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.

How Science Works - Not Abandonning Evolution - Refining Our Understanding Of It

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

A new theory of molecular evolution | University of Michigan News

A new paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution by a research team at the University of Michigan, led by evolutionary biologist, Professor Jianzhi Zhang, comprehensively, but incidentally, refutes several common creationist claims — such as that mainstream biologists are abandoning evolution because it supposedly cannot explain the evidence, that all mutations are harmful, so cannot underpin evolution, and that scientists are prevented from publishing findings that challenge orthodoxy.

The study examines a key assumption of the Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution — namely that most amino-acid substitutions are neutral (neither beneficial nor strongly deleterious) and fix by drift rather than selection. The authors report experimental data showing that in mutational-scanning assays of over 12,000 amino-acid-altering mutations across 24 genes, >1 % of mutations were beneficial, implying a far higher beneficial-mutation rate than is conventionally assumed.

To reconcile that finding with the fact that comparative genomic data appear consistent with many substitutions being neutral, Zhang’s team propose a new model — “adaptive tracking with antagonistic pleiotropy” — in which beneficial mutations are frequently environment-specific, and when the environment changes the same mutation may become deleterious, hence failing to fix. In this way, although beneficial mutations are common, they rarely reach fixation when environments shift, and substitution patterns can appear neutral.

The paper operates fully within the framework of evolutionary theory by natural selection: it does not challenge evolution itself, but refines a subsidiary theoretical model about molecular changes. Thus, it strengthens the broader evolutionary paradigm rather than undermines it.

Creationism Refuted - Neanderthals Didn't Disappear - They Became Us

A simple analytical model for Neanderthal disappearance due to genetic dilution by recurrent small-scale immigrations of modern humans | Scientific Reports

One of the enduring myths cherished by creationists is that humans appeared suddenly, as a distinct and immutable species, untouched by the messy processes of evolution. Yet study after study continues to reveal just how fluid and interconnected the human story really is. The latest comes from three researchers - Andrea Amadei, Giulia Lin, and Simone Fattorini - who have just published a fascinating analytical model in Scientific Reports explaining how the Neanderthals did not simply “vanish,” but were gradually absorbed into the expanding population of early modern humans.

This idea is not new, as I have reported before in this blog here and here, but what is new is this analytical model that shows how easily it happened. The model shows that repeated, small-scale migrations of Homo sapiens into Neanderthal territories would have resulted in gradual genetic dilution over time, without any need for violent extermination or sudden extinction events. Their DNA lives on in our genomes today — in Europeans, Asians, and other non-African populations — a genetic signature of our shared ancestry.

This finding adds yet another layer to the mounting evidence that humanity is not the product of divine design without ancestry but of evolutionary blending and adaptation. The neat, separate categories that creationists like to imagine simply never existed. Instead, what we see is a continuum of populations interacting, interbreeding, and shaping one another’s evolutionary fate. Rather than distinct “kinds,” humans and Neanderthals were part of a dynamic, interconnected lineage shaped by migration and time — the very processes that creationist dogma denies.

Far from the simplistic tale of a single miraculous creation, the history of our species is one of mixture, movement, and gradual transformation — precisely what evolution predicts, and precisely what the fossil and genetic evidence confirms.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution By LOSS of Genetic Information

Dysdera tilosensis

Credit: Marc Domènech and Pedro Oromí

Dysdera catalonica

Dysdera tilosensis

Fotografies: Marc Domènech and Pedro Oromí

Deciphering the mechanisms of genome size evolution - Current events - University of Barcelona

For years, creationists have confidently assured anyone who’ll listen that evolution can’t possibly work, because losing genetic material is always disastrous — rather like claiming a book can’t be edited without collapsing into meaningless gibberish. Yet nature has an unhelpful habit of ignoring such pronouncements and getting on with things regardless. And now, a tiny spider living quietly in the Canary Islands has delivered another inconvenient data point: it’s been shedding DNA at a remarkable rate, and doing perfectly well in the process.

Researchers led by Julio Rozas and Sara Guirao, from the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) at the University of Barcelona, have shown that a spider endemic to the Canary Islands has lost almost half its genome in only a few million years.

The spider, Dysdera tilosensis, is a close relative of the mainland species D. catalonica and the familiar British woodlouse-hunter, D. crocata, yet is morphologically almost identical to both.

The findings have been published in the journal Molecular Biology & Evolution.

This discovery runs counter to a general pattern in evolutionary biology, in which adaptation to oceanic island environments often involves increases in genome size. Rather than undermining evolution, this unexpected result enriches the scientific debate over how and why genome size changes during evolution.

It also raises awkward questions for creationist dogma. Why would an intelligent designer equip spiders with almost twice as much genetic material as they actually need? And how would one distinguish such closely related species or show a transition from one to the other in the fossil record, if genome size — the key difference — leaves no trace in fossils?

Refuting Creationism - Ancient Teeth Show Mixed Origins Of A Transitional Hominin - 2 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Paranthropus robustus

Parathropus robustus (Artist's impression)

Bary Davies, RCA

New clues from 2 million-year-old tooth enamel tell us more about an ancient relative of humans

Human evolution isn’t a tidy staircase; it’s a branching, tangled tree full of transitional forms. And now, cutting-edge protein analysis from two-million-year-old teeth has revealed that Paranthropus robustus — one of our distant cousins — carried mixed ancestry, adding powerful new evidence to the evolutionary story creationists work so hard to deny.

If there is anything guaranteed to send a creationist into a fit of denial — desperately trying to redefine basic terms such as “transitional”, “species”, and “evolution”, and, as a last resort, claiming palaeontologists must have faked the evidence — it is the discovery of a transitional species in human evolutionary history.

But the hominin fossil record, like the evolutionary record for most living species, is absolutely packed with transitional forms. In fact, there are so many in human palaeontology that it can be difficult to single out one that is clearly more ‘transitional’ than the rest, because they form a fairly smooth continuum from the australopiths through to the genus Homo, just as we would expect of a slow process unfolding over tens of thousands or millions of years.

However, one species, Paranthropus robustus, stands out for its mosaic of features consistent with a lineage intermediate between the common ancestor of chimpanzees and hominins and the australopiths that followed.

And this mosaic has now been expanded to include genetic-level evidence, thanks to advances in palaeoproteomics. Proteins can persist far longer than DNA, yet they retain a direct correspondence to DNA via RNA, which encodes their amino-acid sequences. Once ancient proteins have been recovered and analysed, researchers can work backwards to reconstruct the RNA, and therefore the DNA, that produced them.

Using proteins extracted from the tooth enamel of four P. robustus fossils, researchers led by the University of Copenhagen have shown that these individuals themselves had mixed ancestry — indicating interbreeding with contemporaneous relatives, just as we now know happened among later hominin species, and almost certainly among the australopiths too.

Refuting Creationism - The Human Skull Evolved Fastest of All the Apes

Great Apes

Gibbons

Phylogeny and configuration of landmarks and semilandmarks.

Gómez-Robles Aida, et al. (2025)

Humans evolved fastest amongst the apes | UCL News - UCL – University College London

A newly published paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B by researchers from University College London (UCL) shows that the human skull evolved relatively rapidly compared to that of other apes. The evolutionary changes involve modifications in the size and shape of the facial and cranial bones.

This serves as a reminder of just how artificial and functionally useless the creationist concept of a “kind” is. It should also show creationists the fallacy of the frequent claim that biologists are abandoning the Theory of Evolution, since this paper discusses the results of evolution, not some infantile notion of magical intervention by an unevidenced supernatural entity.

Creationists are quite content to regard all cats—from domestic tabbies to tigers—as belonging to the same “kind”, even though the main difference between them lies in the size of their skeletons. Yet they balk at the idea that humans and the great apes could belong to the same “kind”, despite the fact that the key distinctions between us and them are also differences in size and proportion—most notably in the bones of the skull.

But then, “kind” is precisely the sort of term creationists favour because it has no fixed definition and can be expanded or contracted to suit whatever argument they are trying to make. The only consistent rule seems to be that whatever constitutes a “kind”, it must always exclude humans. This sometimes leads to the absurdity of defining an “animal kind” and a separate “human kind”.

The UCL team suggest that the rapid evolution of the human skull can be explained by the considerable advantage conferred by a larger brain and advanced cognitive abilities.

Our complex cognition allows us to communicate abstract ideas through both words and gestures—what we call “body language”—much of which depends on facial expression. A flat, forward-facing face enhances our ability to convey and interpret these subtle cues. As social animals, we identify acquaintances and strangers by their faces; we watch the faces of those who speak to us; and we instinctively read emotions such as pleasure, anger, confusion, or distress in their expressions.

In short, it is our large brain and expressive face that make us human — not the addition of new organs or limbs, as creationists often insist marks a change above the genus level, but rather differences in the size and shape of the bones of the skull. Given the close similarity of our genomes to those of other apes, these differences arise not from the amount of genetic information, but from the way that information is regulated during embryonic development.

Refuting Evolution - Allopatric Evolution, Just as The Theory of Evolution Predicts

(a) Chamaecyparis obtusa in Japan

(b) C. obtusa var. formosana in Taiwan

Map of the South China Sea showing the Ryuku Arc between Taiwan and Kyushu

Google Maps

Natural Japanese and Taiwanese Hinoki Cypresses Genetically Differentiated 1 Million Years Ago | Research News - University of Tsukuba

Japanese plant geneticists, led by scientists from University of Tsukuba, have shown that the Japanese and Taiwanese Hinoki cypresses began to diverge around one million years ago, following the destruction of a land bridge that once connected Taiwan to the Japanese archipelago.

This is a textbook example of allopatric speciation, in which an isolated population diverges from its parent population through a combination of founder effects, genetic drift, and natural selection in response to different environmental pressures.

The now-vanished land bridge once linked Taiwan to the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. Its remnants form the Ryukyu Arc — a chain of small islands marking the south-eastern boundary of the South China Sea.

Faced with such clear evidence of speciation, creationists typically resort to a familiar tactic: redefining evolution into a straw man. They insist that “evolution” means one species turning in a single event into something utterly unrelated — for instance, that these cypresses should transform into daisies, cabbages, mammals, or birds. If such an absurd event ever occurred, it would in fact falsify evolutionary theory and throw the entire fields of biology and taxonomy into chaos. This is the standard creationist tactic on social media: misrepresent science, then demand that science defend the misrepresentation, and claim victory when it doesn’t.

The reality remains, however, that the divergence of these related species of cypress — and the fact that this divergence can be correlated precisely with geological change — stands as powerful evidence for Darwinian evolution. Charles Darwin knew nothing of genes, alleles, or genetic drift, yet his description of descent with modification through inherited traits is elegantly confirmed here by modern genetics and biogeography. The genus Chamaecyparis — commonly known as the false cypresses — is an evolutionarily interesting group of conifers in the cypress family Cupressaceae. Their distribution and divergence provide a good illustration of how geological change, climate oscillations, and geographic isolation have shaped the evolution of temperate conifers.

Unintelligent Design - How Wheat Could Have Been Designed To Give Tripple The Yield

A spike of wheat showing three grains clustered within each spikelet, where there is ordinarily just one.

Credit: Vijay Tiwary,
University of Maryland

Wheat monoculture - but it could have been better designed!

Scientists Discover a Gene that Could Triple Wheat Production | College of Agriculture & Natural Resources at UMD

News that a single mutant gene could triple wheat yields raises some uncomfortable questions for Bible-literalist creationists, and indeed for anyone who believes their god created the Earth and all life on it exclusively for humans — its supposed favoured species, for whom “all of creation” was made.

This belief has profoundly shaped Western attitudes towards the planet and its resources. One consequence of this selfish worldview has been the destruction of vast areas of the Earth, its ecosystems, and the countless species that depend on them. In the relentless search for mineral wealth, cropland, and grazing land, humans have transformed immense regions into effective monocultures which, to anything not adapted to those particular crops, might as well be deserts. Moreover, the same belief — coupled with the idea that brown and black people were inferior to whites and therefore “created” to serve Europeans — helped justify imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade.

One question that creationists, in my experience, consistently shy away from is this: if an omniscient god truly created our domestic animals for our use, why have we almost always had to modify them through selective breeding to make them more useful? It’s as though this god didn’t actually know what we would need or how we would use these animals. Which leads to the obvious follow-up question: why didn’t this supposedly omniscient being create ideal domestic plants and crops in the first place?

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

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

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

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

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