Refuting Creationism - Why There Are No fossils Of The Early Sponges From 650 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Sponges in the Ediacaran

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A giant barrel sponge from Indonesia. Sponges were the first reef builders and maintain a fundamental role in modern marine ecosystems.

January: Bristol scientists discover early sponges were soft | News and features | University of Bristol

Creationists have a massive gap to try to close; a gap so wide it makes the Grand Canyon look like a mere ditch. It is the gap between the earliest signs of life in the fossil record and the timeline a literal reading of the Bible allows. And that gap just got a lot wider.

Creationists could once take comfort from the fact that there was little solid fossil evidence of multicellular life much before the Cambrian, when organisms with hard body parts that fossilise begin to appear in the record. That gap was closed, not by fossils as we normally understand the term, but by chemical fossils contained in ancient rocks, as I explained in my last blog post. This evidence, together with genetic evidence from other work, shows that the common ancestors of multicellular animal life were very probably sea sponges.

But to a creationist, conditioned to believe that the Theory of Evolution is a theory about fossils—so that any gaps in the fossil record must be fatal for the theory—there is still some comfort in the fact that whatever left these chemical fingerprints in ancient rocks left no tangible fossils.

Now a team of palaeontologists, led by the University of Bristol, have shown that the lack of fossil evidence of these ancestral sponges has a simple explanation: they were soft-bodied, having yet to evolve the characteristic skeletons composed of millions of microscopic glass-like spicules. These did not evolve until about 560 million years ago. The team have recently published their findings, open access, in the journal Science Advances.

The Bristol-led team have now pushed back the evolution of these soft-bodied sponges to between 615 and 600 million years ago by using a combination of genetic evidence from 133 protein-coding genes and fossil evidence. This approach also showed that the spicules evolved independently in different sponge groups by convergent evolution.

Refuting Creationism - Our Earliest Animal Ancestors May Have Been Sea Sponges - 541 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Some of the first animals on Earth were likely ancestors of the modern sea sponge, according to MIT geochemists who unearthed new evidence in very old rocks.

Image: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT

The first animals on Earth may have been sea sponges, study suggests | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Another fatal blow against creationism was revealed recently by geochemists led by Professor Roger E. Summons of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with news that they have found chemical evidence in ancient rocks suggesting that the earliest animals may have been the ancestors of sponges, living some 541 million years ago. Their findings have just been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

They succeeded in extracting the chemical signature of animal life from rocks in Oman, where they found an abundance of steranes that they determined were the preserved remnants of 30-carbon (C₃₀) sterols — a rare form of steroid that they showed was most likely derived from ancient sea sponges known as demosponges.

Not only is this fatal to creationists' notion of Earth being just a few thousand years old, with all living organisms magically created without ancestry and with different “kinds” unrelated to other “kinds”, but it also delivers another hammer blow to the creationist parody of the so-called 'Cambrian Explosion' as a literal explosive creation of multiple body plans in a single event. Slightly more sophisticated creationists attempt to claim that this was the act of creation for which the tales in Genesis are merely a metaphor, with each day of 'creation week' representing millions of years — a claim that collapses on realisation that, according to Genesis, green plants would have had to exist for millions of years with no sun to drive photosynthesis, since the sun is supposedly created the 'day' after plants.

This analysis pushes the origins of the Cambrian biota back into the Ediacaran, showing not a sudden spontaneous creation 540 million years ago, but the cumulative products of evolutionary diversification, probably beginning with these early multicellular organisms.
In addition to Professor Roger E. Summons of MIT, the team included Dr Lubna Shawar of Caltech, Gordon Love of the University of California, Riverside, Benjamin Uveges of Cornell University, Alex Zumberge of GeoMark Research in Houston, Paco Cárdenas of Uppsala University in Sweden, and José-Luis Giner of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

Refuting Creationism - Creationists Rebutted By Old Irish Goats From Before The Legendary Genocidal Flood

Old Irish Goat carries 3,000 years of Irish history - University College Dublin

If the biblical flood really wiped the slate of life almost clean a few thousand years ago, we should expect to see unmistakable genetic signatures of that event across modern species. Instead, what scientists repeatedly find is exactly the opposite: long, continuous lineages stretching back thousands of years before the supposed catastrophe.

A good example comes from Ireland, where geneticists at University College Dublin, in collaboration with colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast and international partners, have shown that the ‘Old Irish Goat’, an Gabhar Fiáin – the wild goat – is a descendant of goats living in Bronze Age Ireland some 3,000 years ago, and thus ultimately of an older population introduced by Neolithic agriculturalists about 5,900 years ago. Their paper is published open access in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

According to Bible literalists, there was a general reset of Earth’s biology a few thousand years ago when their god supposedly decided to destroy everything in a fit of pique because its creation had gone wrong and, rather than undertaking an entirely new creation, chose instead to start again with a few survivors, hoping the outcome would be different this time. However, time and again we find evidence not of a general reset but of uninterrupted continuity of cultures and ancient species, such as the Old Irish Goat, which existed both before and after the supposed reset.

The problem for creationists is that, although they claim there was a period of miraculous hyper-evolution in which a handful of ‘kinds’ that survived the genocide radiated into all the modern species—an event which appears to have gone unnoticed and unreported by the people who supposedly lived while it was happening, and a belief for which there is no Biblical basis—the Old Irish Goat shares its common ancestry with other goats long before the alleged flood, not within the last few thousand years. Within the creationist paradigm, therefore, it must trace its ancestry to just two survivors. However, although there is evidence of a genetic bottleneck, this is very recent and is due to population collapse brought about by human activity; there is no evidence of the narrow bottleneck of just two individuals about 4,000 years ago.

Refuting Creationism - Global Spread of Giant Predatory 'Sea Salamanders' - 250 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Erythrobatrachus noonkanbahensis (foreground) and Aphaneramma (middle ground)

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250 million-year-old amphibian fossils from Australia reveal global spread of ‘sea-salamanders’

Since the beginning of 2026, with only a few days spent on other projects, I’ve been able to write one or two articles every day about yet another paper that comprehensively refutes basic creationist dogma and illustrates the strength of the Theory of Evolution as the grand unifying theory of biology, without which little of it would make sense. Over the same period, there has not been the faintest hint of a paper providing peer-reviewed support for ID creationism, or even suggesting that the Theory of Evolution is in crisis and in need of replacement because it cannot explain the facts.

Today is no exception, with the second such paper. The first showed how people were using signs and patterns to communicate ideas 30,000 years before creationists think Earth was created; this one discusses the fossil record from 250 million years ago and what it tells us about the evolution of early marine tetrapods — animals that had returned to the marine environment from which their ancestors had originally emerged and had become apex predators. In this case, the focus is on an amphibian that had converged on a body shape resembling a crocodile.

It also shows how an environmental catastrophe — itself utterly inconsistent with creationist notions of a created perfection ideally suited for life — created opportunities that could be exploited by the evolutionary process, allowing surviving lineages to radiate into new species, exactly as evolutionary theory predicts. Again, this stands in stark contrast to the childish notion of special creation without ancestors by some unexplained magical process.

The paper, by an international team led by Dr Lachlan Hart of the University of New South Wales, has just been published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. It explains how fossils of a marine amphibian, Erythrobatrachus noonkanbahensis, found in the Blina Shale and originally described in 1972 from material recovered in the 1960s, turn out on re-examination to represent two different species, one of which rapidly achieved a near-global distribution, probably by coastal dispersal around the supercontinent Gondwana.

These species appear to have flourished soon after the ‘Great Dying’, the end-Permian mass extinction event that saw the disappearance of 90–96% of all species (around 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species).

Dr Hart has explained his team’s research and its significance in a University of New South Wales news item. He has also written an article in The Conversation, reproduced below under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. First, background information on the end Permian mass extinction or 'Great Dying':

Refuting Creationism - Humans were recording information 30,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'.

The Adorant figurine from Geißenklösterle Cave, approximately 40,000 years old, consists of a small ivory plate bearing an anthropomorphic figure and multiple sequences of notches and dots. The application of these marks suggests a notational system, most notably in the rows of dots on the back of the plate.

© Landesmuseum Württemberg / Hendrik Zwietasch, CC BY 4.0

Signs on Stone Age objects: Precursor to written language dates back 40,000 years | Universität des Saarlandes

Creationists have to be increasingly inventive in their attempts to explain away the inconvenient facts emerging from science — facts showing that complex life existed on Earth long before their chronology allows there to have been an Earth at all. That difficulty was not eased today with the discovery that humans were recording information at least 40,000 years ago — some 30,000 years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’.

This discovery, by linguist Professor Christian Bentz at Saarland University and archaeologist Dr. Ewa Dutkiewicz at the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte (Museum of Prehistory and Early History) in Berlin, is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. By analysing more than 3,000 geometric patterns recorded on 260 figurines and tools, the authors showed that these markings contain information densities comparable to the earliest proto-cuneiform scripts from around 3000 BCE in Mesopotamia.

This points to a level of cultural sophistication — and a need to communicate and preserve ideas — among some of the earliest anatomically modern humans to colonise Eurasia, tens of thousands of years before Bronze Age pastoralists in the Middle East began writing down their imaginative origin myths to fill the gaps in their knowledge and understanding of the world.

Refuting Creationism - Closing a Gap In the Fossil Record - 190 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Xiphodracon goldencapensis

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Reconstruction of what the Xiphodracon could have looked like.

Bob Nicholls.

Rare Jurassic 'Sword Dragon' prehistoric reptile discovered in the UK

Creationists crave gaps in scientific knowledge as somewhere to relocate their ever-shrinking little god, but few of them would have been aware of this particular gap — and even if they had been, it lay inconveniently within that vast stretch of Earth’s history that occurred long before creationism’s deity allegedly created the small flat planet with a dome over it described in Genesis.

The gap concerned the fossil record of ichthyosaur evolution — those marine, dolphin-like reptiles that were apex predators in the Jurassic oceans. The gap-filling specimen was recovered from cliffs near Golden Cap in Dorset, part of the ‘Jurassic Coast’.

It bridges the interval between the extinction of earlier ichthyosaur families and the emergence of later ones. Further compounding the embarrassment for creationists, it represents a genuinely transitional species, displaying a mosaic of primitive and derived features.

The new find — one of the most complete ichthyosaurs ever discovered — is described in a paper by Dean R. Lomax of Bristol University and honorary research fellow at Manchester University, Judy A. Massare of the State University of New York at Brockport, and Erin E. Maxwell of the State Museum of Natural History, Stuttgart, Germany, published in Papers in Palaeontology.

An additional difficulty for Intelligent Design advocates is that, like other secondarily marine vertebrates such as dolphins, turtles, seals and other cetaceans, ichthyosaurs were constrained to return to the surface to breathe. Their respiratory system was inherited from their terrestrial tetrapod ancestors. Yet, according to creationist claims, their putative designer had already produced an efficient system for extracting oxygen from water using gills. There is therefore no obvious theological reason why that same designer could not have equipped marine reptiles with gills as well.

Evolution, of course, has no foresight and no capacity to redeploy complex anatomical systems wholesale from one distant lineage to another. It can only modify inherited structures, constrained by ancestry and developmental pathways.

Refuting Creationism - Nosey Secrets of Triceratops Reveal Advanced Evolution - 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Triceratops skull. Seishiro Tada (left) standing next to an awe-inspiring Triceratops skull, with its enormous nasal cavity visible at the front.

©2026 Tada CC-BY-ND

Why Triceratops has such a big nose | The University of Tokyo

Once upon a time, in that ancient world during the 99.975% of Earth’s history that elapsed before creationism’s small god supposedly conceived the idea of creating a small flat plane with a dome over it in the Middle East, there lived a dinosaur that had evolved a horned head and a wide protective frill to shield its vulnerable neck from the jaws of the large predators that ruled the land some 100 million years ago. Carrying those horns and that protective neck shield required a large head — and a large head is difficult to keep cool.

The solution, according to researcher Seishiro Tada of the University of Tokyo Museum, was a large nasal cavity containing turbinate bones to mix incoming air, together with a plentiful blood supply to dissipate excess heat. Tada and colleagues from various Japanese research institutions have recently published their findings in The Anatomical Record.

This is not a fairy story, but what palaeontology is revealing.

From an evolutionary perspective, this research shows that Triceratops was the product of a long evolutionary process in which predation drove the development of large defensive structures, which in turn created new physiological challenges — in this case, the risk of overheating. Those challenges then drove further evolutionary adaptations. In other words, the solution to one problem generated another problem to be solved, all as part of a predator–prey arms race. This dynamic makes no sense as the work of an intelligent designer, but it is precisely what evolutionary theory predicts.

Refuting Creationism - A Small Problem for Science - A Massive Blow For Creationists

Scarisoara Ice Cave in Romania.

Credit: Paun V.I.

Bacteria frozen in ancient underground ice cave found to be resistant against 10 modern antibiotics

As every schoolboy knows, Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic when the fungus Penicillium contaminated a Petri dish in which he had been culturing bacteria. What Fleming had discovered was a naturally occurring antibacterial substance produced by the fungus.

Such compounds are produced by fungi as part of their evolutionary arms race with the bacteria in their environment, and there is a whole range of them, many still awaiting discovery. On the other side of this arms race, bacteria evolve resistance.

It is a struggle that has been going on for hundreds of millions of years, ever since fungi evolved — and perhaps even earlier between ancestral eukaryotes and bacteria. Modern medical use of antibiotics has simply accelerated this ancient contest. We are now facing a major challenge in keeping pace with bacterial evolution, and hospitals in particular have become breeding grounds for resistant strains.

The tendency, therefore, is to assume that antibiotic resistance is a modern, anthropogenic phenomenon. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to learn that a bacterium, Psychrobacter SC65A.3, recovered from 5,000-year-old ice cores in a Romanian cave, has been found to be resistant to ten modern antibiotics.

Frankly, this is difficult to explain other than in terms of earlier evolutionary arms races. The discovery, by a team from the Institute of Biology, Bucharest, Romania, with colleagues from the University of Bucharest and the Universidad de Antofagasta, Chile, is reported in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology.

While this finding presents microbiologists with an intriguing puzzle, it presents creationists with a more acute problem. There simply should not be 5,000-year-old ice preserved in a Romanian cave — let alone viable bacteria within it — if the biblical narrative of a global flood some 4,000 years ago were historically accurate. And if a putative designer deity created bacteria already equipped with resistance to antibiotics that would not be synthesised by humans for millennia, that would imply pre-emptive malevolence.

This leaves modern Intelligent Design advocates with an uncomfortable choice: retreat into literalist theology and abandon scientific reasoning, or confront the implications of the evidence.

Abiogenesis News - Origin Of Complex (Eukarote) Cells - Origin Of The Cell Nucleus

Amoeba infected with a giant virus

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Ushikuvirus: A newly discovered giant virus may offer clues to the evolutionary relationships
Researchers discover a new virus called the "ushikuvirus" that provide evidence for the viral eukaryogenesis hypothesis and reveal virus-host interactions, shaping the evolution of eukaryotic cells.

Professor Masaharu Takemura.

Ushikuvirus: A Newly Discovered Giant Virus May Offer Clues to the Origin of Life | Tokyo University of Science

One of the remaining questions in evolutionary biology is how the complex (eukaryotic) cell acquired its defining feature: a membrane-bound nucleus in which the DNA is stored.

Prokaryotic cells — bacteria and archaea — possess a single circular DNA molecule located in the cytoplasm. By contrast, all eukaryotic cells contain their genetic material within a membrane-bound nucleus. Now scientists at the Graduate School of Science, Tokyo University of Science (TUS), Japan, led by Professor Masaharu Takemura, have provided further evidence that the eukaryotic nucleus may have originated from a giant DNA virus, similar to those that infect certain species of amoeba. Their findings suggest that the origin of the nucleus may be closely linked to the evolutionary history of this class of virus as it adapted to different hosts.

Professor Takemura and Dr Philip Bell, from the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University, Sydney, independently proposed the viral eukaryogenesis theory (a term coined by Dr Bell) in 2001, suggesting that large DNA viruses — such as poxviruses — might represent plausible ancestors. Since then, beginning in 2003, the discovery of several giant DNA viruses has provided more compelling candidates. When these viruses infect a host cell, they establish so-called ‘virus factories’ within the cytoplasm. In some cases these structures are enclosed within membranes that resemble the nuclear envelope.

The hypothesis proposes that, rather than destroying its host, such a virus formed a long-term association with it. Over evolutionary time, it may have incorporated host genes and transitioned from parasite to symbiotic genetic compartment — eventually becoming the nucleus.

For advocates of “irreducible complexity”, the nucleus is often presented as an all-or-nothing structure: a fully formed membrane, nuclear pores, transport machinery, chromatin organisation and regulatory systems supposedly appearing together or not at all. Yet the viral eukaryogenesis model shows how this argument collapses once intermediate stages are recognised. Giant DNA viruses already construct membrane-bound replication compartments inside host cells; they encode components involved in DNA replication, transcription and even elements of translation.

These viral “factories” function as semi-autonomous genetic centres within the cytoplasm — in effect, simplified proto-nuclei. If such a structure entered into a stable symbiotic relationship with a host cell, incremental gene exchange and co-evolution could gradually integrate and refine the system. Each step would confer immediate functional advantages — protection of DNA, separation of transcription from translation, improved regulation — without requiring the simultaneous appearance of a fully modern nucleus. What is claimed to be irreducible instead looks like a product of stepwise evolutionary integration.

Now Professor Takemura’s team report the discovery of a new giant DNA virus infecting amoebae — the ushikuvirus, named after Lake Ushiku where it was isolated — lending further support to the viral eukaryogenesis theory. Their discovery is reported in Journal of Virology.

Abiogenesis News - Origin Of Complex (Eukaryote) Cells - Association With Mitochondria.

Beginnings of symbiosis

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A Break in a Longstanding Mystery about Origin of Complex Life | College of Natural Sciences

Here are a couple of papers published today that deal with related aspects of the origins of complex (eukaryotic) cells — all living organisms apart from Bacteria, Archaea and viruses (the prokaryotes). There is little doubt in biology that eukaryotes evolved from symbiotic associations between prokaryotes, despite the regular creationist straw man claim that scientists are naïve enough — or somehow brainwashed by evil “Darwinists” — to believe that the first complex cell arose spontaneously in a single step so fantastically improbable that magical creation becomes an almost plausible alternative.

In reality, as these two papers demonstrate, the precise details of how these symbiotic associations arose remain matters of active research and debate. I will deal with the second paper in a separate blog post. This post concerns the paper by scientists from The University of Texas at Austin, published in *Nature*, which addresses the question of how the oxygen-dependent bacterium that became the mitochondrion came together with a presumed anaerobic (oxygen-intolerant) archaeon, given that the two would not be expected to occupy the same environment.

The team propose that this apparent problem may be resolved by evidence that some archaea of the Asgard group — which today live primarily in the deep sea and other oxygen-free environments — can use, or at least tolerate, oxygen.

The Asgard archaea most closely related to eukaryotic cells are found in shallow coastal sediments or floating in the marine column. Crucially, they possess metabolic pathways that use oxygen. It is therefore possible that their ancestors did as well, meaning they could have cohabited with the bacterial ancestors of mitochondria.

Creationism In Crisis - What Caused Homo Floresiensis (The 'Hobbit') To Go Extinct - 40,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'?

Homo floresiensis hunting a Stegodon

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Reconstruction of Homo floresiensis

By Cicero Moraes et al, Arc-Team Research
CC BY 4.0, Link

The ‘hobbits’ mysteriously disappeared 50,000 years ago. Our new study reveals what happened to their home

Long before anatomically modern Homo sapiens took their first tentative steps out of Africa and established themselves in Eurasia, an archaic hominin, Homo erectus, had already done so about a million years earlier, spreading across Asia into what is now the Indonesian archipelago and diversifying into a number of species and regional variants along the way.

One lineage settled on the island of Flores, where they encountered a miniature species of elephant, Stegodon florensis insularis, which probably became one of their principal sources of meat. By a process known to evolutionary biologists as Foster's Rule or the “island effect”, the descendants of these hominins also became smaller, eventually evolving into Homo floresiensis, popularly known as “The Hobbit” on account of their diminutive stature. Then, quite suddenly, they disappeared from history some 50,000 years ago.

Now an international team of archaeologists, including scientists from the University of Wollongong (UOW), Australia, believe they have found evidence explaining their extinction. It appears to have coincided with the disappearance of Stegodon florensis insularis and to have been driven by extensive climate change that began about 76,000 years ago, culminating in severe summer droughts between 61,000 and 50,000 years ago. The researchers reached this conclusion through analysis of the chemical record preserved in stalagmites from Flores caves, alongside isotopic data from the teeth of Stegodon. Their paper has just been published open access in Communications Earth & Environment.

In addition to the University of Wollongong news release explaining the study, four of the authors have written an article in The Conversation. Their article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Refuting Creationism - A Dinosaur With Spikes - 125 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Haolong dongi in a Cretaceous forest setting

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Artistic reconstruction of a juvenile Haolong dongi from the Early Cretaceous of China (125 million years ago).

© Fabio Manucci.

A dinosaur with spikes exhibiting unprecedented properties discovered in China | CNRS

Almost eight weeks into the New Year and not a single scientific paper has emerged in support of creationism—or its pseudo-scientific variant, Intelligent Design. Not even a speculative hint of the long-predicted collapse of ‘Darwinism’, nor any sign that Intelligent Design is making inroads into biomedical science. Instead, the steady flow of research continues to do precisely the opposite: quietly and methodically reinforcing evolutionary biology as the indispensable framework through which palaeontology, cell biology, virology and the rest of modern life sciences make coherent, testable sense of the evidence.

Today brings yet another example. An international team led by researchers from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), working at the Université de Rennes, has identified a new species of iguanodontian dinosaur that lived in what is now China around 125 million years ago. Their paper, recently published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, reports that this species was probably covered in hollow spikes, somewhat reminiscent of porcupine quills. The team have named the new species Haolong dongi in honour of Dong Zhiming, a pioneer of Chinese palaeontology.

Using X-ray scans and high-resolution histological sections, the researchers were able to identify preserved skin structures, revealing hollow cutaneous spikes over much of the animal’s body. Although herbivorous, this dinosaur lived in an environment where predation pressure from small carnivores would have been significant, and the spikes likely provided a degree of protection comparable to that of modern porcupines. The structures may also have played roles in thermoregulation and/or sensory perception.

Creationism Refuted - Genetic Diseases 2,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

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Daniel Fernandes preparing to take a sample.

© Adrian Daly

Ancient DNA reveals 12,000-year-old case of rare genetic disease

The standard creationist response to evidence that the human genome is not the perfectly designed blueprint we should expect from a flawless designer is to claim that ‘sin’ somehow caused it to become degraded. Discovery Institute fellow Michael J. Behe even introduced the biologically nonsensical notion of ‘genetic entropy’, which supposedly allows deleterious genes to spread throughout a species’ gene pool by some unexplained process — an idea that only those unfamiliar with how natural selection works could find convincing.

It is, of course, impossible for a genuinely deleterious gene to increase in frequency within a population unless it is linked to an advantageous trait whose benefits far outweigh its harmful effects. And if the genome were originally perfect, as Behe assumes, how could any advantageous mutation arise in the first place?

Behe, unwittingly or otherwise, appears to have abandoned any pretence that Intelligent Design is science rather than fundamentalist Christianity in a lab coat. By invoking an initial perfect creation followed by corruption through ‘sin’, he has simply retreated into theology — especially after his ‘irreducible complexity’ argument collapsed so spectacularly during the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial.

Even that feeble argument, however, has now fallen foul of evidence showing that deleterious variants and genetic disorders existed in the human genome long before the creationist narrative claims that ‘perfect’ humans were created somewhere in Mesopotamia just 6,000–10,000 years ago. A paper recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine by a team of researchers led by the University of Vienna and Liège University Hospital Centre reports the identification of genetic variants associated with a rare disorder in two prehistoric individuals who lived more than 12,000 years ago.

The individuals were discovered in 1963 at Grotta del Romito in southern Italy, buried in an embracing position. There was no sign of trauma. ‘Romito 1’, an adult female, was embracing ‘Romito 2’, an adolescent initially assumed to be male, whose reduced limb length suggested a height of about 110 cm (3 feet 7 inches). Palaeogenomic analysis, using DNA extracted from the petrous part of the temporal bone, has now shown that the adolescent was also female and was homozygous for a variant in the NPR2 gene, which is essential for normal bone growth. The two individuals were first-degree relatives, probably mother and daughter. The adult, Romito 1, was heterozygous for the same variant.

What this study makes clear is that genetic variants capable of causing disease were already present in the human genome thousands of years before the Bronze Age authors of Biblical origin myths imagined a special creation of ‘perfect’ humans without ancestry. These variants did not require some magical ingredient called ‘sin’ to arise — only the ordinary reality of imperfect replication and inheritance.

Malevolent Design - Yet More Evidence Of Intelligently Designed Cancer?

Scientists Uncover Key Driver of Treatment-Resistant Cancer

These images show the beginnings of chromothripsis in colorectal cancer cells. The N4BP2 enzyme (green) infiltrates a micronucleus (zoomed in square selections), where it induces DNA damage (red). Blue represents the main cell nucleus.

Credit: UC San Diego Health Sciences

At the risk of labouring the point I made in my post yesterday — that the exact same arguments ID creationists use as ‘proof’ of intelligent design can also be applied to cancers, parasites, pathogens, and genetic diseases, thereby ‘proving’, in ID terms, that these too were intelligently designed by the same deity — we have yet another example of complex specified genetic information driving the evolution of cancers as they rapidly develop resistance to treatments.

This is reported in a research paper in Science by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego).

The researchers discovered an enzyme responsible for breaking up a chromosome in cancer cells and rearranging it into a scrambled version, enabling the tumour to evolve rapidly. The process is quite simple and closely mimics evolution by natural selection, or the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Shuffling genes in this way increases the likelihood that a small number of cancer cells will survive the treatment aimed at destroying them. The tumour then regrows from these resistant cells, producing a treatment-resistant cancer.

This ability, known as chromothripsis, is found in about 24% of human cancers.

The key to this process is the protein enzyme N4BP2, and the complex, specified gene that produces it. The process begins when an error in DNA replication causes individual chromosomes to become trapped inside tiny, fragile structures called micronuclei. When these micronuclei burst, the chromosome is exposed to nucleases — enzymes capable of breaking DNA.

Within the ID creationist paradigm, there are no such things as mistakes: everything works exactly as it was designed to work. So we are left to assume that these fragile micronuclei, with their entrapped chromosomes, are a deliberate design feature.

The researchers showed that N4BP2 is uniquely capable of entering micronuclei and breaking the trapped chromosome.

To test the hypothesis that N4BP2 is the culprit, they eliminated it in brain cancer cells and observed a reduction in chromothripsis. They then introduced it into healthy cell nuclei and found that it caused chromosomes to break even in otherwise normal cells.

This is, of course, just as much compelling evidence of intelligent design as anything traditionally cited by ID creationists as proof of an intelligent designer. By contrast, the theory of evolution provides an explanation with none of the problems that force creationists to retreat into contradictory theology, Bronze Age origin myths, and appeals to ‘mystery’.

Creationism Refuted - Poisoned Arrows 50,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Preparing poison arrowheads, 60,000 years ago at the Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

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Both sides of one of the arrowheads analysed. The left-hand image shows the organic remains in which the arrowhead residues were identified.

Photo: Marlize Lombard.

World’s oldest arrow poison – 60,000-year-old traces reveal early advanced hunting techniques - Stockholms universitet

Creationism’s Biblical narrative has just become even harder to defend, with news that researchers from South Africa and Sweden, led by Professor Sven Isaksson of the Archaeological Research Laboratory at Stockholm University, have identified the oldest traces of arrow poison yet discovered. These were found on 60,000-year-old quartz arrowheads from Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

That is a full 50,000 years before creationist mythology claims the world was created, but entirely consistent with the palaeontological and archaeological evidence that fully modern humans had already evolved in Africa and were developing increasingly sophisticated technologies.

The discovery is reported open access in Science Advances.

The significance of this find is two-fold. Firstly, it shows that early humans had invented the bow and arrow as a hunting weapon much earlier than previously thought. Secondly, it demonstrates that they also understood how to exploit natural toxins — specifically the alkaloids buphanidrine and epibuphanisine — found in the plant Boophone disticha, commonly known as gifbol or “poison onion”. Traces of these compounds had previously been identified on arrowheads only around 250 years old, so this remarkable discovery reveals that the knowledge and use of such poison technology persisted among hunter-gatherer groups for tens of millennia.

Refuting Creationism - Life In A New Zealand Cave - 1 million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Prehistoric New Zealand Cave

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AI generated image of the NZ cave

P Scofield, Canterbury Museum.

1m-year-old 'lost world' discovered – News

About a million years before creationism’s putative designer supposedly fashioned a small flat world beneath a solid dome — the imagined cosmos of Bronze Age pastoralists in the Middle East who authored the Bible’s creation myths — ancient frogs and birds, the ancestors of today’s New Zealand species, lived and died and became fossilised deep in a cave near Waitomo on Aotearoa’s North Island.

Of course, confined as they were to within a few days’ walk of the Canaanite hills, the authors of those myths could have had no inkling of people and places in far-flung regions of a spherical planet. Their tales were based entirely on what they imagined to be the whole universe, and contain nothing that existed beyond their narrow horizons.

How these New Zealand fossils were unearthed, and what they can tell us about Aotearoa’s deep past, is the subject of a paper just published in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology, by a research group led by Associate Professor Trevor Worthy of the College of Science and Engineering at Flinders University.

It is, of course, a story vastly different from Biblical mythology — the evidence for which stubbornly refuses to manifest itself, and instead consistently refutes it, revealing it to be the product of parochial ignorance and an attempt to force-fit what little was known into prevailing cultural assumptions: what Christopher Hitchens aptly called “the fearful infancy of our species”.

The findings show that around 33–50% of species went extinct about one million years before humans first arrived on Aotearoa (New Zealand). The cause appears to have been a combination of rapid climate change and catastrophic volcanic activity. The discovery helps fill a fifteen-million-year gap in our knowledge of Aotearoa’s history.

Excavations at St Bathans in Central Otago have allowed palaeontologists and geologists to reconstruct the period between 20 and 16 million years ago, but until now there has been very little information about the long stretch between then and one million years ago.

Among the discoveries was a new species of parrot, Strigops insulaborealis, an ancient relative of the flightless kākāpō, but one that could probably fly; an extinct ancestor of the modern takahē; and an extinct species of pigeon closely related to Australian bronzewing pigeons.

To forestall the traditional creationist attempt to discredit both the discovery and the scientists who made it — by claiming the dating methods are flawed or even fraudulent — the fossils can be dated accurately because they lie between two layers of volcanic ash: one deposited around 1.55 million years ago, and another about one million years ago. Volcanic ash can be dated with a high degree of confidence using Uranium–Lead (U–Pb) dating of zircon crystals.

Malevolent Design - How Cancer Reprograms The Immune System To Work For It, Not Against It - Malevolence or Evolution?

Tumour containing infiltrating neutrophils. In light grey, tumour cells. Among the infiltrating neutrophils, some do not express CCL3 (blue), while others are CCL3 positive (red). CCL3-positive neutrophils are highly conserved across tumour types and promote the growth of growing tumours.

© Mikaël Pittet – UNIGE

Immune 'hijacking' predicts cancer evolution - Medias - UNIGE

A recent research paper in Cancer Cell, published by a team from the Université de Genève (Unige), Switzerland, led by Professor Mikaël Pittet, describes how neutrophils — key cells of the immune system — can be reprogrammed by cancer cells and then co-opted to drive the cancer’s progression.

This process depends entirely on the presence of multiple interacting components and on specific genes being expressed in both the tumour cells and the neutrophils. Without such irreducible complexity and so-called complex specified genetic information, these cancers would fail to progress.

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that, if we accept the Intelligent Design creationists’ argument for design — namely irreducible complexity and complex specified information — then the inescapable conclusion is that this putative designer must also be the evil genius behind cancers, parasites, pathogens, genetic disorders, congenital diseases, and all the suffering they entail, along with the vast medical resources required to combat them.

Far from being the reputedly omnibenevolent and compassionate god of the Bible, creationism’s designer becomes the exact opposite: randomly mendacious and obsessively sadistic, toiling relentlessly to devise ever more ways to increase suffering in the world.

And yet creationists appear to prefer us to adopt that view of their favourite deity rather than accept the evidence that such systems have evolved — and that what we see in cancers, parasites, and pathogens is precisely what the Theory of Evolution predicts, with no supernatural malice or intent involved. For some reason, Intelligent Design creationists often seem more concerned with disproving “Darwinism” for political purposes than with promoting the god of the Bible or Qur’an.

This apparent paradox goes a long way towards explaining why they have so little hesitation in bearing false witness against scientists, misleading their followers with disinformation, and spreading blatant falsehoods. There is no pro-truth agenda in creationism. There is, however, a thinly veiled political agenda: the establishment of theocratic government — first in the USA, then elsewhere — dragging society back towards the pre-Enlightenment world of the so-called Dark Ages, when ignorance, fear, and superstition allowed unelected and unaccountable religious clerics to rule unchecked, and for most people at the lower strata of a hierarchical society, life was nasty, brutish and short.

Abiogenesis News - The Genes That Predate Life

Scientists describe a window into evolution before the tree of life | Oberlin College and Conservatory | EurekAlert!

In a paper published recently in the journal Cell Genomics, scientists Aaron Goldman (Oberlin College), Greg Fournier (MIT), and Betül Kaçar (University of Wisconsin–Madison) describe how they were able to study evolutionary history even before the last universal common ancestor of all living things (LUCA) emerged, and discovered that some of the genes associated with LUCA may in fact predate LUCA itself.

Creationists determined to misrepresent the process of abiogenesis often present it as a ridiculous parody in which a fully complex cell is supposed to have spontaneously assembled out of inorganic atoms and molecules. This straw-man caricature is far easier to attack than what science actually proposes: that the first population of self-replicating proto-cells arose through gradual chemical and evolutionary processes within a large and diverse population.

Within such a population, variation would inevitably occur, and whatever produced the most copies of itself would come to dominate. One of the earliest characteristics to emerge would have been rapid replication, because in a vast population with generation times measured in minutes, even “million-to-one” mutations are not rare events — they occur thousands of times a day. Under such conditions, what creationists portray as wildly improbable becomes not only plausible, but effectively inevitable over time.

Several independent evolutionary pathways could also have developed in parallel: RNA molecules coding for particular enzymes, ribosomes assembling from self-catalysing RNA, and primitive membranes forming across which chemical energy gradients could arise. Only once these components were already present could they come together within an enclosing membrane to form the first true prokaryotic cells.

The research team led by Aaron Goldman has now developed a method for determining which genes were likely present in LUCA, and which must already have been available to be incorporated when LUCA first emerged. In other words, some genes appear to predate LUCA itself, pushing parts of evolutionary history even deeper into the pre-cellular past.

What Was LUCA — and What Came Before It? The Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) is often misunderstood, especially by creationists who portray it as the very first living organism. In reality, LUCA was not the origin of life, nor the first cell, nor some single creature that suddenly appeared fully formed.

LUCA is simply the most recent population of organisms from which all life alive today ultimately descends — bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes alike. Crucially, LUCA already possessed a level of biochemical sophistication. Most researchers agree it likely had:

• a genetic code based on RNA and DNA
• ribosomes capable of translating RNA into proteins
• enzymes for metabolism and replication
• membrane structures maintaining internal chemistry
• the ability to exploit chemical energy gradients

This means LUCA could not have been the beginning of life. Instead, it must have been the product of a long evolutionary history that preceded it.

Pre-LUCA Evolution: A World of Competing Proto-Life

Before LUCA, early Earth was almost certainly home to a diverse population of simpler self-replicating systems — sometimes called proto-cells or pre-cellular life. These were not fully modern organisms, but chemical systems capable of reproduction, variation, and selection.

Rather than a single miraculous event, abiogenesis is best understood as an extended evolutionary process in which:

• self-replicating molecules competed for resources
• advantageous variants spread through populations
• metabolic pathways evolved gradually
• membranes formed to enclose and stabilise reactions
• genetic and protein machinery became increasingly integrated

LUCA represents the point at which one lineage became the common ancestor of everything that survived, not the moment life began.

Genes Older Than LUCA

What makes the new research so significant is the finding that some genes associated with LUCA appear to be even older — suggesting that early evolutionary innovations were already circulating in the pre-LUCA world and later became incorporated into the first universal ancestor.

This is exactly what evolutionary theory predicts: life did not begin with a fully formed cell, but with populations of evolving systems, long before anything resembling modern biology existed.

Their methodology is explained further in a press release from Oberlin College, via EurekAlert!.

Refuting Creationism - Bonobos Can Imagine Things Detached From Reality

Apes share human ability to imagine | Hub

A paper published recently in Science should give creationists something to think about. It shows how our close relatives, the bonobos, can imagine things completely detached from physical reality — rather like children playing games of pretend, or creationists pretending they are leading experts on biology and understand the subject better than the actual experts.

In this study, two researchers from Johns Hopkins University demonstrate that bonobos can engage in imaginative “pretend play”, an ability long assumed to be uniquely human. In doing so, they dismantle yet another supposed human-exclusive trait that creationists cite as evidence of special creation.

In one experiment with a captive bonobo, Kanzi — a 43-year-old individual living at Ape Initiative — a researcher pretended to pour juice from an empty jug into a transparent empty cup, and then pour it again into a second empty cup. When asked, “Where is the juice?”, Kanzi correctly identified the second cup.

In a similar experiment, an imaginary grape was taken from an empty bowl and placed into an empty jar. When asked, “Where is the grape?”, Kanzi again correctly pointed to the jar.

These experiments show that Kanzi was able to imagine and successfully track the movement of invisible, non-existent objects — something human children can typically do by the age of about two.

Creationism Refuted - A Football-sized Vegetarian - From 307 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A Shoreline scene in the Carboniferous

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

A reconstruction of Tyrannoroter heberti, eating a fern.

Illustration by Hannah Fredd.

Football-sized fossil creature may have been one of the first land animals to eat its veggies - Field Museum

We have another example today of how the evidence written into the fossil record — which creationists insist either does not exist, or is at best a lie forged to deceive us — stubbornly refuses to conform to creationist requirements. Instead, it continues to tell the only story it can: of life evolving slowly over deep time on a planet that is billions of years old.

The latest example comes from a paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution by researchers from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and the Smithsonian Museum. The study was co-led by Arjan Mann, assistant curator of fossil fishes and early tetrapods at the Field Museum.

The paper presents evidence of the earliest known herbivorous vertebrate — dating to some 307 million years before creationists believe the Earth was created. Once again, this highlights the fundamental problem creationists face when they begin with a dogmatic belief that the Earth is only a few thousand years old because a handful of Bronze Age pastoralists said so. Having declared in advance that there has been no significant evolution, only minor variation within “kinds”, they are then forced to twist and contort the real-world evidence in a futile attempt to shoehorn it into their absurdly compressed timescale.

The animal, named Tyrannoroter heberti by the researchers, evolved over the tens of millions of years since the first vertebrates transitioned from lobe-finned fish to terrestrial tetrapods around 375 million years ago — perhaps to escape aquatic predators, or to exploit the invertebrate prey that had already colonised the land. Plants, meanwhile, which had begun spreading onto land some 475 million years ago, had also been evolving, and by this time were well established as ferns, horsetails, and other tough early vegetation.

Tyrannoroter heberti, known so far from a single skull, was probably among the largest terrestrial animals alive at the time, reaching around a foot in length — roughly the size of an American football — based on the proportions of close relatives. The fossil was recovered from shoreline cliffs in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada.

It is thought to represent a stem amniote: part of the lineage of vertebrates that evolved the ability to lay eggs away from water, unlike amphibians which must still return to water to reproduce. This group ultimately gave rise to reptiles, birds, and mammals — in other words, to almost the entire later terrestrial vertebrate world, including ourselves.