Creationism Refuted - The Simple Mutation That Made Grasses So Successful - 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Joinvillea ascendans, a close relative of grass plants. Used in the Study

Photo: Sarah Friedrich.

Maeda and his collaborators sequenced the slow-growing Joinvillea ascendans plant, a close relative of grasses, to compare genomes and learn what makes grass plants unique.

Photo: Sarah Friedrich.

Molecular “bypasses” improve grass plants’ synthesis of lignin and starch, laying the early groundwork for evolutionary success – Department of Biology – UW–Madison

Creationists routinely claim that mutations can only damage genetic “information” and can never produce anything genuinely new. The claim depends partly upon leaving information conveniently undefined and partly upon ignoring the many well-understood processes by which genomes acquire new functions. Gene duplication, mutation and natural selection can preserve an existing function while a spare copy accumulates changes, sometimes enabling it to perform an additional task or participate in a new biochemical pathway.

A new study published in Science provides an unusually clear example. Rather than merely showing that related organisms possess different enzymes, Yuri Takeda-Kimura and colleagues reconstructed how two important metabolic innovations arose during the ancestry of grasses: additional routes for producing starch and lignin. They did this by comparing the genomes of grasses with those of several of their closest non-grass relatives, including Joinvillea, Ecdeiocolea, Pharus and Typha.

Refuting Creationism - Observed Evolution Of Live Birth in the European Common Lizard

European common lizard, Zootoca vivipara

Image credit: Meredith Kimble

European common lizard, Zootoca vivipara

By Ocrdu - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

University of Glasgow - University news - Scientists uncover the evolutionary process behind live birth in lizards

Live birth is not a simple characteristic that could be produced by switching a single gene on or off. Retaining embryos inside the mother until they are sufficiently developed to survive requires coordinated changes in gestation length, uterine physiology, eggshell formation, gas exchange, nutrient transfer, hormonal control and the maternal immune response. To creationists, this is just the sort of complex biological system that must supposedly have appeared complete and fully functional in a single act of creation.

But that is not what the genomes of living animals show.

In a study recently published in Current Biology, an international team led by Dr Hongxin Xie of the University of Glasgow has reconstructed how live birth evolved in the Eurasian common lizard, Zootoca vivipara. The transition did not depend upon one miraculous genetic leap, or even upon one or two mutations of exceptionally large effect. It arose through natural selection acting upon numerous genetic changes distributed across the genome and accumulated over an extended period.

Refuting Creationism - How Flightless Beetles Evolved On Japanese Islands

Carabus blaptoides

By Adan - Photo taken by Adan at Sendai Miyagi, Japan., CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Reach in or crush the shell? A flightless snail-hunting beetle evolved different body shapes even without a sea barrier | EurekAlert!

Montage created by AI (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Phylogenetic relationships and geographic distribution of Carabus blaptoides

Junji Konuma

Islands have repeatedly provided some of the clearest demonstrations of evolution in action. The most famous example is, of course, Darwin’s finches, whose differently shaped beaks reflect adaptation to different foods in the Galápagos. More recently, as I described in an earlier article about “Darwin’s daisies”, the Galápagos plant genus Scalesia has diversified from a common ancestor into forms with different growth habits and leaf shapes suited to different island environments.

Now scientists studying the Japanese Archipelago have uncovered another striking example of the same fundamental evolutionary process—this time involving flightless beetles and the land snails they eat.

In a paper published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, Junji Konuma of Toho University, Nobuaki Nagata of Japan’s National Museum of Nature and Science, and Teiji Sota of Kyoto University describe the evolutionary diversification of the snail-eating ground beetle Carabus blaptoides. The species is distributed across the Japanese islands and has diversified into eight recognised subspecies.

Because the beetles’ hindwings are reduced, they cannot fly and must disperse on foot. Seas therefore isolate populations on different islands, while sheer distance, topography and environmental variation can restrict movement even between populations on the same large island. This reduced gene flow allows populations to respond independently to local ecological conditions—the familiar starting point for adaptive divergence and, eventually, speciation.

The principal selective pressure appears to be sitting on the beetles’ dinner plate—or, more accurately, retreating into its shell. Different regions of Japan contain different assemblages and sizes of land snails, particularly species of Euhadra and Satsuma. Beetles living where large snails predominate tend to have long, narrow heads and thoraxes. This slender form allows a beetle to push its head deeply into a large shell and reach the animal inside.

Refuting Creationism - Rapid Evolution In Andean Potato Eaters

Andean Quechua speaker

By Cacophony - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Quechua woman and child in the Sacred Valley

By quinet - Mother and Child, CC BY 2.0, Link

Indigenous Andeans have a digestive superpower; researchers think it may be linked to potatoes  | UCLA

The results of a study co-led by researchers at UCLA and the University at Buffalo, published in Nature Communications in May 2026, provide another straightforward counterexample to the creationist claim that natural processes cannot add genetic material to a genome without the intervention of their particular magic creator. They also show how relatively recent human evolution can be detected, reconstructed and quantified from the DNA of living populations.

What cannot be observed is the intelligently designed caricature of evolution that creationists are conditioned to mistake for the scientific theory: a single dramatic event in which one species suddenly transforms into an unrelated form. There is no plausible biological mechanism for such a transformation, which is why evolutionary biologists have never proposed one. Biological evolution is a change in the frequency of heritable variants within a population over successive generations; larger differences, including those associated with speciation, accumulate through many such changes.

Young-Earth creationists are nevertheless prepared to invoke evolution at an absurdly accelerated rate when their mythology requires it. To squeeze the present diversity of life into the few millennia supposedly available after their genocidal global flood, a small number of vaguely defined ancestral “kinds” would have needed to diversify into hundreds of thousands of beetle species and countless other forms almost overnight. Yet the same creationists baulk at evidence that human populations have undergone much more modest evolutionary changes over thousands of years.

The new research concerns AMY1, the salivary amylase gene. Salivary amylase begins the digestion of starch in the mouth, and people differ considerably in the number of AMY1 copies they carry. An early duplication of the gene occurred in the hominin lineage at least 800,000 years ago, after which repeated duplications, deletions and inversions generated numerous structural variants containing different numbers of copies. These are mutations that change the amount and arrangement of genetic material in the genome — precisely the sort of naturally arising variation that creationists insist cannot occur.

Crucially, cultivating potatoes did not cause the ancestors of Indigenous Andeans to acquire additional AMY1 copies because they needed them. High-copy variants were already present in the population. When potatoes and other starch-rich crops became dietary staples, people carrying more copies probably produced more salivary amylase and obtained a reproductive or survival advantage. Natural selection then increased the frequency of those pre-existing variants — evolution acting as a filter, not as a designer working towards a predetermined goal.

The researchers analysed AMY1 copy numbers in 3,723 people representing 85 populations. Indigenous Peruvian Andeans had among the highest numbers found, with the Quechua participants carrying a median of ten copies, compared with six among the closely related Maya comparison group and seven across the worldwide sample. The genetic evidence indicates that a high-copy haplotype increased in frequency among Andeans from about 2 per cent to approximately 45 per cent after around 10,000 years ago, coinciding with permanent settlement of the high Andes and the domestication of potatoes between about 10,000 and 6,000 years ago.

Refuting Creationism - Ancient Hunters Targeted Female Mammoths - 20,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Mammoth bone accumulation site, Kraków Spadzista, Poland

Photo: Jarosław Wilczyñski

Excavation in Langmannersdorf, Austria, 2025.

Photo: Marc Händel/Austrian Academy of Sciences

Ancient DNA reveals Ice Age hunter-gatherers preferentially targeted female mammoths - Stockholms universitet

A heap of ancient bones does not come with a label explaining how it was formed. When large accumulations of woolly mammoth remains are found at Upper Palaeolithic sites, archaeologists must determine whether the animals were killed by people, scavenged after natural deaths, or accumulated through entirely natural processes such as floods, landslides or animals becoming trapped in bogs.

Cut marks, deliberately broken bones and stone projectile points embedded in mammoth remains show that humans sometimes hunted and butchered these enormous animals. But such evidence is not present on every bone, leaving open the possibility that some of the great mammoth bonebeds of Eurasia resulted largely from natural mortality rather than sustained human exploitation.

Now an international team led by researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm has approached the problem from an ingenious new direction: instead of asking only what happened to the bones, they used ancient DNA to determine whether the mammoths were male or female.

As described in a newly published paper in Current Biology, the researchers analysed genome data from 521 woolly mammoths, Mammuthus primigenius, recovered across Eurasia and North America. These included 448 animals sequenced for the first time, making this one of the largest palaeogenomic studies yet undertaken on an extinct species.

The contrast was striking. Among 421 mammoths recovered as dispersed remains from natural depositional settings, 66 per cent were male and only 34 per cent female. That male bias is consistent with the behaviour of modern elephants: adult males commonly leave their natal herds and live alone, making them more likely to take risks or become caught in natural traps such as bogs, sinkholes and landslides.

However, among 100 mammoths from large bone accumulations associated with Upper Palaeolithic people, the ratio was almost exactly reversed: 70 per cent were female and only 30 per cent male. As the researchers explain, this substantial difference provides population-scale evidence that human activity, rather than natural mortality alone, was the principal force creating these bone accumulations.

That does not necessarily mean that hunters deliberately selected females simply because they were smaller than adult males. If mammoths lived like modern elephants, females and their young would have travelled in matriarchal herds capable of mounting a formidable collective defence. However, such herds may also have followed more predictable routes than solitary males, making them easier for hunter-gatherers to locate repeatedly. People may have hunted them, scavenged animals that died along those routes, or—most probably—used a combination of both strategies.

Either way, the result opens a remarkable window onto human behaviour between about 30,000 and 20,000 years ago. Mammoths supplied meat and fat for food, hides for clothing and shelter, bones for construction, and ivory for tools, ornaments and works of art. By combining genetics with archaeology and knowledge of elephant social behaviour, scientists can now reconstruct something of how Upper Palaeolithic people located and exploited this critically important resource.

And all this human ingenuity, accumulated ecological knowledge and repeated interaction with mammoth herds was taking place tens of thousands of years before creationists believe their god created Earth and everything upon it. Once again, the evidence reveals not a recently created world interrupted by a global flood, but a deep and richly documented human past—one preserved not merely in tools and bones, but in fragments of ancient DNA surviving within those bones.

Creationism Refuted - The Neanderthal Genes We Inherited Are Still Making A Difference.

We carry the legacy of our ancestors interbreeding with Neanderthals

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5)

Shana - the daughter of a Neanderthal father and a Homo sapiens mother
Cover illustration for my book The Way of the Wolf

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Neandertal growth hormone receptor increases muscle mass in people today | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Evolutionary history is often represented as a neatly branching tree: an ancestral population divides, its descendants diverge, and each resulting lineage continues along its own independent path. Real evolution, however, is frequently much less tidy.

As I explained in my previous post on the Hawaiian honeycreepers, lineages that have begun to diverge can subsequently meet again and exchange genes through hybridisation. The result is reticulated evolution: an evolutionary history that is partly tree-like but also contains connecting branches where genes have passed between related populations.

The same principle applies to our own ancestry.

Modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans were not separately created, genetically sealed “kinds”. They were closely related human lineages produced by population separation and divergence, but that separation was never absolute. When populations encountered one another again, they sometimes interbred, allowing genes from one evolutionary branch to enter another—a process known as introgression.

Much of the resulting Neanderthal-derived DNA carried by people today may have little or no detectable effect. Some introgressed variants, however, continue to influence human biology. An international team led by Philipp Kanis of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Hugo Zeberg of Karolinska Institutet has now investigated one particularly interesting example: the Neanderthal version of the growth-hormone receptor.

Their peer-reviewed paper in Current Biology examines two amino-acid substitutions in the receptor that were characteristic of Neanderthals. The growth-hormone receptor sits on the surface of cells and transmits the signal produced when growth hormone binds to it, helping to regulate the growth of bone, muscle and other tissues.

In laboratory-grown cells, the Neanderthal form of the receptor produced a stronger response to growth hormone than the common modern-human version. Under the experimental conditions used, cells carrying it grew by about 40 per cent more, with most of the increase attributable to one of the two Neanderthal-derived substitutions.

Refuting Creationism - Evolutionary Radiation Of Hawaiian Honeycreepers

Hawaiian honeycreepers

Source: Wikipedia (various contributors)

Loxiodes bailleui

By Jack Jeffrey, USGS - gallery.usgs.gov, Public Domain, Link

Smithsonian Scientists Resolve the Hawaiian Honeycreeper Family Tree | Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute

Only a few days after writing about Darwin’s famous Galápagos finches and how the Galápagos daisy had parallelled their evolutionary radiation, another group of island birds provides an even more spectacular example of adaptive radiation.

This time the setting is the Hawaiian archipelago, and the birds are the Hawaiian honeycreepers — an extraordinary collection of finches that evolved an assortment of beaks, diets and ways of life from a shared ancestral population.

More than 60 species of Hawaiian honeycreeper are known, ranging from thick-billed seed-eaters and nectar-feeders to birds with long, curved beaks for probing flowers or extracting insects from beneath bark. Some became so anatomically different that, before their evolutionary relationships were understood, naturalists found it difficult to believe that they could all be related.

But related they are. According to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Michael G. Campana and colleagues at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute and National Museum of Natural History, the honeycreepers form a single adaptive radiation whose history includes not only repeated branching into new species but also genetic exchange between some of those emerging lineages.

Creationism in Crisis - Speciation in Progress? - Genetic Isolation In A British Dolphin.

Risso's dolphin Grampus griseus.

Credit: Nicola Hodgins

Risso's dolphin, Grampus griseus

© Nicola Hodgins.

British Risso’s dolphins belong to single population - University of Exeter News

According to newly published research in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom (JMBA), Risso’s dolphins, Grampus griseus, around the British Isles appear to form a single, genetically connected population. At the same time, their mitochondrial DNA distinguishes them from dolphins sampled elsewhere in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, suggesting that the British population has experienced relatively little genetic exchange with more distant populations.

The research was conducted by an international team whose joint first authors were Nicola K. Hodgins, a visiting researcher at the University of Exeter, UK, and Ing Chen of National Taiwan Normal University, with Michael Krützen of the University of Zurich as corresponding author.

At first sight, describing the British dolphins as both a single population and genetically distinct might seem contradictory, but the two findings concern different geographical scales. Within British waters, the dolphins appear to interbreed freely enough to prevent significant regional genetic divisions from developing. Compared with populations farther afield, however, reduced gene flow has allowed the British population to acquire a distinctive genetic signature.

Creationism In Crisis - After Darwin's Finches It's Darwin's Daisies - Evolution In Progress

Serrated leaves of Scalesia affinis (radiate-headed scalesia)

Photo: Michael Martin, NTNU University Museum

Botany’s answer to Darwin’s finches shows evolution in real time

The Galápagos Islands occupy an iconic place in the history of evolutionary biology. The animals and plants Darwin encountered there during the voyage of HMS Beagle contributed important evidence to the theory he developed after returning to England: that living species are not fixed and immutable but are the products of a long historical process.

Darwin eventually realised that natural selection acting upon inherited variation could produce organisms that appeared designed for their environments, without foresight, planning or divine intervention. Individuals possessing variations that gave them an advantage in their particular circumstances tended to leave more descendants, causing those variations to become more common over successive generations.

Like the uniformitarian geologists—particularly Charles Lyell—Darwin recognised that the world as we see it is not a fixed unchangeable result of a single act of perfect creation, but is the product of natural processes operating over immense periods of time. The processes that shaped the past are still operating today and will continue to shape the future.

The familiar story that Darwin saw the Galápagos finches and immediately conceived his theory is, however, an oversimplification. During the voyage, he believed he had collected birds belonging to several different groups, including finches, grosbeaks, blackbirds, wrens and warblers. Only after the ornithologist John Gould examined the specimens in England did it become apparent that these apparently disparate birds belonged to a distinctive group of closely related species—what we now call Darwin’s finches, although taxonomically they are members of the tanager family.

Darwin then appreciated the evolutionary significance of their shared characteristics and striking differences. Their varied body sizes and beaks could be understood as modifications of a common ancestral form, associated with different diets and ecological niches throughout the archipelago. One ancestral population had diversified into numerous related forms: a process now known as adaptive radiation.

The standard creationist response is to dismiss Darwin’s finches as evidence for evolution because they remain recognisably finch-like. This objection depends upon the childish parody of evolution in which one species should turn suddenly into an entirely different and supposedly unrelated species. Such an event would not demonstrate evolution; it would contradict the branching process of descent with modification. Descendants necessarily remain related to their ancestors and inherit modified versions of ancestral structures.

This misconception lies behind such familiar creationist “Gotchas!” as “Why do we never see evolution happening?” and “Why has evolution stopped?” Evolution has not stopped. What creationists demand to see is not evolution but an instantaneous transformation that evolutionary biology neither predicts nor requires.

Darwin knew nothing of Mendelian genetics or DNA, of course. Modern genomic research has confirmed the common ancestry of his finches while revealing a history more complicated than a simple, neatly branching tree. Rapidly diverging lineages can retain genetic variants inherited from their common ancestor and can occasionally exchange genes through hybridisation.

Now, genomic research into a family of plants—the genus Scalesia, commonly known as the Galápagos giant daisies—has provided a botanical counterpart to Darwin’s finches. In only about one million years, the founding lineage has diversified into 15 recognised species occupying habitats ranging from dense, humid highland forests to hot, dry and exposed lowlands. They vary from low-growing shrubs to trees, with leaves ranging from large and unlobed to small, deeply lobed and intricately serrated.

Refuting Creationism - The Complex Origins of Modern Humans - No Just A Single Couple - Not Even A Single Species

Interwoven Human ancestry

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

New technique pinpoints human DNA inherited from ‘ghost’ ancestors - Berkeley News

Using genealogical relationships in DNA, UC Berkeley researchers have uncovered hidden contributions from extinct human populations that left no sequenced genomes.

Meaghan Marohn

The evolutionary ancestry of modern Homo sapiens is far more complex than anything the authors of the Bible’s absurdly simplistic origin myths could have imagined. We already know that populations of our species migrating out of Africa interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans, and that these two archaic lineages also exchanged genes with one another. Consequently, most people with ancestry outside Africa carry some Neanderthal DNA, while many Asian and especially Oceanian populations also carry Denisovan DNA.

Now, according to a paper just published in Science, our ancestry is even more complicated. A team led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, with colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and 54Gene, has identified genetic material inherited from two previously unknown archaic hominin lineages. These are described as “ghost” lineages because no sequenced genome from either population is available: their existence must be inferred from the traces they left in the genomes of living people.

The researchers developed a computational method called TRACE — TRacking Archaic Contributions via ARG Estimation — which reconstructs genealogical relationships among segments of DNA. By identifying regions whose ancestry extends unusually far back in time, TRACE can detect contributions from extinct populations without requiring DNA recovered from their bones.

Creationism Refuted - How Humans Modified Wild Rice - Because 'The Creator' Didn't Know What We Needed?

Paddy fields in Vietnam with people transplanting rice.

Dave Mckay/Alamy Stock Photo

Different varieties of rice grown today

By IRRI Images - originally posted to Flickr as IMG_2039-77,
CC BY 2.0, Link

One grain to rule them all: the history of rice as a global food

A point made several times in these blog posts is that the creationist interpretation of Genesis presents the living world as having been deliberately created for human use. That raises an obvious question: why have humans needed to modify virtually every domesticated animal and cultivated plant to make it more useful?

In many cases, selective breeding has altered organisms so extensively that modern breeds and crop varieties are barely recognisable as descendants of their wild ancestors. Did the supposed creator fail to anticipate how humans would use them, or was it simply incapable of finishing the job and obliged to leave the improvements to us?

Creationists have never produced a satisfactory, evidence-based answer. Instead, they appeal to “mystery”, “unknowable intentions” or some other form of theological evasion — ways of avoiding the question while pretending to have answered it. Alternatively, they simply ignore the problem and continue asserting that Genesis provides an accurate account of history and the origins of living species.

Rice, of course, doesn't get a mention in the Bible, the cultural origins of whose authors were primarily the Tigris-Euphrates rivers of Mesopotamia and later the Nile in Egypt, where wheat and barley were the staple crops, so they knew nothing of the origins or cultivation of rice, nor of India or China for that matter. Wheat by contrast is mentioned in the Bible 51 times and barley, 37.

Science, by contrast, allows us to reconstruct increasingly detailed and testable histories of domesticated animals and cultivated plants. Genetics, archaeology and the study of ancient plant remains show how humans selected heritable variations and gradually changed wild populations through artificial selection, hybridisation and the movement of crops between regions. One particularly fascinating example is the origin and cultivation of Asian rice, Oryza sativa, which now provides sustenance for more than 3.5 billion people.

The evidence traces this history across a timescale wholly incompatible with the creationist belief in a 6,000–10,000-year-old Earth. Wild rice ancestral to modern cultivated rice was growing in the lower Yangtze region of China about 100,000 years ago. Humans began gathering and processing it approximately 24,000 years ago, and evidence of pre-domestication cultivation appears about 13,000 years ago. By around 11,000 years ago, plant remains show a rapid increase in characteristics associated with domestication, as generations of human selection transformed wild rice into a recognisably cultivated crop.

There is also evidence of rice cultivation in the Ganges valley of northern India as early as 6500 BCE—about 8,500 years ago. The details remain a subject of legitimate scientific debate, particularly whether Indian rice was domesticated independently and how much the eventual development of indica rice owed to hybridisation between local rice and japonica introduced from China. What is not in dispute is that modern rice emerged through a prolonged history of cultivation, selection, migration and hybridisation — not through an instantaneous act of creation.

The history of rice is the subject of an article in The Conversation by Garritt C. Van Dyk, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. His article is reprinted below under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency:

How Evolution Works - The Founder Effect

The brown tree snake, Boiga irregularis

Photo: USGS

Photo: USGS

Study: Hidden genetic diversity may have helped inbred brown tree snakes take over Guam - University at Buffalo

Biological invasions present evolutionary biologists with an apparent paradox. A newly established population may begin with only a handful of individuals and therefore contain only a small sample of the genetic variation present in its parent population. The resulting population bottleneck should increase inbreeding, reduce its capacity to adapt and expose harmful recessive mutations to natural selection. In extreme cases, the population should succumb to what population geneticists call an “extinction vortex”, in which declining genetic diversity and declining population size reinforce one another.

And yet some introduced species do precisely the opposite. They survive, proliferate and overwhelm the ecosystems into which they have been introduced. Few examples are more spectacular—or more ecologically destructive—than the brown tree snake, Boiga irregularis, on the Pacific island of Guam.

Native to Australia, Papua New Guinea and other parts of the western Pacific, brown tree snakes probably reached Guam as accidental stowaways in military cargo sometime after the Second World War. The invading population is believed to have been founded by only a handful of snakes. Nevertheless, their descendants multiplied until, in some parts of the island, densities reached an extraordinary 30,000 snakes per square mile.

The consequences for Guam’s wildlife have been catastrophic. As nocturnal, generalist predators encountering abundant prey that had evolved without such a snake, they devastated the island’s native birds, causing several species to disappear from the wild on Guam. They have also disrupted food webs, preyed upon reptiles and small mammals and caused hundreds of power cuts by climbing electricity infrastructure.

But how did a population founded by so few individuals avoid collapsing under the burden of inbreeding?

A new paper in Science Advances by Christopher A. Osborne of the University at Buffalo and colleagues from Buffalo and the US Geological Survey suggests that the answer lies partly in a form of genetic variation that earlier sequencing methods tended to miss.

The snakes did not, in fact, avoid the bottleneck. Their genomes retain compelling evidence of it. The researchers found that roughly half of each snake’s genome consisted of long “runs of homozygosity”—regions in which the copies inherited from the mother and father were almost identical. This is a genomic signature of intense inbreeding, comparable with that seen in some endangered species of conservation concern.

However, genetic diversity is not confined to changes in individual DNA letters. Using long-read sequencing, which can detect much larger differences, the researchers found nearly 19,000 structural variants. These included sections of DNA that had been duplicated, deleted, inserted or rearranged. Together, these structural variants affected almost eight times as much of the genome as the single-nucleotide variants upon which conventional estimates of genetic diversity have largely relied.

More importantly, the surviving variation was not distributed randomly. Structural variants were especially abundant around gene promoters and in genes associated with adaptive immunity and olfaction. Variation in immune genes could help the snakes respond to pathogens, while variation affecting their highly developed sense of smell could influence their ability to recognise prey, exploit different foods and distinguish closely related snakes from potential prey. In other words, a population can be genetically impoverished overall while retaining disproportionately important variation in precisely those parts of its genome that influence survival and adaptability.

Refuting Creationism - The Unbroken History of China

Carving stone at Shimao city.

Image by IVPP.

The landscape of Shimao city.

Image by IVPP.

New DNA Study Unlocks Origins, Social Structure of Neolithic Shimao Civilization----Chinese Academy of Sciences

In my last blog post, I pointed out that ancient Egypt’s archaeological and written record extends continuously from long before the date young-Earth creationists assign to Noah’s Flood, through that supposed catastrophe and into biblical times. Nowhere is there any sign that Egypt was destroyed by a global flood and subsequently repopulated by migrants from Mesopotamia. I also showed that the biblical writers who set stories in Egypt possessed only a tenuous understanding of its real history and culture.

Ancient China presents creationists with much the same problem. Its archaeological record contains long regional sequences extending across the supposed date of the Flood, with local populations, cultures and economies continuing to develop. If every human outside Noah’s immediate family had been exterminated, the existing peoples of East Asia should disappear from the record and be replaced by a rapidly expanding population of recent Mesopotamian origin. That is not what archaeology shows—and ancient DNA now provides an especially clear test of the claim.

The evidence comes from a paper published in Nature in November 2025 by an international team led by Professor Qiaomei Fu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with researchers from several other Chinese institutions.

The team analysed genome-wide data from 169 ancient individuals recovered from Shimao and surrounding settlements in northern China. Population analyses were conducted using 144 unrelated individuals, while the remaining close relatives enabled the researchers to reconstruct pedigrees extending across as many as four generations.

Shimao, in northern Shaanxi Province, was one of the largest fortified settlements in Late Neolithic China. Occupied from approximately 2300 to 1800 BCE, it covered about four square kilometres and contained massive stone walls, separate inner and outer enclosures, specialised craft production, elite cemeteries and unmistakable evidence of a highly stratified society. Its occupation therefore began at about the very time when, according to the conventional young-Earth creationist chronology, the world should have been struggling to recover from a global extermination and repopulation by Noah’s immediate descendants.

Instead, the genomes showed that the people associated with Shimao were predominantly descended from populations already living in northern Shaanxi at least 1,000 years earlier. Those earlier inhabitants were associated with the Yangshao cultural tradition of the Yellow River’s Loess Plateau. The researchers found regional genetic continuity from the Middle to the Late Neolithic—continuity extending from before the supposed Flood into the centuries following it.

This was not a completely isolated or genetically static population. The researchers detected continuing contact with Yumin-related people from Inner Mongolia, close connections with the contemporary Taosi population farther south, and some ancestry from southern East Asian populations, possibly associated with the northward spread of rice cultivation. These were the ordinary movements, exchanges and intermarriages expected among neighbouring prehistoric farming and pastoral communities. They did not interrupt the dominant local ancestry, and there was no sign of wholesale population replacement by descendants of a family recently arrived from Mesopotamia.

The genetic evidence also revealed much about the organisation of Shimao society. Pedigrees reconstructed from elite burials indicated a predominantly patrilineal system in which status and wealth commonly passed from high-ranking men to their sons. Male members of these lineages showed relatively little diversity in their Y-chromosome ancestry, whereas the women displayed much greater mitochondrial diversity. This is consistent with women frequently marrying into communities dominated by established male lineages, although the evidence for strictly patrilocal residence remains suggestive rather than conclusive.

The study also uncovered a possible sex-related pattern in Shimao’s practice of human sacrifice. Nine of the ten sampled victims buried beneath the East Gate were male, contradicting earlier identifications based on skeletal anatomy. In contrast, most sampled sacrificial victims accompanying elite burials were female: six of seven at Hanjiagedan and fourteen of nineteen at Huangchengtai. This suggests that male and female victims may have been selected for different rituals conducted in different places, although the researchers caution that the number of genetically sexed victims remains too small to establish the pattern conclusively.

Refuting Creationism - Population Collapse And Migration in Neolithic Europe - And No Evidence Of A Genocidal Flood

The researchers have conducted DNA analyses of the skeletons from a burial site like this one in France and found traces of several different diseases.

Photo: Getty Images / Michal Boubin

Stone age population collapse revealed by DNA study in France – University of Copenhagen

A paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution by a large international team led by researchers at the University of Copenhagen, reports evidence that simply should not exist if the Bible creation myth, and its later global genocidal flood myth, had any basis in reality. The evidence shows a significant population collapse among Neolithic farming communities in what is now northern France about 5,000 years ago, followed by migration into the depopulated area by people with strong genetic links to southern France and the Iberian Peninsula.

The study is based on ancient DNA from 132 individuals buried in the allée sépulcrale at Bury, a large megalithic tomb about 50 kilometres north of Paris. The site was used during two distinct burial phases, separated by a hiatus associated with the wider Neolithic decline around 3000 BC. The researchers found that the people buried before and after this decline were not simply later descendants of the same local population, but belonged to largely discontinuous genetic groups. In other words, this was not merely a change in burial custom; it was a major population turnover.

The problems this presents for creationism are multiple. First, there is the evidence of established farming populations in northern Europe at a time when, according to Young Earth Creationist chronology, the world had only recently been magicked into existence. Secondly, there is the embarrassing survival of archaeological and genetic evidence which, under the same mythology, should either have been destroyed in a global flood a few centuries later, or buried beneath a distinctive, worldwide layer of fossil-bearing flood silt — a layer which is conspicuous by its absence. Thirdly, there is the evidence that the human population of Europe had already diversified into regionally distinct genetic populations by about 3000 BC, with enough structure for ancient DNA to distinguish northern French and German-like Neolithic farmers from later migrants with strong southern French and Iberian affinities.

None of this, of course, will cause creationists to reconsider the mythology. We can confidently predict that it will instead be treated as another test of faith: one more opportunity to demonstrate the strength of their determination never to let evidence change their minds. In creationist apologetics, refusal to learn is often mistaken for intellectual victory. The more compelling the evidence, the greater the achievement in ignoring it.

The reason for the population decline is not yet clear. The human remains contained genetic traces of pathogens, including the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, and the louse-borne relapsing fever bacterium, Borrelia recurrentis, but the evidence does not support plague as the sole cause of the collapse. The more likely explanation is a combination of disease, environmental stress, demographic disruption and social breakdown. Earlier burials contained multiple generations from the same extended families, suggesting stable, kin-based communities. Later burials were more selective and were dominated by a single male lineage, indicating a marked change in social organisation after the population turnover.

This adds to the growing picture of the so-called Neolithic decline as a widespread phenomenon affecting much of northern and western Europe, not just Scandinavia and northern Germany. It also offers a plausible explanation for the abrupt disappearance of megalithic tomb-building and other monumental traditions across parts of Europe at about the same time. The people who built those monuments did not merely change their minds about architecture; in places such as the Paris Basin, the population itself appears to have collapsed and been replaced.

Malevolent Design - How Melanomas Are Cleverly 'Designed' To Stay Alive

Telomeres shown as white caps on the ends of the chromosome arms.

Pitt scientists discovered a key genetic step in melanoma’s race to live forever | University of Pittsburgh

Examples from nature in which, if creationist arguments for the existence of an intelligent designer are applied consistently, that designer can only be regarded as a malevolent entity intent on increasing suffering in the world, continue to accumulate. And the more examples there are, the more creationists need to ignore their own arguments, abandon any pretence that creationism is a genuine alternative science, and retreat instead into the fundamentalist biblical myths of 'The Fall' and 'Original Sin'. The evidence remains the same; only the interpretation is twisted to preserve the preferred narrative.

The latest such example concerns the genetics behind one of malignant melanoma's most dangerous properties: its ability to evade the normal cellular limit on repeated division. This had long been a missing piece in understanding how melanoma cells avoid the ordinary route to cellular senescence and continue to proliferate. Like Michael J. Behe's and William A. Dembski's supposed 'evidence' for intelligent design, it depends on a set of interacting components being in place and on genetic changes producing just the right molecular effect — precisely the kind of arrangement the Discovery Institute insists cannot arise by natural processes because, in its caricature of biology, evolution is merely 'random chance'. That claim, of course, ignores the elementary biological fact that natural selection makes evolution very much a non-random process.

The discovery, published in Science in November 2022 by Pattra Chun-on, Jonathan K. Alder and colleagues, concerns telomeres — the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes. In most normal somatic cells, telomeres gradually shorten with repeated cell division until the cell can no longer divide. This is one of the body's safeguards against uncontrolled proliferation. Cancer cells, however, often find ways to bypass this limit, and melanoma has long been known for having unusually long telomeres, even compared with many other cancers. What had not been fully understood was how melanoma achieved this.

The answer involves telomerase, the enzyme complex that lengthens telomeres. In most normal adult cells, telomerase activity is switched off or kept very low. Many melanomas carry mutations in the promoter region of TERT, the gene that encodes the catalytic component of telomerase, and these mutations increase telomerase activity. But that turned out to be only part of the story. When researchers introduced TERT promoter mutations into melanocytes, they did not reproduce the exceptionally long telomeres seen in melanoma tumours.

The missing component was TPP1, a member of the shelterin complex that helps regulate telomeres. The researchers found that mutations in the promoter region of ACD, the gene that encodes TPP1, can increase TPP1 production. When these TPP1-promoter mutations occur together with TERT promoter mutations, the two changes cooperate to produce the long telomeres characteristic of melanoma. In other words, melanoma's ability to evade normal cellular mortality depends on a coordinated interaction between altered telomerase activity and altered telomere regulation.

So, in intelligent-design creationist terms, we have a system requiring interacting molecular components, each specified by genetic changes in ordinary cellular genes, and each contributing to a result that benefits the cancer cell at the expense of the patient. If the same kind of molecular cooperation in a harmless or useful organism is to be paraded as evidence of design, then consistency demands the same conclusion here. Melanoma, on that argument, would be another product of the same intelligent designer — one whose ingenuity is directed towards helping cancer cells escape the body's normal restraints.

Of course, the scientifically honest conclusion is not that melanoma was designed, malevolently or otherwise. It is that cancer exploits the same evolved molecular machinery that normal cells use, and that mutations filtered by selection within the tumour can favour cells that divide faster, survive longer and outcompete their neighbours. The creationist problem is that the very mechanisms they claim as evidence for their designer are just as plainly at work in disease, parasitism and suffering.

Refuting Creationism - Observed Evolution In A South African Leopard Population

The elusive Cape leopard.

Jana Ohrner/iNaturalist, CC BY-NC

Leopards adapted to South Africa’s Cape so successfully that they’re genetically unique – study

This paper will have creationists hurriedly trying to redefine evolution so that it no longer means what biologists mean by it — change in allele frequencies in a population over time — but instead becomes some childish parody of the idea, carefully constructed to exclude the scientific definition and so safely miss the point. The paper, published last January (2026) in Heredity, shows that a small, isolated population of leopards (Panthera pardus) in South Africa’s Cape Floristic Region is a striking example of incipient allopatric divergence, and possibly early speciation, in progress. The population, estimated at fewer than 1,000 individuals, has developed a distinctive genome and includes small leopards, some with only about half the body mass of leopards elsewhere in Africa.

In what will also disappoint those creationists who are still eagerly awaiting the abandonment of “Darwinism” by mainstream biologists and its replacement by magic-based creationism, the authors — an international group of leopard conservationists and evolutionary biologists — interpret their findings wholly within the framework of evolutionary theory. By comparing whole-genome data from 43 leopards, including 10 from the Western Cape province (WCP), the team found that the WCP leopards diverged from those of northern South Africa about 20,000–24,000 years ago — in other words, many thousands of years before creationists’ mythical “Creation Week”. They found no obvious evidence that genetic drift alone was responsible for this divergence, and concluded instead that it is more likely to reflect the population’s demographic history, long-term isolation and adaptation to the Cape’s distinctive environmental conditions, including low prey availability.

Their conclusion is that the leopards of the Western Cape can be regarded as an evolutionarily significant unit (ESU): a genetically distinctive population representing a unique component of the species’ evolutionary history and therefore one that should be managed and conserved as such.

One of the team, and first author of the paper, Assistant Professor Laura Tensen of the University of Greifswald, has written an article in The Conversation describing the research and its findings. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Unintelligent Design - The DNA In A Developing Brain Gets Broken And Has To Be Repaired - Incompetent Design Or Evolution?

Neurons migrating through dense tissue in the developing brain (green) frequently undergo DNA damage (magenta).

DNA in neurons is damaged and repaired during brain cortex formation | News | Kyoto University iCeMS

Like my last post, this post illustrates how the human body, far from being the perfect design of the omnipotent, omniscient designer creationists would have us believe in, is the result of a utilitarian evolutionary process. Layers of complexity arise, not from divine brilliance, but from evolved solutions to problems created by suboptimal earlier solutions to other problems — which were themselves the result of imperfect evolution.

In the previous post we saw how DNA replication is sufficiently imperfect that it requires mechanisms to repair the resulting DNA damage. However, these repair processes are themselves potentially dangerous and need control systems to maintain a careful balance between too little and too much repair. When this control process fails, it can lead to cancers that mimic those caused by the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which are associated with increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer.

In this post we see how newborn neurons in the developing brain need to squeeze through tight spaces in dense tissue, past other cells and between fibres, in order to reach their final positions and form neural circuits in the cerebral and cerebellar cortices. This process is such a physical struggle that the DNA in these neurons can suffer double-strand breaks and must be repaired quickly to ensure normal brain development. This is the finding of a research team from Kyoto University, the University of Tokyo, Osaka University, the National University of Singapore and the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, led by Professor Mineko Kengaku who have just published their findings in Nature.

Mostly, this repair is quick and successful. However, the research team also found striking similarities between the development of mice in which the repair process failed and human genome-instability syndromes that affect the cerebellum.

Another important point is that this repair process appears to be much more successful in damaged neuronal DNA than in similar damage that can occur when some cancer cells migrate through narrow channels. The difference seems to lie in where the DNA breaks occur. In neurons, they tend to occur in regions of the genome that are not actively being transcribed, whereas in cancer cells the damage can involve essential genes. That suggests there is some biological bias in where these breaks occur in neurons, rather than the process being simply random mechanical shattering.

This raises the obvious question for creationists: why create a process that breaks DNA in developing brain cells, only to require another process to repair it, with the inherent risk that the repair process might be incomplete or imperfect? It also raises the possibility that the resulting small differences in the genomes of individual neurons could contribute to neuronal individuality and perhaps to some neurodevelopmental or neurodegenerative diseases.

The emerging picture, from this and from the rogue repair-control process that can mimic cancers caused by the BRCA genes, is not of a human body designed by an omniscient engineer. It is more like a William Heath Robinson contraption: improvised, overcomplicated, dependent on compensatory mechanisms, and always vulnerable to the failure of the very systems needed to keep it working.

Unintelligent Design - What Happens when A Badly 'Designed' Process Goes Rogue - Cancer - Malevolent Design Or Evolution?

Dr. Alexandra Nusawardhana, the lead author of the study and who earned her doctorate in biomedical sciences this year from Penn State College of Medicine, conducts research to understand genomic instability and cancer treatment response.

Credit: Jason Plotkin / Penn State. Creative Commons

DNA repair protein gene gone rogue may unlock new cancer treatments | Penn State University

A characteristic of evolved biological systems, and one that distinguishes them from systems designed from first principles, is that they are often unnecessarily complex, vulnerable to failure and dependent on layers of patchwork compensation. This is what we should expect from systems produced by utilitarian, suboptimal compromises built from whatever was available at the time.

With no plan, no foresight and no predetermined objective, natural selection can only favour whatever leaves more descendants in a particular environment. The result is not an ideal solution, but merely a workable one — one that is better than what preceded it, even if it remains a very long way from perfection. An intelligent designer, such as the one proposed by advocates of intelligent design, would be under no such historical constraints and could, in principle, rebuild a system from scratch to arrive at the optimal solution.

To illustrate this, this post and the next will look at two recent papers that incidentally demonstrate how many human health problems arise from these over-complex, error-prone systems — systems that would not exist if the human body were the pinnacle of created perfection that creationists imagine it to be. Unless, of course, the designer intended us to suffer when its systems failed.

The first concerns a paper published in February 2026 in Nature Communications by researchers at Penn State College of Medicine. It shows how one component of the DNA repair machinery — a system needed because DNA replication and maintenance are themselves vulnerable to error and damage — can itself go wrong and produce a pattern of genomic instability resembling that seen when the BRCA1 and BRCA2 tumour-suppressor pathway is defective.

The culprit is EXO1, a gene that encodes an exonuclease involved in DNA processing and repair. In normal cells, EXO1 helps trim and process damaged or mismatched DNA so that repair can proceed. But when EXO1 is overexpressed, as the researchers found in a significant proportion of several cancers, including about 20–30% of breast and ovarian cancers as well as melanoma, testicular, cervical and hepatobiliary cancers, too much of this normally useful protein becomes destructive. Instead of helping to preserve genome integrity, excessive EXO1 activity can degrade newly synthesised DNA during replication stress, expanding single-stranded DNA gaps and degrading reversed replication forks.

The result is a BRCA-like pattern of genomic instability even in cells whose BRCA pathway is still functional. In other words, the cell behaves in some important respects like a BRCA-mutant tumour cell, not because BRCA1 or BRCA2 is mutated, but because too much EXO1 has overwhelmed the normal protective system. This matters clinically because such tumours may respond to some of the same treatments used against BRCA-mutant cancers, including drugs that target DNA repair vulnerabilities.

So, we have a DNA replication and maintenance system that needs elaborate repair machinery because the genome is constantly vulnerable to damage; then we have the catastrophic consequences when that repair machinery itself goes rogue. Compare that with the simpler, more robust system we might expect from an intelligent designer endowed with foresight and unconstrained by evolutionary history. Complexity is not the hallmark of intelligent design that creationists claim it to be. In biology, it is very often the accumulated consequence of failure-prone, suboptimal compromises produced by evolutionary tinkering without a predetermined objective.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Cultivated Cotton - No Magic Required

Wild cotton, on left, has short, brown, and coarse fibers, while modern domesticated cotton has white, fine and abundant fibers. A new study led by Iowa State University scientists identified the northwestern Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico as the original source of domesticated cotton.

Photo: Corrinne Grover/Iowa State University.

Cotton’s roots trace to Yucatan Peninsula, where wild gene pool runs deepest - News Service

My last blog post looked at the evolution of the strawberry and how the evidence of multiple whole-genome duplications and speciation by hybridisation refutes several basic creationist, counter-evidential myths and articles of faith.

This post deals with the evolution and cultivation of the cotton plant, which again refutes the childish notion of divine creation, perfectly suited for use by the creator god's favourite creation, humankind, as well as the creationist article of faith that no new genetic information can arise without the direct intervention of a designer god, because this would supposedly violate the laws of thermodynamics.

As a recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), by a team of researchers including Professor Jonathan Wendel of Iowa State University, has shown, modern upland cotton, Gossypium hirsutum, is the result of thousands of years of human selection acting on naturally occurring genetic variation. The team traced its domestication to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, probably to the north-western Yucatán, where wild populations still retain the deepest gene pool. Cotton was first domesticated there about 5,000 years ago, which, if creationist chronology were taken seriously, places it before the supposed genocidal global flood, which it appears to have survived along with the people who cultivated it.

The researchers found that domestication transformed a wild, perennial shrub with small bolls and short, coarse, brown fibres into the modern crop with abundant, long, fine, white fibres. This was not the result of a single act of magical design, nor of a sudden, miraculous improvement, but of long-term selection acting on many mutations of relatively small effect, accumulated and filtered over many generations.

The team also showed that, while human selection produced fibres more useful to people, it did so at a cost. Useful traits present in wild populations, such as disease resistance and salt tolerance, were left behind as farmers selected repeatedly from a restricted subset of the original wild gene pool. Each generation of selection narrowed the genetic base still further, pushing cultivated cotton through a genetic bottleneck.

The researchers reached these conclusions by comparing the genomes of cultivated cotton with those of specimens collected from wild populations across the plant's native range. Their analyses showed that domesticated cotton is most closely related to wild cotton from north-western Yucatán, where two random wild plants still show, on average, about twice as much genetic difference as two random modern cultivars.

After cultivated upland cotton spread out of the Yucatán, it eventually became the dominant cotton crop worldwide, displacing or overshadowing other cotton species that had been independently domesticated in South America, Africa and India. Today, Gossypium hirsutum, or upland cotton, accounts for about 90% of the world's cotton crop.

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.