An SwRI-led team compared the early impact history of Venus and Earth, determining that Venus experienced higher-energy impacts that created a superheated core. Models show these conditions could create Venus’ extended volcanism and younger surface.
Evolution of Terrestrial Planets
A new SwRI-led paper highlights the scientific progress made in understanding the evolution of terrestrial planets, including the effects of late large impacts on pre-existing modes of tectonics. For instance, the Earth experienced transient subduction, when one tectonic plate slides beneath another. Because Venus’ surface is covered by a single plate, a high-velocity impact led to a superheated core and long-lived volcanism. On Mars, a large, low-velocity impact facilitated variations in its hemispheres. Impacts also modify the atmospheres of terrestrial planets in profound ways, including eliminating or supplementing existing gases.
Creationist myths describe Earth as a flat world under a dome at the centre of the Universe, made just a few thousand years ago. The real story is far more extraordinary: a fragile chain of chance events and natural forces that made life possible on this small rocky planet.
Earth orbits an ordinary star on the edge of the Milky Way, one of billions in one of trillions of galaxies. That it exists at all is down to gravity, physics, and luck. Out of this came a beautiful world teeming with life—including one species able to marvel at the Universe and ask how it all began, and in it's fearful, ignorant infancy, make up the myths to explain it that now pass for science in some scientifically backward cultures.
One early collision with a smaller planetoid gave us the Moon, tides, and seasons; this or a later impact may, according to this study, be responsible for tectonic plates, giving us a forever changing, dynamic planet, driving evolutionary divergence. While not required for life to appear, these events shaped the planet into the diverse, life-rich world we know today.
So that creationists can rehearse their excuses for dismissing science and retaining their childish delusion that Genesis is an accurate description of the universe, written or inspired by an omniscient creator god, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, here are some recent images and videos from the European Space Agency (ESA).
They were created from the most accurate three-dimensional map of star-formation regions in our Milky Way galaxy, based on data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope. The star-formation region that is mapped out (contoured by a circle) reaches out to 4000 light-years from our Sun. The Sun is located at the center of this region. The star-formation map is plotted on an artist impression of our Milky Way, based on Gaia data.. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, S. Payne-Wardenaar, L. McCallum et al (2025)
Creationists use a deliberately fuzzy and flexible definition of “kinds,” shifting its scope whenever it suits their argument. It can be narrowed down to the species level, broadened to a genus or family, or even stretched to encompass an entire order. On occasion, I’ve even seen it expanded to the absurdity of “animal kind,” depending on what the argument requires. This elasticity allows them to maintain the delusion that evolution never happens in the way biologists describe, and to caricature it instead as one species suddenly giving rise to a completely unrelated species in a single step — their parody of so-called “macro-evolution.”
But the case of the Iberian harvester ant (Messor ibericus) presents a real problem for this narrative. Here the definition of “kind” only needs to extend as far as members of a single genus. That still doesn’t rescue creationists, because this ant has evolved a remarkably complex reproductive strategy that undermines any notion of intelligent design and raises awkward questions about what a “kind” even is. Queens of M. ibericus can only reproduce successfully with males of a related species, Messor structor.
Such interspecies dependence is not unknown in either the animal or plant kingdoms, but M. ibericus takes it a step further. When a queen produces male offspring — instead of the usual sterile female workers — those males may be either M. ibericusorM. structor. In other words, she is doing precisely what creationists constantly demand as “evidence for evolution” - one species producing offspring of another species.
Scientisst have a remarkable way to verify one of the fundamental principles of evolutionary biology - the 'founder effect' and how it contributes to allopatric speciation - a process that is hotly disputed by creationists who dogmatically refuse to accept any evidence for evolutionary diversification.
The great thing about science is that its theories can be tested and verified. Even better, they are frequently shown to be correct through evidence. This is in stark contrast to faith as a means of determining truth. Faith is not based on evidence, so it cannot be independently verified; in logical terms, it is unfalsifiable.
That doesn’t mean it can’t be falsified, but rather that there are no tests which, if failed, would demonstrate it false. Take, for example, the creationist claim that “God did it.” How could such a claim ever be tested? With no objective evidence beyond subjective feelings, anecdotes, or alleged personal experiences, there is nothing to examine. And if such a claim were challenged, it could always be shielded with further untestable assertions: “God is untestable,” “God is beyond science,” and so on.
By contrast, evolutionary biology offers theories that are not only testable but also repeatedly confirmed. One such theory is the founder effect. This occurs when a new habitat is colonised by only a small sample of a parent population. Two important factors follow:
The new sample is unlikely to perfectly represent the genetic diversity of the parent population, so it will begin with a different allele profile.
For the new colony to succeed, the founding individuals must already be somewhat pre-adapted to the environment. Those less well-suited are eliminated, while those better adapted survive and reproduce. Over successive generations, this natural selection creates a population increasingly fit for its new environment. The result is a wave of adaptation and divergence from the parent stock — the essence of allopatric speciation.
The natural “laboratory” for studying this process exists in the form of Nishinoshima, a remote Japanese island subject to frequent volcanic eruptions. Each eruption wipes the island clean of vegetation, effectively resetting the ecosystem and creating opportunities for colonisation by founder populations from elsewhere.
By careful genetic analysis of the, now extinct, Nishinoshima population of Portulaca oleracea, the team were able to show that the parent population was on nearby Chichijima, another volcanic island, however, the Nishinoshima population differed markedly from the parent population, and were derived from a very small founder population. In addition, there was evidence of genetic drift, which is much more significant in a small population than in a larger one - exactly as the Theory of Evolution predicts. Genetic drift is the process where, by chance alone, a neutral allele can increase or decrease in the population. The smaller the population the more quickly an allele can progress to fixation in the population or be eliminated. (for more detail on this, see the Introduction to my book, Twenty Reasons To Reject Creationism: Understanding Evolution (ISBN 13: ISBN-13 : 979-8306548166).
Now, researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have reported the results of this natural experiment, and they align precisely with what evolutionary theory predicts.
The 'Cigar Galaxy' (Messier 82). A close-in view of the centre of galaxy M82. Bright, bluish light radiating from the centre is due to stars actively forming there. A thick lane of gas, black in the centre and red around the edges, crosses the centre and blocks much of the light. Thinner strands and clumps of reddish dust cover much of the rest of the view.
Here we have yet another image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released by the European Space Agency—not to belittle the Bible’s account of creation in Genesis, though that happens automatically. The biblical description reflects the view of a pre-scientific people who imagined a flat Earth under a solid dome, with stars as tiny lights stuck to it and the Sun and Moon moving across the sky like lamps hung for our benefit. It reads exactly like the report of someone told to look up and describe what they see without any understanding of what lies beyond.
Modern astronomy shows us something utterly different. The universe is not a small stage with a few lights above it, but a vast, dynamic cosmos shaped by natural processes. Stars are born, live, and die in titanic cycles of creation and destruction; galaxies collide and merge; black holes sculpt their surroundings with unimaginable power.
This particular image, ESA’s Picture of the Week, captures the so-called Cigar Galaxy (Messier 82), a starburst galaxy just 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear). Here we see the turbulent heart of a galaxy where new stars are forming in great swathes, driving winds of gas and dust thousands of light-years into space.
The contrast could not be greater: a childlike tale of a sky-dome with a few lights versus the grandeur of a living universe billions of years old and on a scale our ancestors could never have imagined. Contrast the Bible's description with that of ESA's description of the image:
A team of researchers led by Dr. Mayukh Mondal of the Centre for Genomics, Evolution & Medicine, Institute of Genomics, University of Tartu, Estonia, have used AI-powered demographic modelling to estimate the genetic ancestry of the people of Papua New Guinea (PNG), whose origins have long been debated.
Papua New Guineans have physical features that differ noticeably from many Asian populations, and some superficial similarities to sub-Saharan Africans have led to speculation that they might descend from a very early migration out of Africa, predating most other non-African Homo sapiens. This new study strongly challenges that hypothesis: it attributes PNG’s genetic distinctiveness instead to a substantial Denisovan admixture followed by a prolonged period of isolation, a severe population bottleneck, and slower population growth.
According to the creationist mythologies, all human beings alive today descend from Adam and Eve—or, in some versions, from Noah and his family after a global flood. If that were literally true, then all living humans would share a very narrow genetic base: mitochondrial DNA (passed via the maternal line) would be limited to a very small number of variants, and all males would share essentially the same Y-chromosome (barring mutation) tracing back to the same male ancestor.
However, the observable facts are that human genetic diversity is much richer than those narratives predict. The mitochondrial DNA lineages in living people trace back to multiple distinct haplogroups with divergence times of tens to hundreds of thousands of years within Africa and beyond into archaic ancestors; similarly, Y-chromosome diversity indicates many lineages. Our human genome tells a far more complex story: long periods of evolution in isolation, multiple migrations, re-mixing, and interbreeding with related hominin species.
The same applies to other species which creationists mythology insists are the descendants of a small number of survivors of the same genocidal flood. Few living species show evidence of such a narrow genetic bottleneck, which would probably have resulted in far too much inbreeding resulting in extinction for most of them.
All non-African humans today are descended from the major “Out-of-Africa” (OOA) migration(s) of Homo sapiens. As populations moved into Eurasia, they interbred first with Neanderthals, then with Denisovans. Underlying all this, there is also the possibility of genetic contributions from even earlier human migrations (e.g. H. erectus) into the ancestors of Neanderthals, Denisovans, or earlier modern humans. Given the evidence that hominin populations often interbred when they came into contact, it would be surprising if there were no admixture between H. erectus (or similar early lineages) and the predecessors of Neanderthals and Denisovans (often thought to include H. heidelbergensis or H. antecessor).
Here is yet another fossil that will give creationists a lot to think about. It’s a fossil of the earliest known lepidosaur — the group that includes lizards, snakes, and the tuatara of New Zealand. It is ∼242 million years old and was found in a sandstone deposit in Devon, in southwest Britain. It was picked up on a beach in Devon in 2015, and has been examined by a team from the University of Bristol.
At that age it is very close to the stem of the order Lepidosauria. However, it already displays some “advanced” features, and some of the assumed primitive features are already absent.
One of the primitive features often discussed is the lower temporal bar — a bony rod running between the cheek and the jaw hinge—which is present in the tuatara but absent (“open”) in modern lizards and snakes. This opening gives greater flexibility to the skull, allowing more motion for feeding. Also, many modern lizards have palatal teeth (teeth on the roof of the mouth) which help grip prey.
The fossil skull (from Agriodontosaurus helsbypetrae) has no skull hinge and no palatal teeth, but it does have an open lower temporal bar. In other words, this is a transitional species: it has a mosaic of primitive and derived traits—a pattern Darwin predicted, but which creationists generally dismiss. To creationists, fossils are often denied, mischaracterised, or claimed to be “just as they were created a few thousand years ago.” But this specimen is clear evidence of evolutionary change.
Meanwhile, the evidence of fossil ages—dating back hundreds of millions of years—refutes the idea of a young Earth (~ thousands of years), which cannot be reconciled with the geological, biological, and radiometric data.
None of that undermines the real discovery: an early lepidosaur with a mosaic of features lived in what is now Devon, UK, in the Middle Triassic, about 242 million years ago. As always, in rational enquiry, solid evidence must take priority over magical or mythological claims.
The discovery that ancient rodents evolved a thumbnail in place of a claw helps explain why they are the most successful mammalian order on the planet. That small anatomical change opened up a whole new range of ecological niches, triggering an explosive radiation of new rodent species.
This fact alone should worry creationists who cling to a child-like understanding of science. Their favourite avoidance tactic—when pressed for an example of evolution—is to retreat hastily down their rabbit hole with the familiar cry: “Ah! But that’s not real, ‘macro’-evolution. That’s just variation within a ‘kind’.”
Of course, creationists are consistently reticent about defining what they mean by “macro-evolution,” or explaining how the processes that supposedly produce it differ from those of normal evolution. In scientific terms, evolution is simply a change in allele frequencies in a population over time. There is no separate mechanism for “macro” versus “micro.”
So here’s the awkward question for them: was the evolution of the thumbnail from a claw a case of “macro-evolution” or not?
According to the new research, led by Rafaela Missagi of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, with collaborators from the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago, USA), Northwestern University (Chicago, USA), and the Natural History Museum (London, UK), this change was pivotal. It allowed rodents to diversify into countless species—just as the elongation of bat fingers into wings enabled bats to radiate into hundreds of species. Crucially, in both cases no “new structures” were created from nothing; existing ones were repurposed.
This sort of question usually sends creationists scurrying for cover, chanting Bible verses as they go.
Unlike creationist dogma, which collapses under this kind of scrutiny, the new findings provide yet another vindication of evolutionary theory. Evolution predicts that when a new function arises, it can open up new ecological opportunities, leading to rapid diversification. Not because there is a plan, but because natural selection now has something new to work on.
This post is a bit of a change from my usual fare, where I’m busy pulling apart the pseudo-science of creationism with its reliance on magic and one ancient book of myths from a small Bronze Age tribe. Today, instead, I want to share something more uplifting: a glimpse of the rich and colourful life thriving in Britain’s coastal waters.
The footage comes from the Isles of Scilly, a protected area lying just off the tip of Cornwall in the far southwest of Britain. Thanks to the Gulf Stream, these islands enjoy a climate that feels almost Mediterranean — a rare treat for the UK!
A team from the University of Exeter’s Centre for Ecology and Conservation set up remote cameras around the islands to see what they could capture. This was a proof-of-concept project designed to test new ways of monitoring coastal ecosystems. The results didn’t disappoint. Their findings have just been published open-access in the Ecological Society of America’s journal Ecological Applications.
Scientists have found a textbook example of evolution in progress—in the very mould used to mature cheese in caves.
“Show me an example of witnessed evolution!” is one of the stock demands from creationists in online debates. But it’s a trick request. No sooner is an example given than they hurriedly shift the goalposts, redefining evolution into a childish caricature. Instead of the real scientific process, they demand to see a cow turn into a whale overnight, or a mouse suddenly grow wings—some grotesque parody of “macro-evolution” that no biologist has ever claimed happens. Ironically, if such nonsense did occur, it would actually falsify the theory of evolution rather than confirm it.
This intellectual dishonesty is the lifeblood of creationist rhetoric. Their arguments only work by preying on scientific illiteracy in their audience, peddling strawmen and false definitions to cover the absence of any evidence for their own claims.
Meanwhile, science continues as it always has, with evolution properly defined as a change in allele frequency in a population’s gene pool over time. And right on cue, another clear demonstration has just been published in Current Biology.
The researchers studied the fungus Penicillium solitum, which is used to ripen cheese, by following its population over eight years in the controlled cave environment of Jasper Hill Farm. By comparing samples collected in 2016 with those taken more recently, they were able to track both visible and genetic changes in the mould over time.
What they found was striking. The rind colour, once a leafy green, had shifted to a chalky white. Genetic analysis showed this was due to repeated mutations in a pigment-producing gene called alb1, which is responsible for melanin production. In the dark, cave-like conditions, melanin offered no advantage, so natural selection favoured lineages that conserved energy by not producing it. The loss of pigment arose independently several times, through different mutations—including both point mutations and the disruption of the gene by mobile DNA elements.
This is evolution at its most direct: heritable changes in the genetic make-up of a population, producing visible differences in response to environmental conditions. It illustrates a well-known principle called relaxed selection—when a trait is no longer useful, natural selection no longer preserves it, and the trait may fade away. In this case, the shift also altered the appearance and sensory qualities of the cheese, underlining how evolutionary change can have immediate, practical consequences.
How Cheese Rinds Form.
The rind of a cheese is not just a protective skin — it’s a living ecosystem. During the ageing process, the outer layer of the cheese is colonised by microbes, most often fungi and bacteria, that thrive in the controlled conditions of cheese cellars or caves.
In bloomy cheeses (like Brie or Camembert), surface-ripening moulds such as Penicillium camemberti are deliberately introduced. These fungi grow across the surface, forming the familiar white, velvety rind. In washed-rind cheeses, the surface is repeatedly brushed or washed with brine, beer, or spirits, encouraging the growth of reddish or orange bacteria such as Brevibacterium linens. In natural-rind cheeses, the surface flora develops spontaneously from microbes present in the environment, including caves, maturing rooms, and even the cheesemaker’s own tools and hands.
As these microbial communities grow, they break down proteins and fats, softening the texture beneath the rind and shaping the flavour profile of the cheese. In the case of the cave-aged cheeses studied in the Tufts research, Penicillium solitum was the dominant mould, producing a rind that initially appeared green but, through evolution, shifted to white.
The rind, then, is not just decorative: it’s an edible record of microbial activity — and, as this research shows, a window into evolution itself.
The story of how this discovery was made is outlined in an article by Mike Silver in TuftsNow — the online news magazine of Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, USA.
‘These Cheeses Have a Life, They Have a Story’Color changes in fungi on cheese rinds point to specific molecular mechanisms of genetic adaptation—and sometimes a tastier cheese
Many scientific discoveries are serendipitous—the result of chance. Seeing evolution in action in a cheese cave turned out to be exactly that for Benjamin Wolfe, associate professor of biology, and his colleagues.
Back in 2016, Wolfe convinced his former post-doc advisor to drive with him to Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont to get samples of a special cheese called Bayley Hazen Blue, a ruse for her boyfriend to propose marriage at the spot where they first met. Wolfe ended up keeping that cheese in the freezer in his lab.
I’m notorious for not throwing samples away just in case we might need them.
Benjamin E. Wolfe, Corresponding author.
Department of Biology
Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA.
But when graduate student Nicolas Louw picked up recent samples of Bayley Hazen Blue from the Jasper Hill caves—large, damp rooms built into the side of steep hills—he discovered the cheese, previously coated with a leafy green layer of fungus, was now chalk white on the outside.
This was really exciting because we thought it could be an example of evolution happening right before our eyes. Microbes evolve. We know that from antibiotic resistance evolution, we know that from pathogen evolution, but we don’t usually see it happening at a specific place over time in a natural setting.
Benjamin E. Wolfe.
Wolfe and his colleagues reported the finding in Current Biology.
Understanding how fungi adapt to different environments can help us in areas of food security and health, too, says Louw.
Somewhere around 20% of staple crops are lost pre-harvest due to fungal rot, and an additional 20% are lost to fungi post-harvest. That includes the moldy bread in your pantry and rotting fruit on market shelves. The biggest threat to global food security is just rot from mold.
Nicolas L. Louw, first author.
Department of Biology
Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA.
Understanding how to control this problem while preventing fungal adaptation is an agricultural priority.
A Small but Key Mutation
When wheels of cheese are placed to ripen in natural or artificial cave environments, they form microbial rinds on their surface made up of communities of bacteria, yeast, and filamentous fungi (molds). These wild microbes are picked up from soil, plant, and marine environments and end up colonizing and adapting to the environments of the cheese caves.
What caused the Penicillium solitum fungi on the Jasper Hill cheeses to change color? A student in one of Wolfe’s advanced microbiology laboratory courses on microbiomes found the answer. Jackson Larlee, A24, discovered that the change was prompted by the disruption of a gene called alb1.
Alb1 is involved in producing melanin. You can think of melanin as an armor that organisms make to protect themselves from UV damage. For the fungi, it creates the green color that absorbs UV light. If you are growing in a dark cave and can get by without melanin, it makes sense to get rid of it, so you don’t have to expend precious energy to make it. By breaking that pathway and going from green to white, the fungi are essentially saving energy to invest in other things for survival and growth.
Nicolas L. Louw.
It’s a process called “relaxed selection,” when an environmental stressor is removed, and that happens to many organisms when they adapt to dark conditions, from Mexican cave fish to salamanders to some insects. It’s almost always a loss of pigments and melanin. Some creatures become blind, then increase their ability to sense food in other ways.
The fungi gave the Wolfe lab an opportunity to identify the genetic mechanisms that led to a small evolutionary change.
We found that the change was not just one mutation that swept through the whole colony, but the color shift came about through many types of mutations independently.
Nicolas L. Louw.
Some of the fungi had point mutations—single DNA base pair changes—at different locations in the genome. Others had a large insertion of DNA caused by something called a transposable element. Transposable elements, once called “jumping genes,” pop out of one location and insert themselves into another in the genome.
In this case, transposable elements were inserting themselves ahead of the alb1 gene, which disrupted its expression, effectively knocking it out. Transposable elements can cause a lot of damage, but this time, it was an advantage for the fungi to forego production of melanin—allowing it more energy to grow. Thus, the white wheels of cheese in the Jasper Hill cave.
Aspergillus fungi are in the same family as Penicillium. They are found in the soil, on decaying plants, in household dust and ventilation systems and in massive quantities in the air. Most of the time they are harmless, but some strains can cause severe lung infections. Understanding how they become locally adapted and lodged in the lung environment could help researchers understand and prevent these infections.
For now, the Wolfe lab, in collaboration with Jasper Hill Farm, is exploring another benefit of evolving and domesticating fungi—creating new types of cheese with improved aesthetics, taste, and texture. They inoculated fresh brie cheese with the novel white mold and let it grow and ripen the cheese for two months.
The result:
It’s slightly nuttier and less funky. I think it’s delicious.
Nicolas L. Louw.
Based on a taste testing panel, the new cheese has promising attributes that will be further fine-tuned in future batches of cheese at Jasper Hill Farm.
Seeing wild molds evolve right before our eyes over a period of a few years helps us think that that we can develop a robust domestication process, to create new genetic diversity and tap into that for cheesemaking.
A Penicillium solitum population has shifted from green to white in a cheese cave
Multiple mutations in a melanin biosynthesis gene (alb1) are found in white strains
White P. solitum strains outcompete green strains, but only in the dark
This local adaptation may be part of a fungal domestication process
Summary
Previous comparative and experimental evolution studies have suggested how fungi may rapidly adapt to new environments, but direct observation of in situ selection in fungal populations is rare due to challenges with tracking populations over human time scales. We monitored a population of Penicillium solitum over eight years in a cheese cave and documented a phenotypic shift from predominantly green to white strains. Diverse mutations in the alb1 gene, which encodes the first protein in the dihydroxynaphthalene (DHN)-melanin biosynthesis pathway, explained the green-to-white shift. A similar phenotypic shift was recapitulated with an alb1 knockout and experimental evolution in laboratory populations. The most common genetic disruption of the alb1 genomic region was caused by putative transposable element insertions upstream of the gene. White strains had substantial downregulation in global transcription, with genetically distinct white strains possessing divergent shifts in the expression of different biological processes. White strains outcompeted green strains in co-culture, but this competitive advantage was only observed in the absence of light. Our results illustrate how fermented food production by humans provides opportunities for relaxed selection of key fungal traits over short time scales. The local adaptation we observed may be part of a domestication process that could provide opportunities to generate new strains for innovation in fermented food production.
So here we have it: evolution, witnessed in real time, written not in fossils but in the rind of a cheese. No sudden monster hybrids, no overnight miracles, just the steady, measurable genetic change that defines evolution.
It’s a reminder that evolution doesn’t need to be spectacular to be real. Most of the time, it works quietly, generation by generation, gene by gene, adapting life to its environment with ruthless efficiency. In this case, it stripped away an unnecessary pigment because, in the darkness of a cave, producing it was a waste.
And that’s the point creationists can’t face: evolution is not a matter of belief, but of evidence. It can be seen in the lab, in the field, and now, even in the cheese on your plate. So the next time a creationist demands to see “witnessed evolution,” you can simply tell them to check their dinner.
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Creationism is rooted in Bronze Age mythology and rests on a single source, the Bible, whose only claim to authority is its own demonstrably false assertion that it is the inerrant word of a creator god.
This is a claim anyone could make, and it collapses when its statements are compared with the observable world.
For example, biblical genealogies, beginning with a mythical first couple created from dust without ancestors, imply that Earth is only a few thousand years old. In reality, geological and astronomical evidence shows that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and the fossil record demonstrates that life was flourishing hundreds of millions of years before the Bible implies creation began.
One striking piece of evidence comes from an analysis of mastodon DNA, which shows that between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago mastodons in North America had already diversified into several genetically distinct populations.
The dating of a clutch of fossil dinosaur eggs will leave creationists scrambling for excuses to dismiss the evidence and cling to the childish notion that Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old, created ex nihilo by magic, with all extant and extinct species brought into existence without ancestors just a few days later. In other words, this discovery is yet another small addition to the mountain of evidence showing that the biblical creation story was the work of ignorant Bronze Age people trying to make sense of the world around them, not the word of an omniscient creator god who would have known better.
An added problem for creationists is that the research team used a new method of dating the eggs based on measuring when the eggshell itself formed, rather than relying solely on dating the rock in which the eggs were embedded. The difficulty with the latter approach is that, while it gives the age of the surrounding rock, the mineral grains in that rock may predate the eggs and could have been transported there by water or wind.
The new technique is conceptually similar to the uranium–lead (U–Pb) method used to date zircon crystals in volcanic tuff. Tiny amounts of uranium, which readily substitute into the crystal lattice, are incorporated when the zircon forms, but lead is excluded. Over time, uranium isotopes decay into stable isotopes of lead. Thus, any lead present within a zircon crystal must have come from radioactive decay, and by measuring the ratio of uranium to lead isotopes, scientists can calculate the crystal’s age with high precision.
A very similar process occurs in the carbonate of dinosaur eggshells: uranium is incorporated during formation, but lead is excluded. Measuring uranium–lead isotope ratios in the shell carbonate therefore provides a direct and highly accurate age for the eggs themselves, leaving little room for error.
LMC N44C
Stars in a star cluster shine brightly blue, with four-pointed spikes radiating from them. The centre shows a small, crowded group of stars while a larger group lies out of view on the left. The nebula is mostly thick, smoky clouds of gas, lit up in blue tones by the stars. Clumps of dust hover before and around the stars; they are mostly dark, but lit around their edges where the starlight erodes them.
This week’s NASA/European Space Agency (ESA) Hubble picture of the week is a stunning cloudy starscape from an impressive star cluster. The scene lies within the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy about 160,000 light-years away in the southern constellations Dorado and Mensa. With a mass equal to 10–20% of that of the Milky Way, the LMC is the largest of the dozens of small galaxies orbiting our own.
The light captured in this image began its journey 160,000 years ago, when early Homo sapiens were making their first tentative steps beyond Africa, following in the paths of Homo erectus and encountering Neanderthals, who had already lived in Eurasia for some 100,000 years.
That very distance — 160,000 light-years — alone undermines the biblical timeline. The contrast between this breathtaking glimpse of just a tiny fragment of the universe and the childishly naïve picture painted in Genesis is a near-superfluous refutation of the idea that its description came from an all-knowing creator.
Archaeologists led by Budianto Hakim of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) and Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution have uncovered evidence of tool-making on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi dating back 1.04 million years. The identity of the toolmakers remains unknown, as no hominin fossils have yet been found on the island. Their discovery has just been published open-access in Nature.
The most likely candidates are Homo erectus or a descendant population that adapted to Sulawesi’s distinctive environment. The island lies close to Flores, home of the diminutive ‘Hobbit’ (H. floresiensis), thought to have evolved from H. erectus through island dwarfism, a process that also produced the miniature elephants of Flores. A related discovery was made in 2019 on Luzon in the Philippines, where H. luzonensis—another likely offshoot of H. erectus—was identified. It is therefore entirely plausible that H. erectus, or one of its evolutionary branches, was present and making tools on Sulawesi more than a million years ago.
For creationists, such finds are troublesome because they align seamlessly with evolutionary theory, showing hominins branching, adapting, and diversifying in different environments, just as Darwin and Wallace first described in 1859. They also highlight the profound role of environment in shaping evolutionary outcomes.
For science, the discovery is particularly significant because it implies that an early hominin was capable of undertaking sea crossings across the formidable ‘Wallace Line’—a biogeographic boundary that long isolated the fauna of Australasia from mainland Asia by preventing the natural dispersal of terrestrial animals.
Scientists analysing data from NASA’s Perseverance rover have reported a tantalising discovery from Jezero Crater on Mars: rocks rich in minerals and chemical patterns that could represent potential biosignatures — the traces left behind by ancient life. The findings, published by an international team led from Imperial College London, point to the remains of an ancient lake where conditions may once have been favourable for microbial life to take hold.
The evidence comes from mudstones, clays, silica, iron-phosphate and iron-sulphide nodules, along with carbon compounds that appear to have undergone redox reactions. On Earth, such processes are often associated with biology, though the researchers are careful to stress that non-biological explanations are still possible. It will take the return of rock samples to Earth, with far more powerful laboratory techniques, before firm conclusions can be reached.
Archaeologists from Cardiff University have published the largest study of its kind into animal remains from Late Bronze Age Britain, and their findings reveal a surprisingly complex picture of feasting, farming, and far-reaching social networks. The research, published in iScience, reports on multi-isotope analysis of more than 3,500 bones from six prehistoric middens in Wiltshire and the Thames Valley. These vast heaps of discarded remains are the archaeological traces of large communal feasts held some 3,000 years ago.
The team found that the animals consumed—cattle, pigs, and sheep—were not all raised locally. Some were brought from considerable distances, suggesting both a sophisticated agricultural economy and a culture in which travel and exchange linked communities across southern Britain. Such large-scale gatherings, the researchers conclude, were central to forging alliances, maintaining social bonds, and reinforcing ritual practices in the closing centuries of the Bronze Age.
In other words, these middens are the material testimony of thriving societies in Britain whose development ran seamlessly from the Neolithic into the Bronze Age, without any trace of a catastrophic global flood. If Genesis were literal history, such sites could not exist. But they do. The Cardiff findings are therefore another piece of hard archaeological evidence that exposes the biblical flood as a myth, not a record of real events.
Far from being isolated farming villages, Late Bronze Age communities in Britain were enmeshed in a dynamic cultural landscape with trade and ritual at its heart. I have previously written about the political control and economic development in Britain being sufficient to command and supply the manpower needed to undertake massive civil engineering projects such as building Stonehenge and Silbury Hill. Silbury Hill alone took an estimates 18 million man-hours to build (i.e. 500 men working for 15 years) - a level of political and economic development which would have been impossible within the Bible's framework.
And here lies the striking problem for biblical literalism. If we take the chronology given in Genesis at face value, Noah’s Flood is supposed to have occurred around 2348 BCE. By that reckoning, all humans and animals on earth, save those aboard the Ark, were annihilated. The Late Bronze Age middens, however, date to between 1200 and 800 BCE—well after the supposed global deluge. The isotope evidence shows continuity of local herds, supplemented by long-distance transport of animals, not a sudden repopulation from a single Middle Eastern source.
