Rosa Rubicondior

Friday, 5 September 2025

Origin of a People - The Migration of the Slavs

Excavation in 2020 at the pre-Slavic cemetery of Brücken, Mansfeld-Südharz District (Saxony-Anhalt).

How the Slavic migration reshaped Central and Eastern Europe

This blog post is something of a departure from my usual refutations of creationism. At times, that exercise can feel like shooting fish in a barrel, since almost every scientific paper on palaeontology, cosmology, or evolutionary biology casually refutes creationism simply by presenting the facts and evidence—something creationism singularly lacks.

This, however, is only tangentially related to creationism, in that it concerns the diversification of humans into distinct regional cultural and genetic populations. That richness and complexity is utterly incompatible with the notion that all of humanity radiated out from a single founder population of eight related individuals in the Middle East.

Instead, it is about the genetic evidence for the origins of the Slavic peoples, for whom I feel a special affinity. My youngest son is married to a Slav woman from Czechia and now lives and works there. Former Czechoslovakia also played a formative role in my political development during the 1960s, when the Prague Spring gave those of us on the left hope for a form of socialism that was democratic, open, and inclusive — rather than the totalitarian system into which Soviet Communism had degenerated. The self-sacrifice of the young idealists Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc, in response to the Soviet-led invasion that suppressed the reforms, was a profound inspiration — about which I wrote after a visit to Prague in December 2011, when a visit to their memorial in Wenceslaus Square, on the site of their self-immolation, reduced me to tears.

Since then, we have returned to Czechia several times. On our most recent trip in the summer of 2024, we visited the museum in the Moravský Krumlov castle near Brno, which currently houses a series of immense art nouveau paintings by the Czech artist Alphons Maria Mucha—perhaps better known in the West for his commercial art nouveau designs for chocolate boxes, biscuit tins, and soap packages that epitomised the 1920s and 30s. The series — a Czech national treasure I described at length soon after our return — titled The Epic of the Slavs, was pained between 1912 and 1926. It depicts the story of the Slavic peoples’ development in Eastern Europe up to the mid-1920s: a people struggling to forge an identity under political pressure from surrounding religious powers, from Eastern Orthodoxy in the south and east, to Catholicism in the west, followed later by German Protestantism. Like the Irish, the Czech people’s identity was forged in this power struggle, eventually emerging as proud and independent. Today, Czechia is one of the most atheist countries in Europe.

This article, however, is about the deeper origins of the Slavic peoples, as described in a recent open-access paper in Nature by an international team of researchers led by Joscha Gretzinger of the Department of Archaeogenetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.

Refuting Creationism - How A Fish Was Equipped to Kill - 310 Million Years Before 'Death Entered the World'

Artist's impression of Platysomus parvulus

Image by Joschua Knüppe.

Fossil fish sheds new light on extra teeth evolution to devour prey - University of Birmingham

Palaeontologists led by Professor Sam Giles of Birmingham University, UK, have discovered the earliest known example of a ray-finned fish, Platysomus parvulus, with extra teeth deep inside its mouth. It lived around 310 million years before creationists believe Earth was created. Aside from that insurmountable problem for creationist mythology, there are other difficulties for their childish beliefs:

Creationists insist that death only “entered the world” as a result of “Eve’s sin”. Before that supposed event, some 6,000–10,000 years ago, nothing ever died. Taken literally, this would mean that every mouthful of food remained alive throughout the entire digestive process, only to be excreted still living at the other end. Alternatively, humans and animals didn’t eat at all, somehow running on an unidentified, miracle source of energy. Either way, the claim collapses into absurdity.

An additional disappointment for creationists is that this team of evolutionary biologists show no hint of the widely predicted (in creationists circles) abandonment of the Theory of Evolution in favour of creationism, that two generations of creationists have been told will happen, like the second coming of Jesus, "Any day now, real soon. You'll see!".

From an evolutionary biology perspective, this fossil sheds light on the diversification of ray-finned fish following the End-Devonian mass extinction and represents a transitional stage in the evolution of tongue-biters from simple jawed fish. It also shows that advanced forms evolved relatively quickly in ecosystems dominated by predator-prey relationships.

Fossils with signs of bone disease were from sauropods, of the same order as Tambatitanis

illustration: Palaeotaku/Wikimedia Commons.

Deadly bone disease wiped out long-necked dinosaurs in what is now the interior of the state of São Paulo, Brazil

According to creationist dogma — though not explicitly stated in the Bible but added later to patch over awkward evidence — death did not enter the world until Eve’s sin somehow allowed it to. Along with death, so the story goes, came parasites, pathogens, and anything else creationists find inconvenient. And, of course, all of this supposedly happened just 6,000–10,000 years ago.

The problems with that are two-fold:

Firstly, there is the question of what Adam and Eve, and the animals allegedly created for their use, ate. Did the plants they consumed remain alive as they passed through the digestive system, nutrients extracted but the plant cells excreted still living? Or did none of them eat anything at all? Obviously, the myth’s authors didn’t understand that plants are just as alive as animals.
Secondly, the entire narrative collides with the fossil record, which shows long-dead animals preserved in strata dated to tens or even hundreds of millions of years before the mythical ‘Creation Week’—during the 99.9975% of Earth’s history that creationism simply erases. Those animals had metabolisms dependent on consuming living or dead tissues, and their fossils often show evidence not only of death, but of predation, parasitism, and disease. Many evolved armour plating, spines, and other defences that make sense only in the presence of predators and pathogens.

And here’s a paradox creationists often tie themselves in knots over: did God design humans with an immune system, or was it a post-Fall upgrade? If it was there from the start, then God was already planning for parasites and pathogens—hardly the “perfect” world creationists claim. If it was added later, then God wasn’t omniscient, as he failed to foresee a future need. Either way, the story collapses under its own contradictions.

It is therefore no surprise that researchers from the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) and the Regional University of Cariri (URCA) in Crato, Ceará, Brazil, have found evidence of dinosaurs being infected—and killed—by osteomyelitis around 80 million years before ‘Creation Week’. Fossils of sauropod dinosaurs show clear signs of active osteomyelitis, with no signs of healing, indicating that the disease proved fatal.

The Universe Is Nothing Like The Description of it in The Bible 5

A planetary accretion disk forming around a star.

AI-generated (ChatGPT 5)

Unusual carbon dioxide-rich disk detected around young star challenges planet formation models - Stockholm University

This, the last in this series - at least for a while - is on the discovery made by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of a disk rich in carbon dioxide around a young star. Apart from again highlighting the yawning gap between the Bible's child-like description of the universe and the real thing, it also showcases how, contrary to creationist conspiracy theorists’ claims that scientists are not allowed to publish anything which challenges “scientific orthodoxy,” a discovery that challenges the current consensus is openly flagged to the scientific community in peer-reviewed publications.

The problem this raises for cosmology is that, in the standard model of planetary formation, icy grains from the colder outer regions of a disk drift inward. As they cross the so-called snow lines, the ice sublimates into gas: first carbon dioxide, then closer in, water vapour. Because both species are expected to follow this process, astronomers normally expect water vapour to be at least as abundant as, if not more abundant than, carbon dioxide in the warmer inner regions. Yet in the disk surrounding a young star in the star-forming region NGC 6357, JWST found the reverse of what models predict — little or no water, but a striking abundance of carbon dioxide.

Intriguingly, the observation may also help explain another puzzle: the unusual isotopic fingerprint found in meteorites and comets. The imbalance of gases could be linked to intense radiation altering chemical pathways in the disk.

For Bible literalists, however, such details have no bearing on their imagined universe of a small, flat Earth with a dome overhead and fixed, immovable stars. There is no recognition in their text of star formation, accretion disks, or the vastness and dynamism of a changing cosmos. The Bible’s universe doesn’t even contain planetary systems.

Figure 1. Image stamps of example very bright dropouts in F090W, F115W, F150W, and F200W, arranged from top to bottom. Two example objects are shown for each group. The stamps are 2″×2″ in size and are oriented with north being up and east being left. The images are from the HST ACS, JWST NIRCam, and JWST MIRI, with the passbands as noted. Most of the very bright dropouts are either disk-like (∼40%) or compact (∼45%) in morphology in F356W, and one each is shown for the F090W, F150W and F200W dropouts. The example F115W dropouts include a disk-like object and an irregular object. Only ∼15% of the very bright dropouts have irregular morphologies. The color stamps in the last column are constructed based on the NIRCam images, using F090W + F115W + F150W as blue, F200W + F277W as green, and F356W + F410M + F444W as red.

Sun, Bangzheng & Yan, Haojing (2025).(CC BY 4.0)

Early galaxies — or something else? Mizzou scientists uncover mysterious objects in the universe

In this fourth article in the series contrasting the real universe with the one described in the Bible, I look at the announcement that two cosmologists from the University of Missouri have discovered about 300 objects that are brighter than they should be if they are what researchers think they are – some of the first galaxies in the early universe. If that's what they turn out to be, it will require a reassessment of what cosmologists thought they knew about the formation of galaxies.

This highlights a frequently repeated contradiction in creationist claims: on the one hand, they insist scientists are only allowed to publish papers that conform to existing consensus, so "creationist science" never gets published; on the other hand, they complain that scientists keep changing their minds and rewriting the science books, unlike the Bible which never changes. They claim this means science is unreliable and not to be trusted. Obviously, both can't be right, but that doesn't stop creationists from claiming both simultaneously.

The other problem this paper highlights is the sheer scale of the universe and the timeline involved, which make the Bible's account look laughably naïve, even childish in its simplicity.

These mystery objects, discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope, are in the order of 13–14 billion light-years in look-back time, meaning we are seeing the light that left them when the universe was only a few hundred million years old. Because the universe has been expanding ever since, their actual present-day distance is much greater — probably 25–30 billion light-years away.

This doesn’t contradict the 13.8-billion-year age of the universe: the light has only been travelling for 13 billion years, but in that time the fabric of space itself has stretched. It’s a bit like two ants on a rubber band: one ant flashes a signal when it is 13 cm away, but by the time the other ant sees it, the band has stretched so much that they are now 30 cm apart. The signal only travelled 13 cm, but the current separation is larger because of the stretching. To suggest, as creationists must, that the well-established methods of cosmological distance measurement are so wrong that they confuse a universe a few thousand years old with one tens of billions of light-years across, is to cling to absurdity.

In fact, this paper shows science at its best. The researchers are effectively saying to their colleagues: “Look, we may have found a fundamental problem that could mean we were wrong all along. Let’s investigate further and be prepared to change our minds if the evidence demands it.” Now imagine a creationist announcing that they had discovered a contradiction in the Bible that forced them to question its divine authorship, or a Discovery Institute fellow admitting to evidence that could only be explained by Darwinian evolution. Such an admission would simply never happen — and certainly never be published in a creationist outlet.

Science is reasonable uncertainty; religion is unreasonable certainty.

The Universe Is Nothing Like The Description of it in The Bible 3

Labeled Version of the Image

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Hong Kong/S. Zhang et al.; Radio: ATNF/CSIRO/ATCA; H-alpha: UK STFC/Royal Observatory Edinburgh; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk

Chandra :: Photo Album :: MSH 15-52 :: August 20, 2025

In this, the third entry in the series, we turn to an extraordinary image of a nebula popularly known as “The Hand of God.” Like the famous Horsehead Nebula, its nickname arises simply because it happens to resemble something faintly recognisable—in this case, the outline of a human hand. Some creationists may take comfort in that name, imagining it to mean that scientists literally see the hand of God at work in the creation of the universe.

Few things could be further from the truth. The more we learn, the clearer it becomes that the universe is not the product of spells cast by a supernatural magician, as described in the Bible, but the result of natural forces acting on a scale so vast the authors of Genesis could never have conceived it.

Without modern science—and without the stunning images produced by instruments such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory which created this composite — we too would struggle to imagine the universe as it really is. Expecting Bronze Age pastoralists to have described it accurately would be like asking a five-year-old today to look up at the night sky and provide a scientific account of the cosmos.

What we see here is just a tiny fraction of the heavens — the area covered by a single grain of rice held at arm’s length — yet, by combining electromagnetic images at different wavelengths, scientists have rendered the nebula visible in all its grandeur.

A scientist and a preacher investigate the Universe

Using exoplanets to study dark matter | UCR News | UC Riverside

The second of five blog posts that comprehensively refute any lingering notion that Genesis is the inerrant word of a creator god, rather than the best guesses of primitive Bronze Age pastoralists, who imagined Earth as a small, flat plane beneath a solid dome. This time, the focus is on news from a University of California Riverside (UCR) team, who are using the more than 5,000 exoplanets discovered to date to investigate the mysterious phenomenon of dark matter.

Dark matter poses a challenge for science—not because its existence is in doubt, but because its nature and relationship to the standard model of particle physics remain unknown. We know it exists because it exerts gravitational effects on galaxies and other cosmic structures, yet it does not appear to interact with ordinary matter in any detectable way. What we can infer, however, is that dark matter makes up a substantial fraction of the universe’s total mass.

For science, this is a puzzle to be investigated head-on. For creationists, however, both the confirmed existence of thousands of exoplanets and the reality of dark matter are insurmountable contradictions to their Bible-based cosmology. The Genesis account insists on a tiny, flat Earth, immovably fixed at the centre, covered with a dome, with waters above and below — a description so far removed from reality that it cannot honestly be excused as metaphor, allegory, or poetic licence. It is simply wrong.

Unlike science, which welcomes such problems as opportunities to investigate and refine our understanding, religion turns a blind eye and ploughs on, muttering about “mysterious ways,” “beyond human comprehension,” or simply, “God did it!” — all while smugly pretending the issue has been solved “by faith.”

Illustration of an accreting supermassive black hole shrouded by dust in
CAPERS-LRD-z9.

NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Artist representation of CAPERS-LRD-z9, home to the earliest confirmed black hole. The supermassive black hole at its center is believed to be surrounded by a thick cloud of gas, giving the galaxy a distinctive red color.

Image credit: Erik Zumalt, The University of Texas at Austin.

Meet the Universe’s Earliest Confirmed Black Hole: A Monster at the Dawn of Time - UT Austin News - The University of Texas at Austin

Creationists normally assume that scientists are all out to destroy their faith because they hate God and/or worship Satan, so to add to that paranoid delusion, this is the first of five blog posts about very recent discoveries in the fields of Astronomy and cosmology that illustrate the glaring contrast between the real universe and the universe described in Genesis. The Bible describes a small, flat planet fixed and immobile at the centre, covered by a solid dome, with water above and below and stars, sun and moon fixed to the dome as lamps and tiny lights that can shake lose and fall to Earth during earthquakes; the whole thing created just 6,000 - 10,000 years ago from nothing.

The first of these papers is by an international team of astronomers, led by The University of Texas at Austin’s Cosmic Frontier Center who have discovered the most distant black hole ever confirmed. It is in the galaxy CAPERS-LRD-z9 which formed 500 million years after the Big Bang. That places it 13.3 billion years into the past, when our universe was just 3% of its current age. A time line and distance completely off the Bible's scale.

Malevolent Design - A Paradox Creationists Pretend Not to See

Progress of the Black Death in Europe

By Flappiefh - Own work from:Natural Earth Cesana, D.; Benedictow O.J., Bianucci R. (2017). "The origin and early spread of the Black Death in Italy: first evidence of plague victims from 14th-century Liguria (northern Italy)". Anthropological Science 125 (1): 15–24. DOI:10.1537/ase.161011. ISSN: 0918-7960. (page 17),
CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

USF, FAU researchers solve 1,500-year-old mystery: The bacterium behind the first pandemic

The notion of intelligent design — the current flagship of creationism’s attempt to replace scientific realism with magical superstitions and Bible literalism dressed up as “alternative science” — contains a blatant paradox its advocates must ignore: the very same “logic” used to argue that the God of the Bible created living organisms can just as easily be used to argue that any such designer is a malevolent sadist who deliberately increases suffering in the world while ignoring countless ways to reduce it.

The theological problems this raises are never discussed in polite creationist circles, except for the lazy fallback of blaming everything on “The Fall.” But this move exposes intelligent design for what it really is — Bible-literalist religion in disguise. And that sits awkwardly against over half a century of insistence by the Discovery Institute that ID is not a religious idea, but rather a scientific one that should be taught in American public schools at taxpayer expense — a direct violation of the Establishment Clause and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987).

The paradox lies in the fact that the very same so-called evidence — Michael J. Behe’s “irreducible complexity” and William A. Dembski’s “complex specified genetic information” — can be found in the genomes, structures, and processes of parasites and pathogens, making them devastatingly effective at exploiting and destroying their hosts. In fact, Behe himself has, probably without realising it, used precisely such examples. The bacterial flagellum he highlights enables E. coli to move efficiently through our gut, causing sometimes fatal food poisoning. And his example of resistance to anti-malarial drugs in Plasmodium parasites illustrate how evolution equips them to continue killing hundreds of thousands of children every year while condemning millions more to cycles of malarial fever.

Now, new research has highlighted another gruesome example. The bacterium Yersinia pestis — responsible for multiple waves of plague throughout the Middle Ages — has been shown to have evolved into its highly lethal form only in relatively recent human history. Beginning with the “Plague of Justinian” about 1,500 years ago, Y. pestis unleashed pandemics that killed between 30% and 50% of Europe’s population.

An interdisciplinary team at the University of South Florida (USF) and Florida Atlantic University (FAU), with collaborators in India and Australia, has now confirmed genomically that the Justinian plague was indeed caused by Y. pestis, as long assumed. Analysing DNA from plague victims buried in a mass grave at the ancient city of Jerash, Jordan — the epicentre of that pandemic — one group identified the culprit, while another team traced the bacterium’s evolutionary changes that made it one of history’s most notorious killers.

A Monster “Goblin” at the Feet of Dinosaurs | Natural History Museum

View of the Kaiparowits Formation from Death Ridge in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Figure 4. Reconstruction of UMNH VP 16266 (holotype, Bolg amondol gen. et sp. nov.). Gold: preserved skeletal elements. Grey: morphological hypotheses of reconstructed elements based on the morphology of preserved skeletal elements. Black: missing skeletal elements, based on publicly available rendered CT scans on morphosource.org of specimen UF:Herp:153328, Heloderma horridum.

Woolley C. Henrik, et al. (2025)

There was a gaping hole in our knowledge of evolution which, had creationists been aware of it, we would never have heard the end of. They would have claimed that their gap-shaped god fitted it perfectly, like a puddle in its hollow. Of course, it was no secret. Biologists—especially those studying the evolution of lizards—knew about it well enough. No one was hiding it from creationists. Their blissful ignorance was simply the result of their fear of engaging with real biology.

We knew that today’s large-bodied lizards must share common ancestors, but the gap lay in the fossil evidence to support that view—what creationists dismissively call “conjecture” or claims made without evidence. Yet the Theory of Evolution always predicted that such ancestral and transitional forms must have existed.

Creationists, however, have missed that particular boat because the gap has now been filled. The prediction of evolutionary theory has, once again, been vindicated.

The gap-filling discovery was made by Dr Hank Woolley of the Dinosaur Institute while examining a jar of bones at the Natural History Museum of Utah, simply labelled “lizard bones.” Dr Woolley identified them as belonging to the Monstersauria—a group of lizards with a 100-million-year history, but until now an incomplete fossil record. A modern member of this group is the Gila Monster, one of only two venomous lizards alive today. The fossil, belonging to a large-bodied lizard which Dr Woolley has named Bolg amondol after a character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, was found in the Kaiparowits Formation of the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, Utah—a palaeontological treasure trove and one of North America’s richest dinosaur-dominated records. Alongside dozens of new species, the site offers a vital window into the deep past. The age of this fossil places it squarely in the age of the dinosaurs, a crucial factor in lizard evolution.

Incidentally, the picture above shows the Kaiparowits Formation. Perhaps a creationist would like to explain how those vast sedimentary strata could have been deposited in a single global flood.

Refuting Creationism - Why Creationists Can't Look Blind Cavefish in the Eye

Typhlichthys subterraneus

Matthew Niemiller

Dark ages: Genomic analysis shows how cavefish lost their eyes | Yale News

Some days there are so many papers in which the authors casually — and with no intention of doing so — comprehensively refute basic creationist claims, that there just aren’t enough hours in the day to keep up with them. For creationists, of course, the task is simple: never read a scientific publication. The last thing any dedicated creationist wants is those pesky, “Satanic” scientists trying to make them lose ‘faith’, or worse, consider the possibility of being wrong when confronted with nasty, toxic facts.

In the bizarre world of faith, things must be true if you believe them by faith. After all, faith is the sure and certain way to “just know” the truth without all that bothersome learning. It’s also the sure and certain way to know that yours is the only true faith and that all other faiths are wrong.

So this new research about the convergent evolution of blind cavefish will need to be kept firmly behind the impregnable shield of faith, because faith must be protected from cold, harsh reality at all times — even at the cost of personal integrity. A creationist would much rather be thought of as intellectually dishonest than wrong.

The news comes from researchers at Yale, who have discovered how blind cavefish lost their eyes through something creationists insist can’t happen because it is invariably fatal: loss of genetic information. And not just once, but in several species of blind cavefish — all of which lost their eyes by essentially the same mechanism.

The researchers showed, using a new “mutational clock,” that the oldest blind cavefish, the Ozark cavefish (Troglichthys rosae), began degenerating up to 11 million years ago. This technique also establishes a minimum age for the caves these fish inhabit, since the caves must have existed before the fish colonised them.

In a nice confirmation of the Theory of Evolution — which predicts that environmental change will drive evolutionary change and that species will evolve towards greater fitness in that environment — several species of cavefish exhibit broadly similar adaptations such as a flattened skull, a long, thin body, and the loss or reduction of pelvic fins.

Refuting Creationism - Another Fossil; Another Thorny Problem for Creationists

Fossils of S. afer

“Bizarre” armoured dinosaur, Spicomellus afer, had spikes sticking out from its neck, fossils show - University of Birmingham

A newly-identified bizarre dinosaur fossil from Morocco has presented creationists with yet another thorny problem to ignore.

It is that of an ankylosaur from early in the evolutionary history of that group. Not only is its great age a problem for those who believe Earth was magicked into existence by a god with all living things fully formed and an environment perfectly tuned for life (i.e. human life — supposedly the god’s favourite), but at 165 million years old it comes from the vast span of Earth’s pre-“Creation Week” history — that 99.9975% of the planet’s history which creationists pretend never happened. This is, in fact, the oldest ankylosaur yet discovered.

Unlike later ankylosaurs, however, this one had long spikes firmly attached to its bones. These appear to have been lost as the group evolved, showing relatively rapid change. That in itself runs counter to the creationist dogma that evolution cannot proceed by loss of genetic information and must always involve increasing complexity for it to be “real” evolution. This claim, like so many creationist assertions, ignores abundant evidence — such as the reduction in genome size and anatomical complexity in many endoparasites.

Now they have yet another example to ignore while busily constructing their infantile strawman versions of evolution to attack.

The discovery by palaeontologists co-led by Professor Susannah Maidment of Natural History Museum, London, and the University of Birmingham, has just been reported in Nature and is explained in a news item from the University of Birmingham and an accompanying YouTube video:

Graphic abstract

Attwater, J., Augustin, T.L., Curran, J.F. et al.(2025)

Chemists recreate how RNA might have reproduced for first time | UCL News - UCL – University College London

The day creationists dread — the final closure of their favourite god-shaped abiogenesis gap — moved a little closer last May, when scientists at University College London (UCL) announced that they had shown how the first RNA could have reproduced. In a selective environment with competition for resources, this would have led inevitably to ever-increasing efficiency in replication, kick-starting the whole evolutionary process and the emergence of self-organising systems (or “life”) from prebiotic precursors (or “non-life”). This is, of course, the very process that creationists insist is “impossible”, clinging to the idea that “life” is some magical essence that must be granted by a supernatural deity.

When this God-shaped gap is finally and conclusively closed — as all the others have been — creationists will need to scramble once again to reframe their beliefs and cling to whatever shrinking space remains for their god. Just as their old claim that evolution was “impossible” collapsed, to be replaced with notions of a short burst of warp-speed evolution “within kinds” after “The Flood” (and supposedly still happening today, but conveniently “guided” by God), so too will abiogenesis inevitably be rebranded as yet another process directed by divine intention — naturally, with the eventual production of (American) humans as the goal.

Figure 2. Skull and jaw of Kostensuchus atrox gen. et sp. nov.
Photographs in (A) right lateral, (B) dorsal, and (C) ventral views. Interpretative drawings in (D) right lateral, (E) dorsal, and (F) ventral views. Abbreviations: ang, angular; ap, anterior palpebral; de, dentary; ec, ectopterygoid; fr, frontal; j, jugal; la, lacrimal; mx, maxilla; pa, parietal; pal, palatine; pmx, premaxilla; pnf, perinarial fossa; po, postorbital; pp, posterior palpebral; pt, pterygoid; q, quadrate; qj, quadratojugal; na, nasal; rarp, retroarticular process; sang, surangular; sof, suborbital fossa; spl, splenial; sq, squamosal; stf, subtympanic foramen. Scale bar 5 cm.

Novas FE, et al. (2025)

New crocodile-relative “hypercarnivore” from prehistoric Patagonia was 11.5ft long and weighed 250kg | EurekAlert!

Seventy million years before creationists believe the universe even existed, a ferocious crocodile was prowling the rivers of what is now Brazil. Its fossil remains, recently described in an open-access paper in PLOS One and summarised in a press release from EurekAlert, add yet another line to the mountain of evidence that life has a vast, deep history stretching back hundreds of millions of years.

For creationists, however, discoveries like this present a problem. To remain in the cosy confines of their self-referencing dogma, they must either ignore such evidence or twist it into their narrative that evolution is a Satanic lie and the universe is only a few thousand years old because the Bible says so. Their mission, as they see it, is to defend God’s revealed truth from the “deceptions” of science.

But even if one accepts, for the sake of argument, that a god created the universe and a demonic adversary named Satan exists, the logic collapses under its own weight. Surely it would have been easier for Satan to forge a single book than to fabricate all the astronomical, geological, radiometric, genetic, and fossil evidence pointing to an ancient universe and the evolutionary diversification of life. The alternative is that the creator itself deliberately falsified the evidence science uncovers—yet creationists prefer to believe that this same deceiver told the truth in just one book.

And so the walls of the creationist cult remain, impervious to evidence. But outside those walls, science continues to reveal the true story of life on Earth, in discoveries like this ancient crocodile from long before “Creation Week”—from a time when, according to creationist belief, nothing at all should have existed.

Malevolent Design - How a Spider Uses Captive Fireflies To Lure More To Their Death - Malevolence or Evolution?

Firefly caught in a sheetweb spider's web

Spider uses trapped fireflies as glowing bait - BES

This news will thrill devotees of a creationist god of divine malevolence; but for those who prefer their deity to resemble the all-loving god of the New Testament, it will be a cause for concern. Even more worrying for the latter, the current campaign by creationist organisations such as the Discovery Institute—trying to promote the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design as a scientific alternative to evolutionary biology—unwittingly strengthens the case for a malevolent designer. After all, Michael J. Behe’s notion of irreducible complexity and William A. Dembski’s concept of complex specified genetic information apply just as well to parasites and stealth predators as they do to supposed “beneficial” features such as human intelligence or the biological systems that keep us alive.

The latest example comes from scientists at Tunghai University, Taiwan, who have shown that a sheet-web spider has evolved a particularly nasty trick for luring fireflies to their deaths. The method is brutally simple: once the spider captures a firefly, it keeps it alive, so its flashing courtship signal continues to glow. Instead of attracting a mate, the unfortunate insect draws more fireflies into the spider’s web—and to certain death.

To an evolutionary biologist, this is a fascinating demonstration of how a mindless natural process can hone behaviour in whatever direction produces more offspring, regardless of whether humans judge the outcome “good” or “evil.”

This image, which combines infrared data from the James Webb Space Telescope with submillimetre observations from the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA), shows the doughnut-shaped torus and interconnected bubbles of dusty gas that surround the Butterfly Nebula’s central star. The torus is oriented vertically and nearly edge-on from our perspective, and it intersects with bubbles of gas enclosing the star. The bubbles appear bright red in this image, illuminated by the light from helium and neon gas. Outside the bubbles, jets traced by emission from ionised iron shoot off in opposite directions.

ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, M. Matsuura, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), N. Hirano, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb) (CC BY 4.0).

An optical image view of the Butterfly Nebula, NGC 6302, captured by the Hubble space telescope.

Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, K. Noll, J. Kastner, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb).

JWST observations of Butterfly Nebula reveal how cosmic dust is made in space - News - Cardiff University

There’s a double whammy for creationists in this new paper. Not only does it expose the Bible’s description of the Universe as laughably naïve, but it also shows how organic molecules — in the form of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) — that may have formed the basis of life on the prebiotic Earth, could have been created in deep space and later incorporated into our planet either at its formation or via impacts from space debris.

The paper, by a team of scientists led by Cardiff University, has just been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the researchers reveal how stars generate space dust, organic material, and the fundamental building blocks from which rocky planets like Earth are formed. Their study focuses on the Butterfly Nebula (NGC 6302), a spectacular stellar remnant.

What Are PAHs?

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are complex organic molecules made of fused benzene rings — essentially arrangements of carbon and hydrogen in hexagonal patterns. On Earth, they are often associated with combustion (for example, in car exhaust fumes, cigarette smoke, or charred food). In space, however, they form naturally in the outflows of dying stars and in the dense molecular clouds that give rise to new stars and planetary systems.

PAHs are of great interest to astrobiologists because they are thought to be among the earliest organic compounds to have existed in the Universe. They can undergo chemical transformations to form more complex molecules, including amino acids and nucleotides, which are the essential components of life. Their presence in meteorites and interstellar dust suggests that the seeds of life were widespread long before Earth even formed.

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.

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