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.
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.
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.
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.
Background^ How Humans Produce Eggs and Sperm.
Egg production (oogenesis)
In females, all the eggs a woman will ever have are formed before birth. During foetal development, cells in the ovaries undergo meiosis (a special type of cell division that halves the number of chromosomes).
These immature egg cells (oocytes) remain “frozen” in an early stage until puberty, when hormones begin to stimulate their monthly maturation.
Usually, only one egg completes development and is released each month during ovulation.
Because oocytes are stored for decades, they accumulate damage and errors over time, which explains why fertility declines and the risk of genetic disorders rises with age.
Sperm production (spermatogenesis)
In males, sperm are produced continuously from puberty onwards in the testes.
Specialised stem cells divide by meiosis to create sperm cells with half the normal number of chromosomes.
Each cell division cycle produces millions of sperm every day, but the process is intricate and vulnerable to errors.
Defective sperm are common, though usually filtered out, and sperm quality can decline with age, illness, or environmental factors.
Why it matters
Both processes rely on precise chromosome sorting and pairing. Even small mistakes—such as an extra or missing chromosome—can lead to infertility, miscarriage, or genetic disorders such as Down syndrome. The complexity and fragility of gamete production underline how far these processes fall short of “perfect design”.
In addition, as this article exposes, the eggs are maintained in a state of partial meiosis, 'frozen' at a critical point, sometimes for several decades, until just before ovulation, requiring special processes to conserve them in that state. If this stage fails then it can result in miscarriage, or birth defects.
Landmark Discovery Reveals How Chromosomes Are Passed From One Generation to the NextCritical Event Guides Accurate Distribution of Chromosomes To Eggs and Sperm
When a woman becomes pregnant, the outcome of that pregnancy depends on many things — including a crucial event that happened while she was still growing inside her own mother’s womb. It depends on the quality of the egg cells that were already forming inside her fetal ovaries. The DNA-containing chromosomes in those cells must be cut, spliced and sorted perfectly. In males, the same process produces sperm in the testes but occurs only after puberty.
If that goes wrong, then you end up with the wrong number of chromosomes in the eggs or sperm. This can result in infertility, miscarriage or the birth of children with genetic diseases.
Professor Neil Hunter, corresponding author
Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics
University of California Davis
Davis, CA, USA.
Hunter’s discoveries required methods to watch the molecular events of chromosome recombination unfold with unprecedented detail. This involved genetic engineering in budding yeast — a model organism that has been used for decades to discover how fundamental cellular processes work.
The chromosome structures that we studied have changed very little across evolution. Every protein that we looked at in yeast has a direct counterpart in humans.
Professor Neil Hunter.
His findings could improve our understanding of fertility problems and how they are diagnosed and treated in humans.
Forming chromosome crossovers for strong connections
Humans have 46 chromosomes in each of our cells, made up of 23 pairs of matching, “homologous” chromosomes, with one of each pair inherited from each parent. Early in the process of making sperm or eggs, those chromosome pairs line up, and the parental chromosomes break and rejoin to each other. These chromosome exchanges, called “crossovers,” serve two important functions.
First, they help ensure that each chromosome that is passed on to the offspring contains a unique mixture of genes from both parents. Crossovers also keep the chromosomes connected in matching pairs. These connections guide the distribution of chromosomes when cells divide to produce eggs and sperm. Maintaining crossover connections is especially crucial in females, Hunter said.
As chromosomes pair up in developing egg or sperm cells, matching DNA strands are exchanged and twined together over a short distance to form a structure called a “double Holliday junction.” DNA strands of this structure are then cut to join the chromosomes forming a crossover.
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.
In males, developing immature sperm cells then immediately divide and distribute chromosomes to the sperm. In contrast, egg cells developing in the fetal ovary arrest their development after crossovers have formed. The immature egg cells can remain in suspended animation for decades after birth, until they are activated to undergo ovulation.
Only then does the process lurch back into motion: The egg cell finally divides, and the chromosome pairs that were connected by crossovers are finally separated to deliver a single set of chromosomes to the mature egg.
Maintaining the crossover connections over many years is a major challenge for immature egg cells.
Professor Neil Hunter.
If chromosome pairs aren’t connected by at least one crossover, they can lose contact with each other, like two people separated in a jostling crowd. This causes them to segregate incorrectly when the cell finally divides, producing egg cells with extra or missing chromosomes. This can cause infertility, miscarriage or genetic conditions such as Down syndrome, in which a child is born with an extra copy of chromosome 21, leading to cognitive impairment, heart defects, hearing loss and other problems.
From yeast to humans
Hunter has spent years trying to understand how crossovers form and how this process can fail and cause reproductive problems. By studying this process in yeast, researchers can directly visualize molecular events of double-Holliday junction resolution in synchronized populations of cells.
Researchers have identified dozens of proteins that bind and process these junctions. Hunter and then-postdoctoral fellow Shangming Tang (now an assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Virginia) used a technique called “real-time genetics” to investigate the function of those proteins. With this method, they made cells degrade one or more specific proteins within the junction-associated structures. They could then analyze the DNA from these cells, to see whether the junctions were resolved and if they formed crossovers. In this way, they built up a picture in which a network of proteins function together to ensure that crossovers are formed.
This strategy allowed us to answer a question that previously wasn’t possible.
Professor Neil Hunter.
They identified key proteins such as cohesin that prevent an enzyme called the STR complex (or Bloom complex in humans) from inappropriately dismantling the junctions before they can form crossovers.
They protect the double Holliday junction. That is a key discovery.
Professor Neil Hunter.
This years-long research project in yeast is broadly relevant for human reproduction because the process has changed very little during evolution. Failure to protect double-Holliday junctions may be linked to fertility problems in humans.
In addition to Tang, the postdoc, seven undergraduates in the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences contributed to this work, including Jennifer Koo, Mohammad Pourhosseinzadeh, Emerald Nguyen, Natalie Liu, Christopher Ma, Hanyu Lu and Monica Lee.
Additional authors on the paper include Sara Hariri, Regina Bohn and John E. McCarthy, all members of the Hunter lab.
Protecting double Holliday junctions ensures crossing over during meiosis
Shangming Tang, Sara Hariri, Regina Bohn, John E. McCarthy, Jennifer Koo, Mohammad Pourhosseinzadeh, Emerald Nguyen, Natalie Liu, Christopher Ma, Hanyu Lu, Monica Lee & Neil Hunter
Abstract
Chromosomal linkages formed through crossover recombination are essential for the accurate segregation of homologous chromosomes during meiosis1. The DNA events of recombination are linked to structural components of meiotic chromosomes2. Imperatively, the biased resolution of double Holliday junction (dHJ) intermediates into crossovers3,4 occurs within the synaptonemal complex (SC), the meiosis-specific structure that mediates end-to-end synapsis of homologues during the pachytene stage5,6. However, the role of the SC in crossover-specific dHJ resolution remains unclear. Here we show that key SC components function through dependent and interdependent relationships to protect dHJs from aberrant dissolution into non-crossover products. Conditional ablation experiments reveal that cohesin, the core of SC lateral elements, is required to maintain both synapsis and dHJ-associated crossover recombination complexes (CRCs) during pachytene. The SC central region transverse-filament protein is also required to maintain CRCs. Reciprocally, the stability of the SC central region requires the continuous presence of CRCs effectively coupling synapsis to dHJ formation and desynapsis to resolution. However, dHJ protection and CRC maintenance can occur without end-to-end homologue synapsis mediated by the central element of the SC central region. We conclude that local ensembles of SC components are sufficient to enable crossover-specific dHJ resolution to ensure the linkage and segregation of homologous chromosomes.
Main
During meiotic prophase I, cohesin complexes connect sister chromatids and mediate their organization into linear arrays of chromatin loops tethered to a common axis2,5,7,8,9. These cohesin-based axes define interfaces for the pairing and synapsis of homologous chromosomes that culminates in the formation of SCs. An SC is a tripartite structure comprising the two juxtaposed homologue axes, now called lateral elements, connected by a central lattice of transverse filaments5,6. Extension of this lattice to achieve full synapsis requires an additional central element complex5,6,10 (Extended Data Fig. 1a). Meiotic recombination facilitates pairing and synapsis between homologous chromosomes and then connects them through crossing over. These connections are necessary for accurate segregation during the first meiotic division1. To this end, the DNA events of recombination are physically and functionally linked to underlying chromosome structures2. The protein complexes that catalyse DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) and subsequent strand exchange are tethered to homologue axes. The ensuing joint molecule intermediates and their associated recombination complexes interact with the central region of the SC. A subset of recombination events is assigned a crossover fate with a tightly regulated distribution to ensure that each chromosome pair receives at least one2. At designated sites, nascent joint molecules mature into dHJs that then undergo biased resolution specifically into crossovers3,4. These steps occur in the context of the SC central region and associated CRCs. The post-synapsis roles of SC components in crossing over remain unclear, particularly whether the SC functions after dHJ formation to facilitate crossover-specific resolution.
This study highlights how even the fundamental processes of human reproduction are fragile, failure-prone, and riddled with inefficiencies. The intricate mechanisms required to produce eggs and sperm—the most basic requirement for life to continue—are full of potential points of breakdown. These flaws make perfect sense in light of evolution, a blind tinkerer that cobbles together workable solutions from existing parts, but they are utterly inconsistent with the idea of an intelligent, purposeful designer.
Who in their right mind would consider designing a critical function such as the production of reproductive gametes, that needs to be suspended at a critical point for decades, requiring more complexity to minimise the risk of it failing - and then designing that process so it sometimes fails with serious, even fatal consequences for the resulting child?
Gamete production is just one of many such examples: from reproductive bottlenecks to skeletal weaknesses and brain vulnerabilities, our bodies bear the unmistakable stamp of compromise and accident, not foresight or perfection. This is the reality I explore in detail in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design, part of my Unintelligent Design series.
Advertisement
What Makes You So Special? From The Big Bang To You
How did you come to be here, now? This books takes you from the Big Bang to the evolution of modern humans and the history of human cultures, showing that science is an adventure of discovery and a source of limitless wonder, giving us richer and more rewarding appreciation of the phenomenal privilege of merely being alive and able to begin to understand it all.
Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It
This book explains why faith is a fallacy and serves no useful purpose other than providing an excuse for pretending to know things that are unknown. It also explains how losing faith liberates former sufferers from fear, delusion and the control of others, freeing them to see the world in a different light, to recognise the injustices that religions cause and to accept people for who they are, not which group they happened to be born in. A society based on atheist, Humanist principles would be a less divided, more inclusive, more peaceful society and one more appreciative of the one opportunity that life gives us to enjoy and wonder at the world we live in.
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
All titles available in paperback, hardcover, ebook for Kindle and audio format.
Prices correct at time of publication. for current prices.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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. ibericusorM. structor. In other words, she is doing precisely what creationists constantly demand as “evidence for evolution” - one species producing offspring of another species.
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:
The new sample is unlikely to perfectly represent the genetic diversity of the parent population, so it will begin with a different allele profile.
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.
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).
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.
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.
