Unintelligent Design - Evolution Of Egg Mimicry In The Parasitic Cuckoo Finch Carries A Genetic Cost - No Intelligence Detected

Male cuckoo finch, Anomalospiza imberbis

By terathopius - https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/1507136, CC BY 4.0, Link

Maternal inheritance accelerates sex chromosome degeneration and mitonuclear coevolution in a brood parasitic bird | Nature Ecology & Evolution

Cuckoo finch mimicry of tawny-flanked prinia eggs.

This photograph shows eggs of the cuckoo finch (middle circle) and one of its common host species, the tawny-flanked prinia (outer circle), revealing the diversity of host egg colour and pattern “signatures” (an anti-parasite adaptation that aids host parents in recognizing their own eggs) that are mimicked by cuckoo finch egg “forgeries". However, cuckoo finches do not mimic the rich olive-green eggs (top left) laid by some tawny-flanked prinia females. The new study suggests that a genetic constraint in cuckoo finches may account for their apparent inability to mimic this host egg type.

Source: University of Cambridge (2022).

An intelligent designer worth its salt would presumably avoid improving one feature by compromising another, then introducing further modifications to compensate for the damage. Yet this is precisely the sort of outcome we should expect from evolution: adaptations that work well enough to spread, carrying disadvantages with them because natural selection cannot separate every useful change from its genetic baggage. The African cuckoo-finch, Anomalospiza imberbis, provides a particularly revealing example.

Cuckoo-finches are brood parasites: they lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and leave the hosts to rear their offspring. Their success depends partly on producing eggs that resemble those of their intended foster parents. Hosts, meanwhile, benefit from recognising and rejecting the impostors. The result is an evolutionary arms race between increasingly effective deception and increasingly effective detection — an odd arrangement to attribute to a single intelligent designer supposedly responsible for both sides.

Creationism Refuted - Horizontal Gene Transfer From A Giant Virus Into Our Complex-Celled Ancestor

AI-generated representation of a giant DNA virus, its host and a potassium channel.

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Viruses as master builders of complex proteins – TU Darmstadt

Where do new genes and complex proteins come from? For intelligent design creationists, gaps in our knowledge are opportunities to invoke a supernatural designer. For scientists, they are opportunities to investigate. A discovery reported in PNAS illustrates the difference: researchers have identified a functional protein in a giant virus that offers clues to the evolutionary origins of a more elaborate family of cellular proteins.

The proteins concerned are tandem potassium channels, which allow potassium ions to cross cell membranes. In humans, members of this family help stabilise the electrical potential across membranes and regulate the excitability of nerve cells. Their distinctive architecture includes two linked pore-forming domains within each protein subunit. Although simpler precursors of other potassium-channel families are known from bacteria, the evolutionary origins of this tandem arrangement have remained uncertain.

The researchers found a gene encoding such a channel in Pyramimonas orientalis virus, which infects a single-celled marine alga. Its protein, named Kpov, contains just 178 amino acids, yet experiments in artificial membranes confirmed that it functions as an ion channel with a preference for potassium over sodium. Here, then, is a comparatively simple working version of a molecular structure associated with more elaborate cellular machinery.

The evolutionary analysis adds a particularly interesting twist. The results suggest that the virus did not simply acquire this gene recently from its host. Instead, the channel may have originated through the fusion of simpler viral pore-forming components. This supports the possibility that viruses have contributed both genetic material and molecular innovations to cellular evolution.

Creationism Refuted - Now It's Transitional Dinosaur Egg Shells - From 195 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

An imaginative AI-generated reconstruction of a basal sauropodomorph beside a clutch of eggs in Early Jurassic woodland, approximately 195 million years ago.

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Fig. 1 | Localities of Sinemurian basal sauropodomorph eggs/eggshells, stratigraphic section of the Zhangjiawa Member (Lufeng Formation, Dawa Dinosaur Mountain), and the rock containing Mutabilisoolithus dawaensis and associated embryonic skeletons.

From: Di, Z., Wang, H., Wang, T. et al (2026).

A team led by Di Zhiyong from the School of Life Sciences at Hebei University, in collaboration with others, spent six years meticulously analyzing the world's oldest and most complete amniotic eggshell structure.

Creationism thrives on gaps because it is easy to fool scientifically illiterate people looking for confirmation for their pre-exiting bias with a god of gaps and a false dichotomy fallacy. But one massive gap they invariably ignore is the gap between the real start of the history of life on Earth some 3.8 billion years ago and the mythical 'Creation Week' 6,000-10,000 years ago, as the Bible narrative claims. This means it's easy to refute creationist beliefs simply by discovering evidence from the long pre-'Creation Week' history.

Other gaps creationists crave are the ones that transitional fossils fill, hence creationists insistence that such transitional fossils are missing, despite them regularly being found by palaeontologists, as reported in this blog and the scientific journals. This article then will have creationists performing all manner of intellectual gymnastics to try to minimise it or ignore it altogether.

Some 195 million years ago, in what is now Yunnan, China, an early dinosaur laid eggs with a revealing combination of features: a thick organic membrane and a thin mineralised layer that had not formed a rigid, interlocking shell. These eggs pre-date the supposed creation of the Universe in the conventional young-Earth biblical chronology by almost their entire existence. They also preserve something creationists repeatedly insist is missing from the fossil record: an intermediate condition illuminating an evolutionary transition.

The fossil eggshell, named Mutabilisoolithus dawaensis, is described by Zhiyong Di and colleagues in a paper published in Nature Communications. Associated with an early-diverging sauropodomorph dinosaur, it combines flexibility with a limited degree of biomineralisation — the biological deposition of minerals. Its thin calcareous layer consists of shell units that do not interlock, while its underlying membrane is exceptionally thick. This is a soft eggshell, but “soft” does not mean entirely devoid of mineral reinforcement.

Refuting Creationism - How Our Complex Cells Evolved

3D volume segmentations of Cryo-electron tomogram slice of Methanocalculus. Red, ferritin-like granules; yellow, actin filaments

From: Imachi, H., Nobu, M.K., Ishii, S. et al. (2026).

How could a comparatively simple cell give rise to the elaborate internal organisation found in the cells of animals, plants, fungi and other eukaryotes? For creationists, this is another opportunity to insert a supernatural designer into an unanswered question. For scientists, it is an invitation to investigate. A new study has now brought that investigation a significant step forward by cultivating two strains of microbes belonging to one of our closest known archaeal relatives.

The research, led by Hiroyuki Imachi and Masaru K. Nobu of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, with colleagues including Satoshi Nakagawa of Kyoto University, was published in Nature on 28 October 2026. The organisms belong to Heimdallarchaeia, within the group widely known as Asgard archaea, now formally classified as Promethearchaeota.

What makes these organisms especially informative is the combination of internal simplicity and elaborate external structures. They lack a nucleus and persistent internal membrane systems, yet produce long, branching membrane protrusions. They also depend on metabolic partnerships with other microorganisms. Their biology therefore provides a way to investigate how close associations between initially separate cells could have helped set the stage for a much more intimate evolutionary partnership.

Endosymbiosis involves one organism living inside another. In the case of eukaryotic origins, a bacterial partner eventually became the mitochondrion. The outstanding questions concern how that relationship began and how it became integrated with changes in the host cell. These new findings support scenarios in which the archaeal host was still internally simple, with much of eukaryotic cellular complexity developing during or after the establishment of that partnership.

Refuting Creationism - Early Humans Lived In The Jordan Valley - 1.9 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A bifacial stone tool from ‘Ubeidiya

Credit: Omry Barzilai

A specialized imaging technique reveals mineral layers preserved within a fossilized Melanopsis shell (sample UB1).

Credit: Perach Nuriel

Study Finds 1.9 Million Year Out-of-Africa Migration wave leaves its mark in the Jordan Valley | EUROPEAN FRIENDS OF THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY

Long before anyone composed the biblical creation stories, early members of our genus were making stone tools and inhabiting the Jordan Valley. Research on the prehistoric site of ‘Ubeidiya, south of the Sea of Galilee, now suggests that this chapter of human history began earlier than previously thought — probably more than 1.9 million years ago. The landscape subsequently woven into biblical tradition preserves a much older history, written in sediments, fossils and archaeological remains.

The research, published in Quaternary Science Reviews brings together cosmogenic burial dating, ancient magnetic signatures and uranium–lead dating of fossil freshwater snail shells. Their combined interpretation favours an older chronology for the site, with implications for when tool-making hominins dispersed beyond Africa.

These inhabitants were not modern Homo sapiens. They were earlier members of our genus, probably associated with the Homo erectus/ergaster group, although the surviving fossils do not justify an unqualified species identification. Their presence, together with the site's Acheulean stone tools, contributes to an increasingly detailed picture of early human expansion into Eurasia.

Refuting Creationism - More On Denisovans Exposes Moronic Creationism

An artist's reconstruction of what a Denisovan might have looked like.

Image credit: Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology / Chinese Academy of Sciences

Chinese Scientists Solve Puzzle of Identifying Extinct Group of Hominins----Chinese Academy of Sciences

One of the strengths of science is its willingness to leave a question open until there is enough evidence to answer it. An incomplete picture is an invitation to investigate, and an explanation that changes when new evidence emerges is a demonstration that the method is working. The developing story of the Denisovans provides an excellent example: an extinct group of humans is acquiring a clearer identity through the patient accumulation and comparison of evidence.

As a Xinhua report reproduced by the Chinese Academy of Sciences explains, Denisovans were first identified in 2010 through DNA recovered from a tiny finger bone found in Siberia. Scientists could recognise a distinct evolutionary lineage before they had much idea of what its members looked like. That imbalance between molecular knowledge and anatomical knowledge presented a problem that further discoveries and improved analytical methods could address.

Unintelligent Design - Discovering The Rules Of Evolutionary Arms Races - No Intelligence Found

AI-depiction of a celestial designer confused by its unintelligently designed arms race

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Uncovering the Rules of a Genetic Arms Race | HHMI

Creationists who claim that biologists are abandoning the Theory of Evolution in favour of intelligent design might benefit from looking at what biologists actually do, if only they could find the courage to read some actual science.

A good place to start would be the research of Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Harmit Malik and his colleagues, who investigate how genetic conflicts drive evolutionary change. Here, evolution is a working scientific framework: it supplies questions, generates testable predictions and helps researchers explain their experimental results.

No supernatural designer is required.

A study led by Tamanash Bhattacharya and published in Science Advances describes this research programme. Working with Sindbis virus, the researchers investigated how an unusual genetic stop signal helps the virus evade its hosts’ immune defences.

This signal, known as the opal stop codon, helps maintain the integrity of tiny compartments in which the virus copies its RNA, shielding that RNA from immune detection. Its importance therefore depends on the opposition the virus encounters. In mosquito cells with functioning antiviral defences, selection strongly favoured viruses carrying the stop signal. Within five days — approximately 24 rounds of replication — viruses that had regained it almost completely replaced a variant lacking it. When the relevant host defence was disabled, the selective advantage changed, and variants without the stop signal could prevail.

That is evolution measured in the laboratory: heritable variation, differential reproductive success and a resulting change in the genetic composition of a population. The experiment reveals a mechanism through which host immunity shapes viral evolution. It also illustrates why “fitness” has no meaning independently of circumstances. A genetic variant advantageous in one environment can become disadvantageous when that environment changes.

Such conflicts make straightforward sense in evolutionary terms. Hosts benefit from restricting infection, while viruses benefit from overcoming those restrictions. Over evolutionary time, adaptations on either side can impose selection for counter-adaptations on the other. There is no foresight, agreed destination or concern for the welfare of the opposing side — simply competing lineages leaving different numbers of descendants.

Unintelligent Design News - How RNA Can Harm The Cell - Incompetence, Malevolence Or Evolution?

AI-generated illustration of RNA overload.

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Too much RNA can starve cells of energy, study finds – Texas A&M Stories

What sort of omniscient designer would make a cell dependent on a molecule that, when allowed to accumulate, can damage its energy-generating machinery? Presumably, one who could foresee the problem would also be capable of avoiding it. Yet research from Texas A&M University reveals precisely this vulnerability: RNA, indispensable to the functioning of living cells, can interfere with mitochondrial energy production when its abundance escapes normal control.

The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) concern the relationship between RNA turnover and mitochondrial function. Messenger RNA carries instructions used to manufacture proteins, but those messages must also be broken down. The researchers found that this disposal process does more than regulate gene expression: it helps protect the machinery that supplies much of a cell’s usable energy.

Working with vaccinia virus, the team found that disrupting the breakdown of RNA allowed it to accumulate and severely impaired mitochondrial respiration. Further experiments showed that excess messenger RNA and double-stranded RNA could impair mitochondria even outside intact cells. The effect therefore did not require the usual antiviral immune responses. Excess RNA reduced mitochondrial membrane potential, a crucial component of the energy gradient used to make ATP. Precisely how RNA produces this disruption remains to be established.

This is not a case of cells having no safeguards. They have elaborate systems for controlling RNA abundance. The difficulty for intelligent design is that an essential component can become a threat to another essential component, leaving the cell dependent on continual regulation and clearance. Calling the safeguards evidence of brilliant design merely invites the question of why an all-knowing, all-powerful designer chose an arrangement with this vulnerability in the first place.

There is no comparable puzzle for evolution. Natural selection has no foresight, no drawing board and no opportunity to start again with an entirely different biochemistry. It acts on heritable variation in existing systems, favouring changes whose effects improve reproductive success under prevailing conditions. Benefits can outweigh costs without eliminating them, and a mechanism that works adequately under ordinary circumstances can remain vulnerable when conditions change. This study illustrates such a vulnerability; it does not establish the precise historical trade-offs that produced it.

Refuting Creationism - The Blind Cave Snail That Evolved by LOSS of Information

Erhaia dijiang.

Credit: Yue-Ming He, et al., 2026

Erhaia dijiang.

Credit Yue-Ming He, et al., 2026.

China’s First Cave-Dwelling Freshwater Snail Named After A Mythical Mountain God | Pensoft Blog

A tiny, eyeless snail living in a Chinese cave offers an instructive challenge to two familiar creationist assumptions: that evolution must mean increasing complexity, and that the natural world was arranged for the benefit of humans. Erhaia dijiang has neither eyes nor body pigmentation, and its existence remained unknown to science until researchers investigated its obscure underground habitat. For an animal supposedly included in a creation designed around us, it has kept a remarkably low profile.

Described by Yue-Ming He and colleagues in Subterranean Biology, the species was discovered in a cave in Yuxi City, Yunnan Province, at an altitude of 2,062 metres. It is reported as China's first recorded freshwater cave snail. Its translucent shell, unpigmented body and absence of eyes are characteristic of an animal specialised for subterranean life. Appropriately, its name honours Di Jiang, a faceless being from Chinese mythology.

The evolutionary lesson is straightforward: evolution has no obligation to produce increasingly elaborate organisms. It can involve the reduction or loss of structures, just as it can produce new structures or modify existing ones. Eyes are useful where there is light to see by; in permanent darkness, their usual advantage disappears. Selection maintaining functional eyes can consequently weaken, allowing mutations that impair them to persist. Where reduced investment in unnecessary structures improves reproductive success, natural selection can also favour that reduction. The precise contributions of these processes have not been established for this particular snail, but its eyeless condition fits a familiar pattern of evolution in subterranean animals.

Comparable reductions occur in many parasites, including the loss of digestive structures in animals that absorb nutrients from their hosts. This is not evolution going backwards: evolution has no predetermined destination from which to retreat. Nor does losing one organ mean that an animal has become simpler in every respect. It means that particular features have changed within a particular ecological setting. Calling such changes “degeneration”, as creationists often do, does not place them outside evolutionary biology or explain them away.

Refuting Creationism - How Evolution Explains The Nightjar's Wing - No Magic Needed

European nightjar, Caprimulgus europaeus

The nightjar needs to be able to fly both long distances and at lower speeds.

Photo: Urban Rundström.

Nightjar wings reveal a trade-off between hunting slowly and travelling far | Lund University

Evolution does not produce organisms that are perfect at everything. Natural selection acts on inherited variation, and an improvement in one function can come at a cost to another. A bird that must both migrate over long distances and catch insects in slow, manoeuvrable flight faces competing aerodynamic demands. The European nightjar, Caprimulgus europaeus, provides a revealing example of how these demands can produce a workable compromise.

As described in a news release from Lund University, the nightjar travels between Europe and southern Africa, yet uses the same wings to pursue flying insects at low speeds. Efficient travelling and slow-speed hunting do not necessarily favour identical wing shapes. Features that help the bird remain airborne while moving slowly can impose an aerodynamic penalty when it flies faster.

The research, published in PLOS Biology, investigated this compromise by measuring the airflow behind nightjars flying in a wind tunnel. At cruising speeds, the researchers detected an unusual double wingtip vortex associated with less efficient lift generation. They interpret this as a cost of the bird’s broad, slotted wingtips: a shape likely to help generate lift during slow flight and hovering, but which produces a less favourable distribution of lift at higher speeds.

Creationism Refuted - Dinosaur Tracks Record Transition From Crawling to Bipedalism

Holotype of Pachychirotherium gardenaensis

Photo: @ University La Sapienza of Roma.

From Sprawling to Bipedalism: How Locomotion Evolved in Dinosaur Ancestors - Museum für Naturkunde Berlin

One of the familiar refrains of creationism is that the fossil record contains no transitional forms. Yet transitions need not be preserved only in bones: sometimes, animals left evidence of evolutionary change in the footprints they made. A new study of ancient reptile tracks reveals a stepwise acquisition of features associated with upright locomotion — changes that helped establish the conditions for the later evolution of two-legged movement in dinosaurs and their close relatives.

The research, by Lorenzo Marchetti of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and Hendrik Klein of the Saurierwelt Paläontologisches Museum, is published in Palaeontology, concerns early archosauriforms, members of the wider evolutionary group that includes archosaurs — dinosaurs, pterosaurs, crocodilians and their relatives. Their history extends back into the Late Permian, more than 250 million years ago: already an insurmountable chronological problem for a literal reading of Genesis.

Marchetti and Klein re-examined footprints from the Val Gardena Sandstone Formation of northern Italy, including previously undescribed specimens, and recognised a distinctive track type, which they named Pachychirotherium gardenaensis. This is a name for the fossil traces, rather than a newly identified species of skeletal animal. Comparisons with fossil feet suggest that their makers were early archosauriforms with an anatomy resembling that of erythrosuchids.

The wider comparison with Permian and Triassic tracks is particularly revealing. Late Permian forms retain evidence consistent with sprawling locomotion; some Early Triassic forms show transitional characteristics; and a fully erect stance probably emerged during the Middle Triassic. Increasing reliance on the toes, changes in toe proportions and a reduction in the relative size of the forefoot impressions accompanied this evolutionary transition. These features were assembled progressively, rather than appearing together as a completed package.

Refuting Creationism - Yet Another of Those 'Non-Existent' Transitional Fossils - From 150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Life reconstruction of the Late Jurassic bird Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis.

Image by Chung-Tat Cheung

Life reconstruction of the Late Jurassic bird Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis.

Image by Chung-Tat Cheung

Not All Early Birds Evolved Toward Better Flight, Jurassic Fossil Suggests----Chinese Academy of Sciences

Creationists who insist that there are no transitional fossils might wish that palaeontologists would stop finding animals that refuse to respect their imaginary boundaries. A newly described Jurassic bird from China is another such inconvenience: an evolutionary mosaic combining bird-like features with conspicuously dinosaurian anatomy. And, to compound the difficulty for Bible literalists, it lived approximately 150 million years ago — long before their supposed ‘Creation Week’.

The animal, Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis, discovered in the Late Jurassic Zhenghe Fauna of Fujian Province, is described in a paper published in Nature. This crow-sized animal possessed bird-like pelvic and hindlimb features alongside serrated teeth and a hyperextensible second toe bearing a sickle-shaped claw — a combination reminiscent of its close dinosaurian relatives.

Its unusually short forelimbs provide another intriguing part of the story. Analyses of its limb proportions strongly support a terrestrial, flightless lifestyle, despite its placement within Avialae, the evolutionary group containing living birds and their closest extinct relatives. The researchers interpret it as evidence of exceptionally early flight loss. That interpretation necessarily involves reconstructing ancestral capabilities: the fossil provides anatomical evidence about how this animal lived, rather than a direct record of either its behaviour or its ancestors’ flight.

This matters because evolution has no destination. Early birds were not obliged to become progressively better flying machines, any more than every mammalian lineage was obliged to become a bat. Natural selection favours traits according to their consequences in particular environments; it does not work towards a predetermined ideal. A lineage exploiting opportunities on the ground could follow a different evolutionary course from one increasingly dependent on flight.

Creationism Refuted - How Cephalopods Evolved Intelligence - No Magic Needed

Cephalopods

Californian two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides). Embryo at the final stage before hatching. The species is named after the two prominent blue eyespots that can help deter predators.

3D structure of DNA may explain how cephalopods evolved complex brains

How much new DNA does evolution need to produce a new biological capability? Intelligent design creationists commonly assume that new functions require new “complex specified information”, then insist that only an intelligent designer can supply it. But this overlooks something fundamental about genomes: what matters is not simply which genes an organism possesses, but how, where and when those genes are used. Rearranging existing components can change what a biological system does, without requiring every component to be invented afresh, and, importantly, no new DNA being inserted into the genome.

A new study published in Nature Communications explores this possibility in coleoid cephalopods — octopuses, squid and cuttlefish. These animals have elaborate nervous systems and remarkable behavioural capabilities. The research suggests that part of the explanation for their evolutionary innovations may lie in the three-dimensional organisation of their genomes.

DNA does not lie inside a cell as a neatly stretched-out sequence. It folds, bringing regions that are distant along a chromosome into physical proximity. Those contacts can influence gene regulation. An ancient episode of extensive genome rearrangement in the ancestors of coleoids created opportunities for previously separated regions to acquire new regulatory relationships. The researchers describe the resulting interdependence as “regulatory entanglement”.

Comparing genome organisation and gene activity across species, tissues and developmental stages, the team found a combination of stability and flexibility: larger chromatin domains were broadly conserved, while hundreds of smaller DNA loops varied with species and biological context. Their experiments also went beyond comparisons: deleting a candidate regulatory sequence using CRISPR–Cas9 demonstrated a role for these long-range interactions in neural development.

This is not proof that genome rearrangement alone produced cephalopod intelligence, nor does it mean that no new DNA evolved. The study also considers genome expansion. Its importance is more interesting than either oversimplification: evolutionary novelty can involve changes in the relationships between genetic components, as well as changes to the components themselves.

That leaves the intelligent design argument with a familiar problem. Calling a biological outcome “information” does not demonstrate that it required a supernatural author. Here, scientists are investigating physical mechanisms through which genome evolution can generate new regulatory possibilities. Whether creationists choose to call those possibilities “new information” changes neither the mechanisms nor the evidence. The scientific question is how complexity evolved — and this research offers another testable part of the answer.

Refuting Creationism - Another New Dinosaur From The Isle of Wight For Creationists To Ignore

AI-generated impression of Invictibellatrix amberina in its natural habitat.

ChapGPT-6 Astra (based on a reconstruction
by Sergey Krasovskiy and Pedro Salas).

An artist’s illustration of the new theropod dinosaur, Invictibellatrix amberina (centre of the image), in its ecosystem on the Isle of Wight, United Kingdom in the Early Cretaceous (around 120 million years ago). It lived in what was likely a seasonally wet-to-dry floodplain environment and is surrounded by other dinosaurs including large long-necked rebbachisaurid sauropods (directly behind Invictibellatrix, centre) and relatives of Iguanodon (right). A spinosaurid theropod, potentially the apex predator of the time, fishes (left). Invictibellatrix has just caught and is consuming two small mammals. Gymnosperms dominate the environment as flowering plants (angiosperms) were not common at this time. Other reptiles including relatives to modern lizards, crocodiles and turtles enjoy the warm Early Cretaceous weather of the UK.

Credit: Sergey Krasovskiy and Pedro Salas.

UK dinosaur fossil identified as new long-clawed predator | UCL News

Palaeontologists do not need to set out to refute biblical creationism. They merely need to investigate the history of life, and the evidence does the job for them. Another example comes from the Isle of Wight, where a fossil has revealed a previously unrecognised predatory dinosaur that lived about 120 million years ago — long before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of a literal reading of Genesis. While creationists struggle to squeeze the history of an entire planet into a few thousand years, researchers are reconstructing the evolutionary relationships and geographical movements of animals separated from us by immense stretches of geological time.

The fundamental problem creationists have created for themselves is that, because there is vastly more history pre-'Creation Week' than there is post-'Creation Week', by several orders of magnitude, virtually every palaeontological, geological and archaeological discovery incidentally refutes creationism, so the most risible and dishonest mental gymnastics have to be invoked to dismiss it all, and creationists end up looking both intellectually and morally bankrupt.

For example, as described in a study, published in Royal Society Open Science, a team led by University College London (UCL) researchers has identified Invictibellatrix amberina, the first recognised European member of a group of carnivorous dinosaurs known as megaraptorans. The discovery concerns a partial skull acquired by the Natural History Museum in 1924. CT scanning and anatomical comparisons have now revealed its significance. From its relatives, the researchers infer an animal around three to four metres long, probably feathered and equipped with substantial grasping arms and curved claws.

The discovery also helps fill a geographical gap in the group’s known distribution, supporting the hypothesis that megaraptorans dispersed from Asia through Europe towards the southern continents. This is the sort of question evolutionary science can investigate: how related animals diversified, where they lived, and how changing geography influenced their distribution. A fossil becomes evidence within a wider, testable account of life’s history.

Refuting Creationism - A Newly-Discovered Giant Fungus from A Family That Evolved 65 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'.

Stromata of Dianjunus rex in the field. (a, c, d, f) Stromata attached to host roots. (b, e, g, h) Stromata around host plant. (a) Collectors. (i) Total weight of largest bilobedstromata.

Song, Yan, Pérez-Moreno, et al (2026)

Stromata of Dianjunus rex attached to host root.

Song, Yan, Pérez-Moreno, et al (2026)

Scientists discover ‘D-rex’, a giant fungus from Chinese forests whose unique lineage dates back 65 million years | EurekAlert!

Another newly described species has brought with it an evolutionary history that refuses to fit into creationism’s abbreviated chronology. This time it is a giant fungus from China’s Yunnan Province, named Dianjunus rex, whose family lineage is estimated to have diverged about 65 million years ago — almost 65 million years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of young-Earth creationism. Apparently, this fungus’s ancestors failed to wait for the universe to be created.

Described in a new paper in Frontiers in Fungal Biology, the fungus produces imposing reproductive structures reaching 50 centimetres high and weighing up to 2.2 kilograms. Its anatomy and genetic relationships justified the recognition of not merely a new species and genus, but a new family: Dianjunaceae.

The date needs a little care. The researchers are not claiming that today’s species has remained unchanged for 65 million years. Their evolutionary analysis estimates when its family lineage separated from its closest relatives, with a reported range of approximately 50–80 million years. That uncertainty is scientifically significant, but offers no refuge for biblical literalism: even the youngest end of the range is vastly older than the entire history permitted by a young-Earth reading of Genesis.

There is a further irony here. Genesis offers no recognition of fungi as a distinct group of organisms. Although biblical passages refer to conditions translated as mould or mildew, these are hardly an account of fungal biology or evolutionary relationships. We cannot know that the authors simply assumed mushrooms were plants, but we can say that their creation narrative supplies none of the distinctions needed to understand this discovery. That is unsurprising in an ancient religious text; it becomes a problem only when that text is presented as authoritative natural history.

Unintelligent Design - The Prolific Waste of Spawning Coral

Spawning coral on the Great Barrier Reef - prolific waste in action

Spawning coral release quintillions of eggs each year: new research

spawning coral on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia

One of the most conspicuous features of the living world is its reproductive extravagance. Organisms manufacture enormous quantities of eggs, sperm, seeds and spores, only for the overwhelming majority to leave no descendants. Coral spawning provides a spectacular example: an underwater blizzard of reproductive material, produced at considerable biological expense, from which only a tiny fraction will ultimately contribute to the next generation of breeding corals. If this is intelligent design, its designer appears remarkably comfortable with failure on an industrial scale.

New research by M. M. Bilodeau and K. M. Quigley, published in Ecology and Evolution puts a staggering figure on this reproductive output. The researchers estimate that Indo-Pacific corals could produce approximately 3.46 quintillion eggs — 3.46 × 10¹⁸ — during a single hypothetical spawning period. This is a first approximation based on reproductive traits and coral cover, with missing measurements estimated from other traits. It is neither a direct count nor a precise total for all coral reproduction worldwide each year.

Each egg and sperm normally carries one set of chromosomes: half the usual chromosome complement of the parent’s body cells, including a reshuffled selection of its inherited genetic variants. Producing these cells requires resources, and eggs also contain provisions for early development. Yet many gametes never achieve fertilisation, while many resulting larvae fail to establish themselves and survive to reproductive maturity. The study estimates the scale of egg production, not the precise proportion lost, but the distinction between producing eggs and producing successful descendants is fundamental.

Creationism In Crisis - A Jurassic Crocodile With Needle Teeth - 170 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated impression of Ctenosuchus tenuidens hunting.

ChatGPT-6 Astra

An artist’s restoration of Ctenosuchus tenuidens.

Artwork by Nathan Dehaut.

New species of Jurassic crocodile had unusually slender teeth | University of Portsmouth

Some 170 million years ago, in the rivers and lakes of what is now Morocco, a crocodile relative was exploiting a feeding niche very different from that of the large-prey predators familiar today. Named Ctenosuchus tenuidens, it had a long, narrow snout armed with exceptionally slender, closely spaced teeth. For young-Earth creationists, its existence presents the familiar chronological problem: an animal was living, feeding and participating in a complex ecosystem more than 169 million years before their preferred biblical chronology allows Earth itself to have existed.

The discovery is described in a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by Hamzah Imran of the School of the Environment and Life Sciences, University of Portsmouth, and colleagues. The animal belonged to the thalattosuchians, an extinct group of crocodile relatives. Its delicate dentition suggests a diet of small aquatic prey, such as tiny fish, shrimps and worms, rather than large, struggling animals capable of breaking those fine teeth.

This makes the fossil particularly informative about evolutionary specialisation. Teeth are not simply more or less effective in some universal sense: their usefulness depends on what an animal eats and how it feeds. A robust tooth suited to restraining substantial prey and a fine tooth suited to retaining small organisms represent different solutions to different ecological problems. An adaptation can therefore open up one feeding opportunity while limiting another. Evolution produces such compromises because natural selection favours reproductive success under particular conditions, rather than engineering an organism that excels at everything.

Creationism In Crisis - An Extinct Egyptian Crocodile Fossil In the Same Rock The Sphynx Was Carved From - 45 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

[caption]

[credit]

The holotype skull (SMNS 10575) of H. cairensis n. gen. n. comb. (a) Photograph of SMNS 10575 in dorsal view, (b) interpretative drawing of SMNS 10575 in dorsal view, (c) photograph of SMNS 10575 in ventral view and (d) interpretative drawing of SMNS 10575 in ventral view. Abbreviations: f, frontal; ic, internal choana; j, jugal; m, maxilla; ma, maxillary alveoli; n, nasals; o, orbit; oc, occipital condyle; p, parietal; pa, palatines; pf, prefrontal; po, postorbital; pt, pterygoid; q, quadrate; sof, suborbital fenestra; sq, squamosal; sqp, squamosal prong; stf, supratemporal fenestra. Scale bar, 10 mm.

From: Paul M. J. Burke, et al (2026)

New crocodile species discovered in rocks used to build the Great Sphinx | UCL News

The Great Sphinx of Giza is an ancient monument carved into something vastly more ancient: rocks recording a world that existed long before humans, let alone Egyptian civilisation. A newly recognised crocodilian from the same geological formation lived about 45 million years ago. For anyone attempting to reconcile Earth's history with a literal reading of Genesis and its young-Earth chronology, the difficulty begins with the material from which the monument itself was carved.

As UCL News reports, researchers have identified Herugavialis cairensis, an extinct gavial, or long-snouted crocodilian, from Egypt's Mokattam Formation. Its nearly complete skull was discovered in the 1920s and had long been assigned to Tomistoma, the genus containing today's false gharial. CT scanning revealed distinguishing anatomical features, including a raised ridge around the eyes, supporting its recognition as a separate genus. The findings are published in Royal Society Open Science.

This is a useful example of how science corrects itself. A fossil does not cease to be informative because it has spent a century in a museum, and an identification does not become unchallengeable merely because generations of researchers have accepted it. Better tools and renewed scrutiny can expose distinctions that earlier investigators missed. Revising the classification strengthens our understanding of evolutionary history; it does not undermine the evidence that such a history occurred.

The animal also belonged to a very different Egypt. Shallow seas covered areas that are now land, and several gavial species inhabited its coastal waters. UCL describes a wider Mediterranean history in which crocodilian diversity fluctuated alongside changes in temperature and sea level, before the region lost its crocodilians around the Mediterranean drying crisis roughly six million years ago. Even that much later episode predates the conventional young-Earth creationist date for the entire Universe by orders of magnitude.

Creationism In Crisis - How Breast Feeding Evolved - 165 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fossil skeleton of Megacauda sungei

University of Chicago

Fossil skeleton of Megacauda sungei

University of Chicago

Professor Peishu Li coauthors Nature study uncovering ancient origins of mammalian suckling and swallowing

Some 165 million years before creationists imagine Earth existed, an aquatic relative of modern mammals was already carrying anatomical equipment associated with one of our most characteristic abilities: suckling milk. A newly described fossil from Inner Mongolia, China, adds another inconvenient chapter to the evolutionary history that young-Earth creationism insists never happened. Its significance extends beyond its age, however. It also preserves a revealing combination of ancestral and more modern features — precisely the sort of transitional anatomy that creationists routinely claim is missing from the fossil record.

The animal, Megacauda sungei, is described in a new paper in Nature. It belonged to the docodonts, an extinct branch of mammaliaforms, the broader group encompassing mammals and their closest extinct relatives. Living approximately 168–163 million years ago, it had a broad, flattened tail, swimming adaptations and specialised teeth suited to an animal diet. It was a functioning, specialised inhabitant of Jurassic freshwater environments, with an evolutionary history written into its anatomy.

Particularly informative are small bony projections near the back of the palate and specialised throat bones. In living mammals, comparable structures support the muscles and soft tissues involved in swallowing and suckling. Their presence in Megacauda suggests that important components of this feeding apparatus had already evolved by the Middle Jurassic. This does not mean that the fossil identifies the first animal to produce milk, or preserves a youngster caught feeding. The inference concerns the anatomical machinery that made mammal-like suckling and swallowing possible.

Refuting Creationism - The Earliest Aquatic Mammal Complete With Transitional Features - 120 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Holotype specimen of Dongoconodon platycauda

Reconstruction of the semi-aquatic life of Dongoconodon platycauda

Drawn by Chen Yu.

A joint study by Professor Bi Shundong of the School of Life Sciences at Yunnan University has discovered the earliest known swimming mammal to date.

Some 120 million years before anyone imagined a six-day creation, a small mammal in what is now northeastern China was combining features that refuse to fit the tidy categories creationists would like nature to obey. Dongoconodon platycauda had adaptations for swimming, an unusual pattern of tooth replacement, and an ear apparatus that retained a connection to its lower jaw. Here was a functioning animal with a mosaic of characteristics, illustrating how evolution modifies inherited structures without waiting for an entire collection of supposedly “mammalian” features to arrive together.

The nearly complete skeleton, from the Early Cretaceous Jiufotang Formation of Liaoning Province, is described by Shundong Bi and colleagues in Nature Communications. The research is also explained in institutional reports from Nanjing University and Yunnan University, both in Chinese.

Its broad hands and feet probably supported webbing, while its flattened, tapering tail appears to have helped with steering and stability. Comparisons with the skeletons of 124 living mammal species supported a semiaquatic lifestyle. This adds to the evidence that mammals living alongside dinosaurs occupied a much wider range of ecological niches than the familiar image of small, uniformly shrew-like creatures might suggest.