Creationism Refuted - How Science Works - A Fossil Fly That Challenged Evolution.

A 150-million-year-old fossil with a singular adaptation may unlock the origin of quironomids | Estación Biológica de Doñana - CSIC

In a striking example of how science, in contrast to creationism, starts from the evidence and builds understanding accordingly, a newly discovered fossil fly has led scientists to revise their view on a seemingly minor detail of insect evolution.

Creationism, by contrast, starts with the conclusion and either distorts the evidence or ignores it altogether when, as is usually the case, it contradicts what they believe. To a creationist, the belief is sacred, so facts must comply—or be disregarded.

In my last blog post, I explained how psychologists view this behaviour as a perceived test of strength: creationists see challenges to their beliefs as threats that would make them appear weak if they accepted and adapted to the evidence. They respond by setting their faces like flint against any contradiction.

Science, by contrast, sees a refusal to change one’s mind when the evidence demands it as a mark of intellectual dishonesty. A willingness to revise one’s views shows a desirable strength of character — the hallmark of a good scientist. To a scientist, facts are sacred; opinions must flow from them. In any scientific debate, facts are neutral.

The discovery in question involves a Jurassic fossil midge from Australia — Telmatomyia talbragarica, the oldest known member of the Chironomidae (non-biting midge) family in the Southern Hemisphere. The fossil shows a mechanism for attaching to rocks using suction pads on its feet. This trait was previously thought to have evolved in marine species, but this insect lived in freshwater. That detail suggests the family did not originate in Siberia, as once believed, but in Gondwana before it broke apart.

Not the most dramatic scientific breakthrough, perhaps, but this is precisely how science advances — especially evolutionary biology: one careful step at a time, with constant re-examination and revision as new evidence emerges. It’s like working on a million-piece jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the box.

Creationism Refuted - Why Creationists Cling To Easily Disproven Claims - It's All About Weak People Needing To Appear Strong

Winning with misinformation: New research identifies link between endorsing easily disproven claims and prioritizing symbolic strength

Anyone who values facts as the foundation of rational opinion will quickly grow frustrated trying to reason creationists out of their infantile beliefs with information. The problem, according to a paper recently published in the Journal of Social Psychology, is that creationists—like antivaxxers, conspiracy theorists, climate change deniers, flat-earthers, and those who believe Donald Trump will “make America great again”—see it as a weakness to ‘give in’ to reason. For them, it is a sign of strength to resist facts and cling defiantly to beliefs that can be easily disproven.

This reflex stems from an underlying sense of vulnerability in the face of complex information and a perception that science is attempting to manipulate them into conforming to mainstream knowledge. For such individuals, the priority is not to hold factually correct, verifiable beliefs—anyone can do that—but to assert symbolic strength by being contrary.

And what better evidence of that superior strength is there than persuading someone else to agree with you - by any means available?

Unfortunately, the full journal article is behind a paywall. However, two of the four authors have also written an accessible article in The Conversation, which is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Tracking Dinosaurs In Oxfordshire - 166 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Aerial view of the trackway at Dewars Farm Quarry, Oxfordshire

Credit: Richard Butler,
University of Birmingham.

Oxford researchers return to the Jurassic Highway | University of Oxford

Members of the 2025 excavation team

One of the sauropod trackways.

Photos: Emma Nicholls.

Oxfordshire, where I was born and spent the first twenty-odd years of my life, is steeped in fossil history. Notably, the lower jaw of the very first named dinosaur — Megalosaurus bucklandii — was discovered in Stonesfield, in the quaintly named valley, Bag's Bottom, the centre of the former Stonesfield slate industry, just about a mile and a half from my childhood home in the hamlet of Fawler.

About 166 million years ago, in the Middle Jurassic, much of the region now known as Oxfordshire lay under a warm, shallow sea. A sandbar separated it from the open ocean, forming a tranquil lagoon. Sediment slowly accumulated, forming limestone that preserved innumerable small molluscs. Even today, you can spot their fossilised shells in the drystone walls built from that same limestone — a subtle but constant reminder of deep time.

When I was a teenager, I would take the grandsons of the renowned palaeoanthropologist and former President of the Royal Society, Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, on fossil-hunting excursions. One disused quarry, rich in fossil mussels, coiled snails and bivalves, became a familiar haunt. But nothing we ever uncovered then compares to what has just been unearthed at Dewars Farm Quarry, between Middleton Stoney and Ardley. Dubbed the “Oxfordshire Dinosaur Highway,” this newly announced discovery appears to be the longest dinosaur trackway known in Europe, at 220 metres.

The work was conducted by a team of palaeontologists co-led by Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH) and The University of Birmingham. Unsurprisingly, this find challenges certain creationist narratives and casually refuted the Bible creation myth. The announcement was recently made in an Oxford University news release.

Creationism Refuted - Hippos Lived In The Rhine - More Than 21,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Left mandible fragment of a female hippopotamus from Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen Mannheim.
Between 46,000 and 48,300 years old.

Photo: Rebecca Kind

Hippos lived at the Upper Rhine in the same time frame as mammoths. In the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen a hippo reconstruction meets a mammoth skeleton.

Photo: Rebecca Kind

Hippos lived in Europe during the last ice age | University of Potsdam!

News that an international research team led by University of Potsdam and Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen Mannheim, working with Curt-Engelhorn-Zentrum Archäometrie, has produced evidence that hippos lived along the Rhine in what is now Germany some 21,000 years before creationists believe Earth was created out of nothing, will probably come as no surprise to creationists.

They are well-practised at living in a world where verifiable evidence repeatedly refutes their beliefs. Over time, they have developed all manner of convoluted mental gymnastics to cope with the resultant cognitive dissonance—secure in the arrogant conviction that their beliefs trump evidence simply because they label them “faith”.

Normal people, of course, tend to have the humility to accept that evidence is the only valid basis for an informed opinion, and that it must therefore take precedence over myths and fairy tales told to them by parents and authority figures with vested cultural interests. The real test of whether a belief is right or wrong is how well it is supported by evidence—not how cleverly the evidence can be ignored.

This discovery extends our knowledge of the extinction timeline of European hippos, previously believed to have disappeared around 115,000 years ago. The new evidence pushes that date forward dramatically, showing that they survived until about 31,000 years ago, at least in that part of Europe. It also clarifies how these European populations were related to the African hippos.

That timeline is not only inconvenient for creationists; it also highlights the parochial nature of the Bible’s authors, who clearly had no knowledge of flora and fauna beyond their narrow Middle Eastern world. Notably, the Bible makes no mention of the African megafauna—hippos, elephants, giraffes, or ostriches, for example. In fact, the latter would have posed a serious problem for their primitive taxonomy, which classified bats as “birds” simply because they could fly. One can only wonder where they might have placed the flightless ostrich.

Creationism Refuted - Time For A Bible Re-Write

A Palaeolithic handaxe with a broken distal end, discovered during the Ayvalık survey

Early humans may have walked from Türkiye to mainland Europe, new groundbreaking research suggests - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

A phrase much loved by journalists (and creationists) is “the history/science books will need to be re-written”. It’s a convenient bit of lazy journalistic rhetoric — but in this case, the book that actually needs to be re-written is the Bible.

The discovery in question concerns the migration of early Homo sapiens, who may have spread from the Levant across Asia Minor (modern-day Türkiye) and then into Greece via a northern Aegean land bridge, exposed when sea levels were much lower during the last Ice Age — between 115,000 and 11,700 years ago.

This new evidence challenges some existing models of early human migration routes. However, it represents only a refinement of the broader, well-established story of humanity’s dispersal out of Africa, not a challenge to it. What it does completely undermine, however, is the Biblical narrative claiming that all humans descended from a single, ahistorical couple created without ancestors some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago — followed by a supposed global “reset” just 4,000 years ago when a genocidal flood left only eight related survivors.

The evidence for this Ice Age land bridge comes from the recovery of 138 stone tools at ten sites within a 200 km² area around Ayvalık in north-west Türkiye, opposite the Greek island of Lesbos.

Malevolent Design - How Creationism's 'Designer' Favoured The Naked Mole Rat

DNA repair mechanisms help explain why naked mole-rats live a long life

News that scientists have discovered what enables the naked mole-rat to live for up to 37 years — around ten times longer than relatives of a similar size — raises a troublesome question for creationists. The findings were reported recently in Science by a team of researchers from the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Maternal Fetal Medicine.

Creationists like to flatter themselves with the notion that they are the favoured creation of their putative designer god and the ultimate expression of design perfection. So, when evidence emerges of other species surpassing humans in some way — bats with more robust immune systems, elephants and sharks being almost completely immune to cancers, peregrine falcons with far superior vision — it is typically ignored, met with incredulity, or dismissed as an ineffable mystery and part of some divine plan which in no way diminished the unique position of humans in the grand scheme.

Now, to add to their woes, comes the discovery that the secret of the naked mole-rat’s extraordinary longevity may be traced to changes in just four amino acids. This alone undermines creationist claims that mutations are always harmful and incapable of generating new genetic information.

Malevolent Designer News - A Newly-Designed Way To Increase Suffering Is Having Major Success in Southern China

Chikungunya Virus Replication Cycle

BioRender Science Templates

Guangdong faces largest chikungunya outbreak on record | EurekAlert!

An open-access report in the journal Biocontaminant [PDF] describes a sudden, large increase in the number of infections with the chikungunya virus in southern China, with more than 4,000 cases in Foshan City, Guangdong Province, and over 3,600 cases in Shunde District. The initial spread of the outbreak was observed in this region and quickly escalated into a major public health concern. These cases have not only been documented in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Yangjiang, and Zhanjiang within Guangdong Province but have also emerged in Macao and Hong Kong.

Let’s pretend for a moment that Intelligent Design Creationism accurately describes reality — that a supernatural entity, indistinguishable from the supposedly omnibenevolent god of the Bible, is continually intervening in living organisms to ensure they conform to a divine plan for the world, particularly for human life.

Let’s also assume that William A. Dembski, Michael J. Behe, and other “CDesign proponentsists” are correct in asserting that the presence of “irreducible complexity” and particularly “complex specified genetic information” is evidence of the work of this putative designer.

How, then, does this announcement about the increase in cases of chikungunya in southern China fit into that worldview?

Chikungunya is a virus transmitted to humans only through the bite of a female Aedes mosquito when she takes a blood meal — in much the same way that Zika, yellow fever, and malaria are transmitted. Once infected, a person develops a sudden-onset fever with painful joints and acts as a reservoir for the virus, enabling the next mosquito to pick it up and continue the chain of infection.

The recent increase in cases is believed to be due to two main factors:

• More viruses circulating in the population
• More Aedes mosquitoes, with a northward spread driven by global warming

The genetic information in the chikungunya virus genome is clearly enabling the virus population to increase in response to environmental change. If this doesn’t qualify as “complex specified information”, it’s difficult to imagine what would.

Furthermore, the feeding strategy of the Aedes mosquito is a striking example of a finely tuned process: if any part of it fails, the entire transmission cycle collapses. By Michael J. Behe’s own definition, this appears to meet the criteria for “irreducible complexity” and, within that framework, would be touted as conclusive evidence of “intelligent design”.

The inescapable conclusion, then — if we accept the Intelligent Design worldview, in which a divine intelligence is the only possible explanation for such genetic information and irreducibly complex systems — is that both the virus and the mosquito have been intelligently designed to cause human suffering. They seem to have no other purpose than to reproduce themselves and increase infection levels within the population. In other words, according to the logic of ID creationism, this virus was designed with malevolent intent.

Creationism Refuted - Inclusions In 112 Million-Year-Old Amber Show A Diverse Ancient Ecosystem

Diptera: Chironomidae

Scientists unearth a 112-million-year-old time capsule filled with ancient insects | ScienceDaily

A rich source of amber from the Genoveva quarry in the Napo Province of Ecuador is revealing information about life in a dense, tropical rainforest 112 million years ago, requiring the most convoluted of mental gymnastics for creationists to ignore or deny. This newly described deposit, part of the Hollín Formation in the Oriente Basin, represents the first Mesozoic amber deposit with preserved insects ever discovered in South America — and one of the largest known anywhere on the former Gondwanan supercontinent.

Unlike rock fossils, where finer detail is often lost through mineralisation and geological processes, amber frequently preserves plant and animal life with exquisite microscopic precision. This makes the Ecuadorian deposit, produced at a time when Gondwana was on the verge of splitting into Africa and South America, a rare and invaluable window into the humid, densely vegetated ecosystem of an equatorial rainforest during the Cretaceous Period.

Amber is the solidified resinous sap of trees — often conifers such as araucariaceans — and can originate from branches, trunks or even roots, preserving both aerial and subterranean organisms. Almost all known amber deposits come from the northern hemisphere, particularly from Eurasia and North America, so this southern hemisphere deposit provides an unprecedented opportunity to study an ancient Gondwanan ecosystem at a crucial time in Earth’s evolutionary history.

The contrast between this rich, 112-million-year-old ecosystem and the simplistic biblical creation myth is as stark as it could be. Even if we had no other fossils, the life forms trapped in this amber — representing at least five insect orders, spider silk, and an abundance of pollen and spores from ferns, cycads, conifers and early angiosperms — would comprehensively refute the notion of a young Earth created in its present form.

Another strength of amber as a fossil medium is that it is always contemporaneous with the bioinclusions it preserves — organisms became trapped while the resin was still liquid — removing the additional uncertainties sometimes introduced when dating fossils embedded in sedimentary matrices.

Refuting Creationism - Rock Art From Arabia - 2,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

[left caption]

[right caption]

12,000-year-old monumental camel rock art acted as ancient 'road signs' to water sources - Griffith News

Thousands of years before creationism’s god supposedly decided to create a small, flat planet with a dome over it, centred on a tiny patch of the Middle East, humans were already leaving road signs and directions to water sources carved into rocks in what is now the Arabian desert. These carvings offer a fascinating insight into the region’s prehistoric megafauna—and, of course, all such evidence of early human activity would have been completely obliterated by the biblical genocidal flood, had such an event really occurred as described.

The rock carvings were discovered by an international team of archaeologists, led by the Heritage Commission of the Saudi Ministry of Culture, and including scholars from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), University College London, Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE), and others. Their findings were published open access in Nature Communications a few days ago.

At the time, the region that is now arid desert was made habitable by a humid period following the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), when surface water was abundant. Stone tool manufacture from the site shows clear cultural links with Neolithic societies in the Levant—ironically, the very region where the authors of Genesis set most of their imaginative origin myths, apparently oblivious to the deeper history of the area or the existence of earlier human populations beyond their narrow horizons.

Creationism Refuted - The Cosmos Is Not Fine-Tuned For Life

An artist’s impression of a red supergiant star in the final year of its life emitting a tumultuous cloud of gas. This suggests at least some of these stars undergo significant internal changes before going supernova.

W.M. Keck Observatory/
Adam Makarenko.

An artist’s impression of a red supergiant star in the final year of its life emitting a tumultuous cloud of gas.

W.M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko.

Astronomers capture red supergiant’s death throes - Northwestern Now

Although now rather old news, the observation of the death of a red supergiant star in 20222 has just been reported in Science Daily, prompting me to look again at the 'fine-tuned universe' argument beloved by (usually American) creationists, and often repeated uncritically with little or no understanding of the subject.

Briefly, the argument is that the universe is so “finely tuned” that changing even a single parameter by the smallest amount would make life impossible. The superficiality of this argument is revealed by the fact that many of the same individuals also claim that radiometric dating is unreliable because radioactive decay rates were supposedly much higher in the past. Yet, if that were true, their fine-tuning claim would collapse entirely: accelerated decay would have released so much energy that not only would life have been impossible, but atoms themselves could not have formed at the time they claim their deity magically created everything.

The fine-tuning argument collapses almost immediately when creationists are asked to explain any of the supposed parameters in detail. Specifically, they cannot show the theoretical range of values that parameter could take, nor can they demonstrate how the probability of its current value was calculated without access to multiple universes where it differs. In practice, no such calculation is ever performed; instead, a vanishingly small probability is simply asserted without evidence. Yet if no other values are actually possible, then the probability of the parameter having its current value is not small at all — it is certain (i.e. 1).

Unintelligent Design - The Needless Complexity That Produces Orchids

Cremastra variabilis

Cremastra variabilis

Deadwood brings wild orchids to life | Kobe University News site

An interesting open-access paper, recently published in the journal, Functional Ecology, by two researchers from Kobe University, Japan, explains the complex, symbiotic relationship between an orchid and a wood-decomposing fungus, not only between the fungi and the adult plants that depend on the fungi to provide the orchid with nutrients, but also for the orchid seed to germinate.

This complex relationship appears to benefit the orchid because it can live in otherwise nutrient-poor conditions. However, from an intelligent design perspective, it makes no sense at all because an omnipotent, omniscient designer could have endowed the orchid with the genetic machinery to do what the fungus does.

The relationship between the seeds and the fungus is even more bizarre. The seeds, unlike those of other plants, are devoid of nutrients and therefore need the fungus to supply some. Orchid seeds are notoriously small, being almost invisible to the naked eye. Contrary to Jesus’s bizarre reputed claim in the Bible that the mustard seed is the smallest seed, orchid seeds are orders of magnitude smaller.

Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.

Matthew 13: 31–32

The mustard seed is not only not the smallest of seeds but also doesn’t grow into a tree!

Contrary to what creationists have been conditioned to believe, one of the hallmarks of good, intelligent design is minimal complexity because the simpler a process is, the fewer opportunities there are for it to go wrong.

The converse is true for evolved organisms and processes because there is no plan or foresight in evolution, which can only build on what is already present, and natural selection prioritises utility, based solely on what is better than what preceded it. Consequently, evolved organisms are a collection of suboptimal compromises, and there is selection pressure to minimise failures with another layer of complexity.

This has led to confusion in creationist thinking, which associates complexity with intelligent design as they try to force-fit what can be observed with their need to have a role for their particular deity — especially in their own ‘design’ — giving them a sense of importance that being ‘merely’ the product of evolution doesn’t give them.

Refuting Creationism - Hominins Hunted Elephants in Italy - 400,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Hunting straight-tusked mammoths, Palaeoloxodon antiquus

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5)

Butchering the carcass with small flint blades

AI-generated (ChatGPT 5)

Early humans butchered elephants using small tools and made big tools from their bones | EurekAlert!

A recent archaeological finding, by Beniamino Mecozzi of Sapienza University of Rome, Italy and colleagues, at the site of Casal Lumbroso in northwest Rome, has once again refuted the Bible narrative by extending the known depth of human prehistory far beyond the limits imposed by biblical literalism.

In sediments dated to some 400,000 years before creationism’s mythical 'Creation Week', the research team has uncovered evidence that early humans were butchering elephants with small stone tools and then fashioning large implements from the animals’ bones. These traces of planning, adaptation, and technological innovation demonstrate that human ingenuity was already well advanced hundreds of millennia before the supposed creation of Adam.

More interestingly from a scientific perspective is not the incidental refutation of ancient creation myths, which happens with almost every archaeological and palaeontological discovery, but the fact that these hominins predate the successful Homo sapiens migration out of African and into Eurasia by tens of thousands of years and pre-date even the earliest evidence of Neanderthals in western Eurasia. Such discoveries highlight the sheer scale of time over which our lineage evolved—an evolutionary saga measured not in millennia but in hundreds of thousands of years. The people who left these marks were not modern humans, but archaic members of the genus Homo, close relatives or ancestors of the Neanderthals. Their world was already ancient when the earliest chapters of Genesis were imagined.

Refuting Creationism - The Vast Cosmos - That the Bible Says Is Centred On A Small Flat Planet With A dome Over It.

Yellow and blue, old and new | ESA/Hubble

Creationists have a choice - they can either be ignorant of what the Bible says, or remain ignorant of what science is discovering - or both. They can also arrogantly assume that their beliefs must be right so they trump any evidence science can produce.

But what they can't do is reconcile the reality as science reveals it with the description of it in the Bible. The difference is so wide that the Bible can't even be explained away as some sort of metaphor or allegory. It's no more a metaphor or an allegory than a child would produce if asked to look up at the sky then describe the universe. The Bible's description is no more a detailed description of the cosmos than the description of a glass of tap water by a six-year-old is a detailed description of the Pacific Ocean

As though to rub salt in creationists' wounds, although the scientist's regular refutation of creationism is merely incidental, the European Space Agency (ESA) in association with NASA and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) or the Hubble Space Telescope, keep on producing these images of the week. This week it's a stunning picture of the blue and yellow spiral galaxy, NGC 6000, 102 million light-years away in the Scorpius constellation.

Creationism Refuted - Evolution of 'Language' in Birds.

Male superb fairy wren, Malurus cyaneus
A frequent brood parasite host

By JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/) - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Tawny-flanked prinia, Prinia subflava

By Bernard DUPONT, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

Birds all over the world use the same sound to warn of threats - The Conversation

A recent paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution lends support to Darwin’s theory that language evolved from learned responses to innate sounds conveying specific information — such as a scream in response to pain — behaviours shared across many species.

The paper, by a team of researchers led by William E. Feeney of the Doñana Biological Station, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Seville, Spain, and the School of Environment and Science, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia, together with James A. Kennerley of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York, USA, suggests that different bird species—separated by thousands of miles geographically and tens of millions of years evolutionarily—may illustrate Darwin’s theory in practice.

This study not only strengthens Darwin’s insight into the evolutionary roots of human language but also highlights how universal biological processes—rather than supernatural design—can account for the complexity of communication across species.

Feeney and Kennerley, with co-author Niki Teunissen of Monash University, have explained their discovery and its significance in an article in The Conversation, reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Refuting Creationism - The James Webb Space Telescope Continues to Highlight The Ignorant Authorship Of The Bible.

Pismis 24 (NIRCam Image)

Glittering Glimpse of Star Birth From NASA’s Webb Telescope - NASA Science

Pismis 24 (NIRCam Image)

NASA/JWST

If a creator god had truly inspired the writing of the Bible, as creationists claim, and genuinely wanted us to believe in it and understand the supposedly vital message it contains for humankind, it could easily have included descriptions of things unknown to the people of the time — such as germ theory, atoms, electricity, photosynthesis, cells, and DNA — along with a more accurate description of the cosmos than the laughably naïve nonsense the authors recorded. Then, as science discovered these things, we would have become increasingly convinced of the Bible’s divine authorship.

Instead, we find nothing beyond the limited, parochial knowledge of its Bronze Age authors, who imagined the sky as a solid dome with water above it. Consequently, as science reveals more and more about the universe, we have no choice — if we wish to retain our intellectual integrity — but to conclude that the claim of divine authorship is false, and the Bible can therefore be disregarded as such. Any message or moral imperative it contains was written by people who believed women existed to serve men, that slavery, land theft and genocide were moral, and that the death penalty was a just punishment for trivial transgressions — such as gathering firewood on the Sabbath or failing to scream loudly enough while being raped.

Compare the Bible’s description of the universe with even a tiny glimpse of reality — for instance, this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), recently released by NASA. Inexplicably, there are still adults who cling to the belief that the Bible’s depiction remains the best available description of the universe, far surpassing, in their minds, the accuracy and reliability of anything science can produce.

Creationism Refuted - Blood suckers Were Around Long Before Creationist Frauds - Leeches are 200 Million Years Older Than We Thought

Macromyzon siluricus Ancient leech, 473 million years old

Rare fossil reveals ancient leeches weren’t bloodsuckers | UCR News | UC Riverside

Artist's reconstruction of the ancient Macromyzon siluricus leech.

EK Chan.

Unlike creationist frauds, leeches haven’t always been blood-sucking parasites. Around 473 million years ago, they were probably marine predators preying on small creatures.

It had previously been assumed that leeches evolved around 150–200 million years ago, but this fossil, found in the Waukesha biota — a geological formation in Wisconsin —might more than double that timeline to 473 million years, if confirmed. This extended timescale makes sense, as the complex adaptations required for a blood-sucking lifestyle would have had longer to evolve. However, the classification is disputed and may be an example of convergent evolution. This fossil shows the large posterior sucker that modern leeches still possess, but lacks the anterior suctorial mouthparts used by leeches today to pierce their victims’ skin and suck blood.

The fossil was discovered by researchers from Ohio State University, but was initially unrecognised for what it was until it was identified by Karma Nanglu, a palaeontologist with the University of California, Riverside, during the early pandemic years. Nanglu collaborated with researchers from the University of Toronto, the University of São Paulo, and Ohio State University on a paper describing the fossil, which is now published in PeerJ.

Refuting Creationism - What's Happening In the Real Universe?

Location in the sky of the rogue planet Cha 1107-7626 (visible light)

Six billion tonnes a second: Rogue planet found growing at record rate | ESO

Artist’s impression of Cha 1107-7626.

Location in the sky of the rogue planet Cha 1107-7626 (infrared)

With their childishly naïve grasp of the structure of the universe, the Bible’s authors could no more have imagined the true nature of the cosmos than a Bronze Age farmer could have designed a particle accelerator. They pictured a flat Earth covered by a solid dome, beneath which the sun and stars moved like lanterns suspended on invisible tracks. Believing rain came from “waters above” this dome, they assumed the sky itself must be a vast ocean — blue, like the sea — and that some celestial sluice gates opened when it rained.

Such primitive guesswork, born of ignorance and untested imagination, could never have encompassed even a single heliocentric solar system, let alone the staggering reality of trillions of such systems scattered across billions of galaxies.

And yet, while creationists still cling to those same Iron Age misunderstandings as “divinely inspired truth,” modern science continues to reveal a universe so vast and dynamic that it mocks the limits of ancient superstition. One striking example is the discovery of a planet that has slipped the gravitational leash of its parent star and now drifts aimlessly through the cosmos—sweeping up tons of cosmic dust every second and steadily growing in mass.

Refuting Creationism - A Tiny Fish Ancestor of Catfish and Carp - From 70 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Photograph of Acronichthys maccagnoi fossil (with scale), which was discovered in Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park.

Royal Tyrrell Museum

View of Dry Island Buffalo Leap.

New tiny prehistoric fish species unlocks origins of catfish and carp

A newly discovered fossil fish from the Late Cretaceous has filled a key gap in the evolutionary record of two major freshwater groups – catfish and carp. The fossil was found by researchers from Western University, Ontario, Canada, the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, and international collaborators. Its discovery is bound to send creationists into another bout of denial as they struggle to cope with the cognitive dissonance between reality and their preferred mythology.

When every fossil is transitional, each new find becomes harder for creationists to ignore—unless they retreat to one of their childish parodies of evolution and pretend it means one species instantly transforming into another, as though a ‘species’ consists of a single individual rather than a population, and evolution is a sudden event rather than a gradual process over time. This caricature allows them to dismiss every transitional fossil as a ‘complete species’ with ‘no evidence of intermediates’. From there, they retreat to Bible literalism, invoking vague categories of ‘kinds’ and imagining evolution as one taxon spontaneously giving rise to another—cats turning into dogs, or amoebas becoming humans—something that, if it ever occurred, would indeed defy any scientific explanation.

Hence their constant demands that science provide evidence for their straw-man version of evolution, while they ignore the overwhelming evidence that actually supports evolutionary theory—arguments deliberately crafted to mislead those ignorant of basic biology and to give them spurious reasons to feel smugly superior to ‘elitist scientists’ with their ‘big words’, as though ignorance were a shortcut to expertise.

So they cling to their childish mythology despite the growing number of fossils showing clear mosaic features linking different taxa—exactly what we would expect from ancestral stem species from which two groups diverged. This newly discovered fossil fish from the Late Cretaceous, displaying a mosaic of catfish and carp characteristics, exemplifies that pattern and sheds light on the evolutionary origins of these two major groups of freshwater fish.

Creationism in Crisis - A Transitional Lizard-Snake - From 167 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

[left caption]

[right caption]

a, Life reconstruction of Breagnathair elgolensis based on measured proportions of NMS G.2023.7.1. b, Digital render of the bones as originally preserved in NMS G.2023.7.1, using information from the pilot scan (Supplementary Data 1 and 2). c–f, Digital renders of cervical vertebra (CEb in Extended Data Fig. 5) in left lateral (c), ventral (d), anterior (e) and posterior (f) views. g–i, Caudal vertebra (CAa in Extended Data Fig. 5) in left lateral (g), ventral (h) and anterior (i) views. Scale bars: 50 mm (b), 2 mm (c–i). Life reconstruction reproduced with permission from Mick Ellison (American Museum of Natural History).

Benson, R.B.J., Walsh, S.A., Griffiths, E.F. et al. (2025)

New Species of Ancient Hook-toothed Reptile Discovered | AMNH

A newly described Jurassic fossil from the Isle of Skye, Scotland, has revealed a remarkable “missing link” between lizards and snakes. The find, named Breugnathair elgolensis, provides important evidence of snake evolution and further undermines creationist claims that no transitional forms exist. The research has just been published in Nature and reported by the American Museum of Natural History.

For creationists, this week must feel much like any other, as science continues to produce paper after paper that refutes their beliefs, while not a single one provides a shred of evidence in support of creationism — whether young-Earth or old-Earth, whether invoking an interventionist deity who micro-manages every detail of the universe, or a distant creator who merely lit the blue touch-paper and now sits back to watch the results.

Science, of course, concerns itself only with material reality. It has no use for evidence-free superstitions or fairy tales of the supernatural — notions born of human imagination and the desire for narrative to fill the gaps in our knowledge and understanding. Creationists, therefore, must rely on self-delusion and the irrational belief in a false dichotomy of “facts versus faith”, where even the slightest perceived flaw in science supposedly means total failure and victory for faith by default.

Sadly for creationists, that long-dreamed-of day when science collapses and their god descends triumphantly from the skies in a chariot — looking for all the world like a Bronze Age tribal despot — seems increasingly remote. Science continues to validate the scientific method and to build knowledge upon verifiable evidence, always willing to revise and refine its understanding in light of new discoveries. One such discovery is that of a transitional Jurassic reptile showing a mosaic of lizard and snake features — exactly what we would expect if snakes and lizards share a common ancestor. The problem with pinning one’s hopes on a false dichotomy that depends on science failing is that every new discovery only strengthens science and renders the alternative ever more irrelevant and untenable.

The troublesome fossil for creationists was discovered about ten years ago on the Isle of Skye, in the Inner Hebrides off Scotland’s west coast, by Roger Benson, Macaulay Curator of the American Museum of Natural History, and his colleagues. Named Breugnathair elgolensis — a Latinised form of the Scots Gaelic for “false snake of Elgol” — it has now been described in an open-access paper in Nature.

A Female Archbishop of Canterbury - As The Christian Church Struggles to Catch Up With Evolving Morality

Dame Sarah Mullally - Confirmed as next Archbishop of Canterbury

Sarah Mullally named as new Archbishop of Canterbury - BBC News

The news that Dame Sarah Mullally has been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury – spiritual head of the Anglican/Episcopalian Communion – marks a landmark moment, signalling just how far Western Christendom has moved from the brutal, tribal misogyny of the Bible. It underlines a central truth: religions do not provide society’s moral framework. Rather, morality evolves as societies progress, and religions are dragged along, sometimes kicking and screaming. The alternative, as history shows, is increasing irrelevance and rejection – a trajectory the Christian churches have been on since at least the mid-20th century.

In this blog-post, I’ll trace the historical shifts that culminated in the abandonment of what was once considered a cornerstone of Christendom: male domination and female subservience. For centuries, the priesthood was the exclusive preserve of men, while women were consigned to serving men, bearing children, and running households – denied political and economic power, which was also reserved exclusively for men.