How Do We know The Bible Is Wrong? - We Look At The Real-World Evidence, Of Course!

An example of a binary star system

Hubble uncovers the secret of stars that defy ageing | ESA/Hubble

A paper in Nature Communications by an international research team of astronomers led by Professor Francesco R. Ferraro of the Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “Augusto Righi”, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Italy, reveals a universe utterly at odds with the description of it in the Bible. It should be a simple matter to compare this real universe with the one described in the Bible and draw the obvious conclusion from the glaring differences — but not, it seems, for creationists.

The connection between opinion and evidence appears to be lost on creationists who are determined to cling to patently wrong beliefs, despite the evidence, as though evidence has no right to intrude on their thought processes. In this worldview, truth is unrelated to real-world evidence and must comply with a creationist’s beliefs.

Let’s take a couple of simple examples and apply creationist “logic”.

Firstly: you need to cross a road. How do you know it’s safe before you step off the kerb?

You look at the evidence — how busy is the road? Are there any vehicles approaching, especially on your side? If there are, the evidence tells you that you can’t safely cross and need to wait.

Applying creationist “logic”: you ignore the evidence as unwanted and unwelcome and conclude that the road is safe to cross because you want it to be, and reality is obliged to comply.

What do you think your chances of surviving for long would be using that methodology?

Secondly: you’re waiting at a bus stop to catch a bus. How do you know the bus has arrived?

You can see the bus, of course. It has stopped in front of you and the doors have opened. Other passengers may be getting on or off, so you get on the bus and take your seat.

Applying creationist “logic”: you ignore the evidence and assume the bus must have arrived because you want it to have done so, so you step off the pavement and imagine you’re getting on a bus.

You now look pretty foolish and might even step into the path of the real bus you’ve been waiting for. What you almost certainly won’t do is get on the bus — because it isn’t there.

In both examples, only evidence reveals the real world, and creationist faith may let you down very badly, simply because creationist faith has no relationship to the real world. It reflects only blind imagination and wishful thinking, coupled with the absurd belief that the real world is obliged to comply with personal preferences. Evidence, on the other hand, is the real world, and a rational person allows evidence to determine their beliefs.

So now a third example: how do you know you can rely on the information in the Bible? You compare it with real-world evidence, of course, just as you would when crossing the road or catching a bus.

And if you do that, what do you find?

You find a description of the universe that bears no resemblance to the real universe — just as your faith in a safe and empty road bears no relationship to a real road, or your imaginary bus bears no relationship to a real bus. In other words, the real-world evidence is so far removed from the description in the Bible that the Bible is plainly, obviously, and irrefutably wrong. As such, it is utterly unreliable as a source of factual information about the universe.

What we see in the Bible is a description of a universe consisting of a small flat planet with a dome over it. We see a demon-haunted world that is just a few thousand years old and runs on magic. It has talking snakes and donkeys; it endorses slavery and misogyny, autocratic government and peremptory justice with no right of appeal, and a draconian penal system in which the penalty of choice is death for even minor transgressions. It describes virgin birth and promotes blood sacrifice as absolving people of responsibility for their wrongs.

And doubt itself is treated as a crime carrying the death penalty, as though the worst thing the authors could imagine was people questioning their claims.

With that in mind, let’s look at the real-world evidence as revealed by the European Space Agency (ESA) in conjunction with NASA and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and compare it with the Bible’s description of the universe:

First the Bible:

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

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

How the Bible's authors saw the Universe.

Now the latest photographs of a tiny fragment of the real universe:

A side-by-side visual of two globular clusters: NGC 3201 (left) and Messier 70 (right). The star cluster on the right is visibly compact in shape, as the stars near the centre of the object appear very close together. Contrastingly, the star cluster on the left is less compact, as the stars are more spread apart from one another in the field.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Hubble uncovers the secret of stars that defy ageing

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Some stars appear to defy time itself. Nestled within ancient star clusters, they shine bluer and brighter than their neighbours, looking far younger than their true age. Known as blue straggler stars, these stellar oddities have puzzled astronomers for more than 70 years. Now, new results using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope are finally revealing how these “forever young” stars come to be and why they thrive in quieter cosmic neighbourhoods.

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Blue straggler stars stand out in old star clusters because they appear hotter, more massive and younger than stars that should all have formed billions of years ago. Their very existence contradicts standard theories of stellar ageing, prompting decades of debate over whether they are created through violent stellar collisions or through more subtle interactions between pairs of stars. A new study provides some of the clearest evidence yet that blue stragglers owe their youthful appearance not to collisions, but to life in close stellar partnerships, and to the environments that allow those partnerships to survive.

An international research team analysed ultraviolet Hubble observations of 48 globular clusters in the Milky Way, assembling the largest and most complete catalogue of blue straggler stars ever produced. The sample includes more than 3000 of these enigmatic objects. Their host clusters span the entire range of possible environmental conditions, from very loose to very dense systems (as illustrated in Image A). This vast dataset allowed astronomers to investigate the long-suspected links between blue straggler stars and their surroundings.

Rather than finding more blue stragglers in the most crowded, collision-prone clusters, the team was surprised to discover the opposite: dense environments host fewer blue stragglers. Instead, these stars are most common in low-density clusters, where stars have more space and where fragile binary systems are more likely to survive.

This work shows that the environment plays a relevant role in the life of stars. Blue straggler stars are intimately connected to the evolution of binary systems, but their survival depends on the conditions in which they live. Low-density environments provide the best habitat for binaries and their by-products, allowing some stars to appear younger than expected.

Professor Francesco R. Ferraro, lead author
Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “Augusto Righi”
Alma Mater Studiorum Universita‘ di Bologna
Bologna, Italy.

The team found that blue stragglers are closely linked to binary star systems, in which two stars orbit one another. In such systems, one star can siphon material from its partner or merge with it entirely, gaining fresh fuel and shining more brightly and blue (effectively resetting its stellar clock).

However, these observations show that denser environments host less binaries, suggesting that in densely packed clusters, frequent close encounters between stars can break binaries apart before they have time to produce a blue straggler. In calmer environments, binaries survive and blue stragglers flourish.

Crowded star clusters are not a friendly place for stellar partnerships. Where space is tight, binaries can be more easily destroyed, and the stars lose their chance to stay young.

Enrico Vesperin, co-author
Department of Astronomy
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN, USA.

This discovery marks the first time that such clear and opposite-to-expectation relationships have been observed between blue straggler populations and their environments. It confirms that blue stragglers are a direct by-product of binary evolution and highlights how strongly a star’s surroundings can influence its life story.

This work gives us a new way to understand how stars evolve over billions of years. It shows that even star lives are shaped by their environment, much like living systems on Earth.

Barbara Lanzoni, co-author
Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “Augusto Righi”
Alma Mater Studiorum Universita‘ di Bologna
Bologna, Italy.

By resolving individual stars in crowded clusters and observing them in ultraviolet light, Hubble was uniquely suited to uncovering this long-hidden pattern. The findings not only solve a long-standing astronomical mystery, but also open new paths for understanding how stars interact, age and sometimes find ways to start anew.

Publication:

Ferraro, F.R., Lanzoni, B., Vesperini, E. et al.
A binary-related origin mediated by environmental conditions for blue straggler stars. Nat Commun 17, 768 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-68159-5

Abstract
Blue stragglers are anomalously massive core hydrogen-burning stars that, according to the theory of single star evolution, should not exist. They are suspected to form in mass-enhancement processes, involving binary evolution or stellar collisions. In dynamically active systems like globular clusters, the number of blue stragglers originated by collisions is expected to increase with the local density and the rate of stellar encounters. Here we analyze more than 3000 blue stragglers in 48 Galactic globular clusters with different structures, finding that their number normalized to the sampled luminosity anti-correlates (instead of correlating) with the central density, collision rate, and dynamical age of the parent cluster. Similar trends are also found for the cluster binary fraction. Once inserted in the context of the current knowledge of the BSS phenomenon, these correlations indicate that low-density regions (possibly because of a higher binary production/survival rate) are the natural habitat of both BSSs and binary systems, and the observed BSSs mostly have a binary-related origin mediated by the environmental conditions.

Ferraro, F.R., Lanzoni, B., Vesperini, E. et al.
A binary-related origin mediated by environmental conditions for blue straggler stars. Nat Commun 17, 768 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-68159-5

Copyright: © 2026 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

What Professor Ferraro and his colleagues reveal is not some marginal technical curiosity, but yet another piece of overwhelming evidence that the universe bears no resemblance whatsoever to the one described in the Bible. The universe is vast beyond comprehension, ancient beyond any biblical timescale, and governed by consistent physical laws that operate without reference to angels, demons, magic, or divine interventions. This is not an inconvenient detail that can be patched over with a little theological hand-waving. It is a fundamental incompatibility.

That incompatibility creates an insoluble problem for the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. If the Bible were genuinely the product of a creator god who also created the universe, then its description of that universe would at least be recognisably accurate. It would not portray a flat Earth capped by a solid dome, a young cosmos running on miracles, or a world in which celestial bodies exist merely as lights hung in the sky for human benefit. A god capable of creating galaxies, stars, black holes, and the large-scale structure of the universe would not inspire a text that gets the most basic features of reality so comprehensively wrong.

Creationists like to pretend that these are merely “poetic” or “metaphorical” flourishes, but that excuse collapses as soon as the text is treated consistently. The biblical authors were not offering subtle allegories about cosmology; they were describing the world as they understood it, using the best ideas available to Bronze-Age pastoral societies. Those ideas were wrong then, and they are indefensible now. What modern astronomy exposes is not the mysterious wisdom of a divine mind, but the very human limitations of ancient writers who knew nothing about galaxies, stellar evolution, deep time, or the true scale of the cosmos.

Evidence does not negotiate with belief. It does not care what people want to be true, what they were raised to believe, or what a religious tradition demands they accept. Evidence simply describes the real world as it is. And every new observation from modern astronomy, including those reported in this paper, pushes the Bible further from the realm of plausibility as a divinely inspired source of truth about the universe.

So creationists face the same choice they do when crossing a road or waiting for a bus: either allow evidence to determine their beliefs, or continue pretending that reality is obliged to conform to their faith. One of those approaches keeps you anchored in the real world. The other leaves you clinging to a demonstrably false picture of the universe, authored not by a creator god, but by ancient humans who were doing their best with the limited knowledge of their time — and getting it badly wrong.

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Creationism Refuted - An Elephant Bone Tool from 470,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Map of Lower Paleolithic sites with published elephant-bone tools.

Simon A. Parfitt, Silvia M. Bello (2026).

Ancient humans made elephant bone tools in Europe half a million years ago | Natural History Museum

The problems for creationists deepened today with news that two scientists, Simon Parfitt of the UCL Institute of Archaeology and a Scientific Associate at the Natural History Museum, London, and Silvia M. Bello of the Natural History Museum, have discovered an elephant bone tool dating from roughly half a million years ago — the oldest such tool discovered in Europe, from a time before anatomically modern hominins had left Africa. They published their findings in Science Advances.

Of course, most creationists will be blissfully unaware of this discovery, as with all such archaeology, because there is no point in being a creationist if you are going to read the latest scientific discoveries. How is that going to help you cling to patently absurd beliefs despite all the evidence against you? Best just ignore it and dismiss it all as some sort of Satanic conspiracy aimed at making you show weakness and change your mind.

Nevertheless, the fact is that this elephant bone tool exists and has been dated to about 490,000 years before creationism’s favourite book of Bronze Age superstitions says Earth existed. It was used by archaic hominins, probably to sharpen dulled flint tools by gently knapping the cutting edges. It was discovered at Boxgrove, Kent, England, in the early 1990s but was not recognised as a tool until recently, when finds from the Boxgrove site were studied in detail using new technology such as 3D scans and scanning electron microscopy, which revealed impact notches with embedded flint fragments.

Bone, being softer than flint, would have been the material of choice for work where precision was important, and elephant bone, with its hard outer layer of compact bone making it more durable, would have been the bone of choice. However, elephants and mammoths were rare in what is now southern England 500,000 years ago, so these tools would have been valuable objects.

It is not clear which archaic hominins used these tools in southern England, but at 500,000 years ago it was probably one of the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans, which form the “muddle in the middle” of the human evolutionary story. Here the problem is not a lack of fossils but an abundance of them, showing varying mixtures of primitive and derived features typical of transitional species, coming somewhere between Homo erectus and Neanderthals. Candidates are H. heidelbergensis and H. antecessor.

The stone tools from Boxgrove are part of the widespread Acheulean technology, which originated in East Africa about 1.95 million years ago and spread across Africa and into western Eurasia after about 1.5 million years ago, persisting until between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago.

Creationism Refuted - How The Mammalian Ear Evolved - 250 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fossil study rewrites timeline of evolution of hearing in mammals | University of Chicago News

A recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) reports the discovery that an ancestor of mammals, a cynodont called Thrinaxodon liorhinus, had ear structures derived from redundant jaw bones that probably gave it an acute sense of hearing some 250 million years ago — around 50 million years earlier than previously believed. As nocturnal animals, a well-developed sense of hearing would have been hugely advantageous.

The research, by palaeontologists from the University of Chicago, used CT scans of the skull and jawbones of Thrinaxodon to simulate the effects of different sound pressures and frequencies on its anatomy.

Transitional fossils such as this are a major source of embarrassment to creationists because their Bronze Age mythology insists that all species were created fully formed, without ancestry, so there should never be any examples of species evolving or of existing structures being exapted over time for new functions.

Sadly for creationists, the fossil evidence paints an entirely different picture. It is a record of everything creationism predicts should not be there and everything evolution predicts will be. To most normal people, that sort of evidence should strongly suggest that creationism is wrong and that the Theory of Evolution is right.

It is rather like someone who does not believe in gravity stating that if you throw a stone into the air it will stay there and never fall back to Earth. A simple demonstration will establish the falsehood of that claim, just as the fossil record establishes the falsehood of creationist claims.

Background^ Cynodonts and the Evolution of the Mammalian Middle Ear. Cynodonts were a group of synapsid reptiles that lived from the Late Permian to the Early Jurassic and include the direct ancestors of mammals. Unlike true reptiles, cynodonts already showed many mammal-like features, including differentiated teeth, a more upright posture, a secondary palate, and increasingly complex jaw and skull anatomy. Fossils such as Thrinaxodon, Cynognathus, and later forms like Morganucodon document a clear, step-by-step transition from reptile-like synapsids to early mammals.

One of the most striking evolutionary changes recorded in this lineage is the origin of the mammalian middle ear. In reptiles, several small bones at the back of the lower jaw — notably the articular and quadrate — form part of the jaw joint. In mammals, these same bones are repurposed as the malleus and incus of the middle ear, joining the stapes to form the familiar three-bone hearing apparatus. This transformation did not occur suddenly; it unfolded gradually over tens of millions of years.

Fossil cynodonts preserve intermediate stages in which these jaw bones became progressively smaller, less involved in chewing, and increasingly specialised for sound transmission. Some transitional species even show a “double jaw joint,” with both the old reptilian joint and the new mammalian joint functioning simultaneously. This provides direct, physical evidence for exaptation — the evolutionary process in which structures originally evolved for one function are co-opted for a new one.

The result of this long transition was the highly sensitive mammalian middle ear, capable of detecting higher-frequency sounds far better than that of reptiles. This would have been particularly advantageous for small, nocturnal early mammals, allowing them to detect predators and prey in low-light conditions. Far from being a problem for evolutionary theory, the cynodont fossil record is one of its clearest and most elegant confirmations — and one of the most awkward facts for creationism to explain away.

Creationist Claim vs Reality: The Mammalian Middle Ear

Claim:
The mammalian middle ear is “irreducibly complex” and could not have evolved because all three bones — the malleus, incus, and stapes — must be present and perfectly arranged for hearing to work.

Reality:
The fossil record preserves multiple transitional stages showing exactly how the mammalian middle ear evolved from reptile-like jaw bones. In early synapsids and cynodonts, the articular and quadrate bones formed part of the jaw joint. Over time, these bones became progressively smaller and less involved in chewing, while increasingly specialised for transmitting sound.

Claim:
There are no transitional fossils showing this transformation.

Reality:
There are many. Fossils such as Thrinaxodon, Cynognathus, Diarthrognathus, and Morganucodon preserve intermediate anatomies, including species with a functioning “double jaw joint” — one reptilian and one mammalian — operating at the same time. This is exactly what gradual evolution predicts.

Claim:
Repurposing jaw bones for hearing would destroy their original function.

Reality:
It did not. For millions of years, both functions co-existed. As the new mammalian jaw joint (between the dentary and squamosal bones) took over the role of chewing, the old jaw joint bones were freed to specialise for sound transmission. This is a textbook example of exaptation, not a paradox.

Claim:
Complex biological structures appear suddenly.

Reality:
They do not. The step-by-step transformation of jaw bones into middle ear bones is one of the best-documented transitions in the entire fossil record. It is exactly the opposite of what creationism predicts — and exactly what evolutionary theory predicts.

The research is explained in an article in UChicago News by Matt Wood.

Fossil study rewrites timeline of evolution of hearing in mammals

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UChicago paleontologists use CT scanning and simulations to show how a 250-million-year-old mammal predecessor could hear like us

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One of the most important steps in the evolution of modern mammals was the development of highly sensitive hearing.

The middle ear of mammals, with an eardrum and several small bones, allows us to hear a broad range of frequencies and volumes, which was a big help to early, mostly nocturnal mammal ancestors as they tried to survive alongside dinosaurs.

New research by paleontologists from the University of Chicago shows that this modern mode of hearing evolved much earlier than previously thought. Working with detailed CT scans of the skull and jawbones of Thrinaxodon liorhinus, a 250-million-year-old mammal predecessor, they used engineering methods to simulate the effects of different sound pressures and frequencies on its anatomy.

Their models show the creature likely had an eardrum large enough to hear airborne sound effectively, nearly 50 million years before scientists previously thought this evolved in early mammals.

For almost a century, scientists have been trying to figure out how these animals could hear. These ideas have captivated the imagination of paleontologists who work in mammal evolution, but until now we haven’t had very strong biomechanical tests. Now, with our advances in computational biomechanics, we can start to say smart things about what the anatomy means for how this animal could hear.

Alec T. Wilken, lead author
Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy
The University of Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA.

Fossil specimen of the Thrinaxodon skull and jaw used for the study.

Photo by Matt Wood.

Testing a 50-year-old hypothesis

Thrinaxodon was a cynodont, a group of animals from the early Triassic period with features beginning to transition from reptiles to mammals. They had specialized teeth, changes to the palate and diaphragm to improve breathing and metabolism, and probably warm-bloodedness and fur.

In early cynodonts, including Thrinaxodon, the ear bones—malleus, incus, stapes—were attached to their jawbones. Later, these bones separated from the jaw to form a distinct middle ear, considered a key development in the evolution of modern mammals.

Simulations showed that sound waves applied to the eardrum of "Thrinaxodon" (top) would have enabled it to hear much more effectively than through bone conduction alone (bottom).

Infographic courtesy of April I. Neander, Alec Wilken

Fifty years ago, Edgar Allin, a paleontologist at the University of Illinois Chicago, first speculated that cynodonts like Thrinaxodon had a membrane suspended across a hooked structure on the jawbone that was a precursor to the modern eardrum. Until then, scientists who studied mammal evolution mostly believed that early cynodonts heard through bone conduction, or via so-called “jaw listening” where they set their mandibles on the ground to pick up vibrations.

While the eardrum idea was fascinating, there was no way to definitively test if such a structure could work to hear airborne sounds.

Turning fossils into an engineering problem

Modern imaging tools like CT scanning have revolutionized the field of paleontology, allowing scientists to unlock a wealth of information that wouldn’t have been possible through studying physical specimens alone.

Wilken and his advisors, Zhe-Xi Luo and Callum Ross, both professors of organismal biology and anatomy, took a well-known Thrinaxodon specimen from the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, and scanned it in UChicago’s PaleoCT Laboratory. The resulting 3D model gave them a highly detailed reconstruction of its skull and jawbones, with all the dimensions, shapes, angles and curves they needed to determine how a potential eardrum might function.

Next, they used a software tool called Strand7 to perform finite element analysis, an approach that breaks down a system into smaller parts with different physical characteristics. Such tools are usually used for complex engineering problems, like predicting stresses on bridges, aircraft and buildings, or analyzing heat distribution in engines. The team used the software to simulate how the anatomy of Thrinaxodon would respond to different sound pressures and frequencies, using a library of known properties about the thickness, density and flexibility of bones, ligaments, muscles and skin from living animals.

The results were loud and clear: Thrinaxodon, with an eardrum tucked into a crook on its jawbone, could definitely hear that way much more effectively than through bone conduction. The size and shape of its eardrum would have produced the right vibrations to move the ear bones and generate enough pressure to stimulate its auditory nerves and detect sound frequencies. While it still would have relied on some jaw listening, the eardrum was already responsible for most of its hearing.

Once we have the CT model from the fossil, we can take material properties from extant animals and make it as if our Thrinaxodon came alive. That hasn’t been possible before, and this software simulation showed us that vibration through sound is essentially the way this animal could hear.

Professor Zhe-Xi Luo, corresponding author.
Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy
The University of Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA.

Wilken said the new technology allowed them to answer an old question by turning it into an engineering problem.

That’s why this is such a cool problem to study. We took a high concept problem—that is, ‘how do ear bones wiggle in a 250-million-year-old fossil?’—and tested a simple hypothesis using these sophisticated tools. And it turns out in Thrinaxodon, the eardrum does just fine all by itself.

Alec T. Wilken.

Publication:

A.T. Wilken, C.C.G. Snipes, C.F. Ross, & Z. Luo.
Biomechanics of the mandibular middle ear of the cynodont Thrinaxodon and the evolution of mammal hearing
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (51) e2516082122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2516082122 (2025).

Significance
The middle ear of modern mammals is detached from the mandible and has a soft-tissue eardrum, which allows airborne sound to be heard across a wide range of frequencies. A rich fossil record shows that the middle ear bones of mammals evolved from the jaw bones of their synapsid predecessors, but how this transformation was associated with changes in hearing function is unknown. Our finite element analysis (FEA) of the harmonic response of the mandibular ear bones and soft-tissue eardrum of the synapsid Thrinaxodon suggests that this 250-Mya-old mammal precursor was already capable of tympanic hearing similar to extant mammals and provides evidence that this functional transition occurred very early in mammal evolutionary history.

Abstract
The middle ear of mammals is a major functional innovation, distinctive in that it is detached from the mandible and has a tympanic membrane supported by a ring-like ectotympanic. These novelties of the middle ear have enabled modern mammals to develop more sensitive hearing than all other tetrapods, especially at higher frequencies. Fossils from recent decades have clarified the evolution of the detached middle ear from the jaw bones of Paleozoic therapsids and Mesozoic cynodonts, and the evolution of the tympanum. These discoveries make it possible to answer important questions about the functional significance of these features. Here, we evaluate the relative hearing efficacy of a well-known cynodont precursor to mammals, Thrinaxodon liorhinus. Using finite element analysis (FEA), we calculated the harmonic response of the Thrinaxodon ear to bone-conducted and airborne sound and estimated the sound pressure level (SPL) at the stapedial footplate across a broad range of frequencies. We provide evidence that airborne sound received at the tympanum was the most effective mode of sound reception in Thrinaxodon. In contrast, bone conducted sound through the mandibular bones barely met our estimated hearing threshold. Our findings suggest that, like modern mammals, cynodonts were already reliant on a soft tissue tympanum to receive airborne sound, albeit with limited sensitivity to high frequencies. This is a detailed biomechanical evaluation of tympanum function in the cynodont predecessors of mammals and yields insight into the sequence of functional innovations during the evolution of mammal hearing.

A.T. Wilken, C.C.G. Snipes, C.F. Ross, & Z. Luo.
Biomechanics of the mandibular middle ear of the cynodont Thrinaxodon and the evolution of mammal hearing
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (51) e2516082122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2516082122 (2025).

© 2026 National Academy of Sciences of the USA.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

For creationists, this discovery is yet another reminder of how badly their Bronze Age mythology fails when confronted with real-world evidence. The evolutionary origin of the mammalian middle ear is no longer a theoretical reconstruction inferred from comparative anatomy; it is a physical, fossil-documented transition preserved in stone. The fact that Thrinaxodon already shows mammal-like hearing structures 250 million years ago simply pushes that transition even further back in time and fills in yet another gap that creationists like to pretend does not exist.

It also underlines a point that creationists have been trying to evade for decades: evolution does not require sudden leaps or the magical appearance of fully formed organs. What it requires is exactly what the fossil record shows — incremental modifications of existing structures, shaped by selection, and repurposed for new functions as circumstances change. Jaw bones that once transmitted bite forces gradually became exquisitely tuned instruments for transmitting sound. That is not a problem for evolutionary theory; it is one of its strongest empirical confirmations.

Worse still for Intelligent Design advocates, the researchers show no hesitation whatsoever in interpreting what they found within the framework of evolutionary biology. There is no hint of mystery, no appeal to unknown designers, and no suggestion that natural processes are inadequate to explain what is observed. Instead, the anatomy of Thrinaxodon fits neatly into a well-established evolutionary sequence that has been mapped out for decades and is now being refined in ever greater detail as new fossils and new technologies come to light.

So once again, we are left with a familiar contrast. Evolutionary biology makes clear, testable predictions about what we should find in the fossil record — and those predictions keep being confirmed. Creationism, by contrast, predicts that none of this should exist at all. When one worldview consistently matches the evidence and the other consistently fails, there is no honest ambiguity about which one is right.

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