Refuting Creationism - How The Strawberry Evolved - No Magic Needed

Wild starwberry, Fragaria vesca

By Jörg Hempel, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, Link

A genomic time machine traces how the modern strawberry came to be | EurekAlert!

Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did

Dr. William Butler, Physician - (1535–29 January 1618)
Talking of the strawberry.

This and my next blog post deal with essentially the same refutations of creationist mythology and pseudo-science. The mythology is the Bible’s unambiguous claim that a creator god made everything for its favourite creation, humankind; the pseudo-science is the creationist claim that no new genetic information can arise without the direct intervention of that creator god, because, so they tell us, new genetic information can only be produced by magic, otherwise it would violate the laws of thermodynamics [sic]. Both claims are demonstrable nonsense, of course.

The first example concerns a fruit now ripening in UK gardens and fields — the strawberry. If strawberries had been specially created for humans, we might expect them to have arrived fully formed, already perfect for our tastes and purposes. Instead, like other cultivated crops, they bear the marks of a long evolutionary history followed by recent human selection, breeding and improvement.

A May 2025 paper published in the journal Horticulture Research by researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and collaborating institutions, describes a new way to reconstruct the deep evolutionary history of the cultivated strawberry, Fragaria × ananassa. Their work helps explain how the modern strawberry acquired its complex octoploid genome — not by magic, but by ordinary, natural processes of genome duplication, hybridisation and subsequent evolutionary divergence.

Cultivated strawberries, like many crop plants, are polyploids. Humans are normally diploid, with two sets of chromosomes; cultivated strawberries are octoploid, with eight sets. In the notation used by geneticists, humans are 2n, while the cultivated strawberry is 2n = 8x = 56. This genomic complexity is the outcome of a series of ancient whole-genome duplication and hybridisation events in which entire chromosome sets from different ancestral lineages were brought together in one organism.

Whole-genome duplication does not require supernatural intervention. It is a well-known natural process, especially common in plant evolution. Initially, it duplicates existing genetic material, but those extra gene copies then provide raw material for mutation, altered regulation, divergence, subfunctionalisation and neofunctionalisation. In other words, duplicated genes can be retained, modified, silenced, repurposed or combined in new ways. Hybridisation adds another layer of novelty by bringing together different genomes, producing new combinations of genes and regulatory networks in a single evolutionary lineage.

The research team disentangled the strawberry’s complex polyploid genome by exploiting the evolutionary signatures left by long terminal repeat retrotransposons, or LTR-RTs. These mobile genetic elements accumulate in genomes over time and can act rather like molecular time stamps. By comparing patterns of similarity between these elements across chromosomes, the researchers were able to reconstruct the strawberry’s subgenome architecture and infer the timing of major genome-merging events.

Using this serial similarity matrix method, the researchers found evidence for three successive allopolyploidisation events in the evolutionary history of the cultivated strawberry genome: first between about 3.1 and 4.2 million years ago, then between about 1.9 and 3.1 million years ago, and finally between about 0.8 and 1.9 million years ago. The result is a genome composed of multiple subgenomes with different ancestry, interacting and evolving together over time.

What is perfectly clear from this research is that new genetic variation and genomic complexity can arise through entirely natural mechanisms. Polyploidy, hybridisation, mutation, transposable elements and selection are not gaps in biology into which a magic creator needs to be inserted; they are part of the normal machinery of evolution. The cultivated strawberry is not evidence of special creation, but of a long, traceable evolutionary history later shaped by human cultivation.

Creationism Refuted - Why Science Works While Religions Ignore Failures

Credit: Tobias Baur / Pexels

Credit: Tobias Baur / Pexels

Dark diversity helped solve Darwin’s 160-year-old puzzle | University of Tartu

A paper recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) by an international team that included researchers from the University of Tartu, Estonia, offers a solution to a conundrum in evolutionary ecology first identified by Charles Darwin more than 160 years ago: Darwin’s naturalisation conundrum.

The problem concerns why some introduced species successfully establish themselves in a new environment while others fail. Darwin recognised two apparently contradictory possibilities, both of which make sense in evolutionary terms. On the one hand, a newcomer closely related to local species might succeed because its relatives show that the environment is suitable for that general way of life. In other words, similarity to the local community could be a sign of pre-adaptation. On the other hand, a newcomer might be more successful if it is unlike the resident species, because it avoids direct competition and exploits resources the local community is not already using.

So which is it? Should a successful immigrant species resemble the local species, or should it be different from them? That is Darwin’s naturalisation conundrum.

These are the sorts of paradoxes science thrives on because they expose a gap in understanding and invite investigation. They are not waved aside as mysteries, nor protected from scrutiny by declaring them ineffable. They are problems to be solved by evidence.

That is in stark contrast to religion, where glaring contradictions are often preserved rather than resolved. Christianity, for example, asks its followers to believe simultaneously in an omniscient god and in human free will. Yet the contradiction can be exposed with a simple question: if God has always known that you will eat fish for dinner tomorrow, can you choose steak instead? If yes, then God did not know after all; if no, then you were never free to choose. Either answer undermines a central plank of Christian theology, because without free will there can be no meaningful original sin, no need for salvation, and no coherent reason for the Jesus story.

Another awkward question is why an omniscient god supposedly waited until about 2,000 years ago to arrange the sacrifice of Jesus as the mechanism for saving humanity. If this god had always known that a blood sacrifice would be needed, why wait through countless generations of human suffering before arranging it? Why not solve the alleged problem at the beginning? Did God simply stand by while millions died without that supposed salvation, or did it merely take until the first or second century CE for priests to invent a theological explanation for the Jesus story?

And so the list goes on. Can an omnipotent god create an object too heavy for it to lift? Can God lie? If God claims to be omniscient, how can it know that there is nothing it does not know? And if it is aware of not knowing something, then it is not omniscient. Such questions are usually met not with answers but with evasion, because religions have no neutral referee. They have only opinion, assertion and authority.

Science is different because evidence can arbitrate between competing explanations. This is why science tends to converge on a single answer while religions fragment into sects, denominations and, sometimes, mutually hostile factions.

In the case of Darwin’s naturalisation conundrum, the team, including Wen-gang Zhang and Professor of Botany Meelis Pärtel of the University of Tartu, examined the evidence in the form of a remarkable 340-year dataset from Swedish lakes, recording both successful and unsuccessful fish introductions. This allowed the researchers to test, with unusual precision, what determines whether an introduced species establishes itself.

Refuting Creationism - How Modern Humans Benefitted from Meeting Denisovans

AI-generated Image (Chat GPT 5.5 Thinking)

Image provided by Tucci Lab

Genomes from Oceania offer new clues to human evolution | Yale News

A paper recently published by a Yale University-led team in the journal Science shows how Denisovan genes in the people of Near Oceania have contributed especially to their immune systems, and so have continued to influence human evolution for tens of thousands of years.

Who would be a creationist? It must be galling to wait so eagerly for that great day when biologists finally announce the collapse of evolutionary theory and admit that a better explanation of the observable evidence is one involving unevidenced magic entities doing conjuring tricks with chemistry and physics. That would make biology the first science to abandon natural explanations, ignore Occam’s Razor, and adopt magic as a basic principle. Sadly for creationists, that long-promised day shows no sign of arriving, despite having been predicted any day now for more than half a century.

But then, what would creationism be without a dogged refusal to change its mind when the evidence demands it, and the childish belief that the evidence itself must be part of some vast conspiracy to test the strength of faith? That is not science; it is apologetics dressed up in a lab coat.

The problem, as always, is that reality refuses to conform. The universe continues to produce evidence contradicting creationism and confirming the complex evolution of humans over deep time: migration, isolation, adaptation, bottlenecks, and repeated remixing with genes from other archaic human lineages, themselves the products of long evolutionary histories.

The real-world evidence written into our genomes is that most non-African human populations carry remnants of Neanderthal DNA, while Denisovan ancestry is especially marked in Near Oceanians and in some Asian populations. There is also evidence that Neanderthals and Denisovans themselves met and interbred in central Asia. Human evolution was not a simple ladder, still less a single act of special creation, but a branching, merging, reticulated history of populations moving, separating, adapting and sometimes meeting again.

Some of these archaic genes appear to have mattered because they were useful. In particular, they are often associated with immune responses to pathogenic bacteria and viruses. This makes evolutionary sense: Denisovan-like populations had already adapted to environments outside Africa, including their local burden of pathogens. When the ancestors of present-day Near Oceanians inherited some of that genetic variation through introgression, beneficial variants could be retained by natural selection, even while many other archaic variants were gradually lost.

The Yale-led team filled an important gap in our understanding of human evolution by sequencing the genomes of 177 individuals from 12 distinct populations in different parts of Near Oceania — the southwestern Pacific region that includes Papua New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands — and analysing them alongside 1,284 previously published genomes from individuals worldwide.

They found evidence that the ancestors of Near Oceanian populations interbred with at least three distinct Denisovan-like groups. They also identified thousands of archaic variants that affect how genes are switched on or off, with a notable concentration in immune and antiviral pathways. In other words, Denisovan DNA is not merely a fossil remnant in the genome; in some populations, it is still helping to shape biology today.

Refuting Creationism - A Vast Global Fungal Plant-Support System - Unintelligently 'Designed' Over 480 Million Years [Updated]

Mycorrhizal fungi under the microscope at AMOLF biophysics institute in Amsterdam. The circular structures are spores. Color is altered for legibility.

Credit: Tomás Munita

New global research maps underground fungal infrastructure for the first time - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

An international team of researchers, led by ecologist Justin Stewart of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, has announced the creation of the first global map of the vast underground infrastructure formed by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. The team has published its findings in Science.

These are not fungi in the familiar sense of mushrooms, but microscopic, thread-like filaments, or hyphae, which form intimate partnerships with plant roots. The figures involved are astonishing. The researchers estimate that the upper layer of the world’s soils contains about 110 quadrillion kilometres of these fungal filaments — enough to stretch from Earth to the sun nearly three-quarters of a billion times, or there and back about 368 million times. The networks also transport roughly 4 billion tonnes of CO₂-equivalent into soils each year, about 11% of annual human-caused CO₂ emissions.

This is not a new evolutionary phenomenon. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are part of an ancient plant-fungal symbiosis that appears to date back roughly 475–480 million years, close to the origin of the first land plants. That does not mean, of course, that the individual fungal filaments mapped today are hundreds of millions of years old, but that this type of mutualistic relationship has been evolving since the early colonisation of land by plants.

One sure way to tell that biological systems are not intelligently designed is not simply that they are complex, but that they are historically contingent. They carry the marks of accumulated compromises, improvised workarounds and layered dependencies. Evolution can only modify what already exists; it cannot scrap an imperfect arrangement and begin again with a clean sheet. Its only test is whether a change works well enough, in a particular environment, to leave more descendants than the alternatives.

None of these constraints would apply to an intelligent designer, still less to the omnipotent, omniscient, perfect designer imagined — though rarely named explicitly — by creationists trying to disguise fundamentalist creationism as science. A designed global life-support system would not be expected to emerge through countless local bargains between plants and fungi, mediated by nutrient stress, carbon demand, soil chemistry, competition, disturbance and natural selection.

So we can be as sure as it is possible to be that this vast, intricate and globally important biological infrastructure was not intelligently designed. It evolved because both partners gained from the exchange: plants provided carbon fixed by photosynthesis; fungi extended the reach of plant roots, supplying water and mineral nutrients, especially phosphorus and nitrogen. Over deep time, those local mutual advantages became part of the living fabric of terrestrial ecosystems.

The paper in Science is accompanied by a news release from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, which includes a link to an interactive map of this global fungal infrastructure.

Unintelligent Design - Evolution By Viral Infection

Pomacea canaliculata egg clusters above the water line.

Apple Snail, Pomacea canaliculata

By KENPEI, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Lingnan University joint research analyses genome of global agricultural pest ‘apple snail’: Ancient viral gene-driven evolution of ‘terrestrial oviposition’ ability - Press Release | Lingnan University

A paper recently published in the journal Advanced Science, by researchers including Assistant Professor Jack Chi-Ho Ip, from Lingnan University, Hong Kong, is deeply problematic for creationists, not only because it describes a process that took place over an immense period of time incompatible with the biblical narrative, but also because it deals with a mechanism for evolution that cannot be waved aside as mere "variation within a kind", or something creationists like to dismiss as "micro-evolution".

Creationists continue to insist that large-scale evolution does not happen, so everything must have been specially created more or less as it is, with only limited variation within the "kind" — a term always left conspicuously undefined, so the goalposts can be moved whenever the evidence becomes inconvenient. This is despite the well-attested mechanisms by which biodiversity arises, including classical Darwinian natural selection acting on inherited variation, and genetic drift, in which chance changes in allele frequencies can lead to a neutral mutation becoming fixed in, or eliminated from, a population gene pool.

There is also the founder effect, where a non-representative sample of a population becomes isolated from the parent population, usually by a physical or ecological barrier. The new population therefore begins with a different allele-frequency profile from the population from which it came. Then there is hybridisation, where hybrid offspring can, in some circumstances, become reproductively isolated from both parent species, forming a new genetically distinct population or species.

And lastly, we have horizontal gene transfer, where an organism acquires genetic material from another biological lineage in its environment. This is especially familiar in bacteria, but it also occurs in animals, often through viruses. Retroviruses are particularly important in this respect because they insert a DNA copy of their genome into that of their host. Over time, the viral sequence may be disabled by mutation, or the host may evolve a defence against it. Either way, the remnant of the virus can become part of the host genome, where it is free to mutate over time. Occasionally, such inherited viral DNA is exapted for a new function, creating useful new genetic information without the slightest need for supernatural assistance. One well-known example is syncytin, derived from ancient retroviral genes, now involved in the formation and function of the mammalian placenta.

Now researchers at Hong Kong's Lingnan University and their collaborators have shown that a viral-derived gene in apple snails is probably involved in their ability to lay eggs out of water — a key adaptation in the evolution of aerial egg-laying and one reason some apple snails have become such successful invasive pests. The gene, associated with the perivitelline fluid surrounding the developing embryo, was probably acquired by the ancestor of the Ampullariidae during the Jurassic. It would be interesting to see a creationist explain how acquiring a gene from an entirely unrelated viral lineage can be described as "variation within a kind". It would also be interesting to see them explain why an intelligent designer would need to borrow viral genetic material to equip a snail to lay eggs above the waterline.

Refuting Creationism - Evolving Millipedes Crawl All Over Creationism

Hirudicryptus canariensis

Photo by Rafael Garcia and Paul Marek, Virginia Tech

Hirudicryptus canariensis (left) Siphoniulus neotropicus (microscopic image at right) are the two rare millipedes whose DNA helped researchers complete the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders.

Photos by Rafael Garcia and Paul Marek for Virginia Tech.

Ancient millipedes still had secrets to tell | EurekAlert!

A paper published today (12 June 2026) in Current Biology is almost guaranteed to upset any creationists with the courage to read it and the ability to understand it. Written by an international team led by Associate Professor Paul Marek and Dr Luisa F. Vasquez-Valverde of Virginia Tech, it reports the completion of the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders, including two rare groups whose DNA had never previously been included in a phylogenetic analysis.

Millipedes were amongst the earliest animals to colonise the land, arriving long before vertebrates had made the transition from water to land. According to the researchers, they beat vertebrates onto land by more than 80 million years. As detritivores, they helped to establish early terrestrial ecosystems by breaking down decaying organic matter and recycling nutrients, gradually helping to create soils in which later plant communities could develop.

For more than a century, biologists have known that two rare groups of millipedes — Siphoniulida and Siphonocryptida — existed, but without fresh specimens it was impossible to analyse their DNA and confirm where they belonged in the millipede family tree. One of the groups includes species barely a centimetre long that spend their entire lives underground; the other is known from only a few locations.

Members of the team therefore travelled to Los Tuxtlas, Mexico, and the Spanish Canary Islands to collect Siphoniulus neotropicus and Hirudicryptus canariensis, the two millipedes whose DNA had not previously been included in an evolutionary analysis. By sequencing DNA from these groups, comparing hundreds of genes across 82 millipede species, and combining those results with evidence from 29 fossils, the researchers were able to determine where the groups fit into millipede history and when their lineages emerged.

The result was especially interesting because one of the supposed “orders”, Siphonocryptida, appears not to be a separate order after all, but part of an existing lineage. The other, Siphoniulida, could finally be placed among its closest relatives on the millipede evolutionary timeline. The analysis also pushed the likely origin of millipedes back to nearly 460 million years ago — roughly 35 million years earlier than the oldest known millipede fossils.

This is bad news for creationists for at least three reasons:

• It shows these arthropods had their origin hundreds of millions of years before their mythical “Creation Week”.
• It shows a long history of descent from a common origin, just as the Theory of Evolution predicts.
• It shows the researchers were entirely dependent on evolutionary theory to frame the question, predict relationships, interpret the DNA and fossil evidence, and explain the results — with no hint that they found evolution inadequate and no need to invoke magic, special creation, or the long-promised “collapse of Darwinism” that creationists have been assuring their followers is imminent, and has been for more than half a century.

Refuting Creationism - No Sex Please, We're Ediacaran

A lack of sex held back life’s diversity for millions of years | University of Cambridge

Try debating with a creationist on social media and before long you will be challenged to explain how sexual reproduction evolved, because there must have been a first male and a first female. A regular form of this, betraying the abysmal ignorance of the creationist, is the childish attempt at a "Gotcha!" with, "How long did the first man have to wait for the first woman to evolve?"

Like so many creationist preconceptions about what evolution is and what evolutionary biologists claim, this assumes that each species somehow evolves without ancestry, so everything about it must have arisen spontaneously in a single individual or, in this case, in a single couple. There is no awareness of inheritance from common ancestors, nor of the slow accumulation and honing of traits over time. Presumably, the questioner thinks adult men and women being magicked into existence without parents is a perfectly rational belief.

In reality, sexual reproduction did not begin with men and women. A form of sex almost certainly arose long before animals, among single-celled eukaryotes, and need not have involved anything recognisable as male and female. At its simplest, sex is the mixing of genetic material from different individuals. The interesting question, from the point of view of evolutionary biology, is not where the first man and first woman came from, but what advantage genetic mixing had over cloning or other asexual forms of reproduction, such that it became the predominant, although far from exclusive, method of reproduction among complex organisms.

Now two researchers from the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, UK, believe they have part of the answer, and have just published their findings in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The paper, by Dr Emily G. Mitchell and Professor Andrea Manica, examines how reproductive mode affected competition, dispersal and diversity among Ediacaran animal communities. It is accompanied by a research news item from the University of Cambridge.

The Ediacaran Period, roughly 635-539 million years ago, saw some of the earliest known large animals. Many of them would look nothing like any modern animal: they were sessile, lacked mouths and obvious digestive systems, and probably absorbed nutrients directly from the surrounding seawater. In the relatively benign conditions of the Ediacaran oceans, with limited predation and reduced competition, there was less pressure for rapid diversification. As a result, these early animal communities appear to have changed only slowly for millions of years before the later burst of diversity that preceded and fed into the Cambrian radiation.

But, as they began to colonise the shallower seas and coastal regions, the Ediacaran biota would have encountered increasingly unstable conditions with tides, storms and fluctuating temperatures and nutrient levels, so there would have been competition and selection pressure to adapt to these more hostile conditions. And this is what we see in the fossil record as the Ediacaran biota produced a second wave of more diverse forms, leading eventually to the 'Cambrian Explosion'.

Previous work has shown that some of these Ediacaran organisms reproduced asexually by sending out stolons or runners, rather like strawberry plants do today. Their offspring were clones, physically connected to the parent colony and genetically very similar. That can work well in a stable environment, but it has a serious evolutionary limitation: it restricts the mixing of genes from different lineages. Beneficial mutations that arise in separate clonal lines cannot easily be combined in the same genome, so lineages compete with one another instead of pooling their evolutionary gains.

Sexual reproduction changes that. It does not create evolution by magic; it provides natural selection with more combinations on which to act. Beneficial alleles that arise in different lineages can be brought together in the same genome instead of being trapped in competing clonal lines. This is the Fisher-Muller advantage of recombination: sex can turn evolutionary change from a slow serial process into a more rapid parallel one.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Hagfish By LOSS of Eye Complexity

Feeding hagfish

Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Refuting Creationism - Yet Another Gap Is Closing - No God Found

Illustration of the Qreiya 3 fauna.

Image credit: Ian Baylatry.

Fossil discovery fills in missing information about modern fish evolution | Michigan News

Complete skeleton of the oldest jack fish, part of the group that includes modern jacks and trevallies.

A close-up of sharp teeth in an early relative of modern tunas.

Images credit: Professor Hesham Sallam, Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center

There are only two things in the universe faster than light: monarchy and gods. When a monarch dies, the monarchy passes instantaneously to the sovereign’s heir, regardless of where either of them happens to be at the time; and when science shines a light into one of the gaps in which creationists have been hiding their god, the god has already departed. That, presumably, is why no god has ever been detected by science.

Creationist dependence on these god-shaped gaps has produced an ever-shrinking god as science fills one gap after another with evidence. The fallacy depends on the gamble that, unlike every previous gap closed by science, this one will turn out to require a supernatural creation event. It never does, of course, but that never seems to diminish creationist confidence that the next gap will be different.

True to form, science has now closed yet another gap with evidence, not magic. It is one few creationists are likely to know about, and fewer still would be willing to acknowledge, because it concerns a gap in the fossil record between the K–Pg mass extinction, which eliminated the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago, and about 56 million years ago. In other words, it is a 10-million-year interval in the very long pre-‘Creation Week’ history of life on Earth — a history no self-respecting creationist can honestly admit exists without conceding that the Bible’s creation myth is not real history. Specifically, it is a gap in the fossil record of fish evolution, from the devastation at the K–Pg boundary to the later appearance of many species that look markedly different from those that preceded it.

That gap, known to palaeontologists as “Patterson’s Gap”, has now been partly filled by the discovery of the earliest known examples of six modern fish groups by a research team led by Sanaa El-Sayed, a University of Michigan doctoral student and researcher at the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center. The fossils were found in the Qreiya 3 Lagerstätte, dated to 62.2 million years ago, in Egypt’s Eastern Desert. The discovery has just been reported in Science Advances.

Refuting Creationism - Wild Cattle Roamed The Grasslands Of Europe - 4 million Years Before Creation Week

Half-ton early Bovines roamed 4-million-year-old grasslands in Europe | EurekAlert!

Palaeoartistic reconstruction of the environment in the surrounding of Camp dels Ninots maar lake during the early Pliocene.

Artwork by Mauricio Antón.

Nowhere in the Bible will you find any mention of wild cattle roaming the land, nor any indication that domestic animals are highly modified descendants of wild species, reshaped by human selection because their wild ancestors were not conveniently suited to human use. Instead, we find the childish claim that all animals were created for the exclusive benefit of humankind — which raises the obvious question: did the creator not know what humans would later need, or did it simply get things wrong, leaving humans to correct the design by selective breeding?

This is easily explained once we recognise that the authors of Genesis had a narrow, parochial view of the world. They knew little or nothing of Earth’s history or of the origins of life on it, so they made up stories that conformed to their own cultural assumptions and superstitions, often borrowing from neighbouring cultures.

They were completely unaware of the rest of Eurasia beyond their limited view from the Canaanite hills, and equally unaware of the great age of the Earth or the cycles of glacial and interglacial periods that had characterised it for the previous several million years. Indeed, the concept of such deep time seems to have been far beyond their comprehension. They could therefore have had no concept of the early forms of cattle-like bovines that once roamed Europe, already fitted by evolution for life in the changing environments of the Pliocene.

One such animal was a large bovine species, weighing up to about half a ton, which lived in what is now north-eastern Iberia about 4.41 million years ago. The discovery and re-analysis of this animal has just been published in PLOS One by Leonardo Sorbelli of the Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Germany, and colleagues.

The fossils, from the Camp dels Ninots site in Catalonia, include remains from at least 14 individuals, among them eight nearly complete and partly articulated skeletons. The species, Parabos tigneresi, helps fill a gap in the evolutionary history of Eurasian bovines, including the wider lineage that eventually gave rise to modern cattle, bison and buffalo. Although smaller than many living domestic cattle, these animals were larger than comparable bovids of their time, suggesting an early stage in the increase in body size that later became characteristic of the bovine lineage.

The researchers suggest that this increase in size may have been associated with the climatic and environmental changes that characterised Pliocene Europe. The anatomy of Parabos tigneresi also indicates an animal adapted mainly to humid, vegetation-rich environments, consistent with the reconstructed setting of Camp dels Ninots as a water-rich maar lake ecosystem.

This incidental confirmation of an earlier reconstruction of the lake ecosystem at Camp dels Ninots is a good example of how independent strands of evidence converge on the same conclusion. It also illustrates the strength of Darwinian evolutionary theory: organisms are expected to show adaptations to the environments in which they lived, rather than appearing as arbitrary, ready-made forms. In this case, the anatomy of these bovids is consistent with animals adapted to a humid, vegetation-rich lakeside habitat, exactly as the geological and palaeoecological evidence had already indicated.

Creationism Refuted - The Theory of Evolution May Be Slightly Wrong - But It's No Comfort To Creationists

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Microscopic fungi, baker’s or brewer’s yeast, are used as probiotics to restore normal flora of intestine.

Image credit: Adobe Stock

A new theory of molecular evolution | University of Michigan News

A paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution last november (2025) by four evolutionary biologists from the University of Michigan might have caused a stir of excitement in creationists cirles if any of them ever read a science paper because it appears on first sight to question the basis of the Theory of Evolution - what creationists call 'Dawinism'. However, that excitement would have been short-lived if they had read the details.

This is not the long-awaited collapse of the Theory of Evolution that creationists have been confidently predicting since at least the middle of the last century. It is nothing of the sort. It is a normal example of science doing what science does: testing a model against evidence, finding that the model is incomplete, and adjusting the explanation accordingly.

The theory being challenged here is not evolution itself, nor common descent, nor natural selection, nor mutation, nor population genetics. It is the neutral theory of molecular evolution, a theory developed in the 1960s to explain why many genetic changes appear to spread through populations without obvious adaptive advantage. The new paper argues that this appearance of neutrality may be misleading. What looks neutral in the long term may, in fact, be the result of short-term adaptation to changing environments.

The researchers found that beneficial mutations are more common than the classic neutral theory assumes. The problem, then, is why these apparently useful mutations do not become fixed at the rate one might expect. Their answer is beautifully evolutionary: environments change. A mutation that helps in one set of conditions may be useless, or even harmful, in another. So populations are not marching steadily towards some perfect design; they are continually tracking a moving target.

That is what the authors mean by adaptive tracking with antagonistic pleiotropy. “Pleiotropy” means that one mutation can have more than one effect. “Antagonistic” means that those effects can pull in opposite directions: helpful here, harmful there; useful now, costly later. This is not magic. It is not supernatural intervention. It is the ordinary interaction between genes, organisms and environments.

Creationists often pretend that science is an orthodoxy in which biologists merely defend Darwin at all costs. This paper shows the opposite. Scientists have examined one of their own long-standing theories, compared it with new evidence, and proposed a better explanation. No sacred text was protected. No dogma was shielded from scrutiny. No conclusion was declared immune from revision.

The result is not less evolution, but more evolutionary detail. Mutation still supplies variation. Selection still acts on differences in reproductive success. Genetic drift still matters. Environments still shape which variants succeed and which fail. What has changed is the understanding of how molecular change can appear neutral over deep time while still being shaped by episodes of adaptation in shifting environments.

So, far from helping creationism, this paper undercuts one of creationism’s favourite caricatures of science. It shows evolutionary biology as a living, self-correcting science, not a rigid ideology. It also shows why no supernatural designer is needed. The process described is entirely natural: mutations arise, their effects depend on circumstances, environments change, and populations respond as best they can, without foresight, plan or purpose.

Refuting Creationism - Another Bizarre Dinosaur - From 70 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A reconstruction of Kank australis

Gabriel Díaz Yantén

A reconstruction of Kank australis

Gabriel Díaz Yantén.

Heron-like, fish-eating dinosaur from 70 million years ago discovered in Argentina - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

In my previous post, I wrote about Labrujasuchus expectatus, a bizarre distant relative of the crocodile line which walked on two legs, had tiny arms, and possessed a toothless mouth tipped with a beak. Although not a dinosaur, it looked superficially dinosaur-like — a neat example of convergent evolution. Because earlier and later shuvosaurids were already known from the region, palaeontologists predicted that a form occupying the gap between them should exist, and Labrujasuchus duly turned up in the right place and in the right rock formation.

That is how science works: evidence fits into a testable, predictive framework. Creationism, by contrast, has nothing to offer except hand-waving, misrepresentation and denial when confronted with a bizarre extinct archosaur from some 212 million years ago, just as it has nothing to offer in explanation of this almost equally bizarre dinosaur from about 70 million years ago.

The new species, Kank australis, is described by palaeontologist Dr Matías J. Motta, of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires (Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales “Bernardino Rivadavia”), and his colleagues in a paper published on 28 May 2026 in the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Kank australis was a paravian theropod — an unenlagiid, belonging to a group of small- to medium-sized raptor-like dinosaurs known from Late Cretaceous Gondwanan deposits. Its discoverers suggest that it may have lived rather like a large heron. Its long jaws, armed with teeth, suggest a fish-eating habit, while its cervical vertebrae show structures associated with muscle attachment and the protection of neck blood vessels, features comparable with those seen in modern birds that rely on rapid, precise neck movements. In other words, this was probably not the familiar pop-culture image of a raptor as a fast-running terrestrial predator, but a specialised animal exploiting the riverine and wetland ecosystems of southern Patagonia.

And, as so often with new fossil discoveries, Kank australis fills in yet another of those gaps so beloved of creationists looking for somewhere to hide their ever-shrinking little god. In this case, it helps bridge a distributional gap in the Late Cretaceous record of southern Patagonia, connecting better-known unenlagiid records from northern Patagonia with those from Antarctica, and adding more detail to the still-patchy evolutionary history of these South American paravian dinosaurs.

Refuting Creationism - Bizarre Creature From The Long History of Earth Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Labrujasuchus expectatus

Art by Jorge Gonzalez
© NHMLAC Dinosaur Institute.

Reconstruction of Labrujasuchus expectatus, a new species of Shuvosauridae from Late Triassic rocks of Ghost Ranch, New Mexico

Art by Jorge Gonzalez, © NHMLAC Dinosaur Institute.

New Species of Bizarre, Bipedal, Toothless Crocodile Relative from the Triassic Discovered | Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County

Evolution, proceeding without a plan and lacking any sense of direction, can produce some truly bizarre creatures which, despite their appearance, survived perfectly well in the environments in which they evolved. Indeed, it would be bizarre to suppose otherwise, given that natural selection favours those forms that work well enough to survive and reproduce over those less well fitted to do so. To suppose otherwise would rival creationism for irrationality.

In this post, I’ll deal with a bizarre distant relative of the crocodiles; in the next, I’ll write about a strange theropod dinosaur from 70 million years ago that comes close to what any creationist might imagine a transitional species between dinosaurs and birds should look like.

Creationism is, of course, itself the product of an evolutionary process, forced into ever more bizarre forms by the hostile environment of scientific evidence. Modern creationism has therefore, by a similar process, become almost as bizarre as the life forms it is forced to deny in order to survive.

The sad thing is that creationists are denied the wonder of the truth about our planet as revealed in increasingly astonishing detail by science, because the facts must be waved aside and denied in order to cling to the childishly simplistic belief in magic and a world full of evil conspirators diligently working to trick them into changing their minds.

Who, for example, could have predicted that a distant relative of the crocodiles walked on two legs, had tiny arms, and had a toothless mouth tipped with a beak? It is almost as bizarre as the mental gymnastics creationists need to perform to dismiss it and force-fit the evidence into the predetermined conclusion that it must have been magically created within the last few thousand years and then allowed to go extinct for no apparent purpose — or that the evidence must either have been forged, misinterpreted or planted to test or deceive us.

Nevertheless, this creature, Labrujasuchus expectatus, did exist about 212 million years ago, in the Late Triassic, and its description is the subject of a recent paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Its fossilised remains were unearthed in Late Triassic rocks at the Hayden Quarry, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, USA, by a team of palaeontologists led by Dr Alan H. Turner of Stony Brook University, New York, USA, with colleagues including Dr Nathan D. Smith of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, California, USA.

To add insult to injury for creationists, this find fills one of those beloved gaps into which creationists try to force fit their creator god. The gap was that between two earlier discovered shuvosaurs from the region. It's discovery was thus a predicted by the Theory of Evolution, not by a book of Bronze Age mythology.

Creationism Refuted - Evolution of Gigantism in British Island Wrens

A St Kilda Wren, Troglodytes troglodytes hirtensis

Photo: Craig Nisbet

A Shetland Wren, Troglodytes troglodytes zetlandicus, Kergord, Mainland, Shetland

Photo credit: Dr Michał Jezierski

New research helps scientists unlock evolution of gigantism in Scottish island wrens - University of Birmingham

Creationists will continually demand evidence for evolution being observed, then, when the evidence is provided, immediately insist that science should adopt their childish parody of evolution, in which one species turns into an unrelated species in a single miraculous event. That is not evolution as any biologist understands it. In fact, if such a thing were ever observed, it would falsify the Theory of Evolution, not confirm it.

By demanding evidence for something no scientist has ever claimed happens, creationists imagine they are somehow refuting science, or at least providing a plausible anti-Darwin argument for people who do not understand the science.

So this example of evolution in living populations will almost inevitably be dismissed by creationists using that same disingenuous tactic. It is evidence for the evolution of island gigantism in isolated populations of the wren, Troglodytes troglodytes, on Scottish islands. And, to rub salt in creationists' wounds, it is not merely a single isolated example, but multiple examples of gigantism evolving in island environments — an example of parallel evolution in response to similar environmental pressures acting on different local populations.

In other words, this is not some local curiosity that can be waved away as a one-off oddity, but the predictable result of isolation, restricted gene flow and similar island conditions acting on related populations. The evidence has just been published, open access, in the Evolutionary Journal of the Linnean Society by researchers led by the University of Birmingham.

The researchers, led by Dr Michał Jezierski, examined four subspecies of island wren, each isolated on a specific Scottish island or archipelago — Shetland, Fair Isle, the Outer Hebrides and St Kilda. Each of these subspecies is geographically isolated, yet exposed to broadly similar island environments, and each differs significantly from the wrens found throughout mainland Britain and continental Europe.

The study showed that the wrens of St Kilda and Shetland show little evidence of interbreeding with the mainland population. These two populations have evolved spectacular island gigantism: a wren from England will typically weigh about 7–10 grams, while a St Kilda wren weighs about 13–16 grams. The largest St Kilda wrens are therefore more than twice the weight of the smallest mainland wrens, and their genetic distinctiveness is so marked that the researchers say they may be on the way to becoming separate species.

Importantly, the genomic evidence shows that the Shetland and St Kilda wrens are genetically distinct from each other, despite having evolved similar enlarged body sizes. In other words, the same broad evolutionary outcome has arisen independently in separate island populations, rather than being inherited from a single already-giant ancestor. That is exactly what evolutionary biology predicts: related populations, isolated in similar environments, can be shaped in similar directions by similar selection pressures, even when the detailed genetic route differs.

Malevolent Design - How Honey Bees And A Parasitic Fungus Have Teamed Up

“Invasional Mutualism” Between Honey Bees and Myrtle Rust Pathogen | Blog

Figure 1.
Foraging of urediniospores by bees on plants infected with myrtle rust. a. Honey bee forager collecting Austropuccinia psidii urediniospores from leaves of broadleaf paperbark [Melaleuca quinquenervia (Myrtales, Myrtaceae)], Bungawalbin, New South Wales, Australia; b. A. psidii urediniospores in the opening of a Geraldton wax [Chamelaucium uncinatum (Myrtales, Myrtaceae)] flower bud in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

Photographs by Geoff Pegg.

A paper published in March 2026 in NeoBiota is entirely unsurprising to an evolutionary biologist, but deeply awkward for anyone trying to present nature as the intelligent design of an omnibenevolent creator. It reports what appears to be a mutually beneficial relationship between the introduced Western honey bee, Apis mellifera, and the invasive fungal plant pathogen myrtle rust, Austropuccinia psidii. It is a neat example of how evolution has no foresight, no moral purpose and no long-term plan. Symbiotic alliances can arise naturally between different species when there is an immediate benefit to both, even when the longer-term consequences for one or both partners — and for the wider ecosystem — may be destructive.

Myrtle rust, Austropuccinia psidii, is an invasive rust fungus in Australia. It infects more than 500 species in the Myrtaceae family, which includes many of Australia’s culturally, ecologically and economically important native plants, including eucalypts, paperbarks and related species. In Australia, the pathogen is regarded as a serious threat to native ecosystems, with around 17% of endemic vegetation considered at risk. The other partner in this apparent mutualism is also an introduced species: the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera.

The basis of this relationship is an exquisite example of the sort of functional complexity creationists routinely try to claim as evidence for intelligent design. That, of course, raises the obvious question: why would an omnibenevolent designer design a fungal pathogen capable of damaging so much of Australia’s native vegetation, and then provide it with a convenient pollinator-assisted dispersal system?

The mechanism is ingenious, but only in the blind, short-term sense in which natural selection can be ingenious. The bright yellow urediniospores of myrtle rust are collected by honey bees much as pollen is collected. The bees pack the spores into their pollen baskets and carry them back to the hive. For the fungus, this provides a potential route for dispersal beyond simple wind movement. For the bees, the spores are not just inert particles accidentally mistaken for pollen; they have real nutritional value. The researchers found that myrtle rust spores contained more than 22% protein and all ten amino acids regarded as essential for honey bee nutrition, making them comparable with high-quality pollen.

Laboratory feeding trials also showed that honey bee larvae could develop normally on a diet based on myrtle rust spores, with survival, development time and body weight similar to larvae reared on a high-quality pollen diet. Even more concerning from a biosecurity point of view, the spores remained viable inside honey bee colonies for at least nine days, meaning that hives could potentially act as reservoirs and transport systems for the pathogen.

So, the fungus gains a mobile vector, while the bees gain an alternative protein source. But what benefits both in the short term could be damaging in the longer term. As myrtle rust damages Myrtaceae-rich habitats, it can reduce the availability of flowers and pollen. That, in turn, could encourage honey bees to rely more heavily on fungal spores or other alternative foods, while the fungus benefits from the continued movement of bees and managed hives. The result could be a damaging ecological feedback loop, with plant-pollinator networks and forest regeneration placed under increasing pressure.

This is precisely the kind of outcome that any omniscient, intelligent designer should have foreseen and avoided. It is also precisely the kind of outcome that a mindless evolutionary process can produce without difficulty. Natural selection rewards immediate reproductive or nutritional advantage; it does not plan for ecological stability, protect biodiversity, or ensure that mutually beneficial relationships remain harmless in the long term.

Refuting Creationism - How Our Blood Cells Have Evolved From Our Single-Celled Ancestor from 700 Million Years Ago

The origin of blood cells can be traced back approximately 700 million years to when human ancestors were single-celled organisms. When these ancestors evolved into multicellular organisms (animals), macrophages emerged as the first blood cells. Over the course of subsequent evolution, various blood cells, such as mast cells, diversified.

KyotoU / Yosuke Nagahata

The 700-million-year history of our blood cells | EurekAlert!

In a stunning, albeit unwitting, rebuttal of creationist claims, a team of researchers at Kyoto University is due to publish, on 29 May 2026, the results of their investigation into the evolutionary history of animal blood cells in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The paper, entitled "Animals have expanded the evolutionary legacy of unicellular ancestors in blood cells", is unlikely to please those creationists who keep assuring their dupes that biomedical scientists are about to abandon 'Darwinism' and adopt creationism instead.

It will also disappoint those who insist there is no evidence for the evolution of complex multicellular organisms from single-celled ancestors — what they like to caricature as the 'microbes-to-man hypothesis', as though humans, preferably modern Americans, were the preordained end-point of the entire history of life. That, of course, is creationist teleology masquerading as biology: the assumption that evolution must have been aiming at us because Bronze Age religion says humans are the central purpose of creation.

What the Kyoto University team found was not a sudden, magical appearance of blood cells, but a deep evolutionary continuity. They developed a new method for comparing gene-expression profiles across different animal cell lineages and species, and included unicellular organisms in the comparison in order to trace the possible origin of blood cells back to our single-celled animal ancestors.

Among human blood-cell lineages, macrophages showed the closest resemblance to unicellular organisms. This is hardly surprising, since macrophages still behave in a remarkably cell-autonomous way: they move through tissues, detect targets, engulf bacteria, clear dead cells and remove unwanted material — behaviour strongly reminiscent of free-living phagocytic cells.

The team then traced the gene FOS, commonly expressed in blood cells across animal species, back to a single-celled ancestor that lived about 700 million years ago, around the time when the first animals were evolving. The implication is that the earliest animal blood cells did not appear from nowhere. They arose when early multicellular animals repurposed genetic programmes inherited from their unicellular predecessors.

From there, the researchers were able to reconstruct a family tree of blood-cell lineages spanning roughly 700 million years. Their analysis suggests that early blood cells were macrophage-like, that mast cells later branched from that macrophage lineage, and that prototypic T cells and red blood cells subsequently branched from mast cells. Prototypic B cells, meanwhile, appear to have branched from the macrophage lineage after mast cells had already diverged.

In other words, the blood and immune cells circulating in our bodies today are not isolated, specially-created structures with no history. They are modified descendants of ancient cellular systems, inherited, repurposed and diversified during the evolution of animals from unicellular ancestors.

So, far from supporting the creationist claim that there is no evidence for the evolution of complex life from single-celled ancestors, the evidence is literally circulating in our blood. It is also circulating in the blood and immune systems of other animals, carrying with it a molecular and cellular legacy hundreds of millions of years older than the creation myths of the Bronze Age.

And, as usual, the Theory of Evolution provides the only coherent explanation for the observable facts. The research does not point to separate acts of creation, nor to a sudden magical appearance of blood cells fully formed and without ancestry. It shows descent with modification, inherited genetic programmes, divergence of cell lineages, and the repurposing of ancient biological mechanisms — exactly the pattern evolutionary theory predicts, and exactly the pattern creationism cannot explain without special pleading.

Refuting Creationism - The Fossil Record Confirms Evolution - And Falsifies Creationism

Reconstruction of a hypothetical deep-water paleocommunity from the new fossil site in Canada’s Northwest Territories, based on fossils recovered by the researchers.

Alex Boersma

Fossil Trove Expands Range of Squishy Early Animals - American Museum of Natural History

A paper published on 20 May 2026 in Science Advances by a team of palaeontologists led by Scott D. Evans of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, very neatly illustrates the difference between evolutionary biology and creationism. It reports the discovery of a rich new Ediacaran fossil site in the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada’s Northwest Territories, containing fossils that appear earlier in the record, and in deeper-water settings, than current models of the Ediacaran biota had led palaeontologists to expect.

That is not a problem for evolution; it is how science progresses. Unexpected evidence does not destroy a scientific theory merely because it requires a refinement of detail. In this case, the discovery extends the known geographical, ecological and chronological range of part of the Ediacaran biota — the strange, mostly soft-bodied organisms that preceded, and helped set the stage for, the later Cambrian diversification of animal life.

When asked what would falsify the theory of evolution, the evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane is said to have replied, “a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian”. He was making the simple point that evolutionary theory predicts a broad historical sequence: mammals should not appear before vertebrates, vertebrates should not appear before animals, and rabbits should not appear hundreds of millions of years before their ancestors. A genuine rabbit in Precambrian rocks would be an anachronism so extreme that it would call the whole historical framework into question.

But that is not what palaeontologists have found here. The newly reported fossils are not out of sequence; they are exactly the kind of organisms that belong in late Precambrian rocks. The surprise is not that they are in the wrong part of life’s history, but that some of them appear a little earlier, in a wider geographical range, and in somewhat different environments than previously recognised. In other words, the anomaly is chronological and ecological, not evolutionary.

To a creationist, of course, the question of falsification has to be avoided, because the honest answer is deeply uncomfortable. The fossil record as a whole does not show a sudden magical creation of all living things a few thousand years ago. It shows succession: organisms appearing, diversifying, changing and disappearing through vast spans of geological time. The dating of the rocks, using multiple independent geological and radiometric methods, consistently points to an ancient Earth and a long history of life, not to a recent creation week followed by a global flood.

That is why every such discovery is awkward for creationism but routine for science. Fossils are not distributed randomly, as they would be if all life had been created at once and then jumbled together in a recent catastrophe. They occur in a recognisable sequence, constrained by stratigraphy, radiometric dating, comparative anatomy, developmental biology and, for later organisms, genetics. The details are continually revised, but the broad pattern remains overwhelmingly consistent with evolution and wholly inconsistent with Biblical literalism.

By any honest application of the scientific method, that should be enough to falsify the creationist narrative beyond reasonable doubt. That it does not do so for creationists is not because the evidence is weak, but because the conclusion is protected from evidence. When the conclusion is sacred, facts become things to be explained away, misrepresented or ignored.

For evolutionary biologists, however, an unexpected fossil is not an embarrassment to be dismissed, but a clue to be investigated. If the evidence shows that part of the White Sea assemblage was present in Laurentia earlier than previously recognised, and in deeper-water environments, then the scientific response is to refine the model. The theory is not weakened by that process; it is strengthened, because it can absorb new evidence, generate better questions and produce a more accurate account of what happened.

The fossils described in this paper include more than 100 specimens, with several groups not previously recorded from North America, including Dickinsonia, Funisia, Kimberella and Eoandromeda. Some are estimated to be about 567 million years old, overlapping with the older Avalon assemblage and extending the known range of the White Sea assemblage by around 5–10 million years. The researchers also found that these organisms lived in deeper-water settings than had previously been recognised for this assemblage, supporting the idea that some early animal innovations may have begun offshore before spreading into shallower environments.

How Creationists Lie To Us - Ken Ham Shows Us His Cult Is For Fools Who Believe Lies

Tiny fossils found in 1.7 billion-year-old mud yield clues to the evolution of complex life.

The creationist Ken Ham’s website, Answers in Genesis (AiG), is notorious for the way it exploits the ignorance of its target readership and their eagerness for spurious “scientific” validation of evidence-free superstition. For example, AiG recently posted on X, formerly Twitter, asserting that the fossil record is “the graveyard of the global flood”:

The fossil record is the graveyard of the global flood. pic.twitter.com/1OWyNcEk5o

— Answers in Genesis (@AiG) May 20, 2026

What AiG does not say, of course, is that fossils are not found in a chaotic jumble, as would be expected from a single global catastrophe. They occur in a consistent geological sequence, with older rocks containing older fossil assemblages and younger rocks containing later ones. The succession is not random; it records changing environments, extinctions, radiations and evolutionary transitions over immense spans of time. The rocks themselves contain independent evidence of their age and origin — including stratigraphic relationships, geochemical signatures, volcanic ash layers where present, and other dating markers — and many sedimentary sequences accumulated gradually over thousands, millions, or even hundreds of millions of years.

Nor do fossil-bearing rocks show the global mixing that a planet-wide genocidal flood should have produced. Instead, they preserve organisms that lived in particular environments at particular times. Marine organisms occur in marine sediments; freshwater organisms in freshwater deposits; terrestrial organisms in terrestrial deposits. Local and regional faunas remain local and regional.

We do not find Australian marsupials randomly mixed through Cambrian marine deposits, nor African mammals churned together with Jurassic dinosaurs and Ordovician trilobites. If a flood had covered even the highest mountains, tearing up ecosystems across the planet and carrying bodies wherever the currents took them, that is exactly the kind of disorder we should expect. It is not what the fossil record shows.

So, far from proving there was a global genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago, fossils in sedimentary rocks demonstrate exactly the opposite. They record a long, ordered, localised and historically structured history of life on Earth. That history is not only incompatible with the childish flood myth promoted by AiG; it is one of the strongest lines of evidence for evolution over deep time. And that is probably why Ken Ham’s creationist organisation needs its followers to believe otherwise. The tactic is perfectly plain and deliberately dishonest: if the facts contradict your claims, misrepresent the facts.

Malevolent Design - Fungi That Turn Spiders Into 'Zombies'

Spider infected with Gibellula pseudosolita

Chang, Chen-xin, et al (2026)

Spider infected with Gibellula pseudosolita

Chang, Chen-xin, et al (2026)

Inside the Hidden World of Spider-Attacking Fungi | Blog


Parasites are hard enough for creationists to force-fit into their predetermined belief that all things were created by an omnibenevolent god, short of resorting to the near-blasphemous claim that 'Sin' somehow gave a rival creator unfettered access to their god's supposedly perfect creation in order to corrupt and destroy it. That rather undermines the claim of perfection in the first place, because a perfect creation, by definition, ought not to be corruptible.

But even harder for creationists to explain are parasites which, judged by their own favourite pseudo-scientific slogans — 'complex specified information' and 'irreducible complexity' — appear exquisitely adapted not merely to parasitise a living organism, but to consume it from within and then use its body as a platform for producing more parasites. In Pensoft's own popular description, these are "zombie" fungi: araneopathogenic fungi that parasitise spiders, mummify them, and then grow spore-producing structures from their bodies.

For example, newly identified spider-attacking fungi have recently been reported in two papers, published respectively in IMA Fungus and MycoKeys. Together, they add to the growing picture of a hidden diversity of highly specialised fungal parasites adapted to exploit spiders in different habitats.

The first is a new species of Purpureocillium fungus, belonging to the Purpureocillium atypicola group: Purpureocillium atlanticum. It was discovered in Brazil's Atlantic Forest, where it infects trapdoor spiders hidden in their burrows in the forest floor. The fungus covers the spider in cotton-white mycelium and eventually sends a purple fruiting structure up from the spider's cephalothorax, allowing spores to be released above the burrow. This discovery also shows that Purpureocillium atypicola, originally discovered in Japan in 1897 and thought to be a single species, is actually a global complex of multiple species.

The second paper reports three new species of Gibellula fungi — Gibellula pseudopigmentosa, Gibellula pseudosolita, and Gibellula sinensis — discovered on spiders in China and Laos. These fungi erupt from spider bodies in stalked, branch-like structures, and the species were distinguished from one another by differences in their reproductive structures, spore-forming bodies and phylogenetic relationships.