Malevolent Design - How Creationism's 'Designer' Favoured The Naked Mole Rat

DNA repair mechanisms help explain why naked mole-rats live a long life

News that scientists have discovered what enables the naked mole-rat to live for up to 37 years — around ten times longer than relatives of a similar size — raises a troublesome question for creationists. The findings were reported recently in Science by a team of researchers from the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Maternal Fetal Medicine.

Creationists like to flatter themselves with the notion that they are the favoured creation of their putative designer god and the ultimate expression of design perfection. So, when evidence emerges of other species surpassing humans in some way — bats with more robust immune systems, elephants and sharks being almost completely immune to cancers, peregrine falcons with far superior vision — it is typically ignored, met with incredulity, or dismissed as an ineffable mystery and part of some divine plan which in no way diminished the unique position of humans in the grand scheme.

Now, to add to their woes, comes the discovery that the secret of the naked mole-rat’s extraordinary longevity may be traced to changes in just four amino acids. This alone undermines creationist claims that mutations are always harmful and incapable of generating new genetic information.

Creationism In Crisis - How Fungi Created The Conditions For Land Plants - A Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Top L. Chicken of the woods (Laetiporus sulphureus)

Top R. Sulphur tufts (Hypholoma fasciculare)

Bottom L. Common mould (Penicillium)

Bottom R. Mucor (microscopic view)

Fungi set the stage for life on land hundreds of millions of years earlier than thought | Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology OIST

In that vast expanse of pre-‘Creation Week’ history, when 99.9975% of Earth’s story had already unfolded, a pivotal event occurred that would set the planet on a path towards the astonishing diversity of life we see today. According to researchers led by scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan, that turning point was the evolution of multicellular fungi.

Unlike animals and plants, in which multicellularity appears to have arisen only once, fungi seem to have achieved it independently on at least five separate occasions, between 1.4 and 0.9 billion years ago.

This innovation allowed fungi to colonise land and begin transforming bare rock and rock debris into soil. That process, in turn, created the conditions that later enabled plants to establish themselves on land.

In addition to shedding light on how multicellularity evolved in fungi — a process that involved horizontal gene transfer — this research significantly extends the known timeline of fungal evolution, pushing it back by hundreds of millions of years.

Of course, the authors of Genesis, unaware of the distinction between plants and fungi and apparently thinking all plants were angiosperms, made no mention of fungi at all. Their myth betrays no understanding that plants are living organisms or that green plants depend on sunlight for photosynthesis, since it describes them as being created the day before the sun (Genesis 1:15-17). It names only angiosperms while ignoring ferns, mosses, and algae (Genesis 1:11-12), and later claims that “every living substance” outside the Ark was destroyed (Genesis 7:4), as though plants, like rocks, would somehow have survived unscathed, to provide food for the animals afterwards, despite no mention of their preservation during the flood genocide.

Science, as ever, tells a very different story — one based not on gap-filling tales but on evidence written in fungal DNA and preserved in the fossil record. It is a story of awe and wonder, not at the supposed magical powers of an imagined creator, but at the relentless processes of evolution: variation, natural selection, and the exploitation of opportunity, producing the extraordinary biodiversity we see today.

Refuting Creationism - Evidence From Ancient China Buries the Bible Creation and Genocidal Flood Myths

Excavation at Baligang in 2004, showing house, storage and burial pits.

Chi, Zhang & Hung, Hsiao-Chun (2013)
© Antiquity Publications Ltd. 2013

Weisskopf, A., et al; (2015) (CC BY 4.0)

Ancient DNA reveals the population interactions and a Neolithic patrilineal community in Northern Yangtze Region | Nature Communications

The bad news for creationists continues unabated - because science continues unabated to reveal the truth.

Creationists like to insist that the Bible’s tales of creation and Noah’s flood are real history, not myth. But once again, science has delivered a devastating blow to that fantasy. A new open access paper in Nature Communications reports the DNA of 58 individuals from the Baligang archaeological site in central China, spanning from the Middle Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age (6,500 BP - 2,500 BP). Far from supporting the idea of a world repopulated just a few thousand years ago by Noah’s family, the evidence shows continuous human settlement, migration, and cultural development stretching back thousands of years before, during and after the supposed date of the Biblical flood - about 4,000 years BP.

The genetics reveal a population that was anything but “reset.” Northern and southern East Asian groups repeatedly mixed at Baligang, leaving detectable signatures of long-term population movement and exchange. Around 4,200 years ago, southern ancestry became especially prominent, signalling migration into the region. Burial evidence adds further depth: the males were closely related along the paternal line, while the females carried diverse maternal lineages—clear evidence of patrilineal clans drawing in women from outside communities. This is a picture of a complex, interconnected society developing steadily over time.

Uninteligent Design - How The Process of Germ Cell Production Goes Wrong And Creates Genetic Defects.

Paired chromosomes showing crossovers in a mouse oocyte.

Hunter lab

Left panel: short green irregular lines arranged in pairs. Right: Close up of one pair shows that the two strands form a cross shape. Paired chromosomes showing crossovers in a mouse oocyte.

Hunter lab.

Landmark Discovery Reveals How Chromosomes Are Passed From One Generation to the Next | UC Davis

This article continues my series exploring the many ways in which the human body demonstrates unintelligent design. Far from being the perfect handiwork of a benevolent creator, our anatomy and physiology are full of flaws, inefficiencies, and dangerous vulnerabilities. Each of these makes sense in light of evolution by natural selection—an opportunistic, short-term process that tinkers with existing structures—but they make no sense at all if we are supposed to be the product of an all-wise designer.

Creationists often argue from a position of ignorant incredulity, claiming that complexity implies intelligent design, when in fact the opposite is true. The hallmark of good, intelligent design is simplicity, for two very simple reasons: first, simple things are easier to construct and require fewer resources; and second, simple structures and processes have fewer potential points of failure, making them more reliable.

In short: complexity is evidence against intelligent design and in favour of a mindless, utilitarian, natural process such as evolution.

In addition to being minimally complex, another characteristic we would expect of something designed by an omniscient, maximally intelligent, and benevolent designer is that the process should work perfectly, every time, without fail.

The problem for creationists is that their favourite example of supposed intelligent design — the human body — is riddled with complexity in both its structures and processes. This complexity provides countless examples of systems that fail to perform adequately, or fail altogether, with varying frequency. Many failures occur in the layers of complexity needed to control or compensate for the inadequacies of other systems, and when those compensatory mechanisms themselves fail, the result can be a cascade of dysfunctions or processes running out of control. The consequences manifest as diseases, defects, and disabilities — hardly the work of an all-wise designer.

They are, however, exactly what we would expect from a mindless, utilitarian process like evolution, which prioritises short-term survival and reproduction, selecting only what is better — sometimes only marginally better — than what preceded it, rather than seeking optimal solutions. I have catalogued many such suboptimal compromises in the anatomy and physiology of the human body, and the problems that arise from them, in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design, one of my Unintelligent Design series.

Just yesterday, I wrote about research suggesting that autism may be a by-product of the rapid evolution of intelligence in humans. Now we have another striking example of extreme biological complexity which, when it goes wrong, can have catastrophic consequences: the production of eggs in women and sperm cells in men.

Refuting Creationism - How Autism May Be The Result Of Compromise In The Evolution Of Human Intelligence

Trump 'fact checking' his autism claim

How evolution explains autism rates in humans | EurekAlert!

If the human genome had been intelligently designed by an omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent supernatural deity, as creationists insist, it should be perfect and free from defects of any sort. In fact, it is difficult to see why there would be any variance in such an intelligently designed genome, let alone variance that causes genetic defects—unless those were intentionally included by the designer, who then cannot reasonably be described as omnibenevolent or omniscient.

If, however, the human genome is the product of hundreds of millions of years of gradual evolutionary processes — processes that prioritise survival and reproduction, with all the sub-optimal compromises that a utilitarian form of ‘design’ entails — then variance and defects are exactly what we would expect.

Creationists traditionally ignore questions about the origin of variance in a supposedly ‘perfect’ intelligently designed genome. The existence of genetic defects is usually explained away by resorting to Bible-literalist mythology about ‘The Fall’ — an abandonment of the Discovery Institute’s Wedge Strategy, which seeks to present creationism as real science rather than a fundamentalist religion dressed in a lab coat. News that autism may in fact be a by-product of the evolution of intelligence in humans will therefore be an even greater problem for creationists, who insist that our high intelligence sets us apart as the special creation of a perfect god.

Ironically, as well as possessing high intelligence, humans — unlike any other primates — also have autism and schizophrenia. It is this correlation that provides a clue to their shared evolutionary origins.

My book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design, lists lots of examples of how the human body is the result of these sub-optimal evolutionary compromises with all the problems that has produced. This example is just another instance and more evidence of the lack of intelligence in the process.

Creationism Refuted - How Co-Evolution Gave Us Sleep - Courtesy of Our Gut Microbiome

Key to the riddle of sleep may be linked to bacteria | WSU Insider | Washington State University

For an astonishing example of co-evolution — not just involving two organisms but a whole host that have co-evolved over millions of years — you need look no further than your own body, as a paper in *Frontiers in Neuroscience* by Erika L. English and James M. Krueger of Washington State University (WSU) shows. It reports the finding that sleep may be a co-evolved condition in which gut micro-organisms play a central role.

The researchers showed that, in mice, there is a close relationship between sleep patterns and the cyclical presence in the brain of a substance known as peptidoglycan (PG), normally found in the mesh-like walls of gut bacteria. Although co-evolutionary relationships are a well-established concept in evolutionary biology, this example illustrates just how intimate such relationships can become — to the point where it is difficult to say, in biological terms, which organism is the “product” of the other. To what extent are we the product of our gut bacteria, and to what extent are they the product of us?

Of course, creationism has nothing to say about this kind of co-evolution because the Bible is silent on the matter of micro-organisms or evolution. It contains nothing that wasn’t visible to its Bronze Age authors with the naked eye, or that lived outside the narrow confines of their limited experience. It was written by people with no appreciation of the history of life on Earth or of how it has been shaped by environmental change and ecological balances over deep time.

Refuting Creationism - North American Mammoths Interbred - 30,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Columbian Mammoths, Mammuthus colimbi with other Ice Age mammals.

Beth Zaiken

Hybrid mammoths roamed North America following interspecies breeding | Natural History Museum

An open access paper published in Biology Letters by an international team of palaeontologists, led by Marianne Dehasque of the Department of Organismal Biology, Uppsala University, Sweden, will no doubt bring joy to creationists who prefer to see the world in simple black-and-white terms. It shows that one of the usual definitions of species—a group that can reproduce only with one another—needs revising. The paper reports that the two North American species of mammoth—the northern woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) and the southern Columbian mammoth (M. columbi)—regularly interbred where their ranges overlapped, and that the offspring were fertile.

In the black-and-white, science-vs-creationism world of creationist thinking, this will be taken to mean that if science is wrong, then creationism must be right, by default.

Creationist joy will be short-lived, however, once they realise that this interbreeding took place long before they believe Earth was created, and that the researchers explain the findings in terms of how mammoths evolved and diversified. Indeed, the evidence supports the theory that the Columbian mammoth itself evolved from a hybrid population—one of the mechanisms of evolution that creationist dogma insists does not occur. Not only is there not the slightest hint that biologists are abandoning the Theory of Evolution (ToE) in favour of creationism—as creationist leaders have claimed for at least half a century—but the ToE is used to explain the observable facts, and it does so with consummate ease.

Creationism Refuted - Evolutionary Divergence and A Hybrid Jay

A grue jay? Rare hybrid bird identified in Texas

(a) Blue Jay by Travis Maher (ML578309451). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Macaulay Library.

(b) Hybrid Jay by Brian R. Stokes.

(c) Green Jay by Dan O'Brien (ML390361871). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Macaulay Library.

An interesting example of hybridisation between two distantly related species of jay has been reported by two biologists at the University of Texas, Austin. The hybrid is a cross between a blue jay (Cyanocitta cristata) and a green jay (Cyanocorax yncas). Although both are jays — members of the crow (Corvid) family — these two belong to different genera that diverged some seven million years ago and, until recently, lived in non-overlapping ranges in North America. Climate change has allowed them to extend their ranges, bringing them into contact only within the past decade.

The reason this is scientifically significant is that it illustrates how divergent evolution proceeds, and why it does not always progress to complete reproductive isolation. Unlike many other vertebrates, the genomic arrangements of birds are remarkably stable. As long as alleles remain in the same chromosomal loci, interbreeding remains possible. This can be disadvantageous if it results in hybrids with reduced fitness. For example, one population may evolve a long, slender bill adapted for one type of seed, while another evolves a short, stout bill for harder seeds. A hybrid might inherit an intermediate bill suited to neither, creating obvious disadvantages. In such cases, natural selection favours the evolution of barriers to hybridisation.

In many organisms, this is achieved by genetic rearrangements that prevent a zygote from developing even when mating occurs—so-called post-zygotic barriers. Where genomes are stable, such rearrangements rarely arise, so species tend instead to evolve pre-zygotic barriers that prevent mating or fertilisation in the first place. Among birds, these often take the form of plumage differences, mating rituals, or song—hence their remarkable diversity.

The Ever-Shrinking Creationists' God - Closing The Genetic Code Origin God-Shaped Gap - No God(s) Found

Professor Gustavo Caetano-Anollés.

Photo illustration by Fred Zwicky.

U of I researchers trace genetic code’s origins to early protein structures | College of Agricultural, Consumer & Environmental Sciences | Illinois

Just published in the Journal of Molecular Biology is a paper by three research scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that will spread despondency among creationists—at least among those with the courage to read it and the understanding to grasp its significance. Another of their favourite god-shaped gaps has just been slammed shut.

The gap in question is the long-standing mystery of how the genetic code arose through natural processes, without the intervention of a supernatural intelligence. Creationists have long claimed that the genetic code is analogous to a computer program—something they assume must imply a programmer. They bolster this with the usual straw-man arguments and hand-waving about statistical impossibility, declaring that such complexity could not have arisen “by chance alone.”

Of course, that was never more than the familiar argument from ignorant incredulity coupled with the false dichotomy fallacy: because we don’t yet know something, it must have been their particular god. Not any of the other gods, of course—because those aren’t real.

What we do know is that the earliest forms of life appeared on Earth about 3.8 billion years ago, while the genetic code itself did not appear until some 800 million (0.8 billion) years later. Time, therefore, was not a limiting factor: there was no plan, no deadline, and no external programmer. That fact alone should give creationists cause for concern because any decent intelligent designer, especially an omniscient one, would not have taken 0.8 billion years to invent the genetic code.

Now, this team of researchers has produced a plausible explanation (and it only needs to be plausible to refute the claim that no explanation is possible). Their study is based on an analysis of 4.3 billion dipeptide sequences across 1,561 proteomes, representing organisms from all three domains of life: Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya. (Proteomes are the complete sets of proteins expressed in an organism.)

To rub salt into creationist wounds, the evidence points to the genetic code having emerged through an evolutionary “bootstrapping” process, in which improvements in the code itself led to improvements in the proteins that controlled the very process of coding — an elegant feedback loop with no need for divine intervention.

Unitelligent Design - A Queen Ant Produces Two Different Species of Male Offspring!

Messor ibericus and Messor structor males hatched from eggs laid by the same queen.

Juvé, Y., Lutrat, C., Ha, A. et al (2025).

One queen ant, two species: the discovery that reshapes what ‘family’ means in nature

Creationists use a deliberately fuzzy and flexible definition of “kinds,” shifting its scope whenever it suits their argument. It can be narrowed down to the species level, broadened to a genus or family, or even stretched to encompass an entire order. On occasion, I’ve even seen it expanded to the absurdity of “animal kind,” depending on what the argument requires. This elasticity allows them to maintain the delusion that evolution never happens in the way biologists describe, and to caricature it instead as one species suddenly giving rise to a completely unrelated species in a single step — their parody of so-called “macro-evolution.”

But the case of the Iberian harvester ant (Messor ibericus) presents a real problem for this narrative. Here the definition of “kind” only needs to extend as far as members of a single genus. That still doesn’t rescue creationists, because this ant has evolved a remarkably complex reproductive strategy that undermines any notion of intelligent design and raises awkward questions about what a “kind” even is. Queens of M. ibericus can only reproduce successfully with males of a related species, Messor structor.

Such interspecies dependence is not unknown in either the animal or plant kingdoms, but M. ibericus takes it a step further. When a queen produces male offspring — instead of the usual sterile female workers — those males may be either M. ibericus or M. structor. In other words, she is doing precisely what creationists constantly demand as “evidence for evolution” - one species producing offspring of another species.

Refuting Creationism - Observed Evolution of Plants on A Volcanic Island

P. oleracea on Nishinoshima

Nishinoshima Island

Scientists trace origins of now extinct plant population from volcanically active Nishinoshima | EurekAlert!

Scientisst have a remarkable way to verify one of the fundamental principles of evolutionary biology - the 'founder effect' and how it contributes to allopatric speciation - a process that is hotly disputed by creationists who dogmatically refuse to accept any evidence for evolutionary diversification.

The great thing about science is that its theories can be tested and verified. Even better, they are frequently shown to be correct through evidence. This is in stark contrast to faith as a means of determining truth. Faith is not based on evidence, so it cannot be independently verified; in logical terms, it is unfalsifiable.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be falsified, but rather that there are no tests which, if failed, would demonstrate it false. Take, for example, the creationist claim that “God did it.” How could such a claim ever be tested? With no objective evidence beyond subjective feelings, anecdotes, or alleged personal experiences, there is nothing to examine. And if such a claim were challenged, it could always be shielded with further untestable assertions: “God is untestable,” “God is beyond science,” and so on.

By contrast, evolutionary biology offers theories that are not only testable but also repeatedly confirmed. One such theory is the founder effect. This occurs when a new habitat is colonised by only a small sample of a parent population. Two important factors follow:

1. The new sample is unlikely to perfectly represent the genetic diversity of the parent population, so it will begin with a different allele profile.
2. For the new colony to succeed, the founding individuals must already be somewhat pre-adapted to the environment. Those less well-suited are eliminated, while those better adapted survive and reproduce. Over successive generations, this natural selection creates a population increasingly fit for its new environment. The result is a wave of adaptation and divergence from the parent stock — the essence of allopatric speciation.

The natural “laboratory” for studying this process exists in the form of Nishinoshima, a remote Japanese island subject to frequent volcanic eruptions. Each eruption wipes the island clean of vegetation, effectively resetting the ecosystem and creating opportunities for colonisation by founder populations from elsewhere.

By careful genetic analysis of the, now extinct, Nishinoshima population of Portulaca oleracea, the team were able to show that the parent population was on nearby Chichijima, another volcanic island, however, the Nishinoshima population differed markedly from the parent population, and were derived from a very small founder population. In addition, there was evidence of genetic drift, which is much more significant in a small population than in a larger one - exactly as the Theory of Evolution predicts. Genetic drift is the process where, by chance alone, a neutral allele can increase or decrease in the population. The smaller the population the more quickly an allele can progress to fixation in the population or be eliminated. (for more detail on this, see the Introduction to my book, Twenty Reasons To Reject Creationism: Understanding Evolution (ISBN 13: ISBN-13 : 979-8306548166).

Now, researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have reported the results of this natural experiment, and they align precisely with what evolutionary theory predicts.

Refuting Creationism - Origins of the People of Papua New-Guinea

Male Huli tribe member in Tari area of Papua New Guinea in traditional clothes and face paint.

Image Credit: By Amy Nichole Harris / Shutterstock

New AI Study Clarifies the Origins of Papua New Guineans | University of Tartu

A team of researchers led by Dr. Mayukh Mondal of the Centre for Genomics, Evolution & Medicine, Institute of Genomics, University of Tartu, Estonia, have used AI-powered demographic modelling to estimate the genetic ancestry of the people of Papua New Guinea (PNG), whose origins have long been debated.

Papua New Guineans have physical features that differ noticeably from many Asian populations, and some superficial similarities to sub-Saharan Africans have led to speculation that they might descend from a very early migration out of Africa, predating most other non-African Homo sapiens. This new study strongly challenges that hypothesis: it attributes PNG’s genetic distinctiveness instead to a substantial Denisovan admixture followed by a prolonged period of isolation, a severe population bottleneck, and slower population growth.

According to the creationist mythologies, all human beings alive today descend from Adam and Eve—or, in some versions, from Noah and his family after a global flood. If that were literally true, then all living humans would share a very narrow genetic base: mitochondrial DNA (passed via the maternal line) would be limited to a very small number of variants, and all males would share essentially the same Y-chromosome (barring mutation) tracing back to the same male ancestor.

However, the observable facts are that human genetic diversity is much richer than those narratives predict. The mitochondrial DNA lineages in living people trace back to multiple distinct haplogroups with divergence times of tens to hundreds of thousands of years within Africa and beyond into archaic ancestors; similarly, Y-chromosome diversity indicates many lineages. Our human genome tells a far more complex story: long periods of evolution in isolation, multiple migrations, re-mixing, and interbreeding with related hominin species.

The same applies to other species which creationists mythology insists are the descendants of a small number of survivors of the same genocidal flood. Few living species show evidence of such a narrow genetic bottleneck, which would probably have resulted in far too much inbreeding resulting in extinction for most of them.

All non-African humans today are descended from the major “Out-of-Africa” (OOA) migration(s) of Homo sapiens. As populations moved into Eurasia, they interbred first with Neanderthals, then with Denisovans. Underlying all this, there is also the possibility of genetic contributions from even earlier human migrations (e.g. H. erectus) into the ancestors of Neanderthals, Denisovans, or earlier modern humans. Given the evidence that hominin populations often interbred when they came into contact, it would be surprising if there were no admixture between H. erectus (or similar early lineages) and the predecessors of Neanderthals and Denisovans (often thought to include H. heidelbergensis or H. antecessor).

Refuting Creationism - A Cheesy Tease For Creationists - Observed Evolution in Cheese-Rind Fungi

Original green mould.

Evolved white mould several years later.

Cheese Fungi Help Unlock Secrets of Evolution | Tufts Now

Bayley Hazen Blue

Scientists have found a textbook example of evolution in progress—in the very mould used to mature cheese in caves.

“Show me an example of witnessed evolution!” is one of the stock demands from creationists in online debates. But it’s a trick request. No sooner is an example given than they hurriedly shift the goalposts, redefining evolution into a childish caricature. Instead of the real scientific process, they demand to see a cow turn into a whale overnight, or a mouse suddenly grow wings—some grotesque parody of “macro-evolution” that no biologist has ever claimed happens. Ironically, if such nonsense did occur, it would actually falsify the theory of evolution rather than confirm it.

This intellectual dishonesty is the lifeblood of creationist rhetoric. Their arguments only work by preying on scientific illiteracy in their audience, peddling strawmen and false definitions to cover the absence of any evidence for their own claims.

Meanwhile, science continues as it always has, with evolution properly defined as a change in allele frequency in a population’s gene pool over time. And right on cue, another clear demonstration has just been published in Current Biology.

The researchers studied the fungus Penicillium solitum, which is used to ripen cheese, by following its population over eight years in the controlled cave environment of Jasper Hill Farm. By comparing samples collected in 2016 with those taken more recently, they were able to track both visible and genetic changes in the mould over time.

What they found was striking. The rind colour, once a leafy green, had shifted to a chalky white. Genetic analysis showed this was due to repeated mutations in a pigment-producing gene called alb1, which is responsible for melanin production. In the dark, cave-like conditions, melanin offered no advantage, so natural selection favoured lineages that conserved energy by not producing it. The loss of pigment arose independently several times, through different mutations—including both point mutations and the disruption of the gene by mobile DNA elements.

This is evolution at its most direct: heritable changes in the genetic make-up of a population, producing visible differences in response to environmental conditions. It illustrates a well-known principle called relaxed selection—when a trait is no longer useful, natural selection no longer preserves it, and the trait may fade away. In this case, the shift also altered the appearance and sensory qualities of the cheese, underlining how evolutionary change can have immediate, practical consequences.

Refuting Creationism - DNA Reveals How Mastodons Had Diversified in North America - A Hundred Thousand Years Before 'Creation Week'

Mastodons lived in Arctic and Subarctic North America during an interglacial period when the area was covered in forests and wetlands.

Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Ancient DNA reveals deeply complex Mastodon family and repeated migrations driven by climate change - Brighter World

Creationism is rooted in Bronze Age mythology and rests on a single source, the Bible, whose only claim to authority is its own demonstrably false assertion that it is the inerrant word of a creator god.

This is a claim anyone could make, and it collapses when its statements are compared with the observable world.

For example, biblical genealogies, beginning with a mythical first couple created from dust without ancestors, imply that Earth is only a few thousand years old. In reality, geological and astronomical evidence shows that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and the fossil record demonstrates that life was flourishing hundreds of millions of years before the Bible implies creation began.

One striking piece of evidence comes from an analysis of mastodon DNA, which shows that between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago mastodons in North America had already diversified into several genetically distinct populations.

Refuting Creationism - A Potted History of Egypt Shows No Sign Of A Global Flood

Pottery vessel in which the Nuwayrat individual was discovered.

Morez Jacobs, A. et al. (2025). Nature (CC-BY 4.0)

We decoded the oldest genetic data from an Egyptian; a man buried around 4,500 years ago – what it told us

Geographic location of the Nuwayrat cemetery (red dot) and the previously sequenced Third Intermediate Period individuals from Abusir el-Meleq²⁰ (purple diamond).

Round about the time when the Bible’s timeline claims there was a global genocidal flood deep enough to cover the highest mountains, the body of a man was being interred in a large earthenware pot in a tomb in Egypt. If there had been a flood such as that described in the Bible, this burial would have been swept away or at least buried under a deep layer of sediment containing the jumbled remains of animals and plants killed in the flood — including species from disconnected landmasses, since there would have been no barriers to how far they could have been transported by the floodwaters.

Yet none of this appears to be true. Egyptian civilisation, which can trace its origins back to around 5,500 BCE, continued unbroken, with no record of a flood other than the annual Nile inundations on which their agriculture depended, until Egypt was absorbed first into the Greek Empire of Alexander and then into the Roman Empire. There is quite simply no record of a global flood in any Egyptian sources, and no evidence that the country was repopulated by people radiating out from a centre somewhere in the Middle East who could miraculously read and write in the hieroglyphics used by pre-“Flood” Egyptians.

Instead, we now have the genetic evidence of the man’s DNA, which tells a story of Egyptian origins that includes both North African and Mesopotamian ancestry.

How the remains of this pot burial were discovered and analysed is the subject of an open-access paper in Nature by an international team of archaeologists led by Dr Adeline Morez Jacobs, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padua, Italy, and a visiting lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, UK.

Dr Morez has also described the research and its significance in an open-access article in The Conversation, in the form of an interview. This article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Refuting Creationism - Scientists Recover Ancient Bacterial DNA - On Million-Year-Old Mammoth Teeth

Steppe Mammoths

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5)

Ancient mammoth remains yield the world's oldest host-associated bacterial DNA - Stockholm University

Parasite–host relationships are a nightmare for creationists. Their usual escape hatch is “The Fall”, but that undermines the Discovery Institute’s claim that intelligent design is science rather than Bible-literalist dogma in a lab coat. It also raises the obvious question: if parasites only appeared 6,000–10,000 years ago, how did they spread so quickly—and why do we find fossil evidence of parasitism millions of years old?

Creationists cope by dismissing science as a conspiracy, waving away radiometric dating, or pushing myths such as dinosaur fossils being “carbon-dated” [sic] to a few thousand years old. So creationism persists, despite the vast amount of evidence against it, by a combination of wilful ignorance, disinformation and a lack of critical thinking skills.

Now creationists must also ignore new research from Stockholm University, where scientists isolated bacterial DNA from the teeth of woolly and steppe mammoths. They showed these bacteria evolved into the ancestors of those infecting modern elephants—evidence of parasites a million years before “Creation Week”, and of co-evolution continuing right up to today’s elephants, the descendants of those mammoths.

Incidentally, neither mammoths nor modern elephants are mentioned in the Bible, reflecting the parochial ignorance of its authors - a fact often overlooked in depictions of animals boarding Noah's Ark, which usually includes a pair of elephants!

Creationism Refuted - How Micro-oranisms Acquire New Genetic Information - Millions of Times A Day

AI generated image

ChatGPT 5

Researchers Quantify Rate of Essential Evolutionary Process - Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences

Researchers at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences (East Boothbay, Maine, USA) have recently quantified a remarkable evolutionary process: a typical marine microorganism acquires and retains approximately 13% of its genes per million years through horizontal (lateral) gene transfer. This rate corresponds to roughly 250 genes exchanged and retained per litre of seawater each day

These transferred genes include those that provide either a selective advantage or are sufficiently neutral to persist via genetic drift—both well-established mechanisms of evolutionary change.

Some creationist arguments misapply Shannon Information Theory, claiming that gaining new genetic information violates the laws of thermodynamics. However, such arguments disregard key biological realities: cells are open systems capable of energy and material exchange; genome duplication and horizontal transfer are well-documented evolutionary processes; and substituting one nucleic acid for another does not create matter ex nihilo - facts of which any qualified biological scientists should be aware.

Furthermore, the successful retention and spread of horizontally acquired genes within microbial genomes provide clear, empirical evidence of Darwinian evolution in action. Although Charles Darwin formulated his theory without the concept of genes — speaking instead of 'heritable traits' — his mechanism of natural selection precisely explains how heritable variations can spread through populations over time.

This study also highlights that microorganisms can evolve not only through mutation and selection but also by acquiring pre-adapted genes from their environment, often from distantly related organisms. Consequently, these newly acquired genes can propagate rapidly within the recipient lineage.

The findings further challenge traditional microbial taxonomy, blurring species boundaries at the genetic level: horizontally transferred genes may function just as effectively in their new hosts as they did in their original genomes, thanks to the universality of underlying molecular machinery (e.g., replication and translation systems).

Origin of a People - The Migration of the Slavs

The Slavs in their Original Homeland

Alphons Mucha (1912)

Excavation in 2020 at the pre-Slavic cemetery of Brücken, Mansfeld-Südharz District (Saxony-Anhalt).

© Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt

How the Slavic migration reshaped Central and Eastern Europe

This blog post is something of a departure from my usual refutations of creationism. At times, that exercise can feel like shooting fish in a barrel, since almost every scientific paper on palaeontology, cosmology, or evolutionary biology casually refutes creationism simply by presenting the facts and evidence—something creationism singularly lacks.

This, however, is only tangentially related to creationism, in that it concerns the diversification of humans into distinct regional cultural and genetic populations. That richness and complexity is utterly incompatible with the notion that all of humanity radiated out from a single founder population of eight related individuals in the Middle East.

Instead, it is about the genetic evidence for the origins of the Slavic peoples, for whom I feel a special affinity. My youngest son is married to a Slav woman from Czechia and now lives and works there. Former Czechoslovakia also played a formative role in my political development during the 1960s, when the Prague Spring gave those of us on the left hope for a form of socialism that was democratic, open, and inclusive — rather than the totalitarian system into which Soviet Communism had degenerated. The self-sacrifice of the young idealists Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc, in response to the Soviet-led invasion that suppressed the reforms, was a profound inspiration — about which I wrote after a visit to Prague in December 2011, when a visit to their memorial in Wenceslaus Square, on the site of their self-immolation, reduced me to tears.

Since then, we have returned to Czechia several times. On our most recent trip in the summer of 2024, we visited the museum in the Moravský Krumlov castle near Brno, which currently houses a series of immense art nouveau paintings by the Czech artist Alphons Maria Mucha—perhaps better known in the West for his commercial art nouveau designs for chocolate boxes, biscuit tins, and soap packages that epitomised the 1920s and 30s. The series — a Czech national treasure I described at length soon after our return — titled The Epic of the Slavs, was pained between 1912 and 1926. It depicts the story of the Slavic peoples’ development in Eastern Europe up to the mid-1920s: a people struggling to forge an identity under political pressure from surrounding religious powers, from Eastern Orthodoxy in the south and east, to Catholicism in the west, followed later by German Protestantism. Like the Irish, the Czech people’s identity was forged in this power struggle, eventually emerging as proud and independent. Today, Czechia is one of the most atheist countries in Europe.

This article, however, is about the deeper origins of the Slavic peoples, as described in a recent open-access paper in Nature by an international team of researchers led by Joscha Gretzinger of the Department of Archaeogenetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.

Refuting Creationism - A Denisovan Gene Helped Humans Populate The Americas

An artist's rendering shows the first-ever portrait of a Denisovan woman, recreated from an ancient DNA sample.

Maayan Harel.

The proposed evolutionary history of MUC19.
The Denisovan-like haplotype (in orange) was first introgressed from Denisovans into Neanderthals and then introgressed into modern humans. The introgressed haplotype later experienced positive selection in populations from the Americas. The introgressed MUC19 haplotype is composed of a 742-kb region that contains Neanderthal-specific variants (blue). Embedded within this Neanderthal-like region is a 72-kb region containing a high density of Denisovan-specific variants (orange), and an exonic variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) region (gray). The box below the 742-kb region depicts zooming into the MUC19 VNTR region, in which admixed American individuals carry an elevated number of tandem repeat copies.

Fernando A. Villanea et al. (2025)

Extinct human relatives left a genetic gift that helped people thrive in the Americas | Brown University

Another day; another scientific paper showing the Bible to be wrong — not just slightly wrong, but fundamentally, demonstrably, and irretrievably wrong.

This latest blow comes from researchers at Brown University, who have traced a variant of the gene MUC19, originally identified in the extinct archaic hominins known as Denisovans, and found it alive and well today in modern Latin Americans with Indigenous ancestry. They also detected it in ancient DNA recovered from archaeological sites across both North and South America.

The variant is far too common in modern populations to be a trivial accident. Its persistence screams survival advantage. Natural selection has kept it in play because it helps its carriers thrive in the environments the earliest migrants into the Americas encountered.

What does MUC19 do? It helps build mucus — not glamorous, but life-saving. From the saliva that begins digestion to the mucosal barriers in the gut and respiratory tract that fend off infection, this gene equips its owners with a stronger shield against disease.

And where did it come from? The Denisovans. But it likely reached us by way of Neanderthals, with whom Homo sapiens also interbred. In other words, modern humans are not some isolated “special creation” freshly minted out of clay a few thousand years ago; we are a patchwork of lineages, woven together by repeated episodes of interbreeding over tens of thousands of years.

For creationists, this paper is a nightmare. First, the scientists are explicit: the explanation rests entirely on Evolution and the blind, natural processes that drive it. Second, the mere fact that extinct species like Denisovans and Neanderthals could successfully mate with our ancestors drives a stake through the heart of biblical literalism. Instead of Adam and Eve, what we see is gradual emergence — modern humans arising by incomplete speciation across a broad geographical spread, with genes flowing back and forth whenever populations met again. This pattern repeats itself throughout hominin history, and it unfolds on a timeline that makes the biblical six-thousand-year fantasy look laughably naïve.

Refuting Creationism - The Transexual Bearded Dragons Of Australia

Central bearded dragon, Pogona vitticeps

Central bearded dragon, Pogona vitticeps

By Photograph: Frank C. Müller, Baden-Baden - Own work,
CC BY-SA 2.5, Link

Being largely ignorant of any wildlife beyond what could be reached within a day or two’s walk of their pastures — and entirely ignorant of anything invisible to the naked eye — the Bible’s authors consistently imply that all living animals exist only as male or female, and that sexual reproduction is the sole reproductive strategy:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Genesis 1:26–27

And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.

Genesis 6:19–20

Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.

Genesis 7:2–3

With their parochial worldview, the Bible’s authors had no knowledge of distant continents such as Australia—indeed, they show no awareness of Northern Europe or of Asia beyond their own region, let alone of a spherical Earth divided into two hemispheres. This limitation could not be levelled against an all-knowing creator god, of course—which is precisely how we know no such god was involved in its writing. Had one been, we might reasonably expect the text to reflect a broader knowledge of the world and its history, and a more accurate understanding of living things, their origins, and their reproductive strategies—including those invisible to the unaided eye. Instead, we encounter a world that conforms only to the narrow perceptions and superstitions of its authors.