Refuting Creationism - Rapid Evolution In Andean Potato Eaters

Andean Quechua speaker

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

Quechua woman and child in the Sacred Valley

By quinet - Mother and Child, CC BY 2.0, Link

Indigenous Andeans have a digestive superpower; researchers think it may be linked to potatoes  | UCLA

The results of a study co-led by researchers at UCLA and the University at Buffalo, published in Nature Communications in May 2026, provide another straightforward counterexample to the creationist claim that natural processes cannot add genetic material to a genome without the intervention of their particular magic creator. They also show how relatively recent human evolution can be detected, reconstructed and quantified from the DNA of living populations.

What cannot be observed is the intelligently designed caricature of evolution that creationists are conditioned to mistake for the scientific theory: a single dramatic event in which one species suddenly transforms into an unrelated form. There is no plausible biological mechanism for such a transformation, which is why evolutionary biologists have never proposed one. Biological evolution is a change in the frequency of heritable variants within a population over successive generations; larger differences, including those associated with speciation, accumulate through many such changes.

Young-Earth creationists are nevertheless prepared to invoke evolution at an absurdly accelerated rate when their mythology requires it. To squeeze the present diversity of life into the few millennia supposedly available after their genocidal global flood, a small number of vaguely defined ancestral “kinds” would have needed to diversify into hundreds of thousands of beetle species and countless other forms almost overnight. Yet the same creationists baulk at evidence that human populations have undergone much more modest evolutionary changes over thousands of years.

The new research concerns AMY1, the salivary amylase gene. Salivary amylase begins the digestion of starch in the mouth, and people differ considerably in the number of AMY1 copies they carry. An early duplication of the gene occurred in the hominin lineage at least 800,000 years ago, after which repeated duplications, deletions and inversions generated numerous structural variants containing different numbers of copies. These are mutations that change the amount and arrangement of genetic material in the genome — precisely the sort of naturally arising variation that creationists insist cannot occur.

Crucially, cultivating potatoes did not cause the ancestors of Indigenous Andeans to acquire additional AMY1 copies because they needed them. High-copy variants were already present in the population. When potatoes and other starch-rich crops became dietary staples, people carrying more copies probably produced more salivary amylase and obtained a reproductive or survival advantage. Natural selection then increased the frequency of those pre-existing variants — evolution acting as a filter, not as a designer working towards a predetermined goal.

The researchers analysed AMY1 copy numbers in 3,723 people representing 85 populations. Indigenous Peruvian Andeans had among the highest numbers found, with the Quechua participants carrying a median of ten copies, compared with six among the closely related Maya comparison group and seven across the worldwide sample. The genetic evidence indicates that a high-copy haplotype increased in frequency among Andeans from about 2 per cent to approximately 45 per cent after around 10,000 years ago, coinciding with permanent settlement of the high Andes and the domestication of potatoes between about 10,000 and 6,000 years ago.

Refuting Creationism - How Spiders Got Their Fangs - 518 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Artist’s impression of Urokodia.

Credit: Xiaodong Wang

UROKODIA! 518-million-year-old fossil shows beginning of spider’s bite | News | University of Leicester

The World Spider Catalog currently recognises more than 54,000 living species of spider, and tens of thousands more may remain undiscovered. Every one of them possesses a pair of specialised mouthparts called chelicerae, each of which terminates in a fang. In most spiders, these fangs inject venom, although a few lineages have lost their venom glands and subdue their prey by other means.

Chelicerae are not, however, unique to spiders. They are the defining appendages of the Chelicerata, the major arthropod group that also includes scorpions, mites, ticks, harvestmen and horseshoe crabs. Scorpions possess small, pincer-like chelicerae near the mouth; their conspicuous claws are modified pedipalps, while their venom is delivered through a sting at the end of the tail. In other chelicerates, the same basic pair of appendages has been modified into pincers, piercing mouthparts or other feeding structures.

This shared anatomy strongly suggests that chelicerae were inherited from a common ancestor and subsequently modified as the different chelicerate lineages evolved. But what did the ancestral appendage look like, and when did it first appear?

Such questions inevitably involve gaps in the fossil record—gaps that creationists routinely misrepresent as evidence against evolution. Their argument depends upon portraying evolutionary theory as little more than a story constructed from fossils and therefore requiring an unbroken succession of specimens linking every species to its ancestors. Evolutionary theory requires no such thing. Fossilisation is an exceptionally rare event, and evolutionary relationships are reconstructed from multiple independent lines of evidence, including comparative anatomy, embryology, genetics and the fossils that happen to have survived.

Nevertheless, creationists will be disappointed to learn that another important part of this particular gap has now been bridged. A paper published in Nature by a Chinese-British research team led by Yu Liu and Lorenzo Lustri of Yunnan University describes the remarkably preserved anatomy of Urokodia aequalis, a small marine arthropod recovered from the famous Chengjiang fossil site in Yunnan Province, southern China. The rock formation containing it dates from approximately 518 million years ago.

Creationism in Crisis - Speciation in Progress? - Genetic Isolation In A British Dolphin.

Risso's dolphin Grampus griseus.

Credit: Nicola Hodgins

Risso's dolphin, Grampus griseus

© Nicola Hodgins.

British Risso’s dolphins belong to single population - University of Exeter News

According to newly published research in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom (JMBA), Risso’s dolphins, Grampus griseus, around the British Isles appear to form a single, genetically connected population. At the same time, their mitochondrial DNA distinguishes them from dolphins sampled elsewhere in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, suggesting that the British population has experienced relatively little genetic exchange with more distant populations.

The research was conducted by an international team whose joint first authors were Nicola K. Hodgins, a visiting researcher at the University of Exeter, UK, and Ing Chen of National Taiwan Normal University, with Michael Krützen of the University of Zurich as corresponding author.

At first sight, describing the British dolphins as both a single population and genetically distinct might seem contradictory, but the two findings concern different geographical scales. Within British waters, the dolphins appear to interbreed freely enough to prevent significant regional genetic divisions from developing. Compared with populations farther afield, however, reduced gene flow has allowed the British population to acquire a distinctive genetic signature.

Creationism In Crisis - After Darwin's Finches It's Darwin's Daisies - Evolution In Progress

Serrated leaves of Scalesia affinis (radiate-headed scalesia)

Photo: Michael Martin, NTNU University Museum

Botany’s answer to Darwin’s finches shows evolution in real time

The Galápagos Islands occupy an iconic place in the history of evolutionary biology. The animals and plants Darwin encountered there during the voyage of HMS Beagle contributed important evidence to the theory he developed after returning to England: that living species are not fixed and immutable but are the products of a long historical process.

Darwin eventually realised that natural selection acting upon inherited variation could produce organisms that appeared designed for their environments, without foresight, planning or divine intervention. Individuals possessing variations that gave them an advantage in their particular circumstances tended to leave more descendants, causing those variations to become more common over successive generations.

Like the uniformitarian geologists—particularly Charles Lyell—Darwin recognised that the world as we see it is not a fixed unchangeable result of a single act of perfect creation, but is the product of natural processes operating over immense periods of time. The processes that shaped the past are still operating today and will continue to shape the future.

The familiar story that Darwin saw the Galápagos finches and immediately conceived his theory is, however, an oversimplification. During the voyage, he believed he had collected birds belonging to several different groups, including finches, grosbeaks, blackbirds, wrens and warblers. Only after the ornithologist John Gould examined the specimens in England did it become apparent that these apparently disparate birds belonged to a distinctive group of closely related species—what we now call Darwin’s finches, although taxonomically they are members of the tanager family.

Darwin then appreciated the evolutionary significance of their shared characteristics and striking differences. Their varied body sizes and beaks could be understood as modifications of a common ancestral form, associated with different diets and ecological niches throughout the archipelago. One ancestral population had diversified into numerous related forms: a process now known as adaptive radiation.

The standard creationist response is to dismiss Darwin’s finches as evidence for evolution because they remain recognisably finch-like. This objection depends upon the childish parody of evolution in which one species should turn suddenly into an entirely different and supposedly unrelated species. Such an event would not demonstrate evolution; it would contradict the branching process of descent with modification. Descendants necessarily remain related to their ancestors and inherit modified versions of ancestral structures.

This misconception lies behind such familiar creationist “Gotchas!” as “Why do we never see evolution happening?” and “Why has evolution stopped?” Evolution has not stopped. What creationists demand to see is not evolution but an instantaneous transformation that evolutionary biology neither predicts nor requires.

Darwin knew nothing of Mendelian genetics or DNA, of course. Modern genomic research has confirmed the common ancestry of his finches while revealing a history more complicated than a simple, neatly branching tree. Rapidly diverging lineages can retain genetic variants inherited from their common ancestor and can occasionally exchange genes through hybridisation.

Now, genomic research into a family of plants—the genus Scalesia, commonly known as the Galápagos giant daisies—has provided a botanical counterpart to Darwin’s finches. In only about one million years, the founding lineage has diversified into 15 recognised species occupying habitats ranging from dense, humid highland forests to hot, dry and exposed lowlands. They vary from low-growing shrubs to trees, with leaves ranging from large and unlobed to small, deeply lobed and intricately serrated.

Refuting Creationism - The Complex Origins of Modern Humans - No Just A Single Couple - Not Even A Single Species

Interwoven Human ancestry

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

New technique pinpoints human DNA inherited from ‘ghost’ ancestors - Berkeley News

Using genealogical relationships in DNA, UC Berkeley researchers have uncovered hidden contributions from extinct human populations that left no sequenced genomes.

Meaghan Marohn

The evolutionary ancestry of modern Homo sapiens is far more complex than anything the authors of the Bible’s absurdly simplistic origin myths could have imagined. We already know that populations of our species migrating out of Africa interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans, and that these two archaic lineages also exchanged genes with one another. Consequently, most people with ancestry outside Africa carry some Neanderthal DNA, while many Asian and especially Oceanian populations also carry Denisovan DNA.

Now, according to a paper just published in Science, our ancestry is even more complicated. A team led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, with colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and 54Gene, has identified genetic material inherited from two previously unknown archaic hominin lineages. These are described as “ghost” lineages because no sequenced genome from either population is available: their existence must be inferred from the traces they left in the genomes of living people.

The researchers developed a computational method called TRACE — TRacking Archaic Contributions via ARG Estimation — which reconstructs genealogical relationships among segments of DNA. By identifying regions whose ancestry extends unusually far back in time, TRACE can detect contributions from extinct populations without requiring DNA recovered from their bones.

Refuting Creationism - Ceremonial Rituals In An Australian Cave - 15,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

GunaiKurnai grass-burning ritual, 25,000 years ago

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

GunaiKurnai grass-burning ritual, 25,000 years ago, Cloggs Cave, Victoria, Australia.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Microscopic plant remains reveal 25,000 years of GunaiKurnai rituals deep in a Victorian cave

A point I have made before in this blog is that the ignorance of the Bible’s authors is revealed as clearly by what they omitted as by what they included. When examined in the light of modern science, many of their claims turn out to be wrong, showing that they filled gaps in their knowledge with stories that reflected the prevailing superstitions of their culture. Meanwhile, the omissions reveal just how narrow their geographical and intellectual horizons were.

There is no unmistakable fact in the Bible that could not have been known, inferred or imagined by people living in the ancient Near East when its various books were written. There is no knowledge that required revelation from an omniscient being and no awareness of vast regions, peoples or periods of history lying beyond the experience of its human authors.

That is entirely understandable if the Bible is a collection of human writings. It is much more difficult to explain if its ultimate author was an omniscient god. Such an author would not have shared the cosmological limitations of ancient people or presented the world in the familiar ancient Near Eastern form found in Genesis: primordial waters divided by a firmament, dry land beneath it, and the Sun, Moon and stars placed in that firmament as lights. Whatever ingenious reinterpretations modern apologists may retrofit to the text, there is nothing in it that anticipates the real structure, age or scale of the Universe.

Nor is there any hint that people were already living on the other side of the planet. Archaeological evidence from Madjedbebe in northern Australia indicates human occupation by about 65,000 years ago. The Bible’s authors knew nothing of Australia, its First Peoples or the tens of thousands of years of human history that had already elapsed before the supposed events of Genesis.

What is perhaps more surprising is that educated adults today can still imagine that the Genesis creation myth is an accurate and inerrant account of history, despite its demonstrable errors and enormous omissions. The text contains no Australia, no Americas, no Pacific peoples and no conception of the deep human past—only the restricted world known to its authors, projected onto the entire planet.

Augustine of Hippo provides an illuminating example of how treating Scripture as historical fact could obstruct an otherwise rational consideration of the evidence. Contrary to a common misconception, Augustine did not insist that Earth was flat. By his time, its spherical shape had been understood by educated Greeks and Romans for centuries, and Augustine was prepared to concede that it might be demonstrated scientifically.

What he could not accept was that the far side of a spherical Earth might be inhabited, because that appeared irreconcilable with the biblical claim that every human descended from a single original man—and, after the supposed global flood, from Noah and his family. In De Civitate Dei, he wrote:

How Snakes Lost Their Legs - 80 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

fossil of Tametara mirim

Agustin Martinelli

80-million-year-old snake fossil sheds light on why lizards lost their limbs and started slithering

Of all the primitive ‘just-so’ stories in Genesis, the tale of how the serpent was condemned to crawl on its belly must rank among the most transparently mythological. Having supposedly tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, God curses the serpent to go on its belly and ‘eat dust’ for the rest of its life. Although the story never explicitly says that the serpent previously had legs, the curse plainly implies a change and has traditionally been understood as an explanation for why snakes slither instead of walking.

Like so much of Genesis, it begins with an observation familiar to its authors—snakes have no legs—and invents a magical tale to explain it. It is an ancient example of an etiological myth: folklore devised to explain why something in the natural world appears as it does, long before anyone had the evidence or intellectual framework needed to understand its real history.

Even as mythology, however, the story is strangely incoherent. Genesis itself does not identify the serpent as Satan but introduces it as the most cunning of the wild animals God had made. Nevertheless, this supposedly ordinary animal can speak, reason and somehow knows about a prohibition that God had given to Adam before Eve had even been created. The text makes no attempt to explain how it acquired either this knowledge or the power of speech.

More awkward still for anyone insisting that the story is literally true, the serpent’s predictions prove substantially more accurate than God’s warning. God tells Adam that he will die on the day he eats the fruit. The serpent tells Eve that they will not die, that their eyes will be opened and that they will become like God, knowing good and evil. They eat the fruit, their eyes are opened and they do not die that day. God then confirms that the humans have indeed become ‘like one of us’ in knowing good and evil. According to Genesis itself, Adam goes on to live for another 930 years.

On the most straightforward reading of the story, therefore, the serpent tells Eve the truth while God’s threat to Adam proves false. Later theologians have attempted to rescue the tale by inventing a ‘spiritual death’, or by claiming that Adam merely began to die that day, but neither qualification appears in the text. These are apologetic repairs added by people who can see the problem but cannot admit that the story’s authors created it.

Science, meanwhile, has uncovered a very different account of how snakes acquired their extraordinary bodies—one involving neither talking reptiles nor fruit, curses or human disobedience, but descent with modification over immense periods of geological time. Snakes are highly modified members of the squamate reptile radiation. Their ancestors progressively elongated their bodies, increased the number of vertebrae and reduced their limbs as different lineages adapted to particular ways of life. Their evolutionary history extends back at least to the Middle Jurassic, about 160 million years ago.

Now, a paper published in Nature by an international team led by Tiago R. Simões describes an exceptionally well-preserved early snake from the Late Cretaceous of Brazil. Named Tametara mirim, the animal lived approximately 85–75 million years ago, when non-avian dinosaurs still dominated terrestrial ecosystems. It is the first articulated snake fossil known from Brazil and preserves a three-dimensional skull together with more than 100 connected vertebrae.

The preserved portion of its skeleton appears to have lacked forelimbs. Because the region around the pelvis is missing, the researchers cannot determine whether it retained vestigial hindlimbs, as some other early snakes did. Its skull also combines recognisably snake-like specialisations with ancestral features resembling those of other squamate reptiles—precisely the sort of mosaic of old and new characteristics expected in an evolving lineage, but not from the instantaneous transformation of an animal by a divine curse.

Refuting Creationism - The Unbroken History of China

Carving stone at Shimao city.

Image by IVPP.

The landscape of Shimao city.

Image by IVPP.

New DNA Study Unlocks Origins, Social Structure of Neolithic Shimao Civilization----Chinese Academy of Sciences

In my last blog post, I pointed out that ancient Egypt’s archaeological and written record extends continuously from long before the date young-Earth creationists assign to Noah’s Flood, through that supposed catastrophe and into biblical times. Nowhere is there any sign that Egypt was destroyed by a global flood and subsequently repopulated by migrants from Mesopotamia. I also showed that the biblical writers who set stories in Egypt possessed only a tenuous understanding of its real history and culture.

Ancient China presents creationists with much the same problem. Its archaeological record contains long regional sequences extending across the supposed date of the Flood, with local populations, cultures and economies continuing to develop. If every human outside Noah’s immediate family had been exterminated, the existing peoples of East Asia should disappear from the record and be replaced by a rapidly expanding population of recent Mesopotamian origin. That is not what archaeology shows—and ancient DNA now provides an especially clear test of the claim.

The evidence comes from a paper published in Nature in November 2025 by an international team led by Professor Qiaomei Fu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with researchers from several other Chinese institutions.

The team analysed genome-wide data from 169 ancient individuals recovered from Shimao and surrounding settlements in northern China. Population analyses were conducted using 144 unrelated individuals, while the remaining close relatives enabled the researchers to reconstruct pedigrees extending across as many as four generations.

Shimao, in northern Shaanxi Province, was one of the largest fortified settlements in Late Neolithic China. Occupied from approximately 2300 to 1800 BCE, it covered about four square kilometres and contained massive stone walls, separate inner and outer enclosures, specialised craft production, elite cemeteries and unmistakable evidence of a highly stratified society. Its occupation therefore began at about the very time when, according to the conventional young-Earth creationist chronology, the world should have been struggling to recover from a global extermination and repopulation by Noah’s immediate descendants.

Instead, the genomes showed that the people associated with Shimao were predominantly descended from populations already living in northern Shaanxi at least 1,000 years earlier. Those earlier inhabitants were associated with the Yangshao cultural tradition of the Yellow River’s Loess Plateau. The researchers found regional genetic continuity from the Middle to the Late Neolithic—continuity extending from before the supposed Flood into the centuries following it.

This was not a completely isolated or genetically static population. The researchers detected continuing contact with Yumin-related people from Inner Mongolia, close connections with the contemporary Taosi population farther south, and some ancestry from southern East Asian populations, possibly associated with the northward spread of rice cultivation. These were the ordinary movements, exchanges and intermarriages expected among neighbouring prehistoric farming and pastoral communities. They did not interrupt the dominant local ancestry, and there was no sign of wholesale population replacement by descendants of a family recently arrived from Mesopotamia.

The genetic evidence also revealed much about the organisation of Shimao society. Pedigrees reconstructed from elite burials indicated a predominantly patrilineal system in which status and wealth commonly passed from high-ranking men to their sons. Male members of these lineages showed relatively little diversity in their Y-chromosome ancestry, whereas the women displayed much greater mitochondrial diversity. This is consistent with women frequently marrying into communities dominated by established male lineages, although the evidence for strictly patrilocal residence remains suggestive rather than conclusive.

The study also uncovered a possible sex-related pattern in Shimao’s practice of human sacrifice. Nine of the ten sampled victims buried beneath the East Gate were male, contradicting earlier identifications based on skeletal anatomy. In contrast, most sampled sacrificial victims accompanying elite burials were female: six of seven at Hanjiagedan and fourteen of nineteen at Huangchengtai. This suggests that male and female victims may have been selected for different rituals conducted in different places, although the researchers caution that the number of genetically sexed victims remains too small to establish the pattern conclusively.

Creationism Refuted - How The Building Blocks Of Life Can be Made Without Magic

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Cosmic dust analogue seen through a microscope created by experiment by Linda Losurdo.

This student made cosmic dust in her lab. What she found could help us understand how life started on Earth - The University of Sydney

Creationist objections to abiogenesis often smuggle in the long-discredited idea of vitalism: the belief that living matter contains some special ingredient or “vital force” absent from non-living matter. This appears to lie behind the familiar creationist refrain that “life cannot come from non-life”, as though “life” were a substance that must be added to matter by a supernatural agent.

The word “life”, however, is rarely defined in this argument. Scientists can devise operational definitions for particular purposes, but life is not a single substance possessed by some molecules and absent from others. It is a collection of properties displayed by sufficiently organised chemical systems. By leaving the term undefined, creationists turn their assertion into a slogan that can neither be tested nor falsified.

The distinction between organic and inorganic chemistry is useful, but partly conventional and historical. Organic chemistry deals broadly with carbon compounds, although some carbon-containing substances—including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and carbonates—are traditionally classified as inorganic. There is no fundamental physical boundary between the two categories: both obey precisely the same laws of physics, chemistry and quantum mechanics.

Carbon’s extraordinary chemical versatility follows from its atomic structure. A carbon atom has six protons and six electrons, four of which are valence electrons in its outer shell. Its small size and ability to form strong covalent bonds with itself and with elements such as hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen allow it to form stable chains, rings, branches and extensive molecular networks. Depending on how it is bonded, carbon can adopt tetrahedral, trigonal-planar or linear arrangements and can form single, double or triple bonds. All this follows from quantum chemistry; no vital spark, magical ingredient or special rule is required.

None of that proves that the origin of life was inevitable, and science does not yet possess a complete account of every stage of abiogenesis. What it does show is that there is no known chemical or physical barrier preventing non-living chemistry from becoming progressively more complex. Under suitable conditions, chemical systems can acquire such properties as compartmentalisation, catalysis and molecular replication. Once populations of replicating systems existed with heritable variation, natural selection could favour those that survived longer, reproduced more reliably and used available resources more efficiently.

One important question is where the organic raw materials involved in this prebiotic chemistry came from. Some could have formed on the early Earth, but organic compounds are also widespread throughout the Solar System and interstellar space. They have been detected in comets and asteroids and regularly occur in meteorites. Earth may therefore have received substantial quantities of organic material from several extraterrestrial sources. This raises another scientific question: what natural chemical and physical processes produced and modified that material in space?

Linda Losurdo, a PhD candidate in materials and plasma physics in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, Australia, has investigated part of that question with her supervisor, Professor David McKenzie. They recreated some of the energetic, near-vacuum conditions associated with stars and other astrophysical environments inside glass tubes. After evacuating the tubes, they introduced nitrogen, carbon dioxide and acetylene and subjected the mixture to an electrical potential of about 10,000 volts for approximately an hour, producing a plasma known as a glow discharge.

Refuting Creationism - Population Collapse And Migration in Neolithic Europe - And No Evidence Of A Genocidal Flood

The researchers have conducted DNA analyses of the skeletons from a burial site like this one in France and found traces of several different diseases.

Photo: Getty Images / Michal Boubin

Stone age population collapse revealed by DNA study in France – University of Copenhagen

A paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution by a large international team led by researchers at the University of Copenhagen, reports evidence that simply should not exist if the Bible creation myth, and its later global genocidal flood myth, had any basis in reality. The evidence shows a significant population collapse among Neolithic farming communities in what is now northern France about 5,000 years ago, followed by migration into the depopulated area by people with strong genetic links to southern France and the Iberian Peninsula.

The study is based on ancient DNA from 132 individuals buried in the allée sépulcrale at Bury, a large megalithic tomb about 50 kilometres north of Paris. The site was used during two distinct burial phases, separated by a hiatus associated with the wider Neolithic decline around 3000 BC. The researchers found that the people buried before and after this decline were not simply later descendants of the same local population, but belonged to largely discontinuous genetic groups. In other words, this was not merely a change in burial custom; it was a major population turnover.

The problems this presents for creationism are multiple. First, there is the evidence of established farming populations in northern Europe at a time when, according to Young Earth Creationist chronology, the world had only recently been magicked into existence. Secondly, there is the embarrassing survival of archaeological and genetic evidence which, under the same mythology, should either have been destroyed in a global flood a few centuries later, or buried beneath a distinctive, worldwide layer of fossil-bearing flood silt — a layer which is conspicuous by its absence. Thirdly, there is the evidence that the human population of Europe had already diversified into regionally distinct genetic populations by about 3000 BC, with enough structure for ancient DNA to distinguish northern French and German-like Neolithic farmers from later migrants with strong southern French and Iberian affinities.

None of this, of course, will cause creationists to reconsider the mythology. We can confidently predict that it will instead be treated as another test of faith: one more opportunity to demonstrate the strength of their determination never to let evidence change their minds. In creationist apologetics, refusal to learn is often mistaken for intellectual victory. The more compelling the evidence, the greater the achievement in ignoring it.

The reason for the population decline is not yet clear. The human remains contained genetic traces of pathogens, including the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, and the louse-borne relapsing fever bacterium, Borrelia recurrentis, but the evidence does not support plague as the sole cause of the collapse. The more likely explanation is a combination of disease, environmental stress, demographic disruption and social breakdown. Earlier burials contained multiple generations from the same extended families, suggesting stable, kin-based communities. Later burials were more selective and were dominated by a single male lineage, indicating a marked change in social organisation after the population turnover.

This adds to the growing picture of the so-called Neolithic decline as a widespread phenomenon affecting much of northern and western Europe, not just Scandinavia and northern Germany. It also offers a plausible explanation for the abrupt disappearance of megalithic tomb-building and other monumental traditions across parts of Europe at about the same time. The people who built those monuments did not merely change their minds about architecture; in places such as the Paris Basin, the population itself appears to have collapsed and been replaced.

Malevolent Design - The Complex Mechanism That Helps Bacteria Make Us Sick

Clockwise: A bacterium retracts its pili, reeling in a piece of DNA in the environment. This action facilitates “natural transformation,” a process by which bacterium acquire new genetic traits, including antibiotic resistance.

Image courtesy the Dalia Lab, Indiana University

IU biologists uncover a molecular mechanism that helps bacteria spread antibiotic resistance genes: College of Arts + Sciences : Indiana University

Creationists have a problem of their own making. The same evolutionary processes they try to rebrand as evidence for a creator god are also the processes that produce parasites, pathogens and the molecular machinery by which they exploit their hosts. If Michael J. Behe wants to claim “irreducible complexity” as evidence of design, and William A. Dembski wants to claim “complex specified information” as the signature of an intelligent designer, then they cannot confine those arguments to the parts of biology they find theologically convenient. The same kinds of complexity and genetic information are also found in organisms that make us sick and increase the suffering in the world.

Although professional creationists, including fellows of the Discovery Institute such as Behe and Dembski, are careful to avoid naming their putative designer, their audience invariably identifies it with the supposedly omnibenevolent god of the Bible, Torah and Qur’an. But that creates an obvious problem: using their own criteria, this creator god must be credited not only with designing humans and other animals, but also with designing the bacteria, viruses, parasites and molecular mechanisms that infect, disable and kill them.

The significance of this is often lost on creationists because it requires a basic understanding of biology and a willingness to follow an argument to its logical conclusion. When they cite Behe’s favourite examples, such as the E. coli flagellum or anti-malarial drug resistance in Plasmodium falciparum, as evidence for their god, they are in effect crediting that god with designing mechanisms that help microbes move, invade, survive and evade our attempts to stop them. Point this out, however, and the same evidence that was allegedly scientific evidence for intelligent design is suddenly reinterpreted as evidence for “The Fall” and “Original Sin”. The pretence that creationism is science is abandoned in a hasty retreat into fundamentalist theology, where the same facts are repurposed to reach a more comfortable conclusion.

In addition to the two examples I recently discussed here and here, another example has now been reported — and this one involves a powerful molecular motor that should, by creationist standards, look very much like the sort of thing they would normally call “designed”. It is the type IV pilus retraction system, recently reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), which many bacteria use to retract tiny hair-like surface structures called pili. These pili act like microscopic grappling hooks, helping bacteria attach to surfaces and tissues, form antibiotic-resistant biofilms, and pull in fragments of DNA from their surroundings, including genes for drug resistance acquired from other bacteria.

Creationism Refuted - Our Ancestors Lived In North America - 56 Million Years Ago

Life reconstruction of Teilhardina

Ai-generated image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

Our primate ancestors evolved in the cold – not the tropics

At times, it seems almost cruel to keep reminding creationists that another day, another week and another month have passed, and still there is no hint that biomedical scientists are about to abandon evidence-based evolutionary biology and adopt magic-based creationism as a better explanation of the facts. And yet here we are again: another paper, another article, and another example of evolution providing the rational framework for interpreting the evidence.

And, to rub salt into creationist wounds, the evidence deals with events around 56 million years before creationists’ mythical “Creation Week”. As though to refute yet another creationist myth — that scientists are only allowed to publish papers that confirm mainstream scientific orthodoxy — the findings, published by Jorge Avaria-Llautureo of the University of Reading and colleagues in the mainstream journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), challenge the long-standing assumption that the primate lineage originated in warm tropical forests.

The study maps the likely geographic origins of our primate ancestors and reconstructs the historical climate at those locations. Its conclusion is surprising: early primates appear to have lived, dispersed and diversified through cold, arid and temperate regions, not primarily in the tropics. Their later colonisation of tropical regions took several million years and seems to have been driven more by local changes between dry and wet climates than by global warming itself.

One useful example is the tiny early primate Teilhardina, a small, tree-dwelling mammal known from fossils around 56 million years old — roughly 10 million years after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. Fossil evidence suggests that Teilhardina had nails rather than claws, helping it grasp branches and handle food, a characteristic associated with primates. Species of this early primate group appear in the fossil record of North America and then dispersed rapidly across what are now Europe and China.

An article explaining the finding and its significance for understanding our evolutionary origins was published in The Conversation by Jason Gilchrist, a lecturer in the School of Applied Sciences at Edinburgh Napier University. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Unintelligent Design - The DNA In A Developing Brain Gets Broken And Has To Be Repaired - Incompetent Design Or Evolution?

Neurons migrating through dense tissue in the developing brain (green) frequently undergo DNA damage (magenta).

DNA in neurons is damaged and repaired during brain cortex formation | News | Kyoto University iCeMS

Like my last post, this post illustrates how the human body, far from being the perfect design of the omnipotent, omniscient designer creationists would have us believe in, is the result of a utilitarian evolutionary process. Layers of complexity arise, not from divine brilliance, but from evolved solutions to problems created by suboptimal earlier solutions to other problems — which were themselves the result of imperfect evolution.

In the previous post we saw how DNA replication is sufficiently imperfect that it requires mechanisms to repair the resulting DNA damage. However, these repair processes are themselves potentially dangerous and need control systems to maintain a careful balance between too little and too much repair. When this control process fails, it can lead to cancers that mimic those caused by the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which are associated with increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer.

In this post we see how newborn neurons in the developing brain need to squeeze through tight spaces in dense tissue, past other cells and between fibres, in order to reach their final positions and form neural circuits in the cerebral and cerebellar cortices. This process is such a physical struggle that the DNA in these neurons can suffer double-strand breaks and must be repaired quickly to ensure normal brain development. This is the finding of a research team from Kyoto University, the University of Tokyo, Osaka University, the National University of Singapore and the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, led by Professor Mineko Kengaku who have just published their findings in Nature.

Mostly, this repair is quick and successful. However, the research team also found striking similarities between the development of mice in which the repair process failed and human genome-instability syndromes that affect the cerebellum.

Another important point is that this repair process appears to be much more successful in damaged neuronal DNA than in similar damage that can occur when some cancer cells migrate through narrow channels. The difference seems to lie in where the DNA breaks occur. In neurons, they tend to occur in regions of the genome that are not actively being transcribed, whereas in cancer cells the damage can involve essential genes. That suggests there is some biological bias in where these breaks occur in neurons, rather than the process being simply random mechanical shattering.

This raises the obvious question for creationists: why create a process that breaks DNA in developing brain cells, only to require another process to repair it, with the inherent risk that the repair process might be incomplete or imperfect? It also raises the possibility that the resulting small differences in the genomes of individual neurons could contribute to neuronal individuality and perhaps to some neurodevelopmental or neurodegenerative diseases.

The emerging picture, from this and from the rogue repair-control process that can mimic cancers caused by the BRCA genes, is not of a human body designed by an omniscient engineer. It is more like a William Heath Robinson contraption: improvised, overcomplicated, dependent on compensatory mechanisms, and always vulnerable to the failure of the very systems needed to keep it working.

Unintelligent Design - What Happens when A Badly 'Designed' Process Goes Rogue - Cancer - Malevolent Design Or Evolution?

Dr. Alexandra Nusawardhana, the lead author of the study and who earned her doctorate in biomedical sciences this year from Penn State College of Medicine, conducts research to understand genomic instability and cancer treatment response.

Credit: Jason Plotkin / Penn State. Creative Commons

DNA repair protein gene gone rogue may unlock new cancer treatments | Penn State University

A characteristic of evolved biological systems, and one that distinguishes them from systems designed from first principles, is that they are often unnecessarily complex, vulnerable to failure and dependent on layers of patchwork compensation. This is what we should expect from systems produced by utilitarian, suboptimal compromises built from whatever was available at the time.

With no plan, no foresight and no predetermined objective, natural selection can only favour whatever leaves more descendants in a particular environment. The result is not an ideal solution, but merely a workable one — one that is better than what preceded it, even if it remains a very long way from perfection. An intelligent designer, such as the one proposed by advocates of intelligent design, would be under no such historical constraints and could, in principle, rebuild a system from scratch to arrive at the optimal solution.

To illustrate this, this post and the next will look at two recent papers that incidentally demonstrate how many human health problems arise from these over-complex, error-prone systems — systems that would not exist if the human body were the pinnacle of created perfection that creationists imagine it to be. Unless, of course, the designer intended us to suffer when its systems failed.

The first concerns a paper published in February 2026 in Nature Communications by researchers at Penn State College of Medicine. It shows how one component of the DNA repair machinery — a system needed because DNA replication and maintenance are themselves vulnerable to error and damage — can itself go wrong and produce a pattern of genomic instability resembling that seen when the BRCA1 and BRCA2 tumour-suppressor pathway is defective.

The culprit is EXO1, a gene that encodes an exonuclease involved in DNA processing and repair. In normal cells, EXO1 helps trim and process damaged or mismatched DNA so that repair can proceed. But when EXO1 is overexpressed, as the researchers found in a significant proportion of several cancers, including about 20–30% of breast and ovarian cancers as well as melanoma, testicular, cervical and hepatobiliary cancers, too much of this normally useful protein becomes destructive. Instead of helping to preserve genome integrity, excessive EXO1 activity can degrade newly synthesised DNA during replication stress, expanding single-stranded DNA gaps and degrading reversed replication forks.

The result is a BRCA-like pattern of genomic instability even in cells whose BRCA pathway is still functional. In other words, the cell behaves in some important respects like a BRCA-mutant tumour cell, not because BRCA1 or BRCA2 is mutated, but because too much EXO1 has overwhelmed the normal protective system. This matters clinically because such tumours may respond to some of the same treatments used against BRCA-mutant cancers, including drugs that target DNA repair vulnerabilities.

So, we have a DNA replication and maintenance system that needs elaborate repair machinery because the genome is constantly vulnerable to damage; then we have the catastrophic consequences when that repair machinery itself goes rogue. Compare that with the simpler, more robust system we might expect from an intelligent designer endowed with foresight and unconstrained by evolutionary history. Complexity is not the hallmark of intelligent design that creationists claim it to be. In biology, it is very often the accumulated consequence of failure-prone, suboptimal compromises produced by evolutionary tinkering without a predetermined objective.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Cultivated Cotton - No Magic Required

Wild cotton, on left, has short, brown, and coarse fibers, while modern domesticated cotton has white, fine and abundant fibers. A new study led by Iowa State University scientists identified the northwestern Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico as the original source of domesticated cotton.

Photo: Corrinne Grover/Iowa State University.

Cotton’s roots trace to Yucatan Peninsula, where wild gene pool runs deepest - News Service

My last blog post looked at the evolution of the strawberry and how the evidence of multiple whole-genome duplications and speciation by hybridisation refutes several basic creationist, counter-evidential myths and articles of faith.

This post deals with the evolution and cultivation of the cotton plant, which again refutes the childish notion of divine creation, perfectly suited for use by the creator god's favourite creation, humankind, as well as the creationist article of faith that no new genetic information can arise without the direct intervention of a designer god, because this would supposedly violate the laws of thermodynamics.

As a recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), by a team of researchers including Professor Jonathan Wendel of Iowa State University, has shown, modern upland cotton, Gossypium hirsutum, is the result of thousands of years of human selection acting on naturally occurring genetic variation. The team traced its domestication to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, probably to the north-western Yucatán, where wild populations still retain the deepest gene pool. Cotton was first domesticated there about 5,000 years ago, which, if creationist chronology were taken seriously, places it before the supposed genocidal global flood, which it appears to have survived along with the people who cultivated it.

The researchers found that domestication transformed a wild, perennial shrub with small bolls and short, coarse, brown fibres into the modern crop with abundant, long, fine, white fibres. This was not the result of a single act of magical design, nor of a sudden, miraculous improvement, but of long-term selection acting on many mutations of relatively small effect, accumulated and filtered over many generations.

The team also showed that, while human selection produced fibres more useful to people, it did so at a cost. Useful traits present in wild populations, such as disease resistance and salt tolerance, were left behind as farmers selected repeatedly from a restricted subset of the original wild gene pool. Each generation of selection narrowed the genetic base still further, pushing cultivated cotton through a genetic bottleneck.

The researchers reached these conclusions by comparing the genomes of cultivated cotton with those of specimens collected from wild populations across the plant's native range. Their analyses showed that domesticated cotton is most closely related to wild cotton from north-western Yucatán, where two random wild plants still show, on average, about twice as much genetic difference as two random modern cultivars.

After cultivated upland cotton spread out of the Yucatán, it eventually became the dominant cotton crop worldwide, displacing or overshadowing other cotton species that had been independently domesticated in South America, Africa and India. Today, Gossypium hirsutum, or upland cotton, accounts for about 90% of the world's cotton crop.

Creationism Refuted - Scientists Explain How To Make A Universe - No Magic Required

An expanding mini universe could counterbalance the collapsing matter of a star, thereby creating a stable gravastar.

Credit: Daniel Jampolski and Luciano Rezzolla,
Goethe University Frankfurt

Big Bang inside a star: How a gravastar forms | EurekAlert!

Creationists like to think they have dealt a death-blow to cosmology with the childish question, "How can a universe come from nothing?" Usually, this is not so much an argument as an admission that they have mistaken a failure of their own imagination for a law of physics. They begin with the assumption that "nothing" must mean a sort of empty box waiting for a god to put something in it, then demand that science should explain the box, the waiting, and the god.

But modern physics has a habit of being far more imaginative, and far less parochial, than Bronze Age mythology.

A paper recently published in Physical Review D, by theoretical physicists Daniel Jampolski and Professor Luciano Rezzolla of Goethe University Frankfurt, explores one of those ideas that sounds, at first hearing, almost like science fiction: a collapsing star might not inevitably form a conventional black hole. Under the right conditions, the collapse could instead generate what is called a gravastar — a gravitational vacuum star — containing an expanding region of dark-energy-like spacetime, rather like a tiny universe forming inside the dying star.

This does not mean, of course, that physicists have proved that our universe began inside a star, still less that they have solved every problem in cosmology. Nor does it mean that "nothing" in physics is the same as the philosopher's or theologian's absolute nothing. What it does show, however, is that serious scientists can construct mathematical models in which expanding spacetime can arise naturally from the equations of general relativity, without once needing to insert a magic being, a supernatural command, or a cosmic conjuring trick.

That is the part creationists habitually miss. Science is not claiming that universes pop into existence by magic. It is doing what science always does: examining what the known laws imply under extreme conditions, identifying where those laws may need refinement, and testing whether natural processes can account for phenomena that once seemed impossible. In this case, the model suggests that when matter collapses to almost the point of becoming a black hole, a rapidly expanding de Sitter region could form inside it and counterbalance the collapse.

So, far from helping creationism, this work illustrates precisely why the creationist argument from incredulity is so feeble. "I don't understand how it could happen naturally" is not evidence for a god. It is merely the opening sentence of a scientific investigation.

Refuting Creationism - How Modern Humans Benefitted from Meeting Denisovans

AI-generated Image (Chat GPT 5.5 Thinking)

Image provided by Tucci Lab

Genomes from Oceania offer new clues to human evolution | Yale News

A paper recently published by a Yale University-led team in the journal Science shows how Denisovan genes in the people of Near Oceania have contributed especially to their immune systems, and so have continued to influence human evolution for tens of thousands of years.

Who would be a creationist? It must be galling to wait so eagerly for that great day when biologists finally announce the collapse of evolutionary theory and admit that a better explanation of the observable evidence is one involving unevidenced magic entities doing conjuring tricks with chemistry and physics. That would make biology the first science to abandon natural explanations, ignore Occam’s Razor, and adopt magic as a basic principle. Sadly for creationists, that long-promised day shows no sign of arriving, despite having been predicted any day now for more than half a century.

But then, what would creationism be without a dogged refusal to change its mind when the evidence demands it, and the childish belief that the evidence itself must be part of some vast conspiracy to test the strength of faith? That is not science; it is apologetics dressed up in a lab coat.

The problem, as always, is that reality refuses to conform. The universe continues to produce evidence contradicting creationism and confirming the complex evolution of humans over deep time: migration, isolation, adaptation, bottlenecks, and repeated remixing with genes from other archaic human lineages, themselves the products of long evolutionary histories.

The real-world evidence written into our genomes is that most non-African human populations carry remnants of Neanderthal DNA, while Denisovan ancestry is especially marked in Near Oceanians and in some Asian populations. There is also evidence that Neanderthals and Denisovans themselves met and interbred in central Asia. Human evolution was not a simple ladder, still less a single act of special creation, but a branching, merging, reticulated history of populations moving, separating, adapting and sometimes meeting again.

Some of these archaic genes appear to have mattered because they were useful. In particular, they are often associated with immune responses to pathogenic bacteria and viruses. This makes evolutionary sense: Denisovan-like populations had already adapted to environments outside Africa, including their local burden of pathogens. When the ancestors of present-day Near Oceanians inherited some of that genetic variation through introgression, beneficial variants could be retained by natural selection, even while many other archaic variants were gradually lost.

The Yale-led team filled an important gap in our understanding of human evolution by sequencing the genomes of 177 individuals from 12 distinct populations in different parts of Near Oceania — the southwestern Pacific region that includes Papua New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands — and analysing them alongside 1,284 previously published genomes from individuals worldwide.

They found evidence that the ancestors of Near Oceanian populations interbred with at least three distinct Denisovan-like groups. They also identified thousands of archaic variants that affect how genes are switched on or off, with a notable concentration in immune and antiviral pathways. In other words, Denisovan DNA is not merely a fossil remnant in the genome; in some populations, it is still helping to shape biology today.

Refuting Creationism - A Vast Global Fungal Plant-Support System - Unintelligently 'Designed' Over 480 Million Years [Updated]

Mycorrhizal fungi under the microscope at AMOLF biophysics institute in Amsterdam. The circular structures are spores. Color is altered for legibility.

Credit: Tomás Munita

New global research maps underground fungal infrastructure for the first time - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

An international team of researchers, led by ecologist Justin Stewart of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, has announced the creation of the first global map of the vast underground infrastructure formed by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. The team has published its findings in Science.

These are not fungi in the familiar sense of mushrooms, but microscopic, thread-like filaments, or hyphae, which form intimate partnerships with plant roots. The figures involved are astonishing. The researchers estimate that the upper layer of the world’s soils contains about 110 quadrillion kilometres of these fungal filaments — enough to stretch from Earth to the sun nearly three-quarters of a billion times, or there and back about 368 million times. The networks also transport roughly 4 billion tonnes of CO₂-equivalent into soils each year, about 11% of annual human-caused CO₂ emissions.

This is not a new evolutionary phenomenon. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are part of an ancient plant-fungal symbiosis that appears to date back roughly 475–480 million years, close to the origin of the first land plants. That does not mean, of course, that the individual fungal filaments mapped today are hundreds of millions of years old, but that this type of mutualistic relationship has been evolving since the early colonisation of land by plants.

One sure way to tell that biological systems are not intelligently designed is not simply that they are complex, but that they are historically contingent. They carry the marks of accumulated compromises, improvised workarounds and layered dependencies. Evolution can only modify what already exists; it cannot scrap an imperfect arrangement and begin again with a clean sheet. Its only test is whether a change works well enough, in a particular environment, to leave more descendants than the alternatives.

None of these constraints would apply to an intelligent designer, still less to the omnipotent, omniscient, perfect designer imagined — though rarely named explicitly — by creationists trying to disguise fundamentalist creationism as science. A designed global life-support system would not be expected to emerge through countless local bargains between plants and fungi, mediated by nutrient stress, carbon demand, soil chemistry, competition, disturbance and natural selection.

So we can be as sure as it is possible to be that this vast, intricate and globally important biological infrastructure was not intelligently designed. It evolved because both partners gained from the exchange: plants provided carbon fixed by photosynthesis; fungi extended the reach of plant roots, supplying water and mineral nutrients, especially phosphorus and nitrogen. Over deep time, those local mutual advantages became part of the living fabric of terrestrial ecosystems.

The paper in Science is accompanied by a news release from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, which includes a link to an interactive map of this global fungal infrastructure.

Refuting Creationism - Evolving Millipedes Crawl All Over Creationism

Hirudicryptus canariensis

Photo by Rafael Garcia and Paul Marek, Virginia Tech

Hirudicryptus canariensis (left) Siphoniulus neotropicus (microscopic image at right) are the two rare millipedes whose DNA helped researchers complete the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders.

Photos by Rafael Garcia and Paul Marek for Virginia Tech.

Ancient millipedes still had secrets to tell | EurekAlert!

A paper published today (12 June 2026) in Current Biology is almost guaranteed to upset any creationists with the courage to read it and the ability to understand it. Written by an international team led by Associate Professor Paul Marek and Dr Luisa F. Vasquez-Valverde of Virginia Tech, it reports the completion of the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders, including two rare groups whose DNA had never previously been included in a phylogenetic analysis.

Millipedes were amongst the earliest animals to colonise the land, arriving long before vertebrates had made the transition from water to land. According to the researchers, they beat vertebrates onto land by more than 80 million years. As detritivores, they helped to establish early terrestrial ecosystems by breaking down decaying organic matter and recycling nutrients, gradually helping to create soils in which later plant communities could develop.

For more than a century, biologists have known that two rare groups of millipedes — Siphoniulida and Siphonocryptida — existed, but without fresh specimens it was impossible to analyse their DNA and confirm where they belonged in the millipede family tree. One of the groups includes species barely a centimetre long that spend their entire lives underground; the other is known from only a few locations.

Members of the team therefore travelled to Los Tuxtlas, Mexico, and the Spanish Canary Islands to collect Siphoniulus neotropicus and Hirudicryptus canariensis, the two millipedes whose DNA had not previously been included in an evolutionary analysis. By sequencing DNA from these groups, comparing hundreds of genes across 82 millipede species, and combining those results with evidence from 29 fossils, the researchers were able to determine where the groups fit into millipede history and when their lineages emerged.

The result was especially interesting because one of the supposed “orders”, Siphonocryptida, appears not to be a separate order after all, but part of an existing lineage. The other, Siphoniulida, could finally be placed among its closest relatives on the millipede evolutionary timeline. The analysis also pushed the likely origin of millipedes back to nearly 460 million years ago — roughly 35 million years earlier than the oldest known millipede fossils.

This is bad news for creationists for at least three reasons:

• It shows these arthropods had their origin hundreds of millions of years before their mythical “Creation Week”.
• It shows a long history of descent from a common origin, just as the Theory of Evolution predicts.
• It shows the researchers were entirely dependent on evolutionary theory to frame the question, predict relationships, interpret the DNA and fossil evidence, and explain the results — with no hint that they found evolution inadequate and no need to invoke magic, special creation, or the long-promised “collapse of Darwinism” that creationists have been assuring their followers is imminent, and has been for more than half a century.

Refuting Creationism - No Sex Please, We're Ediacaran

A lack of sex held back life’s diversity for millions of years | University of Cambridge

Try debating with a creationist on social media and before long you will be challenged to explain how sexual reproduction evolved, because there must have been a first male and a first female. A regular form of this, betraying the abysmal ignorance of the creationist, is the childish attempt at a "Gotcha!" with, "How long did the first man have to wait for the first woman to evolve?"

Like so many creationist preconceptions about what evolution is and what evolutionary biologists claim, this assumes that each species somehow evolves without ancestry, so everything about it must have arisen spontaneously in a single individual or, in this case, in a single couple. There is no awareness of inheritance from common ancestors, nor of the slow accumulation and honing of traits over time. Presumably, the questioner thinks adult men and women being magicked into existence without parents is a perfectly rational belief.

In reality, sexual reproduction did not begin with men and women. A form of sex almost certainly arose long before animals, among single-celled eukaryotes, and need not have involved anything recognisable as male and female. At its simplest, sex is the mixing of genetic material from different individuals. The interesting question, from the point of view of evolutionary biology, is not where the first man and first woman came from, but what advantage genetic mixing had over cloning or other asexual forms of reproduction, such that it became the predominant, although far from exclusive, method of reproduction among complex organisms.

Now two researchers from the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, UK, believe they have part of the answer, and have just published their findings in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The paper, by Dr Emily G. Mitchell and Professor Andrea Manica, examines how reproductive mode affected competition, dispersal and diversity among Ediacaran animal communities. It is accompanied by a research news item from the University of Cambridge.

The Ediacaran Period, roughly 635-539 million years ago, saw some of the earliest known large animals. Many of them would look nothing like any modern animal: they were sessile, lacked mouths and obvious digestive systems, and probably absorbed nutrients directly from the surrounding seawater. In the relatively benign conditions of the Ediacaran oceans, with limited predation and reduced competition, there was less pressure for rapid diversification. As a result, these early animal communities appear to have changed only slowly for millions of years before the later burst of diversity that preceded and fed into the Cambrian radiation.

But, as they began to colonise the shallower seas and coastal regions, the Ediacaran biota would have encountered increasingly unstable conditions with tides, storms and fluctuating temperatures and nutrient levels, so there would have been competition and selection pressure to adapt to these more hostile conditions. And this is what we see in the fossil record as the Ediacaran biota produced a second wave of more diverse forms, leading eventually to the 'Cambrian Explosion'.

Previous work has shown that some of these Ediacaran organisms reproduced asexually by sending out stolons or runners, rather like strawberry plants do today. Their offspring were clones, physically connected to the parent colony and genetically very similar. That can work well in a stable environment, but it has a serious evolutionary limitation: it restricts the mixing of genes from different lineages. Beneficial mutations that arise in separate clonal lines cannot easily be combined in the same genome, so lineages compete with one another instead of pooling their evolutionary gains.

Sexual reproduction changes that. It does not create evolution by magic; it provides natural selection with more combinations on which to act. Beneficial alleles that arise in different lineages can be brought together in the same genome instead of being trapped in competing clonal lines. This is the Fisher-Muller advantage of recombination: sex can turn evolutionary change from a slow serial process into a more rapid parallel one.