Malevolent Design - Yet More Evidence Of Intelligently Designed Cancer?

Scientists Uncover Key Driver of Treatment-Resistant Cancer

These images show the beginnings of chromothripsis in colorectal cancer cells. The N4BP2 enzyme (green) infiltrates a micronucleus (zoomed in square selections), where it induces DNA damage (red). Blue represents the main cell nucleus.

Credit: UC San Diego Health Sciences

At the risk of labouring the point I made in my post yesterday — that the exact same arguments ID creationists use as ‘proof’ of intelligent design can also be applied to cancers, parasites, pathogens, and genetic diseases, thereby ‘proving’, in ID terms, that these too were intelligently designed by the same deity — we have yet another example of complex specified genetic information driving the evolution of cancers as they rapidly develop resistance to treatments.

This is reported in a research paper in Science by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego).

The researchers discovered an enzyme responsible for breaking up a chromosome in cancer cells and rearranging it into a scrambled version, enabling the tumour to evolve rapidly. The process is quite simple and closely mimics evolution by natural selection, or the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Shuffling genes in this way increases the likelihood that a small number of cancer cells will survive the treatment aimed at destroying them. The tumour then regrows from these resistant cells, producing a treatment-resistant cancer.

This ability, known as chromothripsis, is found in about 24% of human cancers.

The key to this process is the protein enzyme N4BP2, and the complex, specified gene that produces it. The process begins when an error in DNA replication causes individual chromosomes to become trapped inside tiny, fragile structures called micronuclei. When these micronuclei burst, the chromosome is exposed to nucleases — enzymes capable of breaking DNA.

Within the ID creationist paradigm, there are no such things as mistakes: everything works exactly as it was designed to work. So we are left to assume that these fragile micronuclei, with their entrapped chromosomes, are a deliberate design feature.

The researchers showed that N4BP2 is uniquely capable of entering micronuclei and breaking the trapped chromosome.

To test the hypothesis that N4BP2 is the culprit, they eliminated it in brain cancer cells and observed a reduction in chromothripsis. They then introduced it into healthy cell nuclei and found that it caused chromosomes to break even in otherwise normal cells.

This is, of course, just as much compelling evidence of intelligent design as anything traditionally cited by ID creationists as proof of an intelligent designer. By contrast, the theory of evolution provides an explanation with none of the problems that force creationists to retreat into contradictory theology, Bronze Age origin myths, and appeals to ‘mystery’.

Malevolent Design - More Evidence Of Intelligently Designed Cancer?

Pancreatic cancers co-opt nerve cells to assist them to develop.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Let’s get on pancreatic cancer’s nerves | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Creationists seem to have pinned all their hopes of justification for their evidence-free beliefs on a false dichotomy and a classic “god of the gaps” fallacy: the claim that complex specified information and irreducible complexity are proof of design by an intelligent entity. This argument relies heavily on the parochial ignorance of its intended audience, who are expected to assume that this “designer” must be the Christian god of the Bible — or, depending on geography and cultural background, the god of the Qur’an — and that therefore those holy books must be the inerrant word of the supposed creator.

However, the problem this raises for creationists is an obvious one: who or what, within their framework, designed all the many examples of irreducible complexity and complex specified information that cause suffering, sickness, and death?

Another striking example has just been published in Cancer Discovery by Professor Jérémy Nigri and colleagues from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, USA.

In this paper, the researchers use advanced 3D imaging to show how, even before tumours form, tumour-promoting fibroblasts — known as myCAFs — send out signals that attract nerve fibres. The myCAFs and nerve cells then work together within pancreatic lesions to create a microenvironment favourable for cancer growth. Embarrassingly for Intelligent Design advocates, this system depends entirely on the genetic capacity of myCAFs to send the correct molecular signals, and for nerve fibres to respond appropriately — a finely tuned interaction requiring precisely the sort of “irreducible complexity” they insist can only arise through intentional design.

Within the ID paradigm, these facts should be indisputable evidence of their god’s involvement — but only when the outcome is something they find beneficial, such as eyes, blood clotting, or a brain capable of abstract thought. When the very same logic points instead to cancers, parasites, and congenital diseases, it is suddenly no evidence at all, and certainly not evidence of malevolent intent on the part of the designer. The argument collapses into childish special pleading: design is invoked when convenient, but denied when morally awkward.

Creationism Refuted - How Neanderthals and Later Hunter-Gatherers Changed The European Landscape

Neanderthal hunting party

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

A new study shows that Neanderthals did not shy away from hunting even very large animals, such as the prehistoric elephant, which could weigh up to 13 tons. The impact of Neanderthals and hunter-gatherer peoples on nature turns out to have had a far greater influence on shaping the landscape of what we now know as Europe.

Photo: Wikimedia, AI

Neanderthals and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lit the fire: Humans shaped European landscapes long before agriculture

The past is a minefield for creationism because it becomes increasingly impossible to shoehorn reality into a 6,000–10,000-year timescale, or to maintain the fantasy of humans and animals appearing suddenly, without ancestry, only a few millennia ago. The more we learn about prehistory, the more creationists are forced either to dismiss the evidence or pretend it does not exist. Their difficulty is that their childish view of reality is rooted in the best guesses of ignorant Bronze Age pastoralists, who knew nothing of the world beyond their narrow horizons and understood nothing of the sciences that now inform our understanding of the universe around us.

In a paper published last October in PLOS ONE, an international team of researchers led by Anastasia Nikulina (Leiden University and Durham University), and including Professor Jens-Christian Svenning of Aarhus University, argue that Neanderthals — and later Homo sapiens — were already instrumental in shaping the European landscape long before agriculture transformed it. The most significant drivers of change were hunting of the megafauna and the widespread use of anthropogenic fire.

And of course, this explanation incorporates something creationism cannot successfully accommodate within its preferred mythology: the existence of an archaic human species that predated Homo sapiens in Eurasia by several hundred thousand years. It also rests upon a history of climatic change in Europe that makes sense only within the context of a world vastly older than creationist mythology can allow.

The team reached their conclusions after an extensive analysis of pollen records from two warm periods in European history: one between 125,000 and 116,000 years ago, and the other between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago. By comparing these results with computer simulations modelling the effects of climate change, large herbivores, and natural fires alone — and then adding the impacts of human hunting and deliberate burning — they found that the human-influenced models provided the best fit to the pollen data.

Creationism Refuted - The Oldest Known Human Remains in Northern Britain Are From 1,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'!

A Mesolithic burial, 11,000 years ago

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Figure 3. View facing west over the surface of the deposits in the main chamber at the start of the current fieldwork, showing the paint markings made by Mr Redshaw.

Photo by Martin Stables.

DNA analysis reveals Northern Britain’s oldest human remains are of a young female child

A good thousand years before creationism’s god allegedly created the first two humans, the body of a young girl was being buried in a cave in Cumbria, northern England.

This unwelcome news for creationists comes from an international team led by archaeologists at the University of Lancashire, who have just published their findings in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society.

The girl’s remains were discovered about three years ago in Heaning Wood Bone Cave by local archaeologist Martin Stables, from the nearby village of Great Urswick. The University of Lancashire team have now succeeded in extracting enough DNA to determine that she was between about 2.5 and 3.5 years old when she died.

Jewellery in the form of a deer tooth pendant and pierced beads has been radiocarbon dated to around 11,000 years ago, strongly suggesting this was a deliberate burial. This raises the question of why the cave held such significance as a burial site. Modern hunter-gatherer groups often regard caves as gateways to a spirit world, so it is possible that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in northern Europe held similar beliefs.

The team also showed that at least eight other individuals were buried in the cave over a period spanning roughly 4,000–11,000 years ago, from the Early Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age — ironically, the latter being the period when the creation myths of the Bible were being invented. The authors of those Bronze Age stories, of course, would have known nothing whatever of hunter-gatherer societies in northern Europe, their cultural history, or their spiritual traditions.

No doubt we will see the traditional creationist misrepresentation of this evidence, with unfounded assertions that radiocarbon dating “doesn’t work” and that scientists simply make things up to conform to some notional Darwinian narrative. Making things up to fit a pre-existing story is something creationists themselves routinely do. It seems to be characteristic of those who set out to deceive that they accuse others of doing exactly what they themselves practise.

Abiogenesis News - A Small Self-Copying RNA Molecule That Could Easily Arise Spontaneously

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Bridging the gap from chemistry to life: discovery of a tiny RNA that can copy itself | MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

A paper by Philipp Holliger’s group in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology’s Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry (PNAC) Division, Cambridge, UK, announces the discovery of a self-replicating small RNA molecule that can also synthesise its complementary strand. It was published yesterday in Science Advances.

This effectively resolves one of the few remaining major questions in explanations of abiogenesis: the origin of a simple self-catalysing replicator. Such a molecule must have existed at the very beginning of life’s emergence, and for decades RNA has been the leading candidate, because it can function both as an enzyme and as an information store — capable of copying that information repeatedly, provided there is a supply of nucleotides from which to build itself.

The question of where such a replicator first arose — in Darwin’s “warm little pond”, at a deep-ocean hydrothermal vent, or on wave-splashed rocks providing a steady supply of raw materials — is secondary to the more fundamental question of what could have initiated self-replication in the first place. Once replication began, occasional copying errors would inevitably generate variation, giving natural selection something to act upon. From that point, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that progressively more efficient replicators would emerge, eventually dominating and monopolising the available resources.

Although various RNA molecules are known that can also act as catalysts (ribozymes), most are far too large to self-catalyse, or plausibly to have arisen spontaneously under prebiotic conditions. This newly discovered RNA molecule, at a mere 45 nucleotides long, neatly plugs that gap.

Creationists will no doubt reach for their usual “astronomical improbability” trope, but it only works by assuming the wrong problem. It treats abiogenesis as if one exact, predetermined sequence had to assemble by perfectly random chance in a single step. Real chemistry is biased, real environments concentrate and cycle materials, and—most importantly—the target was never one unique sequence but any of a potentially vast number of small RNAs with even modest replicative activity.

Once replication begins, copying errors generate variation and natural selection can take over, amplifying the better replicators. In short: the relevant question is not the odds of one bullseye in 4⁴⁵, but how quickly chemistry can stumble into a broad foothold and let Darwinian processes do what they inevitably do.

Refuting Creationism - Life In A New Zealand Cave - 1 million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Prehistoric New Zealand Cave

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

AI generated image of the NZ cave

P Scofield, Canterbury Museum.

1m-year-old 'lost world' discovered – News

About a million years before creationism’s putative designer supposedly fashioned a small flat world beneath a solid dome — the imagined cosmos of Bronze Age pastoralists in the Middle East who authored the Bible’s creation myths — ancient frogs and birds, the ancestors of today’s New Zealand species, lived and died and became fossilised deep in a cave near Waitomo on Aotearoa’s North Island.

Of course, confined as they were to within a few days’ walk of the Canaanite hills, the authors of those myths could have had no inkling of people and places in far-flung regions of a spherical planet. Their tales were based entirely on what they imagined to be the whole universe, and contain nothing that existed beyond their narrow horizons.

How these New Zealand fossils were unearthed, and what they can tell us about Aotearoa’s deep past, is the subject of a paper just published in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology, by a research group led by Associate Professor Trevor Worthy of the College of Science and Engineering at Flinders University.

It is, of course, a story vastly different from Biblical mythology — the evidence for which stubbornly refuses to manifest itself, and instead consistently refutes it, revealing it to be the product of parochial ignorance and an attempt to force-fit what little was known into prevailing cultural assumptions: what Christopher Hitchens aptly called “the fearful infancy of our species”.

The findings show that around 33–50% of species went extinct about one million years before humans first arrived on Aotearoa (New Zealand). The cause appears to have been a combination of rapid climate change and catastrophic volcanic activity. The discovery helps fill a fifteen-million-year gap in our knowledge of Aotearoa’s history.

Excavations at St Bathans in Central Otago have allowed palaeontologists and geologists to reconstruct the period between 20 and 16 million years ago, but until now there has been very little information about the long stretch between then and one million years ago.

Among the discoveries was a new species of parrot, Strigops insulaborealis, an ancient relative of the flightless kākāpō, but one that could probably fly; an extinct ancestor of the modern takahē; and an extinct species of pigeon closely related to Australian bronzewing pigeons.

To forestall the traditional creationist attempt to discredit both the discovery and the scientists who made it — by claiming the dating methods are flawed or even fraudulent — the fossils can be dated accurately because they lie between two layers of volcanic ash: one deposited around 1.55 million years ago, and another about one million years ago. Volcanic ash can be dated with a high degree of confidence using Uranium–Lead (U–Pb) dating of zircon crystals.

Malevolent Design - How Cancer Reprograms The Immune System To Work For It, Not Against It - Malevolence or Evolution?

Tumour containing infiltrating neutrophils. In light grey, tumour cells. Among the infiltrating neutrophils, some do not express CCL3 (blue), while others are CCL3 positive (red). CCL3-positive neutrophils are highly conserved across tumour types and promote the growth of growing tumours.

© Mikaël Pittet – UNIGE

Immune 'hijacking' predicts cancer evolution - Medias - UNIGE

A recent research paper in Cancer Cell, published by a team from the Université de Genève (Unige), Switzerland, led by Professor Mikaël Pittet, describes how neutrophils — key cells of the immune system — can be reprogrammed by cancer cells and then co-opted to drive the cancer’s progression.

This process depends entirely on the presence of multiple interacting components and on specific genes being expressed in both the tumour cells and the neutrophils. Without such irreducible complexity and so-called complex specified genetic information, these cancers would fail to progress.

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that, if we accept the Intelligent Design creationists’ argument for design — namely irreducible complexity and complex specified information — then the inescapable conclusion is that this putative designer must also be the evil genius behind cancers, parasites, pathogens, genetic disorders, congenital diseases, and all the suffering they entail, along with the vast medical resources required to combat them.

Far from being the reputedly omnibenevolent and compassionate god of the Bible, creationism’s designer becomes the exact opposite: randomly mendacious and obsessively sadistic, toiling relentlessly to devise ever more ways to increase suffering in the world.

And yet creationists appear to prefer us to adopt that view of their favourite deity rather than accept the evidence that such systems have evolved — and that what we see in cancers, parasites, and pathogens is precisely what the Theory of Evolution predicts, with no supernatural malice or intent involved. For some reason, Intelligent Design creationists often seem more concerned with disproving “Darwinism” for political purposes than with promoting the god of the Bible or Qur’an.

This apparent paradox goes a long way towards explaining why they have so little hesitation in bearing false witness against scientists, misleading their followers with disinformation, and spreading blatant falsehoods. There is no pro-truth agenda in creationism. There is, however, a thinly veiled political agenda: the establishment of theocratic government — first in the USA, then elsewhere — dragging society back towards the pre-Enlightenment world of the so-called Dark Ages, when ignorance, fear, and superstition allowed unelected and unaccountable religious clerics to rule unchecked, and for most people at the lower strata of a hierarchical society, life was nasty, brutish and short.

Abiogenesis News - The Genes That Predate Life

Scientists describe a window into evolution before the tree of life | Oberlin College and Conservatory | EurekAlert!

In a paper published recently in the journal Cell Genomics, scientists Aaron Goldman (Oberlin College), Greg Fournier (MIT), and Betül Kaçar (University of Wisconsin–Madison) describe how they were able to study evolutionary history even before the last universal common ancestor of all living things (LUCA) emerged, and discovered that some of the genes associated with LUCA may in fact predate LUCA itself.

Creationists determined to misrepresent the process of abiogenesis often present it as a ridiculous parody in which a fully complex cell is supposed to have spontaneously assembled out of inorganic atoms and molecules. This straw-man caricature is far easier to attack than what science actually proposes: that the first population of self-replicating proto-cells arose through gradual chemical and evolutionary processes within a large and diverse population.

Within such a population, variation would inevitably occur, and whatever produced the most copies of itself would come to dominate. One of the earliest characteristics to emerge would have been rapid replication, because in a vast population with generation times measured in minutes, even “million-to-one” mutations are not rare events — they occur thousands of times a day. Under such conditions, what creationists portray as wildly improbable becomes not only plausible, but effectively inevitable over time.

Several independent evolutionary pathways could also have developed in parallel: RNA molecules coding for particular enzymes, ribosomes assembling from self-catalysing RNA, and primitive membranes forming across which chemical energy gradients could arise. Only once these components were already present could they come together within an enclosing membrane to form the first true prokaryotic cells.

The research team led by Aaron Goldman has now developed a method for determining which genes were likely present in LUCA, and which must already have been available to be incorporated when LUCA first emerged. In other words, some genes appear to predate LUCA itself, pushing parts of evolutionary history even deeper into the pre-cellular past.

What Was LUCA — and What Came Before It? The Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) is often misunderstood, especially by creationists who portray it as the very first living organism. In reality, LUCA was not the origin of life, nor the first cell, nor some single creature that suddenly appeared fully formed.

LUCA is simply the most recent population of organisms from which all life alive today ultimately descends — bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes alike. Crucially, LUCA already possessed a level of biochemical sophistication. Most researchers agree it likely had:

• a genetic code based on RNA and DNA
• ribosomes capable of translating RNA into proteins
• enzymes for metabolism and replication
• membrane structures maintaining internal chemistry
• the ability to exploit chemical energy gradients

This means LUCA could not have been the beginning of life. Instead, it must have been the product of a long evolutionary history that preceded it.

Pre-LUCA Evolution: A World of Competing Proto-Life

Before LUCA, early Earth was almost certainly home to a diverse population of simpler self-replicating systems — sometimes called proto-cells or pre-cellular life. These were not fully modern organisms, but chemical systems capable of reproduction, variation, and selection.

Rather than a single miraculous event, abiogenesis is best understood as an extended evolutionary process in which:

• self-replicating molecules competed for resources
• advantageous variants spread through populations
• metabolic pathways evolved gradually
• membranes formed to enclose and stabilise reactions
• genetic and protein machinery became increasingly integrated

LUCA represents the point at which one lineage became the common ancestor of everything that survived, not the moment life began.

Genes Older Than LUCA

What makes the new research so significant is the finding that some genes associated with LUCA appear to be even older — suggesting that early evolutionary innovations were already circulating in the pre-LUCA world and later became incorporated into the first universal ancestor.

This is exactly what evolutionary theory predicts: life did not begin with a fully formed cell, but with populations of evolving systems, long before anything resembling modern biology existed.

Their methodology is explained further in a press release from Oberlin College, via EurekAlert!.

Refuting Creationism - Bonobos Can Imagine Things Detached From Reality

Apes share human ability to imagine | Hub

A paper published recently in Science should give creationists something to think about. It shows how our close relatives, the bonobos, can imagine things completely detached from physical reality — rather like children playing games of pretend, or creationists pretending they are leading experts on biology and understand the subject better than the actual experts.

In this study, two researchers from Johns Hopkins University demonstrate that bonobos can engage in imaginative “pretend play”, an ability long assumed to be uniquely human. In doing so, they dismantle yet another supposed human-exclusive trait that creationists cite as evidence of special creation.

In one experiment with a captive bonobo, Kanzi — a 43-year-old individual living at Ape Initiative — a researcher pretended to pour juice from an empty jug into a transparent empty cup, and then pour it again into a second empty cup. When asked, “Where is the juice?”, Kanzi correctly identified the second cup.

In a similar experiment, an imaginary grape was taken from an empty bowl and placed into an empty jar. When asked, “Where is the grape?”, Kanzi again correctly pointed to the jar.

These experiments show that Kanzi was able to imagine and successfully track the movement of invisible, non-existent objects — something human children can typically do by the age of about two.

Creationism Refuted - A Football-sized Vegetarian - From 307 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A Shoreline scene in the Carboniferous

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

A reconstruction of Tyrannoroter heberti, eating a fern.

Illustration by Hannah Fredd.

Football-sized fossil creature may have been one of the first land animals to eat its veggies - Field Museum

We have another example today of how the evidence written into the fossil record — which creationists insist either does not exist, or is at best a lie forged to deceive us — stubbornly refuses to conform to creationist requirements. Instead, it continues to tell the only story it can: of life evolving slowly over deep time on a planet that is billions of years old.

The latest example comes from a paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution by researchers from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and the Smithsonian Museum. The study was co-led by Arjan Mann, assistant curator of fossil fishes and early tetrapods at the Field Museum.

The paper presents evidence of the earliest known herbivorous vertebrate — dating to some 307 million years before creationists believe the Earth was created. Once again, this highlights the fundamental problem creationists face when they begin with a dogmatic belief that the Earth is only a few thousand years old because a handful of Bronze Age pastoralists said so. Having declared in advance that there has been no significant evolution, only minor variation within “kinds”, they are then forced to twist and contort the real-world evidence in a futile attempt to shoehorn it into their absurdly compressed timescale.

The animal, named Tyrannoroter heberti by the researchers, evolved over the tens of millions of years since the first vertebrates transitioned from lobe-finned fish to terrestrial tetrapods around 375 million years ago — perhaps to escape aquatic predators, or to exploit the invertebrate prey that had already colonised the land. Plants, meanwhile, which had begun spreading onto land some 475 million years ago, had also been evolving, and by this time were well established as ferns, horsetails, and other tough early vegetation.

Tyrannoroter heberti, known so far from a single skull, was probably among the largest terrestrial animals alive at the time, reaching around a foot in length — roughly the size of an American football — based on the proportions of close relatives. The fossil was recovered from shoreline cliffs in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada.

It is thought to represent a stem amniote: part of the lineage of vertebrates that evolved the ability to lay eggs away from water, unlike amphibians which must still return to water to reproduce. This group ultimately gave rise to reptiles, birds, and mammals — in other words, to almost the entire later terrestrial vertebrate world, including ourselves.

Creationism Refuted - Why We Need Our Gut Microbiome To Keep Us Healthy

Gut microbiome - AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Electron microscopic image of rod-shaped gut bacteria.

© Bacteria in the gut. NIH Image Gallery/Donny Bliss, NIH

What gut bacteria like

An open access paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) is a stunning example of the ludicrous complexity evolution has produced — the exact antithesis of what an intelligent designer would create, if such a designer were anything more than grossly incompetent. As I explain in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax, and as I have pointed out repeatedly on this blog, the hallmark of intelligent design should be minimal complexity and maximal efficiency. And yet what we find in humans — and in just about every other bilaterian animal with a gut — is a vast, intricate symbiotic microbiome supplying functions that could far more simply have been provided directly, with even a little forethought on the part of any competent designer.

Instead, in the sort of convoluted complexity that creationists like to attribute to their putative designer god, but which is in reality a hallmark of evolved systems, we see yet another example of a biological arrangement that betrays not intelligence, but its absence.

The paper, by an international team led by Professor Victor Sourjik and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, the University of Ohio, and Philipps-University Marburg, describes how an interdependent gut microbiome helps to keep both the microorganisms and their host healthy. They show that this complex and dynamic community is governed by countless chemical interactions — not only among the microorganisms themselves, but also between microbes and host tissues. The perception of nutrients and signalling molecules by gut bacteria is therefore crucial in maintaining these relationships.

One key role of this microbiome is in deterring and combating pathological species which would otherwise find the gut — with its warmth and steady supply of pre-digested nutrients — an ideal environment to colonise. This must have been a problem even for the earliest animals with a digestive tract: a vulnerability effectively built into the body plan. The solution, in the form of beneficial commensal organisms, is therefore probably as old as the first tube-like bilaterians themselves.

The problem the human gut faces in this respect can be gauged from the fact that some studies have shown that 50-55% or more of the dry weight of human faces is bacteria, dead and alive[1] , with populations of bacteria in the order of 10¹¹ bacteria per gram![2] Imagine then the opportunities this presents to a potentially pathological bacteria with a generation time in minutes. With a population exploding exponentially, the potential to overwhelm the host in a few days is enormous. This is the scale of the problem, and of the selection pressure to overcome it, that has produced this massively complex solution, because it wasn't solved in the initial 'design' stage.

Since it worked well enough, there has been no evolutionary pressure to replace it with a less vulnerable gut, or one better equipped to cope with infection without relying on an entire ecosystem of different microorganisms to maintain health. In other words, what we have today is the result of more than half a billion years of evolutionary history since this basic body plan first emerged in the Cambrian.

Malevolent Design - How Ovarian Cancer Looks Intelligently Designed to Spread Rapidly

Creationism's intelligent designer at work

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Cancer cells (red) stick to mesothelial cells (green) and form hybrid spheres that cut into surrounding abdominal tissue.

Credit: Uno et al., 2026

Scientists now know why ovarian cancer spreads so rapidly in the abdomen | Nagoya University

If intelligent design advocates were honest enough to follow the logic of their own arguments and apply it consistently to the real world, they ought to be acutely embarrassed by the deity they are presenting to the public. Their putative designer god, judged by the evidence they themselves cite, looks less like a benevolent engineer and more like the author of suffering, disease, and death.

That uncomfortable reality is illustrated by yet another research paper showing that pain and mortality can be the direct result of the very things ID proponents celebrate as hallmarks of design: irreducible complexity and “complex specified information”.

This latest example comes from scientists at Nagoya University, Japan, who have shown how ovarian cancer forms an alliance with healthy cells that enables it to spread rapidly to other organs in the abdomen. Their paper has just been published in Science Advances.

As regular readers will be aware, a recurring theme of this blog is that ID advocates conspicuously ignore the vast number of examples from parasitology, oncology, and genetics where the very evidence they cite for an intelligent designer applies just as readily to diseases caused by parasites, pathogens, and genetic malfunctions. Applying ID’s own logic, these are not signs of benevolent craftsmanship but evidence of something far darker — a malevolent intent behind the supposed designer.

The paper in Science Advances is yet another case in point, and doubtless there will be many more soon.

The authors discovered that ovarian cancer cells gather clusters of mesothelial cells from the peritoneum and form hybrid spheres. These protect the cancer cells, help them invade other organs, and create a pathway for metastasis throughout the abdomen. Worse still, these hybrid spheres resist chemotherapy more effectively than cancer cells alone.

If something this complex resulted in something beneficial for humans, Discovery Institute fellows Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski would doubtless have produced one or more books about it, written magazine articles, and embarked on television tours explaining how the finding devastates “Darwinism” and constitutes scientific proof of an intelligent designer — leaving their audiences in no doubt that the locally favoured god is the only entity capable of producing such complexity.

As it is, we can expect only a deafening silence from the Discovery Institute, while their hapless supporters cast about for a fundamentalist religious excuse such as “the Fall”, or perhaps invoke some other evil agent — anything, in fact, except the god of the Bible, who is apparently only credited with designing good things.

Refuting Creationism - Conflict and Ritual Killings In Europe - Evidence That Wouldn't Be There If The Bible Tales Were True

Locations of the massacres.

From: Teresa Fernández-Crespo et al. (2025).

New research reconstructs the identity of victims from one of the earliest victory celebrations in Europe. | School of Archaeology

Of course — and this is a really strong draft already: clear, punchy, and very much in your usual style. I’ve just smoothed the grammar, corrected spelling, tightened a few phrases, and made the flow a little more polished while keeping your voice intact. Evidence revealed in a paper just published in Science Advances tells a grim story of ritualised killings in Europe about 6,000 years ago. The paper is the work of a team led by Dr Teresa Fernández-Crespo of the University of Valladolid, a Research Associate at Oxford’s School of Archaeology, together with Professor Rick J. Schulting of Oxford University. The killings appear to have been carried out as a victory celebration or demonstration of power, and they speak of conflict and struggles for regional dominance between rival Neolithic groups.

Two things about this research should trouble creationists who cling to patently absurd beliefs despite the vast array of evidence showing them to be wrong.

Firstly, this ritual slaughter took place at a time when, according to the biblical narrative, there would supposedly have been too few people on the planet to form rival groups competing for power and territory in Europe.

Secondly, none of this evidence ought to exist at all if the genocidal Flood described in Genesis had really occurred just a few thousand years ago, because it would either have been swept away entirely or, at best, buried beneath a thick layer of flood-deposited silt containing the fossils of all the dead animals and plants such a catastrophe would have produced.

The isotopic analysis of the remains tells a story of conflict on two levels: rivalry between local groups, in which severed left arms were collected as war trophies, and conflict with outsiders, prisoners from whom were ritually slaughtered in grim victory celebrations.

AI Is Good But Far From Perfect - Learning From Neanderthals

This is an AI generated image created with DALL-E 3 that was included in this research study. Its prompt described typical activities, setting, attire and tools but did not request scientific accuracy.

New study uses Neanderthals to demonstrate gap in generative AI, scholarly knowledge - UMaine News - The University of Maine

I have been using AI now for a couple of years to do research quickly to summarise scientific papers and press releases and to edit drafts to correct typos, spelling and grammatical errors and especially to generate images and illustrations. And I have to say, I think it's worth every penny of the subscription fee. However, it does get things wrong sometimes and I've frequently corrected some information or asked it to look again at an image.

Now researchers, Assistant Professor Matthew Magnani of the University of Maine, USA and Professor Jon Clindaniel of the University of Chicago, USA, have used what we know of Neanderthals to demonstrate the gap between AI-generated images and scholarly knowledge of them. The gap can widen or narrow depending on the prompt AI is given. For example, requesting scientific accuracy will produce better results than not asking for it. One of the problems the study highlights is that a great deal of scientific research is inaccessible due to copyright restrictions, before open access began to be widely used in about 2000.

Generative artificial intelligence is often marketed as a kind of universal expert — a machine that can instantly reconstruct the past, summarise scholarship, and conjure convincing images of worlds long gone. But a new study from the University of Maine demonstrates that, when it comes to archaeology and human evolution, the reality is rather less impressive. Far from reflecting the current scientific understanding of our extinct relatives, today’s most popular AI systems often reproduce something closer to the stereotypes and misconceptions of decades ago.

The researchers tested widely used generative tools, including ChatGPT and the image generator DALL-E, by asking them to describe and depict Neanderthals. What they found was striking: even when explicitly prompted for scientifically accurate, expert-level reconstructions, the outputs frequently resembled outdated mid-twentieth-century portrayals — apelike brutes, crude caricatures, and simplistic narratives that modern archaeology has long since abandoned. In effect, the AI was not drawing on the cutting edge of scholarship, but on the cultural sediment of older popular ideas.

The accompanying paper, published in Advances in Archaeological Practice, makes the deeper point that generative AI does not “know” the past in any meaningful sense. It assembles plausible-sounding and plausible-looking content from patterns in its training data — and much of that data reflects what is easily available online, not what is most accurate in the academic literature. The result is a sobering reminder that AI can be a powerful tool, but without careful expert guidance it is just as capable of reinforcing obsolete narratives as it is of illuminating the truth.

Refuting Creationistm - An Evolutionary Trap That No Intelligent Designer Would Blunder Into

Sceptobius beetles in an ant colony

The evolutionary trap that keeps rove beetles alive

A new study reported in Cell describes an extraordinary example of evolutionary adaptation unfolding right under our noses — and it will make uncomfortable reading for anyone still clinging to the creationist fantasy that living systems were neatly “designed” in their present form a few thousand years ago.

Researchers from the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, CA. USA, investigating the symbiotic relationship between certain rove beetles and their ant hosts have shown how these beetles have evolved the ability to infiltrate ant colonies by chemically disguising themselves as ants. Far from being “created” to live harmoniously together, this is an evolutionary arms-race in miniature: ants have evolved sophisticated chemical recognition systems to detect intruders, while the beetles have evolved equally sophisticated counter-measures to bypass those defences.

And the details are exactly the sort of thing intelligent design advocates never seem to anticipate. The beetles do not simply possess some magical, pre-installed “ant colony access” trait. Instead, evolution has shaped them into something far stranger and far less tidy: they suppress their own scent production and acquire the colony’s chemical signature directly from the ants themselves. In effect, they become living imposters — accepted not because the ants were “meant” to host them, but because natural selection has honed the beetles’ ability to exploit a biological loophole.

Malevolent Design - The Malaria Parasite Is Irreducibly Complex And Has Complex Specified Genetic Information - Oops!

Blood smear showing P. falciparum parasites.

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Malaria: Newly Identified “Crown” Stage Controls Parasite Reproduction

Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have uncovered yet another layer of exquisite molecular sophistication in one of humanity’s most persistent and lethal parasites, Plasmodium falciparum, the chief cause of malignant malaria. Their findings, reported in a recent press release and published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Cell Biology, describe a newly identified regulatory “crown” checkpoint that controls parasite reproduction with remarkable precision.

It is difficult to imagine a discovery more awkward for Intelligent Design creationists, because Plasmodium falciparum is precisely the sort of organism that embodies everything Michael Behe and William Dembski insist cannot arise by evolution. Here is complex specified genetic information, tightly regulated developmental choreography, and interlocking biochemical machinery operating across multiple life stages — the very definition, we are told, of “irreducible complexity”.

Unfortunately for the Discovery Institute, this irreducible complexity does not produce a bird’s wing, a human eye, or some uplifting example of divine craftsmanship. It produces malaria — a parasite responsible for immense suffering and hundreds of thousands of deaths every year, mostly children. If complexity is meant to be a hallmark of intelligent design, then the designer’s portfolio includes some rather grim specialities.

The problem is compounded by the fact that Michael Behe has already made malaria central to his arguments. In The Edge of Evolution, he famously pointed to the parasite’s resistance to anti-malarial drugs as an example of the supposed limits of Darwinian evolution, claiming that multiple coordinated mutations were beyond the reach of natural selection. Yet malaria has since become one of the clearest demonstrations that evolution not only occurs, but does so rapidly and repeatedly, exploiting enormous population sizes and intense selection pressures to produce exactly the adaptations Behe claimed were improbable.

As Kenneth Miller pointed out, Behe's mathematical sleight of hand was to assume resistance had to evolve as a single event in a single cell, not across a large population over time - a fallacy of which any good microbiologists should have been aware.

This newly described “crown” stage is simply the latest reminder that biological complexity is not evidence of supernatural design. Evolution predicts complexity wherever it confers survival advantage — including in parasites, pathogens, and diseases. The only real surprise is that creationists continue to present complexity as a theological virtue, when nature so often deploys it in the service of exploitation rather than benevolence.

As ever, none of this will deter creationists from repeating their familiar articles of faith. Faced with an organism whose life cycle resembles a biochemical symphony — regulated checkpoints, specialised invasion machinery, host-cell remodelling, immune evasion, and reproductive stages split between mosquito and human — they will insist that this is not evidence for evolution but evidence against it. The argument, such as it is, runs that complexity must have been present from the start, because it could not have arisen gradually.

But this is simply the old “irreducible complexity” claim in a new disguise: the assertion that because creationists personally cannot imagine intermediate stages, no such stages could have existed. Science, of course, is not obliged to conform to the limits of anyone’s imagination. Evolution does not require that complex systems appear in a single leap. It proceeds by modification of what already exists — co-option, duplication, repurposing, and incremental refinement over deep time — producing the layered complexity we observe today.

Another common retreat is the insistence that this is merely “microevolution”, the trivial shuffling of genes within some mythical created “kind”. Yet Plasmodium falciparum is not merely adjusting the colour of its spots. It is evolving novel biochemical strategies, repeatedly acquiring drug resistance, fine-tuning developmental regulation, and exploiting host environments with extraordinary efficiency. If this is “only microevolution”, then the term has been drained of all meaning.

Refuting Creationism - A Gap-Filling Miniature Dinosaur from 120 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Paleo art reconstruction of Foskeia pelendonum.

Credit: Martina Charnell

Tiny new dinosaur Foskeia pelendonum reshapes the dinosaur f | Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), working with colleagues in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, have just described a remarkable new species of dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous of northern Spain. Their findings are the subject of a read-only paper in Papers in Palaeontology.

The tiny herbivore, named Foskeia pelendonum, lived around 125 million years ago, yet it is already forcing palaeontologists to rethink part of the ornithopod family tree. The discovery provides another striking example of how the fossil record continues to grow in detail, resolution, and explanatory power.

This will come as an unwelcome development for creationists, who still cling to the claim that evolution is “just speculation” and that the fossil record contains no meaningful evidence of transitional relationships or evolutionary diversification. On the contrary, finds like Foskeia show exactly what evolutionary science predicts: new lineages appearing in the right strata, in the right environments, with a mixture of ancestral and derived traits that help clarify how later forms evolved.

Creationists will, of course, respond in the usual way. Some will insist that this dinosaur is “just another dinosaur”, as though classification and evolutionary relationships are irrelevant. Others will retreat to the vacuous assertion that it represents merely “variation within a kind”, without ever defining what a “kind” is or explaining why such variation produces a nested hierarchy that maps so precisely onto geological time. And as always, the more committed will simply dismiss the evidence altogether, because no amount of fossil discovery can compete with a belief system that must remain true regardless of what the rocks contain.

Yet the significance of Foskeia pelendonum lies precisely in the details. This was not simply a juvenile form of a larger dinosaur, but a genuinely small-bodied species, confirmed by bone histology to have reached adulthood. Even more intriguingly, it possessed unexpectedly specialised skull and dental features, showing that evolutionary change does not always follow the simplistic “bigger and more advanced” caricature imagined by creationists, but often proceeds through ecological experimentation, miniaturisation, and adaptation to local conditions.

Far from undermining evolutionary theory, discoveries like this strengthen it. They refine the dinosaur family tree, help fill long-recognised gaps in the ornithopod record, and demonstrate once again that the history of life is written not in Bronze Age mythology but in the sedimentary archive of deep time — an archive that continues to contradict creationism with every new fossil unearthed.

Refuting Creationism - How A Chance Mutation Allowed The Evolutionary Transition From Invertebrates To Vertebrates

Sea squirt, Ciona intestinalis

Credit: Shunsuke Sogabe

New discovery sheds light on evolutionary crossroads of vertebrates | University of St Andrews news

Researchers from the University of St Andrews, working with colleagues from the University of Aberdeen and the University of Oxford, have identified a pattern of gene evolution that appears to have been crucial to the origin and subsequent diversification of vertebrates from their common ancestry with invertebrates. They have just published their findings in BMC Biology.

This discovery will be a major disappointment for creationists who cling to the notion that there is no evidence for what they call “macroevolution” — a term so ill-defined that it can be stretched to mean whatever a creationist happens to need at the time. Sometimes it is invoked to mean the origin of a new species, at other times a new genus, an entire new order, or even the biologically absurd idea of one species giving birth to an individual belonging to a completely different order. More often, though, “macroevolution” is said to mean the origin of entirely new anatomical structures.

Even that definition collapses immediately under scrutiny. Asked what novel structure humans possess that chimpanzees lack, “macroevolution” abruptly becomes the evolution of anything creationists choose to label a “kind” — another conveniently nebulous term, defined precisely nowhere and flexibly everywhere.

Yet if the origin and diversification of vertebrates does not qualify as “macroevolution”, it is difficult to imagine what possibly could. The St Andrews–led team has shown that this transition was enabled by gene evolution — that is, mutation acted upon by natural selection — affecting the genetic control of cell signalling during embryonic development. These changes influence when and where new cell types arise as a developing embryo progresses from a single-celled zygote to a complex multicellular organism, complete with differentiated tissues and specialised organs.

As this gene regulatory system evolved, it allowed the vertebrate phylum to diversify into the many classes and orders that now dominate marine and terrestrial ecosystems. No doubt this will require yet another round of misrepresentation by creationists, along with further blurring of the already elastic definitions of “macroevolution” and “kinds”.

Creationism Refuted - How The Fossil Record Tracks Climate Change

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The climate in Catalonia was much rainier 10 million years ago - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - UAB Barcelona

A paper published a few days ago in the Journal of Mammalian Evolution describes how the climate in Catalonia was much wetter 10 million years ago than it is today, with rainfall roughly twice the present rate, and how this was reflected in the evolution of mammals in the region. The study was conducted by palaeontologists at the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP-CERCA), in association with colleagues from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).

This must be deeply frustrating for creationists because, no matter how much they ignore the evidence, misrepresent it, or shout abuse at scientists, the evidence stubbornly refuses to support creationism and invariably supports evolution over deep time on an ancient Earth. The findings presented in this paper are, of course, no exception.

Scientists have previously established a close link between rainfall and the composition of mammalian communities, with wetter conditions favouring insectivores. Increased rainfall promotes the development of forests, which in turn provide abundant niches for insects and other invertebrates—the primary food source of insectivorous mammals. This relationship between small mammals and climate was first studied in detail by Jan van Dam, an associate researcher at the ICP. Van Dam developed equations that allow both average annual rainfall and its seasonal distribution to be estimated from fossil assemblages of small mammals.

Building on that earlier work, the present study analyses the abundant fossil record of small mammals to reconstruct populations that changed dynamically through time in response to shifting climatic conditions—exactly as predicted by the Theory of Evolution. There is, unsurprisingly, no evidence of spontaneous creation of species, nor of a global biological reset caused by a genocidal flood a few thousand years ago.

Malevoent Design - Has Creationism's Divine Malevolence Been Up To Its Old Tricks? - Another Bat Virus Modified To Infect Humans.

Pteropine orthoreovirus (PRV)

Illustration of a Nipah virus.

Photo: AFP / Ruslanas Baranauskas / Science Pho

Bats Identified as Origin of Unexplained Acute Respiratory Illness and Encephalitis in Bangladesh | Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health

paper just published in Emerging Infectious Diseases by a team led by Nischay Mishra, of the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, shows that Pteropine orthoreovirus (PRV) — a bat-borne orthoreovirus — has crossed the species barrier into humans in Bangladesh, causing a Nipah-like illness that is difficult to distinguish clinically from Nipah virus infection. The disease presents primarily as an acute respiratory infection, sometimes accompanied by encephalitis.

It has long been known that bats possess a markedly more effective antiviral immune system than humans. This fact alone presents a problem for creationists who insist that humans — and, conveniently, themselves — are the special creation of an omnibenevolent deity. There is no coherent reason why such a deity would equip bats with a superior immune system while leaving humans comparatively vulnerable, unless the intention were for humans to suffer more infectious disease than is strictly necessary.

However, the bat immune system appears to have a significant evolutionary trade-off. Rather than eliminating viruses entirely, it often suppresses their pathological effects while allowing persistent infection. As a result, bats function as biological incubators in which viruses can circulate, diversify, and evolve. Inevitably, some of these variants acquire the ability to cross species barriers and infect humans. This remains the most parsimonious explanation for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19 — the pandemic of 2020–2022 that killed tens of millions of people and inflicted severe damage on the global economy.

Creationists argue that complex, specified genetic information must be supplied by their putative intelligent designer and then, by a glaring act of circular reasoning, claim that the mere existence of such information constitutes evidence for that designer. This line of argument has no more merit than insisting that tins of baked beans can only be made by magic pixies, and therefore that the existence of tins of baked beans proves the existence of magic pixies. It is a form of reasoning that functions only for those who lack even a basic grasp of logic.

An additional difficulty for creationists is that PRV could only become infectious to humans if it possessed the precise genetic features required for that capability. Within the internal logic of intelligent design apologetics, the zoonotic PRV must therefore count as the product of deliberate design — and hence as evidence for a malevolent intelligent designer. The usual response is to abandon any pretence that intelligent design is science rather than religion in disguise, and to retreat into Christian fundamentalism, invoking “the Fall” and claiming that some other supernatural entity was empowered to interfere with creation and design its own suite of pathogens and parasites. This claim borders on blasphemy even within Christian theology, which traditionally reserves the creation of living things exclusively to their deity.