Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Syphilis - How Did It Survive On The Ark?

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

© Angélica Triana.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reversing hallmarks of rapid aging by silencing a cellular alarm system

Photo credit: Eitan Moses

How the Immune System Rewrites Rapid Aging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum.

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

Red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum

Source: Wikipedia - Public Domain, Link

How sex can help save species from extinction | UEA

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

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

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

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

Creationism Refuted - The Evidence That Wouldn't Be There If The Bible Were True - Climate Change Over 130,000 Years

AI-generated image showing sediment accumulating over time on an Australian lakebed.

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Australia’s ancient rainfall patterns more complex than previously believed – News

For creationists who attribute much of Earth’s sedimentary record to a single, year-long global flood, the difficulty goes well beyond explaining how so much sediment accumulated. They also need to explain why natural archives preserve evidence of changing environments over periods vastly longer than their preferred age of the entire Universe. Producing layers of mud is one thing; reproducing a dated history of changing climate is quite another.

A new study by Alexander F. Wall and colleagues, published in Quaternary Science Reviews brings that problem into focus. The researchers analysed 69 natural palaeoenvironmental archives from tropical Australia, collectively spanning the past 130,000 years. Their purpose was to reassess how the complexity of rainfall patterns changed through the last glacial cycle.

Their conclusion challenges the suggestion that rainfall became uniquely variable and geographically patchy during the Holocene, the geological epoch encompassing approximately the past 11,700 years. Older records generally preserve less detail, so their apparent simplicity may reflect the limitations of the surviving evidence. A blurred photograph does not establish that the landscape it depicts contained fewer features.

The relevance to creationism is straightforward, although testing the biblical flood story was no part of the researchers’ purpose, but like almost all science, they did that incidentally, simply by revealing the facts. A flood can erode older deposits, transport fossils and produce successive sediment layers. None of those observations, however, demonstrates that it can reproduce the chronology and environmental history reconstructed from natural archives. A credible alternative would have to account for the ages, the sequence of environmental changes and the differences between locations together. Simply labelling everything “Flood sediment” supplies no such explanation.

How We Know The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People - More Evidence From The James Webb Space Telescope.

IC 348, a star-forming region. It is blanketed in thick clouds of gas and dust, millions of kilometres across, that form swirling patterns. Bright stars are scattered throughout the clouds, with the densest cluster situated in the centre of the scene. Each is crowned with six long points created by the optics of the telescope’s mirrors. In the upper right, a couple of hidden stars blast out long, glowing jets of material.

ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, K. Luhman, C. Alves De Oliveira, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb)

Webb reveals stunning panorama of star formation | ESA/Webb

No sooner do I show the comparison between the Bible's author's description of the universe with the reality science is revealing, than ESA/Webb produce another batch of images as though to reinforce the conclusion that the authors of the Bible were writing from a position of primitive ignorance.

So, I'm pleased to be able to share those images here so that fair-minded, objective people can decide whether the rest of the Bible should be read in the light of that understanding, and treated accordingly:

Creationism Refuted - Dino Dung Tells Us More Than The Bible's Ignorant Authors Ever Could

Artist's impression of a tyrannosaur preying on an ancient diving bird.

Credit: Andrey Atuchin

The fossil feather preserved in dinosaur poop.

Credit: O’Connor, et al. (2026))

A fossil feather preserved inside dinosaur poop could help explain why birds survived the mass extinction - Field Museum

Creationism’s problems with the fossil record now extend even to dinosaur droppings. A small piece of fossilised dung from Montana preserves evidence of a meal eaten some 66 million years ago — long before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of young-Earth creationism. Within it are feathers that may help illuminate why some ancient birds disappeared while the ancestors of today’s birds survived. As, reported in Current Biology, researchers led by Field Museum palaeontologist Jingmai O’Connor, examining a coprolite — fossilised faeces — from the Hell Creek Formation found exceptionally preserved feathers alongside fish scales and bones belonging to a hesperornithiform, an extinct diving bird.

The feathers combine structures associated with waterproofing in modern aquatic birds with smaller, simpler, fuzzy body feathers. The researchers suggest that differences in insulation, feather replacement through moulting, or both might have influenced which bird lineages survived the cold conditions following the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact. Hesperornithiforms disappeared; the lineage containing all living birds survived. This remains a hypothesis, however: one coprolite cannot establish why entire groups became extinct. The distinction between the observed feathers and the proposed explanation is central to the Field Museum’s account of the findings.

For creationists, the difficulty goes beyond the date. This combination of ancestral and more derived features makes sense within an evolutionary family tree, in which different characteristics change at different rates. Evolution does not require every part of an animal to move together along some imaginary ladder from ‘primitive’ to ‘advanced’. Nor does an extinct bird need to be a direct ancestor of living species to preserve evidence of the evolutionary history they share. There is also a useful lesson here about adaptation. A feature that works adequately in one environment may become a liability when conditions change. Evolution has no foresight: natural selection cannot prepare organisms for an asteroid impact millions of years in the future. Survival depends on the circumstances organisms encounter and the characteristics they already possess, with chance also playing its part. What makes this discovery particularly telling is how an apparently unpromising object can yield evidence against which explanations can be tested. Scientists can investigate both the history of feathers and the unresolved details of extinction without invoking a designer. The uncertainty concerns which natural factors mattered most — and further fossils may help resolve it. Even a dinosaur’s discarded meal can contribute to that process.

Malevolent Design - Creationists Plagued By Ancient Parasites

AI-generated image of an Ancient Baikal settlement hit by plague

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Two of the occupants of this grave were full siblings: a brother (aged 7-9 years old) and a sister (aged 9-11 years old) from whom plague DNA was identified. Not enough of the remains of the third individual were preserved to be able to be able to analyse them as well.

Photo: Vladimiri Bazaliiskii.

Oldest strains of plague caused deadly outbreaks 5,500 years ago – University of Copenhagen

For creationists who insist that biological complexity requires an intelligent designer, plague presents an awkward question: what, exactly, was the designer trying to achieve? A parasitic bacterium capable of causing fatal disease in children is certainly biologically impressive. Whether it is evidence of benevolent intelligence is another matter entirely, but it appears to conform to creationists 'proof' of intelligent design - irreducible complexity and complex specified genetic information, both of which ID proponents insist can only be created by an intelligent designer.

Research published in Nature reveals that early strains of Yersinia pestis, the plague bacterium, were already causing deadly outbreaks among hunter-gatherers around Lake Baikal in Siberia approximately 5,500 years ago. These were small, mobile communities: crowded agricultural settlements were evidently not a prerequisite for devastating plague outbreaks.

Researchers detected plague DNA in 18 of 46 individuals examined from four cemeteries. Combined with radiocarbon dating, burial evidence and reconstructed family relationships, the findings point to outbreaks that killed members of the same families, with a particularly striking impact on children. That detection rate is a proportion of the sampled dead, of course, not a measurement of the mortality rate in the living population.

The evolutionary details are especially revealing. These early strains lacked some of the adaptations associated with efficient flea-borne transmission in later plague. Nevertheless, they could cause lethal disease. They also possessed a gene locus encoding a superantigen — a substance capable of provoking excessive immune activation — which is absent from later plague strains. Its contribution to their lethality remains a hypothesis, but the changing genetic repertoire exposes a pathogen with an evolutionary history, rather than an organism equipped from the outset with one fixed set of features.

For intelligent design advocates, this creates a familiar difficulty. If useful biological machinery demonstrates a designer’s foresight, why should machinery that helps pathogens exploit their hosts be exempt from the same argument? Invoking a “Fall” supplies a theological explanation, but it does not establish a biological mechanism or account for the particular genetic changes revealed by ancient DNA.

Refuting Creationism - Norwegian Fossil Shows Complex Organisms - 560 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Charnia, one of the oldest 3D Ediacaran fossils found

Stratigraphic context of the Kommagnes Charnia specimen. A, photograph (facing north) of the eastern part of the cliff, with the site of the float block marked by a star. B, stratigraphic log of the left side of A, marking the stratigraphic range from which the float block could have originated.

From: Veenma, Y.P., et al. (2026)

One of the oldest known 3D animal fossils found in Norwegian sheep field | University of Cambridge

Creationists have a major problem with the so-called Cambrian Explosion, some 535 million years ago. On the one hand, they insist it was a sudden moment of creation in which multiple different body-plans were magically created without ancestry; on the other hand, they deny there was any history before 6,000-10,000 years ago. Clearly both views can't be right; However, both views can be wrong.

And for creationists of both camps, the Ediacaran presents and even bigger problem: not only did it precede the Cambrian, but it shows that complex body-plans had already evolved. This problem just got a lot more acute with the discovery of an exceptionally well-preserved fossil in a sheep field in Arctic Norway, in approximately 560 million year old rocks, of a fossils of Charnia, a branching, frond-like organism that lived during the Ediacaran Period, well before the Cambrian began. These organisms inhabited an ancient seabed hundreds of millions of years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of young-Earth creationism.

As a paper published in Palaeontology by researchers led by Dr Yorick Veenma reports, this is the first confirmed fossil of Charnia to be found in Scandinavia. It was found alongside other Ediacaran fossils and is a rare three-dimensional specimen which preserves anatomical details normally obscured in flattened impression.

Despite its superficial resemblance to a fern, Charnia was no plant. It belonged to the rangeomorphs, an extinct group generally interpreted as early animals, although their precise relationships to living animal groups remain debated. We need not claim that Charnia was a direct ancestor of any particular Cambrian animal to appreciate its significance: large organisms with elaborate body structures already existed before the diversification that creationists so often misrepresent as an instantaneous act of creation.

How We Know the Bible is Wrong - It Is Written In The Stars

Montage of early images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope

ESA/Webb (CC-BY)

IRAS 04302+2247, a planet-forming disc located about 525 light-years away in a dark cloud within the Taurus star-forming region.

Creationists and fundamentalist Bible literalists continue to insist that the Bible is the inerrant word of their god and a more reliable account of science and history than anything discovered through scientific investigation. Yet however emphatically that claim is repeated, repetition does not turn it into evidence.

The claim of divine authorship requires independent support. Quoting the Bible to establish the Bible’s authority merely takes us round in a circle. As Christopher Hitchens’s familiar principle reminds us, an assertion offered without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

When I and other critics argue that biblical cosmology bears little resemblance to the observable universe, however, we can point to evidence. We can compare what the texts describe with what astronomical observations reveal, and ask whether those descriptions display the knowledge we would expect of an omniscient creator.

Consider the ancient cosmology reflected in Genesis: an earthly realm beneath a firmament that separates the waters above from the waters below, with the sun, moon and stars set in that firmament. The familiar illustration of a flat earth beneath a solid dome reconstructs this ancient worldview; Genesis does not describe a planet orbiting a star in a galaxy. Its heavenly lights serve to illuminate the earth and mark days, seasons and years. Genesis 1:6–19

Elsewhere, the imagery becomes even more striking. Revelation describes stars falling to earth following the announcement of a great earthquake, while Daniel’s vision depicts a horn casting down and trampling some of the heavenly host and stars. These are apocalyptic visions, with symbolic meanings, so it would be misleading to present them as straightforward astronomical claims. Nevertheless, anyone who insists on reading such passages as literal descriptions of physical events has an obvious problem: real stars are not little lights that can fall onto the ground and be trodden underfoot. Revelation 6:12–14; Daniel 8:9–10.

Now compare that ancient picture with the James Webb Space Telescope’s image below. It shows the “Treasure Chest”, a cloud of gas and dust enclosing a young star cluster in the Carina Nebula, some 7,500 light-years away. The cluster contains an estimated 70 stars and is thought to be around 1.3 million years old. This is just one small region within our own galaxy. Webb’s infrared measurements, translated into visible colours, reveal the physical structures of a stellar nursery. ESA/Webb image and description

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

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

Credit: Julius Csotonyi (CC-BY SA)

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

Velizar Simeonovski

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

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

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

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

Refuting Creationism - Bible Mythology Dead And Buried Beneath The Gondwana Supercontinent

Artists impression of the supercontinent Gondwana.

Source: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty (Royalty-free)

Reconstruction of Greater Gondwana at ca. 500 Ma or at 550 to 500 Ma compared with conventional paleogeographic interpretations (inset).

From: Tao Wang et al.(2026).

Gondwana really was a supercontinent. And it helped kick-start life on Earth

More than half a billion years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of biblical literalism, moving continents were reshaping the planet and helping to establish the environmental conditions in which early animals diversified. That is the inconvenient historical setting of new research into Gondwana: a vast continental assembly whose formation, geological activity and subsequent fragmentation belong to a timescale that bears no resemblance to the few thousand years allowed by young-Earth creationism.

A paper in Science Advances , by Tao Wang of the State Key Laboratory of Deep Earth and Mineral Exploration, Institute of Geology, Beijing, China, and colleagues, suggests that Gondwana was substantially larger than conventional reconstructions show. As co-author Bill Collins explains in his accompanying account in The Conversation, isotopic evidence in granites identifies ancient continental material now concealed beneath younger geological formations across much of Asia. Including these overlooked fragments increases Gondwana’s estimated share of Earth’s continental landmass to roughly 80 per cent, making it a supercontinent even under a restrictive definition of that term. This reconstruction concerns the world of approximately 550–500 million years ago.

Its significance extends beyond redrawing an ancient map. The researchers propose that the reorganisation of plate boundaries associated with Gondwana’s assembly established an enormous belt of volcanic activity. Sustained emissions of greenhouse gases could then have helped alter the climate, contributing to conditions favourable to the diversification of Cambrian life. This is a proposed connection between geological and biological change, rather than a demonstration that volcanism alone caused the Cambrian radiation.

One distinction matters here: despite the article’s headline, this concerns the diversification of life, not its original appearance. Life already had a long evolutionary history before the Cambrian, and animals existed before that period began. Nor was the Cambrian ‘explosion’ an instantaneous event resembling a magical creation. The term describes a geologically rapid evolutionary diversification, unfolding over millions of years.

For creationism, therefore, the problem is more substantial than another inconvenient date. Here is a testable account connecting the history of continents with the environmental context of biological evolution. Continents assemble, plate boundaries change, volcanoes influence the atmosphere, and organisms evolve in the resulting conditions. None of this requires foresight or a predetermined destination. It requires physical processes, evolving populations and the immense passage of time.

Refuting Creationism - The People of Sulawesi Were Chewing Betel Nuts Thousands Of Years Before Creationism's God 'Created The World'

Areca 'betel' nuts, Areca catechu

By Praveenmnaik - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Areca 'betel' nut (Areca catechu)

By LBM1948 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Ice Age origins of one of humanity’s oldest drug habits - Griffith News

One of the recurring problems for Bible-literalist creationism is that people were living ordinary human lives long before its chronology permits them to have existed. They were finding food, acquiring knowledge of local plants and developing habits that left recognisable traces on their bodies. Two ancient individuals from Sulawesi, Indonesia, now provide a particularly revealing example: their teeth preserve evidence of betel-nut consumption thousands of years before the supposed biblical Flood—and, in the older individual’s case, long before “Creation Week” itself.

The research, published in Science Advances, concerns two hunter-gatherers, one dated to approximately 25,000–16,000 years ago and the other to 7,600–6,300 years ago. Even the youngest end of the older specimen’s age range places that person well before the entire universe supposedly appeared, according to young-Earth creationism. The younger individual also predates the legendary genocidal Flood in conventional biblical chronologies; indeed, both individuals predate creation itself under the familiar approximately 6,000-year scheme. These are awkward people to accommodate in a history constructed from Genesis.

As the Griffith University news report, researchers detected arecoline, a psychoactive compound found in betel nut, in the individuals’ dental tissues. Both also had unusual rounded grooves in their teeth, interpreted as evidence of habitually sucking whole nuts. Experiments showed that soaking intact nuts in artificial saliva released enough of the compound to produce effects in laboratory receptor tests. Together, the chemical evidence, tooth wear and experiments make a strong case for an ancient practice of consuming a neuroactive plant.

Refuting Creationism - The Evidence For Denisovans Just Keeps Getting Better

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Refuting Creationism - Creationists Bitten By Snapping Tasmanian Tiger

AI-depiction of a thylacine in the Tasmanian bush

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The last known Tasmanian tiger in footage digitised by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Photograph: National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

3D scans of Tasmanian tiger’s skull reveal it had crocodile-style snapping jaws

The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, has long been a textbook example of convergent evolution: a marsupial predator whose resemblance to a wolf evolved independently in a distant branch of the mammalian family tree. For creationists, such similarities offer an opportunity to invoke a designer reusing a successful design. But that explanation overlooks the more revealing question: how far does the resemblance go, and why do similarities in some features coexist with substantial differences in others?

New research led by Flinders University’s Professor Vera Weisbecker, published in Nature Communications, shows why describing the thylacine as a “marsupial wolf” can be misleading. Its skull combined features resembling those of different carnivores with an unusual specialisation of its own. As the university’s account explains, this animal was more closely related to kangaroos than to dogs, despite its superficially canine appearance.

Three-dimensional comparisons revealed a striking mixture. The back of the skull resembled that of larger canids, including wolves, while the long, slender snout looked more like that of smaller foxes and jackals. Yet the whole skull was disproportionately large for the animal carrying it. The researchers suggest that this combination supported rapid, forceful snapping bites at relatively small prey. Some features even invite comparison with crocodiles and other vertebrates that catch agile prey with elongated jaws. These are inferences from anatomy, rather than direct observations of hunting behaviour, but they undermine the familiar image of a predator equipped to overpower large animals in the manner of a wolf. The authors explain these findings in their article for The Conversation.

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

AI depiction of how shells accumulate in sediment

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Collection of creatures that can disturb sediment and relocate shells.

Florida Museum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creationism Refuted - How Mammalian Genes Combine to Produce New mRNA - No Magic Required

AI-generated depiction of a chimeric mRNA being formed from two different genes

ChatGPT 6 Astra

A watercolor painting depicts chimeric mRNAs.

Image: Hannah Davis/Jackson Lab.

Mammalian Genes Can Combine To Make Previously Unknown mRNAs, Proteins | Harvard Medical School

An immune system that saves your life in one circumstance can help kill you in another makes sense in the light of evolution: natural selection favours advantages whose benefits outweigh their costs under prevailing conditions, without guaranteeing safety in every eventuality. For creationists who present biological complexity as evidence of perfect intelligent design, however, such compromises require some explaining.

A new study published in Nature on 2 September 2026 provides a particularly revealing example. Researchers found that mammalian cells can join RNA sequences copied from separate genes into a combined message. One resulting protein improves antibacterial defence in mice, but also increases vulnerability to lethal inflammatory responses in experimental models of sepsis. The same molecular mechanism brings both protection and danger.

To understand the discovery, think of DNA as a collection of stored recipes. Messenger RNA, or mRNA, is a working copy that a cell uses to assemble a protein. Scientists have long known that cells can edit these copies, allowing a single gene to produce different proteins. Here, the researchers investigated messages containing material from different genes, sometimes located on different chromosomes. It is rather like making a new recipe by combining instructions from two separate cookbooks. The joining occurs at the RNA level; it does not require the original DNA recipes to merge.

These combined messages are called chimeric RNAs. Crucially, the team demonstrated that one produces a functional protein, named GSDMD–TMEM106A, during inflammation in mice. Most of the other candidate messages have yet to be shown to produce functional proteins, so the discovery should not be mistaken for proof that every detected combination has a useful role.

The evolutionary interest lies in the consequences. Strengthening an inflammatory response can help an animal resist infection, yet the resulting damage can become lethal. Weakening that response can reduce the danger from inflammation while leaving the animal less able to control bacteria. There is no simple setting at which “more immunity” always means “better health”.

This is precisely the sort of trade-off evolutionary biology helps us understand. Natural selection works with inherited mechanisms and their competing consequences; it has neither foresight nor a commitment to the welfare of every individual or to the perfect solution. The study does not reconstruct the evolutionary history of this particular protein, but its findings illustrate why a useful biological feature need not be harmless, let alone perfect. For intelligent-design advocates, the question is therefore more demanding than “Is it complicated?” It is why an allegedly flawless designer’s protective machinery comes with the capacity to inflict fatal damage on the organism it protects.

Creationism Refuted - A Cretaceous Dinosaur From Brazil With A Close Relative From Spain - From 120 Million Years Ago

AI-generated impression of Dasosaurus tocantinensis in the Cretaceous.

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Artistic reconstruction of the new dinosaur from Maranhão state. It was 20 meters long and had a European relative .

Paleoart: Jorge Blanco.

New long-necked dinosaur found in Northeast Brazil was a close relative of a European species

A newly described giant dinosaur from Brazil presents creationists with more than the familiar problem of a fossil vastly older than their supposed creation of the Universe. Its evolutionary relationships also preserve evidence of a world whose geography has changed profoundly: continents separating, ancestral populations dispersing, and related lineages following different evolutionary paths. This is precisely the sort of historical pattern we expect when common descent operates on a planet reshaped by plate tectonics.

The dinosaur, Dasosaurus tocantinensis, was approximately 20 metres long and lived around 120 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous. Its remains were discovered during construction of a road–rail terminal at Davinópolis, in the north-eastern Brazilian state of Maranhão. Described by Elver Luiz Mayer and colleagues in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, it has its closest known evolutionary relative in what is now Spain. The researchers interpret this affinity as evidence that its ancestors probably reached South America from Europe via North Africa between about 140 and 120 million years ago.

That proposed route needs to be understood against the geography of the time. Africa and South America had not yet completed their separation, and connections between landmasses offered opportunities for dispersal that the modern map conceals. The finding therefore concerns ancestral movements through an ancient landscape, rather than dinosaurs somehow crossing the present-day Atlantic.

The broader evolutionary principle is straightforward. Populations can spread when geographical connections permit; when barriers interrupt gene flow, their descendants can diverge. Consequently, relationships between species should reflect both their ancestry and the changing opportunities for movement and isolation. Evolutionary biology supplies the explanation for the branching relationships, while plate tectonics supplies the changing geographical setting. This particular fossil does not, by itself, prove that continental separation caused a specific speciation event, but its affinities fit the larger picture remarkably well.

For young-Earth creationism, the difficulty is therefore both chronological and explanatory. A dinosaur living 120 million years ago cannot be accommodated within a literal Genesis chronology. Nor does the assertion that a creator suddenly produced separate “kinds” explain why their anatomical relationships should correspond to ancient geographical connections. Common descent makes that correspondence intelligible; magical creation provides no comparable prediction.

What emerges is a history of life unfolding on a changing Earth, with neither continents nor their inhabitants fixed in their present arrangements. Understanding that history requires evidence, evolutionary relationships and deep time — all conspicuously absent from the biblical creation account.

Creationism Refuted - Arrowheads From Uzbekistan Shoot Creationism Down

Micropoints from Obi-Rakhmat, layers 20-21

From: Plisson H, et al (2025)

Obi-Rakhmat rock shelter

From: Plisson H, et al (2025)

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

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

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

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

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

Refuting Creationism - Eocene Footprints In Antarctica Trample Creationism In The Mud

Artist's impression of the small mammal that left its mark in Antarctica

Credit: Álvaro Medina

This is what the small mammal that left its mark in Antarctica might have looked like.

Credit: Álvaro Medina

First Terrestrial Mammal Footprint Discovered in Antarctica

Sometimes, a small footprint exposes an enormous problem for creationism. In this case, it is a partial impression preserved in approximately 55.5-million-year-old volcanic sediment on what is now King George Island, Antarctica. Its age alone places it far outside the few thousand years allowed by a literal reading of Genesis. But its setting tells an equally significant story: an Antarctic landscape capable of supporting terrestrial mammals, profoundly different from the frozen continent we know today.

The discovery, described by Héctor Mansilla-Vera and colleagues in Polar Biology, comprises a partial forefoot-and-hindfoot impression. The researchers interpret its maker as a small carnivorous mammal, possibly a sparassodont—an extinct relative of marsupials otherwise known from South America. That identification remains tentative: the incomplete trace cannot establish a particular species or confidently identify the group. Nevertheless, it records a mammal walking across an Antarctic substrate, providing evidence of its presence where it lived, rather than bones or teeth transported after death. Javier Gelfo’s account of the research explains both the interpretation and its limitations.

This animal inhabited a warmer, forested Antarctica that retained land connections with South America. Antarctica was already at high southern latitudes; its subsequent transformation cannot simply be explained as a warm continent drifting towards the pole. The larger story involves the breakup of Gondwana, the loss of connections between continents, changing ocean circulation and a changing atmosphere.

As tectonic movements opened and deepened southern ocean gateways, they altered the movement of water and heat around Antarctica. Falling atmospheric carbon dioxide also played a major role in the cooling that culminated in extensive Antarctic glaciation around 34 million years ago. Geography and climate interacted over geological time to transform the conditions under which life could survive. Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

The challenge to creationism is therefore more precise than simply showing that Earth has changed. Biblical literalists themselves invoke catastrophic change through their Flood narrative. What confronts them here is evidence belonging to a much longer, independently reconstructed history: continents separating, connections disappearing, climates shifting and ecosystems being transformed over tens of millions of years. An appeal to an originally “perfect” creation explains none of those details.

This tiny trace offers a glimpse of life on a planet whose geography and habitability have never been permanent fixtures. Understanding it requires geology, palaeontology and climate science working together—and the willingness to distinguish what the evidence demonstrates from what it merely suggests.

An account and discussion of this research by Antonio García was published in La Brújula Verde. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

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

Ediacaran tubular fossil Conotubus (inset: symbiotic chemosynthetic bacteria)

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 6 Astra)

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

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

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

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

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

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