Creationism Refuted - How Evolution Works

Mimicry in Butterflies Is Seen here on These Classic “Plates” Showing Four Forms of H. numata, Two Forms of H. melpomene, and the Two Corresponding Mimicking Forms of H. erato.

Source - Repeating Patterns of Mimicry. Meyer A, PLoS Biology, Vol. 4/10/2006, e341 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040341, CC BY 2.5, Link

Evolution has reused the same genes for 120 million years, study shows - News and events, University of York

The great day creationists have been assuring themselves is imminent — and have been doing so for at least half a century — when evolutionary biologists finally announce that they have abandoned the Theory of Evolution because it fails to explain the evidence, seems to recede even further with almost every new research paper. Instead of being replaced by creationism, complete with unproven supernatural entities, magic, “unknowable mysteries” and evidence-free Biblical folklore treated as real history, evolution remains the basic framework within which modern biology makes sense of the evidence, formulates hypotheses and interprets results.

Almost invariably, research that appears at first sight to question some aspect of evolution is doing nothing of the sort. It is refining the details. That is the case with a new paper in PLOS Biology by a team led by scientists at the University of York, the University of Sheffield and the Wellcome Sanger Institute, which suggests that, in some circumstances, evolution may be more predictable than a simple caricature of random mutation filtered by natural selection would lead us to expect.

The team analysed the genomes of seven species of Ithomiini and Heliconius butterflies, together with the day-flying moth Chetone histrio. These lineages diverged between about 1 million and 120 million years ago, yet they have evolved remarkably similar wing colour patterns as members of neotropical mimicry rings. These warning patterns signal to predators that the insects are toxic or distasteful, so different species benefit by converging on similar “do not eat me” designs.

What the researchers found was striking. In several butterfly lineages, similar colour-pattern switches were associated with the same two genes, ivory and optix. More precisely, the important changes were not usually in the protein-coding parts of those genes themselves, but in nearby regulatory regions — the genetic switches that determine when and where those genes are turned on and off during wing development. In other words, natural selection has repeatedly arrived at similar visible results by acting on the same underlying developmental toolkit.

This is not evolution being refuted; it is evolution being understood in greater detail. What looks like simple convergence from the outside turns out, at the genomic level, to be a repeated use of the same limited set of viable routes. Evolution is still contingent, still dependent on mutation, recombination, selection and inheritance, but it is not infinitely free to do anything at all. Developmental systems constrain what variations are available, and those constraints can make some evolutionary outcomes more likely than others.

One particularly awkward aspect for creationists such as Stephen Meyer, who insist that new “information” must be intelligently inserted by some unknown mechanism, is that the study shows how major changes in form and appearance can arise from changes in the regulation and arrangement of existing DNA. In the moth Chetone histrio, colour-pattern variation is associated with a large inversion — a section of DNA flipped in orientation — closely resembling the inversion-based “supergene” architecture seen in one of the co-mimetic butterflies, Heliconius numata. No designer is required; ordinary genomic processes, filtered by selection, are enough.

It is also worth noting the timescale. These same genetic routes appear to have been available to lepidopterans since deep in the Mesozoic, around the time of the dinosaurs. The predators, environments and ecological communities have changed enormously since then, but the evolutionary principle remains the same: when similar selective pressures act on organisms with similar developmental machinery, evolution can repeatedly find similar solutions.

Refuting Creationisn - How An Evolutionary Arms Race Made Us What We Are

Graphic representation of the impact of malaria on the formation of the human niche

© Michela Leonardi

Malaria Shaped Distribution of Early Human Populations

A powerful and predictable result of an arms race between a host and a parasite is that the host population will evolve in ways that make it better able either to resist the parasite or to survive despite its presence. In other words, the presence of a parasite can be a strong environmental selector and a major driver of evolutionary change. And, of course, parasite-host arms races make no sense in terms of intelligent design, still less when the designer is supposed to be omnibenevolent.

One well-known example of this evolutionary pressure is the persistence of the sickle-cell allele in parts of the world where malaria is, or has been, common. Carrying one copy of the sickle-cell mutation provides a degree of protection against the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum. Carrying two copies, however, causes sickle-cell disease, which can be severely debilitating and sometimes fatal. The result is a classic example of balancing selection: in malarial regions the allele can be maintained in the population, despite its harmful effects in those who inherit two copies, while in populations not exposed to malaria it tends not to persist at high frequency.

Now scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Cambridge, with colleagues, believe they have shown that Plasmodium falciparum malaria was a significant factor in the deep history of Homo sapiens in Africa. Their study suggests that malaria helped shape where early human populations could live between about 74,000 and 5,000 years ago, fragmenting populations across the landscape and influencing patterns of contact, separation and genetic exchange long before recorded history. This was the crucial period before humans dispersed widely beyond Africa and before agriculture dramatically altered patterns of malaria transmission.

They have recently published their findings, open access, in the journal Science Advances.

The irony, of course, is that this study shows modern humans not as the product of an intelligent designer’s magic, but as the outcome of deep evolutionary history, shaped in part by parasite-host arms races — one of the strongest arguments against any intelligent, benevolent agency being involved in the process.

Creationism Refuted - Crabby Creationists Scuttle Off

Some of the true crab species included in the study.

Clockwise from top left: Two photographs of Tuerkayana hirtipes; Cardisoma carnifex (by Tsubasa Inoue); and Ocypode sinensis (by Junya Taniguchi)

European shore crab, Carcinus maenas

By © Hans Hillewaert, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Study suggests crabs’ iconic sideways walk evolved from common ancestor | For the press | eLife

Unlike real intelligent design, evolution has no plan, no foresight and no ability to review progress and start again. It is a non-sentient, reactive process, constrained by what already exists, and able to respond to changing conditions only by favouring advantageous variations in the inherited material available to it. The result is that future generations always carry traces of earlier generations — not merely for a few years, but for millions of years.

This simple consequence of descent with modification explains why living organisms can be grouped into clades, and why the descendants of earlier taxa remain members of those taxa. These nested hierarchies are themselves confirmation of the Theory of Evolution because they are exactly what the theory predicts. Conversely, they are evidence against intelligent design, which, if it were real, should show no such inherited constraint, but rather repeated innovation, clean design solutions and optimal responses to environmental change.

For a good example, look no further than the familiar sideways scuttle of a shore crab (Carcinus maenas). This distinctive form of locomotion is characteristic of true crabs, although not universal among them, and a research team led by Associate Professor Yuuki Kawabata of the Graduate School of Integrated Science and Technology, Nagasaki University, Japan, has shown that it probably arose once, in a common ancestor, around 200 million years ago. Their findings have just been published as a Reviewed Preprint in eLife.

Creationism Refuted - A 'Living Fossil' - from 275 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Tanyka amnicola grazing

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)
(after an illustration by Vitor Silva

Fossils of jaw bones of Tanyka amnicola

Pardo, J.D; Marsicano, C.A; Smith, R.; et al (2026)

This ancient plant-eater had a twisted jaw and sideways-facing teeth - Field Museum

Creationists love so-called ‘living fossils’ because they imagine they show evolution has not happened and that Earth is only a few thousand years old. Of course, by the twisted logic of creationism, the vast number of species that have changed over time somehow do not prove the opposite: that evolution does happen and that Earth is vastly older than a few thousand years.

Their argument also ignores the scientific definition of evolution: change in allele frequencies in a population over time. Without DNA from earlier members of the same lineage, it is impossible to say whether evolution has or has not occurred within that lineage. Superficial resemblance is not genetic stasis. But then, the creationist ‘definition’ of evolution is not the scientific one. It is a childish straw man parody, designed to be easier to attack.

So this latest ‘living fossil’, reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society B by a team led by Dr Jason D. Pardo of the Field Museum, Chicago, is bound to set up cognitive dissonance in creationists. That will probably result in their usual coping strategy: ignoring it altogether, or blaming scientists for trying to make them change their minds.

The fossil belongs to a new species, Tanyka amnicola, an archaic stem tetrapod from the Early Permian of Brazil, about 275 million years ago. It belonged to a lineage that had been thought to have disappeared much earlier, making it a “living fossil” even in its own time. The fossils were found in a dry riverbed in north-eastern Brazil, in the Pedra de Fogo Formation, one of the few windows scientists have into Gondwanan animal life during this period.

What the team found was not a complete skeleton but a set of fossil lower jaws — nine in all — each showing the same extraordinary feature: the jaw was twisted, with some teeth pointing sideways, while the inside of the jaw was lined with numerous small denticles that appear to have formed a grinding surface. Since all the jaws show the same structure, this was not a deformity or fossilisation artefact, but part of the animal’s normal anatomy.

The researchers suggest that this strange arrangement may have allowed Tanyka to process food in a highly unusual way. The Field Museum describes it as probably eating aquatic plants, while the paper itself leaves open the possibility that the jaw was adapted either for processing plant material or for specialised feeding on small invertebrates. Either way, this was not a static remnant of a bygone age, but a member of an ancient lineage still exploring new ecological possibilities in Permian Gondwana.

Malevolent Designer News - How The Malaria Parasite Is Cleverly Designed to Maximise Suferring

Immune response to
Plasmodium falciparum infection

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Plasmodium falciparum parasite.

Malaria’s mRNA: Messages that Mess with the Immune System | Weizmann USA

Research is continually revealing just how efficient the human malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, is at making people sick — and, all too often, killing them. There can be few better examples of the sort of intricate, information-rich biological machinery that Discovery Institute Fellows such as Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski insist points to an intelligent designer. Although they are careful never to say so plainly, their dog-whistle signals leave their followers in little doubt that this putative designer is meant to be the god of the Bible and Qur’an. That ambiguity gives them enough wriggle-room to tell courts and educators that Intelligent Design is science, not creationism in a lab coat, while still presenting it to supporters as a moral crusade against “Darwinism”.

Now researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in a paper published recently in Cell Reports, have shown yet another reason why this parasite is so successful. Malaria caused an estimated 610,000 deaths in 2024; the WHO African Region accounted for about 95% of those deaths, and children under five made up about three-quarters of the deaths in that region, according to the World Health Organization.

The researchers, led by Professor Neta Regev-Rudzki, discovered that the parasite exports tiny vesicles containing messenger RNA (mRNA), not only into the red blood cells it infects, but also into the host’s monocytes — immune-system cells that should be helping to fight the infection. Once inside the monocyte, the parasite’s mRNA enters the cell nucleus and binds to two essential human proteins, ACIN1 and PNN, which are normally involved in cutting and splicing RNA transcripts so they can be translated into proteins. With this splicing machinery disrupted, crucial immune-related transcripts are misprocessed and degraded, suppressing the production of proteins needed for an effective immune response.

In other words, P. falciparum is not merely hiding from the immune system; it is actively sabotaging part of the host’s cellular communication network from inside the nucleus. The result is a neat evolutionary trick: the immune system is distracted and disrupted while the real threat — parasites multiplying inside red blood cells — continues to spread.

Refuting Creationism - Why Neanderthals Went Extinct - 30,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Neanderthal family

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The study shows that regions favourable to Homo sapiens were found to be more highly connected than those of Neanderthals.

Why did the Neanderthals disappear? - UdeMnouvelles

A recent paper in Quaternary Science Reviews by a team led by Professor Arianne Burke of the Department of Anthropology at Université de Montréal, and head of the Quebec-based Hominin Dispersals Research Group, offers fresh insight into why Neanderthals disappeared from Europe around 40,000 years ago.

The timeframe alone should be enough to send any self-respecting creationist reaching deep into the catalogue of prepared excuses for dismissing inconvenient facts. What we will not see, of course, is any acknowledgement that science has once again produced evidence that flatly contradicts their beliefs, or even the faintest shadow of doubt about the Bible’s usefulness as a textbook of history or science.

Archaic hominins have always been a major problem for creationists, whose responses range from outright denial, through misrepresentation of the science, to the extraordinary mental gymnastics needed to shoehorn the evidence into a childish Bible narrative of a single ancestral human couple living some 6,000–10,000 years ago.

A recent example is Ken Ham’s assertion, through Answers in Genesis, that Adam and Eve were the ancestors not only of modern humans but also of Neanderthals and Denisovans. That would make Adam and Eve something like Homo heidelbergensis, H. antecessor, or whichever Middle Pleistocene hominin eventually proves to have been the last common ancestor of these lineages. It also neatly ignores the African fossil record and raises the obvious question — even if we ignored the evidence for the age of these archaic humans for the sake of argument — of how their descendants could have spread so widely, diversified so markedly, and then partly disappeared, all within a few thousand years.

Of course, it is nonsense, and is clearly aimed at people who are either unaware of the evidence but vaguely aware of these archaic hominins, or are so eager to clutch at straws that any apologetic will do, however absurd it becomes when placed beside the facts.

“Primitive” people were actually just humans like you and me. pic.twitter.com/NXGQm0sYCW

— Answers in Genesis (@AiG) April 13, 2026

Yes, there are still unanswered questions about the common ancestry of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans, but one thing we can be certain of is that their common ancestor did not live within the absurdly compressed timeframe allowed by the Bible narrative. That is just one of the many ways in which we know the Bible story is wrong — which is precisely why Ken Ham does not want his followers to think too carefully about it.

But if the question of origins is awkward for creationists, the question of extinction is no less so. Why did the Neanderthals disappear, and why did Homo sapiens survive and expand? There are several competing explanations, and, as so often in science, they are not mutually exclusive. Did Neanderthals succumb to climate instability? Were they weakened by inbreeding and low population density in small, scattered groups? Were they outcompeted by H. sapiens, with their wider social networks, more flexible technology and perhaps, eventually, dogs? Or were some Neanderthal populations simply absorbed into the larger and expanding population of H. sapiens through interbreeding?

Now, modelling by Professor Burke’s team suggests that the answer was not a single, simple cause. Climate change and interspecific interaction with H. sapiens were factors, but their importance varied across Europe. The study suggests that a significant difference may have been the resilience of social networks. In regions favourable to H. sapiens, populations appear to have been more strongly connected than Neanderthal populations, giving them a better safety net when climate, resources or local demography became unstable.

This does not mean Neanderthals were isolated, unintelligent or incapable of maintaining relationships between groups. Archaeological evidence shows that they had interregional connections too. But, according to the models, those networks appear to have been more fragile, especially in parts of Central and Eastern Europe. In a world of rapid climatic swings, that difference may have mattered. A better-connected population can share information, exchange partners, move temporarily into allied territories, and recover after local shocks. A more weakly connected population can be left isolated, vulnerable and demographically brittle.

Creationism In Crisis - Evolution In Progress As A Familiar Mediterranean Lizard Goes Green

Common wall lizard, Podarcis muralis.
The yellow and orange colour morphs disappeared over time.

Photo: Roberto García Roa

The "Hulk" lizard.

Photo: Roberto García Roa.

“Hulk lizard” knocks out ancient colour palette | Lund University

This lovely example of evolution in progress will no doubt have creationists demanding that science abandon its definition of evolution and adopt their childish “change of kind” parody instead — a caricature which, if it meant one basic type of organism suddenly turning into another, would falsify evolution rather than confirm it.

The example concerns the common wall lizard, Podarcis muralis, a species widespread in the Mediterranean region. For millions of years, populations of this lizard have included three genetically determined throat-colour morphs: white, yellow and orange. These colour forms are not merely superficial differences. They are associated with different strategies for gaining territories, attracting mates and competing with rivals, and their long-term coexistence has been a textbook example of evolutionary balance maintained by natural and social selection.

Now that balance has been disrupted by the spread of a new phenotype: a larger, bright green, aggressive and sexually dominant form, known to science as the green-and-black, white-throated nigriventris phenotype, nicknamed the “Hulk” by the researchers appears to have arisen near Rome several thousand years ago (a mere tick in evolutionary time) and is now spreading through Italy.

As this form spreads through the landscape, the yellow- and orange-throated morphs are disappearing, leaving the white-throated form behind. The change has been so rapid that, had it involved a marked alteration in a structure likely to fossilise, such as teeth or bones, it would appear in the fossil record of the future as a sudden change after a long period of stasis — in other words, exactly the kind of pattern described by punctuated equilibrium. It is, of course, classic evolution: allele frequencies in populations shifting as a newly successful phenotype spreads.

This evolutionary change in progress is the subject of a paper in Science by an international team of researchers led by Professor Tobias Uller of Lund University, Sweden. The team analysed colour data from about 240 populations of P. muralis, comprising more than 10,000 individuals. The results show that the newcomer has significantly altered the long-standing balance within the species, eliminating the yellow and orange morphs as the larger, more aggressive form spreads through the region.

Creationism Refuted - A Newly-Discovered Mammal That LIve Alongside Dinosaurs - 75 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

An illustration of Cimolodon desosai on the tree with a fruit in its mouth. It was about the size of a golden hamster. It likely scampered on the ground and in the trees and ate fruits and insects.

Photo: Andrey Atuchin.

Researchers discover the fossil of a new hamster-sized mammal that lived alongside dinosaurs on the Pacific Coast – UW News

Although the catastrophe at the end of the Cretaceous exterminated about 75% of life on Earth, including all the non-avian dinosaurs, some small mammals survived. Among them were rodent-like multituberculates: not rodents, but an extinct and highly successful group of mammals that had already lived alongside dinosaurs for more than 100 million years. One newly identified member of that group was a small mammal, about the size of a golden hamster, described in a recent paper published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The people who made up the creation myths in the Bible could have known nothing of this, of course. As their stories show, theirs was a narrow, parochial view of the world, centred on a small part of the Middle East and on the folk history of one people. Their modern legacy is a movement of equally incurious believers who treat those ancient stories as real history and their creation fantasy as real science. Consequently, the evidence revealed by palaeontologists is almost invariably too awkward for them to acknowledge honestly.

Sadly, creationists continue trying to boost their dwindling numbers, and soothe their fragile egos, by demanding the right to indoctrinate children at public expense. Behind that demand lies the curious belief that falsehoods become less false if enough people can be persuaded to believe them. The facts themselves are of little consequence. What matters is recruitment: encouraging ignorance, anti-science conspiracism and belief in magic, while leaving children ill-equipped to evaluate evidence, understand complex data, or perhaps become the scientists society will need in the future.

Nevertheless, the facts remain what they are, regardless of who accepts them. In this case, a research team led by the University of Washington has identified a new 75-million-year-old species of Cimolodon from a fossil discovered at a research site in Baja California, Mexico. The species, named Cimolodon desosai, was about the size of a golden hamster and probably scampered both on the ground and in trees, feeding on fruit and insects.

Creationism Refuted - Why Snakes, Like Creationists, Don't Have A Leg To Stand On - Evolution

Najash rionegrina

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Najash rionegrina

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

An ancient snake's cheekbone sheds light on evolution of modern snake skulls | Faculty of Science

Creationism is the art of ignoring evidence while pretending to be interested in it. Creationists continually demand that science provide supporting evidence for their childish parodies of evolution, abiogenesis, the Big Bang, and other scientific explanations; then, when the evidence is provided, they either ignore it, misrepresent it, or move the goalposts.

This is neatly illustrated by a paper published in Science Advances in 2019 by an international team of palaeontologists, including researchers from Argentina, the University of Alberta and McGill University. The paper provides creationists with something they are forever pretending to ask for — a transitional fossil — while also undermining another of their favourite assertions: that evolutionary change must always involve adding something new, and that loss or reduction cannot contribute to evolution.

The fossil in question belongs to Najash rionegrina, a rear-limbed fossil snake from Argentina. The presence of hind limbs is striking enough, but it is not the most important point of the paper. The fossil also shows that, during snake evolution, legs were not the only structures to be reduced or lost. The skull of Najash still retained a cheekbone — the jugal bone — which has almost entirely disappeared in living snakes.

That matters because it helps refine our understanding of how the modern snake skull evolved. Rather than appearing suddenly, fully formed and magically snake-like, the snake body plan was assembled over time through a series of anatomical changes, including elongation of the body, reduction of limbs, modification of the skull, and the loss or reduction of bones that were present in earlier ancestors. In other words, this is exactly the kind of transitional evidence creationists claim not to have seen, and exactly the kind of evolutionary reduction they claim cannot happen.

How Science Works - 'Miniature Dinosaur' Fossils Identified As Baby Ankylosaurs

Liaoningosaurus paradoxus

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Numerous fossils of Liaoningosaurus paradoxus have so far been discovered.

© Zheng et al. 2025

First armoured dinosaur hatchling discovered in China | Natural History Museum.

Unlike fundamentalist belief systems such as creationism, in which facts are either forced to fit sacred dogma or dismissed with ad hoc excuses, science readily incorporates new information and adjusts its understanding accordingly. That process was neatly illustrated by the paper published in September 2025 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, which reported a reassessment of fossils from China first described in 2001.

These fossils were initially classified as belonging to a miniature armoured ankylosaur named Liaoningosaurus paradoxus. Since then, more specimens have been found, but none exceeds 40 cm in length, which is strikingly odd for ankylosaurs, a group whose members were typically around 3 metres or more long.

Where creationism would brush aside anomalies like this with a shrug and a retreat into theology, muttering about ‘mysterious ways’ or ‘tests’, science treats them as clues that something is not yet fully understood. The existence of these fossils pointed to something that had yet to be properly integrated into our knowledge of ankylosaurs, requiring scientists to refine either their understanding of the animals themselves or of the fossils attributed to them.

Now, a re-examination by a team of four palaeontologists, including Professor Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum, London, has shown that these specimens were not miniature adults at all, but baby ankylosaurs. That makes them the youngest ankylosaurs yet discovered. There is still much to learn, because no adult Liaoningosaurus paradoxus has yet been found. Even so, these hatchling fossils add significantly to our understanding of how ankylosaurs developed.

Evolution In Progress - How Honey Bees Are Evolving - Another Move In The Arms Race

Southern California hybrid honeybee hive hanging from a tree in the wild.

Boris Baer/UCR

Varroa destructor on a honeybee

Jon Gascoyne/Flickr

SoCal honeybees can fend off deadly mites | UCR News | UC Riverside

A new paper in Scientific Reports by Genesis Chong-Echavez and Boris Baer of the University of California, Riverside, casually refutes creationism by showing evolution in progress. It describes how honeybees, Apis mellifera, are evolving to survive in the presence of a serious parasite, the Varroa mite, Varroa destructor. And, no doubt to the consternation of any creationists who understand the implications, it also illustrates how evolutionary arms races are a major driver of adaptation. Both parasites and arms races are deeply embarrassing for creationism because they make little sense as the products of an intelligent designer. Indeed, parasites conform to the Discovery Institute’s supposed “proof” of intelligent design only if that designer is malevolent; yet if parasites are dismissed as evidence of design, creationists are simply abandoning one of their own favourite arguments.

In other words, a parasite-host arms race is a paradox that creationism cannot resolve, whereas evolutionary theory not only explains it, but is strengthened by it. The paper concerns a Southern Californian hybrid population of honeybees with ancestry from Western European, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and African lineages. These bees are showing resistance to the Varroa mite, a parasite that has played a major role in the catastrophic losses of managed honeybee colonies in the United States, where beekeepers reported losses of up to 62% in 2025.

The researchers monitored 236 colonies over four years and found that the Californian hybrid colonies consistently had lower mite infestation rates than colonies headed by commercial queens. In the UCR summary of the work, the hybrid colonies are described as having about 68% fewer mites on average and as being more than five times less likely to cross the treatment threshold at which chemical control becomes necessary. Laboratory experiments also showed that the mites were less attracted to larvae from these hybrid bees, especially at the stage when mites would normally be most likely to invade brood cells.

The usual creationist response to examples like this is to retreat into a parody definition of evolution involving a change in “kind”, with “kind” carefully left undefined, or to fall back on Bible-literalist theology and explain parasites as the result of “sin”, by some unexplained mechanism against which their creator appears curiously powerless. But the problem of arms races remains. On that view, creationism’s single designer seems to be competing with itself, continually redesigning solutions to problems of its own making, ad infinitum. Evolutionary biology, by contrast, has no such difficulty. It predicts exactly this kind of reciprocal adaptation between parasite and host.

Refuting Creationism - Another Gap Shrinks And It's More Bad News For Creationists

Helicolocellus cantori in an Ediacaran sea

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

Helicolocellus cantori in an Ediacaran sea

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

Virginia Tech researcher's team discovers 'missing' sea sponges | Virginia Tech News | Virginia Tech

Scientists have narrowed another gap in the fossil record and, as usual, no gods were found. The gap concerned the long interval between the time molecular-clock analyses suggest sponges first evolved in the Neoproterozoic, perhaps around 700 million years ago, and the earliest widely accepted sponge fossils from the early Cambrian. That gap has now been pushed back into the Late Ediacaran by Virginia Tech geobiologist a paper in Nature.

Creationists normally delight in gaps in the fossil record because they think Darwin somehow “admitted” that missing links were fatal to his theory. In reality, Darwin was doing what honest scientists do: openly acknowledging the limitations of the evidence available in 1859. The key point is that he was writing about the state of knowledge then, not in 2026. Since Darwin’s day, the Theory of Evolution has not only provided a framework for understanding the history of life; it has also told scientists what sort of evidence to look for and where to look for it. As a result, palaeontologists now have access to vastly more fossils than Darwin could ever have imagined, together with genetic evidence and radiometric dating methods that did not exist in his lifetime. More fossils are being found almost daily and invariably confirm the Theory of Evolution.

And those gaps continue to shrink, almost always to the discomfort of creationists, because they so often concern events hundreds of millions, even billions, of years before the narrow timescale allowed by biblical literalism. This fossil is especially awkward for them because it further undermines the familiar creationist misrepresentation of the Cambrian “Explosion” as a sudden, magical appearance of multiple body plans with no ancestry. Instead, this Late Ediacaran sponge adds to the growing evidence that the Cambrian diversification was preceded by a long evolutionary prelude, in which animals were already emerging and diversifying before the Cambrian began. Far from an abrupt act of creation, the picture is one of gradual evolutionary change over immense spans of time, as the largely sessile Ediacaran world gave way to the more active and ecologically complex Cambrian one.

Malevolent Design - Science is Close To Combatting Another Of Creationism's Divine Malevolence's Nasties

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

Scientists develop first-of-its-kind antibody to block Epstein-Barr virus - Fred Hutch

A recent paper in the Cell Press journal Cell Reports Medicine by researchers at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle reports the development of monoclonal antibodies against Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), a pathogen carried by an estimated 95% of the global human population. The mere existence of such a virus, together with the fact that human scientists have now produced what looks like a promising way of blocking it, should be acutely embarrassing to any creationist prepared to follow the evidence where it leads.

For devotees of creationism’s putative intelligent designer, EBV is an awkward example of its supposed handiwork. It is superbly adapted for what it does: infecting human cells, evading immune defences, and contributing to a range of diseases, including several cancers. If one were looking for something that appears exquisitely “designed” to do harm, EBV would be a strong candidate.

It is especially effective at finding and entering its target cells. The viral glycoprotein gp350 helps it bind to receptors on human cells, while gp42 helps it fuse with and enter them. In other words, it possesses precisely the sort of functional complexity that Intelligent Design advocates such as William Dembski and Michael Behe habitually point to as evidence of design. By their own argument, a system so finely tuned to perform a specific task should count as “specified complexity” or even “irreducible complexity”. The problem, of course, is that the task in question is the infection of human beings by a cancer-associated virus.

Creationists who lean on these arguments are therefore trapped by them. If complexity and functional integration are proof of a designer, then they must also account for the obvious implication: a designer responsible for EBV would have to be, at best, indifferent to human suffering and, at worst, positively malevolent. To escape that conclusion, they usually have to abandon Intelligent Design’s own logic and retreat instead to the theological fallback of “The Fall” and “sin” from the Abrahamic creation myths. In doing so, they quietly concede that their alleged scientific proof of design proves far more than they want it to.

This paper adds a further layer of discomfort. Human scientists have begun to do what any competent and benevolent designer should have done in the first place: devise antibodies capable of blocking the virus from infecting human cells. The study reports monoclonal antibodies against gp350 and gp42, with one anti-gp42 antibody preventing infection in mice with human immune systems. So the obvious question for intellectually honest creationists is this: if human science can engineer a way to interfere with such a pathogen, why was an all-powerful designer unable, or unwilling, to equip us with protection from the outset?

Predictably, most will not confront that question. They will retreat into the familiar refuge of mystery: “we cannot know the mind of God”. But that is precisely where religion and science part company. Science does not declare a problem solved by calling it unknowable. It treats mysteries as challenges to be investigated, understood and, where possible, overcome. That is exactly what these researchers have done with EBV.

Refuting Creationism - How Complex Organs Evolve

Using the placenta to understand how complex organs evolve

Recently, a new creationist member of a Facebook group resorted to the familiar tactic of presenting the placenta as a complex organ that could not possibly have evolved. As so often with creationist arguments, this was little more than an argument from personal incredulity dressed up as a challenge. In place of scientific evidence, he relied on a god-of-the-gaps argument and a false dichotomy, implying that if he could not imagine a natural explanation, the only alternative must be magic performed by his preferred deity.

The new member appears to have left the group soon after replies began to appear in the comments, complete with links to articles and papers explaining exactly how the problem can be approached scientifically.

This paper in Nature by Oliver W. Griffith and Günter P. Wagner of Yale University provides precisely the sort of answer that exposes the weakness of this common creationist tactic on social media. Their argument amounts to little more than: “I do not know how this could have evolved, therefore God did it.” That is not an explanation; it is simply ignorance masquerading as evidence, and tells us more of the parochial ignorance of the creationist than they probably intended. The paper uses the evolution of the placenta to explain some basic principles of how complex organs evolved. Needless to say, no magic is involved anywhere in the process.

One of the authors, Oliver W. Griffith, has also written an article in The Conversation explaining their research and what it tells us about the evolution of complex organs in vertebrates. His article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

First, a short explanation of the role of the placental in placental mammals:

Creationism Refuted - The Transition From Cold-Blooded to Warm-Blooded Mammal Ancestors

Tritylodon in its natural setting

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

Mystery solved: when mammals’ ancestors became warm-blooded

If the transition from cold-bloodedness to warm-bloodedness is not a change in “kind” in the creationist sense, it is hard to imagine what would qualify. Creationists often try to dismiss major evolutionary transitions as mere “variation within a 'Kind'”, but the shift from ectothermy to endothermy was not some trivial adjustment. It was a profound physiological transformation that allowed animals to maintain a high, stable internal temperature, remain active across a wider range of conditions, and exploit ecological niches closed to their cold-blooded ancestors. Yet, according to creationist mythology, no such transition ever occurred, and there was never a point in time when it began.

Unfortunately for creationists, the evidence says otherwise. An international team of palaeontologists led by Ricardo Araújo of the Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal, Romain David of the Natural History Museum, London, UK, and Kenneth D. Angielczyk of the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, USA, believe they have identified when endothermy arose in the mammalian lineage. Their findings were published in Nature in July 2022. The team concluded that mammalian ancestors became warm-blooded about 233 million years ago, roughly 33 million years before the first true mammals appeared, and at about the same time that other recognisably mammalian traits such as fur and whiskers were evolving. The timing is consistent with evolutionary expectations that major innovations can arise in response to changing environmental pressures. [1.1]

They also concluded that this transition was rapid in geological terms, taking less than a million years rather than unfolding gradually over tens of millions of years, as had often been assumed. [2.1]

The researchers reached these conclusions by examining 3D models of the inner ears of dozens of mammalian ancestors, many from South Africa’s fossil-rich Karoo region. Karoo fossils are especially valuable because they preserve an exceptionally detailed record of synapsid evolution across almost 100 million years, documenting the transition from reptile-like therapsids to mammals. What the team focused on was the shape of the semicircular canals of the inner ear, which form part of the balance system. These canals are filled with endolymph, a fluid whose viscosity changes with temperature. As body temperature rose during the evolution of endothermy, the geometry of the canals had to change to keep the balance organ functioning properly. That gave the researchers a way to infer when warm-bloodedness first evolved in the mammalian line. [2.1]

Four of the authors of the paper in Nature also published an article in The Conversation explaining their results and their significance for understanding mammalian evolution. Their article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

First, information about the Karoo fossils:

Refuting Creationism - Ancestral Mammals Laid Eggs - Over 200 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Impression of Lystrosaurus in natural setting

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Lystrosaurus embryo within its partially preserved shell, reconstruction of the animal

Pictures - Professor Julien Benoit Drawing - Sophie Vrard.

Embryo fossil found in South Africa is world’s oldest proof that mammal ancestors laid eggs

It is well established in evolutionary biology that mammals arose from within the synapsid lineage, the ancient group that includes the therapsids - stem-mammals that long predate true mammals. What had remained uncertain, however, was whether those early synapsids still reproduced by laying eggs, as modern monotremes such as the platypus and echidnas do, or whether live birth had evolved much earlier in the mammalian line.

That gap in our knowledge has now been narrowed dramatically and, no doubt to the acute discomfort of creationists, the evidence shows that about 250 million years ago - roughly 244 million years before young-Earth creationists believe the Earth was created - a therapsid was still reproducing by laying eggs. The evidence comes from a fossil embryo discovered in South Africa in 2008 by palaeontologist John Nyaphuli. Even more awkward for creationists, their mythology requires animals to have been created as separate, unrelated ‘kinds’, yet here we have direct evidence from the stem-mammal lineage showing a reproductive stage inherited from deep evolutionary ancestry rather than sudden, magical creation without predecessors.

Now Julien Benoit and Jennifer Botha of the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, together with Vincent Fernandez of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, have used high-resolution CT and synchrotron imaging to examine the curled-up embryo inside the rock and identify it as a young Lystrosaurus, a dicynodont therapsid from the Early Triassic. Crucially, the specimen preserves features consistent with an unhatched embryo, including a tightly curled in ovo posture and an unfused lower jaw symphysis. No calcified eggshell was preserved, so the egg was probably soft and leathery, as expected for a very early synapsid. Their findings are reported in an open access paper in PLOS One.

The authors have also co-authored an article in The Conversation explaining the discovery and its significance. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Refuting Creationism - Neanderthals And Modern Humans Lived Together - 120,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals shared technology and behavior

Credit: Efrat Bakshitz

Archaeological examination of the Tinshemet Cave floor.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Neanderthal and Homo sapiens Interactions in the Mid-Middle Palaeolithic (130,000–80,000 years ago) | EUROPEAN FRIENDS OF THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY

Neanderthals are a persistent thorn in the side of creationism because they show that human origins are far older, messier and more interesting than the simplistic creation myths in the Bible. Genetic evidence shows that people outside Africa still carry a small but significant inheritance from Neanderthals, demonstrating that human ancestry was shaped not by descent from a single primordial couple, but by repeated episodes of migration, divergence and interbreeding between distinct human populations. There is even evidence that early Homo sapiens were interbreeding with Neanderthals as long as 100,000 years ago.

Now, new research by archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University, excavating at Tinshemet Cave in central Israel, suggests that the relationship between Neanderthals and early modern humans in the Levant, between about 130,000 and 80,000 years ago, involved far more than occasional contact. Their evidence indicates sustained interaction, shared technologies, similar hunting strategies and parallel ritual behaviour, including formal burial practices. The team have just published their findings in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. What emerges is a picture of different human groups living in close contact, exchanging ideas and behaviours to such an extent that their cultural differences became increasingly blurred.

The researchers reached this conclusion by integrating evidence from four main areas: stone-tool production, hunting strategies, symbolic behaviour and social complexity. Particularly striking is the clustering of burials at Tinshemet Cave, which suggests that the cave may have served as a repeated burial site, perhaps even an early cemetery. The placement of objects such as stone tools, animal bones and pieces of ochre in graves points to shared ritual practices and symbolic behaviour, hinting at a level of social and cultural complexity that creationist caricatures of early humans simply cannot accommodate.

Refuting Creationism - More on the Domestication of Dogs - Long Before 'Creation Week'

Artist’s impression of a human and their canine companion near a settlement in Ice Age Switzerland.

Credit: Oliver Uberti, Nature.

Cover picture for The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic

Canine companions: revealing the genetic history of our first friends | Crick

This is the second of my posts on the domestication of dogs and on why the facts are so awkward for creationists. It concerns research by a team led by Anders Bergström and Pontus Skoglund of the Francis Crick Institute, London, working with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a large international network of collaborators.

The team have shown that the domestication of dogs had already begun well before the invention of farming, when humans in Europe still lived in nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers. At that stage, dogs would have been hunting companions, sentinel guards for encampments, and perhaps even family pets, long before they were adapted for the many tasks later associated with farming, such as herding livestock and guarding flocks. Their findings are published in Nature.

This establishes dogs as the first domestic animals and suggests that the human-dog relationship may have helped lay the groundwork for later animal husbandry and selective breeding.

The story of the domestication of dogs from wolves is something in which I have long taken a special interest, and it was that interest which led me to write two books with fictionalised accounts of how it may have happened - The Girl and the Wolf and its sequel, The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic.

Biologically, of course, this evolved symbiotic relationship between two species is exactly the sort of outcome the Theory of Evolution leads us to expect. But, embarrassingly for creationists, it also tells a story rooted in deep time, for which creationism has no credible explanation. Worse still for biblical literalists, it makes a mockery of the claim that God created all animals for the benefit of humankind, because that claim presupposes that animals created by an omniscient, omnipotent designer would already be fit for purpose and would not need extensive modification by human selective breeding.

The researchers reached their conclusions by analysing DNA from 216 canid skeletal remains, including 181 pre-Neolithic samples - that is, from before approximately 10,000 years ago. These remains came from sites across Europe and nearby regions, including Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland.

Creationists previously had a little wriggle room when the earliest indisputable domestic dog was thought to date to about 10,900 years ago. They could at least pretend that dogs appeared during their imaginary ‘Creation Week’ or shortly afterwards. That pretence is now no longer sustainable. This study shows that the ancestry of later dogs was already established before 14,200 years ago, and probably earlier still.

Creationism Refuted - Earliest Domestic Dogs - 6,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Cover picture for The Girl and the Wolf

Oldest genetic evidence for domestic dogs identified in Europe and Türkiye | University of Oxford

Artistic reconstruction of Pınarbaşı c. 15,800 years ago based on evidence from archaeological excavations by University of Liverpool.

(c) Kathryn Killackey

This is the first of two blog posts on a pair of recent papers published in Nature on the earliest known domestic dogs and what they tell us about when grey wolves first entered into a domestic relationship with humans. Together, these studies push the earliest firm genetic evidence for dogs back[1] about 10,900 years ago, showing that dog populations were already present in western Eurasia during the Late Upper Palaeolithic. For creationists committed to a young Earth and to the simplistic Bronze Age origin myths of the Bible, that is yet another awkward fact: dogs were already on their way to becoming humanity’s first domestic animal long before their preferred chronology even allows for the Earth to exist. [1.1]

Since then, of course, dogs have been systematically modified by selective breeding to suit the many roles humans have found for them. That alone sits uneasily with the claim that a perfect creator made all animals ready-made for human benefit. But what makes these papers especially interesting to me is not only that they create yet another problem for creationist superstition, but that they touch directly on the background to two novels I have recently published, in which the domestication of wolves forms part of the story.

The first of these books, The Girl and the Wolf, tells the story of Almora, a child of the Drognai clan, who is raised alongside a wolf cub, Sharma, who becomes her inseparable companion. When Almora meets one of the last Neanderthals, Tanu, and they fall in love, Sharma plays a crucial part in bringing them together. The kindness of Almora’s mother, Shana, in rescuing and raising the starving cub becomes the small act from which a much larger change in human history begins.

In the sequel, The Way of The Wolf: A Stone Age Epic, Almora and Sharma have become the stuff of legend, their story spreading far beyond the lands of the Drognai. When Almora’s daughter, Shana — herself of mixed Neanderthal and modern human ancestry — chooses to leave the clan because of the tensions her family’s presence has caused, Almora, Tanu and a small band of Drognai go with her to a distant land. There they discover a people who have taken the legend of Almora and Sharma to heart and formed a close relationship with a pack of tame wolves, a relationship that has helped carry them through hardship into a period of hunting success and prosperity.

These books are fiction, of course, because we cannot know exactly how wolves became domesticated. What we can say is that the current evidence points to a long and complex process rather than a single moment of “invention”. The broad consensus is that some wolves probably began by exploiting scraps around human camps, while humans gradually came to recognise their value as sentinels, scavengers and hunting partners. The rest, as they say, is history.

And according to the first of these two new papers, that history was already under way deep in the Late Ice Age. One study generated nuclear and mitochondrial genomes from canid remains from Pınarbaşı in Türkiye, dated to 15,800 years ago, and from Gough’s Cave in Somerset, dated to 14,300 years ago, and concluded that a genetically homogeneous dog population was already widely distributed across Europe and Anatolia by at least 14,300 years ago. The second study analysed 216 canid remains from Europe and found its oldest dog genome in a 14,200-year-old specimen from Kesslerloch in Switzerland, showing that European dogs were already genetically distinct by then. [1.1]

Refuting Creationism - How Humans Caused 'Warrior' Wheat to Evolve.

Early farming unintentionally bred highly competitive "warrior" wheat, study finds | Biosciences | The University of Sheffield

One of the more embarrassing questions you can ask a creationist is this: if an omniscient, perfect god created all living things for the benefit of humankind, as the biblical creation myth claims, why have humans had to modify almost all our domesticated animals and cultivated crops to make them fit for purpose? In many cases, we have altered them so extensively that they are barely recognisable as the same species as their wild ancestors.

The story of how humans domesticated wild species and gradually modified them is, in effect, a textbook example of evolution in progress. Sometimes this happened through conscious selective breeding, but often it was an unintended consequence of domestication itself. Wheat, for example, evolved grains that were more firmly attached to the stalk. This meant fewer grains were lost when harvested and carried back to camp for communal use, so the plants whose seeds stayed attached were more likely to have those seeds planted again, whether deliberately or accidentally, around early hunter-gatherer encampments.

Another example in wheat is the evolution of taller plants with more upright leaves. As humans began planting wheat more densely, they created an environment in which the more aggressive plants literally overshadowed their neighbours and captured a greater share of the sunlight. In this struggle for existence, the plants best suited to the human-made environment were the ones most likely to survive and become the parents of the next generation.

That is the conclusion of a research group led by Dr Yixiang Shan and Professor Colin Osborne of the University of Sheffield, working in collaboration with colleagues from the Autonomous University of Madrid, Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain, and Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Their findings are published in Current Biology.