Refuting Creationism - The Pages Of Gospels Record Evolution Over 3,500 Years

Created in Northumbria in the eighth century, this copy of the Epistles of St Paul is among the oldest books held in the Trinity College Cambridge Library.

Credit: the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge

DNA of the ancient virus was extracted from millennium old sheepskin Bible parchment, now in the collections of the University of Cambridge.

Credit: the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge.

Hidden DNA in medieval gospels reveal history of deadly livestock virus - University College Dublin

Sometimes history leaves two very different records on the same page. One was deliberately written in ink by medieval scribes, copying stories that religious authorities declared to be sacred truth. The other was written unintentionally in molecules: fragments of viral DNA preserved in the animal skin on which those stories were written.

Unlike the supernatural claims in the text, this second record does not depend on faith, revelation or ecclesiastical authority. It can be extracted, sequenced and compared with DNA recovered from other archaeological specimens and from viruses circulating today. Ironically, manuscripts intended to preserve the Christian message have also preserved independently verifiable evidence of evolution.

As reported in Science Advances, an international research team led by scientists at University College Dublin has now recovered DNA from sheeppox virus (Capripoxvirus sheeppox) in medieval parchment manuscripts, including the approximately 1,000-year-old York Gospels, the earlier Corpus Glossary and other codices from Britain and continental Europe. Because parchment was manufactured from the skins of sheep, goats and cattle, each sheet can retain a molecular record of the animal from which it came—including traces of pathogens infecting it when it died. In several manuscripts, viral DNA occurred on several pages, suggesting that the skins of infected animals had been used in their manufacture.

Creationism In Crisis - Scientists Witness How First Complex Cells May Have Formed

3D segmentation analysis of the tomogram showing the identified inner membrane (blue), outer layer (teal), putative ribosomes (gray), extracellular fibers (light orange), and intracellular filament (light green).

From: Nobs S, Johnson M, Williams T, et al. (2026)

A composite image of the Asgard archaeon (inset) found within the microbial mats of Shark Bay, Western Australia.

Image: Iain Duggin, Debnath Ghosal, Brendan Burns

‘First contact’ that may have led to complex life on Earth finally witnessed by scientists

The origin of the eukaryotic cell was one of the most consequential transitions in the history of life. Every animal, plant, fungus and protist is composed of eukaryotic cells—cells containing a nucleus and an elaborate internal organisation that is absent from bacteria and archaea. Without that ancient evolutionary innovation, there would have been no plants, no animals and, of course, no humans.

Yet eukaryotic cells appear not to have arisen through the sudden creation of an entirely new kind of organism. The evidence increasingly indicates that they emerged through an extended evolutionary association between previously independent microorganisms. An archaeal host formed a close relationship with at least one bacterium, and a descendant of an alphaproteobacterium eventually became the mitochondrion—the energy-processing organelle still present in almost every eukaryotic cell. Other cellular features evolved before, during or after this extraordinary merger.

Precisely how that relationship began remains one of evolutionary biology’s most difficult questions. The event occurred billions of years ago, microorganisms rarely leave informative fossils, and the organisms involved have long since disappeared. Scientists must therefore reconstruct the process by combining comparative genomics, cell biology, phylogenetics and observations of living microorganisms whose biology may preserve clues to those ancient interactions.

Now an international research team led by scientists at the University of New South Wales, the University of Technology Sydney and the University of Melbourne has observed something tantalisingly suggestive. As described in an open-access paper in Current Biology, the researchers cultivated a previously unknown member of the Asgard archaea from a microbial mat associated with the stromatolites of Gathaagudu, or Shark Bay, Western Australia.

Creationism Refuted - Creationists Stung By Giant Scorpion - From 415 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Praearcturus gigas in a Devonian river

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Life reconstruction of Praearcturus gigas

© Franz Anthony

World’s largest scorpion revealed from 415-million-year-old fossils

Anyone attempting to reconcile Earth’s history with the creation myths in Genesis has another awkward fossil to explain: the remains of a scorpion that lived in Britain approximately 415 million years ago—more than 400 million years before the supposed biblical Creation Week.

The animal,Praearcturus gigas, inhabited the river channels and floodplains of what are now England and Wales during the Early Devonian Period. Although known only from fragmentary remains, its enormous pincers and body plates suggest that it may have approached a metre in length, making it the largest scorpion yet identified. One of its fossil claws is more than 15.9 centimetres long, while the preserved carapace is about 9.4 centimetres wide.

The fossils themselves are not a new discovery. Some were collected in the nineteenth century and have been held in the Natural History Museum’s collections for more than 150 years. First described in 1871,Praearcturus was originally classified as a giant isopod-like crustacean and was subsequently compared with several other arthropod groups. Its identity remained controversial because none of the known specimens preserves an entire animal, including the characteristic segmented tail and sting.

Now, as reported in Plaeontology, researchers from the Natural History Museum, the University of Manchester and Technological University Dublin have re-examined the specimens using detailed photography, anatomical comparisons and computed tomography. Features including its large claw-bearing pedipalps, the structure of its sternum and a stridulatory surface on one of its leg bases provide strong evidence that it was a true scorpion. The researchers also concluded that fossils previously namedBrontoscorpio anglicus andBennettarthra annwnensis probably belonged to the same species and should be treated as junior synonyms ofPraearcturus gigas.
Its age is established by its geological context. The specimens come from the St Maughans Formation of the Anglo-Welsh Basin, a sequence of river and floodplain deposits belonging to the Lochkovian Stage of the Early Devonian. Fossil spores place the relevant rocks within a recognised biological zone dated to approximately 415.8–412 million years ago. This was not the familiar green world of later geological periods: forests had not yet evolved, land plants were still small, and terrestrial ecosystems were only beginning to develop.

Creationism Refuted - Recovering DNA from Extinct Galápagos Giant Tortoises

The Pinzón saddleback tortoise, a small giant tortoise species native to Pinzón Island in the Galápagos characterized by a saddle-like curve in its shell.

Credit: Evelyn Jensen

Dome-shelled Galápagos giant tortoise, Chelonoidis nigra

By Mfield, Matthew Field, http://www.photography.mattfield.com - Own work,
CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Reading the giant tortoise DNA that time forgot | Yale News

Few places are more closely associated with evolutionary biology than the Galápagos Islands. Their isolation has repeatedly divided colonising populations into smaller groups, allowing mutation, genetic drift and natural selection to produce distinct island lineages. Yet their subsequent history has not always resembled a neatly branching tree. Occasional migration—and, more recently, the deliberate movement of animals by humans—has brought formerly isolated populations back into contact, permitting them to interbreed and exchange genes.

The evolutionary radiation of the Galápagos giant tortoises is a particularly striking example. Thirteen living and four extinct lineages are currently recognised within the Chelonoidis complex, each descended from the same ancestral colonisation but subsequently differentiated by geographical isolation. Unfortunately, centuries of exploitation by sailors and settlers devastated many populations, leaving some lineages represented only by bones preserved in museums.

Those remains retain a record of their evolutionary history, but reading it is difficult. DNA begins to fragment and chemically deteriorate after death, while contamination from microorganisms and people can overwhelm the surviving genetic material. In some of the museum specimens examined in a new study, researchers could read less than one per cent of the original genome—far too little for many conventional methods of genomic comparison.

However, a team led by researchers at Yale University has now developed a computational approach capable of extracting reliable evolutionary information from such exceptionally incomplete genomes. As described in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the researchers analysed dried bones from five historical specimens and placed their surviving DNA fragments upon a reference phylogeny constructed from high-quality genomes belonging to living and other historical tortoises.

Importantly, the researchers did not manufacture plausible sequences to fill the gaps. Their analytical pipeline was designed to recover the phylogenetic and population-genetic signal present in ultra-low-coverage genomes without imputing the missing genotypes. Even at sequencing depths as low as 0.008 times the genome, the surviving fragments contained enough mutually consistent information to reveal where the specimens belonged.

The results confirmed that the bones represented two evolutionarily distinct, now-extinct lineages: the former tortoises of Santa Fe and an extinct San Cristóbal lineage different from the population still living on that island. These were not merely unusual individuals belonging to surviving populations but genetically distinguishable branches of the wider Galápagos tortoise radiation.

Refuting Creationism - The Evolution of Complexity - No Magic Needed

Stomata on a leaf surface

Credit: Emilio Ermini, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Stomata on a leaf surface.

How plants evolved a molecular switch to cope with heat

Creationists routinely portray complex biochemical pathways as systems that must have been designed as complete working units. Remove one component, they argue, and the system ceases to function; therefore, by the presuppositional false dichotomy that characterises creationism, all the components must have been assembled simultaneously by an intelligent designer.

Evolution does not work by assembling entirely new systems from nothing, however. It modifies what is already present. Existing proteins acquire new interactions, mutations alter their stability or activity, and old signalling pathways are recruited for additional purposes. A comparatively small change can connect existing components and produce a new, environmentally responsive function.

An elegant example has now been described by Shao-Li Yang and colleagues from VIB, Ghent University, KU Leuven and collaborating institutions. Their study, published in Nature Plants, identifies a molecular pathway that helps Arabidopsis thaliana cool its leaves during heat stress. It also shows how evolution produced the regulatory switch by altering the electrical charge at a particular position in an existing protein.

Plants cannot escape into the shade when conditions become dangerously hot. One of their principal cooling mechanisms is transpiration: stomata—microscopic pores in the leaf surface—open, allowing water to evaporate and remove heat. This resembles sweating in animals, although excessive stomatal opening also risks dehydration. Plants must therefore regulate the process rather than simply leave their stomata permanently open.

The newly discovered pathway centres on UBP24, a protein belonging to a family of enzymes known as deubiquitylases. Ubiquitin molecules attached to a protein can help to determine its location, activity or destruction; deubiquitylases remove those molecular tags. Under high-temperature conditions, B4 RAF kinases activate another kinase, OPEN STOMATA 1, or OST1. OST1 then attaches a phosphate group to the amino acid serine at position 360 in UBP24.

Refuting Creationism - Refining The Details - How Did The Common Ancestor of Hominins And Chimps Climb Trees?

Speculative depiction of the last common ancestor of hominins and chimpanzees

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Researchers observed and confirmed with measurements that wild sooty mangabey monkeys in an Ivory Coast forest display foot bone flexibility that facilitates vertical climbing up skinny tree trunks to hide, forage or sleep.

Photo: W. Scott McGraw.

Last common ancestor, no matter its feet, could have been a vertical climber

One of the standard creationist tactics is to portray disagreement between scientists as evidence that the science itself is unreliable. Yet disagreement over the details of an evolutionary history is not disagreement over whether evolution occurred. On the contrary, it is often the means by which science advances: competing explanations are identified, their testable implications are examined, and evidence is gathered to determine which assumptions remain tenable.

A long-running example concerns the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, whose descendant lineages diverged some six to seven million years ago. Palaeoanthropologists agree that such an ancestor existed; the disagreement concerns what it looked like and how it moved. In particular, was its foot more like that of a modern African ape, with an ankle capable of substantial upward flexion during vertical climbing, or more like that of a monkey adapted principally to moving along branches?

That question matters because the evolution of habitual bipedalism cannot be understood without reconstructing the locomotion from which it developed. Fossilised foot and ankle bones preserve anatomical structure but not behaviour, so palaeoanthropologists must infer what their owners could do by comparing them with living primates. One influential assumption was that a primate needed a chimpanzee-like ankle to climb vertical tree trunks proficiently. A fossil with a more monkey-like foot might therefore be interpreted as evidence against frequent vertical climbing.

Luke D. Fannin, Carmen Pape and W. Scott McGraw have now tested that assumption with evidence from living animals. For their study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they recorded wild sooty mangabeys, Cercocebus atys, climbing trees in Côte d’Ivoire’s Taï Forest and measured the movements of their feet. Mangabeys lack the highly flexible ankle of a chimpanzee, yet they achieved an average of about 46 degrees of upward flexion through the middle of the foot—virtually the same range that chimpanzees achieve at the ankle.

In other words, two differently constructed feet can solve the same biomechanical problem in different ways. Chimpanzees flex chiefly at the ankle; mangabeys obtain comparable movement from the midfoot. This is a striking example of convergent evolution: similar selection pressures have produced functionally equivalent performances by modifying different parts of an inherited anatomical system.

Refuting Creationism - How Our Cells Communicate Was Inherited From Our Bacterial Ancestors

Ancient Calcium Signaling in Cyanobacterial Cells

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Even ancient bacteria possessed intercellular communication structures like humans today | CMFI News

The human body is not an organism assembled from newly invented components according to a unique design. It is the latest product of a continuous evolutionary history in which old molecules, old regulatory systems and old cellular capabilities have repeatedly been modified and recruited for new purposes.

Even something as fundamental to our existence as communication between neighbouring cells has roots extending far back into the microbial world.

Our tissues depend upon cells exchanging ions, metabolites and signals through specialised connections. In animals, structures known as gap junctions form channels between adjacent cells, allowing them to coordinate their activity. They are essential, for example, to the synchronised contraction of heart muscle. Calcium ions also serve as important intracellular signals controlling an enormous range of cellular processes.

It might be tempting to regard such coordinated communication as an innovation requiring the complexity of animals or, at the very least, nucleated eukaryotic cells. However, an international research team has shown that a strikingly similar functional principle operates in filament-forming cyanobacteria—organisms belonging to an ancient bacterial lineage.

As the researchers report in The EMBO Journal, the cyanobacterium Nostoc sp. PCC 7120 forms long filaments in which neighbouring cells are linked by structures called septal junctions. These pass through arrays of tiny pores in the peptidoglycan partitions between cells, permitting metabolites and signalling molecules to move along the filament.

Creationism Refuted - Hominin Footprints - 1.4 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

One of the large, 1.4-million-year-old footprints that the team excavated.
A 6-inch (~15 cm) ruler is shown for scale.

© Kay Behrensmeyer

Reconstruction of Parathropus boisei from holotype specimen OH5

By Daderot - Own work, CC0, Link

Fossil footprints show large body size and group dynamics in 1.4-million-year-old human relatives | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

One of the more tangible problems for Bible-literalist creationism is that the rocks beneath our feet contain evidence of creatures that lived and died long before the supposed biblical “Creation Week”. Fossilised bones can sometimes appear remote and abstract, but footprints are different. They record a fleeting moment in the life of an individual: a foot pressed into soft mud, weight transferred forwards, toes lifted and another step taken. For a few seconds, an extinct relative of ours occupied that precise spot—and the impression it left can remain for more than a million years.

At GaJi10, on the eastern side of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, researchers have now documented 21 hominin footprints made by at least eight individuals approximately 1.43 million years ago. The tracks occur alongside those of hippopotamuses, antelopes and other animals that crossed the same muddy lakeshore during the Early Pleistocene. Volcanic ash associated with the surrounding sediments allowed the track-bearing surface to be dated.

As an international research team reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the footprints provide much more than evidence that hominins were present. Their shape and the pattern of movement recorded in them differ from the more modern-looking tracks attributed to contemporary Homo erectus. The researchers therefore consider them most likely to have been made by Paranthropus boisei—an extinct, bipedal cousin of our own lineage, best known from its enormous chewing teeth, powerful jaws and heavily built skull. The attribution is an inference from footprint anatomy and locomotion rather than an identification that can be made with absolute certainty.

Creationism Refuted - Fossils On Mountains Are Evidence Of Dynamic Geology, Not A Flood

TOL-1 Section, Mut Basin, Türkiye.

Credit: Selma Sarı.

The Durupinar site in Eastern Anatolia (Türkiye) often misrepresented by creationists as the fossil remains of Noah's Ark.

By Mfikretyilmaz - Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link

International research team finds the world's highest late Middle Pleistocene marine deposits

Finding marine fossils more than a kilometre above sea level might seem, at first sight, to be just the sort of discovery biblical literalists could seize upon as evidence of Noah’s flood. After all, if sediments containing the remains of marine organisms occur high in the mountains, surely the sea must once have covered those mountains—or so the familiar creationist argument runs.


The argument depends upon ignoring one of the most elementary facts of geology: continents are not stationary platforms. Their crust is folded, faulted, stretched, compressed, raised and lowered by tectonic processes operating over millions of years. Marine sediments found at high altitude do not necessarily show that the sea rose to that altitude; they may show that a former seabed was subsequently raised far above the sea.


A striking new example has now been documented by Selma Sarı and an international team of geologists in the Mut Basin on the southern margin of the Central Anatolian Plateau in Türkiye. Their study, published in the journal Geology, describes the world’s highest known late Middle Pleistocene marine deposits: sediments now preserved 1,177 metres above mean sea level but deposited beneath the sea during Marine Isotope Stage 7, approximately 230,000 years ago.


The researchers did not simply find shells on a hillside and invent a convenient explanation for them. They combined several independent lines of evidence, including calcareous nannofossils, foraminifera, ostracod communities, palaeomagnetism, stable-isotope measurements and reconstruction of the original water depth. The ostracods indicate that the sediments accumulated about 50 metres below the contemporary sea surface, while the fossil succession and magnetic record constrain when that deposition occurred.


Taking the original water depth and contemporary sea level into account, the researchers calculated that the deposits have been raised at an average rate of approximately 5.2 metres per thousand years. That is an exceptionally rapid geological uplift rate, probably produced by interacting processes deep beneath Anatolia, including break-off of part of the subducting Cyprus slab and mantle flow associated with the Arabian slab. The marine sediments have therefore become a precisely dated marker carried upwards by the movement of Earth’s crust.

This is exactly what creationist flood mythology cannot provide: a coherent explanation that agrees simultaneously with the fossils, sedimentary environment, magnetic record, isotope evidence, reconstructed water depth, regional tectonics and measured chronology. A single recent inundation would not explain why marine sediments occur at different elevations, belong to different geological periods and have subsequently undergone folding, faulting, uplift and erosion.

Creationism Refuted - Eurasian Homo sapiens Stopped Eating Insects - Thousands Of Years Before 'Creation Week'

Insects in Chang Moi, Mueang Chiang Mai District, Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Credit: mohigan. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

European Homo sapiens ate fewer insects than Neanderthals and tropical populations - Institut de Biologia Evolutiva - CSIC UPF (UPF)

Humans are strange creatures. While we recoil at the thought of tucking into a dish of sautéed maggots, fried grasshoppers or other insects, we happily eat their close arthropod relatives, crabs, lobsters and prawns, and yet the evidence is that this has only been so for Northern Eurasians for about the last 9,000 year.

People are also strange in another way: despite all the evidence to the contrary and with no supporting evidence at all, there are people who believe the whole of history can be compressed into a few thousand years and that animals can be created by magic without ancestors.

For biblical literalists, every human who has ever lived must be squeezed into the few thousand years since the supposed creation of the first couple. Yet evidence preserved in something as commonplace as calcified plaque on ancient teeth tells a very different story: one of several human lineages, changing diets, inherited genetic variation and adaptation to contrasting environments over tens of thousands of years.

In a paper published in Science Advances, Manuel Piñero and Pablo Librado of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona combined two independent sources of evidence to investigate the history of human insect-eating, or entomophagy. They searched ancient dental calculus for insect DNA and examined genetic variants affecting our ability to digest chitin—the tough polysaccharide forming much of an insect’s exoskeleton.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution Of Immunity, Longevity And Cancer Resistance In Bats - No Magic Needed

Myotis bats

Little Brown Bat, Myotis lucifugus. Can live up to 35 years, immune to most viruses and rarely develops cancers

Photo © Michael Durham,
Illinois Department of Natural Resources

Clues to longevity may reside in the genomes of long-lived bats - Berkeley News

Creationists routinely claim that mutation cannot produce new genetic information and that complex biological systems must have been separately designed for their allotted purposes. Yet living genomes bear little resemblance to collections of independently engineered components. Genes are duplicated, deleted, rearranged and modified; the resulting variants are tested by natural selection; and the same molecular machinery is repeatedly recruited for several different functions. A new study of bats provides a particularly revealing example of this evolutionary improvisation.

Viruses and their hosts have been engaged in evolutionary arms races for hundreds of millions of years. Viruses evolve ways to enter cells, evade immune responses and appropriate cellular machinery for their own replication, while their hosts evolve countermeasures. From a creationist perspective, this requires an intelligent designer simultaneously to design the viruses, their means of attacking their hosts and the defensive systems needed to resist them. Evolution provides the far simpler explanation: each side imposes selection on the other, with no foresight, overall plan or concern for the suffering caused along the way.

In a paper published in Nature, an international team of researchers assembled near-complete genomes for eight closely related species of Myotis bat and established primary cell lines with which to test some of the genomic findings. The comparison revealed abundant structural variation—including inversions, translocations and gene duplications—within an otherwise strongly conserved arrangement of chromosomes.

The researchers found that bats have responded differently to different classes of virus. Proteins interacting with DNA viruses showed an unusually strong signature of positive selection, whereas genes interacting with RNA viruses were especially prone to gains and losses of copies. One antiviral gene, EIF2AK2, better known as PKR, occurs in one, two or, in one lineage, three copies. The original duplication appears to have arisen near the base of the Myotis radiation, with duplicated and unduplicated forms persisting across species for tens of millions of years. This is new genetic material arising through mutation and subsequently being retained, modified or lost according to its effects—not information supplied fully formed by an external intelligence.

Refuting Creationism - How We Know The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People - Sex Determination In Geckos

Various Geckos

Source: Wikipedia

XY or ZW? Geckos Reveal Evolution's Hidden Playbook

The simplest way to test the claim that the Bible is the inerrant work of an omniscient creator is to compare its account with observable reality. When that is done, its creation stories reflect the limited biological knowledge of their human authors, not omniscience. Genesis 1:27 presents “male and female” as divinely ordained categories for humans, while the wider biblical narrative assumes the familiar arrangement of sexually reproducing males and females among animals; indeed in Genesis 6:19 the Bible unambiguously states all the animals on the Ark were male and female.

Real biology is much less tidy. Many animal species are simultaneous or sequential hermaphrodites; some lineages consist entirely of females and reproduce by parthenogenesis; and many organisms reproduce without sex at all. The biblical authors displayed only the knowledge expected of people living in an ancient pastoral society. An omniscient creator would have known better.

Nor are the mechanisms that determine sex fixed systems established in a single act of creation, with organisms thereafter reproducing only “after their kind”. They are themselves products of evolution. The new gecko study indicates that different lineages have switched repeatedly between genetic sex determination and environmental sex determination, in which conditions such as egg-incubation temperature influence the offspring’s sex. Even genetic sex determination has repeatedly been reinvented, with different ordinary chromosomes recruited independently to become X and Y or Z and W chromosomes. Instead of one immutable system imposed by a designer, geckos exhibit an evolutionary patchwork assembled and repeatedly modified over millions of years.

The familiar mammalian arrangement in which females are XX and males XY is sometimes treated as though it were the inevitable—and therefore designed—way of determining sex. But nature displays no such uniformity. Birds generally use a ZW system, in which females are ZW and males ZZ, while many reptiles dispense with specialised sex chromosomes altogether and allow environmental conditions, particularly incubation temperature, to influence whether an embryo develops as male or female.

Geckos exhibit all three arrangements, sometimes among relatively closely related species. This extraordinary diversity makes them a natural experiment in how sex-determination mechanisms originate, change and disappear during evolution.

In a new study published in *Science*, Yang Zhou and colleagues compared chromosome-level genomes from geckos representing all seven living families. Their reconstruction indicates that gecko lineages have switched between environmental and genetic sex determination at least 23 times. The researchers identified 22 distinct sex-chromosome systems and traced them to 17 different chromosomes in the ancestral gecko genome. Some of those ancestral chromosomes were recruited independently on several separate occasions.

Refuting Creationism - Now It's A Transitional Early Insect - From 324 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Palaeoecological reconstruction of the Carboniferous stem-insect Chosha praecursor

From: Tihelka, E., Vásquez, C., Engel, M.S. et al (32026)

Amphibious stem-insect rewrites the evolutionary history of insect terrestrialization---- Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology Chinese Academy of Sciences

A favourite creationist debating tactic is to point to a gap in the fossil record and pretend that the absence of a known transitional form is evidence that no transition occurred. When a suitable fossil is eventually found, the manoeuvre simply creates two smaller gaps on either side of it—or the fossil is arbitrarily declared to be “fully formed” and therefore not transitional. A simple trick which exposes the ignorance and disingenuity of creationism, is to ask them to describe exactly what they would expect a transition fossil to look like. They tend to abruptly break off the debate, because to answer it would violate two unwritten rules of creationism - never consider being wrong and never state what evidence would cause you to change your mind in case it's produced.

This 'god of the gaps' rhetorical game depends upon treating an inevitably incomplete geological record as though it ought to contain a specimen from every generation of every evolving lineage - something that if it were true, would be hard for science to explain, given what we know of the circumstances in which fossils are formed, which actually predicts that the record will be discontinuous.

The early history of insects has offered particularly fertile ground for this tactic. Molecular-clock studies indicate that hexapods diverged from aquatic crustacean relatives hundreds of millions of years ago, yet their small, delicate bodies were poorly suited to fossilisation, especially in the environments through which they were making the transition onto land. Consequently, there has been a conspicuous interval—the so-called “hexapod gap”—between the earliest evidence of hexapods and the abundance of unmistakable insects in later Carboniferous rocks.

Now, an international team led by Erik Tihelka and Chenyang Cai has described a remarkable fossil that helps to narrow that gap while illustrating how the familiar insect body plan was assembled. The approximately 324-million-year-old animal, named Chosha praecursor, came from the Late Mississippian Tesnus Formation of western Texas. Collected in 1985 and long misidentified as a juvenile crustacean, it remained in a museum collection until examination under cross-polarised light revealed anatomical details that had previously been almost invisible. The findings are reported in Nature.

Refuting Creationism - A Road-Map Of Evolution Over 600 Million Years - From A Common Ancestor

The ever-branching tree of animal Evolution

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 SOL)

Roadmap of animal biodiversity: largest-ever comparison of chromosome-scale genomes

Words such as rules, pathways and highways can become treacherous when scientific findings pass through the hands of religious apologists. A rule, in ordinary speech, suggests someone who made it; a highway suggests an engineer who decided where it should lead. It is therefore easy to anticipate claims that a major new study of animal chromosomes has discovered evidence that evolution follows rules—and that rules must imply a rule-maker directing evolution towards a predetermined goal.

That, however, is not what the researchers have found.

In the largest comparison of chromosome-scale animal genomes yet undertaken, Darrin Schultz and colleagues analysed 5,821 genomes representing 4,454 species in 19 animal phyla. Their study, published in Science Advances, developed what they call “evolutionary genome topology”: a way of mapping the enormous variety of animal genomes according to the organisation and shared ancestry of their chromosomes. The results reveal recognisable, partly irreversible patterns extending back more than 600 million years to the common ancestor of living animals.

The accompanying University of Vienna press release describes these patterns as “evolutionary highways” and says that genomes evolve according to a limited set of “rules”. Those are useful metaphors, but they describe constraints and consequences—not commands, intentions or a plan.

Animal chromosomes can split, fuse and exchange material, but these processes are not free to produce every imaginable arrangement with equal probability. Existing chromosome structure limits what can happen next, while every change becomes part of the starting conditions inherited by subsequent generations. In particular, when ancestral chromosomes fuse and their genes subsequently become intermingled, the original arrangement cannot simply be reconstructed by reversing the fusion. The researchers call this process “fusion-with-mixing”. It makes chromosome evolution path-dependent: where a lineage can readily go next depends partly upon where it has already been.

This is what “rules” means in this context. It no more implies a supernatural rule-maker than the regular formation of crystals implies a crystal designer, or the course taken by a river implies that someone planned its route. Physical and chemical processes have consistent properties; biological structures impose constraints; and inherited history restricts the range of subsequent possibilities. Regular outcomes can emerge from those natural conditions without foresight or intention.

Nor does the statement that genomes “do not change at random” mean that their future has been prescribed. Mutations and chromosome rearrangements can occur without regard to what an organism needs, but randomness does not mean that every conceivable event is equally likely—or even physically possible. Some rearrangements are more readily produced than others; some are lethal or reduce fertility; some survive genetic drift or natural selection; and every surviving arrangement alters the possibilities available to its descendants. Chance operates within constraints, producing statistical patterns rather than fulfilling a programme.

Refuting Creationism - The Slow Evolution and Extinction Of African Megafauna - Over 23 Million Years

Modern African megafauna

A selection of extinct African megaherbivores

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Scarce emergence of new species drove the decline of African megaherbivores | Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales

Africa’s elephants, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses are surviving representatives of a much richer assemblage of giant herbivores that once included such animals as Deinotherium, an elephant relative with downward-curving tusks, and the pig-like anthracotheres, relatives of modern hippopotamuses. These animals were not merely conspicuous members of their ecosystems. As “ecosystem engineers”, megaherbivores—here defined as herbivorous mammals weighing at least one tonne—alter vegetation, disperse seeds, open pathways, create water holes and redistribute nutrients.

Why so much of this diversity disappeared has usually been approached as a question of extinction. Large animals reproduce slowly, require extensive habitats and comparatively large quantities of food, so it seems intuitively reasonable to assume that they must have been especially vulnerable when climates and environments changed. Human hunting has also figured prominently in explanations of the much more recent global disappearance of large mammals.

But the diversity of any group depends upon two processes, not one. Extinction removes species, while speciation produces new ones. Even a lineage with a comparatively modest extinction rate will decline if its species disappear faster than evolutionary divergence can replace them. Conversely, a group can withstand relatively frequent extinctions if new species continue to arise sufficiently rapidly.

A new study published open access in Nature Communications. has now examined both sides of that evolutionary balance. Juan L. Cantalapiedra and colleagues analysed 3,327 African fossil occurrences representing 396 species of herbivorous mammals. Using neural-network models, they reconstructed changes in speciation and extinction over the past 23 million years while considering body size, tooth-crown height, evolutionary relationships and environmental change. Their results challenge the apparently obvious assumption that Africa’s largest herbivores declined because they were inherently more prone to extinction.

In fact, the models indicate that extinction rates were generally somewhat lower among the largest species. High-crowned teeth, which better withstand abrasive diets, were also associated with a reduced risk of extinction. The underlying problem for megaherbivores was that their already low speciation rates could not compensate for the species that were lost.

The imbalance developed over millions of years. As Africa became increasingly arid from about 7.2 million years ago, both speciation and extinction initially accelerated as changing vegetation and expanding open habitats reorganised its ungulate communities. Speciation then levelled off after about 3.6 million years, while extinction continued to rise and increased sharply with the beginning of the Pleistocene, about 2.58 million years ago. During the driest intervals, smaller herbivores generated new species at substantially higher rates, whereas speciation among megaherbivores was suppressed still further. The resulting decline was already well under way long before humans possessed the technology needed to hunt such enormous animals systematically.

This does not mean that humans played no part in the most recent losses, nor that climate alone explains every extinction. Rather, it places recent events within a much longer evolutionary history in which changing climate, declining ecosystem productivity, extinction and unequal rates of speciation gradually transformed the African fauna.

Creationism Refuted - How The Grand Canyon Was Formed - No Magic Flood Involved

Grand Canyon’s oldest and deepest rocks were unearthed by massive cliff across ancient USA.

Lost mega-escarpment across ancient USA may explain Grand Canyon missing billion years

Creationists sometimes point to the Great Unconformity in the Grand Canyon as evidence of Noah’s mythical global flood. But an unconformity is not a layer deposited by a flood. It is a surface representing an interval during which older rocks were exposed, eroded and sometimes deformed before younger sediments were laid on top of them. What is “missing” is not evidence; it is rock that either was never deposited or was subsequently removed, with the surviving rocks preserving evidence of what happened in the intervening time.

Creationists attempts to fit the Grand Canyon into their Biblical flood myth range from the sublime to the ridiculous, none of them in the least plausible and designed to appeal to the parochial ignorance that typifies American creationism. Their conclusion is always sacred and immune to contradiction. Facts are accepted or rejected based on whether they support the conclusion or not. Science, by contrast, starts with a neutral view, collects evidence, then takes a view that accounts for that evidence, as always in science, the facts are neutral and the conclusion provisional, contingent on the discovery of more evidence.

At parts of the Grand Canyon, Cambrian sedimentary rocks rest upon much older Precambrian rocks, leaving more than a billion years of geological history unrepresented by sedimentary strata at that particular location. Far from supporting the idea that the canyon’s rocks were deposited during a single year-long catastrophe, the contact records a succession of events involving sedimentation, burial, tectonic disturbance, uplift, prolonged exposure, erosion and renewed deposition.

A new study published open access in the journal Geology now proposes a mechanism that may explain much of the extraordinary erosion responsible for this gap in the south-western United States. Thomas M. Gernon of the University of Southampton and colleagues have reconstructed a continent-scale escarpment that may have developed along the western margin of Laurentia—the ancient continental core of North America—as the supercontinent Rodinia began breaking apart approximately 800–750 million years ago.

Refuting Creationism - Why Sex Evolved

Recombination by sexual reproduction drives adaptive diversity in yeast

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

The why behind sex — Harvard Gazette

For creationists, who typically know little or nothing about evolution and so have no understanding that it is a process that takes place in a population, not an event that happens to individuals, sexual reproduction is a fertile source of disinformation and misunderstanding with which to attack the Theory of Evolution.

For instance, they frequently argue that the probability of the 'first man' and 'first woman' evolving together is so highly unlikely that their myth of the spontaneous creation out of dirt of a man and the cloning of a woman by magic is a far more rational alternative explanation. The science is attacked because when they try to force fit their childish myth of every species having a single ancestral male and female couple into the science of evolution, it doesn't fit well. The possibility of the myth being wrong must never be contemplated, because that would risk having to change their mind.

However, science works by addressing questions, not by throwing stones at infantile straw-man parodies of alternative ideas and declaring victory by default.

For science, sexual reproduction presents evolutionary biology with a different long-standing puzzle. An asexual organism can pass on its entire genome without finding a mate, competing for one or investing energy in courtship. In species with separate sexes, there is also the familiar “twofold cost of males”: only females produce offspring, whereas every member of an asexual population can potentially reproduce.

All else being equal, an asexual lineage should therefore increase more quickly than a sexual one, and indeed there are a few examples of where this is true - a single female vine weevil can quickly populate a window box or plant pot with devastating consequences for the owner as I have found to my cost; a single marbled crayfish can rapidly spread through a new river system, out-competing any native species.

Yet sexual reproduction is widespread among eukaryotes and has persisted for hundreds of millions of years. This does not imply that evolution requires foresight or that sex was introduced by a designer for some future purpose. It means that, under many circumstances, the descendants of organisms that exchange and recombine genetic material must acquire advantages sufficient to offset the immediate costs.

One important advantage is that sex reshuffles the genome. In an asexual lineage, genes are inherited together as a largely indivisible package. A beneficial mutation can therefore carry neighbouring neutral or mildly harmful mutations with it as it spreads through a population—a process known as genetic hitchhiking. Sexual reproduction and recombination can break up these associations, separating advantageous mutations from some of the damaging evolutionary baggage accompanying them.

Creationism Refuted - The Simple Mutation That Made Grasses So Successful - 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Joinvillea ascendans, a close relative of grass plants. Used in the Study

Photo: Sarah Friedrich.

Maeda and his collaborators sequenced the slow-growing Joinvillea ascendans plant, a close relative of grasses, to compare genomes and learn what makes grass plants unique.

Photo: Sarah Friedrich.

Molecular “bypasses” improve grass plants’ synthesis of lignin and starch, laying the early groundwork for evolutionary success – Department of Biology – UW–Madison

Creationists routinely claim that mutations can only damage genetic “information” and can never produce anything genuinely new. The claim depends partly upon leaving information conveniently undefined and partly upon ignoring the many well-understood processes by which genomes acquire new functions. Gene duplication, mutation and natural selection can preserve an existing function while a spare copy accumulates changes, sometimes enabling it to perform an additional task or participate in a new biochemical pathway.

A new study published in Science provides an unusually clear example. Rather than merely showing that related organisms possess different enzymes, Yuri Takeda-Kimura and colleagues reconstructed how two important metabolic innovations arose during the ancestry of grasses: additional routes for producing starch and lignin. They did this by comparing the genomes of grasses with those of several of their closest non-grass relatives, including Joinvillea, Ecdeiocolea, Pharus and Typha.

Unintelligent Design - The Evolutionary Compromises That Made The Human Female Pelvis - No Intelligence Involved

Virtual reconstructions of the Neanderthal pelvises of a 1.5-year-old infant from Dederiyeh Cave, Syria (left), and a young adult female from Sima de las Palomas de Cabezo Gordo, Spain (right). Age- and sex-matched modern human pelvises are superimposed in transparency to highlight form differences.

Image credit: Marcia Ponce de León
and Christoph Zollikofer
(University of Zurich)

A Neanderthal woman and Baby. Her Pelvis is the result of the same evolutionary processes as that of Homo sapiens women.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol).

Rethinking Birth and Bipedalism - School of Science University of Tokyo

The human pelvis is a particularly poor candidate for anyone wishing to argue that the human body was intelligently designed from scratch. It must support the upper body, anchor muscles used in standing and locomotion, protect internal organs, maintain the pelvic floor and— in females—provide a passage through which a large-bodied, large-brained infant can be born. The result is not an ideal solution to a single engineering problem, but an evolutionary compromise assembled by modifying an inherited structure while several competing selection pressures acted upon it.

For much of the past century, one influential explanation for its shape has been the “obstetrical dilemma”. According to the simplest version of this hypothesis, the female pelvis represents a compromise between a birth canal wide enough to accommodate a large-brained baby and hips narrow enough to permit efficient bipedal walking. Childbirth pushes pelvic evolution in one direction, in other words, while locomotion pushes it in the other.

That explanation has never been beyond dispute. Studies have questioned whether wider hips necessarily impose the assumed energetic penalty on walking or running, while alternative hypotheses have emphasised maternal metabolism, infant development and the need for a stable pelvic floor capable of supporting the abdominal organs. The pelvis is involved in too many functions for its evolution necessarily to be reduced to a single contest between walking and childbirth.

Refuting Creationism - Observed Evolution Of Live Birth in the European Common Lizard

European common lizard, Zootoca vivipara

Image credit: Meredith Kimble

European common lizard, Zootoca vivipara

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

University of Glasgow - University news - Scientists uncover the evolutionary process behind live birth in lizards

Live birth is not a simple characteristic that could be produced by switching a single gene on or off. Retaining embryos inside the mother until they are sufficiently developed to survive requires coordinated changes in gestation length, uterine physiology, eggshell formation, gas exchange, nutrient transfer, hormonal control and the maternal immune response. To creationists, this is just the sort of complex biological system that must supposedly have appeared complete and fully functional in a single act of creation.

But that is not what the genomes of living animals show.

In a study recently published in Current Biology, an international team led by Dr Hongxin Xie of the University of Glasgow has reconstructed how live birth evolved in the Eurasian common lizard, Zootoca vivipara. The transition did not depend upon one miraculous genetic leap, or even upon one or two mutations of exceptionally large effect. It arose through natural selection acting upon numerous genetic changes distributed across the genome and accumulated over an extended period.