The traditional creationist double-think response, when presented with evidence of malevolent design in the form of parasites such as pathological viruses, bacteria, protozoa or worms, etc., is to blame something called 'Sin' for their creation, absolving their proclaimed intelligent [sic] designer of any culpability, while maintaining that everything living must be attributed to their god because it is the only entity capable of designing living organisms.
However, in the case of HIV, the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in humans, they greeted it with barely concealed jubilation in their caring Christian way, declaring it to be a 'Gay Plague' sent by their god to punish homosexuals, so they now can't blame Satan or 'Sin' for its creation. A case of being hoist by their own petard.
And to add to creationists' embarrassment, they also believe the human immune system that HIV evades then suppresses, was designed by their, allegedly perfect, omniscient designer to protect us from the parasites it created to harm or kill us, in which case, HIV, like so many other pathogens, is a testament to its incompetence.
HIV is one of a group of RNA retroviruses that can hide from our immune system by inserting a DNA version of their RNA into our DNA using the enzyme reverse transcriptase that they bring with them. Once inserted, the virus looks for all the world like just another chunk of junk DNA. Indeed, like most species, our DNA contains lots of mutated and harmless relics of these retrovirus from our evolutionary history.
Now though, medical science, in trying to do what seems beyond the capability of creationism's putative omnipotent intelligent [sic] designer is closing in on just how HIV manages to evade and suppress our immune system, and how our immune system responds to it.
In a paper just published open access in the journal Science Communications a team of scientists led by Ruy M. Ribeiro, a theoretical biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA has shown, using experiments on Macaque monkeys and mathematical modelling, that, although the body's immune system does succeed in suppressing virus production and in killing infected cells, the response only last for a very short time at the start of infection.
In what creationists should see as a triumph for their favourite sadist if they were true to their professed belief and weren't selective in its application, the Asian longhorned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis which they believe it designed, which feeds by sucking the blood of its victims and which was first detected in the USA in 2017 and in Ohio in 2021, is now present in such vast numbers that it is believed to have killed three cattle in southeastern Ohio, simply through blood loss.
One of the cattle was a healthy, 5-year-old bull. It would have taken about 10,000 ticks to kill it by exsanguination.
that number of ticks were recovered in 90 minutes on one Ohio farm alone.
Ticks, like other parasites, if we accept the intelligent [sic] design argument for a moment, can only be ascribed to the work of a pestilential malevolence because creationists also insist that the putative designer is omnipotent and omniscience, therefore it knows exactly what its designs will do, and designs them to do exactly that.
And ticks appear to be designed to do only two things:
And, in a brilliant piece of malevolence, what gives these nasties their great power to spread and colonise new territories in vast numbers, all the adults are females that breed parthenogenically. In favourable conditions a newly-hatched tick can reach sexual maturity in a few weeks to a few months. Each female can lay up to 2,000 eggs which, if they all hatch and breed, will produce 4 million breeding ticks in two generations and 8 billion ticks in three, in favourable conditions.
As an introduced species in the USA, the Asian longhorned tick has few natural predators that can keep their numbers in check. In parts of their native range in Asia, guinea fowl are used to keep them in check, but the breeding rate of the tick is so high that natural predation has negligible impact on their numbers. This fantastic rate of reproduction means that a single female colonising a fresh territory can, if the conditions are right, produce tens of trillions of offspring within a year or two.
Way back in that long spell before 'Creation Week', the creation cult's date when the Universe was created, when 99.97% of Earth's history happened, there were two large, flesh-eating lampreys looking for victims to bore into. Unlike their blood-sucking modern relatives, which latch onto fish and suck their blood and body fluids, these ancient species probably ate the flesh of their victims.
These rare fossils were discovered in 160-million-year-old rocks in North China and are part of the Yanliao Biota, which is found in rock formations that are proving to be a valuable Lagerstätte.
On of the great strengths of science, apart from its rigorous fact-checking and peer-review process, is the way scientists constantly reassesses what they thought they knew and change their mind when the facts demand it.
Unlike creationism, there are no sacred truths or dogmas that must never be questioned in science, and the best way to make a name for yourself in science is to overthrow an established consensus, just as Einstein overthrew Newtonian physics and Darwin overthrew the teleological thinking that had dominated biological science.
Creationism, by contrast, have a form of 'Morton's Demon' that filters all information and only allows information that supports and reinforces creationism to enter their world view.
An example of science reassessing the evidence is this paper by an international group of scientists led by Dr. Martin D. Brazeau of the Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Ascot, UK, and the Department of Earth Sciences, Natural History Museum, London, UK. It reassesses the evidence for the origin of sharks, which were assumed to have evolved from the cartilaginous fish that preceded the boney fish, and suggests that they may in fact originate in the bony fish and have since reverted to a cartilaginous skeleton.
The problems for the creation cult continue to pile up, no-doubt behind the backs of creationists who habitually look the other way when science produces more evidence refuting their dogmas.
This time, it's yet more evidence of the origins of terrestrial tetrapods, including mammals, as air-breathing fish. The evidence is that the basic structures of the mammalian shoulder joint were already present in a fossil fish, and it closes another of creationism beloved gaps in which they force-fit their ever-shrinking little god.
The shoulder girdle – the configuration of bones and muscles that in humans support the movement of the arms – was a classic example of an evolutionary ‘novelty’. This is where a new anatomical feature appears without any obvious precursors; where there is no smoking gun of which feature clearly led to another.
The new study uses fossils, developmental biology, and comparative anatomy, to investigate the 'mystery' and in so doing suggests a new approach to investigating the evolution of major anatomical structures, like the shoulder girdle.
The fossil studied was of the late Devonian placoderm fish, Kolymaspis sibirica:
Appearance of the shrub, branches, and surfaces of T. aphylla. (A) A photograph of T. aphylla located across the coastal sabkha of the United Arab Emirates. (B) A close-up view of the branches. (C) A branch recorded in the late morning (11 a.m.) was encrusted with salt crystals. (D) A branch recorded in the early morning (8 a.m.) showed condensed water droplets. (E and F) Scanning electron microscopic images of the surfaces of leaves with salt crystals (E) and a zoomed image of a single salt gland (F). The length of the scale bars in panels B, C, D, E, and F are 5 mm, 3 mm, 3 mm, 1 mm, and 50 µm, respectively.
Yesterday it was fish 'designed' to live in a desert that demonstrated how biological 'design' is a bottom-up process where, in this case, a fish, is faced with increasing desertification of its environment and only those fit for living in the environment survive to breed, so, over time, and with whatever increased complexity evolves, we have fish 'designed for living in a desert.
An intelligent designer, on the other hand, starting with a desert, would be insane to imagine that what was needed was a fish to live in it, and then set about designing all the complexity and elaborate workarounds for the problems it has needlessly created for itself.
And today, we have another example, in the form of a plant that also lives in a desert, so needs an alternative source of water.
What intelligent designer not in need of responsible adult supervision, would look at a desert and think, "I know what that needs - plants!", then try to solve the problem of, being a plant, it needs water which is singularly lacking in a desert, so it designs a ludicrously complicated way to get water, instead of simply designing the plant to live where there is enough water for it, using the method it has already used successfully in just about every other plant.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has gazed at the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. Since the recording of this energetic event in 1054 CE by 11th-century astronomers, the Crab Nebula has continued to draw attention and additional study as scientists seek to understand the conditions, behavior, and after-effects of supernovae through thorough study of the Crab, a relatively nearby example.
The Crab Nebula seen by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 6-10
The Crab Nebula - a tiny fragment of the universe as seen by science:
The last place you'd expect to find fish would be in a desert.
That's because, being intelligent, no-one would expect an intelligent designer to design fish to live in that environment, and yet there are fish living in a lake in the Arizona desert. These are three species of the Catostomidae, all from the Ictiobus genus, Ictiobus cyprinellus, I. bubalus, I. niger, known colloquially as buffalofish.
Good design is a top-down process, but no intelligent designer would take a desert as its starting point and decide that what the desert needed was fish. Evolution being a bottom-up process starts with fish and, as its environment becomes a desert, those that are better adapted to a desert environment are selected by that environment to survive ad breed, so, over time, we have a fish 'designed' to live in a desert.
And this is how we can tell they weren’t intelligently designed but evolved by a natural, unintelligent process without a plan.
Illustration of bacteriophages infecting a bacterium.
Fig 1. Uptake of T4 phage by mammalian cells does not trigger a pro-inflammatory immune response [modified].
(A) A549 cells and (B) MDCK-I cells incubated with T4 phages for 2 hours. Images were taken with a confocal microscope; the plasma membrane is shown in magenta, T4 phage DNA in green, and the cell nucleus in blue.
Imagine you're a designer charged with designing a mammalian cell so it grows and multiplies efficiently. You've already designed DNA and genes to make the right proteins to stimulate cell growth, but it isn't working as well as it should.
What do you do?
An intelligent designer, especially an omnipotent, omniscient designer, wouldn't have designed it sub-optimally in the first place, but if it had, it would simply redesign it and make sure all the right genes were provided because, being omnipotent, nothing would be impossible.
But whatever designed the mammalian cell didn't do the intelligent thing.
Instead it opted for an unnecessarily complex solution - it used the bacteriophage viruses that it had designed to infect and kill the bacteria it had designed earlier, to infect mammalian cells and give them the missing genes to correct its mistake. It then modified the process it had designed to protect the cells from infection, so these viruses don't trigger an immune response and get destroyed.
No going for the simple solution like a normal intelligent designer would, when a much more complex solution is available, eh?
This is what you need to believe to be an intelligent [sic] design creationist, to explain the findings of a group of researchers led by Jeremy J. Barr of the School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, Australia. They have discovered that phage viruses, which proliferate in our gut where they normally parasitise and kill bacteria, are taken in by mammalian cells where they accumulate and activate metabolic pathways that promote cell metabolism and growth and prolong the cell cycle.
Super-resolution STED microscopy image of HEZ293 cells transfected with the zinc transporter ZnT9 (in green). In magenta the mitochondrial protein TOM 20 and in white the localization in mitochondria.
Credit: Rubén Vicente.
Geographic distribution of the substitution identified in the SLC30A9 gene in current human populations and possible scenarios of Denisovan introgression. Ancestral SLC30A9 corresponds to the version of the gene prior to interbreeding between Denisovans and sapiens. SLC30A9 variant, refers to the version shared with Denisovans.
Credit: Jorge Garcia and Elena Bosch. Licensed under Creative Commons 4.0. Created with mapchart
A team of researchers led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), a joint center of the Superior Council of Scientific Research (CSIC) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) , and by the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences (MELIS) of the UPF, has identified one of the most widespread traces of the genetic inheritance of the extinct Denisovans in modern humans.
These genes probably played an important role in helping early Homo sapiens adapt quickly to a cold climate, but, because they are involved in the regulation of zinc and play a part in cellular metabolism could also be a contributory factor in predisposition to mental health disorders such as depression and schizophrenia.
It's tempting to assume that they may also have contributed to a growth in religion since many 'prophets' seem to have had schizophrenic disorders in which they heard voices. However, that's not the main worry for creationists in this research. What they need to cope with is the fact that all this happened in that vast expanse of time before 'Creation week' when creationists believe the universe was magicked up from nothing, just 10,000 years ago.
There is also the matter of Homo sapiens not having a single founding couple who were created without ancestors, and don't even come from a single species, but are a hybrid between several related species.
In a classic example of how scientists never take what they think they know as proven beyond question, a group of scientists led by associate professor Lasse Jakobsen of the Department of Biology, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark have reassessed how the Western barbastelle bat, Barbastella barbastellus, evolved its hunting strategy, and have concluded that the way we thought it evolved is probably wrong.
But it's no comfort to creationists because there is no suggestion that it may have been acquired by anything other than a god-free natural process or that the scientists are having any doubts about the Theory of Evolution. Indeed, the general principle of arms races is not in doubt, only whether it applies in the case of the barbastelle's hunting strategy. To add to creationist discomfort, evolutionary arms races were the subject of an early research paper by a certain Richard Dawkins together with John Richard Krebs and are now accepted as a fundamental driver of evolution. They are, of course, utterly incompatible with the notion of intelligent [sic] design.
Briefly, it was previously thought that the 'quiet' echolocation used by barbastelles to locate their insect prey was the result of an evolutionary arms race between bats and insects in which insects had evolved the ability to detect bats by their echolocation sounds and take evasive action. Bats then adjusted their sounds by either changing their frequencies or, in the case of barbastelles, turning down the volume.
Why would someone lie to you about the contents of a book?
Like those who lie to you about science, their problem is not that they think it is wrong; their problem is that they think it is right, but they don't want you to think otherwise because they don't want you to be informed. They have an agenda that requires you to remain ignorant and believing falsehoods.
These are frauds who understand how knowledge empowers and sets you free, so they need you to remain captive and weak probably because their income and power depends on it.
This was never better illustrated than by the barrage of lies and disinformation with which the creation industry is trying to stop you reading my books. It is so important to them that you don't read these books that expose them as frauds and conmen that they are willing to sacrifice their personal integrity to try to fool you into not reading them. The fact that they are willing to bear false witness to you for their own self-interest, should tell you that their pretense of piety is part of their agenda, since a devout Christian would believe that bearing false witness is a sin. These are frauds using religion as an excuse for their behaviour.
I suppose I should be flattered in a way, that they are so afraid you'll read these books because of the irrefutable arguments they present and the examples I used that they need to go to these lengths to retain their control of their cult members and recruit more ignorant dupes into it.
An indication of this consternation is the number of misleading and downright dishonest 'reviews' that Amazon are allowing to remain on these books.
The following is an all-too-typical examples, written by someone who calls him or herself 'The Professor' and who purports to be a University professor who has written numerous books, although he/she neglects to say what chair he/she holds at what university or give the tile of any of these 'numerous books'. We just have to take their word for it.
However, the veracity of their word can best be judged by the content of the 'review' of The Malevolent Designer. For some reason, the title of the book in their 'review' is followed by Unintelligent Design in parenthesis, so it's not even clear which book is being 'reviewed' here.
Although post-war Europe has seen major changes in religious affiliation and beliefs with Atheism and acceptance of the scientific view of human origins now the largest demographic by far in many countries, including the UK, the USA continues to be an outlier amongst Western industrial democracies in this regard, with a large number of people believing in magic and the special creation of humans as is, on an Earth that is just a few thousand years old.
Another feature of Western European post-war culture is the presumption that religious freedom comes not from a close association between church and state but by strict secularism, so that many countries that were formerly solidly Catholic or Protestant are increasingly secular. This contrast markedly with American evangelicals, who, whilst not being in the majority in what is also becoming an increasingly secular society, would like nothing more than a theocracy with Christianity even being required to qualify as a 'proper American' and the church being involved in education, the judiciary, the legislature and even the executive, in a Taliban-style theocracy.
As this Pew Research survey shows, American Evangelicals closely resemble South and Southeast Asian Buddhists and Muslims in this respect. The survey is the subject of a report by Jonathan Evans, Kelsey Jo Starr, Manolo Corichi and William Miner and a summary by Jonathan Evans.
It shows that in "three Buddhist-majority countries (Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Thailand) and two Muslim-majority countries (Malaysia and Indonesia), as well as the religiously diverse country of Singapore", religion is an important part of everyday life with both Buddhism and Islam having some similarities in terms of belief, personal and national identity and to what degree it should be involved in politics, laws and customs. In all these measures, religion, regardless of the sect, had a remarkable similarity to Evangelical Christianity in the USA, especially amongst the far-right Christian Nationalists.
Distribution of anthropogenic manufacturing traces, use-wear and residues on the Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 (a) and Leang Panninge (b) tiger shark-tooth artefacts.
Figure 5. Use-related features of the Leang Panninge shark tooth: a) ground facet (indicated by red arrowhead) and striations on the lingual surface; b) grooves between the perforation and tooth shoulder from ligatures; c) plant fibre associated with hafting; d) cut notches along the base and grooves from ligatures (both indicated by red arrowheads) on the labial surface. White scale bars = 1mm (image c by B. Stephenson; all other images by M. Langley).
It's a fundamental requirement of the creation cult to believe that about 4000 years ago, their putative perfect creator god had a human-like fit of temper because its intelligently [sic] designed creation wasn't working as intended and inflicted a genocidal flood on the planet, killing everything apart from a few survivors who lived in a floating box for a year. They then disembarked onto a sterile planet somewhere in the Middle-east and somehow survived to create the biodiversity we see today.
From there, apparently, the surviving humans repopulated Earth, invented new cultures and languages as they did so, forgetting all about the flood and the god who inflicted it on their recent ancestors, and invented new gods and religions, with only one small tribe remembering it all in word-perfect detail.
Apart from the ludicrously narrow genetic bottleneck this would have cause, meaning almost all the surviving species would be extinct within a few generations, there is the little problem of so much archaeology being around that would not have survived such a flood, and evidence of cultures that existed before, during and after it apparently without noticing it at all.
An example is the 7,000-year-old fighting knife made from shark teeth discovered on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, which should not have been there if the Bronze Age tales made up by people who thought Earth was small and flat with a dome over it and ran on magic, that creationists think were true history and real science, actually were true history and real science.
This discovery by a team of archaeologists from Australian and Indonesian universities led by Associate Professor of Archaeology, Michelle Langley of Griffith University, is the subject of an open access paper published recently in Antiquity. Five of the authors have also written about this discovery in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
Bringing a shark to a knife fight: 7,000-year-old shark-tooth knives discovered in Indonesia
Excavations on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi have uncovered two unique and deadly artefacts dating back some 7,000 years – tiger shark teeth that were used as blades.
These finds, reported in the journal Antiquity, are some of the earliest archaeological evidence globally for the use of shark teeth in composite weapons – weapons made with multiple parts. Until now, the oldest such shark-tooth blades found were less than 5,000 years old.
Modified tiger shark teeth found in 7,000-year-old layers of Leang Panninge (top) and Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 (bottom) on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
Credit: M.C. Langley
Our international team used a combination of scientific analysis, experimental reproduction and observations of recent human communities to determine that the two modified shark teeth had once been attached to handles as blades. They were most likely used in ritual or warfare.
7,000-year-old teeth
The two shark teeth were recovered during excavations as part of a joint Indonesian-Australian archaeological research program. Both specimens were found in archaeological contexts attributed to the Toalean culture – an enigmatic foraging society that lived in southwestern Sulawesi from around 8,000 years ago until an unknown period in the recent past.
The shark teeth are of a similar size and came from tiger sharks (Galeocerda cuvier) that were approximately two metres long. Both teeth are perforated.
A complete tooth, found at the cave site of Leang Panninge, has two holes drilled through the root. The other – found at a cave called Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 – has one hole, though is broken and likely originally also had two holes.
Microscopic examination of the teeth found they had once been tightly fixed to a handle using plant-based threads and a glue-like substance. The adhesive used was a combination of mineral, plant and animal materials.
The same method of attachment is seen on modern shark-tooth blades used by cultures throughout the Pacific.
Scratches and a ground section on the tip of the Leang Panninge shark tooth indicate its use by people 7,000 years ago.
Credit: M.C. Langley
Examination of the edges of each tooth found they had been used to pierce, cut and scrape flesh and bone. However, far more damage was present than a shark would naturally accrue during feeding.
While these residues superficially suggest Toalean people were using shark-tooth knives as everyday cutting implements, ethnographic (observations of recent communities), archaeological and experimental data suggest otherwise.
Grooves and traces of red resin along the base of the Leang Panninge tooth show how the teeth were attached using threads.
Credit: M.C. Langley
Why use shark teeth?
Not surprisingly, our experiments found tiger shark-tooth knives were equally effective in creating long, deep gashes in the skin when used to strike (as in fighting) as when butchering a leg of fresh pork.
Indeed, the only negative aspect is that the teeth blunt relatively quickly – too quickly to make their use as an everyday knife practical.
This fact, as well as the fact shark teeth can inflict deep lacerations, probably explains why shark-tooth blades were restricted to weapons for conflict and ritual activities in the present and recent past.
Numerous societies across the globe have integrated shark teeth into their material culture. In particular, peoples living on coastlines (and actively fishing for sharks) are more likely to incorporate greater numbers of teeth into a wider range of tools.
Shark teeth are widely used to edge deadly combat weapons or powerful ritual blades in the Pacific. Left: a knife from Kiribati; centre and right: weapons from Hawai'i.
Observations of present-day communities indicate that, when not used to adorn the human body, shark teeth were almost universally used to create blades for conflict or ritual – including ritualised combat.
For example, a fighting knife found throughout north Queensland has a single long blade made from approximately 15 shark teeth placed one after the other down a hardwood shaft shaped like an oval, and is used to strike the flank or buttocks of an adversary.
Weapons, including lances, knives and clubs armed with shark teeth are known from mainland New Guinea and Micronesia, while lances form part of the mourning costume in Tahiti.
Farther east, the peoples of Kiribati are renowned for their shark-tooth daggers, swords, spears and lances, which are recorded as having been used in highly ritualised and often fatal conflicts.
Shark teeth found in Maya and Mexican archaeological contexts are widely thought to have been used for ritualised bloodletting, and shark teeth are known to have been used as tattooing blades in Tonga, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Kiribati.
In Hawai‘i, so-called “shark-tooth cutters” were used as concealed weapons and for “cutting up dead chiefs and cleaning their bones preparatory to the customary burials”.
A shark-tooth knife from Aua Island, Papua New Guinea. Red arrows highlight wear and damage caused by fighting.
Credit: M. Langley and The University of Queensland Anthropology Museum
Other shark tooth archaeological finds
Almost all shark-tooth artefacts recovered globally have been identified as adornments, or interpreted as such.
Indeed, modified shark teeth have been recovered from older contexts. A solitary tiger shark tooth with a single perforation from Buang Merabak (New Ireland, Papua New Guinea) is dated to around 39,500–28,000 years ago. Eleven teeth with single perforations from Kilu (Buka Island, Papua New Guinea) are dated to around 9,000–5,000 years ago. And an unspecified number of teeth from Garivaldino (Brazil) is dated to around 9,400–7,200 years ago.
However, in each of these cases the teeth were likely personal ornaments, not weapons.
Our newly described Indonesian shark tooth artefacts, with their combination of modifications and microscopic traces, instead indicate they were not only attached to knives, but very likely linked to ritual or conflict.
Published by The Conversation. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
The authors give more technical details in their paper in Antiquity:
Abstract
Although first identified 120 years ago, knowledge of the Toalean technoculture of Middle Holocene Sulawesi, Indonesia, remains limited. Previous research has emphasised the exploitation of largely terrestrial resources by hunter-gatherers on the island. The recent recovery of two modified tiger shark teeth from the Maros-Pangkep karsts of South Sulawesi, however, offers new insights. The authors combine use-wear and residue analyses with ethnographic and experimental data to indicate the use of these artefacts as hafted blades within conflict and ritual contexts, revealing hitherto undocumented technological and social practices among Toalean hunter-gatherers. The results suggest these artefacts constitute some of the earliest archaeological evidence for the use of shark teeth in composite weapons.
Figure 1. Map with (inset) the location of Leang Panninge and Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1
image by K. Newman.
Figure 2. Archaeological contexts of the perforated shark teeth: a) Leang Panninge cave; b) cave entrance at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1, at the foot of the isolated limestone karst tower; c) stratigraphic profile, Leang Panninge (2019); d–e) stratigraphic profiles, Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 (2018); f) Maros point excavated from Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 (Square T9S1) above the Toalean-associated layer that yielded the shark tooth (scale bar is 10mm)
Photographs and image compilation by Y. Perston.
Figure 8. Comparison of the Toalean shark-tooth artefacts with examples of Maros points found at Leang Panninge (bottom left) and Leang Pajae (top and bottom right)
Photographs of Maros points by Y. Perston; figure by M. Langley.
Other than lying about science or blatantly misrepresenting it, I've yet to see a coherent explanation for why so much of Earth's history pre-dates the creation cult's 'Creation Week'.
We know, for instance that the scientists are using the correct decay rates when they use radiometric dating to determine the age of objects like these shark teeth because creationists assure us that if the basic parameters of the Universe were even slightly different, life would be impossible, yet decay rates depend on two of the four fundamental forces - the weak and strong nuclear forces, so, if they were very different 10,000 years ago by an amount that would make 10,000 years look like 3.8 billion, or 14 billion, or whatever is needed to explain the discrepancy between belief and observable reality, then life would have been impossible when it was supposedly created because quite simply, atoms larger than hydrogen would not have existed because their nuclei would have been unstable.
Creationism must be about the only cult that requires its followers to believe that the vast majority of history occurred when there was no place and no time for it to occur in.
But then these are people who can be made to believe that all life on Earth is descended from a tiny number of ancestors that lived in an unventilated box and got out of it onto a sterile planet on which every living substance had been destroyed (Genesis 7:23), including, presumably, the plants the herbivores needed, the insects the insectivores needed and where most of them would have promptly been exterminated by the carnivores.
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