Rosa Rubicondior

Thursday, 28 August 2025

Refuting Creationism - Oceanic Oxygenation Spured Rappid Evolution - 390 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

An artist’s rendering of a prehistoric jawed fish from the Late Devonian called Dunkleosteus. These sorts of large, active vertebrates evolved shortly after the deep ocean became well-oxygenated.

How oxygen made the deep ocean home to animals, spurring rapid evolution | UW News

Another wave of reality breaks over the impervious rocks of creationist dogma, in the form of news that an international team of researchers led by the University of Washington has shown a correlation between the rapid radiation of marine vertebrates and the evolution of plants on land. As trees and other vascular plants spread, more atmospheric carbon became locked into their woody stems, reducing carbon dioxide levels. At the same time, increased photosynthesis raised atmospheric oxygen levels, which in turn oxygenated the oceans, making oxygen available in depths that had previously been anoxic.

Creationists will, of course, need to ignore the fact that this finding flatly contradicts their claims that evolution only occurs within “kinds” and that all diversification happened in a brief burst of warp-speed evolution following a genocidal global flood some 4,000 years ago. The timeline alone is utterly inconsistent with their favourite creationist fairy tale.

Scientists once believed this major oxygenation event had occurred about 500 million years ago, but the new research shows that episode was short-lived. A more significant oxygenation occurred around 390 million years ago. Initially, oxygenation would have taken place in shallow coastal regions where vertebrates first evolved. As oxygen penetrated deeper into the oceans, vertebrates followed into the newly opened niches, leading to a rapid proliferation of jawed vertebrate species — the ancestors from which terrestrial tetrapods later evolved.

The team reached their conclusions after measuring selenium isotopes in 97 sedimentary rock samples from five continents, dated between 252 and 541 million years ago. These rocks had been deposited near the edges of continental shelves, where shallow seas transition into the deep ocean. Selenium occurs naturally in several isotopic forms, and the ratios in which they were deposited depend on the level of oxygen dissolved in seawater. These isotopic signatures thus provide an indirect measure of oxygenation levels at the time the rocks were laid down.

The Fraud Of Turin - How Fundamentalists Lie To Us

The 'shroud' as displayed in Turin Cathedral

Following my post about the so-called 'Shroud of Turin' which reported on an article presenting compelling evidence of how the image was produced by the Early Medieval French artist who made it, I have been bombarded with messages on BlueSky by a user who goes by the name 'Gohan ProLife' who claims to have proof of the shroud's authenticity, although he has failed to produce anything resembling provenance connecting the cloth which suddenly turned up in Early Medieval France with the funeral of a man-god in 1st century Palestine, apart from some vague references to pollen. And so far, he has failed to explain how a cloth used in a funeral in 1st century Palestine came to be woven on a loom which was invented in Medieval Germany

The quality of his 'evidence' can be judged from his claim that a paper in the journal Thermochemica Acta is peer-reviews 'proof' that the radiocarbon dating that placed the flax from which the canvas was woven in the Early Middle Ages, was wrong because it was carried out on fabric used to repair the canvas in the Middle Ages. Even if this were true, how it proves that the cloth was once wrapped around the body of a dead man-god remains a mystery. Nor have we had any explanation of why the claim flatly contradicts the story in the Bible of there being TWO cloths - one for the body and one for the head. Apparently, it is considered much more likely that the story in the Bible is fake, than that a medieval relic is another in a lengthy list of fake relics currently stocking the reliquaries of European Catholic cathedrals.

In 'Gohan ProLife's initial ploy which he apparently thought he needed to reinforce with passive aggression, he claimed the paper proved the radiocarbon dating labs tested cotton, not linen. The only mention of cotton in the paper is a reference to what are assumed to have been cotton fibres, and nor does the "Preliminary estimates" the paper describes prove anything; it simply raises a few questions. All the substantive claims the author made in 2005 have subsequently been refuted by others - a fact that 'Gohan ProLife' seems to be unaware, having stopped his 'research' at the first paper that told him what he wanted. He has also apparently failed to comprehend the significance of the phrase, 'Preliminary estimates'

He is now quibbling over whether the link I sent him to a .txt copy of ChatGPT 5's assessment of his claim is really a link to Wikipedia (it isn't), which strongly suggests he hasn't found the courage or personal integrity to read it. So, I reproduce it below, together with more a more detailed AI analysis of the paper.

Firstly, the part of the cited paper that isn't behind a paywall:

The holotype specimen of Nektognathus from Sirius Passet

Image credit: Tae Yoon Park

2025: Ancient squid-like creatures are not squid after all, study finds | School of Biological Sciences | University of Bristol

The bad day for those creationists who haven't yet closed their minds to contrary information continues. Close on the news of a 220-million-year-old fossil ichthyosaur from Japan comes the discovery of a 500-million-year-old fossil worm from Greenland.

The identification of this Cambrian fossil, Nectocaris, as an ancestor of arrow worms rather than an early squid, as once thought, is a fine example of something creationists pretend to find incomprehensible: scientists changing their minds when new evidence demands it. Wedded to simple certainties, right or wrong, creationists insist that science must be either wholly right or wholly wrong. If a conclusion is shown to be mistaken, they assume the entire scientific enterprise collapses into a cloud of vacuous uncertainty. In their black-and-white world of false dichotomies, that somehow means their evidence-free superstition wins by default.

About 15 years ago, a study of fossils from the Burgess Shale concluded that Nectocaris was a cephalopod mollusc. But that classification posed problems since what could be discerned of its anatomy did not match that of cephalopods. That difficulty has now been resolved by a detailed examination of the ventral ganglion – part of the nervous system – which is revealed to consist of paired structures consistent with being ancestral to arrow worms.

This breakthrough was made possible by the exceptional preservation of fossils at Sirius Passet in northern Greenland, a remarkable Cambrian fossil site.

Refuting Creationism - A Japanese Ichthyosaur - From 220 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

CT cross-sectional image of the fossil-bearing rock block

Bone parts identified from CT scan cross-sections

A Chance Spotting of a Fossil Results in a Major Scientific Discovery. Ichthyosaur Fossil Confirmed for the First Time in Western Japan — Also the First Late Triassic Ichthyosaur Found in Japan | NEWS & TOPICS | Okayama University of Science

Today's casual refutation of creationism is not the result of scientists deliberately setting out to discredit Bible mythology, but comes instead as an incidental by-product of scientific discovery. Once again, the facts uncovered by science simply could not be true if the biblical narrative were correct.

This time the evidence is a fossilised Late Triassic ichthyosaur, embedded in 220-million-year-old rocks. That date alone places the animal in the unimaginably vast span of Earth’s history long before creationist mythology claims the universe, the Earth, and all life were conjured into existence ex nihilo by a pre-existing deity muttering magic words. In reality, this ichthyosaur lived during the 99.9975% of history that biblical literalism must pretend never happened.

Refuting Creationism - Where Our Earliest Common Primate Ancestor Lived

Early primates survived in cold, not tropical climates

Japanese snow macaque - unusual for a modern primate but our common ancestor may have lived in a similar climate.

New research, led by Dr Jorge Avaria-Llautureo of the University of Reading, UK, suggests that our early ancestors evolved in a cold climate rather than the tropical environment traditionally assumed.

Ever-hopeful creationists will no doubt seize on this as evidence that science keeps “getting everything wrong” and is now supposedly admitting that humans did not evolve in Africa but… somewhere else. (Not in Mesopotamia either, and certainly not just 10,000 years ago, but we can worry about that later — the important thing is that science got it wrong again, right?).

But of course, this is a distortion. The new findings don’t overturn evolution, nor do they suggest humans suddenly popped up in the “wrong” place. The study doesn’t even concern early human ancestors directly. Instead, it examines the very earliest primates — the common ancestor of the entire primate clade, which includes monkeys, apes, and humans, but also tree shrews, tarsiers, bush babies, and lemurs.

So the debate here isn’t about whether primates share a common ancestor — that fact is firmly established — but about where that ancestor first evolved. The conventional view has long been that primates arose in warm, tropical forests, because that’s where the majority of them live today. But by examining genetic data, ecological modelling, and the fossil record, Avaria-Llautureo and colleagues argue that the earliest primates actually adapted to cooler conditions. In other words, the roots of the primate family tree may lie in temperate regions, not the tropics.

Far from being a “crisis for evolution”, this is science doing what it always does: refining our understanding in light of new evidence. No biologist doubts that primates, including humans, share common ancestry going back tens of millions of years — far beyond the Bible’s compressed and mythical 6,000–10,000-year timeline. What changes is our picture of the environment in which those ancestors thrived.

As Dr Jason Gilchrist of Edinburgh Napier University — who was not involved in the study — points out in his article in The Conversation, this research challenges old assumptions but also enriches our understanding of primate resilience. If our lineage began in colder settings, it helps explain how primates could later spread and diversify into such a wide range of habitats, from the tropics to the highlands, deserts, and even urban environments where some species now live.

So the take-home message is not “science was wrong again” but rather “science is working as it should”. Each new finding gives us a sharper, more accurate picture of our evolutionary story — a story that remains completely at odds with creationist myth-making, but endlessly fascinating in its complexity.

Refuting Creationism - A Denisovan Gene Helped Humans Populate The Americas

The proposed evolutionary history of MUC19.
The Denisovan-like haplotype (in orange) was first introgressed from Denisovans into Neanderthals and then introgressed into modern humans. The introgressed haplotype later experienced positive selection in populations from the Americas. The introgressed MUC19 haplotype is composed of a 742-kb region that contains Neanderthal-specific variants (blue). Embedded within this Neanderthal-like region is a 72-kb region containing a high density of Denisovan-specific variants (orange), and an exonic variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) region (gray). The box below the 742-kb region depicts zooming into the MUC19 VNTR region, in which admixed American individuals carry an elevated number of tandem repeat copies.

Fernando A. Villanea et al. (2025)

Extinct human relatives left a genetic gift that helped people thrive in the Americas | Brown University

Another day; another scientific paper showing the Bible to be wrong — not just slightly wrong, but fundamentally, demonstrably, and irretrievably wrong.

This latest blow comes from researchers at Brown University, who have traced a variant of the gene MUC19, originally identified in the extinct archaic hominins known as Denisovans, and found it alive and well today in modern Latin Americans with Indigenous ancestry. They also detected it in ancient DNA recovered from archaeological sites across both North and South America.

The variant is far too common in modern populations to be a trivial accident. Its persistence screams survival advantage. Natural selection has kept it in play because it helps its carriers thrive in the environments the earliest migrants into the Americas encountered.

What does MUC19 do? It helps build mucus — not glamorous, but life-saving. From the saliva that begins digestion to the mucosal barriers in the gut and respiratory tract that fend off infection, this gene equips its owners with a stronger shield against disease.

And where did it come from? The Denisovans. But it likely reached us by way of Neanderthals, with whom Homo sapiens also interbred. In other words, modern humans are not some isolated “special creation” freshly minted out of clay a few thousand years ago; we are a patchwork of lineages, woven together by repeated episodes of interbreeding over tens of thousands of years.

For creationists, this paper is a nightmare. First, the scientists are explicit: the explanation rests entirely on Evolution and the blind, natural processes that drive it. Second, the mere fact that extinct species like Denisovans and Neanderthals could successfully mate with our ancestors drives a stake through the heart of biblical literalism. Instead of Adam and Eve, what we see is gradual emergence — modern humans arising by incomplete speciation across a broad geographical spread, with genes flowing back and forth whenever populations met again. This pattern repeats itself throughout hominin history, and it unfolds on a timeline that makes the biblical six-thousand-year fantasy look laughably naïve.

Creationism Refuted - Rappid Diversification Linked To Rapid Environmental Changes

Most known species evolved during 'explosions' of diversity, shows first analysis across 'tree of life'

The Tree of Life

Gustav Klimt, 1909

A new study in Frontiers in Ecology & Evolution delivers a striking confirmation of evolutionary theory while dealing another blow to creationist claims. Researchers John J. Wiens (University of Arizona) and Daniel S. Moen (University of California, Riverside) show that the vast majority of Earth’s species richness stems from a handful of lineages that underwent explosive bursts of diversification — precisely what evolutionary theory predicts.

Analysing enormous datasets covering more than 2 million described species across multiple taxonomic levels, the team found that "over 80% of all known biodiversity is packed into the clades with the fastest diversification rates". This pattern holds true for animals, plants, insects, vertebrates, and even across kingdoms, showing that biodiversity is not spread evenly but arises overwhelmingly from rapid radiations and occurs at all taxonomic levels. The message is clear: most of life’s diversity comes from bursts of speciation linked to ecological opportunity and innovation, not from slow, uniform accumulation over time. The results reveal a universal pattern across the tree of life, confirming that natural selection acting on changing environments and new niches drives the extraordinary richness we see today. For creationists, this is more bad news. Their model of static “kinds” appearing fully formed cannot explain why biodiversity clusters so strongly in rapidly radiating groups, or why it forms the nested hierarchies that evolution predicts. The evidence instead shows life as a continuous, dynamic process of descent with modification from common ancestors—exactly as Darwin envisaged, and the exact opposite of “special creation.”

Creationism Refuted - Neanderthals And Modern Humans Interbreeding in Israel - 130,000 Years Before Creation Week

AI reconstruction of mixed Neanderthal-Homo sapiens family (enhanced).

Earliest Evidence of Neanderthal–Homo sapiens Interbreeding Found in Israel | Tel Aviv University | Tel Aviv University

Another day, another paper refuting creationism and the Bible narrative.

Creationism suffered yet another body blow a few days ago with the announcement that a Tel Aviv University (TAU)-led international team has concluded that 140,000-year-old fossilised remains of a child, found 90 years ago in the Skhūl Cave on Mount Carmel, show unmistakable evidence of being a hybrid between a modern Homo sapiens and a Neanderthal.

Whether this news will penetrate the impervious defences of creationists — who resemble a brain-dead boxer long since counted out, the crowd gone home, yet still convinced he is winning — remains to be seen.

Not only does this timeline, which places anatomically modern humans outside Africa living alongside another hominin species, utterly contradict the Bible’s creation myth, but so does the very fact that there were multiple hominin species at all. The problem for Bible literalists is not just the incompatibility of dates, but the clear evidence of human evolution and divergence — evidence that rules out the notion of a single ancestral couple committing an “original sin” that supposedly condemns all their descendants to seek “salvation” from the wrath of an eternally unforgiving creator god.

To make matters worse for creationism, this fossil was found in the very region that later became central to the Bronze Age mythology of the Bible.

From a scientific perspective, this discovery — confirming what has long been suspected — shows that there were several earlier, ultimately unsuccessful migrations of H. sapiens out of Africa. During these early dispersals, modern humans met and interbred with Neanderthals, introducing *H. sapiens

DNA into Neanderthal populations long before the successful migration around 60,000–40,000 years ago, when further interbreeding occurred.

Central bearded dragon, Pogona vitticeps

By Photograph: Frank C. Müller, Baden-Baden - Own work,
CC BY-SA 2.5, Link

Being largely ignorant of any wildlife beyond what could be reached within a day or two’s walk of their pastures — and entirely ignorant of anything invisible to the naked eye — the Bible’s authors consistently imply that all living animals exist only as male or female, and that sexual reproduction is the sole reproductive strategy:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Genesis 1:26–27

And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.

Genesis 6:19–20

Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.

Genesis 7:2–3

With their parochial worldview, the Bible’s authors had no knowledge of distant continents such as Australia—indeed, they show no awareness of Northern Europe or of Asia beyond their own region, let alone of a spherical Earth divided into two hemispheres. This limitation could not be levelled against an all-knowing creator god, of course—which is precisely how we know no such god was involved in its writing. Had one been, we might reasonably expect the text to reflect a broader knowledge of the world and its history, and a more accurate understanding of living things, their origins, and their reproductive strategies—including those invisible to the unaided eye. Instead, we encounter a world that conforms only to the narrow perceptions and superstitions of its authors.

Refuting Creationism - The Difference Between The Bible And Reality - ESA's Picture Of The Week

Noteworthy nearby spiral | ESA/Hubble

Everywhere science looks, it exposes the widening gulf between the way the Bronze Age authors of the Bible imagined their tiny fragment of the cosmos and the reality we now know. Astronomy, no less than biology, geology, or palaeontology, makes clear just how limited and naïve that worldview was.

Today’s reminder of that contrast comes from the European Space Agency’s “Picture of the Week”: the so-called “nearby” spiral galaxy NGC 2835, lying a mere 35 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra, the Water Snake. In other words, the light now reaching our eyes began its journey 35 million years before the Bible’s writers imagined the universe springing into existence at the command of a magic incantation — יְהִי אוֹר (yehi or! — “Let there be light”), curiously spoken in a language there was no-one else alive to understand.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1.6-10)

And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.(Genesis 1.16-18)

Today’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week offers a closeup of a nearby spiral galaxy. The subject is NGC 2835, which lies 35 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra (The Water Snake).

A previous Hubble image of this galaxy was released in 2020, and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope turned its gaze toward NGC 2835 in recent years as well. Do you see anything different between today’s image of NGC 2835 and the previously released versions? Overall, NGC 2835 looks quite similar in all of these images, with spiral arms dotted with young blue stars sweeping around an oval-shaped centre, where older stars reside.

This image differs from previously released images because it incorporates new data from Hubble that captures a specific wavelength of red light called H-alpha. The regions that are bright in H-alpha emission can be seen along NGC 2835’s spiral arms, where dozens of bright pink nebulae appear like flowers in bloom. Astronomers are interested in H-alpha light because it signals the presence of several different types of nebulae that arise during different stages of a star’s life. Newborn massive stars create nebulae called H II regions that are particularly brilliant sources of H-alpha light, while dying stars can leave behind supernova remnants or planetary nebulae that can also be identified by their H-alpha emission.

By using Hubble’s sensitive instruments to survey 19 nearby galaxies, researchers aim to identify more than 50 000 nebulae. These observations will help to explain how stars affect their birth neighbourhoods through intense starlight and winds.

[Image Description: A spiral galaxy seen face-on. Its centre is a bright glowing yellow. The galaxy’s spiral arms contain sparkling blue stars, pink spots of star formation, and dark threads of dust that follow the arms.]

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Chandar, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST team

Refuting Creationism - Earliest Known Hominins In Europe - 1.4 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Press release | The First Humans Came to Europe 1.4 Million Years Ago - ARUP

A map showing the migration of hominins through Europe.

CAS Prague Institute of Archaeology

This news release slipped beneath my radar back in March 2024, but as it’s now being discussed on social media, I thought I’d take a look and track down the original press release and the publication in Nature.

The news came from the Czech Institute of Archaeology: research by an international team led by Roman Garba, from the Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, has uncovered the earliest evidence of hominins in Europe at a site in Ukraine.

This is, like most discoveries in biology, archaeology, and geology, compelling evidence that the Bible’s account of creation is not only wrong, but so far removed from reality that it can’t even be rescued as metaphor or allegory. Increasingly large portions of the Bible now have to be explained away in this manner as mainstream Christianity retreats from the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy and the idea of a creator god. What’s left is a dwindling rump of die-hard creationists, clinging desperately to the wreckage of their beliefs as the tsunami of evidence sweeps them further into irrelevance.

The discovery was made at Korolevo, Ukraine, and consisted of stone tools—sadly, no bones were found. If confirmed, this pushes back the timeline of hominin migration into Eurasia by 200,000 to 300,000 years from the previous earliest known date at Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, Spain. The scale of denialism required to dismiss this discovery can be measured in the response of one such creationist on Facebook:

since the earth is less then [sic] 6,000 years old where was this skeliton [sic – it’s actually a stone tool] for the remiander [sic] of that time seeing there was no universe?

Malevolent Designer - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Is Actively Killing Children With Malaria - If You Belive ID Creationists

Novel Maneuver Helps Malaria Parasite Dodge the Immune System | Newsroom | Weill Cornell Medicine

Here’s one of those discoveries in biological science that should have ID creationists jumping up and down yelling, "Told you so!". It’s news that the parasite that causes malaria shows both what they call 'irreducible complexity' and 'complex specified genetic information'. According to Discovery Institute fellows Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski, that would mean it is intelligently designed and, by implication, designed to do exactly what it does — by the Christian God.

But, for reasons which can only be guessed at — and probably not a million miles from the fact that this conclusion would mean the Christian god is actively designing ways to kill people, particularly children, and especially in Africa — creationists tend to ignore it. After all, that’s the very antithesis of the compassionate, benevolent, loving god of the Bible.

Instead, they quietly sidestep the inconvenient reality that examples of their supposed 'proof of intelligent design' are found just as often in parasites and pathogens as in their hosts. This is precisely what evolutionary biology predicts: a host–parasite relationship invariably leads to an evolutionary arms race, producing sophisticated and complex systems that equip the parasite to survive in the host and to infect new victims.

And, true to form, we now have another such example in the major cause of malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, which killed some 569,000 people in Africa in 2023:

Key Facts:

Globally in 2023, there were an estimated 263 million malaria cases and 597,000 malaria deaths in 83 countries.
The WHO African Region carries a disproportionately high share of the global malaria burden.
In 2023, the WHO African Region was home to 94% of malaria cases (246 million) and 95% (569,000) of malaria deaths (432,400 children under 5).
Children under 5 accounted for about 76% of all malaria deaths in the Region.

Abiogenesis News - Fully Synthetic 'Life' Evolving in a Laboratory

A step toward solving central mystery of life on Earth — Harvard Gazette

(A) Illustration showing the different stages of polymer vesicle growth leading to the action of expulsion of amphiphiles. (B) Illustration showing the formation of new vesicles from the reorganization through self-reproduction of amphiphiles expelled into the bulk.

S.K. Katla,C. Lin, & J. Pérez-Mercader (2025).

The frequent creationist assertion that abiogenesis is impossible without invoking supernatural intervention has taken another significant blow with the recent open‑access publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The study, Self‑reproduction as an autonomous process of growth and reorganization in fully abiotic, artificial and synthetic cells, demonstrates, for the first time, the successful laboratory creation of simple, non‑biochemical self‑reproducing vesicle‑like systems exhibiting Darwinian evolution: each generation varies slightly in traits that influence their ability to replicate.

This breakthrough indicates that such self‑sustaining systems could plausibly arise through natural processes, and gradually—through Darwinian mechanisms—evolve into the first simple biological life forms, from which all life subsequently diversified. It also lends empirical support to the principle that when self‑replication with small variation occurs in a selective environment, evolution in the direction of increased fitness is inevitable.

Photo by Greg Skomal.

There’s something fishy going on with great white sharks that scientists can’t explain – Research News

Here is something that should bring both delight and disappointment to creationists. It concerns a mystery in the genetics of the great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias — a finding that runs counter to what the theory of evolution would predict. In fact, it is precisely a failed evolutionary prediction that is the subject of a paper recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The disappointment for creationists comes from the simple fact of its publication. It directly refutes the oft-repeated claim that the scientific community refuses to publish anything that does not fully align with the theory of evolution. As with so many creationist accusations, this is a projection of their own malpractice. Major creationist organisations — such as Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis — require contributors to sign statements of faith that commit them never to publish anything inconsistent with their predetermined beliefs. In other words, only creationist organisations demand strict adherence to conclusions before research is even carried out.

The new findings show that the great white shark passed through an extreme population bottleneck in the Indo-Pacific at the end of the last Ice Age, around 10,000 years ago. From this single population, they began diversifying about 7,000 years ago. Today, there are roughly 20,000 individuals across three distinct populations: one in the southern hemisphere (around Australia and South Africa), one in the North Atlantic, and another in the North Pacific. Genetic analysis reveals this divergence in their mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is inherited solely through the female line. Curiously, however, their nuclear DNA (nDNA) — inherited equally from both parents — shows almost no diversity at all. All populations are remarkably similar in nDNA, far more so than evolutionary theory would predict.

This raises the mystery: why does the mtDNA show clear evidence of diversification and population isolation, while the nDNA does not?

Refuting Creationism - How A Single Gene Makes A Big Difference

NU Research Information - Nagoya University

Today, it’s the humble fruit fly that delivers yet another blow to creationist dogma.

Creationists insist that all species were created in their present form, complete with fixed behaviours, as though every instinct was hardwired in a single act of creation. But science has shown—yet again—that reality is very different. A tiny change in a single gene can profoundly alter behaviour, rewiring brains and shaping the way species interact and reproduce. And because mating behaviour is central to forming reproductive barriers, such genetic shifts drive the very process of speciation that creationists deny.

The culprit gene here is fruitless (fru), shared by both Drosophila melanogaster and D. subobscura. Yet, despite the shared gene, their courtship rituals couldn’t be more different: male D. melanogaster woo females with wing vibrations, while D. subobscura males present a drop of regurgitated food.

Scientists at Nagoya University have now shown what happens when you swap the fru gene from D. subobscura into D. melanogaster: the flies abandon their ancestral wing song and instead adopt the food-gifting ritual. The switch isn’t magic—it’s a straightforward change in neural wiring. By lengthening the dendrite of an insulin-secreting neurone so it connects with the courtship neurone, the behaviour is fundamentally altered.

What this experiment does is striking: it replays evolution in the lab. It shows exactly how a behavioural shift could have arisen when these species diverged from a common ancestor. It also demolishes the tired creationist mantra that “macro-evolution” is impossible. Here we have behaviour—controlled by genes, reshaped by neuronal architecture—evolving right before our eyes.

Refuting Creationism - Ancient Duck DNA Shows Us Why The Bible Is Literally Wrong

A wave of scientific knowledge engulfing creationist ignorance

With apologies to Katsushika Hokusai.

Ancient DNA from an extinct native duck reveals how far birds flew to make New Zealand home

Scientists never set out to prove that the Biblical account of science and history as related in Genesis is hopelessly wrong and based on the childish guesses of scientifically illiterate people—that is simply an incidental outcome of the facts they revealed. Nevertheless, it remains a fact. The Bible presents a timeline and an account of the origin of species that are wholly inconsistent with the known facts.

To be fair to the original authors, they probably never intended to mislead scientifically illiterate people thousands of years later. As they devised origin myths to fill the gaps in their knowledge of the world, they could hardly have imagined that someone would one day write their tales down, combine them with other implausible myths, genealogies, and morality stories designed to spread fear and enhance priestly power, and then declare the compilation to be the inerrant word of an omniscient creator god. That declaration, of course, reinforced the text’s usefulness as a source of excuses for actions such as land theft, genocide, and enslavement—atrocities conveniently blamed on a god to absolve perpetrators of personal responsibility.

The Paradise shelduck, Tadorna variegata, the closest relative of the Rēkohu shelduck

The discovery of an extinct shelduck highlights the rich ancient biodiversity of the remote Rēkohu Chatham Islands

Remote islands are the sort of environment biologists might dream up if asked to design a natural laboratory for testing evolution. It’s no coincidence that Darwin was inspired to develop his theory while visiting the Galápagos Islands and noticing how the finches had adapted in different ways to the conditions on each island.

Another striking example comes from the Rēkohu Chatham Islands, about 785 kilometres east of mainland Aotearoa New Zealand. The islands rose in their present form around 3.5 million years ago, effectively resetting the clock for the ecosystems that would develop there. Species arriving from elsewhere had to make do with what traits they already carried, and only those suited to island life survived. Most new arrivals were birds, insects, or wind-blown plants carried there by chance. With few predators and limited competition, these colonists had the perfect opportunity to go their own evolutionary way.

Refuting Creationism - A Tiny Piece of DNA That's So Unkind To Creationists

A Genetic Twist that Sets Humans Apart

Humans and chimpanzees share about 98–99% of their DNA, so the vast differences between us must lie within that small fraction where we differ.

Humans have no organs or structures that chimpanzees don’t also have; the differences are mainly in relative size and proportion. In other words, they’re quantitative, not qualitative. But that doesn’t stop creationists solemnly declaring that we are a totally different “kind” — a human “kind” — while chimps are lumped with gorillas, bonobos, and orangutans into the “ape kind.” Two bins, job done.

Creationists insist that no “kind” could have evolved from another because that would require brand-new organs and “new genetic information,” something they claim is impossible. Instead, they set up a straw man, accusing scientists of believing new genes and structures simply pop into existence out of thin air, like some sort of Darwinian magic trick, while insisting no one can explain how it works. (Apparently, gene duplication, mutation, and selection don’t count when you’ve decided in advance that the answer must be wrong.)

But when it comes to humans and chimpanzees, their reasoning ties itself in knots. Humans can’t have evolved from a chimp-like ancestor, they say, because that would be “macro-evolution.” Except when it isn’t. Lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, and house cats are all just one happy “cat kind,” because in that case there was obviously no “macro-evolution” — only “variation.” So, if evolution produces cats, that’s “micro-evolution.” If it produces humans, it’s “macro-evolution,” and therefore impossible. Heads I win, tails you lose.

In reality, the major differences between humans and chimpanzees aren’t about inventing new bits and pieces, but in how the same components developed. The key lies in relative sizes of bones, muscles, and teeth — and above all in the brain: not new parts, but differences in growth, proportion, and how the brain is wired.

Now, researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine have shown that part of that small genetic difference — specifically a stretch of DNA called HAR123 — acts as an enhancer controlling brain growth and development. In other words, the real evolutionary leap wasn’t the conjuring up of brand-new organs from nowhere, but changes in how existing genes fine-tuned brain development. The decisive shift came not from what parts the brain has, but from how large they grew and the ratio of cell types — glial cells and neurons — within them.

ASU scientists uncover new fossils — and a new species of ancient human ancestor | ASU News

It is generally accepted by palaeoanthropologists that the genus Homo evolved from an Australopithecus species somewhere in East Africa, most likely in the Afar region of Ethiopia, where the famous Australopithecus afarensis specimen “Lucy” was found. However, it is now widely recognised that the hominin evolutionary tree was far from straightforward, resembling more a tangled bush with side-branches that went extinct, rather than a simple, linear progression.

Given the tendency of our ancestors to diversify and occasionally interbreed, it is entirely possible that the genus Homo emerged from a hybrid population, or even that early Homo back-bred with ancestral australopithecines — especially when two or more species lived in close proximity, as new evidence suggests they did in the Afar region.

Maps showing (left) the location of the Ledi-Geraru site within the Horn of Africa on the left, and the location of the Australopithecus and Homo teeth on the right

Images by Penn State Associate Research Professor Erin DiMaggio.

Fossils of a previously unknown Australopithecus species and of early Homo have been found in the same area, apparently coexisting. The newly discovered australopithecine is known only from teeth, and there is currently insufficient information to formally name the species. Teeth are often distinctive enough to indicate a previously unrecognised species, but palaeoanthropologists usually require additional skeletal remains — such as jaws, skulls, or postcranial bones — to confirm unique anatomical features and avoid naming a species prematurely.

Of course, because evolution operates over entire populations and across thousands of years, the distinction between the immediately ancestral Australopithecus and the descendant Homo is inherently arbitrary. It likely means far more to modern palaeoanthropologists than it ever did to the hominins themselves.

This new evidence, discovered by an international team working on The Ledi-Geraru Research Project, led by scientists at Arizona State University, indicates that both the unidentified Australopithecus and early Homo lived in the area between 2.6 and 2.8 million years ago. The age estimates were reliably established using volcanic ash layers immediately above and below the fossil-bearing strata. The team’s findings were published recently, open access, in Nature.

Refuting Creationism - The Grand Canyon Is a Treasure Trove Of Cambrian Fossils - From 500 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

View of the Grand Canyon from the Colorado River.

Jason Muhlbauer

Grand Canyon was a ‘Goldilocks zone’ for the evolution of early animals

One of the things about American creationism that many people in the rest of the world find endearing—if not more than a little irritating—is the ignorant parochialism that underpins so much of it. For example, it is part of the creationist narrative that the Grand Canyon is “proof” of the biblical flood because, so they assert, the layers were laid down during the flood and the canyon was then gouged out by the floodwaters running away. This also plays neatly into the biblical flat Earth idea, because they assume the floodwaters went somewhere—presumably over the edge—having been magically piled up for the best part of a year until the magic was removed.

And of course, it all happened in America, where the important things always happen and where anything that happens is important—when Jesus returns, it will be to America; America is the place God is preparing for Jesus’s return, and so on.

So the recent open-access paper in Science Advances by an international team of palaeontologists led by scientists from Cambridge University, UK, reporting that the Grand Canyon is a rich source of fossils from the Cambrian biota, will no doubt come as a shock to American creationists.

An artist's rendering shows the first-ever portrait of a Denisovan woman, recreated from an ancient DNA sample.

Maayan Harel.

New insights into the Denisovans – the new hominin group that interbred with modern day humans - News & Events | Trinity College Dublin

There is increasing evidence that the human evolutionary story is far richer and more complex than was once assumed, back when many expected a neat series of fossils showing a linear descent from a single African ancestor.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that the Bronze Age human-origin myth in the Bible has about as much historical credibility as Enid Blyton’s Noddy’s Adventures in Toyland — and at least Blyton never claimed her stories were literal truth or the basis of moral authority. Unlike creation myths, Noddy’s adventures were always meant for the nursery, not the classroom.

We now understand that hominin populations frequently split into regional varieties which diversified as more or less isolated groups, only to merge again later into a single population. This process appears to have begun even as we were diverging from the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees. For around a million years after that split, interbreeding remained possible, with chimpanzee genes entering the hominin genome and vice versa.

The interbreeding that most shaped modern, non-African Homo sapiens occurred when African H. sapiens encountered Neanderthals—or their immediate ancestors—during successive waves of migration, permitted by changes in climate and geography. These contacts culminated in the last and only successful migration between roughly 60,000 and 40,000 years ago.

The Neanderthals themselves were descended from an earlier migration that had followed H. erectus into Eurasia, later splitting into Neanderthals in western Eurasia and Denisovans in eastern and south-eastern Eurasia. Modern genomics now shows that it was the Denisovans who contributed even more to the ancestry of non-African H. sapiens than the Neanderthals did. The Denisovans—likely to be reclassified as H. longi, the name given to a skull found in China—appear to have diversified into populations adapted to environments as varied as the Tibetan Plateau and the subtropical coasts of Southeast Asia, Oceania, and Austronesia.

Refuting Creationism - Another Plethora of Transitional Fossils - From 250 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

iv> Fresh fossil finds in Africa shed light on the era before Earth’s largest mass extinction | UW News

An artistic rendering of an evening approximately 252 million years ago during the late Permian in the Luangwa Basin of Zambia. The scene includes several saber-toothed gorgonopsians and beaked dicynodonts.

Gabriel Ugueto

Another day, and another clutch of transitional fossils from millions of years before “Creation Week” for creationists to lie about, misrepresent, or simply ignore in order to cope with the resulting cognitive dissonance. This time, it’s not just a single research paper, but a series of 14 published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The fossils are the result of 15 years of excavation at three sites in Africa and cover the 47-million-year Permian era, which ended with the “Great Dying” 252 million years ago — the mass extinction at the end of the Permian in which an estimated 70% of species became extinct. Not only is that timeline fatal to those creationists who like to imagine the Earth and life on it are just 6,000 to 10,000 years old, but the fact of a mass extinction raises insurmountable problems for intelligent design advocates. They would need to explain the intelligence behind designing species only to have them wiped out by a climate catastrophe — one which should have been anticipated by an omniscient designer and could have been prevented by an omnipotent god.

And of course, another problem for creationists is the abundance of these transitional fossils, which, according to creationist dogma, should not exist at all.

Refuting Creationism - Science Fills A Whale Of A Gap - No Gods Found

A cornucopia of tiny, bizarre whales used to live in Australian waters – here’s one of them - Museums Victoria

My last blog post concluded with:

Science moves forward by explaining these transitions; creationism survives only by ignoring them. With each gap that closes, their god has less room to hide, and the story of life becomes clearer without invoking the supernatural.

So, the prediction that more gap-closing transitional fossils would soon be found was hardly a bold one.

And sure enough, along comes just such a paper. To rub salt in creationists’ wounds, like the subject of my previous blog post on transitional penguin fossils, this one is also published by Oxford University Press in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society of London—the society to which Darwin and Wallace presented their ground-breaking 1858 papers On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties, or, to put it another way, On the Origin of Species.

This new paper fills an important gap in the evolution of whales. It was written by Erich Fitzgerald of Museums Victoria Research Institute, Ruairidh Duncan of Monash University, Victoria, Australia, and colleagues. The discovery and its significance are explained in an article in The Conversation by Erich Fitzgerald and Ruairidh Duncan. Their article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons License, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

First, a brief background on the evolution of whales:

Dagger beaks and strong wings: new fossils rewrite the penguin story and affirm NZ as a cradle of their evolution.

One of the most glaring flaws in creationist reasoning — among the many — is its desperate reliance on gaps in knowledge as hiding places for their putative god. It’s a strategy that ensures their god grows ever smaller and often vanishes entirely as science steadily closes those gaps. This “god of the gaps” approach is ultimately doomed—either to complete collapse or to a never-ending scramble for new gaps, real or imagined, in the forlorn hope that this time, unlike every other, the gap will contain the one thing they crave: a god that cannot be explained away.

One such gap — of which creationists so far seem blissfully unaware, or we would never hear the end of it — is the evolutionary transition between the flying ancestors of penguins and the modern, flightless penguins whose skeletons have adapted from an aerial to a marine existence. This transformation involved all the changes needed to turn wings into powerful flippers for ‘flying’ underwater, a more upright gait, and feathers adapted for life in the water and for the cold of the Antarctic environment where most species now live.

That gap has just been substantially filled by the discovery of a large collection of ancient penguin fossils in the Waipara Greensand Formation in New Zealand, north of Canterbury. This formation spans roughly 62.5 to 58 million years ago—a period of some 4.5 million years, beginning only a few million years after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. With every such discovery, the supposed “mystery” shrinks a little more—and the god wedged into it fades further into irrelevance. How these fossils fill the gap in our knowledge of penguin evolution is the subject of an article in The Conversation by two palaeontologists from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand: Vanesa De Pietri, Senior Research Fellow in Palaeontology, and Paul Scofield, Adjunct Professor in Palaeontology. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

First, some background information on the Waipara Greensand Formation:

Refuting Creationism - More On What The Bible's Authors Got Badly Wrong

A sea monster and a Tarantula ESA/Hubble

The enduring mystery is why, when they can read the first few verses of the Bible and compare it to what science reveals about the universe, or planet and the life on it, do so many people still insist it is inerrant historical and scientific truths reveal by an inerrant, omniscience creator god?

There must be some deep psychological need to believe that absurdity to perform the necessary mental gymnastics required to dismiss the science and stick with the evidence free superstitions that the science overthrows, which can only be guessed at? A personal stake, as with the priests and grifters who wring a living out of their credulous followers, maybe? A justification for holding otherwise unacceptable prejudices for which an excuse can be found in the Bible, with careful scrutiny and maybe changing the meanings of a few words here and there, or by applying the brutal tribal social norms that the Bible prescribes? Whatever the cause, the self-delusion needed to retain belief against the deluge of counter-evidence, often caries kudos in religious societies such as in America's 'Bible Belt' states and inner city ghettos where admitting to doubt or even hinting at accepting the science can carry a heavy social penalty.

So, the tidal wave of scientific evidence keeps breaking on the rocks of ignorant stupidity reinforced by sea wall of social coercive control and psychological fear akin to an acute anxiety disorder or theophobic psychosis.

A scene from a star-forming factory shines in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week. This Hubble picture captures incredible details in the dusty clouds in a star-forming region called the Tarantula Nebula. What’s possibly the most amazing aspect of this detailed image is that this nebula isn’t even in our galaxy. Instead, it’s in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is located about 160 000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the dozens of small satellite galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. The Tarantula Nebula is the largest and brightest star-forming region not just in the Large Magellanic Cloud, but in the entire group of nearby galaxies to which the Milky Way belongs.

The Tarantula Nebula is home to the most massive stars known, some of which are roughly 200 times as massive as our Sun. The scene pictured here is located away from the centre of the nebula, where there is a super star cluster called R136, but very close to a rare type of star called a Wolf–Rayet star. Wolf–Rayet stars are massive stars that have lost their outer shell of hydrogen and are extremely hot and luminous, powering dense and furious stellar winds.

This nebula is a frequent target for Hubble, whose multiwavelength capabilities are critical for capturing sculptural details in the nebula’s dusty clouds. The data used to create this image come from an observing programme called Scylla, named for a multi-headed sea monster from the Greek myth of Ulysses. The Scylla programme was designed to complement another Hubble observing programme called ULLYSSES (Ultraviolet Legacy Library of Young Stars as Essential Standards). ULLYSSES targets massive young stars in the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, while Scylla investigates the structures of gas and dust that surround these stars.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray, N. Bartmann (ESA/Hubble)
Music: Stellardrone - Ascent.

So, here is another wave of facts that might just dislodge a tenacious limpet of ignorance:

Schistosoma mansoni

Parasitic Worms Evolved to Suppress Neurons in Skin - AAI News

It gets tedious repeating this point so often, but so long as creationists keep using what they claim is irreducible complexity and/or complex specified genetic information as evidence for intelligent design, they need to be reminded that the same argument can also be used as evidence of their putative designer’s malevolence.

Creationists, of course, ignore the fact that parasites are no less “designed” than humans and have structures and processes that are “irreducibly complex” and depend on “complex specified information” in order to succeed in their environments. Yet their existence, and how they interact with and even manipulate their hosts, inevitably increases suffering in the world – a theological problem that creationist disinformation organisations such as the Discovery Institute avoid like the plague.

Parasite–host relationships also inevitably involve evolutionary arms races – the antithesis of intelligence if both “sides” are supposedly designed by the same designer.

So, to keep reminding them: if their justification for designating their god as the designer of living systems holds true, then it is also justification for designating the same god as the cause of suffering. Here is another example of a parasite that falls within their definition of an organism “designed” to do what it does and to participate in an arms race with its host in order to do so. This concerns the discovery that the parasitic worm Schistosoma mansoni, which causes schistosomiasis, is able to suppress neurons in the skin to evade detection as it burrows into its victim’s body (usually the leg).

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