Creationism in Crisis - Observable Evolution in the Creeping Woodsorrel (Oxalis Corniculata)

Red-leaved form. Common in urban areas

Does Urbanization Trigger Plant Evolution? | CHIBADAI NEXT

Creeping woodsorrell (green-leaved form),
Oxalis corniculata.
Common in rural areas

This latest refutation of creationism is an example of observable evolution occurring in recent history. It shows how a species will evolve according to local environmental conditions. The definition of biological evolution is of course, changes in allele frequencies in a population over time, and need not include a phenotypic change at all. In this case though the change is the observed change in the leaf-colour of a species of plant, the creeping woodsorrel, Oxalis corniculata.

The traditional response by creationists to these examples is to try to get away with a different definition of biological evolution to include changes that biologists don't claim ever happen, such as an entirely new taxon arising in a single event, or one taxon changing into another, unrelated taxon. It matters not one iota to a creationists that they may have been corrected on this point numerous times, it's almost impossible to shift them away from their protective shell of pretending science makes claims science never makes and the definition of biological evolution is something so absurd that no sane person could accept it.

First, a short conversation with ChatGPT3.5 on the definition of biological evolution and why creationists need to misrepresent the science:

Creationism in Crisis - Disastrous Sea Level And Climate Changes - 385 Million Years Ago.

The Malvinoxhosan biota were a group of marine animals that thrived in cooler waters

2023-10 - Ancient sea level and climate changes led to major extinctions around South Africa - Wits University

A planet designed by a loving, omniscient designer would be stable and not subject to periodic bouts of mass extinction because the life on it couldn't cope with a massive environmental change.

And yet new research by Dr Cameron Penn-Clarke from the University of the Witwatersrand and Professor David Harper from Durham University has shown that a catastrophic environmental change in the Early Devonian caused the mass extinction of the Malvinoxhosan biota. This was in the 99.97% of Earth's history that occurred before the Universe was created out of nothing by magic, according to creationists.

The term 'Malvinoxhosan biota' foxed ChatGPT3.5:

Creationism in Crisis - Now Scientists and Philosophers have Discovered How Evolution Obeys a Fundamental Law of Nature

Scientists and philosophers team up to study concept of evolution beyond biological context | Carnegie Science

A paper written by a consortium of scientists and philosophers led by Carnegie’s Michael Wong and Robert Hazen, has outlined a law that some of us have been arguing is a fundamental law of evolution for many years. Their "law of increasing functional information" states:

The functional information of a system will increase (i.e., the system will evolve) if many different configurations of the system undergo selection for one or more functions.

Basically, in any selective environment, systems will tend towards structures that improve function by accumulating small (micro) differences which eventually result in large (macro) changes. In other words, replication in a selective environment will inevitably result in evolution towards greater fitness in that environment. Where that improved fitness comes from new or improved function then there will be an increase in complexity.

The exception to that law is in parasites where the whole system (the parasite-host complex) can become increasingly complex (by the host taking on many of the functions of the parasite) but the parasite itself can lose complexity.

The force driving that increase in complexity is, of course, natural selection, where selectors in the environment ensure those arrangements better suited to produce the next generation do so in preference to those less suited.

This fundamental law is of course, not restricted to biological systems but will operate in any situation where there is replication and selection, echoing something I wrote many years ago (Darwin's Powerful Science).

The consortium expresses this fundamental law as:

Creationism in Crisis - Women Hunted Too - Before Man-Made Religion Assigned Them a 'God-Given' Role

UD anthropology professor Sarah Lacy has proposed a new theory that challenges the familiar story that labor roles during ancient times were divided by sex and that men evolved to be hunters and women to be gatherers.

Woman the hunter | UDaily

Sarah Lacey, an anthropologist with Delaware University, USA, believes she has found evidence that, in hunter-gatherer societies, in contradiction to the traditional view which has men as the hunters and women as the gatherers, in fact, women played their part as hunters too.

This was before their assumed gender roles became formalised by religions which provided men with the excuses they needed to control women by declaring that 'God' had assigned them roles as man's 'help meet' and so subservient to men. Women were instructed that they should be obedient to a man's demands and fill the role of sex-slave, housekeeper and cook, because God said so:

And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

Genesis 2: 21-24

---

GENE 3.15. And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. GENE 3.16. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

Genesis 3: 15-16

As I related in my book, A History of Ireland: How Religion Poisoned Everything, in pre-Christian Gaelic society, under the 'Brehon Law' women had equal rights to men and could adopt leadership roles, own property and divorce abusive or unfaithful husbands - rights that were systematically stripped from them under the influence of Patricus (St Patrick, first bishop of Armagh), when he called an all-male meeting of Gaelic tribal petty kings and declared those rights to be contrary to God's Law in the Bible, and women should henceforth be subservient and obedient to men and never be in a position of leadership over them.

St. Patrick is reputedly responsible for abolishing the Brehon law or rather with integrating it with Christian Law by going through it line by line with a convention of tribal chiefs called for the purpose and striking out anything which did not accord with the Bible. Brehon law, from the Irish ‘breithim’ meaning ‘a judge’ was the system of law in use in Gaelic Ireland since ancient times – a Celtic Common Law, necessary to settle disputes between residents of different petty kingdoms or different tribal traditions. One effect of this was to reduce the status of women; depriving them of many of the rights they held under Brehon law, such as the right to divorce their husband, to own property and to occupy positions of leadership. St. Patrick’s brand of Christianity was to be strictly hierarchical, patriarchal and misogynistic, in line with the Bible and the teachings of St. Paul, although there were deviations from strict cannon law. Divorce, for example, though no longer available on demand, could still be granted for a wide variety of reasons (4).

Rosa Rubicondior, A History of Ireland: How Religion Poisoned Everything, pp. 8-9

Sarah Lacy, with her colleague, anthropologist Cara Ocobock, from the University of Notre Dame, have published their research in two papers in the journal American Anthropologist and an article in Scientific American. A news release from Delaware University explains their work:

Creationism in Crisis - What Is a 170-Million-Year-Old Pliosaur Doing on a 10,000-Year-Old Earth?

The oldest megapredatory pliosaur, Lorrainosaurus, in the ancient Middle Jurassic sea that covered what is today northern France 170 million years ago.

Artwork by Joschua Knüppe (Germany).

Model of the head of Lorrainosaurus keileni.

Model By 10 Tons

Ancient sea monster remains reveal oldest mega-predatory pliosaur | Uppsala University

Q. What is a 170-Million-Year-Old Pliosaur Doing on a 10,000-Year-Old Earth?

A. Refuting Creationism and showing it to be a childish counter-factual superstition, of course, like everything else that exited in the 99.97% of Earth's history that occurred before 'creation week'.

These fossils of this predatory marine reptile from the Mesozoic Era were recovered in 1983 from a road cutting near Metz, Loraine, France and have now been examined by an international team of palaeontologists from the Naturkunde-Museum Bielefeld in Germany, the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, the Natural History Museum in Luxembourg and The Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University in Sweden, co-led by Sven Sachs of Naturkunde-Museum Bielefeld, Germany and Daniel Madzia of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

They have shown them to be of a new pliosaur genus: Lorrainosaurus.

Creationism in Crisis - Why Earth is Fine Tuned for Extinction

An arid and uninhabitable planet awaits us - in 250 million years.

September: Nature Geoscience extreme heat | News and features | University of Bristol

Creationists like to imagine that Earth is fine-tuned for life. This belief depends on the parochial ignorance of the creationist of course, because they will be oblivious of the fact that, cozy though their small bit of the planet might be, most of it is uninhabitable by humans without specialist equipment, and even cloths and houses are required in the temperate areas. Human life would be impossible without modern technology in the oceans, deserts, arctic waste, the tops of high mountains or just a few thousand feet above the surface of the planet (this is why modern aircraft that fly at 30-60,000 feet need to be pressurised).

But a planet that is fine-tuned for life would also have an infinite life-span, not a time-limited one where the life-time is limited by entirely natural processes, such as plate tectonics and the solar cycle. In fact, the life span of Earth is a mere blink on a cosmic time-scale that is measured by the life of suns.

Long before the sun becomes a red giant and swallows up the inner planets at the end of its life, shortly before becoming a super nova and blowing away the outer planets, Earth's continents will have coalesced into another single super-continent, reminiscent of Pangea, and the climate will have made life untenable for most species of mammal, according to researcher at Bristol University.

The resulting increase in volcanic rifting and out-gassing, combined with 'continentality' and an increase in solar energy output, will result in a 'wet-bulb' temperature of >35^oC and a 'dry bulb' temperature of >40^oC - temperatures at which mammalian thermoregulation fails, leading to death in about 6 hours.

The team's findings are published open access in Nature Geoscience and explained in a Bristol University press release:

Creationism in Crisis - The Universe Is Far Bigger Than Creationist Superstition Says It Should Be

Artist’s impression of a record-breaking fast radio burst

ESO/M. Kornmesser

Astronomers detect most distant fast radio burst to date | ESO

From observation of the 'red shift' we know the Universe is expanding and, by calculating the rate of expansion, we can calculate how far away an object is from any point in the Universe such as Earth.

If the creationist superstition were correct, assuming the Universe is expanding at the velocity of light (in fact, it is nowhere near that fast), the farthest objects could be no more than 10,000 light years away. This is the time it would take for light leaving the object to reach Earth, travelling at the velocity of light (186,000 miles per second).

However, an international team of astrophysicists has discovered a remote source of 'fast radio bursts' (FBR) of radio waves lasting less than a millisecond, in a galaxy so far away that its light took eight billion years to reach us! Although this is the farthest FBR source so far discovered, being about 50% farther away than the previous farthest, it is by no means the farthest object so far detected. These are about twice that distance, consistent with the Universe being 14 billion years old. In other words, the Universe has been expanding for much longer than 8 billion years, and for many times longer than the 10,000 years creationists belie.

So, any creationist capable of doing the simple maths should be able to work out that the Universe is far too large and has been expanding far too long for it to have been created 10,000 years ago, by several orders of magnitude.

The location of the FRB source was pinpointed by researchers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and its discovery is explained in an ESO press release:

Malevolent Designer News - How Science is Racing to Beat Creationism's Favourite Sadist

Illustration by Michael S. Helfenbein

Black-legged tick, Ixodes scapularis
Illustration from The Malevolent Designer

Catherine Webber-Hounslow

Racing to defuse a ‘ticking’ public health time bomb | YaleNews

Like the parasitic worms that zombify their hosts I wrote about in my previous blog post, I also wrote about the black-legged tick, Ixodes scapularis, now proliferating in North America and infecting more and more victims with Lyme Disease, in my popular, illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good.

As the reputed work of an intelligent [sic] designer, this tick can only be regarded as evidence of the pestilential malevolent of any designer that could design such a creature, as it serves no purpose other than to be the vector of a number of different pathogens and to make more ticks.

Malevolent Designer News - How Parasites Got Their Genes For Turning Their Hosts Into Zombies

Mantis, Hierodula sp. with Cordodes or horsehair worm parasite emerging

© Kuan-Chieh (Chuck) Hunh
(CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Mantis Hierodula sp. with two Chordodes mizoramensis emerging

Stolen genes allow parasitic control of behavior | RIKEN

One of the more gruesome aspects of many parasites is their ability to take control of their hosts so the host participates in its own destruction, for the benefit of the parasite.

I wrote extensively about these relationships in by popular, illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, to illustrate the fact that the creator god creationists purport to worship has to be regarded as a pestilential, sadistic monster forever devising more and more nasty ways to make its creation suffer, for no apparent reason other than the pleasure of watching the suffering.

An example I used was the parasitic nematodes known as horsehair worms that live for part of the life-cycle in an insect such as a cricket or mantis, and, when mature, it induces it to seek out and jump into water where it either drowns or gets consumed by a fish. If the former, it emerges from the dead or dying body of its host and adopts a free-living life in the water; if the latter, it passes through the fish unharmed and emerges into the water via that route.

My AI source describes them thus:

Creationism in Crisis - A 50 Million-Year-Old Bat Skull - And Another Gap Closes

Most bats use echolocation - using sound emitted from their mouths or noses - to sense their surroundings.

Photo: Getty Images

Holy bat skull! Fossil adds vital piece to bat evolution puzzle | UNSW Newsroom

Earlier this week I predicted that there would soon be more science papers which casually refute creationism - an easy prediction to make, since just about every serious science paper does exactly that. This is a prediction I'm beginning to regret as they are coming so thick and fast that it's difficult to keep up with them!

This time, it's a paper describing a near-perfect fossil bat skull from 50 million years ago that closes one of creationism’s beloved gaps in the fossil record. Of course, like almost all archaeology, geology and palaeontology, it deals with the 99.97% of the history of Earth that occurred before creationist dogma says the universe was created out of nothing by magic.

The evolutionary history of bats suffers from a lack of fossil evidence, probably because bat skeletons are generally small and thin and bat lifestyle doesn't predispose them to formation of fossils when they die. They mostly roost in caves where dead bats are rapidly consumed by a whole ecosystem of creatures that live on their droppings on the cave floor.

However, this latest find is of a near perfect skull and shows evidence that echolocation may have evolved earlier than previously thought, soon after or parallel with the evolution of powered flight.

First, some AI background:

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Have Shown How Mosquitoes Evolved in Another Casual Refutation of Creationism With Facts

Researchers scoured academic literature and used new genomic techniques to create the mosquito family tree.

Photo credit: Matt Bertone, NC State University.

Aedes eagypti

Anopheles stephensi

Anopheles albimanus

Ochlerotatus notoscriptus

Study Elucidates Evolution of Mosquitoes and Their Hosts | NC State News

It's proving to be another terrible week for the creation cult with yet another science paper that casually, and without any intention on the part of the authors, utterly refutes some basic creationist cult dogmas.

This paper deal with the evolution of the mosquitoes and the parasite-host relationship that refute intelligent design ideas with their arms races, needless complexity and prolific waste, in addition to their refutation of the notion of an omnibenevolent designer.

And of course, as we've come to expect, almost all that evolutionary history occurred millions of years before creationists think the Universe was magically created out of nothing by a magic man made of nothing who popped up from nowhere, in the days when nothing was something that existed. This magic, invisible man then allegedly created every living thing without ancestors, pretty much as we find it today, but on a flat Earth with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out. Seriously!

The point has already been made by others many times before: creationism is not a problem for science; science is a problem for creationism; and this paper is just one more drop in the tsunami engulfing the cult.

First, a little AI background on mosquitoes:

Creationism in Crisis - Human And Chimpanzee Language Developments Have A Common Origin

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

Young chimps develop language in the same way that human babies do.

New study reveals similarities between chimpanzee and human language development | University of Portsmouth

The traditional creationist argument for the daft notion that humans were specially created without ancestors and are thus a different sort of creation to the other animals, is normally to point at unique characteristics of humans, oblivious of the fact that, by definition, any species will have unique characteristics that define it as a distinct species.

One of these supposedly unique abilities is the ability to communicate with complex languages. This again ignores the fact that orcas or killer whales form social groupings with unique cultures and vocalizations with which they communicate with members of their own pod.

Now research by scientists from the University of Portsmouth in England, the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, and Université Clermont Auvergne in France have shown that there are clear similarities between the development of language in humans and the development of vocal communication in chimpanzees, strongly pointing to its origin in a common ancestor.

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Reconstruct the Skull of a 12 Million-Year-Old Ancestral Primate

Virtual reconstruction of the face and cranium of Pierolapithecus catalaunicus using CT scans of the original fossil

© Kelsey Pugh

Artist's impression of the face of Pierolapithecus catalaunicus

Credit: Meike Köhler

Extinct Ape Gets a Facelift, 12 Million Years Later | AMNH

No sooner do I write a blog-post in which I predict that it won't be long before yet more scientific papers which quite incidentally refute creationism are published, than along come another one, right on cue.

Of course, since almost all papers dealing with archaeology, paleontology and geology deal with the 99.97% of Earth's history that occurred before 'Creation Week' according to creationist dogma, this is a simple prediction to make. It is actually harder to find a serious science paper dealing with those subjects that doesn't casually refute creationism.

This paper would be embarrassing for creationists on a number of different levels, if they weren’t careful to remain proudly ignorant of it or at least had a strategy for ignoring inconvenient truths. It is a paper on the reconstruction of the face and cranium of an extinct primate that lived about 12 million years ago and which is believed to be close to if not directly ancestral to all the great apes, including humans.

So, we have another of those supposedly missing 'links' this time between the Hominidae and the other primates, and a fossil that is multiple times older than the Universe, according to the creationist creation myths. And yet the creation cult manages to stagger on regardless of all the evidence against it.

The skull is that of Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, which was discovered in Catalunya, Spain, early this century:

Creationism in Crisis - Neanderthals Were Hunting Cave Lions in Europe 40,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'.

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

Artists impression of a Eurasian cave lion, Panthera leo spelaea

Neanderthals hunted dangerous cave lions study shows - University of Reading

In the third of this week's scientific papers that casually refute creationism by reporting on 'pre-creation' events of which Earth's history is 99.97% composed, we learn that Neanderthals in Europe were hunting cave lions for food and their pelts, 50,000 years ago, during the Paleolithic Age - which came to an end when, bizarrely, creationists believe the Universe was created.

There may well be more papers yet to appear, in what is turning out to be a week of which most creationists will want to remain ignorant, if they haven't already worked out a strategy for coping with the inevitable cognitive dissonance by dismissing the unwanted evidence. To creationists, it must feel at times that science is against them. It is, of course, but that's a problem for creationists, not science. It’s not compulsory to adopt counter-factual beliefs.

The scientific paper is published open access in Scientific Reports and is accompanied by a news release from Reading University. The discovery was made by lead author, PHD student, Gabriele Russo, of Universität Tübingen in Germany, together with a team of colleagues which included archaeologist Dr Annemieke Milks, of the University of Reading.

The skeleton of the cave lion dates to around 50,000 years ago, during the Upper Paleolithic, at a time when anatomically-modern Homo sapiens were just beginning to appear in Eurasia, and Neanderthals had western Eurasia pretty much to themselves.

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Have Reconstructed the Head And Face From the Skull of a 700,000 Year-Old Homo Heidelbergensis

Lateral view. Portrait of Homo heidelbergensis from Petralona, Greece, with hair and skin pigmentation.

Image credit: Aidonis et al., doi: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2023.104206.

Anthropologists Reconstruct Face of Homo heidelbergensis | Sci.News

Frontal view.

Image credit: Aidonis et al., doi: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2023.104206.

Skull of Homo heidelbergensis (the Petralona Skull)

Source: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)

The incidental refutation of basic creationist superstitions continues unabated this week.

Following the news that animal and human tracks carved in rocks in what is now Namibia in Southwest Africa, are twice as old as the Universe, according to creationists, comes news that scientists have reconstructed the head and face of an archaic hominin, Homo heidelbergensis, who lived between 700,000 and 200,000 years ago in Eurasia, and news that Neanderthals were hunting cave lions in Europe, 48,000 years ago (to be the subject of my next blog post).

But, given that 99.99% of the known history of the Universe occurred before it was created by magic out of nothing by a magic man made of nothing that popped up from nowhere, if we believe creationists, this is not in the least surprising. Almost all geology and palaeontology, and much of archaeology is concerned with this 'pre-creation' history.

The team who forensically reconstructed the face and head was led by Christina Papageorgopoulou of the Laboratory of Physical Anthropology, Department of History and Ethnology, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece, and included researchers from the Institute for Bio-Economy and Agri-Technology, Centre for Research & Technology Hellas, Greece and the Ephorate of Palaeoanthropology-Speleology, Ministry of Culture, Greece. First a little about H. heidelbergensis and how the Petralona Skull, used in the reconstruction, was dated to between 200,000 and 700,000 years old:

Creationism in Crisis - Humans Were Carving Human and Other Animal Tracks in Rocks in Namibia, 10,000 Years Before Creationists Think Earth Was Created

Stone Age depictions of human footprints and animal tracks in Doro !nawas mountains, Namibia.

Image credit: Andreas Pastoors.

Large engraving of an elephant at rock art site RAS 8.

How just one set of animal tracks can provide a wealth of information | FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

Hunter-gatherer people were carving human and other animal tracks in rocks in Namibia during the Later Stone Age (LSA) that began in Southern Africa about 20,000 years ago.

Unlike the Paluxy hoax in America, when crudely forged human tracks were carved by local people on top of dinosaur tracks, to provide souvenirs for gullible tourists during the Great Depression, these carvings are believed to have had cultural significance for the people who carved them.

They depict detailed human footprints interspersed with tracks of hooved animals which are so accurate that experts are able to determine detailed information on the species, age, sex, limbs, side of the body, trackway and relative direction of the tracks.

The carvings are on six rockfaces in the Doro !nawas mountains in Namibia.

Creationism in Crisis - Colliding Planets Falsify Creationism

Image shows a visualisation of the huge, glowing planetary body produced by a planetary collision. As the resulting debris moves between the host star and Earth it causes the star to appear to dim. The host star is seen in the background of the image.

Credit: Mark Garlick

October: Exoplanet collision | News and features | University of Bristol

The reason creationism is so easy to refute is that its claims are simplistic, designed as they are to appeal to those who think like children and who know little or no science.

This means we can construct simple hypotheses and predictions and test them against the real world. When we do that, we invariably find the hypotheses are easily falsifiable and the predictions fail to be fulfilled.

Science readily accepts, for example, that much of the observable universe emerged from chaos under the directional force of gravity, which turns a chaotic system into a progressively ordered system, so galaxies, superclusters, black holes, suns and planetary systems all emerged from the background chaos of the Big Bang and quantum fluctuations. This view of the universe predicts that there is still a degree of chaos and unpredictability about the universe.

M1: The Crab Nebula from Hubble.
The chaotic remnants of an exploding supernova.

Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU)

Creationists however, insist that the universe, and everything in it was created in a few days by a perfect, omniscient, god, casting magic spells and commanding everything to appear from nowhere, made out of nothing, in a perfectly ordered and designed universe. It then either micromanages it or sits back and watches while it runs on a prepared a set of rules that govern it (depending on the flavour of creationism and how much the superstition has tried to accommodate science while still believing in magic and the fairy tales they were told in childhood).

So, our simple hypothesis then is that a universe created according to creationist superstitions would be perfectly ordered and free from chaos, and of course had the ultimate purpose of providing humans with somewhere nice to live, like America. Such a well-ordered universe would never have planets colliding, or comets being knocked out of stable orbit in the outer reaches of the solar system and moving into elliptical orbits around the sun, for example. Nor would it have had a minor planet colliding with a young Earth as is believed to account for the Moon and the axis tilt that causes the seasons.

Creationism in Crisis - This Fossil Marsupial is Thirteen Thousand Times Older Than The Universe, According to Creationists

The three species of the family Thylacosmilidae on the South American continent: Anachlysictis gracilis (left, above), Thylacosmilus atrox (right) and Patagosmilus goini (left, below)

Credit: Jorge Blanco.

Anachlysictis gracilis stalking its prey in the La Venta area of Colombia, 13 million years ago. (artists impression)

Credit: Juan Giraldo

Prehistoric predator | Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

Scientists have unearthed the fossilised remains of a predatory sabre-toothed marsupial that lived in what is now Columbia in northwestern South America, 13 million years ago, during the Cenozoic, the period which followed the extinction of the dinosaurs, which cleared the way for a rapid diversification of mammals.

The fossil is of Anachlysictis gracilis, one of the family of predatory marsupial known as the Thylacosmilidae.

Creationism in Crisis - How We Can Tell The Bible Is Not The Work Of The God Described in It

A creator god would not have got so much wrong when it tried to describe the world it had created and described is as though it knew no more than a parochial Bronze Age pastoralist who knew almost nothing and had to rely on guess-work and folkloric superstitions from the fearful infancy of our species.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

The universe from descriptions of it in the Bible.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1: 6-10.

How the Universe really is, as revealed by science:

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Use Ancient 'Fossils' in Ocean Floor Sediment to Analyse Africa's Weather Patterns Over Millions of Years

Floodwaters in the town of Bushmans River, South Africa.

Shutterstock/David Steele

Floodwaters in the town of Bushmans River, South Africa, following unusually heavy rain associated with the Benguela Niño

Shutterstock/David Steele

Syracuse University Paleoclimatologists Use Ancient Sediment to Explore Future Climate in Africa - College of Arts & Sciences at Syracuse University

Scientists from Syracuse University, George Mason University and the University of Connecticut are using hydrogen isotopes locked up in 'fossilised' plant material embedded in ocean floor sediments to analyse the changes in weather patterns in Southern Africa, in order to try to predict the effects of current changes.

The 'fossils' are in the form of stable flakes of the waxy substance that coats plant leaves. These get washed into the ocean when they flake off the leaves and eventually sink to the ocean floor where they become embedded in the layers of silt in chronological order. The team measured the ratio of the two stable isotopes of hydrogen (¹H and ²H or deuterium) in of thin sections core samples of the ocean floor deposits. This ratio is directly related to the rainfall on the adjacent land.

This is only possible because childish creationist claims that the Universe is only 8-10,000 years old are not only quantitatively wrong, but wrong by many orders of magnitude, and quite laughably so to anyone who has even the slightest understanding of the subject.