Creationism Refuted - 'Jumping Genes' Create New Functional Genetic Information - No Magic needed.

Eciton vagans, with lava from a raided wasp nest.

By Geoff Gallice from Gainesville, FL, USA Spoils of the raid, CC BY 2.0, Link

Ants look back on an evolutionary story of success. The photo shows workers of the Asian weaver ant.

© Lukas Schrader

“Jumping genes” helped ants in their evolutionary triumph after the extinction of the dinosaurs

One of creationism’s favourite assertions is that evolution cannot produce “new genetic information” without an intelligent designer. What usually goes missing is a clear definition of information, an explanation of why known genetic mechanisms cannot generate novelty, or any evidence of the supposed designer doing anything. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologists continue to investigate the natural processes by which genomes change and organisms acquire new capabilities. A new study of ants provides another example of how productive that scientific approach can be.

As reported in Science Advances, an international team led by Dr Lukas Schrader has investigated the contribution of transposable elements, commonly called “jumping genes”, to ant evolution. These mobile DNA sequences can move or copy themselves within genomes. Their activity can be disruptive, but it can also supply material for evolutionary innovation. The research links their activity to the expansion of gene families, including those encoding the odour receptors so important to ants’ chemical communication.

The researchers compared genomes from 163 ant species, representing twelve of the sixteen living subfamilies. They identified independent bursts of transposable-element activity in the ancestors of major ant groups, preceding their rapid diversification following the Cretaceous–Palaeogene, or K–Pg, mass extinction approximately 66 million years ago. The findings support a connection between changes within genomes and the evolutionary opportunities created by a profoundly altered world.

The evolutionary significance is straightforward. A mass extinction changes the conditions under which survivors live: ecological relationships are disrupted, resources become available in different ways, and opportunities arise as ecosystems recover. A genetic variant that previously offered little advantage may become useful under these new conditions. Natural selection can then favour organisms carrying it. Neither the mutation nor the environmental upheaval needs to anticipate the outcome.

Nor does genetic novelty require a complete, finished gene to appear from nowhere. Duplication supplies additional copies of existing sequences, which can subsequently diverge; changes to the regulation and arrangement of DNA can also alter what an organism does. Calling the starting material “existing information” does nothing to prevent its descendants from acquiring new functions. The relevant questions concern what changed, how it changed, and what consequences followed—not whether creationists are willing to call the result “information”.

Here, the specific finding is an association between mobile DNA, expanding gene families and subsequent diversification. It should not be inflated into a claim that every extra receptor acquired a demonstrated new function, or that the asteroid impact directly produced particular beneficial mutations. Nevertheless, the study supplies evidence for a natural route connecting genomic change with evolutionary diversification, precisely where the creationist argument substitutes an assertion of impossibility.

For young-Earth creationists, there is the additional inconvenience of the timescale. This diversification followed an extinction event some 66 million years ago—thousands of times further into the past than their entire supposed history of the Universe allows. Ant evolution was already unfolding in a world unimaginably ancient by biblical standards. What emerges is a history of genetic change, environmental catastrophe and opportunities exploited by surviving lineages, without foresight or a predetermined destination.

Fine-Tuned Fallacy Exposed - Earth Fine-Tuned For Regular Mass Extinctions - Malevolence, Incompetence Or Nature?

AI-generated impression of the End-Permian extinction

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AI-generated impression of the End-Permian mass extinction.

UNM researcher helps uncover recurring climate regimes linked to elevated extinction risk | UNM UCAM Newsroom

One of the more ridiculous of creationist claims is that Earth was perfectly ‘fine-tuned’ for life by an omniscient, omnibenevolent designer. Ridiculous because a mere glance at the reality should tell them that natural disasters such as earthquakes, seismic activity and flash-floods regularly devastate huge areas and kill vast numbers of people. The rose-tinted view requires a remarkably selective reading of the planet’s history: admire the organisms alive today, but overlook the environmental upheavals that wiped out so many of their predecessors. A world capable of supporting life is not necessarily a world designed to protect it, and the geological record provides abundant evidence of that distinction.

New research, paper, published in Nature Communications, adds another dimension to this problem. An international team, including UNM palaeobiologist Corinne “Cori” Myers, examined approximately 539 million years of Earth’s history and identified five major, persistent ‘mega-climate’ regimes. Transitions between these regimes were associated with heightened vulnerability in the biosphere and elevated extinction risk. The history emerging from this analysis is one of prolonged climatic states punctuated by potentially dangerous reorganisations.

The study brings together carbon and oxygen isotope records, statistical analyses and a conceptual model of the interacting climate and carbon cycle. The researchers compared the environmental patterns with a measure of biological vulnerability incorporating fossil diversity and the rates at which groups appeared and disappeared. Their findings suggest that the consequences of an environmental disturbance depend partly on the state of the planetary system it affects: a perturbation can help push that system into a different regime, with serious consequences for its inhabitants.

This does not establish that every mass extinction had the same cause, or that each climate transition inevitably produced one. Volcanism, asteroid impacts and their associated environmental effects remain essential parts of the explanation. The study instead offers a broader framework for understanding why some episodes of disruption coincided with particularly severe biological crises. Its central finding concerns an association between changing climate–carbon regimes and increased vulnerability, rather than a single universal extinction mechanism.

For the creationist argument, however, the difficulty is plain. If Earth’s suitability for living organisms is to count as evidence of benevolent design, what are we to make of its capacity to become catastrophically unsuitable for organisms already living here? Invoking a designer’s concern for life while dismissing the destruction of entire evolutionary lineages is an exercise in choosing the evidence to fit the conclusion. Survival receives the credit; extinction disappears into the small print.

Creationism Refuted - The History Of Viticulture - Uninterrupted By A Global Genocide

AI-Generated image of wine-making in Iberia, 3000 Years ago

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Grape seeds from Huelva, Vitis vinifera L.

Image: Guillem Pérez Jordà.

Ancient DNA reveals that the first grapevines cultivated in the Iberian Peninsula arrived from the eastern Mediterranean 3,000 years ago

If fruit-bearing plants were created for human use by an omnipotent, omniscient god, why have humans spent thousands of years modifying them to suit our needs? Genesis 1:29 presents seed-bearing plants and fruit trees as divine provisions for humanity, yet agriculture tells a rather different story: people taking what nature supplied and, through cultivation and selection, producing crops better suited to their purposes. Grapevines provide another example of this gap between the claim of providential design and the biological history of our food.

Research published in Current Biology, traces part of that history through ancient DNA. An international team analysed 28 archaeological grape seeds from Iberia and Sardinia. Their findings indicate that cultivated vines of eastern Mediterranean ancestry reached Iberia approximately 3,000 years ago, associated with Phoenician settlement and trade. These were already domesticated plants, arriving in a landscape where wild grapevines also grew.

The imported vines subsequently crossed with local wild populations. This mixing contributed to the ancestry of traditional Iberian varieties, with characteristic lineages already identifiable in seeds from the fourth century BCE. Ancient DNA also revealed connections between medieval seeds and varieties preserved today. The record therefore contains both change and continuity: new combinations of ancestry alongside lineages maintained across centuries.

More worryingly for Bible-literalist creationist, the genetic evidence shows that viticulture (the cultivation and growing of grapes) has a continuous history from before 'Creation Week' through the mythical global flood and biological reset of Earth, right up to the present, with no evidence of interruption of either the culturally-inherited methods or of the grape varieties used.

This is a useful illustration of how evolution works. Populations do not have to acquire all their useful variation through new mutations arising on the spot. Reproduction can reshuffle existing variation, while interbreeding brings together genetic variants from previously separated populations. Cultivation then provides opportunities for people to retain and propagate plants with desirable characteristics. Human preferences influence which vines reproduce or are multiplied, but the inheritance and variation on which that selection acts are ordinary biological processes.

Creationism Refuted - Relative Bone Strengths Adds More Evidence Of Human Evolution

Image: Cullen Townsend

On the right is a depiction of an early Homo human ancestor characterized by relatively greater bone strength of the femur in the thigh compared to the humerus in the arm. To the left is a depiction of an older human ancestor, Australopithecus, characterized by more equivalent strength in the bones of the arm and thigh.

Image: Cullen Townsend

Study of bone strength reveals new clues about human evolution | EurekAlert!

One of the persistent problems for creationism is that our ancestors left evidence of their existence millions of years before the supposed biblical “Creation Week”. Worse still for the claim that humans were created separately from the other apes, those ancestors possessed combinations of characteristics that make sense as stages in an evolutionary history. The creationist insistence that a fossil must be either “just an ape” or “fully human” cannot accommodate the very mixtures of ancestral and derived features that evolution predicts.

A new study published in Science Advances adds another piece to this picture. Led by Kristian J. Carlson of the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, the researchers examined CT scans of limb bones from seven fossil hominins, dating from approximately 3.7 million to 1.5 million years ago. By analysing the structure of their bone shafts, they estimated resistance to bending and twisting and compared strength across the limbs.
Bone responds to the mechanical loads placed upon it during life, so its internal structure offers clues to habitual activity. In the sampled Australopithecus individuals, relatively strong upper arms suggest substantial climbing, while the relationship between thigh-bone and shin-bone strength was more human-like. Early Homo, by contrast, showed relatively stronger thighs compared with upper arms, consistent with greater reliance on terrestrial walking. These findings support a change in locomotor behaviour, although seven individuals cannot establish every step or the precise pace of that transition.

The evolutionary significance lies in the combination. Upright walking could coexist with continued use of the trees: acquiring one capability did not require the immediate abandonment of another. An ancestor with this mixture was a functioning animal in its own environment, with no need to anticipate the anatomy or lifestyle of its distant descendants. Evolution has no destination, and modern humans were never a goal towards which these populations were consciously or inevitably progressing.

For young-Earth creationism, the chronological difficulty is equally stark. Even the youngest fossils examined are about 150 times older than a generously extended 10,000-year biblical chronology. Their bone structure provides evidence about how these individuals lived; their geological ages place those lives in a past that the creationist narrative simply does not allow. Together, they present a much more substantial account of human origins than an assertion that fully formed humans appeared by supernatural decree a few thousand years ago.

Creationism Refuted - 55-Million-Year-Old Crocodile Eggshells From Queensland, Australia

AI-generated reconstruction of an early mekosuchine crocodilian beside a lakeshore nest in Eocene Australia

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AI-generated reconstruction of an early mekosuchine crocodilian beside a lakeshore nest in Eocene Australia.

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55 million years: Australia’s oldest crocodile eggshells found in Queensland

A major problem for young-Earth creationists is that so much of Earth’s history occurred millions or billions of years before their biblical chronology allows the planet to have existed. Fossils repeatedly confront them with evidence of animals living, reproducing and evolving in worlds that supposedly never existed. Dismissing this evidence as scientific incompetence or dishonesty does nothing to explain it. Nor does accusing researchers of manipulating dates become an acceptable substitute for evidence simply because the accusation is made in defence of the Bible.

The latest addition to this inconvenient record comes from approximately 55-million-year-old crocodilian eggshells found at Murgon in south-eastern Queensland, Australia. These animals were laying eggs more than 5,000 times further back in time than even a generous 10,000-year creationist chronology permits. The fragments are described in a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by an international team including Michael Stein of the University of New South Wales.

The oldest known crocodilian eggshells from Australia, they are attributed to the mekosuchines, an extinct group with a long evolutionary history in the region. These crocodilians belonged to a different branch of the family tree from Australia’s living saltwater and freshwater crocodiles. Their significance therefore extends beyond their inconvenient age: they help document an ancient crocodilian fauna that cannot simply be equated with the species inhabiting Australia today.

Eggshells also preserve information that bones and teeth alone cannot provide. Their microscopic structure offers clues to reproduction and nesting conditions; in this case, the researchers interpret the evidence as indicating nesting around the margins of an ancient lake. These tiny fragments therefore add another dimension to our understanding of how extinct crocodilians lived and interacted with their environment.

The broader evolutionary picture is one of branching lineages, ecological diversity and eventual extinction over immense spans of time. The eggshells contribute to that picture without, by themselves, revealing every evolutionary relationship or the precise identity of the animal that laid them. That distinction matters: science builds its explanations from what the evidence supports, while leaving room for further discoveries. None of that uncertainty reduces 55 million years to a few thousand.

Michael David Stein, a research associate in UNSW’s School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences and a co-author of the paper, describes the discovery and its significance in an article in The Conversation, reprinted below under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism Refuted - Scientists Got It Wrong Again - But It's Still Bad News For Creationists

Life reconstruction of Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda

By Gabriel Ugueto.
George, H., et al. (2026) (CC-BY 4.0)

Photograph of the outcrop at locality Z143 where NMT RB462 was collected

Photograph: K. Angielczyk.
George, H., et al. (2026) (CC-BY 4.0)

September: New species of 240-million-year-old prehistoric animal from Tanzania discovered | News and features | University of Bristol

Scientists have revised their understanding of some fossils once thought to include the oldest dinosaurs. Scientists getting it wrong and having to change their minds should be music to creationist ears — until they discover what the revision actually means. The animals concerned still lived hundreds of millions of years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of biblical literalism. A reassessment within the Triassic does nothing to squeeze the history of life into a few thousand years.

Creationists have an almost schizophrenic attitude towards science: On the one hand they claim scientists are not allowed to publish anything which doesn't conform to some assumed scientific orthodoxy; on the other hand they point to scientific disagreement and debate and scientists even changing their mind as evidence that science is unreliable. And they readily use a computer to inform the world via the Internet that science doesn't work, without the slightest appreciation of the irony!

The research, led by Hady George of the University of Bristol and published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, describes a new species of dicynodont from Tanzania: Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda. Despite its name, this herbivore was a member of the mammalian evolutionary lineage, rather than a dinosaur. This discovery extends a genus previously known only from South America into Africa, around 240 million years ago.
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Creationism Refuted - The Evolution Of Domestic Dogs Began Long Before 'Creation Week'

Top The Eurasian Grey Wolf. Below a selection of its descendants. Creationists need to explain why this is not macro-evolution even though the scale of the differences between them and wolves is at least as great as that between humans, chimpanzees and gorillas

Various Internet sources

More dogs

Internet sources.

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

Last November, just as I was finalising the second of my Ice Age Tales novels, two papers appeared in Science examining a subject central to their underlying theme: the long relationship between humans and the wolves whose descendants became domestic dogs. My stories are set some 30,000–40,000 years ago and imagine the beginnings of that relationship. The new research examines later chapters, revealing that substantial diversity among dogs was already established thousands of years before the intensive breeding that produced modern pedigree breeds.

The distinction matters. These papers do not show that domestication began only 11,000 years ago, nor that today’s breeds originated then. One identifies recognisably dog-like skull shapes in specimens dating to about that time, together with considerable variation among early Holocene dogs. The other traces how ancient dog populations moved and mixed alongside human communities over nearly 10,000 years. Both illuminate a prolonged history, rather than a single moment when wolves suddenly became dogs.

Earlier associations between wolves and hunter-gatherers remain possible, although neither paper establishes the particular scenario imagined in my novels. Taming an individual wolf is also different from domesticating a population: domestication involves inherited changes across generations, and behavioural changes need not coincide with readily identifiable changes in skull shape. The earliest stages of this relationship therefore remain difficult to reconstruct.

Dog domestication is, of course, a classic example of evolution under human influence. Its history presents several awkward questions for creationism, especially claims that substantial biological change is impossible and that the natural world fits a chronology of only a few thousand years.

Unintelligent Design - How The Immune System Can Go Rogue And Cause Premature Ageing

AI-generated image

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Reversing hallmarks of rapid aging by silencing a cellular alarm system

Photo credit: Eitan Moses

How the Immune System Rewrites Rapid Aging

One of the difficulties creationists have with presenting the immune system as evidence of intelligent design is explaining why something supposedly designed to protect us so often contributes to our illnesses. A defence system that can turn the body's own damaged DNA into a trigger for further damage is hardly an obvious example of competent, benevolent engineering. It is, however, entirely understandable as a product of evolution: a collection of mechanisms favoured for their benefits, constrained by their history, and carrying costs that natural selection has never eliminated.

Research from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem provides a revealing example. In a paper published in Genes & Development, Marva Bergman and colleagues investigated how a DNA-sensing protein called cGAS contributes to disorders involving defective DNA repair; the body's response to genetic damage can itself become an important source of harm.

The underlying problem is straightforward. DNA appearing in the fluid surrounding a cell's nucleus can be a warning of infection. cGAS helps detect it and activates an inflammatory defence response. But the DNA need not belong to a virus: damaged cells can expose their own DNA to the same sensor. Consequently, an alarm that normally helps protect against infection can sustain inflammation even when there is no invading organism to fight. The response then risks damaging the very tissues it ordinarily helps defend.

The researchers modelled two human DNA-repair disorders, ataxia-telangiectasia and Bloom syndrome, in turquoise killifish, Nothobranchius furzeri. In the ataxia-telangiectasia model, disrupting the gene for cGAS partially alleviated reproductive defects, cellular senescence in the liver, and inflammation in the cerebellum. Several measures of genome instability also improved, consistent with cGAS having additional effects inside the nucleus, beyond its familiar inflammatory role.

There was, however, a crucial complication: losing cGAS in fish without the underlying repair defect made pathology and genome instability worse. This was therefore no demonstration that the immune system contains a universally dispensable component, nor a discovery that switching off one gene reverses normal ageing. The same protein could be beneficial or harmful depending on the biological circumstances.

That is precisely where the evolutionary explanation becomes useful. A sensor that responds to DNA in an unusual location offers a broadly effective means of detecting danger, but that signal does not identify the DNA's origin with certainty. Such a system needs safeguards and regulation, and its usefulness does not guarantee that those safeguards will work under every condition. Natural selection can preserve a mechanism whose overall benefits outweigh its costs; it cannot anticipate every future mutation or guarantee freedom from disease.

The study did not test the evolutionary history of cGAS, but its findings illustrate the kind of context-dependent compromise evolution produces. For intelligent-design advocates, the awkward question is why an allegedly perfect designer would make protection and self-inflicted damage so intimately connected. For evolutionary biology, the useful question is how that connection works—and whether understanding it can help us reduce the harm.

This is just one example of how the human body is not a work of perfect design, but the product of sub-optimal compromises constrained by contingent history and lacking in foresight, where additional layers of complexity are not hallmarks of intelligent design that creationists like to imagine, but of the need for controls and compensations for problems created by earlier iterations of the evolutionary cycle. Many more are explained in my book, The Body Of Evidence: How The Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design

Refuting Creationism - Bigamous Beetles Have Better Babies - Observed Evolution Over 15 Years

Red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum.

By Udo Schmidt from Deutschland Tribolium castaneum (Herbst, 1797) CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

Red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum

Source: Wikipedia - Public Domain, Link

How sex can help save species from extinction | UEA

One of the recurring claims of creationist apologetics is that mutations condemn living populations to relentless genetic deterioration — a supposedly inevitable decline which evolution cannot overcome. What this argument neglects is that mutations do not operate in isolation: selection influences which genetic variants pass to subsequent generations. Now, a long-running experiment with red flour beetles has provided direct genomic evidence that competition for mates can help remove harmful variants, leaving populations more resistant to extinction.

The research, led by Michael D. Pointer, of the University of East Anglia Department of Biological Sciences, described in a report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), also addresses an interesting evolutionary question: why is sexual reproduction so widespread despite its considerable costs? Finding mates takes time and energy, competition can be costly, and reproduction requires contributions from individuals which do not themselves produce eggs. One possible compensating benefit is that competition for reproductive success helps prevent damaging mutations from accumulating.

The researchers tested this idea using populations of the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, maintained under stronger or weaker sexual selection. After 156 generations, whole-genome sequencing showed that populations exposed to stronger sexual selection carried fewer genetic variants predicted to be harmful. Their overall genetic diversity, however, remained comparable. Selection had reduced the burden of damaging variants without a corresponding reduction in variation across the genome.

The distinction matters. Genetic diversity is often used as an indicator of a population’s prospects, but the amount of variation cannot tell us everything about its effects. In this experiment, the estimated burden of harmful variants was a better predictor of extinction under inbreeding than diversity alone. Populations could retain similar amounts of genetic variation while differing in their vulnerability to genetic stress.

Malevolent Design - Creationists Plagued By Ancient Parasites

AI-generated image of an Ancient Baikal settlement hit by plague

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WARNING!

If prompted, DO NOT 'click here to continue'.
A rogue advertiser (AwayTravel) is linking to a potentially dangerous site!

Two of the occupants of this grave were full siblings: a brother (aged 7-9 years old) and a sister (aged 9-11 years old) from whom plague DNA was identified. Not enough of the remains of the third individual were preserved to be able to be able to analyse them as well.

Photo: Vladimiri Bazaliiskii.

Oldest strains of plague caused deadly outbreaks 5,500 years ago – University of Copenhagen

For creationists who insist that biological complexity requires an intelligent designer, plague presents an awkward question: what, exactly, was the designer trying to achieve? A parasitic bacterium capable of causing fatal disease in children is certainly biologically impressive. Whether it is evidence of benevolent intelligence is another matter entirely, but it appears to conform to creationists 'proof' of intelligent design - irreducible complexity and complex specified genetic information, both of which ID proponents insist can only be created by an intelligent designer.

Research published in Nature reveals that early strains of Yersinia pestis, the plague bacterium, were already causing deadly outbreaks among hunter-gatherers around Lake Baikal in Siberia approximately 5,500 years ago. These were small, mobile communities: crowded agricultural settlements were evidently not a prerequisite for devastating plague outbreaks.

Researchers detected plague DNA in 18 of 46 individuals examined from four cemeteries. Combined with radiocarbon dating, burial evidence and reconstructed family relationships, the findings point to outbreaks that killed members of the same families, with a particularly striking impact on children. That detection rate is a proportion of the sampled dead, of course, not a measurement of the mortality rate in the living population.

The evolutionary details are especially revealing. These early strains lacked some of the adaptations associated with efficient flea-borne transmission in later plague. Nevertheless, they could cause lethal disease. They also possessed a gene locus encoding a superantigen — a substance capable of provoking excessive immune activation — which is absent from later plague strains. Its contribution to their lethality remains a hypothesis, but the changing genetic repertoire exposes a pathogen with an evolutionary history, rather than an organism equipped from the outset with one fixed set of features.

For intelligent design advocates, this creates a familiar difficulty. If useful biological machinery demonstrates a designer’s foresight, why should machinery that helps pathogens exploit their hosts be exempt from the same argument? Invoking a “Fall” supplies a theological explanation, but it does not establish a biological mechanism or account for the particular genetic changes revealed by ancient DNA.

Refuting Creationism - Norwegian Fossil Shows Complex Organisms - 560 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Charnia, one of the oldest 3D Ediacaran fossils found

Stratigraphic context of the Kommagnes Charnia specimen. A, photograph (facing north) of the eastern part of the cliff, with the site of the float block marked by a star. B, stratigraphic log of the left side of A, marking the stratigraphic range from which the float block could have originated.

From: Veenma, Y.P., et al. (2026)

One of the oldest known 3D animal fossils found in Norwegian sheep field | University of Cambridge

Creationists have a major problem with the so-called Cambrian Explosion, some 535 million years ago. On the one hand, they insist it was a sudden moment of creation in which multiple different body-plans were magically created without ancestry; on the other hand, they deny there was any history before 6,000-10,000 years ago. Clearly both views can't be right; However, both views can be wrong.

And for creationists of both camps, the Ediacaran presents and even bigger problem: not only did it precede the Cambrian, but it shows that complex body-plans had already evolved. This problem just got a lot more acute with the discovery of an exceptionally well-preserved fossil in a sheep field in Arctic Norway, in approximately 560 million year old rocks, of a fossils of Charnia, a branching, frond-like organism that lived during the Ediacaran Period, well before the Cambrian began. These organisms inhabited an ancient seabed hundreds of millions of years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of young-Earth creationism.

As a paper published in Palaeontology by researchers led by Dr Yorick Veenma reports, this is the first confirmed fossil of Charnia to be found in Scandinavia. It was found alongside other Ediacaran fossils and is a rare three-dimensional specimen which preserves anatomical details normally obscured in flattened impression.

Despite its superficial resemblance to a fern, Charnia was no plant. It belonged to the rangeomorphs, an extinct group generally interpreted as early animals, although their precise relationships to living animal groups remain debated. We need not claim that Charnia was a direct ancestor of any particular Cambrian animal to appreciate its significance: large organisms with elaborate body structures already existed before the diversification that creationists so often misrepresent as an instantaneous act of creation.

Creationism Refuted - The 'American Cheetah' Was Not A Cheetah - Convergent Evolution

An artistic rendering of two Miracinonyx, one in Beringia preying mainly on fish and one in the Lower 48 feeding on pronghorn antelope.

Credit: Julius Csotonyi (CC-BY SA)

The feline Miracinonyx trumani got its nickname, the “American cheetah,” from its slender, long-limbed body, reminiscent of an African cheetah. While the extinct Pleistocene predator did hunt down speedy prey, such as saiga antelope (illustrated), a new study shows some animals ate a diet of mostly fish, suggesting the species was more adaptable than previously thought.

Velizar Simeonovski

The extinct American ‘cheetah’ was not a cheetah after all | EurekAlert!

A cat can look rather like a cheetah without being a cheetah, and a predator with long legs need not spend its life chasing antelopes. That is the lesson from new research into the extinct “American cheetah”, Miracinonyx trumani, whose ancient DNA and dietary chemistry reveal a more complicated animal than its nickname suggests. It is also another example of why evolutionary relationships have to be investigated through evidence, rather than decided by resemblance and fitted into preconceived categories.

The study, led by Molly Cassatt-Johnstone of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and published in Current Biology, analysed ancient DNA from four specimens. It strengthens earlier evidence that Miracinonyx was more closely related to living pumas than to true cheetahs, with the puma and Miracinonyx lineages estimated to have separated approximately 2.6 million years ago. Its cheetah-like anatomy therefore reflects convergent evolution: the independent evolution of similar features in different lineages.

There is an immediate difficulty here for young-Earth creationism. The evolutionary separation of these cats occurred millions of years before the supposed “Creation Week”, while the three Yukon specimens themselves are approximately 31,000 years old. These were animals living, feeding and dying in an established ecosystem long before the entire universe supposedly existed according to a literal reading of Genesis. Their identification also extends the animal’s known distribution far into northern Canada. Science News.

Refuting Creationism - Bible Mythology Dead And Buried Beneath The Gondwana Supercontinent

Artists impression of the supercontinent Gondwana.

Source: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty (Royalty-free)

Reconstruction of Greater Gondwana at ca. 500 Ma or at 550 to 500 Ma compared with conventional paleogeographic interpretations (inset).

From: Tao Wang et al.(2026).

Gondwana really was a supercontinent. And it helped kick-start life on Earth

More than half a billion years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of biblical literalism, moving continents were reshaping the planet and helping to establish the environmental conditions in which early animals diversified. That is the inconvenient historical setting of new research into Gondwana: a vast continental assembly whose formation, geological activity and subsequent fragmentation belong to a timescale that bears no resemblance to the few thousand years allowed by young-Earth creationism.

A paper in Science Advances , by Tao Wang of the State Key Laboratory of Deep Earth and Mineral Exploration, Institute of Geology, Beijing, China, and colleagues, suggests that Gondwana was substantially larger than conventional reconstructions show. As co-author Bill Collins explains in his accompanying account in The Conversation, isotopic evidence in granites identifies ancient continental material now concealed beneath younger geological formations across much of Asia. Including these overlooked fragments increases Gondwana’s estimated share of Earth’s continental landmass to roughly 80 per cent, making it a supercontinent even under a restrictive definition of that term. This reconstruction concerns the world of approximately 550–500 million years ago.

Its significance extends beyond redrawing an ancient map. The researchers propose that the reorganisation of plate boundaries associated with Gondwana’s assembly established an enormous belt of volcanic activity. Sustained emissions of greenhouse gases could then have helped alter the climate, contributing to conditions favourable to the diversification of Cambrian life. This is a proposed connection between geological and biological change, rather than a demonstration that volcanism alone caused the Cambrian radiation.

One distinction matters here: despite the article’s headline, this concerns the diversification of life, not its original appearance. Life already had a long evolutionary history before the Cambrian, and animals existed before that period began. Nor was the Cambrian ‘explosion’ an instantaneous event resembling a magical creation. The term describes a geologically rapid evolutionary diversification, unfolding over millions of years.

For creationism, therefore, the problem is more substantial than another inconvenient date. Here is a testable account connecting the history of continents with the environmental context of biological evolution. Continents assemble, plate boundaries change, volcanoes influence the atmosphere, and organisms evolve in the resulting conditions. None of this requires foresight or a predetermined destination. It requires physical processes, evolving populations and the immense passage of time.

Refuting Creationism - The Evidence For Denisovans Just Keeps Getting Better

Map showing the geographic locations of Denisovan fossils determined by molecular evidence. The colours of the map reflect a combination of elevation and environmental context.

From: Rao, H., Xing, S., Ruan, Q. et al. (2026).

Denisovan Radius Discovered for First Time in Southwest China----Chinese Academy of Sciences

Fragments of Denisovan teeth, and bones recovered from Bianfu Cave in Southwest China

From: Rao, H., Xing, S., Ruan, Q. et al. (2026).

Long before the universe supposedly existed, according to Young-Earth creationism, human relatives were making tools and processing animal carcasses in what is now south-western China. Two complementary papers in Nature reveal another chapter of this inconvenient prehistory, combining ancient proteins, fossil anatomy and archaeology to investigate the Denisovans of Bianfu Cave in Yunnan Province.

In the first paper, Huiyun Rao and colleagues identify five Denisovan remains: two teeth, two skull fragments and part of a radius, one of the forearm bones. These come from layers dated to approximately 167,000–134,000 years ago. The radius provides the first securely identified example of this bone from a Denisovan, adding valuable evidence about a human lineage whose skeleton remains frustratingly poorly known.

The identification depended on proteins preserved within the fossils. Researchers screened more than 60,000 bone fragments before selecting promising specimens for molecular analysis. Surviving protein sequences contained diagnostic Denisovan variants, allowing small fragments to acquire an evolutionary identity that their appearance alone could not securely establish. The study also places another confirmed Denisovan locality within a previously conspicuous gap in their known Asian distribution.

A second paper in Nature, by Qijun Ruan and colleagues examines the wider archaeological record. Evidence of cave use extends from approximately 190,000 to 70,000 years ago — a span of around 120,000 years. Its inhabitants hunted medium-sized and large animals, produced stone tools and made extensive use of bones without elaborate modification. These practices suggest practical exploitation of available materials in a landscape of coniferous forest and forest-steppe.

An important distinction remains: the identified Denisovan fossils cover only part of that longer sequence. Attributing the wider archaeological record to Denisovans is the researchers’ most economical interpretation, rather than direct proof that Denisovans occupied the cave throughout. Nor does the sequence establish uninterrupted residence. That qualification illustrates how scientific conclusions are bounded by the evidence.

Refuting Creationism - Creationists Bitten By Snapping Tasmanian Tiger

AI-depiction of a thylacine in the Tasmanian bush

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The last known Tasmanian tiger in footage digitised by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Photograph: National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

3D scans of Tasmanian tiger’s skull reveal it had crocodile-style snapping jaws

The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, has long been a textbook example of convergent evolution: a marsupial predator whose resemblance to a wolf evolved independently in a distant branch of the mammalian family tree. For creationists, such similarities offer an opportunity to invoke a designer reusing a successful design. But that explanation overlooks the more revealing question: how far does the resemblance go, and why do similarities in some features coexist with substantial differences in others?

New research led by Flinders University’s Professor Vera Weisbecker, published in Nature Communications, shows why describing the thylacine as a “marsupial wolf” can be misleading. Its skull combined features resembling those of different carnivores with an unusual specialisation of its own. As the university’s account explains, this animal was more closely related to kangaroos than to dogs, despite its superficially canine appearance.

Three-dimensional comparisons revealed a striking mixture. The back of the skull resembled that of larger canids, including wolves, while the long, slender snout looked more like that of smaller foxes and jackals. Yet the whole skull was disproportionately large for the animal carrying it. The researchers suggest that this combination supported rapid, forceful snapping bites at relatively small prey. Some features even invite comparison with crocodiles and other vertebrates that catch agile prey with elongated jaws. These are inferences from anatomy, rather than direct observations of hunting behaviour, but they undermine the familiar image of a predator equipped to overpower large animals in the manner of a wolf. The authors explain these findings in their article for The Conversation.

Creationism Refuted - How Mammalian Genes Combine to Produce New mRNA - No Magic Required

AI-generated depiction of a chimeric mRNA being formed from two different genes

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A watercolor painting depicts chimeric mRNAs.

Image: Hannah Davis/Jackson Lab.

Mammalian Genes Can Combine To Make Previously Unknown mRNAs, Proteins | Harvard Medical School

An immune system that saves your life in one circumstance can help kill you in another makes sense in the light of evolution: natural selection favours advantages whose benefits outweigh their costs under prevailing conditions, without guaranteeing safety in every eventuality. For creationists who present biological complexity as evidence of perfect intelligent design, however, such compromises require some explaining.

A new study published in Nature on 2 September 2026 provides a particularly revealing example. Researchers found that mammalian cells can join RNA sequences copied from separate genes into a combined message. One resulting protein improves antibacterial defence in mice, but also increases vulnerability to lethal inflammatory responses in experimental models of sepsis. The same molecular mechanism brings both protection and danger.

To understand the discovery, think of DNA as a collection of stored recipes. Messenger RNA, or mRNA, is a working copy that a cell uses to assemble a protein. Scientists have long known that cells can edit these copies, allowing a single gene to produce different proteins. Here, the researchers investigated messages containing material from different genes, sometimes located on different chromosomes. It is rather like making a new recipe by combining instructions from two separate cookbooks. The joining occurs at the RNA level; it does not require the original DNA recipes to merge.

These combined messages are called chimeric RNAs. Crucially, the team demonstrated that one produces a functional protein, named GSDMD–TMEM106A, during inflammation in mice. Most of the other candidate messages have yet to be shown to produce functional proteins, so the discovery should not be mistaken for proof that every detected combination has a useful role.

The evolutionary interest lies in the consequences. Strengthening an inflammatory response can help an animal resist infection, yet the resulting damage can become lethal. Weakening that response can reduce the danger from inflammation while leaving the animal less able to control bacteria. There is no simple setting at which “more immunity” always means “better health”.

This is precisely the sort of trade-off evolutionary biology helps us understand. Natural selection works with inherited mechanisms and their competing consequences; it has neither foresight nor a commitment to the welfare of every individual or to the perfect solution. The study does not reconstruct the evolutionary history of this particular protein, but its findings illustrate why a useful biological feature need not be harmless, let alone perfect. For intelligent-design advocates, the question is therefore more demanding than “Is it complicated?” It is why an allegedly flawless designer’s protective machinery comes with the capacity to inflict fatal damage on the organism it protects.

Creationism Refuted - A Cretaceous Dinosaur From Brazil With A Close Relative From Spain - From 120 Million Years Ago

AI-generated impression of Dasosaurus tocantinensis in the Cretaceous.

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Artistic reconstruction of the new dinosaur from Maranhão state. It was 20 meters long and had a European relative .

Paleoart: Jorge Blanco.

New long-necked dinosaur found in Northeast Brazil was a close relative of a European species

A newly described giant dinosaur from Brazil presents creationists with more than the familiar problem of a fossil vastly older than their supposed creation of the Universe. Its evolutionary relationships also preserve evidence of a world whose geography has changed profoundly: continents separating, ancestral populations dispersing, and related lineages following different evolutionary paths. This is precisely the sort of historical pattern we expect when common descent operates on a planet reshaped by plate tectonics.

The dinosaur, Dasosaurus tocantinensis, was approximately 20 metres long and lived around 120 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous. Its remains were discovered during construction of a road–rail terminal at Davinópolis, in the north-eastern Brazilian state of Maranhão. Described by Elver Luiz Mayer and colleagues in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, it has its closest known evolutionary relative in what is now Spain. The researchers interpret this affinity as evidence that its ancestors probably reached South America from Europe via North Africa between about 140 and 120 million years ago.

That proposed route needs to be understood against the geography of the time. Africa and South America had not yet completed their separation, and connections between landmasses offered opportunities for dispersal that the modern map conceals. The finding therefore concerns ancestral movements through an ancient landscape, rather than dinosaurs somehow crossing the present-day Atlantic.

The broader evolutionary principle is straightforward. Populations can spread when geographical connections permit; when barriers interrupt gene flow, their descendants can diverge. Consequently, relationships between species should reflect both their ancestry and the changing opportunities for movement and isolation. Evolutionary biology supplies the explanation for the branching relationships, while plate tectonics supplies the changing geographical setting. This particular fossil does not, by itself, prove that continental separation caused a specific speciation event, but its affinities fit the larger picture remarkably well.

For young-Earth creationism, the difficulty is therefore both chronological and explanatory. A dinosaur living 120 million years ago cannot be accommodated within a literal Genesis chronology. Nor does the assertion that a creator suddenly produced separate “kinds” explain why their anatomical relationships should correspond to ancient geographical connections. Common descent makes that correspondence intelligible; magical creation provides no comparable prediction.

What emerges is a history of life unfolding on a changing Earth, with neither continents nor their inhabitants fixed in their present arrangements. Understanding that history requires evidence, evolutionary relationships and deep time — all conspicuously absent from the biblical creation account.

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

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

Credit: Álvaro Medina

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

Credit: Álvaro Medina

First Terrestrial Mammal Footprint Discovered in Antarctica

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shared protein folds in primordial sea

AI-generated image (ChatGPT-6 Astra)

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

Metabolic Reactions Reveal Early Enzyme Evolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ediacaran tubular fossil Conotubus (inset: symbiotic chemosynthetic bacteria)

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 6 Astra)

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

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

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

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

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

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