Creationism Refuted - How an 'Irreducibly Complex' Process Evolved Naturally

AI-generated illustration of competing bacteriophage viruses and the CRISPR-Cas RNA immune system

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Kenneth Loi shows how VIPR RNA (in pink) snakes around the double helix of DNA (yellow and green) to form a unique triplex structure.

Photo: Glenn Ramit.

VIPR Systems Break the Rules of the Genetic Code to Target and Twist Around DNA

One of the recurring mistakes in creationist arguments is to assume that a complex biological system must always have performed its present function. If its components now work together, the argument goes, they must have been created together for that purpose. Evolution, however, can recruit existing machinery for new roles. Two papers in *Science* now provide evidence that this process may help explain the origin of an important form of microbial immunity—with the intriguing possibility that bacteria acquired the precursors of their antiviral weapons from viruses themselves.

To appreciate the discovery, it helps to understand what CRISPR immunity actually is. Although CRISPR is familiar as a tool for editing genes, its natural role is defence. Many bacteria and archaea possess CRISPR–Cas systems that retain molecular records of past invaders. Short pieces of foreign DNA are incorporated into the cell’s genome, between repeated sequences. These stored fragments provide templates for small RNA molecules, which guide CRISPR-associated—or Cas—proteins to matching genetic material during subsequent infections. Depending on the system, the resulting response can destroy invading DNA or RNA. This is adaptive immunity: protection directed against particular threats, with a genetic memory that can pass to descendants.

CRISPR stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”, a description of the DNA arrangement in which those memories are stored. The best-known gene-editing protein, Cas9, belongs to class 2, whose targeting machinery centres on one large protein. Class-1 systems instead use assemblies of several proteins to recognise their targets. It is the evolutionary origin of this latter machinery that the new research addresses.

The studies, published on 17 September 2026 investigate a compact system called VIPR, short for viral interference programmable repeat. Found in viruses and bacteria, it combines a small protein with a guide RNA. The researchers propose that an ancestral VIPR-like system involved in competition between viruses was recruited into bacterial defence, eventually contributing to the evolution of class-1 CRISPR. This would be evolutionary co-option: machinery favoured in one context becoming useful in another.

Creationism Refuted - A Stem Amphibian from 309 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'.

AI-generated impression of life in Mazon Creek wetland in the Carboniferous Era

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Photo and illustration of the fossil of Jeanerpeton mazonensis.

Credit: Allison Sefcovic. © Field Museum.

Mother of amphibians: New species of proto-amphibian described by two student scientists, named in honor of their moms - Field Museum

One of the recurring problems for young-Earth creationism is that Earth’s history contains so much life before the supposed beginning of Earth’s history. A newly recognised fossil species from Illinois adds another example: a small, amphibian-like animal that lived approximately 309 million years ago, when the area around modern Chicago was a swampy river delta. That places it more than 300 million years before the creation event that biblical literalists insist accounts for all life on Earth. Explaining away a discrepancy of that magnitude requires rather more than pointing to an uncertainty in a scientific paper.

The animal is Jeanerpeton mazonensis, described by Allison J. Sefcovic, Payton J. Kohlberg and colleagues in a new paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Its recognition resulted from a fresh examination of a fossil already held in a museum collection. Previously assigned to Amphibamus grandiceps, the specimen proved sufficiently different in its skull and skeleton to warrant a genus and species of its own. The authors also suggest that other known specimens conceal more diversity among these early amphibamiforms than has previously been recognised.

The fossil comes from the exceptionally productive Mazon Creek deposits. Its preservation includes a body outline, scales, tiny abdominal skeletal elements called gastralia, and even impressions of the eyes. The genus honours the two student lead authors’ mothers, both named Jean. This is a reminder that important discoveries can begin with someone taking a closer look at a specimen collected long ago.

Left: Allison Sefcovic and Payton Kohlberg hold epoxy sculptures of their new species, Jeanerpeton mazonensis.

Photo credit: Arjan Mann. © Field Museum.

Of particular interest are structures previously interpreted as toe pads resembling those of living amphibians. Alongside the skeletal anatomy, such features help researchers investigate the combinations of characteristics present in these ancient animals. That does not establish Jeanerpeton as the direct ancestor of modern frogs or salamanders: resemblance and evolutionary relationship are not proof of direct ancestry. Its significance lies in adding another anatomically distinctive animal to the record against which explanations of amphibian evolution must be tested.

Why Science Works - And Creationism Fails - A Fossil From Mongolia Changes Scientific Minds, But Creationists Will Just Ignore It

AI-generated impression of life in the Cretaceous Gobi. The mammal in the foreground is a generalised small mammal, not Tamirkhan balcarceli, for whom there is insufficient data for a reconstruction

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Field photos of the Khugenetsavkhlant badlands in the Eastern Gobi Desert of Mongolia today, where Tamirkhan balcarceli was discovered.

Michael Novacek/© AMNH

Gobi Fossil Reshapes the Mammal Family Tree | AMNH

One of the most revealing differences between science and creationism is what happens when new evidence challenges an established explanation. In science, that is an opportunity to improve our understanding. In creationism, where the conclusion has already been declared unquestionable, it becomes a problem to explain away. A remarkable fossil from Mongolia’s Gobi Desert provides a particularly instructive example: a small mammal whose combination of teeth, skull and limb bones has prompted scientists to reconsider an enduring hypothesis about mammalian evolution. Predictably, there is no comfort here for anyone hoping that revising an evolutionary family tree means abandoning evolution.

The animal, Tamirkhan balcarceli, is described in a paper in Nature by Andres Giallombardo and colleagues. Discovered in 2004, the exceptionally informative specimen preserves a skull and part of a hind limb. This provides something researchers had previously lacked for the enigmatic mammals known as zhelestids: teeth and substantial skeletal remains belonging to the same individual.

Until now, zhelestids were known principally from teeth and fragmentary jaws. Their relatively low, rounded molar cusps resembled those of plant-eating hoofed placental mammals, encouraging suggestions that they represented an early radiation of placentals during the Cretaceous. The new fossil tests that interpretation against a much broader sample of anatomy. Its zhelestid-like molars occur alongside distinctive incisors, skull structures and hindlimb features characteristic of another ancient mammalian group, the zalambdalestoids. The researchers conclude that zhelestids belong within that group. Their apparently revealing resemblance to later herbivorous placentals arose through convergent evolution.

The significance extends beyond moving a name from one branch of a family tree to another. Identifying which ancient mammals belong within the placental radiation helps establish when that radiation began and how its early members diversified. An animal can possess teeth resembling those of a later group without belonging to that group: similar feeding demands can favour similar dental adaptations in separate evolutionary lineages. More complete fossils allow researchers to distinguish those similarities from the wider anatomical evidence of ancestry. This discovery therefore changes how an important set of Cretaceous fossils contributes to the history of placental origins; it does not, by itself, settle every question about their timing.

For young-Earth creationists, the chronological problem remains as severe as ever. This is a Late Cretaceous mammal, part of a world that existed tens of millions of years before the few thousand years into which they attempt to compress the history of Earth and its inhabitants. Revising its evolutionary relationships does nothing to bring that world within the biblical timetable. Nor does a previously mistaken interpretation of its teeth supply evidence for separately created “kinds”. To establish that claim would require positive evidence of separate creation, not merely the discovery that one proposed relationship needs correction.

Creationism Refuted - Bats Evolved In Europe - 65 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

New study reveals bats originated in Europe and rewrites the bat family tree | University of St Andrews news

Corynorhinus townsendii.

Credit: Elizabeth Clare.

Bats present creationists with a multitude of problems: firstly, there is the fact that they have a vastly more effective immune system than humans, so creationists need to explain why an omnibenevolent creator god would not give his favourite special creation, humans, the best available immune system. Secondly, there is the famous Bible blunder where, in most English language translations, bats appear to have been classified as birds (Leviticus 11:13-19) by the ignorant people who wrote it.

Now the facts have become even more difficult in the form of an awkward combination: remarkable adaptations that invite declarations of “design”, and an evolutionary history that researchers can investigate using evidence. Calling a bat a specially created “kind” explains neither its relationships with other bats nor when and where those relationships arose. Those are questions that require fossils, genomes and testable hypotheses.

Now, a major international study, published in Nature, has brought these questions into sharper focus. Researchers working within the Bat1K consortium assembled genomic data from 103 species, representing all 21 recognised living bat families, and combined this resource with anatomical evidence from 44 fossil bats. The university summarises their findings as pointing to a European origin for bats and mammalian powered flight around 65 million years ago — tens of millions of years before the supposed “Creation Week” of young-Earth creationism.

The research reconstructs a branching history of ancestry, migration and diversification. Its geographical model favours Europe as the ancestral region, followed by dispersal into Africa and subsequent expansion into other continents. These are historical inferences that can be tested and revised as further evidence becomes available.

The study also sheds light on echolocation: the ability to use returning echoes to detect surroundings and prey. The inferred position of the extinct bat Vielasia supports the conclusion that laryngeal echolocation — using calls generated in the voice box — arose before the diversification of the group containing all living bats. This places another celebrated bat adaptation deep within their evolutionary history.

Creationism Refuted - The History Of Viticulture - Uninterrupted By A Global Genocide

AI-Generated image of wine-making in Iberia, 3000 Years ago

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Grape seeds from Huelva, Vitis vinifera L.

Image: Guillem Pérez Jordà.

Ancient DNA reveals that the first grapevines cultivated in the Iberian Peninsula arrived from the eastern Mediterranean 3,000 years ago

If fruit-bearing plants were created for human use by an omnipotent, omniscient god, why have humans spent thousands of years modifying them to suit our needs? Genesis 1:29 presents seed-bearing plants and fruit trees as divine provisions for humanity, yet agriculture tells a rather different story: people taking what nature supplied and, through cultivation and selection, producing crops better suited to their purposes. Grapevines provide another example of this gap between the claim of providential design and the biological history of our food.

Research published in Current Biology, traces part of that history through ancient DNA. An international team analysed 28 archaeological grape seeds from Iberia and Sardinia. Their findings indicate that cultivated vines of eastern Mediterranean ancestry reached Iberia approximately 3,000 years ago, associated with Phoenician settlement and trade. These were already domesticated plants, arriving in a landscape where wild grapevines also grew.

The imported vines subsequently crossed with local wild populations. This mixing contributed to the ancestry of traditional Iberian varieties, with characteristic lineages already identifiable in seeds from the fourth century BCE. Ancient DNA also revealed connections between medieval seeds and varieties preserved today. The record therefore contains both change and continuity: new combinations of ancestry alongside lineages maintained across centuries.

More worryingly for Bible-literalist creationist, the genetic evidence shows that viticulture (the cultivation and growing of grapes) has a continuous history from before 'Creation Week' through the mythical global flood and biological reset of Earth, right up to the present, with no evidence of interruption of either the culturally-inherited methods or of the grape varieties used.

This is a useful illustration of how evolution works. Populations do not have to acquire all their useful variation through new mutations arising on the spot. Reproduction can reshuffle existing variation, while interbreeding brings together genetic variants from previously separated populations. Cultivation then provides opportunities for people to retain and propagate plants with desirable characteristics. Human preferences influence which vines reproduce or are multiplied, but the inheritance and variation on which that selection acts are ordinary biological processes.

How Science Works - Scientists Revise The Age Of Mammoth Fossils - But It's Even Worse News For Creationists

AI-generated impression of Columbian mammoths around the sinkhole trap

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The center of the sinkhole has thin laminated sediments and extensive bone galleries. We sampled near here for MS-16-4 and MS-16-5 using metal tubes.

Mahan SA, et al (2026)

Luminescence Data for the Mammoth Site, Black Hills, South Dakota 2016-19 | U.S. Geological Survey

Creationists who seize on revisions in scientific dating as evidence that scientists cannot be trusted might want to read this particular example to the end. A famous mammoth graveyard in South Dakota has indeed been reassessed, and its previously accepted age has been substantially revised. Unfortunately for young-Earth creationism, the revision moves it much further into the past. An age already incompatible with the biblical timetable has become an even greater problem.

In a paper published in Quaternary Research, Shannon A. Mahan and colleagues report new dates for the fossil-bearing sediments at the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, South Dakota. Long associated with an age of approximately 26,000 years, the deposit now yields luminescence ages of roughly 160,000–232,000 years — around six to nine times that familiar estimate. These are dates for the surrounding sediments, rather than direct measurements of each mammoth’s death, but they place the assemblage in a substantially earlier chapter of the Pleistocene.

How can a fossil’s age change so dramatically? A scientific date is a measurement of a particular physical process. Its reliability depends on choosing suitable material, understanding what happened to it after burial, and checking the result against other evidence.

What was dated originally?

The mammoth bones lacked preserved collagen — the protein commonly used for radiocarbon dating bone. Researchers therefore analysed carbon in the bones’ mineral component, apatite. However, interactions with groundwater can alter that carbon after burial. The resulting measurement may reflect later chemical changes rather than the animal’s death, making ancient remains appear much younger. This is a problem with the sample’s history, not evidence that radioactive decay is unreliable.

What does luminescence measure?

The new study dated feldspar grains in the surrounding sediment. Natural background radiation gradually builds up a trapped-electron signal within these minerals. Sufficient exposure to sunlight empties those traps, effectively resetting the clock. After burial, the signal accumulates again. Measuring it, together with the local radiation dose rate, allows researchers to estimate the time since the grains were last exposed to light.

Does that date the mammoths?

It dates sediment burial, rather than an animal’s death directly. The connection depends on geological evidence that the bones and sediment accumulated together. At the Mammoth Site, the main feldspar results place the fossil-bearing deposits approximately 160,000–232,000 years ago, although the detailed chronology still requires refinement.

Why trust a revised date?

Confidence grows through independent checks, not through refusing to change an answer. Here, analyses at two laboratories and comparisons with earlier dating work exposed weaknesses in the accepted chronology. Further uranium-series dating is planned. Revising an interpretation when better evidence becomes available is precisely how science improves its account of the past.

Sources: Mahan and colleagues, Quaternary Research
Phys.org research report.

As described in Sandee Oster’s report for Phys.org, the site contains more than 60 mammoths, predominantly young male Columbian mammoths. The prevailing explanation is that a warm, spring-fed sinkhole became a lethal trap: animals entering the water could not climb back up its steep, slippery sides. Their remains accumulated in the basin. The earlier radiocarbon measurements were problematic because the bones lacked preserved collagen, leaving researchers to analyse bone apatite, whose carbon can be altered by interaction with groundwater.

The new investigation used infrared-stimulated luminescence dating of feldspar grains, with analyses undertaken at two laboratories. This estimates the time since sediment grains were last exposed to sufficient light to reset their dating signal. The researchers also identify thin sediment layers deposited by runoff entering the pond. Uncertainty remains over the detailed chronology, and further uranium-series work is planned.

For creationists, the awkward point is not merely the increased age. It is how the correction was made. Scientists questioned an established interpretation, investigated the limitations of the material previously dated, and tested the chronology using a different physical process. If dates were simply manufactured to produce predetermined answers, why expose the discrepancy and publish a substantial revision? Here, changing the answer is evidence that the answer remains accountable to observations.

Creationism Refuted - 55-Million-Year-Old Crocodile Eggshells From Queensland, Australia

AI-generated reconstruction of an early mekosuchine crocodilian beside a lakeshore nest in Eocene Australia

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AI-generated reconstruction of an early mekosuchine crocodilian beside a lakeshore nest in Eocene Australia.

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55 million years: Australia’s oldest crocodile eggshells found in Queensland

A major problem for young-Earth creationists is that so much of Earth’s history occurred millions or billions of years before their biblical chronology allows the planet to have existed. Fossils repeatedly confront them with evidence of animals living, reproducing and evolving in worlds that supposedly never existed. Dismissing this evidence as scientific incompetence or dishonesty does nothing to explain it. Nor does accusing researchers of manipulating dates become an acceptable substitute for evidence simply because the accusation is made in defence of the Bible.

The latest addition to this inconvenient record comes from approximately 55-million-year-old crocodilian eggshells found at Murgon in south-eastern Queensland, Australia. These animals were laying eggs more than 5,000 times further back in time than even a generous 10,000-year creationist chronology permits. The fragments are described in a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by an international team including Michael Stein of the University of New South Wales.

The oldest known crocodilian eggshells from Australia, they are attributed to the mekosuchines, an extinct group with a long evolutionary history in the region. These crocodilians belonged to a different branch of the family tree from Australia’s living saltwater and freshwater crocodiles. Their significance therefore extends beyond their inconvenient age: they help document an ancient crocodilian fauna that cannot simply be equated with the species inhabiting Australia today.

Eggshells also preserve information that bones and teeth alone cannot provide. Their microscopic structure offers clues to reproduction and nesting conditions; in this case, the researchers interpret the evidence as indicating nesting around the margins of an ancient lake. These tiny fragments therefore add another dimension to our understanding of how extinct crocodilians lived and interacted with their environment.

The broader evolutionary picture is one of branching lineages, ecological diversity and eventual extinction over immense spans of time. The eggshells contribute to that picture without, by themselves, revealing every evolutionary relationship or the precise identity of the animal that laid them. That distinction matters: science builds its explanations from what the evidence supports, while leaving room for further discoveries. None of that uncertainty reduces 55 million years to a few thousand.

Michael David Stein, a research associate in UNSW’s School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences and a co-author of the paper, describes the discovery and its significance in an article in The Conversation, reprinted below under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism Refuted - Scientists Got It Wrong Again - But It's Still Bad News For Creationists

Life reconstruction of Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda

By Gabriel Ugueto.
George, H., et al. (2026) (CC-BY 4.0)

Photograph of the outcrop at locality Z143 where NMT RB462 was collected

Photograph: K. Angielczyk.
George, H., et al. (2026) (CC-BY 4.0)

September: New species of 240-million-year-old prehistoric animal from Tanzania discovered | News and features | University of Bristol

Scientists have revised their understanding of some fossils once thought to include the oldest dinosaurs. Scientists getting it wrong and having to change their minds should be music to creationist ears — until they discover what the revision actually means. The animals concerned still lived hundreds of millions of years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of biblical literalism. A reassessment within the Triassic does nothing to squeeze the history of life into a few thousand years.

Creationists have an almost schizophrenic attitude towards science: On the one hand they claim scientists are not allowed to publish anything which doesn't conform to some assumed scientific orthodoxy; on the other hand they point to scientific disagreement and debate and scientists even changing their mind as evidence that science is unreliable. And they readily use a computer to inform the world via the Internet that science doesn't work, without the slightest appreciation of the irony!

The research, led by Hady George of the University of Bristol and published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, describes a new species of dicynodont from Tanzania: Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda. Despite its name, this herbivore was a member of the mammalian evolutionary lineage, rather than a dinosaur. This discovery extends a genus previously known only from South America into Africa, around 240 million years ago.
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Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Syphilis - How Did It Survive On The Ark?

[caption]

[credit]

The archeological site of Tequendama 1 at the border of the Sabana de Bogotá, Cundinamarca, Colombia.

© Angélica Triana.

Ancient DNA pushes back record of treponemal disease-causing bacteria by 3,000 years

Creationists who take the biblical Flood story literally have a problem that rarely features in illustrations of Noah’s floating menagerie: what happened to the infectious diseases? Saving their animal hosts would also have provided opportunities to save their pathogens. Conversely, exterminating the hosts would have threatened the survival of the very organisms that depended on them. A supposedly fresh start for life on Earth would therefore require an explanation for why so many ancient infections apparently came along for the ride.

Many pathogens, including those that infect humans are also host-specific, so that begs the question of which of the human passengers were host to the sexually-transmitted diseases, and how, if they were 'righteous' people, did they acquire them? The authors of the tale knew nothing of microorganisms or the germ theory of disease, of course, so saw no reason to explain all that stuff.

A discovery reported in Science on 22 January 2026 gives that question another uncomfortable historical dimension. An international research team has reconstructed a roughly 5,500-year-old genome of Treponema pallidum from human remains at the Tequendama I rock shelter in Colombia. This is the bacterial species whose recognised subspecies cause syphilis, yaws and bejel. The findings are described in a research paper in Science by Davide Bozzi and colleagues.

The ancient bacterium belonged to a previously unknown branch of the family tree, a sister lineage to all the genetically characterised subspecies of T. pallidum. It should therefore not be described simply as a case of modern syphilis in a prehistoric person. Nevertheless, its presence establishes that this group of pathogens was infecting people in South America long before European contact—and before the date commonly assigned to Noah’s genocidal flood.

The evolutionary history reaches further back still. The researchers’ molecular-clock analysis estimates that the ancient lineage and the other known lineages shared a common ancestor approximately 13,700 years ago. That estimate carries substantial uncertainty, with a range of roughly 6,800–20,600 years, but its central value places this ancestral population well before even the more generous versions of the usual young-Earth creationist chronology. These are estimates reconstructed from genetic evidence, not dates obtained by adding together the supposed lifespans of biblical patriarchs.

The Flood problem deserves careful examination. Genesis is ambiguous on the point. On the one hand it describes the destruction of terrestrial, air-breathing life; on the other hand it specifically refers to all living substance being destroyed. Although the authors were unaware of microorganisms so were not writing a microbiology textbook, a supposedly omniscient, creator god would not have been constrained by the ignorance of primitive pastoralists. But then these obligate parasites would not have survived the destruction of their hosts outside the ark, so the question of what 'life' the Bible is referring to become moot. If you subscribe to the Ark myth, you have to accept that any survivors must have been carried in the Ark.

The discovery of an ancient relative of syphilis does not establish that the particular Colombian lineage survived to the present. But neither qualification explains how the surviving branches of an ancient, host-associated pathogen could have persisted through the alleged destruction of their hosts outside the Ark. Within that narrative, infected passengers or another explicitly justified means of survival would be needed. Simply overlooking the pathogens does not solve the problem.

There appears to be no way to avoid the conclusion that, if the Ark myth were true, Noah and his family must have been carrying the obligate, species-specific sexually-transmitted diseases, syphilis, gonorrhoea and chlamydia as well as pubic lice and an assortment of intestinal worms.

Evolution, meanwhile, supplies the framework that makes the discovery intelligible: common ancestry, branching descent and genetic change over time. The scientists can place an unfamiliar ancient genome within a family tree and investigate when its lineage diverged from its relatives. There is no need to invent a separate creation event for each disease, or a miraculous rescue operation to carry ancient infections across an otherwise universal catastrophe. There is a history to reconstruct—and the evidence is preserved in the DNA.

Unintelligent Design - How The Immune System Can Go Rogue And Cause Premature Ageing

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Reversing hallmarks of rapid aging by silencing a cellular alarm system

Photo credit: Eitan Moses

How the Immune System Rewrites Rapid Aging

One of the difficulties creationists have with presenting the immune system as evidence of intelligent design is explaining why something supposedly designed to protect us so often contributes to our illnesses. A defence system that can turn the body's own damaged DNA into a trigger for further damage is hardly an obvious example of competent, benevolent engineering. It is, however, entirely understandable as a product of evolution: a collection of mechanisms favoured for their benefits, constrained by their history, and carrying costs that natural selection has never eliminated.

Research from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem provides a revealing example. In a paper published in Genes & Development, Marva Bergman and colleagues investigated how a DNA-sensing protein called cGAS contributes to disorders involving defective DNA repair; the body's response to genetic damage can itself become an important source of harm.

The underlying problem is straightforward. DNA appearing in the fluid surrounding a cell's nucleus can be a warning of infection. cGAS helps detect it and activates an inflammatory defence response. But the DNA need not belong to a virus: damaged cells can expose their own DNA to the same sensor. Consequently, an alarm that normally helps protect against infection can sustain inflammation even when there is no invading organism to fight. The response then risks damaging the very tissues it ordinarily helps defend.

The researchers modelled two human DNA-repair disorders, ataxia-telangiectasia and Bloom syndrome, in turquoise killifish, Nothobranchius furzeri. In the ataxia-telangiectasia model, disrupting the gene for cGAS partially alleviated reproductive defects, cellular senescence in the liver, and inflammation in the cerebellum. Several measures of genome instability also improved, consistent with cGAS having additional effects inside the nucleus, beyond its familiar inflammatory role.

There was, however, a crucial complication: losing cGAS in fish without the underlying repair defect made pathology and genome instability worse. This was therefore no demonstration that the immune system contains a universally dispensable component, nor a discovery that switching off one gene reverses normal ageing. The same protein could be beneficial or harmful depending on the biological circumstances.

That is precisely where the evolutionary explanation becomes useful. A sensor that responds to DNA in an unusual location offers a broadly effective means of detecting danger, but that signal does not identify the DNA's origin with certainty. Such a system needs safeguards and regulation, and its usefulness does not guarantee that those safeguards will work under every condition. Natural selection can preserve a mechanism whose overall benefits outweigh its costs; it cannot anticipate every future mutation or guarantee freedom from disease.

The study did not test the evolutionary history of cGAS, but its findings illustrate the kind of context-dependent compromise evolution produces. For intelligent-design advocates, the awkward question is why an allegedly perfect designer would make protection and self-inflicted damage so intimately connected. For evolutionary biology, the useful question is how that connection works—and whether understanding it can help us reduce the harm.

This is just one example of how the human body is not a work of perfect design, but the product of sub-optimal compromises constrained by contingent history and lacking in foresight, where additional layers of complexity are not hallmarks of intelligent design that creationists like to imagine, but of the need for controls and compensations for problems created by earlier iterations of the evolutionary cycle. Many more are explained in my book, The Body Of Evidence: How The Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design

Refuting Creationism - Bigamous Beetles Have Better Babies - Observed Evolution Over 15 Years

Red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum.

By Udo Schmidt from Deutschland Tribolium castaneum (Herbst, 1797) CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

Red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum

Source: Wikipedia - Public Domain, Link

How sex can help save species from extinction | UEA

One of the recurring claims of creationist apologetics is that mutations condemn living populations to relentless genetic deterioration — a supposedly inevitable decline which evolution cannot overcome. What this argument neglects is that mutations do not operate in isolation: selection influences which genetic variants pass to subsequent generations. Now, a long-running experiment with red flour beetles has provided direct genomic evidence that competition for mates can help remove harmful variants, leaving populations more resistant to extinction.

The research, led by Michael D. Pointer, of the University of East Anglia Department of Biological Sciences, described in a report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), also addresses an interesting evolutionary question: why is sexual reproduction so widespread despite its considerable costs? Finding mates takes time and energy, competition can be costly, and reproduction requires contributions from individuals which do not themselves produce eggs. One possible compensating benefit is that competition for reproductive success helps prevent damaging mutations from accumulating.

The researchers tested this idea using populations of the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, maintained under stronger or weaker sexual selection. After 156 generations, whole-genome sequencing showed that populations exposed to stronger sexual selection carried fewer genetic variants predicted to be harmful. Their overall genetic diversity, however, remained comparable. Selection had reduced the burden of damaging variants without a corresponding reduction in variation across the genome.

The distinction matters. Genetic diversity is often used as an indicator of a population’s prospects, but the amount of variation cannot tell us everything about its effects. In this experiment, the estimated burden of harmful variants was a better predictor of extinction under inbreeding than diversity alone. Populations could retain similar amounts of genetic variation while differing in their vulnerability to genetic stress.

Creationism Refuted - The 'American Cheetah' Was Not A Cheetah - Convergent Evolution

An artistic rendering of two Miracinonyx, one in Beringia preying mainly on fish and one in the Lower 48 feeding on pronghorn antelope.

Credit: Julius Csotonyi (CC-BY SA)

The feline Miracinonyx trumani got its nickname, the “American cheetah,” from its slender, long-limbed body, reminiscent of an African cheetah. While the extinct Pleistocene predator did hunt down speedy prey, such as saiga antelope (illustrated), a new study shows some animals ate a diet of mostly fish, suggesting the species was more adaptable than previously thought.

Velizar Simeonovski

The extinct American ‘cheetah’ was not a cheetah after all | EurekAlert!

A cat can look rather like a cheetah without being a cheetah, and a predator with long legs need not spend its life chasing antelopes. That is the lesson from new research into the extinct “American cheetah”, Miracinonyx trumani, whose ancient DNA and dietary chemistry reveal a more complicated animal than its nickname suggests. It is also another example of why evolutionary relationships have to be investigated through evidence, rather than decided by resemblance and fitted into preconceived categories.

The study, led by Molly Cassatt-Johnstone of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and published in Current Biology, analysed ancient DNA from four specimens. It strengthens earlier evidence that Miracinonyx was more closely related to living pumas than to true cheetahs, with the puma and Miracinonyx lineages estimated to have separated approximately 2.6 million years ago. Its cheetah-like anatomy therefore reflects convergent evolution: the independent evolution of similar features in different lineages.

There is an immediate difficulty here for young-Earth creationism. The evolutionary separation of these cats occurred millions of years before the supposed “Creation Week”, while the three Yukon specimens themselves are approximately 31,000 years old. These were animals living, feeding and dying in an established ecosystem long before the entire universe supposedly existed according to a literal reading of Genesis. Their identification also extends the animal’s known distribution far into northern Canada. Science News.

Refuting Creationism - The Evidence For Denisovans Just Keeps Getting Better

Map showing the geographic locations of Denisovan fossils determined by molecular evidence. The colours of the map reflect a combination of elevation and environmental context.

From: Rao, H., Xing, S., Ruan, Q. et al. (2026).

Denisovan Radius Discovered for First Time in Southwest China----Chinese Academy of Sciences

Fragments of Denisovan teeth, and bones recovered from Bianfu Cave in Southwest China

From: Rao, H., Xing, S., Ruan, Q. et al. (2026).

Long before the universe supposedly existed, according to Young-Earth creationism, human relatives were making tools and processing animal carcasses in what is now south-western China. Two complementary papers in Nature reveal another chapter of this inconvenient prehistory, combining ancient proteins, fossil anatomy and archaeology to investigate the Denisovans of Bianfu Cave in Yunnan Province.

In the first paper, Huiyun Rao and colleagues identify five Denisovan remains: two teeth, two skull fragments and part of a radius, one of the forearm bones. These come from layers dated to approximately 167,000–134,000 years ago. The radius provides the first securely identified example of this bone from a Denisovan, adding valuable evidence about a human lineage whose skeleton remains frustratingly poorly known.

The identification depended on proteins preserved within the fossils. Researchers screened more than 60,000 bone fragments before selecting promising specimens for molecular analysis. Surviving protein sequences contained diagnostic Denisovan variants, allowing small fragments to acquire an evolutionary identity that their appearance alone could not securely establish. The study also places another confirmed Denisovan locality within a previously conspicuous gap in their known Asian distribution.

A second paper in Nature, by Qijun Ruan and colleagues examines the wider archaeological record. Evidence of cave use extends from approximately 190,000 to 70,000 years ago — a span of around 120,000 years. Its inhabitants hunted medium-sized and large animals, produced stone tools and made extensive use of bones without elaborate modification. These practices suggest practical exploitation of available materials in a landscape of coniferous forest and forest-steppe.

An important distinction remains: the identified Denisovan fossils cover only part of that longer sequence. Attributing the wider archaeological record to Denisovans is the researchers’ most economical interpretation, rather than direct proof that Denisovans occupied the cave throughout. Nor does the sequence establish uninterrupted residence. That qualification illustrates how scientific conclusions are bounded by the evidence.

Refuting Creationism - Why Nature Creates Fossils Of Different Ages In The Same Deposit - Unlike The Mythical Genocidal Flood

AI depiction of how shells accumulate in sediment

ChatGPT 6 Astra

Collection of creatures that can disturb sediment and relocate shells.

Florida Museum.

Paleontologists spent 20 years carbon-dating thousands of marine fossils, then used them to decode a process fundamental to Earth’s history – Research News

A fossil bed is not necessarily a collection of animals that lived and died together. Two shells lying side by side can belong to creatures whose lives were separated by hundreds or thousands of years. For creationists who interpret fossil-bearing deposits as the products of a single, year-long biblical Flood, that raises an awkward question: how much history is actually represented within a supposedly catastrophic snapshot?

An international study, published in PNAS, brings substantial evidence to bear on that question. Drawing on two decades of research, the team assembled dates for more than 7,500 marine fossils, obtained using radiocarbon dating and other methods. They investigated “time averaging”: the mixing of remains from different generations within the same assemblage.

Their principal finding was that sediment accumulation rate is the strongest predictor of this mixing. Where sediment accumulates slowly, remains from successive generations can collect before permanent burial. Faster accumulation generally limits that opportunity. Comparisons between observations and computer simulations showed that sedimentation exerted a stronger influence than the other factors examined, including mixing by burrowing animals and the destruction of skeletal remains. These findings concern the relatively recent fossil record; their application to much deeper time still requires testing.

The creationist response cannot therefore consist merely of declaring that the fossils were all buried by Noah’s Flood. Burial and death are different events. A sudden event could gather older shells and redeposit them, but that would concede that the resulting assemblage contains a history predating the catastrophe. It would still be necessary to explain the age differences, the source of the older material and the surrounding sedimentary evidence.

Nor does a vague appeal to “errors in carbon dating” solve the problem. An identical age offset applied to every specimen would leave their age differences intact. Other proposed errors would need to be specified, quantified and shown to account for the observed pattern. Simply assuming that inconvenient measurements must be wrong is not an explanation; it is a refusal to accept evidence.

The significance of this research is that the history preserved within fossil assemblages can be investigated and measured. Scientists can ask how much time a collection represents, identify the processes responsible and test their explanations against thousands of specimens. For Flood geology, the challenge is to produce an equally convincing account of those observations. A biblical narrative, however confidently repeated, supplies neither the measurements nor the explanation.

Creationism Refuted - Arrowheads From Uzbekistan Shoot Creationism Down

Micropoints from Obi-Rakhmat, layers 20-21

From: Plisson H, et al (2025)

Obi-Rakhmat rock shelter

From: Plisson H, et al (2025)

Arrowhead points found in Central Asia could prove the presence of ‘Homo sapiens’ 80,000 years ago

A handful of tiny stone points from a rock shelter in Uzbekistan presents several difficulties for creationism. They come from deposits dated to around 80,000 years ago, placing their manufacture tens of thousands of years before the supposed creation of the Universe according to young-Earth biblical literalism. They belong to an archaeological record that demands an explanation grounded in prolonged human occupation and sediment accumulation. And their publication demonstrates something creationist propagandists routinely deny: scientists can publish evidence that challenges established interpretations of human history.

The research, by Hugues Plisson and an international team, appeared in PLOS One. Examining stone artefacts from the oldest occupation layers at Obi-Rakhmat, the researchers identified damage consistent with their use as projectile tips. Particularly intriguing are tiny triangular points whose dimensions suggest mounting on light, arrow-like shafts. The authors interpret these as possible evidence of archery approximately 80,000 years ago. Their further suggestion—that the technology indicates the presence of *Homo sapiens*—is an inference from archaeological comparisons, rather than a definitive identification of the toolmakers.

For young-Earth creationism, the chronological problem exists regardless of whether that interpretation ultimately prevails. Disagreement about which human population made an ancient weapon does nothing to bring its manufacture within a biblical timescale. Uncertainty about one aspect of the evidence is not uncertainty about everything, however useful that confusion might be to those trying to dismiss an inconvenient past.

The site also raises an awkward question for advocates of a recent, catastrophic global flood. Its archaeological sequence extends through more than ten metres of deposits representing tens of thousands of years. This is evidence of a lengthy local history that any alternative account must explain. It would be too sweeping to claim that no stone artefact could survive a flood; the stronger objection concerns the preservation and formation of the deposits in which those artefacts occur. Invoking a catastrophe that supposedly reshaped the entire Earth does not explain an ordered archaeological sequence merely by adding water to the story. The paper itself does not investigate Noah’s flood, but its findings add to the ancient history that biblical literalists must somehow compress into a few thousand years.

Creationism Refuted - Complex Symbiosis Between Animals And Microbes - 550 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Ediacaran tubular fossil Conotubus (inset: symbiotic chemosynthetic bacteria)

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 6 Astra)

Ancient fossil from China reveals animal-microbe partnerships dating back 550 million years

Some 550 million years ago, long before the world existed according to a literal reading of Genesis, an early animal may already have been exploiting the biochemical abilities of bacteria. New research on the Ediacaran tubular fossil Conotubus suggests that animal–microbe partnerships have a history extending back towards the beginnings of animal life. For creationism, the inconvenience is twofold: the immense timescale, and a biological arrangement that makes excellent evolutionary sense but raises awkward questions about supposedly intelligent design.

The study, led by Zhenfei Wang and Yongbo Peng of Nanjing University and published in PNAS, examined sulphur and molybdenum isotope signatures in fossils from southern China. These suggest an association with sulphur-oxidising bacteria, potentially supplying nutrition and helping the animal tolerate toxic, sulphide-rich conditions. This is a geochemical inference, rather than the discovery of preserved bacterial partners. If the interpretation is correct, however, it extends the fossil evidence for animal–microbe symbiosis backwards by roughly 100 million years, as co-author Peter Crockford explains in his account of the research in an article in The Conversation.

Creationists often present such interdependence as evidence of design, as though two organisms benefiting from one another could only be the result of someone planning the arrangement. But this overlooks an obvious question: why would an omniscient designer make an animal dependent on another organism for a useful biochemical function? Why not equip the animal itself with the necessary machinery? A partnership introduces additional requirements: the organisms must encounter one another or maintain their association across generations, exchange useful substances, and sustain conditions in which both can function. Each dependency creates something else that can fail.

There is a qualification here. Giving an animal bacterial capabilities would not necessarily be as simple as inserting a few genes into its genome. Genes operate within cellular systems; useful metabolism also requires appropriate regulation, enzymes, transport mechanisms and chemical conditions. Division of labour between organisms can therefore be highly effective. Nevertheless, these are constraints facing organisms produced by evolution. An allegedly omnipotent designer, able to specify the entire system from the outset, cannot readily be excused by invoking the limitations of inherited cellular machinery. Complexity alone is no evidence of intelligent planning, especially when it includes dependence on a separate organism to supply an essential service.

As I argued in The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax complexity is not the evidence for intelligent design that creationists like to think since the hallmark of good, intelligent design is minimal complexity. Complexity is evidence of evolved systems where suboptimal solutions to problems often need additional layers of complexity to mitigate failures.

Refuting Creationism - The Evolution of Complexity - No Magic Needed

Stomata on a leaf surface

Credit: Emilio Ermini, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Stomata on a leaf surface.

How plants evolved a molecular switch to cope with heat

Creationists routinely portray complex biochemical pathways as systems that must have been designed as complete working units. Remove one component, they argue, and the system ceases to function; therefore, by the presuppositional false dichotomy that characterises creationism, all the components must have been assembled simultaneously by an intelligent designer.

Evolution does not work by assembling entirely new systems from nothing, however. It modifies what is already present. Existing proteins acquire new interactions, mutations alter their stability or activity, and old signalling pathways are recruited for additional purposes. A comparatively small change can connect existing components and produce a new, environmentally responsive function.

An elegant example has now been described by Shao-Li Yang and colleagues from VIB, Ghent University, KU Leuven and collaborating institutions. Their study, published in Nature Plants, identifies a molecular pathway that helps Arabidopsis thaliana cool its leaves during heat stress. It also shows how evolution produced the regulatory switch by altering the electrical charge at a particular position in an existing protein.

Plants cannot escape into the shade when conditions become dangerously hot. One of their principal cooling mechanisms is transpiration: stomata—microscopic pores in the leaf surface—open, allowing water to evaporate and remove heat. This resembles sweating in animals, although excessive stomatal opening also risks dehydration. Plants must therefore regulate the process rather than simply leave their stomata permanently open.

The newly discovered pathway centres on UBP24, a protein belonging to a family of enzymes known as deubiquitylases. Ubiquitin molecules attached to a protein can help to determine its location, activity or destruction; deubiquitylases remove those molecular tags. Under high-temperature conditions, B4 RAF kinases activate another kinase, OPEN STOMATA 1, or OST1. OST1 then attaches a phosphate group to the amino acid serine at position 360 in UBP24.

Refuting Creationism - How Our Cells Communicate Was Inherited From Our Bacterial Ancestors

Ancient Calcium Signaling in Cyanobacterial Cells

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Even ancient bacteria possessed intercellular communication structures like humans today | CMFI News

The human body is not an organism assembled from newly invented components according to a unique design. It is the latest product of a continuous evolutionary history in which old molecules, old regulatory systems and old cellular capabilities have repeatedly been modified and recruited for new purposes.

Even something as fundamental to our existence as communication between neighbouring cells has roots extending far back into the microbial world.

Our tissues depend upon cells exchanging ions, metabolites and signals through specialised connections. In animals, structures known as gap junctions form channels between adjacent cells, allowing them to coordinate their activity. They are essential, for example, to the synchronised contraction of heart muscle. Calcium ions also serve as important intracellular signals controlling an enormous range of cellular processes.

It might be tempting to regard such coordinated communication as an innovation requiring the complexity of animals or, at the very least, nucleated eukaryotic cells. However, an international research team has shown that a strikingly similar functional principle operates in filament-forming cyanobacteria—organisms belonging to an ancient bacterial lineage.

As the researchers report in The EMBO Journal, the cyanobacterium Nostoc sp. PCC 7120 forms long filaments in which neighbouring cells are linked by structures called septal junctions. These pass through arrays of tiny pores in the peptidoglycan partitions between cells, permitting metabolites and signalling molecules to move along the filament.

Creationism Refuted - Eurasian Homo sapiens Stopped Eating Insects - Thousands Of Years Before 'Creation Week'

Insects in Chang Moi, Mueang Chiang Mai District, Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Credit: mohigan. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

European Homo sapiens ate fewer insects than Neanderthals and tropical populations - Institut de Biologia Evolutiva - CSIC UPF (UPF)

Humans are strange creatures. While we recoil at the thought of tucking into a dish of sautéed maggots, fried grasshoppers or other insects, we happily eat their close arthropod relatives, crabs, lobsters and prawns, and yet the evidence is that this has only been so for Northern Eurasians for about the last 9,000 year.

People are also strange in another way: despite all the evidence to the contrary and with no supporting evidence at all, there are people who believe the whole of history can be compressed into a few thousand years and that animals can be created by magic without ancestors.

For biblical literalists, every human who has ever lived must be squeezed into the few thousand years since the supposed creation of the first couple. Yet evidence preserved in something as commonplace as calcified plaque on ancient teeth tells a very different story: one of several human lineages, changing diets, inherited genetic variation and adaptation to contrasting environments over tens of thousands of years.

In a paper published in Science Advances, Manuel Piñero and Pablo Librado of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona combined two independent sources of evidence to investigate the history of human insect-eating, or entomophagy. They searched ancient dental calculus for insect DNA and examined genetic variants affecting our ability to digest chitin—the tough polysaccharide forming much of an insect’s exoskeleton.

Refuting Creationism - Now It's A Transitional Early Insect - From 324 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Palaeoecological reconstruction of the Carboniferous stem-insect Chosha praecursor

From: Tihelka, E., Vásquez, C., Engel, M.S. et al (32026)

Amphibious stem-insect rewrites the evolutionary history of insect terrestrialization---- Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology Chinese Academy of Sciences

A favourite creationist debating tactic is to point to a gap in the fossil record and pretend that the absence of a known transitional form is evidence that no transition occurred. When a suitable fossil is eventually found, the manoeuvre simply creates two smaller gaps on either side of it—or the fossil is arbitrarily declared to be “fully formed” and therefore not transitional. A simple trick which exposes the ignorance and disingenuity of creationism, is to ask them to describe exactly what they would expect a transition fossil to look like. They tend to abruptly break off the debate, because to answer it would violate two unwritten rules of creationism - never consider being wrong and never state what evidence would cause you to change your mind in case it's produced.

This 'god of the gaps' rhetorical game depends upon treating an inevitably incomplete geological record as though it ought to contain a specimen from every generation of every evolving lineage - something that if it were true, would be hard for science to explain, given what we know of the circumstances in which fossils are formed, which actually predicts that the record will be discontinuous.

The early history of insects has offered particularly fertile ground for this tactic. Molecular-clock studies indicate that hexapods diverged from aquatic crustacean relatives hundreds of millions of years ago, yet their small, delicate bodies were poorly suited to fossilisation, especially in the environments through which they were making the transition onto land. Consequently, there has been a conspicuous interval—the so-called “hexapod gap”—between the earliest evidence of hexapods and the abundance of unmistakable insects in later Carboniferous rocks.

Now, an international team led by Erik Tihelka and Chenyang Cai has described a remarkable fossil that helps to narrow that gap while illustrating how the familiar insect body plan was assembled. The approximately 324-million-year-old animal, named Chosha praecursor, came from the Late Mississippian Tesnus Formation of western Texas. Collected in 1985 and long misidentified as a juvenile crustacean, it remained in a museum collection until examination under cross-polarised light revealed anatomical details that had previously been almost invisible. The findings are reported in Nature.