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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creationism Refuted - How New Genetic Information Causes Diseases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Woolly rhinoceros, Coelodonta antiquitatis
Grotte Chauvet, Ardèche, France

Source

Woolly rhinoceros, Coelodonta antiquitatis

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

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

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

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

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

A facial reconstruction of Ötzi the Iceman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Untreated PDAC tumor organoid

PDAC tumor organoid after treatment with ASO-A

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

Short-circuiting pancreatic cancer | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graphical abstract

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genomic Maps Untangle the Complex Roots of Disease

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Balanophora laxiflora

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

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

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

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

Where Balanophora fit in the plant kingdom

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

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

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

Why this placement matters

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

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

Creationism Refuted - Evolution of Parasitic Plants by LOSS of Complexity

Balanophora

Photo credit: Ze Wei, Plant Photo Bank of China

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

© Kobe University (CC BY)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dugong

Manatee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolution News - Self-Sacrificing Ants Show the Evolved Genetic Basis of Altruism

[left caption]

[right caption]

ISTA | Ants Signal Deadly Infection

Scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology, Austria, have found that terminally ill pupae in an ant colony emit a chemical signal that prompts worker ants to disinfect them with formic acid — a process that also brings about their death. This behaviour helps keep the colony free from infection and represents a clear example of evolved altruism with a genetic basis. Their findings are reported, open access, in Nature Communications.

One of the criticisms often levelled at evolutionary biology is that it cannot explain altruism, since individuals that sacrifice themselves for others seemingly shouldn’t survive to pass on any genes responsible for such behaviour.

This is plainly untrue. Acts of altruism are widespread in nature: male spiders and mantises are consumed by their mates, providing nutrients for developing eggs; the offspring of social spiders consume their mother, then go on to consume one another. These behaviours persist because they enhance the success of the genes involved.

The key lies in what Richard Dawkins termed the selfish gene. Contrary to creationist misrepresentations, this is not a claim that there exists a gene for selfishness. It refers instead to the way genes appear to act in their own interests. Genes promoting altruistic behaviour benefit when that behaviour increases the reproductive success of individuals carrying the same genes — typically close relatives. The sacrifice of one carrier can thereby enhance the spread of the genes responsible for the altruism.

In humans, altruism arises not only from genetic evolution but also from memetic evolution — the inheritance and adaptation of ideas, norms, and cultural expectations. Human altruism rarely requires life-or-death sacrifice; it more often involves smaller acts such as sharing resources, giving up a seat on a bus, or letting another driver go first at a junction. The advantage, at both genetic and memetic levels, is that such behaviours help build societies where cooperation is reciprocated. Altruism is ultimately an investment in a more stable, supportive environment that may benefit the genes and memes of the individuals who contribute to it.

Unintelligent Design - How The Human Genome Has Mutation-Prone Weak Spots - Incompetence, Malevolence or Evolution?

Mosaic blastocyst

AI-generated image ChatGPT 5.1

If the outcome is pre-ordained, what are all the other sperms for?

New mutation hotspot discovered in human genome | EurekAlert!

Creationists and other religious fundamentalists claim that their god deliberately fashions each human life according to a divine plan — that every individual is personally designed, even down to the genes they inherit from their parents. But this raises a perpetually unanswered question: why produce so many sperm cells, all competing to reach the egg, if the outcome is pre-ordained?

Creationists also insist that our DNA is a “code”, equivalent to a computer program that must have been created by an intelligent designer or programmer.

If that were true, we would expect the genes bestowed on each individual to be robustly designed and immutable.

However, new research by scientists at the Centre for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain, just published in Nature Communications, shows that this is not the case — and once again, a prediction of fundamentalist creationism has been falsified by science.

The researchers found that the human genome is especially vulnerable to mutations in the first 100 base pairs of genes, particularly during the earliest rounds of cell division in embryo development. Each division introduces mutations with the potential to cause disease, including cancer. Because these mutations do not appear in every cell of the early embryo, the resulting individual becomes a genetic mosaic, with some cells and tissues carrying certain mutations while others do not. But if the mutated cells give rise to germ cells — eggs or sperm — the mutation can be passed to the next generation, whose members will carry it in all their cells and may develop disease as a result.

Unless creationism’s designer god intended this outcome, or is incompetent, there is no coherent way to present this as the deliberate work of an intelligent designer. It is, however, entirely consistent with an unintelligent, utilitarian evolutionary process that settles for sub-optimal solutions based on a single criterion: what produces the most descendants who themselves reproduce?

Malevolent Design - How Breast Cancer is 'Designed' to Survive

Cell culture plates in the Roeder lab where scientists recently studied gene expression in breast cancer.

Credit: Lori Chertoff.

The Rockefeller University » This molecular switch helps cancer cells survive harsh conditions

Researchers at The Rockefeller University's Laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology have uncovered the mechanism that enables breast cancer cells not only to withstand environmental stress, but to turn it to their advantage. They have just published their findings in Nature Chemical Biology.

For ID creationists, these findings pose yet another challenge—one typically ignored or waved away as the consequence of ‘sin’, neatly exposing the Discovery Institute’s attempt to persuade US legislators and educators that ID is a genuine scientific alternative. No real science explains inconvenient evidence by invoking fundamentalist doctrine or unevidenced forces inherited from ancient superstition.

The Rockefeller University team has shown that breast cancer cells can override a regulatory factor that normally controls gene expression. The transcription of DNA into mature messenger RNA involves the enzyme RNA polymerase II (POL II), whose activity depends on around 30 subunits. One of these, MED1, normally carries acetyl groups. Without those acetyl groups, MED1 loses its ability to regulate POL II, allowing the enzyme to transcribe genes that help cancer cells survive. Environmental stress deacetylates MED1. In essence, conditions such as low oxygen or elevated temperature—deadly to normal cells—can instead make cancer cells more resilient.

Refuting Creationism - How Butterfly Genomes Confirm Darwin's Conclusion

[Body]

1,000 butterfly and moth genomes to investigate evolution, climate change resilience, and tackle food security issues

Geneticists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute have just completed the sequencing of 1,000 European butterflies and moths. Their results are already feeding into research papers, such as that by Asia E. Hoile, Peter W. H. Holland & Peter O. Mulhair, in BMC Genomics. The Wellcome Sanger team have published their results in Trends in Ecology & Evolution

In 1858, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection, or as they described it, the origin of species by the preservation of favoured races. Darwin then elaborated on that central idea and concluded that the ‘tree of life’ would branch in ways consistent with diversification from common origins.

Creationists, on the other hand, claim all species were created by magic in their present form just a few thousand years ago, with no evolution and no common ancestry.

Darwin's Tree of Life sketch

Neither Darwin nor Wallace knew anything about DNA or genomes, or that mutations in DNA would become ‘favoured’ in particular environmental niches, driving diversification. They developed their ideas purely from the observable morphological and behavioural similarities and differences among species.

So, if the creationists are right, what should we see in these 1,000 genome sequences?

Malevolent Design - How Some Cancers Are Designed to Win - Incompetence or Malevolence?

Cancer cells dividing

Shapeshifting cancers’ masters, unmasked | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Scientists led by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor Christopher Vakoc have uncovered a mechanism by which certain cancers manage to evade modern medical treatments: they can disguise themselves as ordinary cells from entirely different tissues, such as those of the skin. In two recent papers — one in Nature Communications and another in Cell Reports — Vakoc’s team identify the proteins that determine whether pancreatic cancer cells retain their pancreatic identity or slip into a skin-cell-like state. They also highlight a different set of proteins with a pivotal role in tuft-cell lung cancer.

Proteins, of course, are specified by genetic information, and if that information is altered, so too is the protein’s function. In the language of ID creationists, proteins are products of “complex, specified genetic information”.

This presents intelligent design creationists with a familiar problem — one they usually address, as with parasites and pathogens, by ignoring it and relying on the scientific illiteracy of their followers. If complex, specified information were genuinely evidence of an intelligent designer, then that same designer would be implicated in the origin of the proteins that maintain and diversify cancers. Their “specified information” is neither less complex nor less specific than the proteins involved in cognition, immunity, or embryonic development.

Only by refusing to define “complex specificity” in scientific terms — or to explain how it might be distinguished from information that is supposedly non-complex or non-specified — do ID advocates manage to maintain the fiction that all beneficial traits are the work of their designer, while harmful traits must arise from some other agency. This selective attribution, based entirely on subjective human preference, underscores the religious foundations of intelligent design creationism and its distance from genuine science.

The team’s findings are summarised in a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory news release by Jen A. Miller.

Creationism Refuted - 40,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth RNA

One of Yuka’s legs, illustrating the exceptional preservation of the lower part of the leg after the skin had been removed, which enabled recovery of ancient RNA molecules.

Photo: Valeri Plotnikov.

The world’s oldest RNA extracted from woolly mammoth - Stockholm University

Scientists led by researchers from Stockholm University, Denmark, have just announced that they have successfully extracted RNA from 40,000-year-old mammoth remains — the oldest RNA ever obtained. This shows that not only DNA but also RNA can persist for extraordinary lengths of time under the right conditions, adding yet more to the mountain of evidence that undermines creationist claims. With preserved RNA, researchers can even reconstruct the DNA that originally served as its template, effectively giving scientists two independent avenues for recovering genetic information.

One of the joys of debunking creationism — a childish superstition when set beside the rigour of evolutionary biology — is the sheer abundance of evidence. Almost every peer-reviewed paper in biology, geology, palaeontology, cosmology, and the other natural sciences demonstrates, in one way or another, the reality of evolution and the age of the Earth, and presents verifiable results that creationism simply cannot accommodate.

Even psychology lends its weight. Not only does it support an evolutionary account of human cognition and intelligence, but it also helps explain why creationists cling so tightly to demonstrably false beliefs. For many, rejecting evidence becomes a test of loyalty or personal strength, with scientific data treated as part of a supposed conspiracy designed to shake their faith. If they can cling to their faith despite the overwhelming contrary evidence, then they must really believe it.

Adding this new discovery to the existing evidence is rather like tossing a pebble onto Mount Everest and expecting creationists to accept the mountain’s existence because a pebble lies on it. Such acceptance is impossible for the committed creationist, since that would mean yielding to the ‘evil conspiracy’ and admitting that their favourite holy book is not a perfect, divinely authored scientific text, but a compilation of Bronze Age and Early Iron Age mythology, created by people doing their best to explain a world they did not yet understand.

Creationism Refuted - Doggy Dos For Creationists

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

This is the second article in The Conversation which incidentally refutes creationism and shows us why the Bible must be dismissed as a source book for science and history on the basis that, when compared to reality, it's stories are not just wrong; they're not even close.

This one deals with essentially that same subject as my last past - the evolution of all the different dog varieties since wolves were first domesticated some 11,000 years ago. Together with all the other canids that creationists insist are all dog 'kind', including several foxes, several subspecies of wolf, coyotes, jackals, and African wild dogs, the hundreds of different recognised breeds of dog could not conceivably have arisen from a single pair and the resulting genetic bottleneck just a few thousand years ago. Moreover, we are expected to believe that in that short space of time, all the canids evolved from being vegetarian (with canine teeth, meat-cutting incisors and bone-crushing molars, apparently) to being obligate carnivores.

As well as the paper that was the subject of my last blog post, this The Conversation article mentions another paper, also published in Science by palaeontologists led by Shao-Jie Zhang from the Kunming Institute of Zoology, China. This paper draws on DNA evidence from ancient Eastern Eurasian dogs.

The article by Kylie M. Cairns, a Research Fellow in Canid and Wildlife Genomics, UNSW Sydney, Australia and Professor Melanie Fillios of the Department of Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology, University of New England, USA. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative |Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

How We Know The Bible Was Wrong - Creationists Dogged by DNA And Fossil Evidence

Sharma the Wolf

From The Girl and the Wolf,
By Bill Hounslow

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

This is the first of two articles published in The Conversation concerning the origins of domestic dogs and the myriad different breeds that have been developed under human agency since wolves were first domesticated. Neither of them is good news for creationists for several reason.

Firstly, the DNA evidence points to a history much older that the simple tale origin tale in the Bible allows for - a history stretching back some 11,000 years or more to before creationists believe anything existed.

Secondly, and this is something that I have found creationists will always run away from - if God supposedly created all animals for the benefit of humans, why have we had to modify them to such an extent that in many cases they are scarcely recognisable from their wild ancestors? Did God not know what we would use them for or what designs would be best suited for different purposes?

The answer of course, is that the Bible stories are just that - stories. They were never intended to be written down and bound together in a book later declared, by people with a personal stake who needed a spurious 'God-given' authority to take control of society, to be the inerrant word of a creator god and therefore definitive history and science textbooks. Their complete misalignment with observable reality should be more than a clue that the latter is wrong.

This article by two of the authors involved in the first study - Carly Ameen, a lecturer in Bioarchaeology, University of Exeter and Allowen Evin, CNRS Research Director, Bioarchaeology, Université de Montpellier. Together with a large group of colleagues they have just published their study in Science. Their article in The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.