Refuting Creationism - A 'Jumping Gene' Jumps All Over Creationist Dogmas

AI-generated conceptual illustration of BC200’s transfer from human DNA into a poxvirus, with background neurons representing its association with neuronal regulation.

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AI-generated conceptual illustration of BC200’s transfer from human DNA into a poxvirus, with background neurons representing its association with neuronal regulation.

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New type of human jumping gene found in a poxvirus | Cornell Chronicle

Creationists who insist that functional genetic information requires an intelligent designer have another evolutionary history to explain. A genetic element associated with neuronal regulation in primates began as a “jumping gene”, acquired a cellular function, and nevertheless retained its ability to generate copies elsewhere in the genome. Copies even escaped into a human virus. Far from resembling a collection of sealed, immutable designs, genomes reveal a history of copying, repurposing and exchange.

The element is BC200, the subject of a paper in Science by Pu Gao and colleagues, published on 24 September 2026. Its ancestor was a transposable element recruited into a cellular role approximately 40 million years ago. BC200 produces a non-coding RNA: its product is an RNA molecule, rather than a protein. Abundant in neurons, it is thought to help regulate protein production, although its precise physiological role remains incompletely understood.

This is an example of evolutionary exaptation: existing biological material acquires a new use. A sequence whose ancestral significance lay in its capacity to propagate could become useful to its host. No foresight is required. Variants arise without anticipating future needs, and natural selection can preserve those that improve reproductive success. The new function need not have been the reason the original sequence existed.

The unusual feature here is that recruitment did not end BC200’s mobility. Genes derived from transposable elements typically lose that ancestral capacity; BC200 retained it. The researchers identified two independent transfers into molluscum contagiosum virus during the history of modern humans. Whether the acquired sequence benefits the virus remains an open question.

There are two distinct difficulties here for creationism. For young-Earth creationists, the roughly 40-million-year history already places these events far outside their biblical chronology. For intelligent-design advocates, the difficulty is mechanistic: biological function can emerge through the modification and recruitment of material that already exists. Calling the resulting function “designed” adds no explanation of the evidence.

Nor does transfer into a virus mean that a human became a virus, or that every transferred sequence must be adaptive. It demonstrates something more precise: genetic material can cross the boundary between a host genome and a viral genome. BC200’s history combines inherited ancestry, evolutionary repurposing and continuing mobility — exactly the sort of untidy, contingent history that evolutionary biology allows researchers to investigate.

Creationism Refuted - How an 'Irreducibly Complex' Process Evolved Naturally

AI-generated illustration of competing bacteriophage viruses and the CRISPR-Cas RNA immune system

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Kenneth Loi shows how VIPR RNA (in pink) snakes around the double helix of DNA (yellow and green) to form a unique triplex structure.

Photo: Glenn Ramit.

VIPR Systems Break the Rules of the Genetic Code to Target and Twist Around DNA

One of the recurring mistakes in creationist arguments is to assume that a complex biological system must always have performed its present function. If its components now work together, the argument goes, they must have been created together for that purpose. Evolution, however, can recruit existing machinery for new roles. Two papers in *Science* now provide evidence that this process may help explain the origin of an important form of microbial immunity—with the intriguing possibility that bacteria acquired the precursors of their antiviral weapons from viruses themselves.

To appreciate the discovery, it helps to understand what CRISPR immunity actually is. Although CRISPR is familiar as a tool for editing genes, its natural role is defence. Many bacteria and archaea possess CRISPR–Cas systems that retain molecular records of past invaders. Short pieces of foreign DNA are incorporated into the cell’s genome, between repeated sequences. These stored fragments provide templates for small RNA molecules, which guide CRISPR-associated—or Cas—proteins to matching genetic material during subsequent infections. Depending on the system, the resulting response can destroy invading DNA or RNA. This is adaptive immunity: protection directed against particular threats, with a genetic memory that can pass to descendants.

CRISPR stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”, a description of the DNA arrangement in which those memories are stored. The best-known gene-editing protein, Cas9, belongs to class 2, whose targeting machinery centres on one large protein. Class-1 systems instead use assemblies of several proteins to recognise their targets. It is the evolutionary origin of this latter machinery that the new research addresses.

The studies, published on 17 September 2026 investigate a compact system called VIPR, short for viral interference programmable repeat. Found in viruses and bacteria, it combines a small protein with a guide RNA. The researchers propose that an ancestral VIPR-like system involved in competition between viruses was recruited into bacterial defence, eventually contributing to the evolution of class-1 CRISPR. This would be evolutionary co-option: machinery favoured in one context becoming useful in another.

Creationism Refuted - Bats Evolved In Europe - 65 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

New study reveals bats originated in Europe and rewrites the bat family tree | University of St Andrews news

Corynorhinus townsendii.

Credit: Elizabeth Clare.

Bats present creationists with a multitude of problems: firstly, there is the fact that they have a vastly more effective immune system than humans, so creationists need to explain why an omnibenevolent creator god would not give his favourite special creation, humans, the best available immune system. Secondly, there is the famous Bible blunder where, in most English language translations, bats appear to have been classified as birds (Leviticus 11:13-19) by the ignorant people who wrote it.

Now the facts have become even more difficult in the form of an awkward combination: remarkable adaptations that invite declarations of “design”, and an evolutionary history that researchers can investigate using evidence. Calling a bat a specially created “kind” explains neither its relationships with other bats nor when and where those relationships arose. Those are questions that require fossils, genomes and testable hypotheses.

Now, a major international study, published in Nature, has brought these questions into sharper focus. Researchers working within the Bat1K consortium assembled genomic data from 103 species, representing all 21 recognised living bat families, and combined this resource with anatomical evidence from 44 fossil bats. The university summarises their findings as pointing to a European origin for bats and mammalian powered flight around 65 million years ago — tens of millions of years before the supposed “Creation Week” of young-Earth creationism.

The research reconstructs a branching history of ancestry, migration and diversification. Its geographical model favours Europe as the ancestral region, followed by dispersal into Africa and subsequent expansion into other continents. These are historical inferences that can be tested and revised as further evidence becomes available.

The study also sheds light on echolocation: the ability to use returning echoes to detect surroundings and prey. The inferred position of the extinct bat Vielasia supports the conclusion that laryngeal echolocation — using calls generated in the voice box — arose before the diversification of the group containing all living bats. This places another celebrated bat adaptation deep within their evolutionary history.

Creationism Refuted - 'Jumping Genes' Create New Functional Genetic Information - No Magic needed.

Eciton vagans, with lava from a raided wasp nest.

By Geoff Gallice from Gainesville, FL, USA Spoils of the raid, CC BY 2.0, Link

Ants look back on an evolutionary story of success. The photo shows workers of the Asian weaver ant.

© Lukas Schrader

“Jumping genes” helped ants in their evolutionary triumph after the extinction of the dinosaurs

One of creationism’s favourite assertions is that evolution cannot produce “new genetic information” without an intelligent designer. What usually goes missing is a clear definition of information, an explanation of why known genetic mechanisms cannot generate novelty, or any evidence of the supposed designer doing anything. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologists continue to investigate the natural processes by which genomes change and organisms acquire new capabilities. A new study of ants provides another example of how productive that scientific approach can be.

As reported in Science Advances, an international team led by Dr Lukas Schrader has investigated the contribution of transposable elements, commonly called “jumping genes”, to ant evolution. These mobile DNA sequences can move or copy themselves within genomes. Their activity can be disruptive, but it can also supply material for evolutionary innovation. The research links their activity to the expansion of gene families, including those encoding the odour receptors so important to ants’ chemical communication.

The researchers compared genomes from 163 ant species, representing twelve of the sixteen living subfamilies. They identified independent bursts of transposable-element activity in the ancestors of major ant groups, preceding their rapid diversification following the Cretaceous–Palaeogene, or K–Pg, mass extinction approximately 66 million years ago. The findings support a connection between changes within genomes and the evolutionary opportunities created by a profoundly altered world.

The evolutionary significance is straightforward. A mass extinction changes the conditions under which survivors live: ecological relationships are disrupted, resources become available in different ways, and opportunities arise as ecosystems recover. A genetic variant that previously offered little advantage may become useful under these new conditions. Natural selection can then favour organisms carrying it. Neither the mutation nor the environmental upheaval needs to anticipate the outcome.

Nor does genetic novelty require a complete, finished gene to appear from nowhere. Duplication supplies additional copies of existing sequences, which can subsequently diverge; changes to the regulation and arrangement of DNA can also alter what an organism does. Calling the starting material “existing information” does nothing to prevent its descendants from acquiring new functions. The relevant questions concern what changed, how it changed, and what consequences followed—not whether creationists are willing to call the result “information”.

Here, the specific finding is an association between mobile DNA, expanding gene families and subsequent diversification. It should not be inflated into a claim that every extra receptor acquired a demonstrated new function, or that the asteroid impact directly produced particular beneficial mutations. Nevertheless, the study supplies evidence for a natural route connecting genomic change with evolutionary diversification, precisely where the creationist argument substitutes an assertion of impossibility.

For young-Earth creationists, there is the additional inconvenience of the timescale. This diversification followed an extinction event some 66 million years ago—thousands of times further into the past than their entire supposed history of the Universe allows. Ant evolution was already unfolding in a world unimaginably ancient by biblical standards. What emerges is a history of genetic change, environmental catastrophe and opportunities exploited by surviving lineages, without foresight or a predetermined destination.

Creationism Refuted - The History Of Viticulture - Uninterrupted By A Global Genocide

AI-Generated image of wine-making in Iberia, 3000 Years ago

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Grape seeds from Huelva, Vitis vinifera L.

Image: Guillem Pérez Jordà.

Ancient DNA reveals that the first grapevines cultivated in the Iberian Peninsula arrived from the eastern Mediterranean 3,000 years ago

If fruit-bearing plants were created for human use by an omnipotent, omniscient god, why have humans spent thousands of years modifying them to suit our needs? Genesis 1:29 presents seed-bearing plants and fruit trees as divine provisions for humanity, yet agriculture tells a rather different story: people taking what nature supplied and, through cultivation and selection, producing crops better suited to their purposes. Grapevines provide another example of this gap between the claim of providential design and the biological history of our food.

Research published in Current Biology, traces part of that history through ancient DNA. An international team analysed 28 archaeological grape seeds from Iberia and Sardinia. Their findings indicate that cultivated vines of eastern Mediterranean ancestry reached Iberia approximately 3,000 years ago, associated with Phoenician settlement and trade. These were already domesticated plants, arriving in a landscape where wild grapevines also grew.

The imported vines subsequently crossed with local wild populations. This mixing contributed to the ancestry of traditional Iberian varieties, with characteristic lineages already identifiable in seeds from the fourth century BCE. Ancient DNA also revealed connections between medieval seeds and varieties preserved today. The record therefore contains both change and continuity: new combinations of ancestry alongside lineages maintained across centuries.

More worryingly for Bible-literalist creationist, the genetic evidence shows that viticulture (the cultivation and growing of grapes) has a continuous history from before 'Creation Week' through the mythical global flood and biological reset of Earth, right up to the present, with no evidence of interruption of either the culturally-inherited methods or of the grape varieties used.

This is a useful illustration of how evolution works. Populations do not have to acquire all their useful variation through new mutations arising on the spot. Reproduction can reshuffle existing variation, while interbreeding brings together genetic variants from previously separated populations. Cultivation then provides opportunities for people to retain and propagate plants with desirable characteristics. Human preferences influence which vines reproduce or are multiplied, but the inheritance and variation on which that selection acts are ordinary biological processes.

Creationism Refuted - The Evolution Of Domestic Dogs Began Long Before 'Creation Week'

Top The Eurasian Grey Wolf. Below a selection of its descendants. Creationists need to explain why this is not macro-evolution even though the scale of the differences between them and wolves is at least as great as that between humans, chimpanzees and gorillas

Various Internet sources

More dogs

Internet sources.

Dogs 10,000 years ago roamed with bands of humans and came in all shapes and sizes

Last November, just as I was finalising the second of my Ice Age Tales novels, two papers appeared in Science examining a subject central to their underlying theme: the long relationship between humans and the wolves whose descendants became domestic dogs. My stories are set some 30,000–40,000 years ago and imagine the beginnings of that relationship. The new research examines later chapters, revealing that substantial diversity among dogs was already established thousands of years before the intensive breeding that produced modern pedigree breeds.

The distinction matters. These papers do not show that domestication began only 11,000 years ago, nor that today’s breeds originated then. One identifies recognisably dog-like skull shapes in specimens dating to about that time, together with considerable variation among early Holocene dogs. The other traces how ancient dog populations moved and mixed alongside human communities over nearly 10,000 years. Both illuminate a prolonged history, rather than a single moment when wolves suddenly became dogs.

Earlier associations between wolves and hunter-gatherers remain possible, although neither paper establishes the particular scenario imagined in my novels. Taming an individual wolf is also different from domesticating a population: domestication involves inherited changes across generations, and behavioural changes need not coincide with readily identifiable changes in skull shape. The earliest stages of this relationship therefore remain difficult to reconstruct.

Dog domestication is, of course, a classic example of evolution under human influence. Its history presents several awkward questions for creationism, especially claims that substantial biological change is impossible and that the natural world fits a chronology of only a few thousand years.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Syphilis - How Did It Survive On The Ark?

[caption]

[credit]

The archeological site of Tequendama 1 at the border of the Sabana de Bogotá, Cundinamarca, Colombia.

© Angélica Triana.

Ancient DNA pushes back record of treponemal disease-causing bacteria by 3,000 years

Creationists who take the biblical Flood story literally have a problem that rarely features in illustrations of Noah’s floating menagerie: what happened to the infectious diseases? Saving their animal hosts would also have provided opportunities to save their pathogens. Conversely, exterminating the hosts would have threatened the survival of the very organisms that depended on them. A supposedly fresh start for life on Earth would therefore require an explanation for why so many ancient infections apparently came along for the ride.

Many pathogens, including those that infect humans are also host-specific, so that begs the question of which of the human passengers were host to the sexually-transmitted diseases, and how, if they were 'righteous' people, did they acquire them? The authors of the tale knew nothing of microorganisms or the germ theory of disease, of course, so saw no reason to explain all that stuff.

A discovery reported in Science on 22 January 2026 gives that question another uncomfortable historical dimension. An international research team has reconstructed a roughly 5,500-year-old genome of Treponema pallidum from human remains at the Tequendama I rock shelter in Colombia. This is the bacterial species whose recognised subspecies cause syphilis, yaws and bejel. The findings are described in a research paper in Science by Davide Bozzi and colleagues.

The ancient bacterium belonged to a previously unknown branch of the family tree, a sister lineage to all the genetically characterised subspecies of T. pallidum. It should therefore not be described simply as a case of modern syphilis in a prehistoric person. Nevertheless, its presence establishes that this group of pathogens was infecting people in South America long before European contact—and before the date commonly assigned to Noah’s genocidal flood.

The evolutionary history reaches further back still. The researchers’ molecular-clock analysis estimates that the ancient lineage and the other known lineages shared a common ancestor approximately 13,700 years ago. That estimate carries substantial uncertainty, with a range of roughly 6,800–20,600 years, but its central value places this ancestral population well before even the more generous versions of the usual young-Earth creationist chronology. These are estimates reconstructed from genetic evidence, not dates obtained by adding together the supposed lifespans of biblical patriarchs.

The Flood problem deserves careful examination. Genesis is ambiguous on the point. On the one hand it describes the destruction of terrestrial, air-breathing life; on the other hand it specifically refers to all living substance being destroyed. Although the authors were unaware of microorganisms so were not writing a microbiology textbook, a supposedly omniscient, creator god would not have been constrained by the ignorance of primitive pastoralists. But then these obligate parasites would not have survived the destruction of their hosts outside the ark, so the question of what 'life' the Bible is referring to become moot. If you subscribe to the Ark myth, you have to accept that any survivors must have been carried in the Ark.

The discovery of an ancient relative of syphilis does not establish that the particular Colombian lineage survived to the present. But neither qualification explains how the surviving branches of an ancient, host-associated pathogen could have persisted through the alleged destruction of their hosts outside the Ark. Within that narrative, infected passengers or another explicitly justified means of survival would be needed. Simply overlooking the pathogens does not solve the problem.

There appears to be no way to avoid the conclusion that, if the Ark myth were true, Noah and his family must have been carrying the obligate, species-specific sexually-transmitted diseases, syphilis, gonorrhoea and chlamydia as well as pubic lice and an assortment of intestinal worms.

Evolution, meanwhile, supplies the framework that makes the discovery intelligible: common ancestry, branching descent and genetic change over time. The scientists can place an unfamiliar ancient genome within a family tree and investigate when its lineage diverged from its relatives. There is no need to invent a separate creation event for each disease, or a miraculous rescue operation to carry ancient infections across an otherwise universal catastrophe. There is a history to reconstruct—and the evidence is preserved in the DNA.

Refuting Creationism - Bigamous Beetles Have Better Babies - Observed Evolution Over 15 Years

Red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum.

By Udo Schmidt from Deutschland Tribolium castaneum (Herbst, 1797) CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

Red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum

Source: Wikipedia - Public Domain, Link

How sex can help save species from extinction | UEA

One of the recurring claims of creationist apologetics is that mutations condemn living populations to relentless genetic deterioration — a supposedly inevitable decline which evolution cannot overcome. What this argument neglects is that mutations do not operate in isolation: selection influences which genetic variants pass to subsequent generations. Now, a long-running experiment with red flour beetles has provided direct genomic evidence that competition for mates can help remove harmful variants, leaving populations more resistant to extinction.

The research, led by Michael D. Pointer, of the University of East Anglia Department of Biological Sciences, described in a report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), also addresses an interesting evolutionary question: why is sexual reproduction so widespread despite its considerable costs? Finding mates takes time and energy, competition can be costly, and reproduction requires contributions from individuals which do not themselves produce eggs. One possible compensating benefit is that competition for reproductive success helps prevent damaging mutations from accumulating.

The researchers tested this idea using populations of the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, maintained under stronger or weaker sexual selection. After 156 generations, whole-genome sequencing showed that populations exposed to stronger sexual selection carried fewer genetic variants predicted to be harmful. Their overall genetic diversity, however, remained comparable. Selection had reduced the burden of damaging variants without a corresponding reduction in variation across the genome.

The distinction matters. Genetic diversity is often used as an indicator of a population’s prospects, but the amount of variation cannot tell us everything about its effects. In this experiment, the estimated burden of harmful variants was a better predictor of extinction under inbreeding than diversity alone. Populations could retain similar amounts of genetic variation while differing in their vulnerability to genetic stress.

Creationism Refuted - The 'American Cheetah' Was Not A Cheetah - Convergent Evolution

An artistic rendering of two Miracinonyx, one in Beringia preying mainly on fish and one in the Lower 48 feeding on pronghorn antelope.

Credit: Julius Csotonyi (CC-BY SA)

The feline Miracinonyx trumani got its nickname, the “American cheetah,” from its slender, long-limbed body, reminiscent of an African cheetah. While the extinct Pleistocene predator did hunt down speedy prey, such as saiga antelope (illustrated), a new study shows some animals ate a diet of mostly fish, suggesting the species was more adaptable than previously thought.

Velizar Simeonovski

The extinct American ‘cheetah’ was not a cheetah after all | EurekAlert!

A cat can look rather like a cheetah without being a cheetah, and a predator with long legs need not spend its life chasing antelopes. That is the lesson from new research into the extinct “American cheetah”, Miracinonyx trumani, whose ancient DNA and dietary chemistry reveal a more complicated animal than its nickname suggests. It is also another example of why evolutionary relationships have to be investigated through evidence, rather than decided by resemblance and fitted into preconceived categories.

The study, led by Molly Cassatt-Johnstone of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and published in Current Biology, analysed ancient DNA from four specimens. It strengthens earlier evidence that Miracinonyx was more closely related to living pumas than to true cheetahs, with the puma and Miracinonyx lineages estimated to have separated approximately 2.6 million years ago. Its cheetah-like anatomy therefore reflects convergent evolution: the independent evolution of similar features in different lineages.

There is an immediate difficulty here for young-Earth creationism. The evolutionary separation of these cats occurred millions of years before the supposed “Creation Week”, while the three Yukon specimens themselves are approximately 31,000 years old. These were animals living, feeding and dying in an established ecosystem long before the entire universe supposedly existed according to a literal reading of Genesis. Their identification also extends the animal’s known distribution far into northern Canada. Science News.

Creationism Refuted - How Mammalian Genes Combine to Produce New mRNA - No Magic Required

AI-generated depiction of a chimeric mRNA being formed from two different genes

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A watercolor painting depicts chimeric mRNAs.

Image: Hannah Davis/Jackson Lab.

Mammalian Genes Can Combine To Make Previously Unknown mRNAs, Proteins | Harvard Medical School

An immune system that saves your life in one circumstance can help kill you in another makes sense in the light of evolution: natural selection favours advantages whose benefits outweigh their costs under prevailing conditions, without guaranteeing safety in every eventuality. For creationists who present biological complexity as evidence of perfect intelligent design, however, such compromises require some explaining.

A new study published in Nature on 2 September 2026 provides a particularly revealing example. Researchers found that mammalian cells can join RNA sequences copied from separate genes into a combined message. One resulting protein improves antibacterial defence in mice, but also increases vulnerability to lethal inflammatory responses in experimental models of sepsis. The same molecular mechanism brings both protection and danger.

To understand the discovery, think of DNA as a collection of stored recipes. Messenger RNA, or mRNA, is a working copy that a cell uses to assemble a protein. Scientists have long known that cells can edit these copies, allowing a single gene to produce different proteins. Here, the researchers investigated messages containing material from different genes, sometimes located on different chromosomes. It is rather like making a new recipe by combining instructions from two separate cookbooks. The joining occurs at the RNA level; it does not require the original DNA recipes to merge.

These combined messages are called chimeric RNAs. Crucially, the team demonstrated that one produces a functional protein, named GSDMD–TMEM106A, during inflammation in mice. Most of the other candidate messages have yet to be shown to produce functional proteins, so the discovery should not be mistaken for proof that every detected combination has a useful role.

The evolutionary interest lies in the consequences. Strengthening an inflammatory response can help an animal resist infection, yet the resulting damage can become lethal. Weakening that response can reduce the danger from inflammation while leaving the animal less able to control bacteria. There is no simple setting at which “more immunity” always means “better health”.

This is precisely the sort of trade-off evolutionary biology helps us understand. Natural selection works with inherited mechanisms and their competing consequences; it has neither foresight nor a commitment to the welfare of every individual or to the perfect solution. The study does not reconstruct the evolutionary history of this particular protein, but its findings illustrate why a useful biological feature need not be harmless, let alone perfect. For intelligent-design advocates, the question is therefore more demanding than “Is it complicated?” It is why an allegedly flawless designer’s protective machinery comes with the capacity to inflict fatal damage on the organism it protects.

Creationism Refuted - The People Of Gansu, China Did Not Have Ancestors In The Middle East - Another Bible Blunder

Depiction of Bronze Age Life in Gansu, China

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Astra)

Geographic locations of the studied sites in Gansu and nearby regions (color-filled circles) and published ancient sites in East Asia co-analyzed in this study (white-filled circles).

From: Shi H, Bennett E, Chen G, et al (2026)

Multidisciplinary Study Sheds Light on Agricultural Diffusion, Population Movement, and Funeral Practices in Ancient Gansu----Chinese Academy of Sciences

Archaeologists have long warned that “pots are not people”. The distribution of a particular style of pottery does not necessarily trace the movement of the people who first made it, because pots can be traded, copied or carried through a succession of neighbouring communities. Much the same principle applies to crops, livestock and agricultural techniques: wheat can travel without wheat farmers, sheep without shepherds, and an effective method can spread simply because other people adopt it.

Distinguishing between the movement of people and the movement of their culture is therefore essential when reconstructing prehistory. Agriculture sometimes spread by demic diffusion, in which expanding farming populations moved into new territory and brought their domesticates with them. In other cases, it spread principally by cultural diffusion, as existing populations acquired crops, animals or knowledge through trade, imitation and intermediate exchange networks. Archaeological remains alone do not always reveal which process occurred, but ancient DNA can now test the alternatives directly.

Gansu, in north-western China, provides an especially important case. Situated between the Yellow River basin, the Tibetan Plateau, the Mongolian Steppe and the routes leading towards Central Asia, the region became a major corridor of prehistoric trans-Eurasian exchange. Crops and livestock domesticated much farther west eventually appeared there, raising the obvious question of whether they arrived with migrating western farmers or passed between the established populations of Inner and East Asia.

A multidisciplinary study published in Cell has now examined genomic data from 149 people who lived at eleven Gansu sites between approximately 4,700 and 3,000 years ago. Western-derived crops or livestock were present at nine of those sites, yet the researchers found no corresponding influx of western Eurasian or Central Asian ancestry. The principal genetic components instead derived from populations associated with the Yellow River basin, the south-eastern Mongolian Plateau and the Tibetan Plateau. A few genetic outliers testify to regional mobility and contact, but not to wholesale population replacement.

The evidence therefore indicates that the western domesticates reached Gansu largely through cultural transmission—possibly along the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor or through chains of intermediary communities across the Mongolian Steppe. Crops, animals and ideas crossed Eurasia farther and more readily than the people among whom they had originated. The finding also shows why neither pottery, farming nor any other cultural innovation can safely be treated as a proxy for mass migration.

This carefully reconstructed picture bears little resemblance to the simplistic human history imagined by biblical literalists. It contains no recently dispersed descendants of a single family spreading from Babel with fixed cultures and divinely assigned identities. Instead, it reveals long-established, genetically differentiated populations connected by shifting networks of exchange, occasional mobility and selective cultural borrowing. People did not need to migrate en masse for useful innovations to spread across a continent.

Malevolent Design - How The Success Of A Honey Bee Parasite Is Assured - Malevolent Design Or Evolution?

Varroa desructor female.
Dorsal view (top); ventral view (bottom)

By USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab from Beltsville, Maryland, USA - Varroa destructor, 1_2019-09-06-19.12.07 ZS PMax UDR, Public Domain, Link

Varroa mites on honey bee pupa.

By Unknown author - Kika De La Garza Subtropical Agricultural Research Center
Weslaco, Texas, USA, Public Domain, Link

Varroa mites escape the evolutionary trap of haplodiploidy | Nature Communications

Creationists like to portray living things as products of a single act of creation in which every species was equipped with its characteristic form and method of reproduction from the outset. In that view, reproductive systems should be fixed features of separately created “kinds”, not historically contingent arrangements that can be remodelled by natural selection.

Biology reveals something very different. Even such fundamental characteristics as sex determination, chromosome number and the balance between sexual and asexual reproduction can evolve. Existing developmental mechanisms are modified, discarded or repurposed according to whether the resulting variations leave more descendants. Evolution has no predetermined direction, no obligation to proceed from “simple” to “complex” and no rule forbidding a lineage from reacquiring a feature resembling one possessed by its ancestors.

An international team of researchers has now discovered an especially striking example in Varroa destructor, the globally invasive parasitic mite that feeds on honeybees and transmits damaging viruses between them. Its reproductive system appears to have reversed what was once regarded as an evolutionary one-way street.

Like many mites, bees, wasps and ants, Varroa was believed to be haplodiploid. In conventional haplodiploidy, females develop from fertilised eggs and possess two sets of chromosomes, while males develop from unfertilised eggs and possess only one. Consequently, a haploid male can transmit only the single copy of each gene inherited from his mother.

That should present Varroa with a serious evolutionary handicap. A female mite enters a honeybee brood cell shortly before it is sealed and produces one son followed by several daughters. The siblings mate with one another inside the cell, producing generation after generation of extreme inbreeding. Combined with the population bottlenecks associated with invading new hosts and new geographical regions, this should rapidly erode genetic diversity and limit the parasite’s ability to adapt.

However, by tracing genetic variants through three-generation pedigrees, Nurit Eliash and colleagues discovered that Varroa is not conventionally haplodiploid after all. Its females produce sons parthenogenetically, but those sons initially inherit both copies of their mother’s genome and are effectively genetic clones of her. Although DNA is subsequently eliminated from some of the males’ body cells, their reproductive lineage retains access to both maternal copies, either of which can be transmitted to a daughter.

Creationism Refuted - Recovering DNA from Extinct Galápagos Giant Tortoises

The Pinzón saddleback tortoise, a small giant tortoise species native to Pinzón Island in the Galápagos characterized by a saddle-like curve in its shell.

Credit: Evelyn Jensen

Dome-shelled Galápagos giant tortoise, Chelonoidis nigra

By Mfield, Matthew Field, http://www.photography.mattfield.com - Own work,
CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Reading the giant tortoise DNA that time forgot | Yale News

Few places are more closely associated with evolutionary biology than the Galápagos Islands. Their isolation has repeatedly divided colonising populations into smaller groups, allowing mutation, genetic drift and natural selection to produce distinct island lineages. Yet their subsequent history has not always resembled a neatly branching tree. Occasional migration—and, more recently, the deliberate movement of animals by humans—has brought formerly isolated populations back into contact, permitting them to interbreed and exchange genes.

The evolutionary radiation of the Galápagos giant tortoises is a particularly striking example. Thirteen living and four extinct lineages are currently recognised within the Chelonoidis complex, each descended from the same ancestral colonisation but subsequently differentiated by geographical isolation. Unfortunately, centuries of exploitation by sailors and settlers devastated many populations, leaving some lineages represented only by bones preserved in museums.

Those remains retain a record of their evolutionary history, but reading it is difficult. DNA begins to fragment and chemically deteriorate after death, while contamination from microorganisms and people can overwhelm the surviving genetic material. In some of the museum specimens examined in a new study, researchers could read less than one per cent of the original genome—far too little for many conventional methods of genomic comparison.

However, a team led by researchers at Yale University has now developed a computational approach capable of extracting reliable evolutionary information from such exceptionally incomplete genomes. As described in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the researchers analysed dried bones from five historical specimens and placed their surviving DNA fragments upon a reference phylogeny constructed from high-quality genomes belonging to living and other historical tortoises.

Importantly, the researchers did not manufacture plausible sequences to fill the gaps. Their analytical pipeline was designed to recover the phylogenetic and population-genetic signal present in ultra-low-coverage genomes without imputing the missing genotypes. Even at sequencing depths as low as 0.008 times the genome, the surviving fragments contained enough mutually consistent information to reveal where the specimens belonged.

The results confirmed that the bones represented two evolutionarily distinct, now-extinct lineages: the former tortoises of Santa Fe and an extinct San Cristóbal lineage different from the population still living on that island. These were not merely unusual individuals belonging to surviving populations but genetically distinguishable branches of the wider Galápagos tortoise radiation.

Creationism Refuted - Eurasian Homo sapiens Stopped Eating Insects - Thousands Of Years Before 'Creation Week'

Insects in Chang Moi, Mueang Chiang Mai District, Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Credit: mohigan. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

European Homo sapiens ate fewer insects than Neanderthals and tropical populations - Institut de Biologia Evolutiva - CSIC UPF (UPF)

Humans are strange creatures. While we recoil at the thought of tucking into a dish of sautéed maggots, fried grasshoppers or other insects, we happily eat their close arthropod relatives, crabs, lobsters and prawns, and yet the evidence is that this has only been so for Northern Eurasians for about the last 9,000 year.

People are also strange in another way: despite all the evidence to the contrary and with no supporting evidence at all, there are people who believe the whole of history can be compressed into a few thousand years and that animals can be created by magic without ancestors.

For biblical literalists, every human who has ever lived must be squeezed into the few thousand years since the supposed creation of the first couple. Yet evidence preserved in something as commonplace as calcified plaque on ancient teeth tells a very different story: one of several human lineages, changing diets, inherited genetic variation and adaptation to contrasting environments over tens of thousands of years.

In a paper published in Science Advances, Manuel Piñero and Pablo Librado of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona combined two independent sources of evidence to investigate the history of human insect-eating, or entomophagy. They searched ancient dental calculus for insect DNA and examined genetic variants affecting our ability to digest chitin—the tough polysaccharide forming much of an insect’s exoskeleton.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution Of Immunity, Longevity And Cancer Resistance In Bats - No Magic Needed

Myotis bats

Little Brown Bat, Myotis lucifugus. Can live up to 35 years, immune to most viruses and rarely develops cancers

Photo © Michael Durham,
Illinois Department of Natural Resources

Clues to longevity may reside in the genomes of long-lived bats - Berkeley News

Creationists routinely claim that mutation cannot produce new genetic information and that complex biological systems must have been separately designed for their allotted purposes. Yet living genomes bear little resemblance to collections of independently engineered components. Genes are duplicated, deleted, rearranged and modified; the resulting variants are tested by natural selection; and the same molecular machinery is repeatedly recruited for several different functions. A new study of bats provides a particularly revealing example of this evolutionary improvisation.

Viruses and their hosts have been engaged in evolutionary arms races for hundreds of millions of years. Viruses evolve ways to enter cells, evade immune responses and appropriate cellular machinery for their own replication, while their hosts evolve countermeasures. From a creationist perspective, this requires an intelligent designer simultaneously to design the viruses, their means of attacking their hosts and the defensive systems needed to resist them. Evolution provides the far simpler explanation: each side imposes selection on the other, with no foresight, overall plan or concern for the suffering caused along the way.

In a paper published in Nature, an international team of researchers assembled near-complete genomes for eight closely related species of Myotis bat and established primary cell lines with which to test some of the genomic findings. The comparison revealed abundant structural variation—including inversions, translocations and gene duplications—within an otherwise strongly conserved arrangement of chromosomes.

The researchers found that bats have responded differently to different classes of virus. Proteins interacting with DNA viruses showed an unusually strong signature of positive selection, whereas genes interacting with RNA viruses were especially prone to gains and losses of copies. One antiviral gene, EIF2AK2, better known as PKR, occurs in one, two or, in one lineage, three copies. The original duplication appears to have arisen near the base of the Myotis radiation, with duplicated and unduplicated forms persisting across species for tens of millions of years. This is new genetic material arising through mutation and subsequently being retained, modified or lost according to its effects—not information supplied fully formed by an external intelligence.

Refuting Creationism - How We Know The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People - Sex Determination In Geckos

Various Geckos

Source: Wikipedia

XY or ZW? Geckos Reveal Evolution's Hidden Playbook

The simplest way to test the claim that the Bible is the inerrant work of an omniscient creator is to compare its account with observable reality. When that is done, its creation stories reflect the limited biological knowledge of their human authors, not omniscience. Genesis 1:27 presents “male and female” as divinely ordained categories for humans, while the wider biblical narrative assumes the familiar arrangement of sexually reproducing males and females among animals; indeed in Genesis 6:19 the Bible unambiguously states all the animals on the Ark were male and female.

Real biology is much less tidy. Many animal species are simultaneous or sequential hermaphrodites; some lineages consist entirely of females and reproduce by parthenogenesis; and many organisms reproduce without sex at all. The biblical authors displayed only the knowledge expected of people living in an ancient pastoral society. An omniscient creator would have known better.

Nor are the mechanisms that determine sex fixed systems established in a single act of creation, with organisms thereafter reproducing only “after their kind”. They are themselves products of evolution. The new gecko study indicates that different lineages have switched repeatedly between genetic sex determination and environmental sex determination, in which conditions such as egg-incubation temperature influence the offspring’s sex. Even genetic sex determination has repeatedly been reinvented, with different ordinary chromosomes recruited independently to become X and Y or Z and W chromosomes. Instead of one immutable system imposed by a designer, geckos exhibit an evolutionary patchwork assembled and repeatedly modified over millions of years.

The familiar mammalian arrangement in which females are XX and males XY is sometimes treated as though it were the inevitable—and therefore designed—way of determining sex. But nature displays no such uniformity. Birds generally use a ZW system, in which females are ZW and males ZZ, while many reptiles dispense with specialised sex chromosomes altogether and allow environmental conditions, particularly incubation temperature, to influence whether an embryo develops as male or female.

Geckos exhibit all three arrangements, sometimes among relatively closely related species. This extraordinary diversity makes them a natural experiment in how sex-determination mechanisms originate, change and disappear during evolution.

In a new study published in *Science*, Yang Zhou and colleagues compared chromosome-level genomes from geckos representing all seven living families. Their reconstruction indicates that gecko lineages have switched between environmental and genetic sex determination at least 23 times. The researchers identified 22 distinct sex-chromosome systems and traced them to 17 different chromosomes in the ancestral gecko genome. Some of those ancestral chromosomes were recruited independently on several separate occasions.

Refuting Creationism - A Road-Map Of Evolution Over 600 Million Years - From A Common Ancestor

The ever-branching tree of animal Evolution

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 SOL)

Roadmap of animal biodiversity: largest-ever comparison of chromosome-scale genomes

Words such as rules, pathways and highways can become treacherous when scientific findings pass through the hands of religious apologists. A rule, in ordinary speech, suggests someone who made it; a highway suggests an engineer who decided where it should lead. It is therefore easy to anticipate claims that a major new study of animal chromosomes has discovered evidence that evolution follows rules—and that rules must imply a rule-maker directing evolution towards a predetermined goal.

That, however, is not what the researchers have found.

In the largest comparison of chromosome-scale animal genomes yet undertaken, Darrin Schultz and colleagues analysed 5,821 genomes representing 4,454 species in 19 animal phyla. Their study, published in Science Advances, developed what they call “evolutionary genome topology”: a way of mapping the enormous variety of animal genomes according to the organisation and shared ancestry of their chromosomes. The results reveal recognisable, partly irreversible patterns extending back more than 600 million years to the common ancestor of living animals.

The accompanying University of Vienna press release describes these patterns as “evolutionary highways” and says that genomes evolve according to a limited set of “rules”. Those are useful metaphors, but they describe constraints and consequences—not commands, intentions or a plan.

Animal chromosomes can split, fuse and exchange material, but these processes are not free to produce every imaginable arrangement with equal probability. Existing chromosome structure limits what can happen next, while every change becomes part of the starting conditions inherited by subsequent generations. In particular, when ancestral chromosomes fuse and their genes subsequently become intermingled, the original arrangement cannot simply be reconstructed by reversing the fusion. The researchers call this process “fusion-with-mixing”. It makes chromosome evolution path-dependent: where a lineage can readily go next depends partly upon where it has already been.

This is what “rules” means in this context. It no more implies a supernatural rule-maker than the regular formation of crystals implies a crystal designer, or the course taken by a river implies that someone planned its route. Physical and chemical processes have consistent properties; biological structures impose constraints; and inherited history restricts the range of subsequent possibilities. Regular outcomes can emerge from those natural conditions without foresight or intention.

Nor does the statement that genomes “do not change at random” mean that their future has been prescribed. Mutations and chromosome rearrangements can occur without regard to what an organism needs, but randomness does not mean that every conceivable event is equally likely—or even physically possible. Some rearrangements are more readily produced than others; some are lethal or reduce fertility; some survive genetic drift or natural selection; and every surviving arrangement alters the possibilities available to its descendants. Chance operates within constraints, producing statistical patterns rather than fulfilling a programme.

Refuting Creationism - Why Sex Evolved

Recombination by sexual reproduction drives adaptive diversity in yeast

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

The why behind sex — Harvard Gazette

For creationists, who typically know little or nothing about evolution and so have no understanding that it is a process that takes place in a population, not an event that happens to individuals, sexual reproduction is a fertile source of disinformation and misunderstanding with which to attack the Theory of Evolution.

For instance, they frequently argue that the probability of the 'first man' and 'first woman' evolving together is so highly unlikely that their myth of the spontaneous creation out of dirt of a man and the cloning of a woman by magic is a far more rational alternative explanation. The science is attacked because when they try to force fit their childish myth of every species having a single ancestral male and female couple into the science of evolution, it doesn't fit well. The possibility of the myth being wrong must never be contemplated, because that would risk having to change their mind.

However, science works by addressing questions, not by throwing stones at infantile straw-man parodies of alternative ideas and declaring victory by default.

For science, sexual reproduction presents evolutionary biology with a different long-standing puzzle. An asexual organism can pass on its entire genome without finding a mate, competing for one or investing energy in courtship. In species with separate sexes, there is also the familiar “twofold cost of males”: only females produce offspring, whereas every member of an asexual population can potentially reproduce.

All else being equal, an asexual lineage should therefore increase more quickly than a sexual one, and indeed there are a few examples of where this is true - a single female vine weevil can quickly populate a window box or plant pot with devastating consequences for the owner as I have found to my cost; a single marbled crayfish can rapidly spread through a new river system, out-competing any native species.

Yet sexual reproduction is widespread among eukaryotes and has persisted for hundreds of millions of years. This does not imply that evolution requires foresight or that sex was introduced by a designer for some future purpose. It means that, under many circumstances, the descendants of organisms that exchange and recombine genetic material must acquire advantages sufficient to offset the immediate costs.

One important advantage is that sex reshuffles the genome. In an asexual lineage, genes are inherited together as a largely indivisible package. A beneficial mutation can therefore carry neighbouring neutral or mildly harmful mutations with it as it spreads through a population—a process known as genetic hitchhiking. Sexual reproduction and recombination can break up these associations, separating advantageous mutations from some of the damaging evolutionary baggage accompanying them.

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

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

Photo: Sarah Friedrich.

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

Photo: Sarah Friedrich.

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

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

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

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

European common lizard, Zootoca vivipara

Image credit: Meredith Kimble

European common lizard, Zootoca vivipara

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

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

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

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

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