Refuting Creationism - How Consciousness Evolved - No God-Magic Required

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Why Do We Have a Consciousness? | Newsportal - Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Having recently watched a grey squirrel carefully plot a route through a line of trees, I was struck by the sophistication of its behaviour. It was not simply moving at random. It clearly knew where it wanted to go and was able to take into account such factors as how much slender branches would bend under its weight, how wide a gap it could safely jump, and—perhaps most importantly—exactly where it was within its own mental map of the environment. It is difficult to see how such behaviour could be possible in a creature that was not conscious and, to some degree, self-aware.

In animal psychology, there is now little doubt that many vertebrates possess some level of self-awareness and therefore consciousness. The remaining debate has centred not on whether consciousness exists in non-human animals, but on how it arose. The fact that consciousness is found across a wide range of vertebrates, and even in molluscs such as cephalopods, suggests either that it originated in a remote common ancestor or that it evolved independently multiple times through convergence. Either way, this strongly points to an evolutionary origin.

According to two papers published in a special edition of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, by working groups led by Professors Albert Newen and Onur Güntürkün at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, consciousness can indeed be explained as the outcome of an evolutionary process, with each step conferring a selective advantage. Moreover, consciousness only makes sense as an evolved biological function. The two open-access papers can be found here and here.

This work is bound to provoke another bout of denialism among creationists, for whom consciousness remains one of the standard “impossible to explain without supernatural intelligence” fallback arguments. As with abiogenesis and the Big Bang, the reasoning typically amounts to: “Science hasn’t explained it and I don’t understand how it could, therefore God did it.” This false dichotomy conveniently removes any obligation to provide evidence in support of the supernatural claim. Creationists also like to flatter themselves that consciousness is a uniquely human trait and thus evidence of special creation. In scientific terms, however, this does not even rise to the level of a hypothesis: it proposes no mechanism, makes no testable predictions, and is unfalsifiable by design. It is, in essence, wishful thinking rooted in the belief that the Universe is obliged to conform to personal expectations.

By contrast, the Ruhr University team have identified three distinct levels of consciousness and demonstrated the evolutionary advantage of each, drawing on detailed studies of birds that show parallel forms of consciousness to those seen in humans. These levels are:

1. Basic arousal — such as the perception of pain, which signals that harm is occurring and that corrective action is required.
2. General alertness — awareness of the broader environment, allowing threats and opportunities to be recognised and responded to appropriately.
3. Reflexive (self-)consciousness — the ability to place oneself within an environment, learn from past experience, anticipate future outcomes, and formulate an action plan; in other words, to construct a narrative with oneself as a participant.

Unintelligent design - If We Had Been Intelligently Designed, Modern Life Wouldn't Cause These Problems

A busy intersection in Zürich - where stress levels are high

Into the Woods | | UZH

If we take creationist claims about the human body at face value – that we are the special design of an omniscient, omnipotent creator god – we would have to conclude that this putative god equipped us for life in small, dispersed bands of hunter-gatherers, entirely free from the pressures of modern urban existence. That is the inescapable implication of new work by Daniel P. Longman of the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, Loughborough University, UK, and Colin N. Shaw of the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Zürich, Switzerland.

In their study, recently published in Biological Reviews, they argue that human evolutionary fitness has deteriorated markedly over the past 300 years, beginning with the Industrial Revolution. They attribute this to the escalating stresses of urban life, which are increasingly linked to counter-survival problems such as declining fertility rates and the rising prevalence of chronic inflammatory conditions, including autoimmune diseases. They also highlight impaired cognitive function in urban settings, with chronic stress playing a central role in many of these conditions.

As they note, our stress responses were shaped in environments where predators such as lions posed intermittent but existential threats. A sudden burst of adrenaline and cortisol – the classic fight-or-flight reaction – made the difference between survival and being eaten. Today, however, we summon exactly the same physiological response to traffic noise, difficult conversations with colleagues or family, and that irritatingly arrogant but ignorant creationist on the Internet. Where a lion encounter would once have been an occasional shock, we now experience the physiological equivalent of facing several lions a day.

For creationists, this poses an awkward problem. An omniscient designer should have foreseen humanity’s future circumstances and endowed us with a physiology robust enough to cope with them. Evolution, by contrast, cannot predict even the next generation, let alone the demands of life tens or hundreds of millennia later. It optimised our ancestors for survival on open African landscapes, not for navigating congested cities, chronic noise, 24-hour information streams, and the relentless stimuli of modern technology. This helps explain why our inherited design is increasingly mismatched to our environment, and why evolution cannot adjust us quickly enough to keep pace.

My own family history illustrates this accelerating mismatch. My grandparents grew up in rural Oxfordshire, before the arrival of the motor car, electricity, modern sanitation, or powered heating. Their lives were essentially unchanged from those of their parents and grandparents. My parents, by contrast, had electricity, piped water, proper sanitation, and radio; later a motor car, a television, and eventually a telephone. Now we have smartphones, laptops, air travel, satnavs, and city centres jammed with traffic. We spend hours each day staring at screens, communicating instantly across the world. My grandparents’ lives would have been recognisable to their great-grandparents, but mine would be unrecognisable to them – such has been the accelerating pace of technological change. No evolutionary process could possibly adapt a species to that speed of environmental transformation.

We are, in effect, experiencing stress levels akin to those of ancestors living among a pride of lions, not merely encountering one on rare occasions. And crucially, we have little or no time to recover before the next ‘lion’ appears.

Creationism Refuted - Complex Life Evolved Almost a Billion Years Earlier That We Thought

December: Complex life developed earlier than previously thought, new study reveals | News and features | University of Bristol

Research led by the University of Bristol and published in the journal Nature a few days ago suggests that the transition from simple prokaryote cells to complex eukaryote cells began almost 2.9 billion years ago – nearly a billion years earlier than some previous estimates. Prokaryotes — bacteria and archaea — had been the dominant, indeed the only, life forms for the preceding 1.1 billion years, having arisen about 300 million years after Earth coalesced 4 billion years ago.

Creationists commonly forget that for the first billion or more years of life on Earth, it consisted solely of single-celled prokaryotes — bacteria and archaea. They routinely post nonsense on social media about the supposed impossibility of a complex cell spontaneously assembling from ‘non-living’ atoms — something no serious evolutionary biologist has ever proposed as an explanation for the origin of eukaryote cells.

There is now little doubt among biologists that complex eukaryote cells arose through endosymbiotic relationships between archaea and bacteria, which may have begun as parasitic or predator–prey interactions before evolving into symbioses as the endpoint of evolutionary arms races. The only questions concern when exactly eukaryote cells first began to emerge, and what triggered their evolution.

The team collected sequence data from hundreds of species and, combined with fossil evidence, reconstructed a time-resolved tree of life. They then used this framework to resolve the timing of historical events across hundreds of gene families, focusing on those that distinguish prokaryotes from eukaryotes.

One surprising finding was that mitochondria were late to the party, arising only as atmospheric oxygen levels increased for the first time — linking early evolutionary biology to Earth’s geochemical history.

Evolution News - Self-Sacrificing Ants Show the Evolved Genetic Basis of Altruism

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ISTA | Ants Signal Deadly Infection

Scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology, Austria, have found that terminally ill pupae in an ant colony emit a chemical signal that prompts worker ants to disinfect them with formic acid — a process that also brings about their death. This behaviour helps keep the colony free from infection and represents a clear example of evolved altruism with a genetic basis. Their findings are reported, open access, in Nature Communications.

One of the criticisms often levelled at evolutionary biology is that it cannot explain altruism, since individuals that sacrifice themselves for others seemingly shouldn’t survive to pass on any genes responsible for such behaviour.

This is plainly untrue. Acts of altruism are widespread in nature: male spiders and mantises are consumed by their mates, providing nutrients for developing eggs; the offspring of social spiders consume their mother, then go on to consume one another. These behaviours persist because they enhance the success of the genes involved.

The key lies in what Richard Dawkins termed the selfish gene. Contrary to creationist misrepresentations, this is not a claim that there exists a gene for selfishness. It refers instead to the way genes appear to act in their own interests. Genes promoting altruistic behaviour benefit when that behaviour increases the reproductive success of individuals carrying the same genes — typically close relatives. The sacrifice of one carrier can thereby enhance the spread of the genes responsible for the altruism.

In humans, altruism arises not only from genetic evolution but also from memetic evolution — the inheritance and adaptation of ideas, norms, and cultural expectations. Human altruism rarely requires life-or-death sacrifice; it more often involves smaller acts such as sharing resources, giving up a seat on a bus, or letting another driver go first at a junction. The advantage, at both genetic and memetic levels, is that such behaviours help build societies where cooperation is reciprocated. Altruism is ultimately an investment in a more stable, supportive environment that may benefit the genes and memes of the individuals who contribute to it.

Unintelligent Design - How The Human Genome Has Mutation-Prone Weak Spots - Incompetence, Malevolence or Evolution?

Mosaic blastocyst

AI-generated image ChatGPT 5.1

If the outcome is pre-ordained, what are all the other sperms for?

New mutation hotspot discovered in human genome | EurekAlert!

Creationists and other religious fundamentalists claim that their god deliberately fashions each human life according to a divine plan — that every individual is personally designed, even down to the genes they inherit from their parents. But this raises a perpetually unanswered question: why produce so many sperm cells, all competing to reach the egg, if the outcome is pre-ordained?

Creationists also insist that our DNA is a “code”, equivalent to a computer program that must have been created by an intelligent designer or programmer.

If that were true, we would expect the genes bestowed on each individual to be robustly designed and immutable.

However, new research by scientists at the Centre for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain, just published in Nature Communications, shows that this is not the case — and once again, a prediction of fundamentalist creationism has been falsified by science.

The researchers found that the human genome is especially vulnerable to mutations in the first 100 base pairs of genes, particularly during the earliest rounds of cell division in embryo development. Each division introduces mutations with the potential to cause disease, including cancer. Because these mutations do not appear in every cell of the early embryo, the resulting individual becomes a genetic mosaic, with some cells and tissues carrying certain mutations while others do not. But if the mutated cells give rise to germ cells — eggs or sperm — the mutation can be passed to the next generation, whose members will carry it in all their cells and may develop disease as a result.

Unless creationism’s designer god intended this outcome, or is incompetent, there is no coherent way to present this as the deliberate work of an intelligent designer. It is, however, entirely consistent with an unintelligent, utilitarian evolutionary process that settles for sub-optimal solutions based on a single criterion: what produces the most descendants who themselves reproduce?

Malevolent Designer - How a Hostile Planet Can Kill With Deadly Toxins

Satellite image of Lake Erie.

Image credit: NOAA Great Lakes CoastWatch MODIS Satellite Image
July 6, 2020

Satellite image of Lake Erie.

Image credit: NOAA Great Lakes CoastWatch MODIS Satellite Image – July 6, 2020

Bacterial villain behind Lake Erie’s ‘potent toxin’ unveiled by U-M study | University of Michigan News

You would think that a planet designed specifically for humans would be safe—one with an abundant supply of clean water to drink and wholesome food to eat.

Sadly, that is far from the case. As recent research has shown, on top of the pathogens and parasites that abound in nature—and which seem almost purpose-built to cause suffering, not just to humans but to virtually every other life form—there now exists yet another threat. Wherever you look in the natural world, every species has one or more parasites adapted to live in or on it, and even parasites themselves often fall prey to their own parasites. To this long list we can now add a group of cyanobacteria capable of turning fresh water into a deadly neurotoxin during warm weather. It is almost as though Earth wasn’t designed by an intelligent, benevolent creator after all.

In science, this is what’s known as a falsified hypothesis. You begin with an idea—in this case, that Earth was designed for humans by an omnibenevolent, omniscient deity—then you consider what predictions would logically follow. One such prediction might be that a planet designed for human well-being would contain no natural hazards or harmful organisms that routinely inflict suffering. Then you examine the evidence. If the facts contradict the prediction, the hypothesis is falsified.

And that is precisely what the existence of harmful organisms does. The evidence directly contradicts the creationist claim of an intelligently designed planet optimally crafted for humans. This does not, in itself, disprove the existence of such a deity; rather, it falsifies the specific claim that the deity is all-loving and all-knowing, or that it intentionally designed Earth and its myriad pathogens and parasites. The alternative is that the god described in the Bible and Qur’an is not as advertised—or does not exist and played no role in designing the world. The pathogens and parasites appear to have arisen from entirely different processes while this supposed designer either looked away or was not involved at all. Such outcomes are not the work of a benevolent creator.

In fact, the deity’s reputation would fare better if it didn’t exist, because then it could not be held responsible.

Malevolent Design - How Breast Cancer is 'Designed' to Survive

Cell culture plates in the Roeder lab where scientists recently studied gene expression in breast cancer.

Credit: Lori Chertoff.

The Rockefeller University » This molecular switch helps cancer cells survive harsh conditions

Researchers at The Rockefeller University's Laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology have uncovered the mechanism that enables breast cancer cells not only to withstand environmental stress, but to turn it to their advantage. They have just published their findings in Nature Chemical Biology.

For ID creationists, these findings pose yet another challenge—one typically ignored or waved away as the consequence of ‘sin’, neatly exposing the Discovery Institute’s attempt to persuade US legislators and educators that ID is a genuine scientific alternative. No real science explains inconvenient evidence by invoking fundamentalist doctrine or unevidenced forces inherited from ancient superstition.

The Rockefeller University team has shown that breast cancer cells can override a regulatory factor that normally controls gene expression. The transcription of DNA into mature messenger RNA involves the enzyme RNA polymerase II (POL II), whose activity depends on around 30 subunits. One of these, MED1, normally carries acetyl groups. Without those acetyl groups, MED1 loses its ability to regulate POL II, allowing the enzyme to transcribe genes that help cancer cells survive. Environmental stress deacetylates MED1. In essence, conditions such as low oxygen or elevated temperature—deadly to normal cells—can instead make cancer cells more resilient.

How Science Work - (And Why Creationism Fails) - Changing Our Minds When the Evidence Changes

Life reconstruction of Wadisuchus kassabi in Late Cretaceous Egypt, depicting an adult seizing a lungfish in a wetland while a juvenile looks on. The scene reflects the rich Quseir Formation ecosystem, complete with turtles and dense vegetation revealed by fossil evidence.

Credit: Nathan Dehaut – Artwork / MUVP – Scientific supervision

A New Global Discovery by Mansoura University's Vertebrate Paleontology Center - Mansoura University, Egypt

When scientists from Mansoura University, Egypt, recently announced in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society of London the discovery of an 80-million-year-old marine crocodyliform unearthed in Egypt’s Western Desert, the headlines hailed it as “the earliest known member of Dyrosauridae”, a forgotten branch of ancient crocodile-relatives adapted for coastal and marine life.

Found in mid-Campanian deposits of the Quseir Formation, Wadisuchus kassabi is represented by partial skulls and jaws from several individuals — enough to show that by this stage dyrosaurids already possessed the long, narrow snout and needle-sharp teeth suited for grabbing fish or turtles. What makes this find so important is not merely the age — though pushing the dyrosaurid fossil record back by several million years is notable — but the evolutionary implications and what it tells us about the scientific method. The cranial anatomy of Wadisuchus exhibits a transitional mixture of primitive and derived features: reduced premaxillary alveoli, modified jaw-occlusion patterns, and dorsally positioned nostrils for surface-breathing, reflecting a transitional form on the path from earlier crocodyliforms toward specialised marine dyrosaurids. Phylogenetic analyses consistently recover Wadisuchus as the basal (earliest-diverging) dyrosaurid — pushing the origin and early diversification of the family deeper into the Cretaceous.

This discovery underscores a fundamental truth of modern science: claims are not fixed dogma, but provisional explanations always subject to revision in the light of new evidence. Just as Wadisuchus reshapes our view of when and where dyrosaurids emerged, other fossil finds have repeatedly nudged back the origins of major vertebrate lineages, re-drawn phylogenetic trees, or revealed unexpected ancestral forms. In this way the scientific method resembles nothing so much as a continual conversation with Nature — a conversation always open to challenge, refinement, or outright contradiction when the data demand it.

Unlike creationists, whom recent research has shown, believe not changing their mind is a sign of strength of character and commitment to their 'faith', scientists know that the real test of character is a willingness to accept the evidence and the humility to allow it to dictate opinion.

Incidentally, it might come as a shock to creationists that a marine fossil was found in the Sahara Desert and that Earth was not created as it just a few thousand years ago, but has changed significantly over the millions of years, including periods of 'green Sahara'. As someone who has flown in a small plane over the Egyptian desert, I can attest to the existence of dry riverbeds and feeder streams in that desert, even though today rain is almost unknown in the vicinity of Luxor.

Incompetent Design - How Sunlight Turns Off Cancer Protection in Skin

Schematic of the role of YTHDF2 in regulating U6 snRNA decay and interaction with TLR3 to control UVB-induced inflammation and tumorigenesis.

Seungwon Yang, Yan-Hong Cui, Haixia Li, et al.(2025), Fig.7 P

New study reveals how controlling sunburn-triggered inflammation may prevent skin cancer - UChicago Medicine

Researchers at the University of Chicago have uncovered how prolonged exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation can lead to skin cancer by disabling a vital protective mechanism in skin cells. They have just published their findings, open access, in Nature Communications.

This protective mechanism relies on a protein called YTHDF2, which plays a key role in regulating RNA metabolism and maintaining cellular health. Sunlight degrades this protein, removing that safeguard and allowing damage to accumulate.

For advocates of Intelligent Design (ID) creationism, this research presents several awkward questions—questions they will either ignore or attribute to ‘sin’.

First, why is this protection needed at all? If life were intentionally and intelligently designed, why would RNA metabolism require an additional, failure-prone layer of regulation to keep cells functioning? Why not design it to be robust in the first place?

Second, why create a system so fragile that sunlight—an unavoidable feature of life on Earth—can disable it? Designing a repair mechanism that breaks down precisely when it is needed most hardly inspires confidence in the designer’s competence.

And then there is the broader problem: ID creationism equates its designer with the supposedly omniscient and omnipotent god of the Bible or Qur’an. If that is true, why design a mechanism that predictably causes cancer? Was this an act of malevolence or oversight?

If YTHDF2 were flawless and impervious to degradation, Discovery Institute fellow William A. Dembski would no doubt present it as an example of “complex specified information,” a supposed indicator of intelligent purpose. But its vulnerability raises uncomfortable possibilities: Is this an unsuccessful attempt to patch over earlier design flaws in RNA metabolism? A sign of competing designers beyond the control of ID’s putative omnipotent creator? Or evidence that the designer is actively introducing harm and suffering?

The answer, of course, is that this problem arises because the human body is not the product of intelligent design at all, but of a long evolutionary process that modifies existing processes and structures to produce workable—though often imperfect—solutions. Evolution favours whatever improves short-term reproductive success, even if it introduces compromises and sub-optimal outcomes that undermine long-term survival and health. These sub-optimal systems then drive the evolution of an additional layers of complexity to minimise the results of failure.

Like other organism's the human body is full of these examples of evolutionary compromises and sub-optimal solutions that cause diseases and health problems that illustrate the difference between an intelligently designed system and an evolved system. Looked at in detail, the human body is evidence against intelligent design and strongly supports the Theory of Evolution, as I show in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design.

Unintelligent Design - The Defect that Causes Alzheimer's - Incompetence or Malevolence?

Exosomes

Researchers discover cell defect linked to the development of Alzheimer’s

Researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark have identified a defect in the production of exosomes within cells, linked to a mutation found in patients with dementia. Their findings are published in the journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, *Alzheimer’s & Dementia*.

Advocates of Intelligent Design argue that all genetic information must originate from an intelligent agent, claiming that anything both complex and specified cannot arise without deliberate design. Their proposed designer is invariably indistinguishable from the god of the Bible and Qur’an: an all-knowing, all-powerful and supposedly benevolent creator.

What they never address is why a system attributed to such a being should fail at all—let alone in ways that cause profound suffering. It is akin to a human engineer producing an aircraft with engines that randomly fail or wings that detach mid-flight. And because this designer is held to be omniscient, the failure cannot be inadvertent. It must have been foreseen and deliberately incorporated, making such mutations part of the intended plan rather than unfortunate accidents.

Following the internal logic of ID creationism, Alzheimer’s dementia would therefore count as an intended outcome—meeting William Dembski’s own criteria for “complex specified genetic information”. This provides yet another instance, alongside the cancer example I discussed recently, of biological processes that appear designed to destroy. It sits comfortably among the many parasites and pathogens explored in The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature’s God is Not Good, all pointing to a distinctly malign pattern in the supposed “design”.

ID proponents typically fall back on blaming “The Fall”, implying the existence of another creative force beyond the control of their designer. This manoeuvre only further undermines their claim that ID is a scientific enterprise rather than creationism thinly disguised, since it relies on biblical literalism to rescue the argument from the conclusion of an incompetent or malevolent designer—an outcome that is theologically awkward and, for many believers, outright heretical.

Malevolent Design - How Some Cancers Are Designed to Win - Incompetence or Malevolence?

Cancer cells dividing

Shapeshifting cancers’ masters, unmasked | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Scientists led by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor Christopher Vakoc have uncovered a mechanism by which certain cancers manage to evade modern medical treatments: they can disguise themselves as ordinary cells from entirely different tissues, such as those of the skin. In two recent papers — one in Nature Communications and another in Cell Reports — Vakoc’s team identify the proteins that determine whether pancreatic cancer cells retain their pancreatic identity or slip into a skin-cell-like state. They also highlight a different set of proteins with a pivotal role in tuft-cell lung cancer.

Proteins, of course, are specified by genetic information, and if that information is altered, so too is the protein’s function. In the language of ID creationists, proteins are products of “complex, specified genetic information”.

This presents intelligent design creationists with a familiar problem — one they usually address, as with parasites and pathogens, by ignoring it and relying on the scientific illiteracy of their followers. If complex, specified information were genuinely evidence of an intelligent designer, then that same designer would be implicated in the origin of the proteins that maintain and diversify cancers. Their “specified information” is neither less complex nor less specific than the proteins involved in cognition, immunity, or embryonic development.

Only by refusing to define “complex specificity” in scientific terms — or to explain how it might be distinguished from information that is supposedly non-complex or non-specified — do ID advocates manage to maintain the fiction that all beneficial traits are the work of their designer, while harmful traits must arise from some other agency. This selective attribution, based entirely on subjective human preference, underscores the religious foundations of intelligent design creationism and its distance from genuine science.

The team’s findings are summarised in a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory news release by Jen A. Miller.

Refuting Creationism - Microbes That Create Life From Non-Life

Mud volcano

Fig. 9: Schematic of microbial succession and biogeochemical processes in serpentinite mud at the Mariana forearc.
This schematic depicts lipid biomarker transitions from pelagic sediment communities to extremophiles adapted to high pH and redox conditions in serpentinite mud. The Mariana forearc biosphere is fueled by alkaline serpentinization fluids enriched in H₂, CH₄, DIC, and organic acids, sustaining specialized microbial communities. Lipid and stable carbon isotope data reveal a shift from relict methanogenic archaea, likely engaged in hydrogenotrophic methanogenesis, to a later ANME-SRB community mediating anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM). Changes in substrate availability likely drove this transition. Distinct lipid signatures, including unsaturated diethers, acyclic GDGTs, and ether-based glycolipids, highlight adaptations to pH stress, phosphate limitation, and fluctuating redox conditions. The presence of in-situ branched GDGTs suggests previously uncharacterized bacterial communities persisting in these ultra-oligotrophic conditions. The Mariana forearc serpentinite biosphere, shaped by episodic fluid flow and substrate shifts, provides insights into deep-sea subsurface habitability. DIC = dissolved inorganic carbon, ANME anaerobic methanotrophic archaea, SRB sulfate-reducing bacteria, AOM anaerobic oxidation of methane, GDGT glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraether.

Kumawat, P., Albers, E., Bach, W. et al. (2025).

Fats provide clues to life at its limits in the deep sea

Researchers at MARUM – Bremen University’s Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences – have made a discovery, just published open access in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, which, properly understood, should make depressing reading for creationists.

They have found living organisms both on and within the ocean floor, surviving in conditions where normal life would be impossible. These microorganisms inhabit mud volcanoes with a pH of 14, metabolising hydrogen and carbon to form methane by drawing energy from minerals in the surrounding rock. In other words, they live entirely without oxygen and with almost no organic matter, synthesising all they need from inorganic sources.

Informed creationists will recognise that these organisms directly refute their frequent assertion that life cannot arise from non-life — because producing life from non-life is precisely what these microorganisms are doing.

This also contradicts the biblical claim that all living things were created for the benefit of humans, since there is no conceivable way these organisms could serve any human purpose. Of course, to be fair, the authors of the Bible were completely ignorant of microorganisms, deep-ocean mud volcanoes, and chemosynthetic metabolism. They could only attempt to explain the larger creatures that lived in the limited region around their homes in the Canaanite hills.

And, as any informed creationist should also understand, these are exactly the sort of extreme conditions that biologists believe may have fostered the emergence of the earliest living organisms during the origin of life on Earth — once again undermining any claim that abiogenesis is impossible.

Refuting Creationism - Diverging Sloth Genomes - Just As The TOE Predicts

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Deforested genomes: scientists find signs of environmental degradation in the genomes of the endangered Maned Sloths - Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research

The discovery fits seamlessly within the framework of Darwinian evolution. Two once-connected populations became isolated and exposed to different ecological conditions, followed their own evolutionary paths. Over time, their genomes accumulated distinct mutations reflecting adaptation, genetic drift, and local environmental pressures. The result is two clearly defined species whose divergence can be explained entirely by natural processes acting over generations — a textbook demonstration of evolution in action.

Yet this same process now drives both species along a far more perilous trajectory. As their habitats continue to shrink and fragment, their populations are losing genetic diversity and becoming increasingly inbred. Evolution has no foresight or purpose; it cannot plan for the future or reverse the consequences of environmental destruction. The very mechanism that once diversified life on Earth can, under relentless human pressure, just as readily lead to extinction.

There is no sign of “intelligent design” in this grim reality — only the blind, natural workings of selection, drift, and chance operating within a degraded environment. If a designer were guiding life towards some higher purpose, it would hardly produce a situation where its own creations are being driven to extinction by the ecological collapse of their habitats. The plight of the maned sloths stands as a vivid reminder that life’s diversity, beauty, and tragedy arise not from supernatural intent, but from the impersonal and unyielding logic of evolution.

As world leaders prepare for COP30 in Brazil, the message from the maned sloths’ genomes could not be clearer: conservation must be guided by evolutionary science and ecological understanding, not by comforting myths of divine oversight. Only by recognising the true, natural processes that shape life can we hope to protect what remains of it.

Refuting Creationism - Another of Those 'Living Fossils' For Creationists To Misrepresent

Adult marine shell-boring spionid polychaete.

Vasily Radishevsky/
Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Spionid traces on fossilized bivalve shells.

Javier Ortega-Hernandez/Harvard University.

Half-billion-year-old parasite still threatens shellfish | UCR News | UC Riverside

It’s Coelacanth time for creationist disinformers again.

Hilariously, I’ve known creationists claim that the 'fact' that coelacanths haven’t changed for 200 million years somehow proves the “evilutionists” are wrong and that Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old. How they managed to examine the genome of a 200-million-year-old fossil remains a mystery, but DNA appears to play no part in a creationist’s definition of evolution.

So, for an alternative fallacious argument, here’s an even older fossil that’s still around today, apparently in much the same form as it was almost half a billion years ago. It’s a parasitic worm that attacks oysters. The details have just been published in the journal iScience by scientists led by University of California, Riverside palaeobiologist Karma Nanglu, with colleagues from Harvard.

The parasitic, soft-bodied bristle worm belongs to a group called the spionids. It’s common in today’s oceans and feeds on the shells of mussels and oysters, leaving a characteristic question mark-shaped track in their shells. Their parasitism doesn’t kill the shellfish but probably shortens their lifespan.

Refuting Creationism - 300,000 Years Of Stone Technology In Africa - Over 2 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fig. 1: Map of Turkana Basin with the Namorotukunan Archeological Site and timeline of currently known events in the Plio-Pleistocene.

a Geographical context of the Koobi Fora Formation (red stripes), the paleontological collection area 40 (green square), and the location of the site of Namorotukunan (black dot); [map produced Natural Earth and NOAAA ETOPO 202295]; b Stratigraphic context of the Koobi Fora Formation highlighting members and key volcanic ash marker levels, yellow bars refer to the age of archeological horizons (tephrostratigraphy after McDougall et al.⁹⁶); c A chronology of key Plio-Pleistocene hominins from the East African Rift System (EARS)^11,74,97,98 d A chronology and key localities associated with hominin lithic technology^3,6,12 (images of Nyayanga provided by E. Finestone; images of Lomekwi and BD1 based on 3D models; artifact images are for representation and not to scale) and the investigations at Namorotukunan: red arrows represent the artifact levels in the archeological excavations (photos DRB), and colored circles (lettered A-G) represent geologic sections investigated to develop a synthetic stratigraphic column (presented in Figs. 2 and 3).

Braun, D.R., Palcu Rolier, D.V., Advokaat, E.L. et al (2025)

Stone Tools Through Generations: 300,000 Years of Human Technology | Media Relations | The George Washington University

The story of our origins is written in the ground of Africa. It is real, tangible, and objective — a record that doesn’t rely on belief or interpretation, but on physical evidence left behind by our ancient ancestors. A fresh chapter of that record has just been described in a new open-access paper in Nature Communications, authored by an international team of palaeoanthropologists led by Professor David R. Braun of the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology at George Washington University, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

By comparison, the origins narrative found in Genesis reflects the worldview and assumptions of people who believed the Earth was small, flat, and covered by a solid dome. It is astonishing that, even today, some treat that ancient cosmology as a more reliable account of human history than the rich and expanding fossil and archaeological record in Africa. Yet such individuals continue to seek influence over policy, law, morality, and social institutions, grounding their authority not in evidence, but in pre-scientific tradition — a worldview formed long before the wheel, let alone modern science.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution By LOSS of Genetic Information

Dysdera tilosensis

Credit: Marc Domènech and Pedro Oromí

Dysdera catalonica

Dysdera tilosensis

Fotografies: Marc Domènech and Pedro Oromí

Deciphering the mechanisms of genome size evolution - Current events - University of Barcelona

For years, creationists have confidently assured anyone who’ll listen that evolution can’t possibly work, because losing genetic material is always disastrous — rather like claiming a book can’t be edited without collapsing into meaningless gibberish. Yet nature has an unhelpful habit of ignoring such pronouncements and getting on with things regardless. And now, a tiny spider living quietly in the Canary Islands has delivered another inconvenient data point: it’s been shedding DNA at a remarkable rate, and doing perfectly well in the process.

Researchers led by Julio Rozas and Sara Guirao, from the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) at the University of Barcelona, have shown that a spider endemic to the Canary Islands has lost almost half its genome in only a few million years.

The spider, Dysdera tilosensis, is a close relative of the mainland species D. catalonica and the familiar British woodlouse-hunter, D. crocata, yet is morphologically almost identical to both.

The findings have been published in the journal Molecular Biology & Evolution.

This discovery runs counter to a general pattern in evolutionary biology, in which adaptation to oceanic island environments often involves increases in genome size. Rather than undermining evolution, this unexpected result enriches the scientific debate over how and why genome size changes during evolution.

It also raises awkward questions for creationist dogma. Why would an intelligent designer equip spiders with almost twice as much genetic material as they actually need? And how would one distinguish such closely related species or show a transition from one to the other in the fossil record, if genome size — the key difference — leaves no trace in fossils?

How Science Works - Expanding Our Knowledge of Coelacanth Evolution.

Reconstruction of a large mawsoniid coelacanth from the British Rhaetian.

Artist credit: Daniel Phillips

[Body]

Coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae

Fraser, Michael D.; Henderson, Bruce A.S., et al (2020). CC BY 4.0, Link

Ancient fish was hiding in plain sight hundreds of years after its believed extinction, study shows - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

A recent re-examination of museum coelacanth fossils has shown that there was more than one taxon in the Late Triassic and that, where we believed there were just four specimens, there are actually more than fifty. These fossils were hiding in plain sight, mis-identified for decades in collections across Britain. This significantly expands the known diversity of coelacanths at that time and neatly illustrates how science continually refines and improves its understanding as new evidence and careful re-analysis emerge.

Coelacanths have long been a favourite talking-point for creationists, who seized on the 1938 discovery of living Latimeria — a lineage once known only from the fossil record and thought extinct — as supposed proof that evolution had somehow stalled. Because the modern species still carries the name “coelacanth”, they leap to the assumption that the fish has remained unchanged for over 200 million years, and therefore evolution must be false. I have even seen creationists claim that if coelacanths have “not evolved” in all that time, the Earth must therefore be only a few thousand years old. It’s an extraordinary logical contortion — and one born of misunderstanding both biology and evidence.

In reality, the modern coelacanth is not the same species as the ancient Triassic forms, nor is evolutionary change required to be dramatic or constant for every lineage. Species can remain broadly similar when their ecological niche remains stable — a concept perfectly consistent with evolutionary theory. What this study demonstrates, once again, is the iterative, self-correcting nature of science: questions are never closed, evidence is always open to re-examination, and conclusions adapt as new data emerges.

Unintelligent Design - Flatworms Can Regenerate Body Parts - So Why Can't Humans?

The planarian Schmidtea mediterranea

Credit: FLI / Anna Schroll

Schmidtea mediterranea

New research shows a tiny, regenerative worm could change our understanding of healing Stowers Institute for Medical Research

Researchers at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have uncovered new details explaining how the planarian flatworm, Schmidtea mediterranea, can regenerate not just a missing body part, but an entire organism from a tiny tissue fragment. Their findings have just been published in Cell Reports and represent a major advance in our understanding of regeneration at the cellular and genetic level.

This little worm continues to surprise scientists. Remove its head? It grows a new one. Slice it into pieces? Each piece becomes a complete worm. Such astonishing powers naturally prompt two very different kinds of questions – one scientific, one theological.

If one temporarily accepts creationist premises for the sake of argument, we are forced into a series of uncomfortable and contradictory conclusions.

Why would a supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent designer grant a humble flatworm the ability to regenerate an entire body, yet deny this life-saving ability to humans and virtually all other organisms? If this designer could abolish suffering, disease, and limb loss – and knowingly chose not to – what does that imply about its nature?

Creationists are left defending a worldview in which their designer appears either: unwilling to prevent suffering; unable to create beneficial traits consistently; or deliberately designing suffering into its creation. None of these options are theologically tidy – and they certainly do not align with the claim of a universally benevolent designer. The creationist framework produces contradictions, apologetics acrobatics, and moral dilemmas rather than answers.

By contrast, when we ask the evolutionary question – “How did this ability evolve?” – the picture becomes coherent.

Planarians have followed a unique evolutionary trajectory in which extreme regeneration conferred a significant survival advantage. Natural selection acted on stem-cell behaviour, gene regulation, and patterning networks over deep time, refining a mechanism that happens to be far beyond the needs of most other species.

Other organisms have regenerative abilities too – salamanders, zebrafish, sea stars, even humans to a limited extent – but the selective pressures and biological constraints differed. Regeneration is complex, energetically costly, and evolution works from what already exists. Most lineages simply did not follow that path. To borrow Michael Behe’s favourite term, planarian regeneration may appear “irreducibly complex” – and yet, as usual, complexity proves to be a testament to gradual evolutionary refinement, not evidence for supernatural assembly.

Refuting Creationism - The Human Skull Evolved Fastest of All the Apes

Great Apes

Gibbons

Phylogeny and configuration of landmarks and semilandmarks.

Gómez-Robles Aida, et al. (2025)

Humans evolved fastest amongst the apes | UCL News - UCL – University College London

A newly published paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B by researchers from University College London (UCL) shows that the human skull evolved relatively rapidly compared to that of other apes. The evolutionary changes involve modifications in the size and shape of the facial and cranial bones.

This serves as a reminder of just how artificial and functionally useless the creationist concept of a “kind” is. It should also show creationists the fallacy of the frequent claim that biologists are abandoning the Theory of Evolution, since this paper discusses the results of evolution, not some infantile notion of magical intervention by an unevidenced supernatural entity.

Creationists are quite content to regard all cats—from domestic tabbies to tigers—as belonging to the same “kind”, even though the main difference between them lies in the size of their skeletons. Yet they balk at the idea that humans and the great apes could belong to the same “kind”, despite the fact that the key distinctions between us and them are also differences in size and proportion—most notably in the bones of the skull.

But then, “kind” is precisely the sort of term creationists favour because it has no fixed definition and can be expanded or contracted to suit whatever argument they are trying to make. The only consistent rule seems to be that whatever constitutes a “kind”, it must always exclude humans. This sometimes leads to the absurdity of defining an “animal kind” and a separate “human kind”.

The UCL team suggest that the rapid evolution of the human skull can be explained by the considerable advantage conferred by a larger brain and advanced cognitive abilities.

Our complex cognition allows us to communicate abstract ideas through both words and gestures—what we call “body language”—much of which depends on facial expression. A flat, forward-facing face enhances our ability to convey and interpret these subtle cues. As social animals, we identify acquaintances and strangers by their faces; we watch the faces of those who speak to us; and we instinctively read emotions such as pleasure, anger, confusion, or distress in their expressions.

In short, it is our large brain and expressive face that make us human — not the addition of new organs or limbs, as creationists often insist marks a change above the genus level, but rather differences in the size and shape of the bones of the skull. Given the close similarity of our genomes to those of other apes, these differences arise not from the amount of genetic information, but from the way that information is regulated during embryonic development.

Refuting Creationism - How Dynamic Geology Influenced Early Civilisation

The Great Ziggurat of Ur dedicated to the Moon god. Sumerians believed that the gods lived in the temple at the top of the ziggurats.

Photo credits: Reed Goodman,
Clemson University

Geography of Mesopotamian Plain (dashed black line) and its joint watershed (black line)

Giosan L, Goodman R (2025)

Urban civilization rose in Southern Mesopotamia on the back of tides – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have shown, in a paper just published in PLOS ONE, that the rise of Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia was strongly influenced by the dynamic interplay of tides, rivers, and sedimentation at the head of the Arabian Gulf. In doing so, they remind us just how parochial and derivative the culture that produced the origin myths in Genesis really was.

According to Genesis — which places the Middle East, and the Hebrews in particular, at the centre of everything — humans were created fully formed, without ancestry, in a ready-made Bronze Age civilisation.

Within just five generations of a supposed genocidal global flood that allegedly reset life on Earth, eight survivors are said to have produced a population large and skilled enough to embark on a massive civil engineering project: building a tower up to Heaven. In this worldview, Heaven lay just above the clouds over the Middle East, on a flat Earth watched over by a creator god who could apparently be taken by surprise.

Meanwhile, several other ancient civilisations were continuing uninterrupted, apparently unknown to the author of Genesis — despite the fact that some of the stories in Genesis are clearly derived from older Mesopotamian and Egyptian myths. Both the genocidal flood myth and the Tower of Babel narrative draw directly on Mesopotamian sources: the flood from the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the tower itself from the Great Ziggurat at Ur.

What the Genesis myths fail to acknowledge is the fundamental role of geological and environmental change in shaping human civilisation. The authors of these myths believed they lived in an unchanging world, created especially for them by a perfect god. There is no hint of plate tectonics shifting continents, no awareness that volcanic gases can alter climates, or that major rivers can change course or silt up. Yet such processes could and did disrupt the regular flooding on which early agriculture depended. Silting and delta formation could leave once-coastal communities stranded inland, while blocking the twice-daily tidal ebb and flow that once reached deep upriver.