Refuting Creationism - Evolving Butterfies Are Unkind To Creationists

Greta oto - Glasswing

By David Tiller - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Remapping the evolutionary tree of butterflies
A recent piece of research raises insurmountable problems for creationists trying to fit their definition of 'kind' into the real world of living organisms.

We often assume that closely related species look different from one another because visual cues are crucial for mate recognition. In many animals, especially birds, these differences help prevent interbreeding by acting as barriers to hybridisation. This makes particular sense in birds, where genetic architecture is unusually stable — chromosome numbers and gene mappings remain remarkably consistent — so, in theory, many closely related bird species could interbreed if not for the evolution of distinct plumage or mating displays. These are known as prezygotic barriers because they inhibit the formation of hybrid zygotes.

Given this, we might expect the same to apply to other vividly coloured groups like butterflies. But evolution doesn’t follow a single rulebook — it uses whatever tools are available. While visual cues are often important, other senses can also serve to maintain species boundaries. One of the most powerful is the sense of smell, particularly the use of pheromones.

Pheromones are widespread in the natural world, especially among insects. They’re used for everything from attracting mates to triggering mating behaviours. Some male moths, for instance, can detect a female’s pheromones from over a mile away and home in on her with astonishing precision — guided like a missile by the chemical trail.

Now, an international team of researchers has discovered that what was long thought to be a single species of glass-wing butterfly is actually a complex of six genetically distinct species. These butterflies all look nearly identical, thanks to strong selection pressure for Batesian and Müllerian mimicry — many are toxic, and they gain protection by resembling one another. Visual differences would reduce this shared advantage, so selection favours similarity, not distinction. But predators can't detect pheromones — so these butterflies have evolved subtle chemical differences instead, using scent as a hidden cue to prevent hybridisation.

Along with this chemical divergence, the researchers found significant genomic differences between the species, including striking variation in chromosome numbers — from just 13 to as many as 28. The team also discovered that the arrangement of the genes on the chromosomes is very volatile, so, different closely related species can have very different chromosomal arrangements, increasing the pressure for barriers to hybridization to evolve and allowing a species to rapidly radiate into new ecological niches.

So, the question for creationists is, how does this fit in with the definition of 'kinds' required for the Bible-literalist interpretation of taxonomy?

This fascinating study was conducted by a team including scientists from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Universidad Regional Amazónica Ikiam in Ecuador, Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil, the University of Cambridge, and others. Their findings are detailed in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and summarised in a news release from the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

Fake of Turin - More Evidence that the 'Shroud' of Turin Was a Medieval Creation

3D analysis reveals Shroud of Turin image likely came from sculpture, not Jesus’ body | Archaeology News Online Magazine

The 'shroud' as displayed in Turin Cathedral

More evidence has emerged indicating that the so-called 'Shroud of Turin'—which legend claims was the cloth used to wrap the body of Jesus for burial—is in fact a medieval artefact, likely created for use in religious ceremonies.

As I noted in a 2013 blog post, the 2D image on the cloth could not have been produced by wrapping it around a 3D human body. This can be easily demonstrated using an artist’s mannequin: coat it in paint, and while the paint is still wet, wrap a cloth around it as if preparing a body for burial. The resulting imprint bears little resemblance to the facial features or body contours of the mannequin, because the 3D form cannot transfer accurately to a 2D surface in that way.

There are, of course, many other reasons to doubt the shroud's authenticity. For example, the biblical account is inconsistent with the notion of a single burial cloth. The Gospel of John (20:5–7) clearly describes two cloths—one for the body and another for the head. But this inconsistency pales into insignificance compared to the forensic evidence showing that the cloth was woven on a loom not invented until the early Middle Ages in southern Germany, using flax grown in medieval France.

Even after disregarding or dismissing this wealth of contradictory evidence, believers are still faced with the insurmountable task of proving that the body supposedly wrapped in the cloth was that of the legendary founder of Christianity—Jesus of Nazareth.

In fact, the shroud was denounced as a forgery as far back as 1390 by Bishop Pierre d’Arcis, who, in a letter to Pope Clement VII, wrote:

[The Shroud is] a clever sleight of hand [by someone] falsely declaring this was the actual shroud in which Jesus was enfolded in the tomb to attract the multitude so that money might cunningly be wrung from them.

Bishop Pierre d’Arcis, Bishop of Troyes, 1390.

A. Image obtained from wrapping cloth round a body. B. The image on the 'shroud'. C. The image obtained from relief sculptures.

Moraes, C. 2025.

Abiogenesis News - Organic Precursors to Life Detected In Deep Space.

Planet-forming disc around V883 Orionis. This star is currently in outburst. The dark ring midway through the disc is the point where the temperature and pressure dip low enough for water ice to form.
Orbits of the planet Neptune and dwarf planet Pluto in our Solar System are shown for scale.

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/L. Cieza

This article is best read on a laptop, desktop, or tablet

This artist’s impression shows the planet-forming disc around the star V883 Orionis. In the outermost part of the disc volatile gases are frozen out as ice, which contains complex organic molecules. An outburst of energy from the star heats the inner disc to a temperature that evaporates the ice and releases the complex molecules, enabling astronomers to detect it. The inset image shows the chemical structure of complex organic molecules detected and presumed in the protoplanetary disc (from left to right): propionitrile (ethyl cyanide), glycolonitrile, alanine, glycine, ethylene glycol, acetonitrile (methyl cyanide).

© Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/T. Müller (MPIA/HdA) (CC BY 4.0)

The evolution of life may have its origins in outer space

If you listen to creationists, you might be persuaded to believe that the formation of inorganic chemicals—often deliberately conflated with 'life' to evoke an emotional reaction—is, for all practical purposes, impossible without the intervention of a supernatural intelligence. This is, of course, nothing more than the familiar creationist fallback: the god of the gaps argument, coupled with a false dichotomy, and dressed up with a spurious veneer of mathematical ‘proof’.

But this tactic suffered yet another fatal blow recently with the publication of a study led by Abubakar Fadul of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), which reported the discovery of organic molecules in the protoplanetary disc surrounding the young star V883 Orionis. This finding provides compelling evidence that the formation of prebiotic molecules can begin even before planets form—suggesting that Earth may have developed with a complement of organic compounds already present in the accretion disc from which it emerged.

An alternative, but equally plausible, hypothesis is that these molecules could have been delivered by meteorites or other interplanetary bodies.

Refuting Creationism - Ancient Viruses Hidden in Bird Genomes Reveal Evolution in Action

Phylogenomics Unveils the Complex Evolution of Retroviruses in Birds | Molecular Biology and Evolution | Oxford Academic

Information about endogenous retroviruses is normally unwelcome news for creationists because they form phylogenies which exactly map onto the evolution of different species from common ancestry. This is no less true of a new research paper published by four researchers from the College of Life Sciences, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China, published in Molecular Biology & Evolution.

Endogenous retroviruses for part of the 'junk' (non-coding/non-regulatory) DNA, but some of it have been exapted for other functions over the years and some of it has placed an evolving taxon onto a new evolutionary trajectory. For example, one exapted retrovirus with immuno-suppressive qualities has made placental mammals possible without the growing embryo being treated as a parasite and attacked by the mother's immune system.

The researchers have uncovered the complex evolutionary history of retroviruses in birds by analysing their genetic “fossils” — endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) — embedded in bird genomes. They scanned the genomes of 758 bird species and identified more than 470,000 ERV sequences, revealing a vast and previously underestimated diversity of retroviruses. These sequences are the remnants of ancient viral infections that became part of the host DNA, passed down from generation to generation.

Creationism Refuted - What Caused Our Teeth To Shrink Until 690,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Chronologically from left, the molars of human ancestors got longer over millennia to suit a diet of high-carb grassy plants.

Photo credits: Public domain; Don Hitchcock; Fernando Losada Rodríguez (rotated)

Changes in Diet Drove Physical Evolution in Early Humans | Dartmouth

A recent discovery by palaeoanthropologists, led by researchers from Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA, highlights the stark difference between how a teleological thinker—such as a creationist—imagines evolution works and how it actually proceeds. The study found that the teeth of ancient hominins evolved over a period of some 700,000 years in response to the increasing availability of soft, starchy foods, which began to replace the coarse, fibrous plant matter they had previously consumed.

A teleological thinker—someone who sees purpose and agency in natural processes—would assume that something *caused* the teeth to evolve in order to better process the new food. However, as the theory of evolution predicts, any variation that improves efficiency in food processing or reduces the now-unnecessary cost of growing and maintaining large teeth will be favoured by natural selection. Over evolutionary time, such traits become more common. In the case of archaic hominins, this meant their teeth gradually became smaller.

Teleological thinkers often make the mistake of believing that asking, "Who or what told the teeth they needed to change?" or "How did the teeth know they had to evolve?" is a meaningful challenge to evolutionary theory. To them, it seems reasonable to assume a supernatural intelligence must be involved.

This simplistic view of evolution is actively encouraged by creationist pseudo-scientists such as William A. Dembski and his colleagues at the Discovery Institute, who claim that the genetic information resulting from such optimisation must have been intelligently designed because it is "specified" for a purpose. Of course, at every stage of human evolution, the genetic information that produced a particular tooth shape was necessarily "specified" for that outcome. Dembski never discloses this to his audience, nor does he attempt to correct the teleological bias on which his movement depends.

An interesting aspect of this discovery is that the evolutionary change in this case was driven not so much by environmental change - the starch foods had always been there - as by a change in behaviour - a case of meme-gene co-evolution, using the term 'meme' in the original sense as coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, to mean a unit of cultural inheritance - the analogue of the gene in genetic inheritance.

Creationism Refuted - A Speciation Event 9 Million Years Ago Gave Us Potatoes.

Hybridization and radiation.

Potato evolved from tomato 9 million years ago | EurekaAlert

his story could almost have been tailor-made to embarrass creationists – though, in truth, most scientific papers do that. It concerns the evolution of potatoes by a process that creationists insist never happens: speciation. Adding to their discomfort, this event took place around 9 million years before ‘Creation Week’, during that vast expanse of ‘pre-Creation’ history in which 99.9975% of Earth’s history – and life’s – unfolded.

Speciation is usually a slow, gradual process, occurring over thousands or millions of years as populations diverge under environmental pressures. But in some cases – particularly in plants – a new species can arise almost instantaneously through hybridisation, when a fertile offspring results from the cross between two different species, genetically isolated from both parents.

This latter form of speciation has now been shown to account for the evolution of the potato. Some 9 million years ago, a natural hybridisation event between a tomato-like plant and a species of Etuberosum gave rise to a new lineage. Today, there are around 107 recognised potato species in South America. While closely related to both tomatoes and Etuberosum (a genus with three species that look remarkably like potatoes), neither of those relatives produce tubers. The hybrid did – and that made all the difference.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences have demonstrated that this ancient hybridisation created the genetic mechanism for tuber formation. This allowed the new species to survive harsher environments by overwintering underground as stem tubers. From this key innovation sprang a radiation of new potato species, each adapting to a range of ecological niches.

And, as an added discomfort for creationists, the scientists show no signs of thinking that the known mechanisms of biological evolution were inadequate to explain how this speciation event occurred and required a special magical act of divine intervention to make it happen by creating new information in the genome.

The genetic control of tuber formation in potatoes. The genetic control of tuber formation in potatoes has been the subject of extensive research, particularly because of its agricultural importance and evolutionary significance. The newly published study in Cell (2025) offers a major advance, pinpointing the evolutionary origin and genetic mechanism behind this trait. Here's a summary of what’s currently known, drawing from both the recent paper and prior research:

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Creationism Refuted - Common Origins of Alcohol Metabolism In Humans And African Apes

Scrumped fruit key to chimpanzee life and a major force of human evolution | University of St Andrews news

(b) Scrumping of Pentadesma butyracea (Clusiaceae) by a western gorilla.

Photograph: MMR.

(c) Scrumping of Gambeya albida (syn. Chrysophyllum albidum; Sapotaceae) by an eastern chimpanzee.

Photograph: CH.

The human ability to consume and metabolise alcohol efficiently may trace back to our ape ancestors, who regularly ate overripe and fermented fruit with a naturally high alcohol content. This is according to researchers from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and Dartmouth College, USA.

The bad news for creationists is that this discovery strongly supports the common ancestry of modern apes and humans. The researchers are in no doubt that the Theory of Evolution explains the presence of the same genetic mutation in African apes — including humans — which allows us to metabolise alcohol around 40 times more efficiently than orangutans, which lack the mutation.

This mutation enables African apes to consume fermented fruit — often as a social activity — in a pattern of alcohol consumption strikingly similar to that seen in humans.

To describe this behaviour in wild chimpanzees, the researchers have borrowed the term scrumping — a familiar UK English word for the (often illicit) picking and eating of apples, particularly by children. The word derives from the Middle Low German schrimpen, meaning ‘shrivelled or shrunken’ (to describe over-ripe fruit). It also survives in the name of the traditional West Country cider known as scrumpy.

Refuting Creationism - A Diverse Human Population in China - 290,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Members of the research team.

A study reveals the human diversity in China during Middle Pleistocene | CENIEH

A study recently published in the Journal of Human Evolution reports the discovery of a mixture of archaic and modern traits in the dentition of 300,000-year-old hominin fossils unearthed at the Hualongdong site in Anhui Province, China.

These fossils predate the migration of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) out of Africa by around 250,000 years. They indicate that hominin populations in East Asia were already diversifying and possibly interbreeding with archaic humans, such as Homo erectus, to form lineages distinct from both Neanderthals and Denisovans.

The research, led by Professor Wu Xiujie, director of the Hualongdong excavations, is the result of a longstanding collaboration between scientists from the Dental Anthropology Group at CENIEH — María Martinón-Torres, Director of CENIEH and corresponding author of the paper, and José María Bermúdez de Castro, researcher ad honorem at CENIEH — and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing.

The findings reveal a rich and complex picture of human evolution in East Asia, wholly at odds with the simplistic biblical narrative still clung to by creationists. That account, written by ancient people with no knowledge of the broader world, reflects a worldview in which Earth was small, flat, covered by a dome, and located at the centre of the universe.

Refuting Creationism - Our Ancestors Evolved To Walk Upright In Trees - Like Modern Savannah Chimpanzees

A young male chimp feeds on woodland seeds (cropped).

Image by Rhianna C. Drummond-Clarke/Greater Mahale Ecosystem Research and Conservation (GMERC)

How much time did our ancestors spend up trees? Studying these chimpanzees might help us find out

A group of Issa Valley chimpanzees navigate an open woodland crown to forage on new leaves.

Image by Rhianna C. Drummond-Clarke/Greater Mahale Ecosystem Research and Conservation (GMERC)

A new study published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution delivers yet more evidence for the Theory of Evolution and decisively contradicts Bible-literalist creationism. By closely studying wild chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Issa Valley—an environment that mirrors the mixed woodland–savannah habitats of our early ancestors—researchers found that these apes still spend most of their time in trees and conduct over 85 % of their bipedal movements arboreally. This finding strongly supports the evolutionary view that human bipedalism did not emerge from a sudden exodus from trees but evolved gradually while our ancestors still relied heavily on arboreal habitats.

What is particularly striking is the complete absence of any doubt among the scientists that evolution, driven by natural selection, is the correct framework for interpreting these observations. At no point do they resort to supernatural explanations or even hint that evolution might be insufficient to explain the data. On the contrary, their conclusions seamlessly integrate with the existing evolutionary narrative, demonstrating how behaviours seen in modern chimpanzees provide a living window into the adaptations of our shared ancestors. This directly undermines the creationist claim that mainstream biologists are “abandoning” evolution in favour of unproven religious explanations—a claim that has no basis in reality.

Creationist dogma insists on static, unchanging “kinds” and appeals to unverifiable supernatural causes. Yet, studies like this show that every aspect of our evolutionary past—anatomical, genetic, and behavioural—can be explained through natural processes, without the need for divine intervention. The evidence for a shared ancestry between humans and other primates grows with every new study, while creationism remains stuck with no predictive power and no scientific methodology.

In short, this research reinforces the power and universality of the Theory of Evolution. The scientists involved didn’t set out to “disprove creationism”; they simply applied rigorous observation and analysis, and the results—once again—fell squarely on the side of evolution. Far from being abandoned, the ToE continues to thrive as the backbone of modern biology, while creationism, with its untestable supernatural entities, offers no explanation at all.

Creationism Refuted - How Neanderthals Were Getting Fat - 125,000 before 'Creation Week'

Neanderthals smashing bones to extract the fat

AI generated image (ChatGPT 4o)

Excavation at the Neumark-Nord 2 in central Germany.

Photo: Professor Wil Roebroeks, Leiden University

125,000-year-old Neanderthal ‘fat factory’ discovered in Germany - Leiden University
More evidence has emerged that Neanderthals were far from the slow-witted, lumbering brutes of popular myth. In fact, they were highly organised, culturally sophisticated, and capable of processing food on what can only be described as an industrial scale.

This latest insight comes from a team of archaeologists led by researchers from MONREPOS (Leibniz Centre for Archaeology, Germany) and Leiden University (The Netherlands), in collaboration with the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt (Germany). Their findings were recently published in Science Advances.

At a site known as Neumark-Nord 2 in central Germany, dating back 125,000 years, the researchers have discovered compelling evidence of a bone-processing ‘factory’. Here, Neanderthals systematically broke up the massive bones of straight-tusked elephants and other large mammals—including deer, horses, and aurochs—to extract fat from the marrow by steeping the fragments in hot water. The straight-tusked elephant, which could weigh up to 13 tonnes, would have yielded enough meat to feed 2,000 adult humans their daily caloric needs.

This site predates the arrival of modern humans in Europe by tens of thousands of years, placing it firmly within the Neanderthal era. At the time, Europe was enjoying an interglacial period with a climate comparable to today's.

Creationism Refuted - Scientists Got It Wrong About Coelacanths - But Not About Evolution

One of the authors of the study, Professor Aléssio Datovo, poses next to a coelacanth specimen on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History (photo: personal archive)

New examination of fish considered a ‘living fossil’ changes our understanding of vertebrate skull evolution

Here is something that will cause creationists to jump for joy – until they read beyond the headline (if they ever do). Scientists have announced that they were wrong about the evolution of the vertebrate skull, including that of mammals.

However, beneath that headline lie some disappointing facts for creationists:

• The error was uncovered by re-examining the 400-million-year-old skull of a coelacanth.
• The mistake concerns details of how the vertebrate skull evolved – not whether it evolved.
• The paper directly contradicts the common creationist claim that scientists are only permitted to publish research that conforms to the scientific consensus. This study openly challenges the prevailing view.
• The discovery enhances our understanding of how the vertebrate skull evolved from that of ancestral lobe-finned fishes – precisely the kind of evidence creationists would rather didn’t exist.

Still, creationists can enjoy the headline and may even use it to 'prove' to their audience that science is unreliable because scientists sometimes make mistakes. Of course, they’ll likely ignore the fact that the fossil in question is 400 million years old, and gloss over the reality that – unlike religious dogma – science is a process of continuous refinement. Science allows for doubt, re-examination, and re-evaluation. When the evidence changes, scientists change their minds. In contrast, religious dogma is fixed and unchanging, usually despite the evidence, not because of it, hence the widening gap between what creationists are required to believe and what science reveals.

Upon re-examining the cranial musculature of the African coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae), the researchers found that only 13% of the previously identified evolutionary muscle innovations in major vertebrate lineages were accurate. They also identified nine new evolutionary transformations related to innovations in feeding and respiration.

The researchers, Professor Aléssio Datovo from the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil and the late David Johnson from the Smithsonian Institution in the United States, who sadly died when the paper was in review, have just published their findings in Science Advances.

Creationism Refuted - Ancient DNA Shows Origins Of Finns, Estonians & Hungarians Before 'Creation Week'

Map of all the sites that are sources of samples used in the study.

Source: Zeng, T.C., et al. (2025)

Co-lead author Alexander Mee-Woong Kim in Kazakhstan.

Ancient DNA solves mystery of Hungarian, Finnish language origins — Harvard Gazette

A recent paper in Nature marks a landmark advance in historical linguistics and ancient human migration studies.

Properly understood, the paper devastates Bible literalist dogmas. In solving what had been something of a mystery for linguistics and anthropology, it utterly refutes basic Bible narratives such as a global genocidal flood and a resetting of the human population of Earth some 4,300 years ago, followed by a repopulation from a focal point in the Middle East.

By sequencing and analysing 180 previously unstudied ancient Siberian genomes and integrating them with over 1,300 global ancient DNA datasets spanning 11,000 years, the study robustly traces the prehistoric roots of the Uralic language family—including Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian—to Central Siberia nearly 4,500 years ago [1, 2]. In doing so, it offers scientific clarity on how languages—and by extension cultures—spread via human migrations over millennia. This extends far beyond simplistic literal interpretations of Bible genealogies, emphasising the deep time, continuous migrations and cultural dynamics that falsify any notion of sudden, static origination of peoples as posited in young‑earth creation narratives.

Likewise, the Harvard Gazette article contextualises these genetic findings for a broader audience, highlighting how interdisciplinary scholarship — particularly the work led by recent graduates under guidance from ancient DNA expert David Reich — identifies a distinct genetic signature (“Yakutia\_LNBA”) strongly associated with speakers of Uralic languages who migrated from Eastern Siberia westward over thousands of years [2]. The piece explicitly notes that language transmission is not genetically deterministic, and warns against over‑simplified correlations. By underscoring the necessity of large data, critical caution, and peer‑reviewed methodology, the article reinforces the fundamentally scientific (not scriptural) basis for understanding human prehistory. From a Bible‑literalist creationist perspective—which often assumes humanity’s origins in specific, recent Middle Eastern events described in scripture—these studies are significant because they offer:

• Robust empirical timelines: ancient DNA data covering up to 11,000 years, demonstrating population movements and admixture across Eurasia.
• Clear geographic origins far from the traditional Biblical settings, with linguistic groups emerging from Central Siberian ancestries—not from post‑Flood dispersion from Babel.
• Methodological transparency: ancient genomes, radiocarbon dating, linguistic phylogenies, and cultural archaeology collectively underpin conclusions, in stark contrast to dogmatic, text‑based literalism.

Creationism Refuted Again - Neanderthal Footprints in Portugal - 68,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

General view of the main tracksite with hominin trackways located in the northern cliff of Monte Clérigo beach

de Carvalho, et al. (2025)

This article is best read on a laptop, desktop, or tablet

Gibraltar National Museum scientists participate in a major new international study - 505/2025

Reconstituted scenario of Monte Clérigo tracksite, generated by AI tools following the guidance, and final artworks of J.M. Galán (ChatGPT-4 was used to select the prompts, at https://openai.com/index/gpt-4/; Image Generator Pro to generate various versions, at https://imagegeneratorpro.com; DALL-E3 for the nuances and quality of the image, at https://openai.com/index/dall-e-3/; Photoshop 26.4.1 (www.adobe.com) and digital pencil of Procreate for iPad version 5.3.14, at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/procreate/id425073498, for drawing over the selected image version).

de Carvalho, et al. (2025)

The discovery of 78,000-year-old Neanderthal footprints on a Portuguese beach is yet another blow to creationist pseudoscience. Preserved in the ancient sands of Monte Clérigo, the tracks of an adult male, a child, and a toddler walking together paint a vivid picture of Neanderthal life — not as brutish subhumans, but as highly social beings living in complex family groups, navigating diverse coastal environments long before modern humans entered Europe. Such findings are not only consistent with the evolutionary timeline but utterly irreconcilable with young-Earth creationist beliefs.

According to mainstream geological dating techniques, these footprints were made tens of thousands of years before the supposed biblical date of creation (around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, depending on interpretation). For creationists who insist that all of Earth’s history must be crammed into a few millennia, these kinds of discoveries are profoundly inconvenient. Worse still, the clarity of the evidence — physical impressions in sediment, dated using well-established methods like optically stimulated luminescence — makes them difficult to hand-wave away.

Faced with such a challenge, creationists will likely fall back on a familiar toolkit of denial strategies. Some will try to cast doubt on the dating methods, resorting to pseudoscientific critiques of OSL or claiming unknown “contamination” skewed the results. Others may assert that the footprints were made after Noah’s Flood — an idea that stretches credulity beyond breaking point given the age and geological context. And, of course, some will simply ignore the evidence altogether, pretending it doesn’t exist or insisting that Neanderthals were just humans who lived in “post-Babel dispersion” times, despite the overwhelming fossil, genetic, and archaeological data to the contrary.

The discovery has been reported recently in the journal Scientific Reports by a team of researchers which includes experts from the Gibraltar National Museum and the University of Lisbon, Portugal.

Jesus & Mary On Toast - Why We See Faces Everywhere.

New research details how our brains are drawn to and spot faces everywhere | University of Surrey.

From an early age, the human brain interprets patters and sees faces everywhere. Draw two large black discs on a white sheet of paper and show it to a human baby of just a few weeks old and you will probably make the baby smile, just as they smile when they look at your face. Their brain has perceived the dots as the eyes of a face. This is the phenomenon of human perception known as pareidolia.

Some religious people, in an effort to justify holding irrational beliefs, often attribute these appearances of 'Jesus' or 'Mary', as miracles with some deep religious significance. For example, this anti-Atheist Gotcha, which appeared on Quora a couple of years ago:

Atheists, if there is no God, then why does Jesus' face sometimes appear on toast?

Imagine walking through the woods and briefly believing you're seeing a face in a knot of moss—only to realise seconds later that it’s just a tree. That flicker of recognition is your brain’s face-detection machinery springing into action. In a recent experiment at the University of Surrey, researchers used gaze-cueing techniques to show that when people perceive a face-like arrangement in inanimate objects, their attention is captured even more powerfully than by the averted gaze of a real face. These face-like patterns don’t need eyes, a nose, or even realistic features—just the right suggestion of symmetry and placement is enough for the brain to “see” a face where none exists.

This phenomenon, known as face pareidolia, is a by-product of evolution, not evidence of design. From an evolutionary standpoint, it's safer to wrongly detect a face in a shadow than to miss a predator or an ally. But while this trait once had clear survival value, it now fuels more curious beliefs. Religious individuals, for instance, often interpret pareidolic faces—especially when perceived in burnt toast, water stains, or tree bark—as miraculous signs from divine figures like Jesus or the Virgin Mary. What neuroscience tells us is that these “visions” are false positives produced by a brain primed to find patterns and assign meaning, even when none exists. Evolution has given us a perceptual system that’s fast, but not always accurate—and our cultural context then fills in the rest.

How the human brain interprets so many things as faces is the subject of a recent open access paper in i-Perception by researchers led by Dr Di Fu of the University of Surrey, with colleagues from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Creationism Refuted - Don't Laugh At the Bible's Authors, They Were Only Doing Their Best!

NGC 3285B (137 million lightyears from Earth)

NGC 3285B

A spiral galaxy with a disc made up of several swirling arms. Patchy blue clouds of gas are speckled over the disc, where stars are forming and lighting up the gas around them. The core of the galaxy is large and shines brightly gold, while the spiral arms are a paler and faint reddish colour. Neighbouring galaxies - from small, elongated spots to larger swirling spirals - can be seen across the black background.

Swirling spiral in Hydra | ESA/Hubble

Take a grain of rice and hold it between your thumb and forefinger at arm’s length while looking up at the night sky. The patch of sky hidden behind that tiny grain of rice probably contains thousands of galaxies—each with around half a trillion stars. Some of these stars are ancient, nearing the end of their tens-of-millions-of-years lifespans; others are just beginning to form from clouds of gas and debris left behind by older stars that exploded as supernovae.

What lies behind that grain of rice is a tiny fragment of a dynamic, evolving, ever-changing, and expanding universe. A universe of which our ancient prophets were completely unaware as they crafted imaginative descriptions of its origins—descriptions written just a few thousand years ago that portrayed it as a small, unchanging cosmos, with a flat Earth at the centre covered by a dome.

But let’s not be too hard on them. As they stood in their Canaanite pastures, the Earth must indeed have looked flat and small, and the sky would have seemed like the roof of a great tent, adorned with tiny lights and with the sun and moon suspended from it. To them, the Earth appeared fixed and immobile while the dome overhead turned slowly, or perhaps invisible spirits moved the lights across the heavens each night. They didn’t know where the sun went after sunset and imagined the moon might hide in a deep valley during the day.

Creationism Refuted - Complex Specified Information in 'Spanish Flu' Virus Makes ID Creationists Sick

Emergency hospital in Zurich’s Tonhalle during the so-called “Spanish flu” in November 1918

Image: Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum, Inventarnummer LM-102737.46

Swiss Genome of the 1918 Influenza Virus Reconstructed | UZH

A major stumbling block that non-biologist Christian fundamentalist theologian William A. Dembski has blundered into is that his so-called ‘proof of intelligent design’ (i.e., the Christian god) also, by the same reasoning, constitutes evidence for malevolent design — something found in virtually every genome of every parasite and pathogen. This presents CDesign proponentsists with a fatal paradox: either their ‘proof of intelligent design’ also proves the existence of an evil designer, or ‘complex specified information’ is not the definitive evidence for design they like to claim it is.

A classic example — and another blow to creationist reasoning—has just been described in a study by researchers from the Swiss universities of Basel and Zurich. They have recovered and analysed the genome of the virus responsible for the 1918–1920 ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic, which killed more people than were killed in the First World War. In fact, the term ‘Spanish flu’ is a misnomer; the virus is now believed to have originated in a U.S. military base in Kansas and was brought to Europe by American soldiers.

The Swiss team discovered that from the outset, the virus appears to have been pre-adapted for infectivity and immune evasion. They identified three key mutations that remained unchanged as the virus evolved over the course of the pandemic. Two of these mutations made the virus resistant to an antiviral component of the human immune system, while the third enabled it to bind more effectively to receptors on the surface of human cells, allowing it to enter and infect them more readily. These mutations were so effective that victims frequently died within hours of the onset of symptoms.

Creationism Refuted - A Planet Is Born - And The Bible Tale Looks Even More Absurd

This image, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), shows a spiral disc around the young star HD 135344B.

ESO/F. Maio et al.

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This image, captured with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), shows a spiral disc around the young star HD 135344B. The image, which was released in 2016, was obtained with the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) instrument.

Astronomers witness newborn planet sculpting the dust around it | ESO

It takes a special form of self-deluding immunity to facts and reason for creationists to cling to the absurd belief that the Bible’s description of a small universe formed *ex nihilo* in a few days — by nothing more than a few magic words spoken in a language no one was alive to understand — could possibly reflect reality.

Meanwhile, science continues to produce evidence for a very old, immense universe that is constantly changing and evolving, where new stars and planetary systems are being observed as they form. Many of these systems lie so far away that the light from them has taken billions of years to reach us — in stark contrast to the few thousand years allowed by the Biblical narrative.

As I’ve previously explained on this blog, modern astronomy and the wealth of evidence it provides shows that the Biblical account is not merely inaccurate — it is irredeemably wrong. It can’t even be salvaged as metaphor or allegory. It is exactly as wrong as one would expect from people who believed the Earth was a small, flat disc with a dome over it, and that life was created out of soil, fully formed, just a few thousand years ago.

Today, we have yet more evidence that utterly refutes the Bible’s creation myth — and this time, it doesn’t come from events billions of years ago, but from a mere 440 light-years away. That means the light we’re seeing now set off on its journey in 1585 — the same year Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to found the ill-fated Roanoke Colony in North America, and the Anglo-Spanish War broke out.

Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), using the Very Large Telescope (VLT), have observed a giant planet forming within the accretion disk of a young star — exactly as the modern theory of planetary formation predicts. In other words, the universe is still forming and evolving, in complete contradiction to the static, one-time-only creation described in Genesis.

Abiogenesis News - Not Random Chance Or Divine Magic But Natural Selection

The sugar ribose is more quickly phosphorylated compared to other sugars with the same chemical formula but a different shape. This selective phosphorylation could explain how ribose became the sugar molecule in RNA.

Credit: Scripps Research

Where did RNA come from? | Scripps Research

One fallacy with which anyone who has tried to engage a creationist in debate will soon become familiar is the false dichotomy. This is where a creationist attempts to make a "god of the gaps" argument appear logical by presenting it as a binary choice between something so simplistic or absurd that no serious scientist would argue for it—and "God did it!" In doing so, they ignore the actual scientific explanations and exclude all other plausible natural mechanisms.

A classic example of this is the argument that abiogenesis—often deliberately misrepresented as the spontaneous assembly of a complex, living cell from inorganic materials—is far too improbable to have occurred by chance alone, and therefore must have required a supernatural intelligence. In their minds, the very existence of complex life is "proof" of their particular deity.

This line of reasoning overlooks the crucial role played by natural processes, such as chemistry and physics, and what amounts to an evolutionary process at the molecular level. In such a process, chemical pathways that are more efficient at producing copies of themselves are naturally favoured, leading over time to increased refinement and complexity. For instance, why was the five-carbon sugar ribose selected as the backbone sugar in RNA?

This is the question that two researchers at the Scripps Research Institute have tackled. They demonstrated that ribose is far more efficiently phosphorylated than its alternatives, forming the chemical basis of nucleotides—the building blocks of RNA (and later DNA). This efficiency gave ribose a natural advantage, allowing it to "win" the competition against other sugars.

Their findings show that the emergence of ribose was not the result of random chance, but the predictable outcome of the underlying chemistry and physics. The study has been published in the international edition of the journal of the German Chemical Society, Angewandte Chemie.

The work is also summarised in accessible terms in a Scripps Research press release.

Refuting Creationism - What Life was Like In Illinois - 300 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A Tully Monster (Tullimonstrum gregarium)

Concretions

Recreating Mazon Creek’s 300-million-year-old ecosystem

A major difference between science and religion can be summarised as follows: science embraces reasonable uncertainty, while religion often promotes unreasonable certainty.

In practice, this means science always allows room for doubt—however small—and continually re-examines and reassesses evidence to determine whether a change of understanding is justified. Religion, by contrast, typically seeks reasons not to change its views, no matter how tenuous those reasons may be or how far removed from observable reality.

This essential feature of the scientific method is frequently misrepresented by creationists, who portray science as unreliable precisely because it revises its conclusions in light of new evidence. They contrast this with the supposed ‘eternal truths’ of the Bible, arguing that science books need constant revision while scripture remains unchanging.

One of those supposed eternal truths—about which creationists are not permitted to change their minds—is that the Earth is only a few thousand years old, and that all living things were created ex nihilo in their current forms, with no evolutionary ancestry or shared origins. Science, on the other hand, can re-evaluate the evidence from a 300-million-year-old fossil bed in Illinois and conclude that the original interpretation underestimated the complexity of the ancient ecosystem that once existed there.

A prime example of such a scientific reassessment has recently been published—open access—in the journal Paleobiology. The study was conducted by a team of palaeontologists from the University of Missouri’s College of Arts and Science, in collaboration with Gordon Baird of the Department of Geology & Environmental Sciences at the State University of New York (SUNY), Fredonia.

The work is based on a comprehensive reassessment of the rich fossil deposits from the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte in Illinois, which, during the Carboniferous Period (~300 million years ago), was part of a vast area of tropical swamps, deltas, and shallow seas. These habitats were shaped by rising sea levels that inundated earlier coal-forming wetlands.

Creationism Refuted - How Geophysics Could Have Influenced Human Development - 31,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Aurors in the skies above Europe could have been breathtaking, terrifying or both for ancient humans.

Weird space weather seems to have influenced human behavior on Earth 41,000 years ago – our unusual scientific collaboration explores how

In that long stretch of Earth’s history before it was supposedly "created," according to creationist mythology—a span covering 99.9975% of the planet’s existence—a remarkable geophysical event occurred. Around 41,000 years ago, during a time when modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans coexisted in Eurasia, a major disturbance in Earth’s magnetic field likely influenced human behaviour and may have hastened the disappearance of the Neanderthals.

This event, known as the Laschamps Excursion, was not a typical magnetic pole reversal, which Earth undergoes roughly every 100,000 years. Instead, the planet's magnetic field entered a chaotic state, weakening dramatically to around 10% of its usual strength and breaking into multiple, unstable poles.

Earth’s magnetic field normally shields the surface from ionising radiation by deflecting much of it towards the poles. With that protective barrier severely weakened, the planet would have been exposed to much stronger levels of ultraviolet radiation. The usual deflection of charged particles also produces the auroras, which during this period would have appeared across much of the night sky, including at lower latitudes—perhaps even near the equator—due to the multiple and shifting magnetic poles.

Although the Laschamps Excursion lasted only a few years, the environmental changes it triggered may explain behavioural shifts visible in the archaeological record. This is discussed in an article in The Conversation by Raven Garvey, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan; Agnit Mukhopadhyay, Research Scholar at the University of Alberta and Research Affiliate at Michigan; and Sanja Panovska, a Research Scientist at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences. Together with their colleagues, they have published their findings—open access—in Science Advances.

Incidentally, the archaeological evidence discussed here should not exist at all if the biblical flood narrative were true. Such a flood would have obliterated or buried this material beneath a chaotic layer of silt, destroying the stratified layers of sediment by which these finds are reliably dated—dating that is wholly inconsistent with the timeline of human history as derived from biblical mythology. Moreover, the Laschamps Excursion undermines any creationist claim that the Earth was created and fine-tuned especially for human life. If something as fundamental as magnetic polarity—and the UV protection it affords—can fail naturally due to processes in Earth’s core, then the idea of a specially designed planet collapses under its own absurdity.

The article from The Conversation is reproduced below under a Creative Commons licence and has been reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Creationism Refuted - Astonomers Witness The Birth Of An Earth-Like Planet

HOPS-315, a baby star where astronomers have observed evidence for the earliest stages of planet formation.

This image shows jets of silicon monoxide (SiO) blowing away from the baby star HOPS-315. The image was obtained with the with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner.

For the first time, astronomers witness the dawn of a new solar system | ESO

One of the more dishonest tactics employed by creationist grifter Ken Ham is his infamous question: "Were you there?" As though the only valid form of evidence is eye-witness testimony. The implication is clear—if you didn’t personally observe a species evolving, then you have no grounds to claim that evolution occurred. And by extension, Ham suggests that his own creationist claims are equally valid and deserve the same consideration as scientific explanations, despite the fact that he wasn't there either.

Of course, this deliberately ignores the many well-documented instances of observed evolution and the overwhelming fossil evidence showing gradual transitions over time.

He applies the same fallacious reasoning to cosmology, dismissing scientific accounts of Earth’s and the solar system’s origins on the grounds that no one was there to witness them. As though this somehow makes the biblical Bronze Age myth—a magical spontaneous assembly in response to divine incantation—equally plausible.

In a typically cynical move, Ham teaches children to parrot this question as a way to shut down scientific discussion. Rather than encouraging curiosity with the far more constructive question, "How do you know that?" — a gateway to learning about observation, extrapolation, and logical reasoning — he arms them with a slogan designed to obstruct inquiry and preserve ignorance, while making them feel smugly superior to the scientists having exposed the 'flaw' in their reasoning.

But now, thanks to cutting-edge astronomical research, science has delivered something akin to “being there” at the birth of a planet.

An international team of researchers, using the ALMA telescope (operated in part by the European Southern Observatory) and the James Webb Space Telescope, have observed what appears to be the formation of an Earth-like planet in the accretion disk of a young star. This is direct evidence supporting the scientific model of planetary formation — the very process that explains the origins of Earth and the solar system.

Predictably, this discovery will require some creative misrepresentation from creationists to dismiss it. No doubt we’ll hear claims that it’s not really the same process that formed Earth, or that it doesn’t disprove Genesis — because defending ancient mythology apparently requires ignoring any modern evidence that makes it look absurdly naive.

Creationism Refuted - What Dinosaur Teeth Tell Us About Life 150 million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Original skull of the Giraffatitan from Tanzania.

Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, MB.R.2223

For details, see below.

What Dinosaur Teeth Reveal About Life 150 Million Years Ago | Leibniz Institute

Some 150 million years before the mythical events of ‘Creation Week’—give or take a few thousand years—our distant ancestors were small, nocturnal, rodent-like mammals eking out an existence in a world dominated by colossal reptiles. Among these dominant life forms were the dinosaurs, thriving in a variety of ecosystems and feeding on plants or other animals, depending on their species.

As they ate, they unwittingly left behind a record of their diet etched into the microscopic wear patterns on the enamel of their teeth. Today, with the help of sophisticated analytical techniques, palaeontologists can read these patterns like a diary of prehistoric meals. And with each new discovery, such as the one published by a team led by Dr Daniela E. Winkler of Kiel University, the yawning gap between ancient mythology and modern science widens ever further. Their findings provide yet another decisive refutation of the simplistic narrative crafted by Bronze Age storytellers—later compiled into what some still insist is the inerrant word of an omniscient creator.

This latest blow to creationist pseudoscience comes in the form of an open-access paper, Dental microwear texture analysis reveals behavioural, ecological and habitat signals in Late Jurassic sauropod dinosaur faunas, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The team focused on the teeth of sauropods—long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs such as Camarasaurus, Brachiosaurus, and Diplodocus — from the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation in North America and the Lusitanian Basin in Portugal. Using a method called Dental Microwear Texture Analysis (DMTA), they examined the microscopic wear patterns caused by feeding, revealing a fascinating spectrum of dietary strategies and environmental adaptations among different species.

What they found demolishes the notion of sauropods as a homogenous group of giant leaf-munchers. Instead, the microwear textures show distinct differences in feeding behaviour, likely linked to differences in available vegetation and habitat. For example, Camarasaurus appears to have consumed tougher, more fibrous plant material—perhaps conifers—while others such as Diplodocus may have specialised in softer vegetation like ferns or aquatic plants. These variations not only suggest niche partitioning, where species avoid direct competition by diversifying their diets, but also point to distinct ecological zones across the ancient landscapes they inhabited.

Even more telling is the comparison between North American and European sauropods. Despite being closely related, the differences in their dental microwear suggest adaptations to different environmental pressures and available flora, implying behavioural flexibility and evolutionary divergence shaped by their respective habitats.

Such complexity and diversity, preserved for over 150 million years in the microscopic textures of fossilised teeth, are a world away from the simplistic narratives of static 'kinds' created in a single week. Instead, we see a dynamic, evolving biosphere responding to ecological challenges—exactly what we’d expect in a world governed by natural selection and deep time.

Refuting Creationism - Party Time In Iran 1,000 Years Before 'Creation Week' - And The Flood Missed The Evidence

Samples of ancient boar teeth unearthed at the archaeological site of Asiab in the Zagros Mountains.

Credit: Nic Vevers/ANU

Regional ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr ratios were estimated using data from the Georoc database³⁷ and measurements of modern plants from Ali Kosh²⁹ and interpolated to the wider region using the underlying lithology (following Barakat et al.⁸⁷).

Vaiglova, P., Kierdorf, H., Witzel, C. et al. (2025)

‘Ultimate dinner party guests’: Dispersed communities attending feast in ancient Iran gifted boars sourced from distant lands | Australian National University

A thousand years before Earth was supposedly created—according to the Bronze Age myths that creationists regard as literal history—people were already feasting in the Zagros Mountains, at a site now known as Asiab in modern-day Iran. Then, in what must have been a strangely selective miracle, around 4,300 years ago—when, according to the same myths, a global flood wiped out all life on Earth—the remains of these ancient feasts remained completely untouched. Like countless other archaeological sites, Asiab shows no trace of the thick silt layer that such a cataclysmic flood would inevitably have left behind.

Long before the advent of agriculture, when humans still lived in scattered bands of hunter-gatherers, people gathered at Asiab for a communal feast. The exact reason—whether religious ceremony, marriage, funeral, or some form of tribal leadership event—can only be guessed at. But what is clear is that guests travelled long distances over mountainous terrain, bringing with them the carcasses of wild boar. These animals, dangerous to hunt and not commonly pursued by hunter-gatherers in the region, appear to have held special significance. Their presence suggests that hunting and transporting them was a display of prowess or status, perhaps reserved for prestigious guests.

This conclusion comes from a team of palaeontologists who examined the microscopic wear and isotopic signatures on the teeth of wild boar recovered from the site. (For more on how this technique works, see the AI information side panel.)

The international team, led by Dr Petra Vaiglova of the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU), has just published their findings open access in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Refuting Creationism - With Memes

Common Creationist Fallacies

I asked ChatGPT to list some of the most common fallacies used by creationists in online debates, and to design memes illustrating them.

Most creationists won’t recognise these as fallacies, of course, because their understanding of science and logic is typically on a par with that of a child of nine or ten—old enough to log onto a computer and access social media, but not yet equipped with the critical thinking skills needed to understand how debate works, what constitutes scientific evidence, and what makes a logical argument.

Many are also conspiracy theorists, as research shows (1) a strong correlation between conspiracism and creationism. Both tend to stem from the same underlying cause: a teleological mode of thinking retained from childhood and, in some individuals, carried into adulthood to such an extent that it becomes a cognitive impairment.

This makes them easy prey for the unscrupulous frauds who thrive in creationist circles—parasites who earn a living by peddling pseudoscience to those willing to pay good money for confirmation of their biases, regardless of the quality of the argument or the validity of the evidence.

The following memes are free to use, though a credit would be appreciated. To download, right click on any image and select 'save as...', or to download zipped memepack.

Creationism In Crisis - Neanderthals With Different Cullinary Styles - 50,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

[left caption]

[right caption]

Specialty of the house: Neanderthals at two nearby caves butchered the same prey in different ways, suggesting local food traditions

Cut-marks on a bone found at Amud.

Image by the authors, supplied by Anaëlle Jallon.

More embarrassment for creationists comes in the form of new evidence that Neanderthals were butchering and cooking meat in two caves in what is now Israel. Not only did this occur some 40,000 to 50,000 years before creationists believe the Earth was created, but it also shows that Neanderthal culture had diversified into distinct culinary traditions—even among populations inhabiting neighbouring areas.

The most damning evidence against creationist claims is, of course, the very existence of such archaeological remains. According to the biblical narrative of a global, genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago, this evidence simply should not exist. Such a cataclysm would have erased any trace of it—or at best buried it beneath thick layers of chaotic silt, jumbled together with fossils of plants and animals from distant land masses in no coherent stratigraphic order.

The evidence for Neanderthal cultural diversity comes from researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who studied remains in the nearby caves of Amud and Kebara, located just 70 km apart.

What they found was a marked difference in how the two Neanderthal groups butchered their prey, including whether they processed the carcasses at the kill site or transported them back to their caves for preparation. There also appear to be differences in how the meat was cooked.

The researchers’ findings are published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.