Refuting Creationism - Hominin Diversity In Middle Pleistocene China

Middle Pleistocene humans in China

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A new study places China at the center of the debate on human evolution | CENIEH

1 million-year-old stone tools from the Nihewan Basin

Continuing the theme from my last post, that the human evolutionary story is vastly richer and more complex than the childishly simplistic fairy tale in the Bible, this paper by a team led by the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing, together with researchers from the Spanish Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), and published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, argues that East Asia may have been a major centre of evolution within the genus Homo outside Africa.

At the heart of the study is a systematic reassessment of the so-called ‘transitional’ hominin fossils from the Chinese Middle Pleistocene. These fossils show intriguing mixtures of primitive and derived traits, and refuse to fit neatly into the tidy, linear progression that older models liked to assume between Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. In other words, the human story in Asia was not a simple ladder of progress but a tangled evolutionary bush, with several populations, overlapping traits, and probably more than one lineage sharing the landscape at different times.

Some of these fossils may represent Denisovans, while recently proposed species such as Homo longi and Homo juluensis hint at an even greater diversity of archaic humans than had previously been recognised. It is also entirely possible that there were other hominin groups in East Asia that remain unidentified. As so often in palaeoanthropology, the more evidence scientists uncover, the less plausible the old cartoon version of human evolution becomes — and the more absurd the Biblical fantasy of humanity springing fully formed from a single magically created couple just a few thousand years ago appears by comparison.

This work also resonates with the recent findings from Atapuerca in Spain, where Homo antecessor has been interpreted as representing a basal population from around a million years ago, potentially close to the ancestry of later human lineages. Far from showing a simple, straight-line march toward modern humans, the fossil evidence increasingly suggests a deep and branching history, with different populations spreading, diverging, mixing, and adapting across Eurasia over hundreds of thousands of years.

The study also re-examines the evidence for the arrival of Homo sapiens in China, suggesting that our species may have been present there as early as 100,000 years ago, rather than only around 50,000 years ago as often assumed. If that interpretation is correct, then modern humans were dispersing across Asia earlier, and in a much more complex pattern, than traditional models allowed. That would mean repeated movements of populations, interaction with other human groups, and probably episodes of interbreeding — all of it part of a dynamic evolutionary process that creationists are forced either to ignore or grotesquely misrepresent.

Taken together, the evidence points to East Asia as an important arena in human evolution, occupied by adaptable and innovative hominin populations capable of surviving in a wide range of environments. This increasing adaptability, associated with larger brains and behavioural flexibility, helped lay the foundations for the eventual spread of Homo sapiens across the globe. Once again, the real story of human origins turns out to be not the childish simplicity of myth, but the far more fascinating complexity of evolution.

Refuting Creationism - Rapid Evolution After The Dinosaur Extinction - 66 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

An artist’s interpretation of life and death after the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. The three hair-covered forms (left) represent species of plankton found inside the crater made by the impact. The geometric form (bottom left) is a species of algae. The bones belong to an extinct marine reptile.

The University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences/John Maisano.

Evidence of ‘Lightning-Fast’ Evolution Found After Dino-Killing Asteroid Impact | Jackson School of Geosciences | The University of Texas at Austin

That life on Earth eventually recovered after the Chicxulub impact—the asteroid strike that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs and much of the planet’s megafauna—is hardly surprising. If it had not, mammals and birds would not be the dominant land vertebrates today. What may be more surprising is how quickly that recovery appears to have begun, according to new research led by Assistant Professor Chris Lowery of the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) at the Jackson School of Geosciences.

Their findings have just been published in the journal Geology.

For creationists, the study presents yet another awkward problem. Not only did these events occur 66 million years ago — tens of millions of years before primates evolved, let alone the humans that some creationists insist lived alongside dinosaurs — but the results also show evolution proceeding exactly as evolutionary theory predicts.

Refuting Creationism - The Evolution of Our Ancestral Fish

Illustration of the Paleolophus swimming in ancient Asian seas.

Credit: Dr Brian Choo (Flinders University)

New pieces link fish puzzle – News

Today we have not one but two papers which together help fill a gap between the bony fishes and the first fish to venture onto land and evolve into the terrestrial tetrapods from which all land vertebrates subsequently evolved. It is a gap that presents creationists with a dilemma: it would have been a perfect god-shaped gap into which to insert their designer; however, it dates to some 410 million years ago, far too distant for their preferred timeline of 6,000–10,000 years, into which they need to try to compress the entire history of the universe.

One of these papers, just published in Canadian Journal of Zoology, is by a team from Flinders University, led by Dr Alice Clement, who have reassessed a mysterious fossil from the Late Devonian Gogo Formation in Western Australia using the latest technology, including CT scanning and computed tomography.

This work adds to our understanding of lungfish evolution from a key Australian fossil site that contains a diversity of lungfish fossils, including some poorly preserved specimens.

Meanwhile, Flinders University researcher Dr Brian Choo and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led by the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, have described a new fossil, Paleolophus yunnanensis (‘old crest from Yunnan’). This team's work has just been published in Current Biology.

Paleolophus helps fill the gap between ancestral lungfish and their diversification a few million years later; in other words, it is one more example of the sort of transitional form that creationists insist does not exist: yet another so-called 'missing link'.

Malevolent Design - Why Autism Refutes Intelligent Design - Or Is the Designer Incompetent?

Evolution's well-tinkered machine.

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Autism Research Breakthrough Discovered by Hebrew University Researchers | en.new.huji

Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have uncovered a mechanism that leads to autism. If this is the product of intelligent design then the designer is either incompetent or malevolent, but as so often with diseases that arise when systems go wrong, it is exactly what we expect of an evolved process. Their paper has just been published open access in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

For proponents of Intelligent Design such as Michael Behe and William Dembski, biological systems are supposed to bear the hallmarks of careful engineering — intricate machines whose parts work together with purpose and precision. But the mechanism uncovered in this study looks nothing like the output of a competent engineer. Instead, it reveals a fragile regulatory network in which a single biochemical modification destabilises a key control protein and sends an entire signalling pathway out of balance. The result is a cascade of downstream effects that ultimately alters brain development and behaviour.

What the researchers have uncovered is not a piece of irreducibly complex machinery but a regulatory system that can be knocked off course by a small perturbation. Nitric-oxide signalling modifies the protein TSC2, leading to its degradation and the subsequent overactivation of the mTOR pathway — a pathway that controls cellular growth and protein synthesis throughout the body. In other words, the pathology arises because a normal biological control system fails to maintain the delicate balance on which it depends.

This is precisely the sort of vulnerability we expect from systems produced by evolution. Evolution does not design organisms from scratch with perfect foresight; it works with what already exists, modifying and repurposing pathways that originally evolved for other purposes. The result is a network of interacting components that usually works well enough to keep organisms alive and reproducing, but which inevitably contains points where the system can fail. When those failures occur, the consequences can be severe.

Far from supporting Intelligent Design, discoveries like this highlight the jury-rigged nature of biological systems. They show that life’s complexity arises not from optimal engineering but from the gradual accumulation of workable solutions over evolutionary time — solutions that function most of the time, yet remain vulnerable to the occasional catastrophic malfunction.

Refuting Creationism - Evidence For Earliest Large Land Predators - 280 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

New study finds earliest evidence of big land predators hunting plant-eaters | EurekAlert

Contradicting creationist claims that death entered the world when Eve's sin somehow transformed a previously perfect world into a fallen one—with the creator god apparently powerless to prevent some other magical entity interfering in its creation—we now have evidence of predation; that is, the killing and eating of one living organism by another. Needless to say, like 99.975% of the history of life on Earth, this all occurred 280 million years ago, during that long pre-“Creation Week” period before the creationist god supposedly decided to create his small flat planet with a dome over it and call it perfect.

The nonsensical idea that there were no deaths before “The Fall” has always defied logic because all living things require a supply of energy in the form of food. Even if that food is plants, plants must die in the process. But then the Bible’s mythologies were written by people who confused “living” with “breathing”, so assumed plants were not living. Presumably, Bible literalists today believe the same biologically nonsensical idea.

The evidence for the earliest large land predators comes from three palaeontologists led by Professor Robert R. Reisz of the Department of Biology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, who have just published their findings, open access, in the journal Scientific Reports. The group studied tooth marks on the fossilised skeletons of three young herbivores from the Permian of Texas. Two hundred and eighty million years ago was relatively soon after the first terrestrial tetrapods had crawled out of the sea and evolved into amphibians and the earliest proto-reptiles. The evolution of predation would have been a major driver of evolution due to the resulting arms races in which predators became more efficient hunters and prey became better at avoiding being eaten—a process that hardly fits the description “intelligent design”.

Refuting Creationism - Earth - Fine Tuned For Catastrophe

Impact-formed glass evidence of cosmic collision in Brazil about 6 million years ago

Geologists led by Professor Álvaro Penteado Crósta of the Institute of Geosciences at the State University of Campinas, Brazil (IG-UNICAMP), in collaboration with researchers from Brazil, Europe, the Middle East and Australia, have discovered evidence of an impact by a large extraterrestrial body at least 6.3 million years ago.

They have recently published their findings in the journal Geology. This impact joins the long list of such collisions in Earth’s history — not merely the one that marked the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) mass extinction that eliminated the non-avian dinosaurs.

Creationists like to imagine they live in some sort of wonderland, specially created with them in mind — perfectly designed for human existence. Of course, this ignores the fact that much of the Earth is uninhabitable and even actively hostile to human life without specialised equipment. They often refer to Earth as existing in a ‘Goldilocks zone’ where everything is “just right”, forgetting that life could only have evolved on a planet where conditions permitted it. Our existence does not demonstrate improbability; it simply confirms that the necessary conditions were present.

Away from the tropics, ordinary human life is only possible with clothing, heating and buildings — or at least some form of shelter and a means of making fire. None of us would survive for more than a few hours naked outdoors in mid-winter at northern or southern latitudes.

Much of the planet is covered by deep oceans, and large areas of land consist of high plateaus or arid deserts where human life would again be impossible without specialised technology.

It also ignores the fact that, throughout its history, Earth has endured catastrophe after catastrophe. Mass extinctions have often been triggered by plate tectonics, which alter ocean currents and weather patterns, or by volcanic activity that disrupts the balance between CO₂ production and its removal by plants. Earth exists within a cosmos capable of bombarding it with the debris left over from planetary formation — from microscopic dust grains to vast bodies of rock that release enough energy on impact to devastate regions hundreds of kilometres across. Such collisions can inject enormous quantities of dust and aerosols into the stratosphere, blocking sunlight for years and plunging the planet into prolonged global cooling, with devastating ecological consequences.

Refuting Creationism - Cleaner Wrasse Have Mammal-Like Cognitive Abilities

Cleaner wrasse, Labroides dimidiatus

By Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Cleaner wrasse with giant moray eel client

By Silke Baron - originally posted to Flickr as Giant Moray Eel getting cleaned,
CC BY 2.0, Link

Cleaner fish show intelligence typical of mammals | Osaka Metropolitan University

A central dogma of creationism—indeed one reason why it persists and is clung to in the face of contrary evidence, massaging the egos of creationists—is the claim that humans were uniquely created, separate from and superior to other animals. Until the middle of the 20th century, humans were believed to possess unique abilities to make and use tools, to learn and design, and above all to be self-aware—qualities that religious people believed placed us next to God in possessing these abilities because we had been created in its image.

Since then, one formerly unique human ability after another has been shown to be possessed by other animals, mainly, but not exclusively, mammals and birds. Many species are now known to use tools and some are even known to make them. And many have been shown to be self-aware, using the 'mirror test' in which an animal can identify the image in the mirror as itself—see the information in the side panel for many examples of other animals with these formerly 'unique' human abilities.

Now a team of researchers, led by Dr. Shumpei Sogawa and Professor Masanori Kohda of Osaka Metropolitan University, Osaka, Japan, have shown that a fish, the cleaner wrasse, shows evidence of self-awareness according to the mirror test. These small fish specialise in removing parasites from the bodies of larger fish, even entering the mouths of predators to remove food particles and parasites from between the teeth and on the gills of their 'clients'. The Osaka-led team recently published their findings, open access, in the journal Scientific Reports.

Refuting Creationism - Creationists Rebutted By Old Irish Goats From Before The Legendary Genocidal Flood

Old Irish Goat carries 3,000 years of Irish history - University College Dublin

If the biblical flood really wiped the slate of life almost clean a few thousand years ago, we should expect to see unmistakable genetic signatures of that event across modern species. Instead, what scientists repeatedly find is exactly the opposite: long, continuous lineages stretching back thousands of years before the supposed catastrophe.

A good example comes from Ireland, where geneticists at University College Dublin, in collaboration with colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast and international partners, have shown that the ‘Old Irish Goat’, an Gabhar Fiáin – the wild goat – is a descendant of goats living in Bronze Age Ireland some 3,000 years ago, and thus ultimately of an older population introduced by Neolithic agriculturalists about 5,900 years ago. Their paper is published open access in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

According to Bible literalists, there was a general reset of Earth’s biology a few thousand years ago when their god supposedly decided to destroy everything in a fit of pique because its creation had gone wrong and, rather than undertaking an entirely new creation, chose instead to start again with a few survivors, hoping the outcome would be different this time. However, time and again we find evidence not of a general reset but of uninterrupted continuity of cultures and ancient species, such as the Old Irish Goat, which existed both before and after the supposed reset.

The problem for creationists is that, although they claim there was a period of miraculous hyper-evolution in which a handful of ‘kinds’ that survived the genocide radiated into all the modern species—an event which appears to have gone unnoticed and unreported by the people who supposedly lived while it was happening, and a belief for which there is no Biblical basis—the Old Irish Goat shares its common ancestry with other goats long before the alleged flood, not within the last few thousand years. Within the creationist paradigm, therefore, it must trace its ancestry to just two survivors. However, although there is evidence of a genetic bottleneck, this is very recent and is due to population collapse brought about by human activity; there is no evidence of the narrow bottleneck of just two individuals about 4,000 years ago.

Refuting Creationism - Global Spread of Giant Predatory 'Sea Salamanders' - 250 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Erythrobatrachus noonkanbahensis (foreground) and Aphaneramma (middle ground)

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250 million-year-old amphibian fossils from Australia reveal global spread of ‘sea-salamanders’

Since the beginning of 2026, with only a few days spent on other projects, I’ve been able to write one or two articles every day about yet another paper that comprehensively refutes basic creationist dogma and illustrates the strength of the Theory of Evolution as the grand unifying theory of biology, without which little of it would make sense. Over the same period, there has not been the faintest hint of a paper providing peer-reviewed support for ID creationism, or even suggesting that the Theory of Evolution is in crisis and in need of replacement because it cannot explain the facts.

Today is no exception, with the second such paper. The first showed how people were using signs and patterns to communicate ideas 30,000 years before creationists think Earth was created; this one discusses the fossil record from 250 million years ago and what it tells us about the evolution of early marine tetrapods — animals that had returned to the marine environment from which their ancestors had originally emerged and had become apex predators. In this case, the focus is on an amphibian that had converged on a body shape resembling a crocodile.

It also shows how an environmental catastrophe — itself utterly inconsistent with creationist notions of a created perfection ideally suited for life — created opportunities that could be exploited by the evolutionary process, allowing surviving lineages to radiate into new species, exactly as evolutionary theory predicts. Again, this stands in stark contrast to the childish notion of special creation without ancestors by some unexplained magical process.

The paper, by an international team led by Dr Lachlan Hart of the University of New South Wales, has just been published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. It explains how fossils of a marine amphibian, Erythrobatrachus noonkanbahensis, found in the Blina Shale and originally described in 1972 from material recovered in the 1960s, turn out on re-examination to represent two different species, one of which rapidly achieved a near-global distribution, probably by coastal dispersal around the supercontinent Gondwana.

These species appear to have flourished soon after the ‘Great Dying’, the end-Permian mass extinction event that saw the disappearance of 90–96% of all species (around 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species).

Dr Hart has explained his team’s research and its significance in a University of New South Wales news item. He has also written an article in The Conversation, reproduced below under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. First, background information on the end Permian mass extinction or 'Great Dying':

Abiogenesis News - Origin Of Complex (Eukaryote) Cells - Association With Mitochondria.

Beginnings of symbiosis

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A Break in a Longstanding Mystery about Origin of Complex Life | College of Natural Sciences

Here are a couple of papers published today that deal with related aspects of the origins of complex (eukaryotic) cells — all living organisms apart from Bacteria, Archaea and viruses (the prokaryotes). There is little doubt in biology that eukaryotes evolved from symbiotic associations between prokaryotes, despite the regular creationist straw man claim that scientists are naïve enough — or somehow brainwashed by evil “Darwinists” — to believe that the first complex cell arose spontaneously in a single step so fantastically improbable that magical creation becomes an almost plausible alternative.

In reality, as these two papers demonstrate, the precise details of how these symbiotic associations arose remain matters of active research and debate. I will deal with the second paper in a separate blog post. This post concerns the paper by scientists from The University of Texas at Austin, published in *Nature*, which addresses the question of how the oxygen-dependent bacterium that became the mitochondrion came together with a presumed anaerobic (oxygen-intolerant) archaeon, given that the two would not be expected to occupy the same environment.

The team propose that this apparent problem may be resolved by evidence that some archaea of the Asgard group — which today live primarily in the deep sea and other oxygen-free environments — can use, or at least tolerate, oxygen.

The Asgard archaea most closely related to eukaryotic cells are found in shallow coastal sediments or floating in the marine column. Crucially, they possess metabolic pathways that use oxygen. It is therefore possible that their ancestors did as well, meaning they could have cohabited with the bacterial ancestors of mitochondria.

Creationism Refuted - Genetic Diseases 2,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

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Daniel Fernandes preparing to take a sample.

© Adrian Daly

Ancient DNA reveals 12,000-year-old case of rare genetic disease

The standard creationist response to evidence that the human genome is not the perfectly designed blueprint we should expect from a flawless designer is to claim that ‘sin’ somehow caused it to become degraded. Discovery Institute fellow Michael J. Behe even introduced the biologically nonsensical notion of ‘genetic entropy’, which supposedly allows deleterious genes to spread throughout a species’ gene pool by some unexplained process — an idea that only those unfamiliar with how natural selection works could find convincing.

It is, of course, impossible for a genuinely deleterious gene to increase in frequency within a population unless it is linked to an advantageous trait whose benefits far outweigh its harmful effects. And if the genome were originally perfect, as Behe assumes, how could any advantageous mutation arise in the first place?

Behe, unwittingly or otherwise, appears to have abandoned any pretence that Intelligent Design is science rather than fundamentalist Christianity in a lab coat. By invoking an initial perfect creation followed by corruption through ‘sin’, he has simply retreated into theology — especially after his ‘irreducible complexity’ argument collapsed so spectacularly during the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial.

Even that feeble argument, however, has now fallen foul of evidence showing that deleterious variants and genetic disorders existed in the human genome long before the creationist narrative claims that ‘perfect’ humans were created somewhere in Mesopotamia just 6,000–10,000 years ago. A paper recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine by a team of researchers led by the University of Vienna and Liège University Hospital Centre reports the identification of genetic variants associated with a rare disorder in two prehistoric individuals who lived more than 12,000 years ago.

The individuals were discovered in 1963 at Grotta del Romito in southern Italy, buried in an embracing position. There was no sign of trauma. ‘Romito 1’, an adult female, was embracing ‘Romito 2’, an adolescent initially assumed to be male, whose reduced limb length suggested a height of about 110 cm (3 feet 7 inches). Palaeogenomic analysis, using DNA extracted from the petrous part of the temporal bone, has now shown that the adolescent was also female and was homozygous for a variant in the NPR2 gene, which is essential for normal bone growth. The two individuals were first-degree relatives, probably mother and daughter. The adult, Romito 1, was heterozygous for the same variant.

What this study makes clear is that genetic variants capable of causing disease were already present in the human genome thousands of years before the Bronze Age authors of Biblical origin myths imagined a special creation of ‘perfect’ humans without ancestry. These variants did not require some magical ingredient called ‘sin’ to arise — only the ordinary reality of imperfect replication and inheritance.

Refuting Creationism - Life In A New Zealand Cave - 1 million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Prehistoric New Zealand Cave

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AI generated image of the NZ cave

P Scofield, Canterbury Museum.

1m-year-old 'lost world' discovered – News

About a million years before creationism’s putative designer supposedly fashioned a small flat world beneath a solid dome — the imagined cosmos of Bronze Age pastoralists in the Middle East who authored the Bible’s creation myths — ancient frogs and birds, the ancestors of today’s New Zealand species, lived and died and became fossilised deep in a cave near Waitomo on Aotearoa’s North Island.

Of course, confined as they were to within a few days’ walk of the Canaanite hills, the authors of those myths could have had no inkling of people and places in far-flung regions of a spherical planet. Their tales were based entirely on what they imagined to be the whole universe, and contain nothing that existed beyond their narrow horizons.

How these New Zealand fossils were unearthed, and what they can tell us about Aotearoa’s deep past, is the subject of a paper just published in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology, by a research group led by Associate Professor Trevor Worthy of the College of Science and Engineering at Flinders University.

It is, of course, a story vastly different from Biblical mythology — the evidence for which stubbornly refuses to manifest itself, and instead consistently refutes it, revealing it to be the product of parochial ignorance and an attempt to force-fit what little was known into prevailing cultural assumptions: what Christopher Hitchens aptly called “the fearful infancy of our species”.

The findings show that around 33–50% of species went extinct about one million years before humans first arrived on Aotearoa (New Zealand). The cause appears to have been a combination of rapid climate change and catastrophic volcanic activity. The discovery helps fill a fifteen-million-year gap in our knowledge of Aotearoa’s history.

Excavations at St Bathans in Central Otago have allowed palaeontologists and geologists to reconstruct the period between 20 and 16 million years ago, but until now there has been very little information about the long stretch between then and one million years ago.

Among the discoveries was a new species of parrot, Strigops insulaborealis, an ancient relative of the flightless kākāpō, but one that could probably fly; an extinct ancestor of the modern takahē; and an extinct species of pigeon closely related to Australian bronzewing pigeons.

To forestall the traditional creationist attempt to discredit both the discovery and the scientists who made it — by claiming the dating methods are flawed or even fraudulent — the fossils can be dated accurately because they lie between two layers of volcanic ash: one deposited around 1.55 million years ago, and another about one million years ago. Volcanic ash can be dated with a high degree of confidence using Uranium–Lead (U–Pb) dating of zircon crystals.

Refuting Creationistm - An Evolutionary Trap That No Intelligent Designer Would Blunder Into

Sceptobius beetles in an ant colony

The evolutionary trap that keeps rove beetles alive

A new study reported in Cell describes an extraordinary example of evolutionary adaptation unfolding right under our noses — and it will make uncomfortable reading for anyone still clinging to the creationist fantasy that living systems were neatly “designed” in their present form a few thousand years ago.

Researchers from the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, CA. USA, investigating the symbiotic relationship between certain rove beetles and their ant hosts have shown how these beetles have evolved the ability to infiltrate ant colonies by chemically disguising themselves as ants. Far from being “created” to live harmoniously together, this is an evolutionary arms-race in miniature: ants have evolved sophisticated chemical recognition systems to detect intruders, while the beetles have evolved equally sophisticated counter-measures to bypass those defences.

And the details are exactly the sort of thing intelligent design advocates never seem to anticipate. The beetles do not simply possess some magical, pre-installed “ant colony access” trait. Instead, evolution has shaped them into something far stranger and far less tidy: they suppress their own scent production and acquire the colony’s chemical signature directly from the ants themselves. In effect, they become living imposters — accepted not because the ants were “meant” to host them, but because natural selection has honed the beetles’ ability to exploit a biological loophole.

Refuting Creationism - A Gap-Filling Miniature Dinosaur from 120 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Paleo art reconstruction of Foskeia pelendonum.

Credit: Martina Charnell

Tiny new dinosaur Foskeia pelendonum reshapes the dinosaur f | Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), working with colleagues in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, have just described a remarkable new species of dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous of northern Spain. Their findings are the subject of a read-only paper in Papers in Palaeontology.

The tiny herbivore, named Foskeia pelendonum, lived around 125 million years ago, yet it is already forcing palaeontologists to rethink part of the ornithopod family tree. The discovery provides another striking example of how the fossil record continues to grow in detail, resolution, and explanatory power.

This will come as an unwelcome development for creationists, who still cling to the claim that evolution is “just speculation” and that the fossil record contains no meaningful evidence of transitional relationships or evolutionary diversification. On the contrary, finds like Foskeia show exactly what evolutionary science predicts: new lineages appearing in the right strata, in the right environments, with a mixture of ancestral and derived traits that help clarify how later forms evolved.

Creationists will, of course, respond in the usual way. Some will insist that this dinosaur is “just another dinosaur”, as though classification and evolutionary relationships are irrelevant. Others will retreat to the vacuous assertion that it represents merely “variation within a kind”, without ever defining what a “kind” is or explaining why such variation produces a nested hierarchy that maps so precisely onto geological time. And as always, the more committed will simply dismiss the evidence altogether, because no amount of fossil discovery can compete with a belief system that must remain true regardless of what the rocks contain.

Yet the significance of Foskeia pelendonum lies precisely in the details. This was not simply a juvenile form of a larger dinosaur, but a genuinely small-bodied species, confirmed by bone histology to have reached adulthood. Even more intriguingly, it possessed unexpectedly specialised skull and dental features, showing that evolutionary change does not always follow the simplistic “bigger and more advanced” caricature imagined by creationists, but often proceeds through ecological experimentation, miniaturisation, and adaptation to local conditions.

Far from undermining evolutionary theory, discoveries like this strengthen it. They refine the dinosaur family tree, help fill long-recognised gaps in the ornithopod record, and demonstrate once again that the history of life is written not in Bronze Age mythology but in the sedimentary archive of deep time — an archive that continues to contradict creationism with every new fossil unearthed.

Unintelligent Design - The Prolific Waste Of Baby Dinosaurs as Food - 150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Ecosystem reconstruction of the Late Jurassic Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry around 150 million years ago in Colorado, the United States

Credit: Sergey Krasovskiy and Pedro Salas

Life in Late Jurassic Colorado.

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Baby dinosaurs a common prey for Late Jurassic predators | UCL News - UCL – University College London.

The prolific-waste reproductive strategy of Late Jurassic dinosaurs has been highlighted in a paper published in a New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin by a team of palaeontologists led by Dr Cassius Morrison of University College London’s Department of Earth Sciences.

The team constructed a detailed food web using fossil data laid down around 150 million years ago in the Morrison Formation of the United States. The Morrison Formation is a prominent sequence of Upper Jurassic sedimentary rocks (approximately 156–147 million years old) spanning around 1.5 million square kilometres across the western United States. It is North America’s most prolific source of dinosaur fossils, preserving vast deposits of mudstone, sandstone, and limestone formed in ancient river systems and floodplains.

Their analysis revealed that a major food source for carnivorous dinosaurs consisted of the young of the largest herbivores. These animals followed a reproductive strategy in which large numbers of offspring were produced and then effectively abandoned after hatching. Such juveniles would have been abundant, vulnerable, and easy prey for predators. This strategy is a familiar one in biology and only makes sense as the outcome of evolutionary processes. As an intelligently designed reproductive strategy, however, it is difficult to make sense of at all.

This is yet another example of the prolific waste that characterises living systems and betrays the absence of intelligent foresight in their design. Prolific waste and unnecessary complexity are hallmarks of evolution, whereas minimal waste and minimal complexity are the defining features of genuinely intelligent design — a distinction I explore in detail in my book The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax.

Creationism Refuted - Termite Evolution By Loss Of Genetic Information and Complexity

Physogastric termite queen (top left) of Macrotermes michaelseni being groomed by workers and the larger king, with soldiers in the foreground.

Photo by Jan Sobotnik

The giant northern termite Mastotermes darwiniensis showing the close relationship between termites and other cockroaches.

Public Domain, Link

Scientists solve the mystery of why termite kings and queens are monogamous - The University of Sydney

Researchers from the University of Sydney have just published a paper on termite evolution in Science which will make depressing reading for any creationists brave enough to attempt it. The study comprehensively refutes several articles of creationist faith.

A common creationist assertion is that loss of genetic information is invariably fatal, so mutations cannot be selected for during evolution. They also insist that evolution, as defined by science, is necessarily a process of increasing complexity, which they then claim would violate the laws of thermodynamics by reducing entropy.

The absurdity of this counter-factual claim is easy to see. Variation between individuals is due to genetic differences, and that variation is only possible if mutations generate novelty. Creationists also conveniently ignore the fact that entropy can decrease locally in open systems. Earth is very much an open system, with a continuous influx of energy from the Sun, so nothing in thermodynamics precludes local increases in order or complexity.

Moreover, the claim is demonstrably false. Many endoparasites, such as parasitic worms, have lost substantial amounts of genetic information as they evolved to rely on their hosts for key functions. Several intestinal worms, for example, have no digestive tract at all, because they absorb nutrients directly from their host’s gut. Evolution does not require an increase or a decrease in complexity as such; it requires only a change in the frequency of alleles in a population over time.

The University of Sydney researchers have now identified another striking example of evolution by gene loss — this time in termites. Their results show a massive loss of genes as termites evolved extreme monogamy and sociality. Paradoxically, a reduction in genetic complexity at the individual level was accompanied by an increase in social complexity at the colony level.

Some of the lost genes are those responsible for producing sperm tails, meaning that termite sperm can no longer swim. This is likely a consequence of strict monogamy within the colony, which removes sperm competition altogether. In species where females mate with multiple males, there is strong selection pressure for highly motile sperm, because the fastest are more likely to fertilise the eggs. In termites, that pressure simply does not exist.

To reach these conclusions, the team — led by Professor Nathan Lo — compared the genomes of ‘domestic’ cockroaches (which share a common ancestor with termites), closely related wood roaches that live in small family groups, and multiple termite species exhibiting different levels of social complexity.

Refuting Creationism - Blood Tests On Ancient Fossils - And What They Can Tell Us

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Life in fossil bones: what we can learn from tiny traces of ancient blood chemicals

A paper recently published in Nature details the application of a new field known as palaeometabolomics to reconstruct ancient African environments and track how they changed over time.

Modern medicine can learn a great deal about our health and lifestyle from a blood test, because blood contains traces of metabolites derived from the food we eat, as well as indicators of liver and kidney function and how effectively metabolic waste is disposed of.

But what if we could perform blood tests on archaic animals and human ancestors? Over time, this could tell us not only what they ate, but how their diets changed, which in turn reveals changes in rainfall, temperature, vegetation cover — forest versus savannah — and the species that were hunted and consumed.

Unintelligent Design - One Design Blunder Led To Another And Ended Up Causing Cancer - Or Was It Deliberate?

A broken DNA repair tool accelerates aging | News from Goethe University Frankfurt

Researchers from Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, have shown how a faulty DNA repair mechanism triggers inflammation and leads to accelerated ageing, developmental abnormalities, and cancer.

Their findings are published in Science.

As I explained in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Exposing the Intelligent Design Hoax, one of the hallmarks of an evolved system — and one which creationists have been conditioned to mistake for evidence of intelligent design — is complexity. In reality, the opposite is true: intelligently designed objects and processes are typically *minimally

complex, doing exactly what is required and no more.

One reason complexity arises in evolved systems is the need for additional layers of processes to compensate for the suboptimal designs that evolution inevitably produces. An intelligently designed process — especially one devised by a designer endowed with foresight — would require no such compensatory mechanisms. It would function reliably every time and be robust enough to withstand environmental stressors and other causes of malfunction. Nor would a perfectly designed copying process be prone to copying errors.

What we observe in reality, however, is an excessively complex system that still malfunctions — and when it does, it can do so unpredictably and catastrophically, leading to increased suffering and even death. The equivalent, in engineering terms, would be an aircraft manufacturer producing planes that were mostly safe most of the time, yet costly to build because they relied on intricate back-up systems to compensate for other components prone to failure — and which nevertheless suffered unpredictable mid-flight failures when those back-ups failed, causing aircraft to fall from the sky. Such an incompetent aircraft manufacturer would not remain in business for long.

In contrast to evolved systems which are overly complex and still prone to errors, an intelligently designed organism would be minimally complex, maximally efficient, robust enough to withstand environmental stressors and work perfectly every time. As so often, what ID predicts is not what we actually observe. In normal science, the falsification of a hypothesis is regarded as confirmation that the hypothesis was wrong, but in creationism the reverse holds; if the facts fail to confirm the hypothesis the facts must be wrong. The hypothesis must be clung to with grim determination, come what may.

Creationism Refuted - Only Scientifically Illiterate People Could Have Got the Bible So Badly Wrong

UHZ1, a record breaking galaxy 13.2 billion light-years away, seen when the universe was only 3% of its current age. UHZ1 is puzzling in view of it harboring a supermassive black hole that could not have possibly been seeded even by regular stars, in view of its mass and very little time for the BH to grow. As such, UHZ1 is believed to be evidence for supermassive stars that, upon collapse, generate the supermassive black hole powering the quasar at its center. In this study, the authors show how UHZ1 could harbor a supermassive black hole seeded by the collapse of a dark star. The mechanisms identified by the authors are not restricted to UHZ1 — it provides a pathway for explaining over massive black hole galaxies, of which UHZ1 is a prominent example.

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Ákos Bogdán; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI;
Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & K. Arcand

Dark stars could help solve three pressing puzzles of the high-redshift universe | EurekAlert!

A recent study by scientists from Colgate University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Texas at Austin, led by Assistant Professor Cosmin Ilie, has provided answers to three long-standing puzzles concerning the earliest stages in the formation of the Universe. The picture now emerging stands in stark contrast to the account of cosmic origins found in the Bible.

Quite apart from the hopelessly inaccurate Biblical description of the Universe as consisting of a small, flat Earth capped by a solid dome to which the Sun, Moon, and stars were attached, we are also presented with an equally implausible account of how the Universe supposedly came into being. Far from reflecting divine insight, the narrative reads as the best guess of Bronze Age storytellers attempting to make sense of the world from a position of near-total ignorance of physics and chemistry.

The sequence begins with the creation of light, which at least has the merit of vaguely echoing the fact that, from the earliest moments after the Big Bang, the Universe was dominated by electromagnetic radiation. But matters rapidly unravel. The Biblical account then invokes the separation of land and water—both of which would require atoms and molecules of specific elements. None of these elements could have existed at that time, as they were only forged much later inside stars formed from primordial clouds of hydrogen and helium. Elements such as oxygen, silicon, iron, and aluminium—essential constituents of water and rock—simply did not yet exist.

Even after heavy elements had been created, land could only arise through the formation of planetary systems from the accretion discs of second- or third-generation stars. Yet the Bible places land and water in existence immediately after the creation of light, with no explanation of their origin. The authors clearly assumed these features had always been present because they were part of the familiar world they inhabited. Unaware of atoms, molecules, or stellar nucleosynthesis, they simply imagined their creator working with pre-existing materials.

The result is a confused and self-contradictory narrative: a creator god who allegedly made everything, yet inexplicably relied on materials that must either have existed eternally or have been created earlier, with no account of how or when this occurred. Far from being profound, the story collapses into paradox and incoherence under even minimal scientific scrutiny.

By contrast with this naïve and internally inconsistent creation myth, modern cosmology—supported by sophisticated observational tools such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)—is steadily assembling a coherent, evidence-based account of how the Universe actually formed and evolved.

Refuting Creationism - How U-Pb Dating Proves Humans Not Glaciers Transported the Stonehenge Stones

Grains of sand prove people – not glaciers – transported Stonehenge rocks

Stonehenge in Wiltshire, southern England, is a mysterious place that speaks of a culture and political–religious authority of which we know almost nothing, probably motivated by belief in long-dead gods whose supposed presence was, at the time, undoubtedly considered to be “all around”. This is much as theists of all religions assert of their god or gods today. Who these people were, remains one of the great mysteries, as does how they moved such massive stones into place to build a stone circle with extraordinary precision, and how they transported them over long distances long before the domestication of the horse.

We know they were not the later Welsh-speaking Celts, who did not arrive in Britain until around 1,000 BCE — some two millennia after construction of Stonehenge began. Those Celts replaced the Beaker culture, which itself had replaced the Neolithic farming communities who first built the monument. Construction began around 3,000 BCE, initially as a bank-and-ditch enclosure with a circle of wooden posts. This was later replaced, around 2,500 BCE, by a circle of massive sarsen stones sourced locally from the nearby Salisbury Plain, with the smaller bluestones brought from the Preseli Hills in south-west Wales. The so-called “altar stone” was added last. Its precise origin remains unresolved, with conflicting evidence suggesting either north-west Scotland or west Wales as its source.

While the question of where most of the stones came from has largely been resolved, what remains is the long-standing puzzle of how they were transported using only human labour. The motivation was clearly strong enough to justify the immense effort and manpower involved, and the fact that it was human effort that moved them has now been established beyond reasonable doubt by the falsification of an alternative hypothesis — namely, that the stones were carried to Salisbury Plain by a passing glacier during the last Ice Age.

The refutation of this idea provides a neat example of how science tests and falsifies hypotheses, though it will no doubt unsettle creationists who cling to the absurd belief that the entire history of the Earth can be compressed into a timescale of just 6,000–10,000 years. The work was carried out by two researchers from Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, and relied on dating zircon crystals — a highly accurate method for determining the age of rock formations, as regular readers of this blog will know — along with apatite grains, which similarly exploit the radioactive decay of uranium isotopes into stable lead isotopes.