Refuting Creationism - A Tiny Fossil From New Zealand Is Another Huge Problem For Creationism

A male satin bowerbird by his highly decorated avenue bower.

Photo by Daniel J. Field

Tiny fossil bone helps unlock history of the bowerbird | University of Otago
Apart from the fact that this fossil is a million years old, there is nothing in this discovery that creationists will struggle to dismiss with one of their well-worn stock phrases — “It was just a bird ‘kind’,” “It wasn’t transitional,” and so on. This is despite the fact that their Bible is remarkably vague about how many bird ‘kinds’ there were, includes bats as birds, and says absolutely nothing about anything outside a few square miles of the Middle East.

And of course, the date — like the entire fossil record — will be casually brushed aside as forged, fabricated, or “wrongly dated using proven false carbon dating” [sic].

But to anyone who actually values evidence and truth, and is not intent on proving their strength by clinging to demonstrably false beliefs in defiance of all contrary evidence, this find is genuinely fascinating. It provides strong evidence that the bowerbirds, today confined to Australia and New Guinea, were once far more widespread. This conclusion is based on the fact that the fossil was discovered in New Zealand. It is also suggested that climate change may have brought about its extinction in New Zealand and driven the bowerbirds' range back to its present distribution.

The discovery is reported in the journal Historical Biology by researchers from University of Cambridge, University of Otago, and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. A [news release from the University of Otago]() explains the significance of the find and four of the authors have also written an article about the find in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

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

(a) Chamaecyparis obtusa in Japan

(b) C. obtusa var. formosana in Taiwan

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

Google Maps

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Science Works - And Why Religion Fails

Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia: Unipd develops new model to understand the origins of the Universe

Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team

Unlike religion, science does not claim to know exactly how the universe began. What we do know, however, is that at the moment when time (t) = 0, both time and space came into existence. This means that in the conventional sense of time, there was no ‘before’, because ‘before’ presupposes the existence of time. Questions about what existed before the Big Bang are therefore meaningless, even though our intuition insists that there must have been something.

Religion, by contrast, has claimed to know how the universe began ever since creation myths were first invented in the Bronze Age or earlier — and those claims have remained unchanged. The problem is that they substitute genuine explanations with “God did it!” — a statement that explains nothing, is untestable, unfalsifiable, and devoid of any predictive power. It provides comfort only to those who are content not to know the details and unconcerned with truth.

This highlights another crucial difference between science and religion as tools for understanding reality: science continuously updates its knowledge and understanding. It never settles on convenient certainties, no matter how emotionally satisfying they may be, nor does it declare the search for answers to be over.

For many years, the consensus in cosmology has been that the initial few microseconds of the Big Bang involved a period of hyperinflation — a rapid expansion driven by a massive increase in space. Now, however, a team of researchers from Spain and Italy has revived a model first proposed by Albert Einstein and the Dutch mathematician Willem de Sitter, known as De Sitter space. Using this framework, they argue that gravity alone can explain the first few microseconds of space-time. Their new theory has been published, open access, in Physical Review Research.

One key advantage of this explanation over the inflationary model is its relative simplicity. It also, unlike the 'inflation' model, doesn't need elements that have never been observed, but relies solely on gravity and quantum mechanics. Applying Occam's razor, the simpler explanation with fewer elements or 'entities', is more likely to be correct.

How Science Works - Revising Our Knowledge Of Plant Dispersal

Plants colonising volcanic tepha on Surtsey

Credit: Pawel Wasowicz (CC BY)

Plants colonising lava field on Surtsey island.

Credit: Pawel Wasowicz (CC BY)

New study overturns long-held assumptions about how plants spread to islands | EurekAlert!

Plants that successfully leave more offspring are those with traits that allow their seeds to spread widely. That usually involves two key factors: tolerance or adaptability to new environments, and an effective way of reaching them. Over time, evolution has produced a variety of dispersal strategies—seeds can float on the wind, stick to animals, or pass through birds and end up deposited somewhere new.

Crossing the sea, though, adds another layer of difficulty. Seeds must survive what amounts to a small ocean voyage. For a long time, scientists assumed birds were the main way plants made these crossings. The idea was straightforward: birds eat fruit, fly to new islands, and excrete the seeds.

But new evidence has challenged that view. A recent open-access paper in Ecology Letters examines how plants have colonised Surtsey, the volcanic island that emerged off Iceland in 1963. This unique setting has allowed researchers to watch ecological colonisation unfold in real time.

Their findings were unexpected: most of the 78 vascular plant species that established themselves on the island weren’t fruit-bearing plants spread by birds, but grasses. While birds like geese and gulls did contribute to dispersal, most of the colonising species lacked the traits typically linked with long-distance dispersal.

Creationism Refuted - How Science Works - A Fossil Fly That Challenged Evolution.

A 150-million-year-old fossil with a singular adaptation may unlock the origin of quironomids | Estación Biológica de Doñana - CSIC

In a striking example of how science, in contrast to creationism, starts from the evidence and builds understanding accordingly, a newly discovered fossil fly has led scientists to revise their view on a seemingly minor detail of insect evolution.

Creationism, by contrast, starts with the conclusion and either distorts the evidence or ignores it altogether when, as is usually the case, it contradicts what they believe. To a creationist, the belief is sacred, so facts must comply—or be disregarded.

In my last blog post, I explained how psychologists view this behaviour as a perceived test of strength: creationists see challenges to their beliefs as threats that would make them appear weak if they accepted and adapted to the evidence. They respond by setting their faces like flint against any contradiction.

Science, by contrast, sees a refusal to change one’s mind when the evidence demands it as a mark of intellectual dishonesty. A willingness to revise one’s views shows a desirable strength of character — the hallmark of a good scientist. To a scientist, facts are sacred; opinions must flow from them. In any scientific debate, facts are neutral.

The discovery in question involves a Jurassic fossil midge from Australia — Telmatomyia talbragarica, the oldest known member of the Chironomidae (non-biting midge) family in the Southern Hemisphere. The fossil shows a mechanism for attaching to rocks using suction pads on its feet. This trait was previously thought to have evolved in marine species, but this insect lived in freshwater. That detail suggests the family did not originate in Siberia, as once believed, but in Gondwana before it broke apart.

Not the most dramatic scientific breakthrough, perhaps, but this is precisely how science advances — especially evolutionary biology: one careful step at a time, with constant re-examination and revision as new evidence emerges. It’s like working on a million-piece jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the box.

Creationism Refuted - Inclusions In 112 Million-Year-Old Amber Show A Diverse Ancient Ecosystem

Diptera: Chironomidae

Scientists unearth a 112-million-year-old time capsule filled with ancient insects | ScienceDaily

A rich source of amber from the Genoveva quarry in the Napo Province of Ecuador is revealing information about life in a dense, tropical rainforest 112 million years ago, requiring the most convoluted of mental gymnastics for creationists to ignore or deny. This newly described deposit, part of the Hollín Formation in the Oriente Basin, represents the first Mesozoic amber deposit with preserved insects ever discovered in South America — and one of the largest known anywhere on the former Gondwanan supercontinent.

Unlike rock fossils, where finer detail is often lost through mineralisation and geological processes, amber frequently preserves plant and animal life with exquisite microscopic precision. This makes the Ecuadorian deposit, produced at a time when Gondwana was on the verge of splitting into Africa and South America, a rare and invaluable window into the humid, densely vegetated ecosystem of an equatorial rainforest during the Cretaceous Period.

Amber is the solidified resinous sap of trees — often conifers such as araucariaceans — and can originate from branches, trunks or even roots, preserving both aerial and subterranean organisms. Almost all known amber deposits come from the northern hemisphere, particularly from Eurasia and North America, so this southern hemisphere deposit provides an unprecedented opportunity to study an ancient Gondwanan ecosystem at a crucial time in Earth’s evolutionary history.

The contrast between this rich, 112-million-year-old ecosystem and the simplistic biblical creation myth is as stark as it could be. Even if we had no other fossils, the life forms trapped in this amber — representing at least five insect orders, spider silk, and an abundance of pollen and spores from ferns, cycads, conifers and early angiosperms — would comprehensively refute the notion of a young Earth created in its present form.

Another strength of amber as a fossil medium is that it is always contemporaneous with the bioinclusions it preserves — organisms became trapped while the resin was still liquid — removing the additional uncertainties sometimes introduced when dating fossils embedded in sedimentary matrices.

Refuting Creationism - The Vast Cosmos - That the Bible Says Is Centred On A Small Flat Planet With A dome Over It.

Yellow and blue, old and new | ESA/Hubble

Creationists have a choice - they can either be ignorant of what the Bible says, or remain ignorant of what science is discovering - or both. They can also arrogantly assume that their beliefs must be right so they trump any evidence science can produce.

But what they can't do is reconcile the reality as science reveals it with the description of it in the Bible. The difference is so wide that the Bible can't even be explained away as some sort of metaphor or allegory. It's no more a metaphor or an allegory than a child would produce if asked to look up at the sky then describe the universe. The Bible's description is no more a detailed description of the cosmos than the description of a glass of tap water by a six-year-old is a detailed description of the Pacific Ocean

As though to rub salt in creationists' wounds, although the scientist's regular refutation of creationism is merely incidental, the European Space Agency (ESA) in association with NASA and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) or the Hubble Space Telescope, keep on producing these images of the week. This week it's a stunning picture of the blue and yellow spiral galaxy, NGC 6000, 102 million light-years away in the Scorpius constellation.

Refuting Creationism - The James Webb Space Telescope Continues to Highlight The Ignorant Authorship Of The Bible.

Pismis 24 (NIRCam Image)

Glittering Glimpse of Star Birth From NASA’s Webb Telescope - NASA Science

Pismis 24 (NIRCam Image)

NASA/JWST

If a creator god had truly inspired the writing of the Bible, as creationists claim, and genuinely wanted us to believe in it and understand the supposedly vital message it contains for humankind, it could easily have included descriptions of things unknown to the people of the time — such as germ theory, atoms, electricity, photosynthesis, cells, and DNA — along with a more accurate description of the cosmos than the laughably naïve nonsense the authors recorded. Then, as science discovered these things, we would have become increasingly convinced of the Bible’s divine authorship.

Instead, we find nothing beyond the limited, parochial knowledge of its Bronze Age authors, who imagined the sky as a solid dome with water above it. Consequently, as science reveals more and more about the universe, we have no choice — if we wish to retain our intellectual integrity — but to conclude that the claim of divine authorship is false, and the Bible can therefore be disregarded as such. Any message or moral imperative it contains was written by people who believed women existed to serve men, that slavery, land theft and genocide were moral, and that the death penalty was a just punishment for trivial transgressions — such as gathering firewood on the Sabbath or failing to scream loudly enough while being raped.

Compare the Bible’s description of the universe with even a tiny glimpse of reality — for instance, this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), recently released by NASA. Inexplicably, there are still adults who cling to the belief that the Bible’s depiction remains the best available description of the universe, far surpassing, in their minds, the accuracy and reliability of anything science can produce.

Refuting Creationism - A Tiny Fish Ancestor of Catfish and Carp - From 70 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Photograph of Acronichthys maccagnoi fossil (with scale), which was discovered in Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park.

Royal Tyrrell Museum

View of Dry Island Buffalo Leap.

New tiny prehistoric fish species unlocks origins of catfish and carp

A newly discovered fossil fish from the Late Cretaceous has filled a key gap in the evolutionary record of two major freshwater groups – catfish and carp. The fossil was found by researchers from Western University, Ontario, Canada, the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, and international collaborators. Its discovery is bound to send creationists into another bout of denial as they struggle to cope with the cognitive dissonance between reality and their preferred mythology.

When every fossil is transitional, each new find becomes harder for creationists to ignore—unless they retreat to one of their childish parodies of evolution and pretend it means one species instantly transforming into another, as though a ‘species’ consists of a single individual rather than a population, and evolution is a sudden event rather than a gradual process over time. This caricature allows them to dismiss every transitional fossil as a ‘complete species’ with ‘no evidence of intermediates’. From there, they retreat to Bible literalism, invoking vague categories of ‘kinds’ and imagining evolution as one taxon spontaneously giving rise to another—cats turning into dogs, or amoebas becoming humans—something that, if it ever occurred, would indeed defy any scientific explanation.

Hence their constant demands that science provide evidence for their straw-man version of evolution, while they ignore the overwhelming evidence that actually supports evolutionary theory—arguments deliberately crafted to mislead those ignorant of basic biology and to give them spurious reasons to feel smugly superior to ‘elitist scientists’ with their ‘big words’, as though ignorance were a shortcut to expertise.

So they cling to their childish mythology despite the growing number of fossils showing clear mosaic features linking different taxa—exactly what we would expect from ancestral stem species from which two groups diverged. This newly discovered fossil fish from the Late Cretaceous, displaying a mosaic of catfish and carp characteristics, exemplifies that pattern and sheds light on the evolutionary origins of these two major groups of freshwater fish.

Refuting Creationism - Clues to Abiogenesis In Japan's Hot Springs

A panoramic picture of one of five hot springs during winter, showing the source water and CO₂ bubbles.

Credit: Fatima Li-Hau, ELSI

Hot springs in Japan give insight into ancient microbial life on Earth – ELSI｜EARTH-LIFE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

It’s been a dreadful week for creationists as yet another published paper undermines one of their favourite claims and further reduces the god-shaped gap on which they increasingly depend — the so-called abiogenesis gap. This argument rests on the delusional assumption that if science has not yet fully explained something, then it never will — and therefore creationism wins by default. The history of science, of course, shows the opposite: today’s mysteries are tomorrow’s discoveries.

This time, the blow comes from a publication in the journal Microbes and Environments, which describes how five hot springs in Japan provide natural analogues of the conditions in which the first living organisms could have evolved. These springs are rich in diverse chemical and thermal gradients, making them excellent testbeds for exploring how life can thrive in extreme conditions and use non-traditional energy sources.

The study was conducted by a team led by Fatima Li-Hau, then a graduate student at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI), Tokyo Institute of Science, with Associate Professor Shawn McGlynn as her supervisor. Their work focused on the microbial communities found in these hot springs, which range from moderately warm to boiling.

Refuting Creationism - Scarey Days For Creationists As More Signs of Life on Other Bodies Are Found

Artist's impression of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. With a frozen surface covering a deep ocean, Enceladus is a fascinating target to search for signs of habitability elsewhere in our Solar System.

Graphic composition: ESA; Surface: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Lunar and Planetary Institute
(CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

An artist's depiction of water erupting from the "tiger stripe" fractures in the surface of Enceladus's south pole

© ESA.

ESA - Cassini proves complex chemistry in Enceladus ocean

In a soccer manager’s jargon, this is squeaky bum time for creationists who cling to the notion that science will never demonstrate that abiogenesis is even possible, let alone explain how it happened.

Squeaky bum time for a football manager is when the team’s league position — and with it qualification for European tournaments, and often the manager’s job — hangs on a single unpredictable result.

So it is with creationism. One single piece of definitive evidence that life has arisen independently on another world in the Solar System, or on an exoplanet orbiting a distant sun, would comprehensively consign creationism to the dustbin of history where it has been struggling to avoid ending up since 1859. Such a discovery would refute the claim that ‘life from non-life’ is impossible. Instead, it would show that under the right conditions, life is simply a natural product of chemistry and physics.

And the signs are as dire for creationism as for the embattled football team that finds itself 2–0 down in stoppage time. Scientists at the European Space Agency have just announced the detection of possible signs of life in the ocean beneath the icy crust of one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus, as revealed by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. This follows close on the heels of strong evidence that life once existed on Mars.

The tentative evidence from Enceladus points to processes in its subsurface ocean producing organic precursors to amino acids — the basic building blocks of proteins and a fundamental requirement for prebiotic chemistry that could eventually lead to organised cells. Researchers also report the detection of previously unknown molecules, including aliphatic and (hetero)cyclic compounds, esters, alkenes, ethers, and tentatively nitrogen- and oxygen-bearing compounds.

These organics were detected by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) in ice crystals ejected in plumes through cracks in Enceladus’ ice covering. These plumes are thought to form when water seeps into the moon’s rocky core, is heated, and then forced back up to the ocean floor as hydrothermal vents — much like those found in Earth’s oceans. The hot water increases the pressure in the subsurface ocean until the ice cracks and jets of vapour and ice crystals erupt. Most fall back to the surface, but some escape Enceladus’ weak gravity and contribute to one of Saturn’s rings, within which the moon orbits.

Refuting Creationism - An Ichthyosaur from 200 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Artist’s interpretation of Eurhinosaurus mistelgauensis on 'belemnite battleground'.

Credit: Andrey Atuchin.

Eurhinosaurus mistelgauensis specimen from the Urwelt-Museum Oberfranken on a belemnite battleground. The fossil plate is about 4 m long.

Credit: Spicher et al (2025).

New Jurassic ichthyosaur species discovered in Mistelgau

It's shaping up to be another bad week for creationism, with the evidence for evolution on an old Earth continuing to accumulate, and evidence against any intelligence being involved in its evolution growing unabated. There is even a paper describing how and when Earth was really formed, and the contrast between that reality and the Bible’s version could hardly be greater.

This article looks at just one of these developments (more will follow). From the perspective of evolutionary biology, it is not especially remarkable—simply the description of a new species of extinct ichthyosaur, Eurhinosaurus mistelgauensis, from the Lower Jurassic (around 200 million years ago).

But for creationism, it serves as yet another stark reminder of how wrong the biblical creation story and timeline are. To put it bluntly, this fossil would not exist if the Bible’s story were true. It doesn’t take a genius to see how the fact of its existence bears on debates about the truth or falsity of Genesis—though creationists appear to struggle with this basic deductive logic.

Refuting Creationism - Scientists Might Have Got Something Wrong - But Not As Wrong As The Bible's Authors Did.

Cross-section of an egg-shaped iron oxide stone: It holds information about the amount of organic carbon in the sea millions of years ago, much like a time capsule.

Image: Nir Galili /ETH Zurich

Minute witnesses from the primordial sea | ETH Zurich

Scientists at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich have discovered evidence that may force us to rethink how Ice Ages and complex life began. By studying tiny iron oxide grains called ooides, they found that dissolved carbon dioxide in the oceans between 1000 and 541 million years ago was 90–99 percent lower than today — far too low to have triggered an Ice Age or the rise of multicellular organisms.

For creationists, this creates a dilemma. Whatever did cause these events, it happened hundreds of millions of years earlier than their literal reading of the Bible allows. Science may revise its conclusions when new evidence emerges, but it is nowhere near as wrong as the Bible’s authors—who missed the truth by billions of years.

This difference highlights the contrast between science and religion. Science asks, “What does the evidence show?” and adapts accordingly. Religion demands blind faith, treating doubt as a weakness.

Creationists boast that their “truth” never changes, but the reality is that what doesn't change is the mind of a creationist who is immune to evidence, deductive logic and analytical reasoning. Refusing to change your mind in the light of evidence is intellectual bankruptcy - the hallmark of dogma, not wisdom.

The Childish Bible - The Contrast Between The Bible's Description Of The Universe and the Real Thing

A spiral galaxy, NGC 7456. It shines brightly at the centre, and most of its disc also glows in warm colours. Its two spiral arms, which wind outwards from the centre, are made up mostly of large patches of bright blue specks. They also contain thin, reddish clouds of dust, and bright pink bubbles of glowing gas, where stars are forming. Distant galaxies can be seen around the galaxy as small orange spots, on a dark background.

A galaxy with lots to see | ESA/Hubble

For the Bible’s description of the Universe, try doing something creationists rarely seem to do – actually read it (you don’t need to read much!). In the very first chapter we find a story of a universe created from nothing by a few magic words. This universe is described as a small, flat, dome-covered world, with stars portrayed as tiny lights stuck to the dome. The Sun and Moon are described as lamps hanging from it. Later, we read of stars shaking loose and falling to Earth during earthquakes, and of the Moon hiding in a valley during the day (Genesis 1:6-10, Genesis 1:14-17, Joshua 10:12-14).

The contrast with what science has revealed could hardly be more stark. Given what we now know of the cosmos, the Bible’s account reads like the imaginative attempt of a five-year-old child asked to describe the Universe after a glance at the night sky. It can scarcely be regarded as a definitive scientific account of reality, and yet there are adults who still believe it is just that.

What this tells us about the education and credulity of those creationists who insist on believing such absurdities I will leave for readers to decide. Meanwhile, here is the NASA/ESA Hubble Picture of the Week to compare with the biblical version. It shows the spiral galaxy NGC 7456, located more than 51 million light-years away in the constellation Grus (the Crane). The image reveals glowing pink reservoirs of gas where new stars are forming, their light causing the surrounding gas to emit its tell-tale red glow.

Refuting Creationism - The Lengths Plants Will Go To Just To Get Pollinated - No Intelligence Needed

chloropid flies on a Vincetoxicum nakaianum flower.

The grass fly visiting the flowers (A) and kleptoparasiting spider hunting ant (B)

Press Releases - SCHOOL OF SCIENCE THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO

The driving force behind evolution is reproductive success, so in a broad sense every adaptation can be seen as a reproductive strategy. Few, however, are as peculiar as that of Vincetoxicum nakaianum, a dogbane species native to Japan. Rather than relying on nectar rewards or visual lures to attract pollinators, this plant enlists the services of kleptoparasitic chloropid flies — insects that usually home in on the scent of injured prey in order to steal a meal.

In a remarkable twist, the flowers of V. nakaianum release chemical signals that closely mimic the odour of ants under attack by predators, especially spiders. Drawn in by what they perceive as the scent of a potential victim to exploit, the flies inadvertently collect and deposit pollen as they move from flower to flower. This unusual strategy has now been documented in detail in a study led by Ko Mochizuki of the University of Tokyo, published in Current Biology, and described in a University of Tokyo School of Science press release.

What makes this particularly striking is how roundabout and intricate the mechanism is. If an intelligent designer had set out to ensure pollination, far simpler methods are available — from bright colours and nectar rewards to direct reliance on wind. Instead, V. nakaianum has evolved a convoluted route, exploiting the specialised behaviour of flies that themselves depend on the predation of ants by spiders. Such elaborate, contingent solutions are precisely what we expect from evolution by natural selection acting over countless generations, not from foresightful design.

Refuting Creationism - North American Mammoths Interbred - 30,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Columbian Mammoths, Mammuthus colimbi with other Ice Age mammals.

Beth Zaiken

Hybrid mammoths roamed North America following interspecies breeding | Natural History Museum

An open access paper published in Biology Letters by an international team of palaeontologists, led by Marianne Dehasque of the Department of Organismal Biology, Uppsala University, Sweden, will no doubt bring joy to creationists who prefer to see the world in simple black-and-white terms. It shows that one of the usual definitions of species—a group that can reproduce only with one another—needs revising. The paper reports that the two North American species of mammoth—the northern woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) and the southern Columbian mammoth (M. columbi)—regularly interbred where their ranges overlapped, and that the offspring were fertile.

In the black-and-white, science-vs-creationism world of creationist thinking, this will be taken to mean that if science is wrong, then creationism must be right, by default.

Creationist joy will be short-lived, however, once they realise that this interbreeding took place long before they believe Earth was created, and that the researchers explain the findings in terms of how mammoths evolved and diversified. Indeed, the evidence supports the theory that the Columbian mammoth itself evolved from a hybrid population—one of the mechanisms of evolution that creationist dogma insists does not occur. Not only is there not the slightest hint that biologists are abandoning the Theory of Evolution (ToE) in favour of creationism—as creationist leaders have claimed for at least half a century—but the ToE is used to explain the observable facts, and it does so with consummate ease.

Refuting Creationism - Why Consciousness Doesn't Need A God To Explain it

Major theories of consciousness may have been focusing on the wrong part of the brain

Spend a few days in a Creationism vs. Science group on social media and, before long, you’ll be told that science can’t explain consciousness—because, so the argument goes, matter can’t become self-aware, and consciousness can’t arise from nothing.

In other words, you’ll encounter yet another variation on the combined argument from incredulity, the “god of the gaps” fallacy, and the false dichotomy—presented as if they were sound logic against science, and, since only two possibilities are assumed, in favour of the locally popular version of a creator god.

The more fundamentalist creationists will, of course, also try to “prove” that only humans possess real consciousness, since this sets us apart from other animals and grants us the supposedly unique ability to worship their particular god.

But what creationists can never explain is this: if consciousness is not a function of neurophysiology — in other words, the product of chemistry and physics — why can it be abolished with chemicals such as anaesthetics, or by physical injury?

This makes it all the more interesting that a recent paper in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews by Peter Copple of the Consciousness and Cognition Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK, reviewing the sufficient conditions for consciousness, makes no suggestion that consciousness is divorced from neurophysiology or that it requires supernatural intervention to explain.

He makes similar points in an article in The Conversation, which is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence.

Refuting Creationism - A 108-Million-Year-Old Fossil From Mongolia Fills Another Gap.

Reconstruction of a pachycephalosaur

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5)

Young Zavacephale duel for territory along a lakeshore 108 million years ago.

Image: Masato Hattori

‘Teen’ Pachycephalosaur Butts Into Fossil Record | NC State News

Here we have another of those regular discoveries which, according to the press, supposedly means history will need to be “re-written” — something creationists, always looking for a stick to beat science with, will assume means the whole of history, because science has got everything wrong yet again. Unlike their religion, of course, which — so they claim — has never got anything wrong and is therefore eternally true, including the parts about a six-day creation 6,000–10,000 years ago, a global flood which left no evidence, and a universe consisting of a small, flat planet with a dome over it.

In reality, this is merely journalistic hyperbole designed to draw the reader in — or, in the case of creationists, to be seized upon as ‘scientific’ evidence that science is fatally flawed.

The “re-written” part of history is simply the bit about which we previously had no information. The process is not one of tearing up the past but of filling a gap in our knowledge and thereby arriving at an account closer to reality. In this case, “re-writing the history books” will mean telling a more complete history of a group of dinosaurs. The discovery in question is a 108-million-year-old adolescent pachycephalosaur fossil found in the Gobi Desert, Central Asia. Being both the oldest (by about 15 million years) and the most complete skeleton of this group of dinosaurs yet discovered, it provides crucial information about their origins.

Refuting Creationism - Biblical Ignorance Exposed By Science Again

A spiral galaxy, tilted nearly face-on to us, with a slightly unusual shape. Its spiral arms form an oval-shaped ring around the galaxy’s disc, filled with blue light from stars, as well as pink glowing gas bubbles where new stars are forming. Threads of dark red dust swirl around the brightly glowing core, blocking some of its light. The dust lanes extend into and follow the spiral arms.

Taking a third look | ESA/Hubble

Messier 96

NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

This week’s exposure of the child-like naivety of the Bible's authors comes again in the form of the NASA/ESA/Hubble Space Telescope image of the week. This week, we have a stunning view of an asymmetric spiral galaxy, Messier 96; a mere 35 million light-years away. Even more amazing is the evidence of baby suns actively forming in this galaxy while it is being stretched by gravity.

Creationism Refuted - Evolutionary Divergence and A Hybrid Jay

A grue jay? Rare hybrid bird identified in Texas

(a) Blue Jay by Travis Maher (ML578309451). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Macaulay Library.

(b) Hybrid Jay by Brian R. Stokes.

(c) Green Jay by Dan O'Brien (ML390361871). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Macaulay Library.

An interesting example of hybridisation between two distantly related species of jay has been reported by two biologists at the University of Texas, Austin. The hybrid is a cross between a blue jay (Cyanocitta cristata) and a green jay (Cyanocorax yncas). Although both are jays — members of the crow (Corvid) family — these two belong to different genera that diverged some seven million years ago and, until recently, lived in non-overlapping ranges in North America. Climate change has allowed them to extend their ranges, bringing them into contact only within the past decade.

The reason this is scientifically significant is that it illustrates how divergent evolution proceeds, and why it does not always progress to complete reproductive isolation. Unlike many other vertebrates, the genomic arrangements of birds are remarkably stable. As long as alleles remain in the same chromosomal loci, interbreeding remains possible. This can be disadvantageous if it results in hybrids with reduced fitness. For example, one population may evolve a long, slender bill adapted for one type of seed, while another evolves a short, stout bill for harder seeds. A hybrid might inherit an intermediate bill suited to neither, creating obvious disadvantages. In such cases, natural selection favours the evolution of barriers to hybridisation.

In many organisms, this is achieved by genetic rearrangements that prevent a zygote from developing even when mating occurs—so-called post-zygotic barriers. Where genomes are stable, such rearrangements rarely arise, so species tend instead to evolve pre-zygotic barriers that prevent mating or fertilisation in the first place. Among birds, these often take the form of plumage differences, mating rituals, or song—hence their remarkable diversity.