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.
How Cheese Rinds Form.
The rind of a cheese is not just a protective skin — it’s a living ecosystem. During the ageing process, the outer layer of the cheese is colonised by microbes, most often fungi and bacteria, that thrive in the controlled conditions of cheese cellars or caves.
In bloomy cheeses (like Brie or Camembert), surface-ripening moulds such as Penicillium camemberti are deliberately introduced. These fungi grow across the surface, forming the familiar white, velvety rind. In washed-rind cheeses, the surface is repeatedly brushed or washed with brine, beer, or spirits, encouraging the growth of reddish or orange bacteria such as Brevibacterium linens. In natural-rind cheeses, the surface flora develops spontaneously from microbes present in the environment, including caves, maturing rooms, and even the cheesemaker’s own tools and hands.
As these microbial communities grow, they break down proteins and fats, softening the texture beneath the rind and shaping the flavour profile of the cheese. In the case of the cave-aged cheeses studied in the Tufts research, Penicillium solitum was the dominant mould, producing a rind that initially appeared green but, through evolution, shifted to white.
The rind, then, is not just decorative: it’s an edible record of microbial activity — and, as this research shows, a window into evolution itself.
The story of how this discovery was made is outlined in an article by Mike Silver in TuftsNow — the online news magazine of Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, USA.
‘These Cheeses Have a Life, They Have a Story’Color changes in fungi on cheese rinds point to specific molecular mechanisms of genetic adaptation—and sometimes a tastier cheese
Many scientific discoveries are serendipitous—the result of chance. Seeing evolution in action in a cheese cave turned out to be exactly that for Benjamin Wolfe, associate professor of biology, and his colleagues.
Back in 2016, Wolfe convinced his former post-doc advisor to drive with him to Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont to get samples of a special cheese called Bayley Hazen Blue, a ruse for her boyfriend to propose marriage at the spot where they first met. Wolfe ended up keeping that cheese in the freezer in his lab.
I’m notorious for not throwing samples away just in case we might need them.
Benjamin E. Wolfe, Corresponding author.
Department of Biology
Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA.
But when graduate student Nicolas Louw picked up recent samples of Bayley Hazen Blue from the Jasper Hill caves—large, damp rooms built into the side of steep hills—he discovered the cheese, previously coated with a leafy green layer of fungus, was now chalk white on the outside.
This was really exciting because we thought it could be an example of evolution happening right before our eyes. Microbes evolve. We know that from antibiotic resistance evolution, we know that from pathogen evolution, but we don’t usually see it happening at a specific place over time in a natural setting.
Benjamin E. Wolfe.
Wolfe and his colleagues reported the finding in Current Biology.
Understanding how fungi adapt to different environments can help us in areas of food security and health, too, says Louw.
Somewhere around 20% of staple crops are lost pre-harvest due to fungal rot, and an additional 20% are lost to fungi post-harvest. That includes the moldy bread in your pantry and rotting fruit on market shelves. The biggest threat to global food security is just rot from mold.
Nicolas L. Louw, first author.
Department of Biology
Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA.
Understanding how to control this problem while preventing fungal adaptation is an agricultural priority.
A Small but Key Mutation
When wheels of cheese are placed to ripen in natural or artificial cave environments, they form microbial rinds on their surface made up of communities of bacteria, yeast, and filamentous fungi (molds). These wild microbes are picked up from soil, plant, and marine environments and end up colonizing and adapting to the environments of the cheese caves.
What caused the Penicillium solitum fungi on the Jasper Hill cheeses to change color? A student in one of Wolfe’s advanced microbiology laboratory courses on microbiomes found the answer. Jackson Larlee, A24, discovered that the change was prompted by the disruption of a gene called alb1.
Alb1 is involved in producing melanin. You can think of melanin as an armor that organisms make to protect themselves from UV damage. For the fungi, it creates the green color that absorbs UV light. If you are growing in a dark cave and can get by without melanin, it makes sense to get rid of it, so you don’t have to expend precious energy to make it. By breaking that pathway and going from green to white, the fungi are essentially saving energy to invest in other things for survival and growth.
Nicolas L. Louw.
It’s a process called “relaxed selection,” when an environmental stressor is removed, and that happens to many organisms when they adapt to dark conditions, from Mexican cave fish to salamanders to some insects. It’s almost always a loss of pigments and melanin. Some creatures become blind, then increase their ability to sense food in other ways.
The fungi gave the Wolfe lab an opportunity to identify the genetic mechanisms that led to a small evolutionary change.
We found that the change was not just one mutation that swept through the whole colony, but the color shift came about through many types of mutations independently.
Nicolas L. Louw.
Some of the fungi had point mutations—single DNA base pair changes—at different locations in the genome. Others had a large insertion of DNA caused by something called a transposable element. Transposable elements, once called “jumping genes,” pop out of one location and insert themselves into another in the genome.
In this case, transposable elements were inserting themselves ahead of the alb1 gene, which disrupted its expression, effectively knocking it out. Transposable elements can cause a lot of damage, but this time, it was an advantage for the fungi to forego production of melanin—allowing it more energy to grow. Thus, the white wheels of cheese in the Jasper Hill cave.
Aspergillus fungi are in the same family as Penicillium. They are found in the soil, on decaying plants, in household dust and ventilation systems and in massive quantities in the air. Most of the time they are harmless, but some strains can cause severe lung infections. Understanding how they become locally adapted and lodged in the lung environment could help researchers understand and prevent these infections.
For now, the Wolfe lab, in collaboration with Jasper Hill Farm, is exploring another benefit of evolving and domesticating fungi—creating new types of cheese with improved aesthetics, taste, and texture. They inoculated fresh brie cheese with the novel white mold and let it grow and ripen the cheese for two months.
The result:
It’s slightly nuttier and less funky. I think it’s delicious.
Nicolas L. Louw.
Based on a taste testing panel, the new cheese has promising attributes that will be further fine-tuned in future batches of cheese at Jasper Hill Farm.
Seeing wild molds evolve right before our eyes over a period of a few years helps us think that that we can develop a robust domestication process, to create new genetic diversity and tap into that for cheesemaking.
A Penicillium solitum population has shifted from green to white in a cheese cave
Multiple mutations in a melanin biosynthesis gene (alb1) are found in white strains
White P. solitum strains outcompete green strains, but only in the dark
This local adaptation may be part of a fungal domestication process
Summary
Previous comparative and experimental evolution studies have suggested how fungi may rapidly adapt to new environments, but direct observation of in situ selection in fungal populations is rare due to challenges with tracking populations over human time scales. We monitored a population of Penicillium solitum over eight years in a cheese cave and documented a phenotypic shift from predominantly green to white strains. Diverse mutations in the alb1 gene, which encodes the first protein in the dihydroxynaphthalene (DHN)-melanin biosynthesis pathway, explained the green-to-white shift. A similar phenotypic shift was recapitulated with an alb1 knockout and experimental evolution in laboratory populations. The most common genetic disruption of the alb1 genomic region was caused by putative transposable element insertions upstream of the gene. White strains had substantial downregulation in global transcription, with genetically distinct white strains possessing divergent shifts in the expression of different biological processes. White strains outcompeted green strains in co-culture, but this competitive advantage was only observed in the absence of light. Our results illustrate how fermented food production by humans provides opportunities for relaxed selection of key fungal traits over short time scales. The local adaptation we observed may be part of a domestication process that could provide opportunities to generate new strains for innovation in fermented food production.
So here we have it: evolution, witnessed in real time, written not in fossils but in the rind of a cheese. No sudden monster hybrids, no overnight miracles, just the steady, measurable genetic change that defines evolution.
It’s a reminder that evolution doesn’t need to be spectacular to be real. Most of the time, it works quietly, generation by generation, gene by gene, adapting life to its environment with ruthless efficiency. In this case, it stripped away an unnecessary pigment because, in the darkness of a cave, producing it was a waste.
And that’s the point creationists can’t face: evolution is not a matter of belief, but of evidence. It can be seen in the lab, in the field, and now, even in the cheese on your plate. So the next time a creationist demands to see “witnessed evolution,” you can simply tell them to check their dinner.
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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.
Geographic location of the Nuwayrat cemetery (red dot) and the previously sequenced Third Intermediate Period individuals from Abusir el-Meleq20 (purple diamond).
Round about the time when the Bible’s timeline claims there was a global genocidal flood deep enough to cover the highest mountains, the body of a man was being interred in a large earthenware pot in a tomb in Egypt. If there had been a flood such as that described in the Bible, this burial would have been swept away or at least buried under a deep layer of sediment containing the jumbled remains of animals and plants killed in the flood — including species from disconnected landmasses, since there would have been no barriers to how far they could have been transported by the floodwaters.
Yet none of this appears to be true. Egyptian civilisation, which can trace its origins back to around 5,500 BCE, continued unbroken, with no record of a flood other than the annual Nile inundations on which their agriculture depended, until Egypt was absorbed first into the Greek Empire of Alexander and then into the Roman Empire. There is quite simply no record of a global flood in any Egyptian sources, and no evidence that the country was repopulated by people radiating out from a centre somewhere in the Middle East who could miraculously read and write in the hieroglyphics used by pre-“Flood” Egyptians.
Instead, we now have the genetic evidence of the man’s DNA, which tells a story of Egyptian origins that includes both North African and Mesopotamian ancestry.
How the remains of this pot burial were discovered and analysed is the subject of an open-access paper in Nature by an international team of archaeologists led by Dr Adeline Morez Jacobs, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padua, Italy, and a visiting lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, UK.
Dr Morez has also described the research and its significance in an open-access article in The Conversation, in the form of an interview. This article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
Parasite–host relationships are a nightmare for creationists. Their usual escape hatch is “The Fall”, but that undermines the Discovery Institute’s claim that intelligent design is science rather than Bible-literalist dogma in a lab coat. It also raises the obvious question: if parasites only appeared 6,000–10,000 years ago, how did they spread so quickly—and why do we find fossil evidence of parasitism millions of years old?
Creationists cope by dismissing science as a conspiracy, waving away radiometric dating, or pushing myths such as dinosaur fossils being “carbon-dated” [sic] to a few thousand years old. So creationism persists, despite the vast amount of evidence against it, by a combination of wilful ignorance, disinformation and a lack of critical thinking skills.
Now creationists must also ignore new research from Stockholm University, where scientists isolated bacterial DNA from the teeth of woolly and steppe mammoths. They showed these bacteria evolved into the ancestors of those infecting modern elephants—evidence of parasites a million years before “Creation Week”, and of co-evolution continuing right up to today’s elephants, the descendants of those mammoths.
Incidentally, neither mammoths nor modern elephants are mentioned in the Bible, reflecting the parochial ignorance of its authors - a fact often overlooked in depictions of animals boarding Noah's Ark, which usually includes a pair of elephants!
Researchers at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences (East Boothbay, Maine, USA) have recently quantified a remarkable evolutionary process: a typical marine microorganism acquires and retains approximately 13% of its genes per million years through horizontal (lateral) gene transfer. This rate corresponds to roughly 250 genes exchanged and retained per litre of seawater each day
These transferred genes include those that provide either a selective advantage or are sufficiently neutral to persist via genetic drift—both well-established mechanisms of evolutionary change.
Some creationist arguments misapply Shannon Information Theory, claiming that gaining new genetic information violates the laws of thermodynamics. However, such arguments disregard key biological realities: cells are open systems capable of energy and material exchange; genome duplication and horizontal transfer are well-documented evolutionary processes; and substituting one nucleic acid for another does not create matter ex nihilo - facts of which any qualified biological scientists should be aware.
Furthermore, the successful retention and spread of horizontally acquired genes within microbial genomes provide clear, empirical evidence of Darwinian evolution in action. Although Charles Darwin formulated his theory without the concept of genes — speaking instead of 'heritable traits' — his mechanism of natural selection precisely explains how heritable variations can spread through populations over time.
This study also highlights that microorganisms can evolve not only through mutation and selection but also by acquiring pre-adapted genes from their environment, often from distantly related organisms. Consequently, these newly acquired genes can propagate rapidly within the recipient lineage.
The findings further challenge traditional microbial taxonomy, blurring species boundaries at the genetic level: horizontally transferred genes may function just as effectively in their new hosts as they did in their original genomes, thanks to the universality of underlying molecular machinery (e.g., replication and translation systems).
This blog post is something of a departure from my usual refutations of creationism. At times, that exercise can feel like shooting fish in a barrel, since almost every scientific paper on palaeontology, cosmology, or evolutionary biology casually refutes creationism simply by presenting the facts and evidence—something creationism singularly lacks.
This, however, is only tangentially related to creationism, in that it concerns the diversification of humans into distinct regional cultural and genetic populations. That richness and complexity is utterly incompatible with the notion that all of humanity radiated out from a single founder population of eight related individuals in the Middle East.
Instead, it is about the genetic evidence for the origins of the Slavic peoples, for whom I feel a special affinity. My youngest son is married to a Slav woman from Czechia and now lives and works there. Former Czechoslovakia also played a formative role in my political development during the 1960s, when the Prague Spring gave those of us on the left hope for a form of socialism that was democratic, open, and inclusive — rather than the totalitarian system into which Soviet Communism had degenerated. The self-sacrifice of the young idealists Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc, in response to the Soviet-led invasion that suppressed the reforms, was a profound inspiration — about which I wrote after a visit to Prague in December 2011, when a visit to their memorial in Wenceslaus Square, on the site of their self-immolation, reduced me to tears.
Since then, we have returned to Czechia several times. On our most recent trip in the summer of 2024, we visited the museum in the Moravský Krumlov castle near Brno, which currently houses a series of immense art nouveau paintings by the Czech artist Alphons Maria Mucha—perhaps better known in the West for his commercial art nouveau designs for chocolate boxes, biscuit tins, and soap packages that epitomised the 1920s and 30s. The series — a Czech national treasure I described at length soon after our return — titled The Epic of the Slavs, was pained between 1912 and 1926. It depicts the story of the Slavic peoples’ development in Eastern Europe up to the mid-1920s: a people struggling to forge an identity under political pressure from surrounding religious powers, from Eastern Orthodoxy in the south and east, to Catholicism in the west, followed later by German Protestantism. Like the Irish, the Czech people’s identity was forged in this power struggle, eventually emerging as proud and independent. Today, Czechia is one of the most atheist countries in Europe.
This article, however, is about the deeper origins of the Slavic peoples, as described in a recent open-access paper in Nature by an international team of researchers led by Joscha Gretzinger of the Department of Archaeogenetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.
An artist's rendering shows the first-ever portrait of a Denisovan woman, recreated from an ancient DNA sample.
Maayan Harel.
The proposed evolutionary history of MUC19.
The Denisovan-like haplotype (in orange) was first introgressed from Denisovans into Neanderthals and then introgressed into modern humans. The introgressed haplotype later experienced positive selection in populations from the Americas. The introgressed MUC19 haplotype is composed of a 742-kb region that contains Neanderthal-specific variants (blue). Embedded within this Neanderthal-like region is a 72-kb region containing a high density of Denisovan-specific variants (orange), and an exonic variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) region (gray). The box below the 742-kb region depicts zooming into the MUC19 VNTR region, in which admixed American individuals carry an elevated number of tandem repeat copies.
Another day; another scientific paper showing the Bible to be wrong — not just slightly wrong, but fundamentally, demonstrably, and irretrievably wrong.
This latest blow comes from researchers at Brown University, who have traced a variant of the gene MUC19, originally identified in the extinct archaic hominins known as Denisovans, and found it alive and well today in modern Latin Americans with Indigenous ancestry. They also detected it in ancient DNA recovered from archaeological sites across both North and South America.
The variant is far too common in modern populations to be a trivial accident. Its persistence screams survival advantage. Natural selection has kept it in play because it helps its carriers thrive in the environments the earliest migrants into the Americas encountered.
What does MUC19 do? It helps build mucus — not glamorous, but life-saving. From the saliva that begins digestion to the mucosal barriers in the gut and respiratory tract that fend off infection, this gene equips its owners with a stronger shield against disease.
And where did it come from? The Denisovans. But it likely reached us by way of Neanderthals, with whom Homo sapiens also interbred. In other words, modern humans are not some isolated “special creation” freshly minted out of clay a few thousand years ago; we are a patchwork of lineages, woven together by repeated episodes of interbreeding over tens of thousands of years.
For creationists, this paper is a nightmare. First, the scientists are explicit: the explanation rests entirely on Evolution and the blind, natural processes that drive it. Second, the mere fact that extinct species like Denisovans and Neanderthals could successfully mate with our ancestors drives a stake through the heart of biblical literalism. Instead of Adam and Eve, what we see is gradual emergence — modern humans arising by incomplete speciation across a broad geographical spread, with genes flowing back and forth whenever populations met again. This pattern repeats itself throughout hominin history, and it unfolds on a timeline that makes the biblical six-thousand-year fantasy look laughably naïve.
Being largely ignorant of any wildlife beyond what could be reached within a day or two’s walk of their pastures — and entirely ignorant of anything invisible to the naked eye — the Bible’s authors consistently imply that all living animals exist only as male or female, and that sexual reproduction is the sole reproductive strategy:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
Genesis 1:26–27
And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.
Genesis 6:19–20
Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.
Genesis 7:2–3
With their parochial worldview, the Bible’s authors had no knowledge of distant continents such as Australia—indeed, they show no awareness of Northern Europe or of Asia beyond their own region, let alone of a spherical Earth divided into two hemispheres. This limitation could not be levelled against an all-knowing creator god, of course—which is precisely how we know no such god was involved in its writing. Had one been, we might reasonably expect the text to reflect a broader knowledge of the world and its history, and a more accurate understanding of living things, their origins, and their reproductive strategies—including those invisible to the unaided eye. Instead, we encounter a world that conforms only to the narrow perceptions and superstitions of its authors.
Here is something that should bring both delight and disappointment to creationists. It concerns a mystery in the genetics of the great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias — a finding that runs counter to what the theory of evolution would predict. In fact, it is precisely a failed evolutionary prediction that is the subject of a paper recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The disappointment for creationists comes from the simple fact of its publication. It directly refutes the oft-repeated claim that the scientific community refuses to publish anything that does not fully align with the theory of evolution. As with so many creationist accusations, this is a projection of their own malpractice. Major creationist organisations — such as Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis — require contributors to sign statements of faith that commit them never to publish anything inconsistent with their predetermined beliefs. In other words, only creationist organisations demand strict adherence to conclusions before research is even carried out.
The new findings show that the great white shark passed through an extreme population bottleneck in the Indo-Pacific at the end of the last Ice Age, around 10,000 years ago. From this single population, they began diversifying about 7,000 years ago. Today, there are roughly 20,000 individuals across three distinct populations: one in the southern hemisphere (around Australia and South Africa), one in the North Atlantic, and another in the North Pacific. Genetic analysis reveals this divergence in their mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is inherited solely through the female line. Curiously, however, their nuclear DNA (nDNA) — inherited equally from both parents — shows almost no diversity at all. All populations are remarkably similar in nDNA, far more so than evolutionary theory would predict.
This raises the mystery: why does the mtDNA show clear evidence of diversification and population isolation, while the nDNA does not?
When FruM was activated in insulin-producing neurons in D. melanogaster, these cells grew new neural connections and successfully transferred gift-giving courtship behavior to this species.
Today, it’s the humble fruit fly that delivers yet another blow to creationist dogma.
Creationists insist that all species were created in their present form, complete with fixed behaviours, as though every instinct was hardwired in a single act of creation. But science has shown—yet again—that reality is very different. A tiny change in a single gene can profoundly alter behaviour, rewiring brains and shaping the way species interact and reproduce. And because mating behaviour is central to forming reproductive barriers, such genetic shifts drive the very process of speciation that creationists deny.
The culprit gene here is fruitless (fru), shared by both Drosophila melanogaster and D. subobscura. Yet, despite the shared gene, their courtship rituals couldn’t be more different: male D. melanogaster woo females with wing vibrations, while D. subobscura males present a drop of regurgitated food.
Scientists at Nagoya University have now shown what happens when you swap the fru gene from D. subobscura into D. melanogaster: the flies abandon their ancestral wing song and instead adopt the food-gifting ritual. The switch isn’t magic—it’s a straightforward change in neural wiring. By lengthening the dendrite of an insulin-secreting neurone so it connects with the courtship neurone, the behaviour is fundamentally altered.
What this experiment does is striking: it replays evolution in the lab. It shows exactly how a behavioural shift could have arisen when these species diverged from a common ancestor. It also demolishes the tired creationist mantra that “macro-evolution” is impossible. Here we have behaviour—controlled by genes, reshaped by neuronal architecture—evolving right before our eyes.
Scientists never set out to prove that the Biblical account of science and history as related in Genesis is hopelessly wrong and based on the childish guesses of scientifically illiterate people—that is simply an incidental outcome of the facts they revealed. Nevertheless, it remains a fact. The Bible presents a timeline and an account of the origin of species that are wholly inconsistent with the known facts.
To be fair to the original authors, they probably never intended to mislead scientifically illiterate people thousands of years later. As they devised origin myths to fill the gaps in their knowledge of the world, they could hardly have imagined that someone would one day write their tales down, combine them with other implausible myths, genealogies, and morality stories designed to spread fear and enhance priestly power, and then declare the compilation to be the inerrant word of an omniscient creator god. That declaration, of course, reinforced the text’s usefulness as a source of excuses for actions such as land theft, genocide, and enslavement—atrocities conveniently blamed on a god to absolve perpetrators of personal responsibility.
Humans and chimpanzees share about 98–99% of their DNA, so the vast differences between us must lie within that small fraction where we differ.
Humans have no organs or structures that chimpanzees don’t also have; the differences are mainly in relative size and proportion. In other words, they’re quantitative, not qualitative. But that doesn’t stop creationists solemnly declaring that we are a totally different “kind” — a human “kind” — while chimps are lumped with gorillas, bonobos, and orangutans into the “ape kind.” Two bins, job done.
Creationists insist that no “kind” could have evolved from another because that would require brand-new organs and “new genetic information,” something they claim is impossible. Instead, they set up a straw man, accusing scientists of believing new genes and structures simply pop into existence out of thin air, like some sort of Darwinian magic trick, while insisting no one can explain how it works. (Apparently, gene duplication, mutation, and selection don’t count when you’ve decided in advance that the answer must be wrong.)
But when it comes to humans and chimpanzees, their reasoning ties itself in knots. Humans can’t have evolved from a chimp-like ancestor, they say, because that would be “macro-evolution.” Except when it isn’t. Lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, and house cats are all just one happy “cat kind,” because in that case there was obviously no “macro-evolution” — only “variation.” So, if evolution produces cats, that’s “micro-evolution.” If it produces humans, it’s “macro-evolution,” and therefore impossible. Heads I win, tails you lose.
In reality, the major differences between humans and chimpanzees aren’t about inventing new bits and pieces, but in how the same components developed. The key lies in relative sizes of bones, muscles, and teeth — and above all in the brain: not new parts, but differences in growth, proportion, and how the brain is wired.
Now, researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine have shown that part of that small genetic difference — specifically a stretch of DNA called HAR123 — acts as an enhancer controlling brain growth and development. In other words, the real evolutionary leap wasn’t the conjuring up of brand-new organs from nowhere, but changes in how existing genes fine-tuned brain development. The decisive shift came not from what parts the brain has, but from how large they grew and the ratio of cell types — glial cells and neurons — within them.
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