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 - 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.

Refuting Creationism - How The Evidence Refuses To Comply With Creationist Requirements

Reconstruction of life in the Matjes River Rock Shelter, South Africa, 100,000 years ago

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Ten-thousand-year-old genomes from southern Africa change picture of human evolution – Uppsala University

The story emerging from the latest palaeogenomic research reads like a science fiction epic — only it’s real, deep, and immutably ancient. A new study published in Nature reports that prehistoric humans in southern Africa lived in virtual genetic isolation for tens of thousands of years, diverging so far from other branches of Homo sapiens that their genomes fall “outside the range of genetic variation” seen in any living people. These weren’t minor differences; the DNA of individuals who lived south of the Limpopo River for much of the last 100,000–200,000 years retains an astonishing reservoir of variation, some of which has since vanished from other populations.

This isn’t an update to a dusty side-note in human history. It’s a profound rewriting of our origin story. Instead of a simple, uniform lineage emerging neatly from a single place and time, the evidence shows a complex mosaic of populations, genomes and adaptations evolving in parallel, sometimes in long-term isolation, sometimes intermingling. What we once thought of as the “standard” range of human genetic diversity was simply a tiny slice of a much richer prehistoric past.

For those committed to a literal reading of ancient texts like the Bible, discoveries like this pose a stark challenge. The creationist narrative — anchored in a literal six-day creation a few thousand years ago, followed by the dispersion of humankind from a single family — simply cannot grapple with human populations that were genetically distinct for hundreds of millennia before any traditionally assumed timeline. And yet, even here, one predictable excuse will surface: “God planted the evidence as a test of faith.”

That response, however, collapses under the very theological claims it purports to defend. The Bible repeatedly asserts that God is truthful and incapable of deceit — that “God cannot lie” (Titus 1:2; Numbers 23:19; Hebrews 6:18). If we accept those texts at face value, it follows that the Creator would not embed misleading evidence in the earth’s deepest strata as a cosmic trap for intellect. Instead, what we see in the genetic record is precisely what natural processes — mutation, isolation, selection, drift and admixture — predict and what evolutionary theory models with remarkable fidelity.

Refuting Creationism - How A Chance Mutation Allowed The Evolutionary Transition From Invertebrates To Vertebrates

Sea squirt, Ciona intestinalis

Credit: Shunsuke Sogabe

New discovery sheds light on evolutionary crossroads of vertebrates | University of St Andrews news

Researchers from the University of St Andrews, working with colleagues from the University of Aberdeen and the University of Oxford, have identified a pattern of gene evolution that appears to have been crucial to the origin and subsequent diversification of vertebrates from their common ancestry with invertebrates. They have just published their findings in BMC Biology.

This discovery will be a major disappointment for creationists who cling to the notion that there is no evidence for what they call “macroevolution” — a term so ill-defined that it can be stretched to mean whatever a creationist happens to need at the time. Sometimes it is invoked to mean the origin of a new species, at other times a new genus, an entire new order, or even the biologically absurd idea of one species giving birth to an individual belonging to a completely different order. More often, though, “macroevolution” is said to mean the origin of entirely new anatomical structures.

Even that definition collapses immediately under scrutiny. Asked what novel structure humans possess that chimpanzees lack, “macroevolution” abruptly becomes the evolution of anything creationists choose to label a “kind” — another conveniently nebulous term, defined precisely nowhere and flexibly everywhere.

Yet if the origin and diversification of vertebrates does not qualify as “macroevolution”, it is difficult to imagine what possibly could. The St Andrews–led team has shown that this transition was enabled by gene evolution — that is, mutation acted upon by natural selection — affecting the genetic control of cell signalling during embryonic development. These changes influence when and where new cell types arise as a developing embryo progresses from a single-celled zygote to a complex multicellular organism, complete with differentiated tissues and specialised organs.

As this gene regulatory system evolved, it allowed the vertebrate phylum to diversify into the many classes and orders that now dominate marine and terrestrial ecosystems. No doubt this will require yet another round of misrepresentation by creationists, along with further blurring of the already elastic definitions of “macroevolution” and “kinds”.

Malevoent Design - Has Creationism's Divine Malevolence Been Up To Its Old Tricks? - Another Bat Virus Modified To Infect Humans.

Pteropine orthoreovirus (PRV)

Illustration of a Nipah virus.

Photo: AFP / Ruslanas Baranauskas / Science Pho

Bats Identified as Origin of Unexplained Acute Respiratory Illness and Encephalitis in Bangladesh | Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health

paper just published in Emerging Infectious Diseases by a team led by Nischay Mishra, of the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, shows that Pteropine orthoreovirus (PRV) — a bat-borne orthoreovirus — has crossed the species barrier into humans in Bangladesh, causing a Nipah-like illness that is difficult to distinguish clinically from Nipah virus infection. The disease presents primarily as an acute respiratory infection, sometimes accompanied by encephalitis.

It has long been known that bats possess a markedly more effective antiviral immune system than humans. This fact alone presents a problem for creationists who insist that humans — and, conveniently, themselves — are the special creation of an omnibenevolent deity. There is no coherent reason why such a deity would equip bats with a superior immune system while leaving humans comparatively vulnerable, unless the intention were for humans to suffer more infectious disease than is strictly necessary.

However, the bat immune system appears to have a significant evolutionary trade-off. Rather than eliminating viruses entirely, it often suppresses their pathological effects while allowing persistent infection. As a result, bats function as biological incubators in which viruses can circulate, diversify, and evolve. Inevitably, some of these variants acquire the ability to cross species barriers and infect humans. This remains the most parsimonious explanation for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19 — the pandemic of 2020–2022 that killed tens of millions of people and inflicted severe damage on the global economy.

Creationists argue that complex, specified genetic information must be supplied by their putative intelligent designer and then, by a glaring act of circular reasoning, claim that the mere existence of such information constitutes evidence for that designer. This line of argument has no more merit than insisting that tins of baked beans can only be made by magic pixies, and therefore that the existence of tins of baked beans proves the existence of magic pixies. It is a form of reasoning that functions only for those who lack even a basic grasp of logic.

An additional difficulty for creationists is that PRV could only become infectious to humans if it possessed the precise genetic features required for that capability. Within the internal logic of intelligent design apologetics, the zoonotic PRV must therefore count as the product of deliberate design — and hence as evidence for a malevolent intelligent designer. The usual response is to abandon any pretence that intelligent design is science rather than religion in disguise, and to retreat into Christian fundamentalism, invoking “the Fall” and claiming that some other supernatural entity was empowered to interfere with creation and design its own suite of pathogens and parasites. This claim borders on blasphemy even within Christian theology, which traditionally reserves the creation of living things exclusively to their deity.

Creationism Refuted - Termite Evolution By Loss Of Genetic Information and Complexity

Physogastric termite queen (top left) of Macrotermes michaelseni being groomed by workers and the larger king, with soldiers in the foreground.

Photo by Jan Sobotnik

The giant northern termite Mastotermes darwiniensis showing the close relationship between termites and other cockroaches.

Public Domain, Link

Scientists solve the mystery of why termite kings and queens are monogamous - The University of Sydney

Researchers from the University of Sydney have just published a paper on termite evolution in Science which will make depressing reading for any creationists brave enough to attempt it. The study comprehensively refutes several articles of creationist faith.

A common creationist assertion is that loss of genetic information is invariably fatal, so mutations cannot be selected for during evolution. They also insist that evolution, as defined by science, is necessarily a process of increasing complexity, which they then claim would violate the laws of thermodynamics by reducing entropy.

The absurdity of this counter-factual claim is easy to see. Variation between individuals is due to genetic differences, and that variation is only possible if mutations generate novelty. Creationists also conveniently ignore the fact that entropy can decrease locally in open systems. Earth is very much an open system, with a continuous influx of energy from the Sun, so nothing in thermodynamics precludes local increases in order or complexity.

Moreover, the claim is demonstrably false. Many endoparasites, such as parasitic worms, have lost substantial amounts of genetic information as they evolved to rely on their hosts for key functions. Several intestinal worms, for example, have no digestive tract at all, because they absorb nutrients directly from their host’s gut. Evolution does not require an increase or a decrease in complexity as such; it requires only a change in the frequency of alleles in a population over time.

The University of Sydney researchers have now identified another striking example of evolution by gene loss — this time in termites. Their results show a massive loss of genes as termites evolved extreme monogamy and sociality. Paradoxically, a reduction in genetic complexity at the individual level was accompanied by an increase in social complexity at the colony level.

Some of the lost genes are those responsible for producing sperm tails, meaning that termite sperm can no longer swim. This is likely a consequence of strict monogamy within the colony, which removes sperm competition altogether. In species where females mate with multiple males, there is strong selection pressure for highly motile sperm, because the fastest are more likely to fertilise the eggs. In termites, that pressure simply does not exist.

To reach these conclusions, the team — led by Professor Nathan Lo — compared the genomes of ‘domestic’ cockroaches (which share a common ancestor with termites), closely related wood roaches that live in small family groups, and multiple termite species exhibiting different levels of social complexity.

Refuting Creationism - How Camellias Evolved As The Japanese Islands Formed

Camellia japonica

Camellia Rusticana

How Camellias evolved with the formation of the Japanese archipelago? | News | NIIGATA UNIVERSITY

It's a basic principle of evolution that environmental changes drive evolution by isolating populations which are then free to evolve on their own trajectory, and by creating new ecological niches into which species can diversify.

An almost perfect example of this in progress can be seen in the Camellia group of plants, of which one, tea, Camellia cinensis is perhaps the most important economically, But several others are also important cultivated garden plants with bright red, pink or white flowers.

Another phenomenon of evolution that this group of plants displays is that evolution is not a sudden event but a slow process over time, during which hybridization and gene flow between related species occurs until barriers to hybridization have evolved.

This tendency to form hybrids and the general similar morphologies has made accurate classification of the different species, and subspecies difficult and a matter of debate among taxonomists and botanists.

Now work by a team led by Dr. Harue Abe of Niigata University, Sado, Niiagata, Japan have shown how the evolution and distribution of this genus was strongly influenced by the formation of the Japanese archipelago.

Malevolent Design - How The Toxoplasma Parasite Looks Intelligently Designed - To A Creationist

Toxoplasma gondii cyst in brain cell.

A) Toxoplasma gondii tachyzoites, the rapidly multiplying form of the parasite. B) A bradyzoite cyst containing Toxoplasma gondii within a muscle fiber, showing the cyst wall and individual bradyzoites. C) Histological section of tissue with Toxoplasma gondii cysts. D) Microscopic image of a Toxoplasma gondii oocyst, responsible for environmental transmission.

source.

Scientists find hidden diversity inside common brain parasite | UCR News | UC Riverside

Another example of a nasty little parasite that bears all the hallmarks of the Discovery Institute’s supposed *“proof”* of intelligent design was unveiled today, when scientists from the University of California, Riverside published the results of their investigation into the common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, which infects up to a third of the global population. Their paper was published open access in Nature Communications. It has been released unedited to provide early access to the findings.

Ask Discovery Institute (DI) fellow Michael J. Behe for proof of intelligent design and he will produce multiple examples of what he terms “irreducible complexity”, claiming that such systems could not have evolved step by step and therefore must have been designed by a supernatural intelligent designer. Similarly, ask another DI fellow, William A. Dembski, for proof of intelligent design and he will produce examples of what he calls “complex specified genetic information”, which he claims likewise could not have evolved naturally and therefore must have been provided by a supernatural designer.

Curiously, however, when biologists point to examples of “irreducible complexity” or “complex specified genetic information” in pathogens or parasites — organisms whose sole apparent purpose is to make us ill or kill us, or at the very least to increase suffering in the world - as evidence that, if the ID creationists’ argument were granted, it would imply malevolent intent on the part of the intelligent designer, the response is either silence or retreat into theology. More often than not, the blame is shifted to “the Fall”, while the insistence remains that intelligent design is a genuine scientific alternative to “Darwinism”, and not merely Bible-literalist Christian fundamentalism under another name.

At this point, their supposed “proof” of intelligent design quietly evaporates. Behe will even attempt to argue that the random process he calls “genetic entropy” is responsible, thereby conceding that random processes can generate what Dembski describes as complex specified genetic information — while simultaneously insisting that such information cannot have evolved through random processes at all.

The UC Riverside team have now shown that Toxoplasma gondii is even more complex than previously thought. It was already known that the parasite invades the brain and other tissues, where it forms dormant cysts that can later be reactivated. Its preferred hosts are members of the cat family, and humans are most commonly infected via cats. In some secondary hosts, it has been shown to manipulate behaviour in ways that make them more likely to be eaten by a cat, thereby completing its life cycle. Infected mice, for example, actively seek out the presence of domestic cats, while chimpanzees develop a fascination with the scent of leopard urine. It is possible that effects observed in humans are an echo of this behaviour-modifying mechanism inherited from our evolutionary past.

The new research shows that these cysts are far more complex than simple dormant copies of the parasite. Instead, they are intricate assemblages of multiple sub-types, each with distinct biological functions. In this respect, the cyst exhibits some of the characteristics of a multicellular organism, including a degree of cellular specialisation.

Refuting Creationism - An Evolutionary Arms Race In Space - No Intelligence Involved

This article is best read on a laptop, desktop, or tablet

In this illustration, a phage — a type of virus that infects bacteria — rests on the surface of a host cell. Researchers at UW–Madison designed an experiment for the International Space Station to study how phage-bacteria interactions affect the health of the gut microbiome.

Microbes mutated in space hint at biomedical benefits to humans on Earth – UW–Madison News

In a striking demonstration of the theory of evolution in practice — and something that will have creationists once again insisting on redefining evolution as a theory about one creature turning into an entirely unrelated taxon — an experiment aboard the International Space Station has shown how subtle changes in the environment can dramatically alter an evolutionary trajectory. It also illustrates another major embarrassment for Intelligent Design creationists: evolutionary arms races. Arms races are, of course, utterly incompatible with the idea of an intelligent designer, since running to stand still in a race with yourself is a neat definition of insanity.

Unlike the creationist parody of evolution — carefully engineered to be unprovable because it does not describe what actually happens and what no biologist has ever claimed — the real scientific definition of evolution is simply a change in the frequency of different alleles in a population over time. A definition that creationists know to be irrefutable, hence their persistent attempts to redefine it so that they have something to attack.

The experiment, which had a parallel control on Earth, was designed to observe how bacteriophage viruses that parasitise bacteria and their hosts co-evolved in the microgravity environment of space.

The results have just been published in PLOS Biology. They show that both the T7 phage virus and the E. coli bacteria developed marked genomic differences compared with the Earth-bound populations. The space-station phages gradually accumulated specific mutations that enhanced infectivity or improved their ability to bind receptors on bacterial cells. Meanwhile, the space-station E. coli accumulated mutations that improved resistance to phages and enhanced survival in near-weightless conditions. In other words, what was observed was a genuine evolutionary arms race — and because the environments differed between the space-station populations and the Earth-bound populations, the divergence can be attributed directly to differences in gravity.

The results highlighted another intriguing angle: the mutations that phages and bacteria acquire in space don’t just reveal fundamental evolutionary dynamics, they can also have practical applications for human health on Earth. After 25 days aboard the ISS, both organisms returned with novel mutations not commonly seen under terrestrial gravity, including changes to bacterial surface proteins and corresponding phage adaptations to bind those altered surfaces.

Researchers then engineered phages carrying these space-derived mutations and tested them against bacterial pathogens responsible for urinary tract infections — many of which are now resistant to antibiotics — finding the space-influenced phages were notably effective at killing these otherwise resistant strains. This suggests that the unique selection pressures of microgravity may reveal evolutionary pathways that could be harnessed to design improved therapies for antibiotic-resistant infections back on Earth.

Creationism Refuted - How New Genetic Information Causes Diseases

Study shows your genes determine how fast your DNA mutates with age | UCLA Health

Creationist dogma insists that new genetic information can only be created by their putative intelligent designer, so it should be deeply embarrassing for them to learn that certain stretches of our DNA lengthen as we age, that the rate at which this happens is influenced by genes, and that excessive expansion of these sequences can lead to serious liver or kidney diseases.

This was discovered by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the Broad Institute, and Harvard Medical School, who analysed whole-genome sequencing data from 490,416 UK Biobank participants and 414,830 participants in the All of Us Research Program. Their findings were published recently, open access, in Nature.

This research is particularly awkward for creationists because of their insistence on the supposedly ‘sacred’ principle that only their intelligent designer can add new information to a genome. If we concede that claim for the sake of argument, then this newly generated genetic information must have been created deliberately and designed to produce a specific outcome — unless creationism’s designer was simply fiddling about aimlessly. Having a specific outcome (as all genes do) is precisely what William A. Dembski of the Discovery Institute insists is evidence for intelligent design, by a neat process of circular reasoning that only creationists find persuasive.

We then have the additional fact that a high rate of expansion of these DNA sequences is controlled by genetic modifiers and does not occur if any of those genes is not functioning properly. In other words, the resulting liver and kidney diseases are due to what Michael J. Behe famously describes as proof of a designer god: ‘irreducible complexity’.

Still conceding creationist claims, then, Dembski’s and Behe’s own logic demonstrates that their intelligent designer deliberately causes these diseases of old age.

Creationists are further hoist by their own petard in that they traditionally blame disease on ‘The Fall’, thereby conceding that intelligent design creationism is a form of fundamentalist religion rather than science. At the same time, however, they insist that only their intelligent designer can produce the new genetic information responsible for the expansion of these DNA sequences, which neatly rules out the involvement of the vague, non-physical agency they refer to as ‘sin’.

This leaves creationists with an uncomfortable dilemma: either their designer god actively causes liver and kidney disease, or new genetic information can indeed be produced by natural processes in which their designer plays no part — in which case a major plank of creationism collapses. The alternative is to concede that their allegedly omnibenevolent god is directly responsible for serious diseases in elderly people.

It is scarcely worth pointing out the glaringly obvious fact that these outcomes are easily explained as the predictable result of an undirected evolutionary process that has no concept of perfection, inevitably settling for compromise and prioritising reproductive success early in life at the expense of longer-term health and wellbeing.

How Science Works - Why Did The Woolly Rhino Go Extinct 4,000 Years Before Creation Week?

Woolly rhinoceros, Coelodonta antiquitatis
Grotte Chauvet, Ardèche, France

Source

Woolly rhinoceros, Coelodonta antiquitatis

By Mr Langlois10 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

DNA from wolf pup’s last meal reveals new facts about woolly rhino’s extinction

A new research paper published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, by a team led by palaeogeneticists from the Centre for Palaeogenetics, Stockholm, Sweden, may make uncomfortable reading for any creationists with the courage to read it.

Firstly, it deals with events from that long period of pre-“Creation Week” history — evidence which would not exist if the biblical Flood myth were true. Secondly, it illustrates how, in contrast to the claim that scientists are only permitted to publish findings that conform to a rigid scientific orthodoxy, researchers are perfectly willing to revise established ideas when new evidence demands it. In this case, the study shows that one aspect of what palaeobiologists thought they understood about the evolutionary history of Eurasian megafauna may be wrong.

Refuting Creationism - Two Ancient Eurasians Carried Human Papillomavirus (HPV16) - Long Before 'Creation Week' and 'The Fall'

A facial reconstruction of Ötzi the Iceman.

Image credit: Reconstruction by Kennis © South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Foto Ochsenreiter

Ötzi the Iceman mummy carried a high-risk strain of HPV, research finds | Live Science

Palaeontologists at the Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil have analysed the DNA recovered from two ancient humans and discovered that they were both carriers of the Human Papillomavirus HPV16, a virus implicated in several cancers. They have presented their evidence, ahead of peer-reviewed publication in the pre-print server, bioRxiv.

The interesting thing from the point of view of virology is that this discovery shed considerable light on when HPV entered the human virome and commenced co-evolving with us, with one theory being that we acquired them from Neanderthals. From the point of view of creationists however, the news could scarcely be worse.

The first sample, obtained from the famous 'Ötzi the Iceman', the 5,300 year-old mummified body recovered from a glacier on the Italian-Austrian border, is probably not too much of a problem for creationists as it just about falls within the timeline of the Bible mythology, apart from the little problem of it being from before they believe the was a general reset of Earth's biosphere in a genocidal flood which would have destroyed the glacier and everything in it, so Ötzi should not have been there.

But, the second is a massive problem, since it was recovered from a leg of a man, Ust'-Ishim man, recovered from western Siberia and dated to 45,000 years BP - way before creationists believe Earth existed, and tens of thousands of years before the mythical 'Fall', when creationists believe viruses didn't exist. This specimen provided the oldest complete human genome so far recovered and the DNA contains the unmistakable genome of HPV16. Creationist mythology just keeps getting further and further from reality as exposed by science using real-world evidence.

Traditionally, creationists claim Earth is 6,000 - 10,000 years old and was created perfect in every way, with no deaths or diseases, so no viruses, parasites or pathogens, bodies that always functioned perfectly and genomes that never failed to replicate perfectly. Then, along came 'sin' which, by some mysterious process, was able to thwart the omnipotent creator god's perfect plan and create viruses and other pathogens and make perfect physiology begin to malfunction and genomes to fail to replicate perfectly, causing variations and genetic weaknesses, etc.

Why a reputedly omnipotent creator failed to anticipate the effects of 'sin' and make its creation robust enough to resist them is never explained, although, apparently, it provided immune systems in preparation for something that, although omniscient, and even claimed to have created 'evil' (Isiah 45:7), it then failed to anticipate. But, as though those myths aren't too ridiculous for any adult with even a basic education to believe, creationists have to continually think of ways to ignore the evidence and continue holding plainly absurd beliefs, under the child-like delusion that their ability to do so is a sign of strength.

The paper itself sets out to address a long-standing question in human virology: how long oncogenic human papillomaviruses have been associated with our species, and whether their origins lie in relatively recent cultural changes or deep evolutionary history.

Malevolent Design - How ID Creationism 'Proves' Pancreatic Cancer is 'Intelligently Designed'

The Krainer lab developed 12 initial ASO drug candidates. The best performing ASO—ASO-A—completely broke the SRSF1-AURKA-MYC circuit, leading to slower tumor growth and cell death.

Untreated PDAC tumor organoid

PDAC tumor organoid after treatment with ASO-A

CSHL’s Krainer lab has discovered a key oncogenic circuit driving aggressive pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) progression. Using human PDAC tumor organoids, seen here, the team developed a potential RNA splicing-based therapeutic that collapses the circuit.

Short-circuiting pancreatic cancer | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

These examples of what Discovery Institute fellows Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski call “irreducible complexity” and “complex specified information” respectively — cited by them as evidence for an intelligent designer — are now being discovered with such monotonous regularity that it is astonishing they never appear in any of the Discovery Institute’s anti-evolution, anti-science propaganda.

The answer to that conundrum is, of course, that such examples are far more frequently found in parasites, pathogens, and idiopathic conditions such as cancer and autoimmune disease. No self-respecting religious fundamentalist is going to open that particular can of worms and appear to be promoting a manifestly malevolent god. It is far safer to remain silent and instead present cult followers with carefully curated examples of supposedly “beneficial” complexity, selected to appeal to their pre-existing biases.

Nevertheless, here is yet another example whose refusal to be addressed by creationists neatly illustrates the disingenuous nature of these alleged “proofs of intelligent design”. The news comes from a paper just published in the Cell Press journal, Molecular Cell, which shows how pancreatic cancer—specifically pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC)—depends on a complex regulatory circuit consisting of three key components.

The research, conducted by a team from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and led by former CSHL graduate student Alexander Kral, builds on earlier work by Professor Adrian Krainer, who discovered that the protein SRSF1 jump-starts PDAC. The new study shows that SRSF1 does not act alone, but forms one of three interdependent “pillars” in this malignant system—the other two being Aurora kinase A (AURKA) and the oncogene MYC. In laboratory experiments, disabling any one of these three components using RNA-based therapy collapsed the circuit, reduced tumour viability, and triggered programmed cell death.

In Michael Behe’s terms, reducing the complexity kills the system. In William Dembski’s terms, destroying the “complex specified genetic information” kills the cancer cells.

This leaves creationists who are honest enough to confront the evidence with a stark choice: either this is evidence that their intelligent designer deliberately designed pancreatic cancer, or Behe’s and Dembski’s long-trumpeted “proofs of intelligent design” are nothing of the sort. Some of the less scientifically literate will, predictably, invoke “The Fall”, thereby revealing once again that Intelligent Design creationism is not science at all. It is merely Bible-literalist religious fundamentalism dressed up in a laboratory coat — exactly what the Discovery Institute has been attempting to smuggle into US classrooms ever since the 1987 Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard made it clear that teaching creationism in public schools violates the Establishment Clause of the US First Amendment.

Unintelligent Design - The Design Blunder That Causes Cancer - Or Was It Malevolent Design?

Graphical abstract

Scientists find cancer weak spot in backup DNA repair system | Scripps Research

Scientists at the Scripps Institute have discovered a defective DNA repair mechanism that would normally trigger cell death but which, paradoxically, keeps cancer cells alive. They have recently published their findings, open access, in Cell Reports. It is exactly the sort of biochemical complexity that creationists routinely mistake for evidence of intelligent design, having been led to believe that well-designed systems must be highly complex. In reality, good intelligent design is minimally complex: complexity increases the risk of failure, is harder to maintain, and is more energetically costly.

The DNA “code” is one of creationism’s favourite props for its familiar ignorance-plus-incredulity-therefore-God-did-it argument — a textbook god-of-the-gaps false dichotomy. Yet even a superficial look beneath the metaphor reveals that DNA replication and repair are very far from the flawless perfection we would expect from an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity — especially when it comes to its supposedly special creation, humankind. What we actually observe is a fragile, error-prone system patched together by evolutionary history rather than foresight.

The system is only needed in the first place because cell replication in multicellular organisms remains essentially identical to that of single-celled organisms. Despite the fact that the benefits of multicellularity arise from cell specialisation into tissues and organs with discrete functions — each requiring only a tiny fraction of the genome — every cell is forced to copy the entire DNA complement every time it divides. This vast waste of energy and resources serves only to multiply the probability of error, and errors are not rare anomalies but routine occurrences. This is not the signature of intelligent design.

The Scripps Institute team have shown that some cancer cells survive precisely because the normal high-fidelity repair system fails. When that happens, a crude backup mechanism takes over — an emergency repair process that is little more than a biological kludge and which introduces further errors as it works. It is rather like calling out an emergency plumber who fixes one leak by installing a long section of pipe riddled with smaller leaks. Would anyone describe that as intelligent workmanship?

Unintelligent Design - The Irreducibly Complex Cause Of Alzheimers - Malevolent Design or Evolution?

Clues to Alzheimer’s disease may be hiding in our ‘junk’ DNA

Researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia, have identified DNA switches that help control how astrocytes work. These are brain cells that support neurons and are known to play a role in Alzheimer’s disease. They have just published their findings in Nature Neuroscience.

Coming soon after researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark discovered a design defect in astrocytes that contributes to the development of Alzheimer’s, this represents a double embarrassment for those creationists who understand its implications.

Firstly, there is the embarrassment that the cause of Alzheimer’s is indistinguishable from Michael J. Behe’s favourite ‘proof’ of intelligent design — irreducible complexity — in that all the elements must be present for Alzheimer’s to occur.

Secondly, there is the discovery by the Australian team of which triggers ‘switch on’ which genes that affect the astrocytes implicated in Alzheimer’s. These switches are embedded in the 98% of the human genome that is non-coding, or so-called ‘junk’ DNA. Since they can be separated from the genes they regulate by thousands of base pairs, it has been notoriously difficult to identify which switches control which genes. Now, using CRISPR, the team have identified around 150 of these regulatory elements.

The existence of this non-coding DNA has long been an embarrassment for creationists, who have been unable to explain why an intelligent designer would produce so much DNA that does not contain the roughly 20,000 genes that actually code for proteins. Why such prolific waste, adding massively to the risk of errors that can result in cancer?

The creationist response has been to conflate the terms ‘non-coding’ and ‘non-functional’, and then proclaim this ‘functional DNA’ as intelligently designed — reducing, but by no means eliminating, the amount of ‘junk’ they still have to explain away. Of course, ‘non-coding’ does not mean ‘not transcribed’, only that the RNA does not code for a functional protein. However, this non-coding but functional DNA does play a role in gene expression, in that the resulting RNA can act as controls or ‘switches’ that turn genes on and off.

So, creationists — having triumphantly waved ‘functional, non-coding DNA’ as evidence for intelligent design after all — are now presented with the fact that it is part of the ‘irreducible’ cause of Alzheimer’s, and probably the cause of many other diseases with a genetic basis.

Malevolent Design - The Diseases That Wouldn't Exist if an Intelligent Designer Was Real

Genomic Maps Untangle the Complex Roots of Disease

In another major embarrassment for those creationists who understand it, researchers at the Gladstone Institutes and Stanford University have developed a method for linking the genome of a cell to diseases caused by specific gene variants. They have recently published their findings, open access, in Nature.

Creationists insist that the human genome was intelligently designed, with every outcome the result of “complex specified information” which, according to Discovery Institute Fellow William A. Dembski, constitutes definitive evidence of intelligent design. If this were true, it would follow that genes which cause disease were intelligently designed to cause those diseases.

The difficulty deepens for creationists when one considers that many diseases involve multiple genes, sometimes hundreds or even thousands, all of which must possess the “correct” variants for the disease to emerge. In other words, some diseases not only depend on Dembski’s “complex specified genetic information”, but also conform to Michael J. Behe’s proposed hallmark of intelligent design: irreducible complexity.

Unless creationists invoke an additional creator—one over whom their reputedly omnipotent and omniscient god has no control—their supposedly intelligent designer must have deliberately created these gene variants to produce the suffering they cause.

By contrast, the evolutionary explanation requires no such mental gymnastics. The existence of genetic variants is exactly what evolutionary theory predicts, and provided such variants remain rare within a population, there is little selective pressure to remove them. A genome produced by an omniscient, perfect designer, however, would contain no such variants: the original design would be flawless, as would the mechanisms responsible for replicating it. The very existence of gene variants is therefore evidence against intelligent design.

The technique developed by the research team is sensitive enough to examine the entire genome and determine which genes influence which cell types. This makes it possible to identify which genes contribute to particular diseases. In cases where a single gene is involved, this can be relatively straightforward, but where many genes are implicated, it can be extremely difficult to disentangle their individual effects—precisely the problem this new technique helps to overcome.

Refuting Creationism - Balanophora And Why Creationists Pretend Not To Notice Them

Balanophora laxiflora

A selection of the sampled Balanophora plants. (a) B. japonica (left and center: Kyushu, Japan; right: Taiwan), (b) B. mutinoides (Taiwan), (c) B. tobiracola (from left: Okinawa, Japan; Taiwan), (d) B. subcupularis (Kyushu, Japan), (e) B. fungosa ssp. fungosa (from left: Okinawa, Japan; Taiwan), (f) B. yakushimensis (from left: Kyushu, Japan; Taiwan), (g) B. nipponica (Honshu, Japan).

Credit: Svetlikova et al., 2025 (CC BY)

Among flowering plants, few groups look as alien as Balanophora. These strange, tuberous parasites lack leaves, lack roots in any conventional sense, and contain no chlorophyll. They spend almost their entire lives embedded within the roots of other plants, emerging only briefly to flower. To a casual observer, they barely resemble plants at all — and that superficial oddity has sometimes been exploited by creationists as evidence that they represent a fundamentally distinct “kind”.

In reality, Balanophora are not evolutionary outliers. They are a textbook example of what happens when natural selection acts over long periods on a parasitic lineage.

Where Balanophora fit in the plant kingdom

Molecular phylogenetics places Balanophora firmly within the angiosperms, in the order Santalales. This is the same order that includes mistletoes, sandalwood, and a range of hemi- and holoparasitic plants. Their closest relatives are photosynthetic or partially parasitic species, providing a clear evolutionary gradient from free-living autotrophs to obligate parasites.

This placement is not controversial. It is supported by nuclear, mitochondrial, and plastid gene sequences, as well as by reproductive and developmental traits. Balanophora are deeply nested within the flowering plant family tree, not perched mysteriously at its base.

Angiosperms
│
├── Basal angiosperms (Amborella, water lilies, etc.)
│
├── Monocots
│
└── Eudicots
    │
    ├── Rosids
    │
    ├── Asterids
    │
    └── Santalales
        │
        ├── Photosynthetic lineages (e.g. Santalum – sandalwood)
        ├── Hemiparasites (e.g. Viscum – mistletoe)
        └── Holoparasites
            ├── Balanophoraceae (Balanophora)
            └── Other parasitic families

Why this placement matters

1. Balanophora are deeply nested, not basal.
   
   They are not an early-diverging angiosperm lineage. They sit well within the eudicots, inside an order dominated by parasitism. This is exactly what evolution predicts for a lineage that became parasitic rather than being created as such.
   
   Creationism would expect either:
   • A distinct, isolated “kind”, or
   • No consistent phylogenetic signal at all
   
   Instead, Balanophora fall precisely where descent with modification says they should.
   
2. Transitional relatives exist
   
   Within Santalales you can trace a graded series:
   • Fully photosynthetic plants
   Root parasites that still photosynthesise
   • Plants with reduced photosynthesis
   Fully holoparasitic forms like Balanophora
   
   This gradient is phylogenetic, not just ecological. It maps cleanly onto the tree.
   
3. Plastid phylogeny seals the case
   
   Even though Balanophora plastids are massively reduced, the genes that remain:
   • Cluster with chloroplast genes of Santalales
   • Show derived mutations consistent with long-term loss of photosynthesis
   • Cannot be explained as independently created organelles
   
   In other words, the plastids themselves remember their ancestry.

Creationism, which insists on fixed, separately created categories, has no principled way to explain why these plants fall exactly where evolution predicts they should.

Creationism Refuted - Evolution of Parasitic Plants by LOSS of Complexity

Balanophora

Photo credit: Ze Wei, Plant Photo Bank of China

Species of Balanophora are parasitic plants that live underground and emerge above ground only during the flowering season — and some species even reproduce exclusively asexually. This collage shows species studied to establish how the plants of that group relate to each other, how they modified their plastids and how their reproduction fits into their ecology.

© Kobe University (CC BY)

How parasitic, asexual plants evolve and live | Kobe University News site

A recently published paper in New Phytologist on the biology of the parasitic plants *Balanophora*, by three botanists from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan, together with Kenji Suetsugu of Kobe University, should cause consternation in creationist circles — if only they were not so practised at dismissing any evidence that contradicts their superstition.

Not only does the study highlight the well-known problem of parasitism, which creationists typically attempt to wave aside by invoking “The Fall” — thereby exposing any claim that creationism is a genuine science rather than a form of Christian fundamentalism as a lie — it also reveals that the evolution of this group of plants has involved a loss of complexity, coupled with the repurposing of redundant structures. The result is what creationists themselves would describe as irreducible complexity, accompanied by precisely the kind of “complex specified genetic information” that William A. Dembski insists should be regarded as evidence for intelligent design.

Then there is the problem of an overly complex solution, in that, instead of simply giving the plants the genes they need, some essential genes have been included in cell organelles These are clearly repurposed chloroplasts that no longer perform photosynthesis, produced by an evolutionary process that creationists deny - leaving them to explain why an intelligent designer opted for such an overly complex solution.

Finally, the findings rely entirely on the Theory of Evolution to explain and make sense of the observations, with no hint of any need to invoke the supernatural magic upon which creationism depends — despite repeated assurances from creationist cult leaders to their followers that such a moment is imminent, a promise they have been making for over half a century.

Creationism Refuted - Dugongs and Manatees Blow Creationism Out of the Water.

Dugong

Manatee

Dugongs and manatees — the surviving members of the order Sirenia — are among the most revealing mammals when it comes to understanding evolution. Fully aquatic yet air-breathing, specialised yet constrained by their ancestry, they provide one of the clearest examples of how complex organisms arise through gradual modification rather than sudden creation.

Unlike whales, which are now well known as a textbook evolutionary transition, sirenians are less familiar to the public. That makes them especially valuable, because their fossil record is remarkably complete, their evolutionary trajectory is straightforward, and their genetic relationships were discovered independently of their anatomy. Taken together, they present a problem for creationism that cannot be explained away.

Terrestrial origins. The earliest known sirenians lived around 50 million years ago and were unmistakably terrestrial or semi-aquatic mammals.

Creationism Refuted - Complex Life Evolved Almost a Billion Years Earlier That We Thought

December: Complex life developed earlier than previously thought, new study reveals | News and features | University of Bristol

Research led by the University of Bristol and published in the journal Nature a few days ago suggests that the transition from simple prokaryote cells to complex eukaryote cells began almost 2.9 billion years ago – nearly a billion years earlier than some previous estimates. Prokaryotes — bacteria and archaea — had been the dominant, indeed the only, life forms for the preceding 1.1 billion years, having arisen about 300 million years after Earth coalesced 4 billion years ago.

Creationists commonly forget that for the first billion or more years of life on Earth, it consisted solely of single-celled prokaryotes — bacteria and archaea. They routinely post nonsense on social media about the supposed impossibility of a complex cell spontaneously assembling from ‘non-living’ atoms — something no serious evolutionary biologist has ever proposed as an explanation for the origin of eukaryote cells.

There is now little doubt among biologists that complex eukaryote cells arose through endosymbiotic relationships between archaea and bacteria, which may have begun as parasitic or predator–prey interactions before evolving into symbioses as the endpoint of evolutionary arms races. The only questions concern when exactly eukaryote cells first began to emerge, and what triggered their evolution.

The team collected sequence data from hundreds of species and, combined with fossil evidence, reconstructed a time-resolved tree of life. They then used this framework to resolve the timing of historical events across hundreds of gene families, focusing on those that distinguish prokaryotes from eukaryotes.

One surprising finding was that mitochondria were late to the party, arising only as atmospheric oxygen levels increased for the first time — linking early evolutionary biology to Earth’s geochemical history.