neanderthals Didn't Disappear - They Became Us

A simple analytical model for Neanderthal disappearance due to genetic dilution by recurrent small-scale immigrations of modern humans | Scientific Reports

One of the enduring myths cherished by creationists is that humans appeared suddenly, as a distinct and immutable species, untouched by the messy processes of evolution. Yet study after study continues to reveal just how fluid and interconnected the human story really is. The latest comes from three researchers - Andrea Amadei, Giulia Lin, and Simone Fattorini - who have just published a fascinating analytical model in Scientific Reports explaining how the Neanderthals did not simply “vanish,” but were gradually absorbed into the expanding population of early modern humans.

This idea is not new, as I have reported before in this blog here and here, but what is new is this analytical model that shows how easily it happened. The model shows that repeated, small-scale migrations of Homo sapiens into Neanderthal territories would have resulted in gradual genetic dilution over time, without any need for violent extermination or sudden extinction events. Their DNA lives on in our genomes today — in Europeans, Asians, and other non-African populations — a genetic signature of our shared ancestry.

This finding adds yet another layer to the mounting evidence that humanity is not the product of divine design without ancestry but of evolutionary blending and adaptation. The neat, separate categories that creationists like to imagine simply never existed. Instead, what we see is a continuum of populations interacting, interbreeding, and shaping one another’s evolutionary fate. Rather than distinct “kinds,” humans and Neanderthals were part of a dynamic, interconnected lineage shaped by migration and time — the very processes that creationist dogma denies.

Far from the simplistic tale of a single miraculous creation, the history of our species is one of mixture, movement, and gradual transformation — precisely what evolution predicts, and precisely what the fossil and genetic evidence confirms.

Refuting Creationism - Diverging Sloth Genomes - Just As The TOE Predicts

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Deforested genomes: scientists find signs of environmental degradation in the genomes of the endangered Maned Sloths - Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research

The discovery fits seamlessly within the framework of Darwinian evolution. Two once-connected populations became isolated and exposed to different ecological conditions, followed their own evolutionary paths. Over time, their genomes accumulated distinct mutations reflecting adaptation, genetic drift, and local environmental pressures. The result is two clearly defined species whose divergence can be explained entirely by natural processes acting over generations — a textbook demonstration of evolution in action.

Yet this same process now drives both species along a far more perilous trajectory. As their habitats continue to shrink and fragment, their populations are losing genetic diversity and becoming increasingly inbred. Evolution has no foresight or purpose; it cannot plan for the future or reverse the consequences of environmental destruction. The very mechanism that once diversified life on Earth can, under relentless human pressure, just as readily lead to extinction.

There is no sign of “intelligent design” in this grim reality — only the blind, natural workings of selection, drift, and chance operating within a degraded environment. If a designer were guiding life towards some higher purpose, it would hardly produce a situation where its own creations are being driven to extinction by the ecological collapse of their habitats. The plight of the maned sloths stands as a vivid reminder that life’s diversity, beauty, and tragedy arise not from supernatural intent, but from the impersonal and unyielding logic of evolution.

As world leaders prepare for COP30 in Brazil, the message from the maned sloths’ genomes could not be clearer: conservation must be guided by evolutionary science and ecological understanding, not by comforting myths of divine oversight. Only by recognising the true, natural processes that shape life can we hope to protect what remains of it.

Refuting Creationism - Another of Those 'Living Fossils' For Creationists To Misrepresent

Adult marine shell-boring spionid polychaete.

Vasily Radishevsky/
Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Spionid traces on fossilized bivalve shells.

Javier Ortega-Hernandez/Harvard University.

Half-billion-year-old parasite still threatens shellfish | UCR News | UC Riverside

It’s Coelacanth time for creationist disinformers again.

Hilariously, I’ve known creationists claim that the 'fact' that coelacanths haven’t changed for 200 million years somehow proves the “evilutionists” are wrong and that Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old. How they managed to examine the genome of a 200-million-year-old fossil remains a mystery, but DNA appears to play no part in a creationist’s definition of evolution.

So, for an alternative fallacious argument, here’s an even older fossil that’s still around today, apparently in much the same form as it was almost half a billion years ago. It’s a parasitic worm that attacks oysters. The details have just been published in the journal iScience by scientists led by University of California, Riverside palaeobiologist Karma Nanglu, with colleagues from Harvard.

The parasitic, soft-bodied bristle worm belongs to a group called the spionids. It’s common in today’s oceans and feeds on the shells of mussels and oysters, leaving a characteristic question mark-shaped track in their shells. Their parasitism doesn’t kill the shellfish but probably shortens their lifespan.

Refuting Creationism - 300,000 Years Of Stone Technology In Africa - Over 2 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fig. 1: Map of Turkana Basin with the Namorotukunan Archeological Site and timeline of currently known events in the Plio-Pleistocene.

a Geographical context of the Koobi Fora Formation (red stripes), the paleontological collection area 40 (green square), and the location of the site of Namorotukunan (black dot); [map produced Natural Earth and NOAAA ETOPO 202295]; b Stratigraphic context of the Koobi Fora Formation highlighting members and key volcanic ash marker levels, yellow bars refer to the age of archeological horizons (tephrostratigraphy after McDougall et al.⁹⁶); c A chronology of key Plio-Pleistocene hominins from the East African Rift System (EARS)^11,74,97,98 d A chronology and key localities associated with hominin lithic technology^3,6,12 (images of Nyayanga provided by E. Finestone; images of Lomekwi and BD1 based on 3D models; artifact images are for representation and not to scale) and the investigations at Namorotukunan: red arrows represent the artifact levels in the archeological excavations (photos DRB), and colored circles (lettered A-G) represent geologic sections investigated to develop a synthetic stratigraphic column (presented in Figs. 2 and 3).

Braun, D.R., Palcu Rolier, D.V., Advokaat, E.L. et al (2025)

Stone Tools Through Generations: 300,000 Years of Human Technology | Media Relations | The George Washington University

The story of our origins is written in the ground of Africa. It is real, tangible, and objective — a record that doesn’t rely on belief or interpretation, but on physical evidence left behind by our ancient ancestors. A fresh chapter of that record has just been described in a new open-access paper in Nature Communications, authored by an international team of palaeoanthropologists led by Professor David R. Braun of the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology at George Washington University, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

By comparison, the origins narrative found in Genesis reflects the worldview and assumptions of people who believed the Earth was small, flat, and covered by a solid dome. It is astonishing that, even today, some treat that ancient cosmology as a more reliable account of human history than the rich and expanding fossil and archaeological record in Africa. Yet such individuals continue to seek influence over policy, law, morality, and social institutions, grounding their authority not in evidence, but in pre-scientific tradition — a worldview formed long before the wheel, let alone modern science.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution By LOSS of Genetic Information

Dysdera tilosensis

Credit: Marc Domènech and Pedro Oromí

Dysdera catalonica

Dysdera tilosensis

Fotografies: Marc Domènech and Pedro Oromí

Deciphering the mechanisms of genome size evolution - Current events - University of Barcelona

For years, creationists have confidently assured anyone who’ll listen that evolution can’t possibly work, because losing genetic material is always disastrous — rather like claiming a book can’t be edited without collapsing into meaningless gibberish. Yet nature has an unhelpful habit of ignoring such pronouncements and getting on with things regardless. And now, a tiny spider living quietly in the Canary Islands has delivered another inconvenient data point: it’s been shedding DNA at a remarkable rate, and doing perfectly well in the process.

Researchers led by Julio Rozas and Sara Guirao, from the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) at the University of Barcelona, have shown that a spider endemic to the Canary Islands has lost almost half its genome in only a few million years.

The spider, Dysdera tilosensis, is a close relative of the mainland species D. catalonica and the familiar British woodlouse-hunter, D. crocata, yet is morphologically almost identical to both.

The findings have been published in the journal Molecular Biology & Evolution.

This discovery runs counter to a general pattern in evolutionary biology, in which adaptation to oceanic island environments often involves increases in genome size. Rather than undermining evolution, this unexpected result enriches the scientific debate over how and why genome size changes during evolution.

It also raises awkward questions for creationist dogma. Why would an intelligent designer equip spiders with almost twice as much genetic material as they actually need? And how would one distinguish such closely related species or show a transition from one to the other in the fossil record, if genome size — the key difference — leaves no trace in fossils?

How Science Works - Expanding Our Knowledge of Coelacanth Evolution.

Reconstruction of a large mawsoniid coelacanth from the British Rhaetian.

Artist credit: Daniel Phillips

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Coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae

Fraser, Michael D.; Henderson, Bruce A.S., et al (2020). CC BY 4.0, Link

Ancient fish was hiding in plain sight hundreds of years after its believed extinction, study shows - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

A recent re-examination of museum coelacanth fossils has shown that there was more than one taxon in the Late Triassic and that, where we believed there were just four specimens, there are actually more than fifty. These fossils were hiding in plain sight, mis-identified for decades in collections across Britain. This significantly expands the known diversity of coelacanths at that time and neatly illustrates how science continually refines and improves its understanding as new evidence and careful re-analysis emerge.

Coelacanths have long been a favourite talking-point for creationists, who seized on the 1938 discovery of living Latimeria — a lineage once known only from the fossil record and thought extinct — as supposed proof that evolution had somehow stalled. Because the modern species still carries the name “coelacanth”, they leap to the assumption that the fish has remained unchanged for over 200 million years, and therefore evolution must be false. I have even seen creationists claim that if coelacanths have “not evolved” in all that time, the Earth must therefore be only a few thousand years old. It’s an extraordinary logical contortion — and one born of misunderstanding both biology and evidence.

In reality, the modern coelacanth is not the same species as the ancient Triassic forms, nor is evolutionary change required to be dramatic or constant for every lineage. Species can remain broadly similar when their ecological niche remains stable — a concept perfectly consistent with evolutionary theory. What this study demonstrates, once again, is the iterative, self-correcting nature of science: questions are never closed, evidence is always open to re-examination, and conclusions adapt as new data emerges.

Refuting Creationism - Ancient Teeth Show Mixed Origins Of A Transitional Hominin - 2 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Paranthropus robustus

Parathropus robustus (Artist's impression)

Bary Davies, RCA

New clues from 2 million-year-old tooth enamel tell us more about an ancient relative of humans

Human evolution isn’t a tidy staircase; it’s a branching, tangled tree full of transitional forms. And now, cutting-edge protein analysis from two-million-year-old teeth has revealed that Paranthropus robustus — one of our distant cousins — carried mixed ancestry, adding powerful new evidence to the evolutionary story creationists work so hard to deny.

If there is anything guaranteed to send a creationist into a fit of denial — desperately trying to redefine basic terms such as “transitional”, “species”, and “evolution”, and, as a last resort, claiming palaeontologists must have faked the evidence — it is the discovery of a transitional species in human evolutionary history.

But the hominin fossil record, like the evolutionary record for most living species, is absolutely packed with transitional forms. In fact, there are so many in human palaeontology that it can be difficult to single out one that is clearly more ‘transitional’ than the rest, because they form a fairly smooth continuum from the australopiths through to the genus Homo, just as we would expect of a slow process unfolding over tens of thousands or millions of years.

However, one species, Paranthropus robustus, stands out for its mosaic of features consistent with a lineage intermediate between the common ancestor of chimpanzees and hominins and the australopiths that followed.

And this mosaic has now been expanded to include genetic-level evidence, thanks to advances in palaeoproteomics. Proteins can persist far longer than DNA, yet they retain a direct correspondence to DNA via RNA, which encodes their amino-acid sequences. Once ancient proteins have been recovered and analysed, researchers can work backwards to reconstruct the RNA, and therefore the DNA, that produced them.

Using proteins extracted from the tooth enamel of four P. robustus fossils, researchers led by the University of Copenhagen have shown that these individuals themselves had mixed ancestry — indicating interbreeding with contemporaneous relatives, just as we now know happened among later hominin species, and almost certainly among the australopiths too.

Refuting Creationism - Dinosaurs Thrived Until Disaster Struck - 66 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Small primitive mammals live alongside a Triceratops, pre-extinction. A softshell turtle climbs up a log, unaware that its freshwater surroundings will shelter it from the asteroid.

Illustration © Henry Sharpe.

Dinosaurs were on the up before asteroid downfall | News | The University of Edinburgh

This, the second paper, published in 2022 that utterly refutes creationism on several different levels, reports evidence that particularly undermines their claim that an omnibenevolent god created a world fine-tuned for life.

This belief arises from a deeply ignorant, rose-tinted view of the world — one that conveniently ignores history and habitually attributes anything bad to something else: sin, free will, or other theological constructs that, by their own narrative, could only have applied after some supposed “fall”.

In reality, even a superficial understanding of Earth’s history — 99.9975 % of which took place before creationism’s legendary “Creation Week” — reveals that the planet is anything but fine-tuned for life. Life on Earth has repeatedly been subjected to mass extinctions triggered by geological and cosmological catastrophes that wreaked havoc on the environment, often at a pace too rapid for most species to adapt.

One of the most famous of these events was the meteor impact in what is now the Yucatán Peninsula, 66 million years ago. This strike plunged the planet into a “nuclear winter” as atmospheric dust blotted out the Sun. Within weeks, almost all large species were exterminated, leaving only the avian dinosaurs — likely shielded by insulating feathers — and early mammals, protected by their insulating fur.

But as this recent paper shows, the dinosaurs were thriving in a healthy, biodiverse environment in which they were the dominant species right up until the moment the meteor struck. Had they shared the creationists’ mindset, they might well have concluded that Earth was “fine-tuned” for them too.

The evidence for this comes from an international team of palaeontologists and ecologists, including researchers from University of Oulu (Finland), Universidade de Vigo (Spain), University of Washington (Seattle, USA), University College London (UK), New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (USA), and University of Edinburgh (UK).

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

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

Source: Bryozoans in the British Jurassic

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

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

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

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

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

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

Refuting Creationism - A Tiny Fossil From New Zealand Is Another Huge Problem For Creationism

A male satin bowerbird by his highly decorated avenue bower.

Photo by Daniel J. Field

Tiny fossil bone helps unlock history of the bowerbird | University of Otago
Apart from the fact that this fossil is a million years old, there is nothing in this discovery that creationists will struggle to dismiss with one of their well-worn stock phrases — “It was just a bird ‘kind’,” “It wasn’t transitional,” and so on. This is despite the fact that their Bible is remarkably vague about how many bird ‘kinds’ there were, includes bats as birds, and says absolutely nothing about anything outside a few square miles of the Middle East.

And of course, the date — like the entire fossil record — will be casually brushed aside as forged, fabricated, or “wrongly dated using proven false carbon dating” [sic].

But to anyone who actually values evidence and truth, and is not intent on proving their strength by clinging to demonstrably false beliefs in defiance of all contrary evidence, this find is genuinely fascinating. It provides strong evidence that the bowerbirds, today confined to Australia and New Guinea, were once far more widespread. This conclusion is based on the fact that the fossil was discovered in New Zealand. It is also suggested that climate change may have brought about its extinction in New Zealand and driven the bowerbirds' range back to its present distribution.

The discovery is reported in the journal Historical Biology by researchers from University of Cambridge, University of Otago, and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. A [news release from the University of Otago]() explains the significance of the find and four of the authors have also written an article about the find in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.