How Science Works - Why Did The Woolly Rhino Go Extinct 4,000 Years Before Creation Week?

Woolly rhinoceros, Coelodonta antiquitatis
Grotte Chauvet, Ardèche, France

Source

Woolly rhinoceros, Coelodonta antiquitatis

By Mr Langlois10 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

DNA from wolf pup’s last meal reveals new facts about woolly rhino’s extinction

A new research paper published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, by a team led by palaeogeneticists from the Centre for Palaeogenetics, Stockholm, Sweden, may make uncomfortable reading for any creationists with the courage to read it.

Firstly, it deals with events from that long period of pre-“Creation Week” history — evidence which would not exist if the biblical Flood myth were true. Secondly, it illustrates how, in contrast to the claim that scientists are only permitted to publish findings that conform to a rigid scientific orthodoxy, researchers are perfectly willing to revise established ideas when new evidence demands it. In this case, the study shows that one aspect of what palaeobiologists thought they understood about the evolutionary history of Eurasian megafauna may be wrong.

How We Know The Bible is Wrong - Cosmology

NGC 2566, a spiral galaxy located in the constellation Puppis

potm2412a

These two galaxies are named NGC 4490 and NGC 4485, and they’re located about 24 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs). Aside from the Milky Way’s own dwarf companions (the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds), this is the closest known interacting dwarf-dwarf system where astronomers have directly observed both a gas bridge and resolved stellar populations. Together NGC 4490 and NGC 4485 form the system Arp 269, which is featured in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. At such a close distance (and with Webb’s impressive ability to peer through dusty cosmic clouds) these galaxies allow astronomers to witness up close the kinds of galaxy interactions that were common billions of years ago.

Source: potm2511a

Just a gentle reminder, if any were needed, that we can tell the Bible is wrong by comparing its descriptions with what we can observe. To take a silly-simple example that even a creationists should be able to understand: supposing I told you that the Bible had 7 chapters in three sections, the Old, Middle And New Testaments, and was just 50 pages long, you could simply look in the Bible and see that I was wrong. It would be no use me trying to claim that I was right really because my statement was an allegory or a metaphor, because you could see that it was neither; it was simply wrong, unequivocally and irrefutably so.

Well, it's the same with the description of the Universe in the Bible. We can look at the Universe now, using technology the Bronze Age authors of the Bible could never dream of, and see that it is nothing like the description in the Bible.

So, just as my whimsical description of the Bible was not even close, so we can see that the Bronze age authors of the Bible were not even close. The difference of course is that while my mistakes were deliberate, theirs were the result of ignorance.

So, let's see again how the Bible describes a small, flat universe consisting of a single planet with a sun and moon hanging over it, and the whole covered by a dome to keep the water out.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1.6-10)

And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.(Genesis 1.16-18)

How the Bible's authors saw the Universe.

And now let's look at what some tiny fragments of the Universe are really like, as shown by the James Webb Space Telescope and published by the European Space Agency (ESA):

Unintelligent Design - A Brain 'Designed' for Memory Loss in Old Age

[left caption]

[right caption]

New Mega-Analysis Reveals Why Memory Declines With Age | Hebrew SeniorLife

A paper published last November in Nature Communications by an international team lead by scientists from the University of Oslo, is just the sort of evidence against intelligent design and for evolution that creationists normally misrepresent, lie about or ignore, because it illustrates the stark difference between what ID creationism predicts and what we see, and of course, what we see is exactly what the Theory of Evolution predicts. And it's another superb example of how the human body refutes the childish notion of intelligent design by a magic invisible designer, many more of which I have included in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design.

There is a persistent tendency among creationists and Intelligent Design advocates to imagine biology as if it were the product of a competent, benevolent engineer, optimised for lifelong performance and reliability. Real organisms, however, stubbornly refuse to behave like that. Evolution does not design for comfort, longevity, or even cognitive elegance; it shapes traits that maximise reproductive success in the environments in which our ancestors actually lived. Once reproduction has occurred and offspring are independent, the force of natural selection weakens dramatically. From that point on, biological systems are increasingly free to accumulate compromises, trade-offs, and outright failures — not because they are useful, but because there is little evolutionary incentive to eliminate them.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the ageing human brain. Memory, learning, and cognitive flexibility are exquisitely tuned for early and mid-life, precisely when they matter most for survival, social navigation, and reproduction. Later in life, however, those same systems reveal a striking lack of long-term maintenance. This is not a mystery, nor is it a design flaw crying out for a supernatural explanation. It is exactly what evolutionary theory predicts under mechanisms such as antagonistic pleiotropy, mutation accumulation, and the diversion of finite biological resources away from indefinite repair and towards reproduction. In short, evolution produces brains that are *good enough* for long enough — not brains that are guaranteed to remain intact into old age.

That expectation is strongly reinforced by the paper in Nature Communications, which combines large-scale neuroimaging and cognitive data to examine why memory reliably declines with age even in otherwise healthy adults. Rather than pointing to a single failing component or a neatly isolated genetic “defect”, the study reveals a diffuse pattern of structural brain change, with memory loss emerging from the cumulative erosion of multiple interconnected regions. This kind of widespread, variable vulnerability is exactly what an evolutionary framework anticipates — and exactly the opposite of what Intelligent Design would lead us to expect. What follows is not evidence of poor design, but evidence of no design at all: only the predictable consequences of evolution’s ruthless focus on reproductive success early in life, and its indifference to what happens long after that job is done.

Refuting Creationism - Two Ancient Eurasians Carried Human Papillomavirus (HPV16) - Long Before 'Creation Week' and 'The Fall'

A facial reconstruction of Ötzi the Iceman.

Image credit: Reconstruction by Kennis © South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Foto Ochsenreiter

Ötzi the Iceman mummy carried a high-risk strain of HPV, research finds | Live Science

Palaeontologists at the Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil have analysed the DNA recovered from two ancient humans and discovered that they were both carriers of the Human Papillomavirus HPV16, a virus implicated in several cancers. They have presented their evidence, ahead of peer-reviewed publication in the pre-print server, bioRxiv.

The interesting thing from the point of view of virology is that this discovery shed considerable light on when HPV entered the human virome and commenced co-evolving with us, with one theory being that we acquired them from Neanderthals. From the point of view of creationists however, the news could scarcely be worse.

The first sample, obtained from the famous 'Ötzi the Iceman', the 5,300 year-old mummified body recovered from a glacier on the Italian-Austrian border, is probably not too much of a problem for creationists as it just about falls within the timeline of the Bible mythology, apart from the little problem of it being from before they believe the was a general reset of Earth's biosphere in a genocidal flood which would have destroyed the glacier and everything in it, so Ötzi should not have been there.

But, the second is a massive problem, since it was recovered from a leg of a man, Ust'-Ishim man, recovered from western Siberia and dated to 45,000 years BP - way before creationists believe Earth existed, and tens of thousands of years before the mythical 'Fall', when creationists believe viruses didn't exist. This specimen provided the oldest complete human genome so far recovered and the DNA contains the unmistakable genome of HPV16. Creationist mythology just keeps getting further and further from reality as exposed by science using real-world evidence.

Traditionally, creationists claim Earth is 6,000 - 10,000 years old and was created perfect in every way, with no deaths or diseases, so no viruses, parasites or pathogens, bodies that always functioned perfectly and genomes that never failed to replicate perfectly. Then, along came 'sin' which, by some mysterious process, was able to thwart the omnipotent creator god's perfect plan and create viruses and other pathogens and make perfect physiology begin to malfunction and genomes to fail to replicate perfectly, causing variations and genetic weaknesses, etc.

Why a reputedly omnipotent creator failed to anticipate the effects of 'sin' and make its creation robust enough to resist them is never explained, although, apparently, it provided immune systems in preparation for something that, although omniscient, and even claimed to have created 'evil' (Isiah 45:7), it then failed to anticipate. But, as though those myths aren't too ridiculous for any adult with even a basic education to believe, creationists have to continually think of ways to ignore the evidence and continue holding plainly absurd beliefs, under the child-like delusion that their ability to do so is a sign of strength.

The paper itself sets out to address a long-standing question in human virology: how long oncogenic human papillomaviruses have been associated with our species, and whether their origins lie in relatively recent cultural changes or deep evolutionary history.

Creationism Refuted - What Was Happening In Australia Long Before 'Creation Week'

An ancient Australian landscape shaped by millions of years of slow erosion, Kalbarri National Park, Western Australia.

Maximilian Dröllner

Binocular microscopic images of zircon crystals separated from various studied rocks: (a) gabbro A1: P4, A2: S20; (b) porphyritic granite, B1: S1, B2: L1, B3: S5, B4: S6; (c) fine-grained granite, C1: L3, C2: S12, C3: S7, C4: S12; (d) mylonitic granite, D1: S4, D2: S5, D3: L5, D4: P2; (e) leucocratic granitoid, E1: S3, E2: L5, E3: G1, E4: P2; bars: 100 m.

Shahbazi, Hossein; et al. (2014)

A ‘cosmic clock’ in tiny crystals has revealed the rise and fall of Australia’s ancient landscapes

The Bronze Age creation myths preserved in the Bible assert that Earth is only some 6,000–10,000 years old, depending on how the text is interpreted. The difficulty for those who insist on treating the Bible as literal history is that these claims are casually and repeatedly refuted by real-world evidence. That leaves creationists with few options other than bearing false witness against scientists or asserting that the physical evidence itself must be deceptive—despite their own scripture reassuring them that the god it describes “cannot lie” (Titus 1:2).

The problem is compounded by the fact that scientists are continually improving their ability to measure the age of things, including the histories of entire continents. We can now say, with a high degree of confidence and with abundant supporting evidence, that Earth is billions of years old and has undergone profound changes over that vast span of time. These include the movement of tectonic plates, the rise and erosion of mountain ranges, repeated fluctuations in sea level, major climate shifts, and the appearance, spread, and extinction of forests and entire orders of animal and plant life.

That ability has now taken another significant step forward. A team of scientists from Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and the University of Cologne in Germany has developed a technique that not only allows rocks to be dated, but also reveals what has happened to them over immense spans of time—recorded in microscopic zircon crystals as they were exposed at Earth’s surface, buried, and later re-exposed. Their findings have just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Three members of the team have also published an open-access article in The Conversation, which I will reproduce below under a Creative Commons licence, formatted for stylistic consistency. Before that, however, here is an explanation of how this remarkable technique works, and why it allows scientists to reconstruct the deep-time history of entire landscapes.

Refuting Creationism - Why The Theory of Gravity is Incomplete, Unlike The Theory of Evolution

It may come as a surprise to some that scientists at the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) at the University of Bremen, Germany, together with colleagues from the Transylvanian University of Brașov, Romania, have proposed a new theory of gravity, which they recently published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

Even flat-earthers do not attempt to deny gravity. No one who does not require medication doubts that gravity is the force that prevents us from floating off into space and causes objects to fall when dropped. No one seriously believes they can step off a tall building and come to no harm because gravity is “just a theory”.

And yet, despite its obvious and universal effects, gravity remains incompletely understood. Unlike evolution—which can be directly observed and whose underlying mechanisms have been well established for decades—we still lack a complete explanation of how gravity works. Newton described it mathematically as an attractive force between masses, proportional to those masses and obeying an inverse-square law, but he did not explain why masses attract one another. Einstein later recast gravity as the curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy, with objects following the shortest paths through that curved geometry. However, gravity has never been successfully reconciled with quantum mechanics and appears to be a phenomenon that belongs to the macroscopic domain of relativity. Although most physicists assume that relativity and quantum mechanics must ultimately be unified, a quantum theory of gravity remains elusive.

In other words, as with evolution, we know that gravity is real, and we understand its effects extremely well. But unlike evolution—where we possess a comprehensive and coherent explanatory framework—we currently have only incomplete and sometimes conflicting theories for gravity’s underlying cause.

Despite this, creationists never dispute the theory of gravity on the grounds of these gaps. The reason is obvious: their sacred collection of Bronze Age myths makes no claims about gravity at all. Its authors took gravity for granted, seeing no need to explain it, and therefore left no theological foothold for modern denial. There are no angels holding planets in orbit or magical forces suspending objects in mid-air, and so gravity is quietly accepted.

Refuting Creationism - Earth - A Planet Fine Tuned For Nematodes

Michael Werner collects water and soil samples while hunting nematodes on Great Salt Lake’s east shore between Fremont and Antelope islands.

Photo credit: Julie Jung.

Great Salt Lake roundworm gets Shoshone name – @theU

Representative microbialite mounds at Site 6 from which nematodes were extracted.

News recently published in the Journal of Nematology should give pause for thought to any creationist who imagines that a magical creator made Earth perfectly suited for human life. The report describes the discovery of a new species of nematode — a group of roundworms, some of which are little more than a millimetre long — living under the extreme conditions found in the Great Salt Lake in northern Utah, USA. The species is believed to be endemic to that lake.

Nematodes are the most abundant animal phylum on Earth in both aquatic and terrestrial environments, with around 250,000 described species. It is estimated that roughly 80% of all animal life in terrestrial soils, and about 90% of that on the ocean floor, consists of nematodes. They occur in virtually every environment, from polar ice to deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and, as this newly discovered species demonstrates, in conditions of extreme salinity.

If Earth can be said to be ideally suited for any group of organisms, nematodes would be strong contenders. Humans, by contrast, require a very narrow range of terrestrial conditions in order to survive without specialised technology; consequently, much of the planet is unsuitable for — and often actively hostile to — human life.

Genetic analysis indicates that there may be two distinct populations of this nematode within the lake, raising intriguing questions for biologists: how did they arrive there, and what role do they play in the lake’s ecosystem? This species represents only the third metazoan known to inhabit the lake, the other two being brine shrimp and brine flies. Together, these organisms support vast populations of migratory birds, making the Great Salt Lake a vital feeding ground during migration.

Creationism Refuted - Earth - A Planet Fine-Tuned For Extinction

© Kaori Serakaki (OIST)

Illustrations of Ordovician, jawless vertebrates. Left is a Promissum conodont, ranging from 5 to 50 cm in length and named after unusual, cone-like teeth fossils, which are hypothesized to be ancestors of modern lampreys and hagfishes. On the right is a pair of Sacabambaspis, around 35 cm in length, which had distinct, forward-facing eyes and an armored head. Very few conodont species survived the Late Ordovician Extinction Event, and no fossils of animals like Sacabambaspis from after the event have been discovered.

© Nobu Tamura (CC BY-SA)

The Age of Fishes began with mass death | Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology OIST

A recent paper published in Science Advances by Wahei Hagiwara and Professor Lauren Sallan of the Macroevolution Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan, closes a long-standing gap in our understanding of the early radiation of vertebrates into jawed and jawless fishes following the Late Ordovician mass extinction, around ~445–443 million years ago. Their analysis shows that this radiation arose from a small number of fortunate survivors clinging on in ecological refugia. From those few lineages, of course, all modern marine and terrestrial vertebrates ultimately evolved.

This study neatly dismantles one of creationism’s favourite rhetorical fallbacks: the claim that Earth was deliberately “fine-tuned” to support complex life, and ultimately humans. The evolutionary pattern revealed here—near-annihilation followed by recovery from a few scattered refugia—is not the signature of foresight or optimisation, but of contingency and survival against the odds. Life does not flourish because conditions are perfectly arranged for it; rather, whatever happens to survive is forced to adapt to whatever conditions remain. The history of vertebrates, like that of life more generally, is therefore not one of careful planning, but of repeated catastrophe followed by opportunistic evolutionary radiation.

Creationists are notable for clinging to demonstrably false beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence, childishly mistaking stubbornness for intellectual strength, rather like a spoilt toddler refusing to accept that they have just lost a game of Snap!. Alongside the patently absurd claim that Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old sits the almost equally untenable belief that the planet was created exactly as it is, perfectly suited for human life. This notion is maintained despite abundant evidence for repeated mass extinctions driven by cosmic impacts, large-scale geological processes such as plate tectonics and associated seismic activity, major reorganisations of ocean circulation, and delicately balanced biogeochemical feedback systems involving oxygenation and carbon cycling that periodically spiral out of control, triggering catastrophic climate change.

What the evidence actually reveals is not a cosy, well-regulated world resembling some tranquil small town in Kansas, but a planet that is frequently so hostile to life that much of it is wiped out entirely. Most species go extinct, leaving only a handful of survivors to inherit the aftermath and radiate into new forms adapted to altered conditions—until they too are eliminated by some future catastrophe. The conclusion is unavoidable: Earth is not fine-tuned for human life, or for life in general. Instead, today’s species are the fortunate descendants of a few lucky survivors, shaped by natural selection to fit available ecological niches as neatly as a hand fits a glove.

Malevolent Design - How ID Creationism 'Proves' Pancreatic Cancer is 'Intelligently Designed'

The Krainer lab developed 12 initial ASO drug candidates. The best performing ASO—ASO-A—completely broke the SRSF1-AURKA-MYC circuit, leading to slower tumor growth and cell death.

Untreated PDAC tumor organoid

PDAC tumor organoid after treatment with ASO-A

CSHL’s Krainer lab has discovered a key oncogenic circuit driving aggressive pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) progression. Using human PDAC tumor organoids, seen here, the team developed a potential RNA splicing-based therapeutic that collapses the circuit.

Short-circuiting pancreatic cancer | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

These examples of what Discovery Institute fellows Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski call “irreducible complexity” and “complex specified information” respectively — cited by them as evidence for an intelligent designer — are now being discovered with such monotonous regularity that it is astonishing they never appear in any of the Discovery Institute’s anti-evolution, anti-science propaganda.

The answer to that conundrum is, of course, that such examples are far more frequently found in parasites, pathogens, and idiopathic conditions such as cancer and autoimmune disease. No self-respecting religious fundamentalist is going to open that particular can of worms and appear to be promoting a manifestly malevolent god. It is far safer to remain silent and instead present cult followers with carefully curated examples of supposedly “beneficial” complexity, selected to appeal to their pre-existing biases.

Nevertheless, here is yet another example whose refusal to be addressed by creationists neatly illustrates the disingenuous nature of these alleged “proofs of intelligent design”. The news comes from a paper just published in the Cell Press journal, Molecular Cell, which shows how pancreatic cancer—specifically pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC)—depends on a complex regulatory circuit consisting of three key components.

The research, conducted by a team from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and led by former CSHL graduate student Alexander Kral, builds on earlier work by Professor Adrian Krainer, who discovered that the protein SRSF1 jump-starts PDAC. The new study shows that SRSF1 does not act alone, but forms one of three interdependent “pillars” in this malignant system—the other two being Aurora kinase A (AURKA) and the oncogene MYC. In laboratory experiments, disabling any one of these three components using RNA-based therapy collapsed the circuit, reduced tumour viability, and triggered programmed cell death.

In Michael Behe’s terms, reducing the complexity kills the system. In William Dembski’s terms, destroying the “complex specified genetic information” kills the cancer cells.

This leaves creationists who are honest enough to confront the evidence with a stark choice: either this is evidence that their intelligent designer deliberately designed pancreatic cancer, or Behe’s and Dembski’s long-trumpeted “proofs of intelligent design” are nothing of the sort. Some of the less scientifically literate will, predictably, invoke “The Fall”, thereby revealing once again that Intelligent Design creationism is not science at all. It is merely Bible-literalist religious fundamentalism dressed up in a laboratory coat — exactly what the Discovery Institute has been attempting to smuggle into US classrooms ever since the 1987 Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard made it clear that teaching creationism in public schools violates the Establishment Clause of the US First Amendment.

Creationism Refuted - Why Cosmic Ray Storms Make C14 Dating So Accurate - Running Rings Around Creationists

Pencil marks note specific years along tree rings from a Japanese cedar.

Tomozo Yagi/AP Images for American Association for the Advancement of Science (“AAAS”); publisher of Science

A cosmic carbon spike
Cosmic rays from solar flares or other extraterrestrial sources collide with gas molecules in our atmosphere, spawning neutrons. When a free neutron knocks a proton out of a nitrogen atom, it forms the radioisotope carbon-14 (¹⁴C). The more energetic the event, the higher the ratio of ¹⁴C to stable carbon isotopes. Trees breathe in these isotopes as carbon dioxide (CO₂)

Marking time: Cosmic ray storms can pin precise dates on history from ancient Egypt to the Vikings | Science | AAAS

As though 2026 hadn't started badly enough for creationism, it just got a whole lot worse, with news that geochronologists have a method with which they can pinpoint carbon-14 dates to exact years, removing virtually all sources of error and, devastatingly for creationists, one of their traditional ways to dismiss evidence they don't like has evaporated. But this isn't new information; it's something creationists have either been kept ignorant of, have been pretending not to know about it, or, more likely, did not understand the subject well enough to realise it refuted their claims. It was actually published in Science in April 2023

One of the most persistent fall-back positions in creationist rhetoric is not to deny individual discoveries outright, but to retreat into claims that scientific dating methods are too uncertain to be trusted. Radiocarbon dating, in particular, is routinely portrayed as vague, circular, or endlessly “adjusted” to fit preconceived evolutionary timelines. This claim relies heavily on the idea that dates come with wide error bars that can supposedly be stretched, compressed, or reinterpreted to accommodate a much younger history.

Creationists also rely on the unsupported assertion that radioactive decay rates were much higher once upon a time - a process that coincidentally stopped as soon as we developed the technology to measure it accurately. This claim also sits uncomfortably with another creationist claim - that the Universe is so fine-tuned that altering any of its parameters by even the smallest an=mount would make life impossible. The inconsistency of these two claims is lost on those who have no understanding of how radioactive decay depends on nuclear forces and altering those would make the formation of atoms impossible, so high decay rates when they believe life was created would mean not even Earth could exist, let alone organic molecules.

But perhaps the most amusing accusations against science is that carbon-14 dating assumes a constant ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere, but in fact it is variable, depending on solar activity. Not only is this known and is routinely compensated for using dendrochronology because tree rings contain an accurate record of these changes, but it forms the very basis of this devastating rebuttal of creationist claims - we can accurately pinpoint spikes in carbon-14 production and correlate them with known events in history, thus removing any reasonable margin of error.

Creationism Refuted - Early Hominins From Morocco Confirm The African Origin of Homo Sapiens

Thomas Quarry I, Grotte à Hominidés: Mandible ThI-GH-10717 during the excavation.

© J.P. Raynal,
Programme Préhistoire de Casablanca

773,000-year-old mandible ThI-GH-1 from Thomas Quarry in Morocco.

© Hamza Mehimdate, Programme Préhistoire de Casablanca.

Early hominins from Thomas Quarry I (Morocco) reveal an African lineage near the root of Homo sapiens

The discovery and dating (of which more later) of hominin remains in a Moroccan quarry, reported recently in Nature, has provided further confirmation that the origin of Homo sapiens lies in Africa, not Eurasia, contrary to an alternative hypothesis that has occasionally been proposed. The material consists of mandibles and other fragmentary remains, and also sheds light on the evolutionary origins of Neanderthals and Denisovans.

That is not to say that any serious palaeoanthropologists believed humans evolved wholly in Eurasia. Rather, some suggested that the final stages of Homo sapiens evolution may have occurred there, derived from descendants of earlier African migrants such as H. erectus, H. rhodesiensis, or H. antecessor. Others have argued that the so-called ‘muddle in the middle’ of the hominin family tree may represent a single, widely distributed species exhibiting regional variation across both Africa and Eurasia.

However, the Moroccan specimens display a clear mosaic of primitive and derived features — precisely the pattern that creationists call ‘transitional species’ and insist don't exist. These fossils combine traits seen in African sister lineages with features associated with H. antecessor, a pre-Neanderthal/Denisovan European species whose remains are being excavated at the Sima de los Huesos (Cave of Bones) site at Atapuerca, Spain.

The fossils are also exceptionally valuable for palaeoanthropology for another reason. The sediments in which they were found preserve the unmistakable signature of the Matuyama–Brunhes geomagnetic reversal, which occurred around 773,000 years ago when Earth’s magnetic poles flipped. This provides an unusually robust chronological anchor, as the timing of this reversal has been independently verified from multiple, entirely separate lines of evidence.

There is therefore a great deal here for creationists to attempt to dismiss. First, there is the mosaic of primitive and derived features that identify these fossils as genuinely transitional — something creationism insists does not exist. Second, there is the age of the material, securely dated to approximately 763,000 years (±4,000 years) before creationists insist Earth was magicked out of nothing, placing ancestral hominins hundreds of thousands of years before the Bronze Age biblical story of a single, ancestor-free human couple. Finally, and perhaps most inconveniently of all, the dating does not rely on radiometric methods at all, but on geomagnetic reversal stratigraphy, verified beyond any reasonable doubt. The biblical timeline is therefore wrong by many orders of magnitude.

Unintelligent Design - An Arms Race Between a Parasitic Beetle And a Parasitic Fungus

Creationism's Unintelligent Designer Trying To Solve The Problem He Just Created

Adult spruce bark beetles in their galleries in the bark of a Norway spruce tree. The beetle in the middle is infected with the fungus Beauveria bassiana.

© Benjamin Weiss, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology

Fungus turns bark beetles’ defenses against them

A paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) has raised the spectre of evolutionary arms races for creationism. Evolutionary arms races are something of a nightmare for creationists because, within the paradigm of intelligent design by a single designer, having an arms race with yourself makes no sense at all.

Evolutionary arms races are among the strongest arguments against intelligent design, as I point out in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax. They epitomise stupidity. What on Earth is the point of designing a solution to a problem for one species, only to treat that solution as a problem to be solved for another? It is almost exactly as if two organisms are evolving in response to changes in their environments, of which their predator or prey is a key component. It makes less sense than a dog chasing its own tail – at least the dog gets some exercise.

The arms race reported in this paper, by a research team at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, is between the spruce bark beetle, Ips typographus, and the pathogenic fungus Beauveria bassiana.

In fact, there are two arms races at work here. The first is between the Norway spruce, Picea abies, and its microbial environment. The tree produces antimicrobial phenolic compounds as a defence. The spruce bark beetle has evolved the ability to convert these compounds into an even more toxic derivative, which helps protect the beetle and enables it to successfully colonise the spruce.

The clever twist is that the fungus Beauveria bassiana has evolved a countermeasure. It converts the beetle’s toxic compound by binding a sugar molecule to it and adding a methyl group. This modification effectively neutralises the beetle’s antifungal defence, making it more susceptible to fungal infection.

Translated into creationist terms, a designer first designed a defence for the spruce that can be exploited by a parasitic beetle to protect itself from microbes, including a pathogenic fungus. The same designer then designed a pathogenic fungus capable of neutralising the beetle’s defences, allowing it to infect the beetle more efficiently.

Malevolent Design - How The Herpes Virus Entered Our Genome Then Co-Evolved With Us

Source: BioLogos

First ancient human herpesvirus genomes document their deep history with humans

An international research team led by the University of Vienna and the University of Tartu (Estonia) — in collaboration with the University of Cambridge and University College London — has shown that ancient genomes of human betaherpesvirus 6A and 6B (HHV-6A/B) entered the human genome and then co-evolved with humans over the last 2,000 years. Their study, published in Science Advances a few days ago, confirms that these viruses have been evolving with, and within, humans since at least the Iron Age.

A common creationist claim, rooted in ignorance of what genetic information actually is, is that new genetic information cannot be created. Claims that new genetic information cannot arise because it would violate the laws of thermodynamics rely on a fundamental category error. The second law applies to closed systems, whereas every biological system on Earth is emphatically open, continuously exchanging energy and matter with its environment. Local decreases in entropy are not only permitted but expected in open systems supplied with external energy — which, on Earth, is overwhelmingly provided by the Sun. Crystals grow, snowflakes form, embryos develop, and genomes increase in length and complexity without violating any physical law.

Moreover, information is not a conserved physical quantity like energy. Shannon information theory concerns the statistical properties of signals in communication channels; it says nothing about biological meaning, function, or heredity. Treating genetic information as though it were interchangeable with thermodynamic entropy is simply a misuse of terminology. When genomes gain duplicated genes, viral insertions, or transferred sequences, no atoms are created, no laws are broken, and no special pleading is required — just chemistry operating under well-understood physical principles.

The creationist claim is flatly contradicted by straightforward observations of several well-understood mechanisms by which new genetic information can enter a species’ genome. These include gene duplication or whole-genome duplication, horizontal gene transfer from one species to another (particularly common in parasite–host relationships), and — as demonstrated by the research discussed here — the insertion of viral DNA into the genome. This last process gives rise to endogenous viral elements that are ubiquitous in biology and which precisely match evolutionary trees established independently from multiple other lines of evidence.

Endogenous viral insertions are especially devastating for the creationist concept of immutable “created kinds”. Viral DNA does not insert itself independently at exactly the same genomic locations in unrelated lineages by chance. When identical viral sequences are found embedded at the same chromosomal positions in different populations — and when their accumulated mutations form nested hierarchical patterns — they provide a precise historical record of shared ancestry.

The HHV-6A/B insertions documented in this study behave exactly as evolutionary theory predicts: they enter the genome at a particular point in time, are inherited by descendants, accumulate mutations at measurable rates, and track human population history. There is no coherent creationist explanation for why a designer would place broken, mutating viral sequences into genomes in patterns that perfectly mirror evolutionary trees derived independently from anatomy, archaeology, and population genetics.

If humans were created as a distinct “kind”, there is no reason for their genomes to contain time-stamped viral relics tracing population divergence over millennia. But if humans evolved — and if viruses have co-evolved with us — this is precisely the pattern we expect to find. The data fit evolution effortlessly, while creationism is left inventing ad hoc excuses to deny what the genome itself records.

Creationism Refuted - Domestic Dogs Began to Diversify At Least 1,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Modern dog skull used for the photogrammetric reconstruction of 3D models in the study.

Image credit: C. Ameen (University of Exeter)

Variations in skulls of modern dogs.

Extensive dog diversity millennia before modern breeding practices - University of Exeter News

There is, of course, no let-up in the steady stream of bad news for creationists to ignore in 2026, and today is no exception. This time the problem comes from archaeology and concerns events taking place toward the end of the very long span of Earth’s history that preceded creationism’s so-called *Creation Week*. The news is that the diversification of domestic dogs, descended from domesticated wolves, had already begun at least 11,000 years ago — long before anything resembling the modern concept of dog “breeds”.

The evidence is presented in a paper published in Science by a team led by palaeontologists from the University of Exeter and France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). The researchers analysed 643 modern and archaeological canid skulls—including recognised breeds, village dogs, and wolves—spanning the last 50,000 years. In both geographical scope and time depth, it is the largest and most comprehensive study of its kind to date.

Using a technique known as geometric morphometrics, the team demonstrated that by the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods dogs already displayed a striking range of shapes and sizes. This diversity almost certainly reflects their varied roles in early human societies, from hunting and herding to guarding and companionship, rather than anything resembling systematic modern breeding.

All of this directly contradicts the claim in Genesis that animals were created fully formed for mankind’s exclusive use by an omnipotent and omniscient creator. Had that been the case, dogs would not require modification to make them fit for different purposes, nor would the archaeological record preserve clear evidence of their gradual evolutionary divergence from an ancestral wolf population. Instead, the evidence shows — unambiguously — that modern dogs are the product of an evolutionary process in which human-mediated selection played a central role, carried out by people who themselves existed long before the biblical timeline allows.

Bible Blunder - Archaeologists Find Evidence For a Creation Myth - But NOT the Bible Version.

[left caption]

[right caption]

Extracting drilled sediments.

Origins of Ancient Egypt’s Karnak Temple revealed – Uppsala University

An international team of archaeologists led by Dr Angus Graham of Uppsala University has shown that the temple to Amun-Ra at Karnak Temple Complex was originally built more than 3,000 years ago on an island formed when the Nile split into eastern and western channels. Their findings were published last October in the journal Antiquity.

One can easily imagine the jubilation with which Christian circles would greet the discovery of any credible archaeological evidence for Adam and Eve or Noah’s Ark. In practice, judging by the regular declarations of “proof” that appear on social media, almost any claim — no matter how tenuous or poorly authenticated — that can be retro-fitted to a biblical story is enthusiastically celebrated. It is hard to avoid the impression that this eagerness betrays a certain underlying insecurity.

Yet when archaeological discoveries appear to lend support to the origin myths of other cultures, the reaction is very different. The usual response is indifference, outright dismissal, or an appeal to the tentative nature of the evidence and the dangers of confirmation bias—precisely the same grounds on which much supposedly “biblical” evidence can be rejected, of course.

It will therefore be interesting to observe the reaction in Christian circles to this research from Karnak and its relevance to ancient Egyptian creation mythology, in which the land is caused to rise from the primordial waters by the creator. This bears an obvious resemblance to the later biblical motif of land being divided from the waters. The relatively high ground at Luxor is the only plausible candidate in the region for such a formation, and during periods of high Nile flood it would indeed have appeared as an island within a lake—an environment readily imbued with sacred significance by the temple builders.

Such parallels are not especially surprising. The ancient Near East was a densely interconnected cultural landscape in which ideas, myths, and cosmological frameworks circulated freely over centuries. Egyptian conceptions of creation—particularly the emergence of land from primeval waters—pre-date the composition of the Hebrew Bible by many centuries and would have been well known, directly or indirectly, throughout the eastern Mediterranean. When the authors of Book of Genesis framed their own creation narrative, they were not writing in a cultural vacuum, but drawing upon a shared mythological vocabulary that had long been established in the region.

The team also uncovered evidence that the eastern Nile channel was deliberately infilled with sand, accelerating a silting process that was already under way. These conclusions are based on detailed analysis of 61 sediment cores taken from in and around the temple complex, along with thousands of ceramic fragments recovered from the site.

Malevolent Design - How Cancer Perfectly Illustrates ID Creationism's 'Proof' of Intelligent Design

Creationism's God at work

Creationism's intelligent designer creating cancer.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2).

Dresden research group uncovers new key mechanism in cancer cells | TU Dresden

ID advocates should be thrilled to learn that a team of researchers from Technische Universität Dresden (TUD), Germany, together with colleagues from Charles University, Prague, Czechia, have discovered a perfect example of what Discovery Institute fellows William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe claim is proof of intelligent design—namely complex specified information and irreducible complexity. The team have just published their findings, open access, in Nature Communications.

There is one slight problem, however: this supposed ‘proof of intelligent design’ turns out to be one of the mechanisms that makes cancer so effective at increasing pain and suffering — and at killing people.

This presents creationists with a theological conundrum. Either there is more than one intelligent designer, which comes close to—or even crosses—the line into blasphemy, or the intelligent designer is actively and knowingly creating a cause of pain and suffering, and is therefore not the omnibenevolent deity portrayed in the Bible.

The stark alternative to these theologically insurmountable problems is equally problematic for ID creationism: admitting that their ‘proof of intelligent design’ is nothing of the sort, and is better explained as the result of a natural process in which no intelligence was involved—thereby absolving their god of any culpability.

The TUD-led team discovered that the protein MCL1 not only inhibits programmed cell death, or apoptosis, but also plays a central role in tumour metabolism. Normal, non-cancerous cells will usually self-destruct if their DNA becomes corrupted beyond repair, but when this process fails, a tumour can develop through the proliferation of cells carrying damaged DNA. In cancers, this self-destruct mechanism is suppressed by MCL1.

The team also found that MCL1 is not only responsible for preventing apoptosis, but also dysregulates cellular energy metabolism. In other words, a single factor ensures both cancer cell survival and the functioning of key metabolic and signalling pathways for the benefit of the tumour.

In Michael J. Behe’s terms, all the components of this survival mechanism must be present for the cancer to persist; and in William A. Dembski’s terms, the genetic information coding for MCL1 must constitute highly specified complex information.

Creationism Refuted - A 'Transitional Species' That is Probably Another Ancestral Hominin

Dr Jesse Martin of LaTrobe University thinks Little Foot could be a whole new branch of the human family tree.

Photograph: La Trobe University

Iconic fossil may be new type of human ancestor, News, La Trobe University

A brief communication, published last November in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology may, if creationists never read past the title (as usual), have produced a frisson of excitement in those circles. It questioned the taxonomic status of one of the most complete fossil skeletons of an early ancestral hominin, Australopithecus prometheus, popularly known as “Little Foot”.

However, reading even a little further would have turned that excitement into disappointment — assuming, of course, that they understood what they were reading. The authors were not questioning whether the fossil was ancestral at all, but whether it had been assigned to the correct position in the hominin family tree, or whether it should instead be recognised as a distinct ancestral hominin species. In other words, this was a discussion about how many transitional species there are, not whether transitional species exist at all.

The only crumb of comfort available to creationists is the familiar claim that this demonstrates how science “keeps changing its mind”, something they take as evidence that science is fundamentally unreliable—presumably including even those parts they routinely misrepresent as supporting their beliefs.

For anyone who understands the scientific method, and the importance of treating all knowledge as provisional and contingent on the best available evidence, this paper represents the principle functioning exactly as it should. Far from being a weakness, this willingness to revise conclusions in the light of new information is what makes science self-correcting and progressively more accurate over time.

The authors of the paper — a team led by La Trobe University adjunct Dr Jesse Martin—carried out a new analysis of the “Little Foot” fossils and concluded that the specimen was probably placed in the wrong taxon when first described on the basis that it does not share the same “unique suite of primitive and derived features” as Australopithecus africanus. Since that initial assessment, additional fossils of A. prometheus have been discovered, and it has become clear that “Little Foot” also differs from those specimens. At the same time, it remains sufficiently distinct from A. africanus that reassignment to that species is not justified. In short, it possesses its own unique combination of primitive and derived traits and should therefore be recognised as a separate species.

Naturally, there is no real comfort here for creationists. The phrase “suite of primitive and derived features” is simply palaeontological shorthand for evidence of descent with modification—what Darwin referred to as transitional forms. It follows that the researchers involved have no doubt whatsoever that the species under discussion evolved from earlier ancestors, and there is no hint that they believe it was spontaneously created, without ancestry, by magic.

Refuting Creationism - Fine Tuned For Catastrophe

Source: Canadian Geographic.

Researchers find evidence of cosmic impact at classic Clovis archaeological sites | The Current

A new paper in PLOS One presents compelling evidence that a comet exploding in Earth’s atmosphere around 13,000 years ago played a major role in the extinction of megafauna such as mammoths and mastodons across Eurasia and North America, and in extinguishing the Clovis Culture, the archaeological sites of which provided the evidence for the impact. The study was led by James Kennett, Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, working with an international team of collaborators.

The findings cut directly across a familiar creationist trope: the claim that Earth is “finely tuned” to be a benign and stable haven, perfectly suited for human life. This notion, often promoted by parochial American creationists, quietly assumes that the wider world is a trivial backdrop where nothing of consequence ever happens. It ignores the obvious realities of earthquakes, floods, famines, volcanic eruptions and climate shocks—realities that dominate both human history and the deep geological record.

That record tells a very different story. Earth’s past is marked by repeated catastrophes, ranging from abrupt climate shifts to mass extinctions, many triggered by astronomical or geological events. Impacts from space, massive volcanism, plate tectonics and cascading ecosystem failures have repeatedly reshaped life on this planet. Far from being a delicately balanced paradise, Earth is a dynamic and often hostile environment in which survival has always depended on adaptation—and, frequently, sheer luck.

Refuting Creationism - Now It's Evidence of Bipedalism in a Hominin From 7 Million Years Ago

Cast of the skull of Sahelanthropus tchadensis
a species discovered in the early 2000s.

By Didier Descouens - Own work
CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

S. tchadensis fossils (TM 266) compared to a chimpanzee and a human.

Anthropologists Offer New Evidence of Bipedalism in Long-Debated Fossil Discovery

We are only three days into 2026 and already creationism is facing an avalanche of new evidence against it and in favour of evolution on an ancient Earth in a vastly older Universe — directly contradicting the Bronze Age origin myths that creationists cling to with the desperation of a drunk clutching a lamppost.

The latest blow comes from the New York University Department of Anthropology, where a team of researchers led by Associate Professor Scott Williams, working with colleagues from the University of Washington, Chaffey College, and the University of Chicago, have carried out a detailed re-examination of fossil remains attributed to Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Their analysis provides strong evidence that this species was bipedal and shared several key skeletal characteristics with later bipedal hominins, including the australopithecines and members of the genus Homo.

Sahelanthropus tchadensis was discovered in the early 2000s, and its place in human evolution has been debated ever since. Some researchers argued it might represent an extinct ape rather than a stem hominin. Evidence for habitual bipedalism, however, strongly favours the latter interpretation, making S. tchadensis the earliest known human ancestor currently identified in the fossil record.

As such, it becomes yet another example of the transitional species that creationists continue to insist do not exist, often under the mistaken belief that Charles Darwin — whom they treat as the final authority on all matters evolutionary — admitted that the absence of transitional forms was a serious problem for his theory. In reality, Darwin explicitly predicted that such fossils would eventually be found, and the subsequent century and a half of palaeontology has repeatedly confirmed that prediction.

The discovery is of a point of attachment on the femur of a ligament only found in bipedal hominins. The importance of bipedalism in human evolution cannot be overstated. Habitual upright walking is one of the defining characteristics that separates hominins from other apes, reflecting a fundamental shift in anatomy, locomotion, and behaviour. It requires extensive reorganisation of the skeleton, including changes to the position of the foramen magnum, the curvature of the spine, the shape of the pelvis, the proportions of the limbs, and the structure of the feet. Because these adaptations are complex, interdependent, and leave clear signatures in fossilised bones, bipedalism is not a trivial or ambiguous trait. Evidence for it in Sahelanthropus tchadensis therefore places this species firmly on the human lineage and pushes the origin of upright walking — and with it the human evolutionary trajectory — back far earlier than creationist models allow.

Scott Williams’ team have now published their findings, open access, in Science Advances.

Creationism Refuted - Reconstructing Ancient Ecosystems From Molecules Trapped in Fossils

Fossilized elephant dentine (scale: 1.5 mm across), with rock seen in the lower right and dentine in the upper left. The white dentine is intact collagen.

Credit: Timothy Bromage and Bin Hu,
NYU Dentistry

Metabolic Analyses of Animal Fossils Helps Scientists Reconstruct Million-Year-Old Environments

The bad news for creationism continues unabated. Scientists led by Professor Timothy G. Bromage of the Department of Molecular Pathobiology at New York University College of Dentistry have developed a technique that opens an entirely new window onto the deep past. By analysing metabolites preserved in fossilised bones, the researchers are able to extract detailed biological and environmental information from animals that lived between 1.3 and 3 million years ago.

The team have published their findings in Nature, describing a method that pushes palaeobiology well beyond traditional morphology-based reconstruction.

The significance of this technique lies in its ability to reconstruct ancient environments with remarkable precision. From the chemical signatures locked within fossil bone, researchers can infer temperature, soil conditions, rainfall patterns, vegetation, and even the presence of parasites. The resulting picture is one of ecosystems changing over time, with animals adapting in step with shifting environments — exactly what evolutionary theory predicts, and wholly incompatible with the childish notion of magical creation a few thousand years ago or a recent biological reset caused by a genocidal flood.