Refuting Creationism - How Earth Was Really Made - No God-Magic Needed

High-energy Venus Impacts

An SwRI-led team compared the early impact history of Venus and Earth, determining that Venus experienced higher-energy impacts that created a superheated core. Models show these conditions could create Venus’ extended volcanism and younger surface.

Evolution of Terrestrial Planets
A new SwRI-led paper highlights the scientific progress made in understanding the evolution of terrestrial planets, including the effects of late large impacts on pre-existing modes of tectonics. For instance, the Earth experienced transient subduction, when one tectonic plate slides beneath another. Because Venus’ surface is covered by a single plate, a high-velocity impact led to a superheated core and long-lived volcanism. On Mars, a large, low-velocity impact facilitated variations in its hemispheres. Impacts also modify the atmospheres of terrestrial planets in profound ways, including eliminating or supplementing existing gases.

SwRI-led paper summarizes notable progress in understanding the evolution of the terrestrial planets | Southwest Research Institute

Creationist myths describe Earth as a flat world under a dome at the centre of the Universe, made just a few thousand years ago. The real story is far more extraordinary: a fragile chain of chance events and natural forces that made life possible on this small rocky planet.

Earth orbits an ordinary star on the edge of the Milky Way, one of billions in one of trillions of galaxies. That it exists at all is down to gravity, physics, and luck. Out of this came a beautiful world teeming with life—including one species able to marvel at the Universe and ask how it all began, and in it's fearful, ignorant infancy, make up the myths to explain it that now pass for science in some scientifically backward cultures.

One early collision with a smaller planetoid gave us the Moon, tides, and seasons; this or a later impact may, according to this study, be responsible for tectonic plates, giving us a forever changing, dynamic planet, driving evolutionary divergence. While not required for life to appear, these events shaped the planet into the diverse, life-rich world we know today.

Refuting Creationism - Look How Wrong The Bible's Authors Were!

Fly through Gaia's 3D map of stellar nurseries

So that creationists can rehearse their excuses for dismissing science and retaining their childish delusion that Genesis is an accurate description of the universe, written or inspired by an omniscient creator god, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, here are some recent images and videos from the European Space Agency (ESA).

They were created from the most accurate three-dimensional map of star-formation regions in our Milky Way galaxy, based on data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope. The star-formation region that is mapped out (contoured by a circle) reaches out to 4000 light-years from our Sun. The Sun is located at the center of this region. The star-formation map is plotted on an artist impression of our Milky Way, based on Gaia data.. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, S. Payne-Wardenaar, L. McCallum et al (2025)

Unitelligent Design - A Queen Ant Produces Two Different Species of Male Offspring!

Messor ibericus and Messor structor males hatched from eggs laid by the same queen.

Juvé, Y., Lutrat, C., Ha, A. et al (2025).

One queen ant, two species: the discovery that reshapes what ‘family’ means in nature

Creationists use a deliberately fuzzy and flexible definition of “kinds,” shifting its scope whenever it suits their argument. It can be narrowed down to the species level, broadened to a genus or family, or even stretched to encompass an entire order. On occasion, I’ve even seen it expanded to the absurdity of “animal kind,” depending on what the argument requires. This elasticity allows them to maintain the delusion that evolution never happens in the way biologists describe, and to caricature it instead as one species suddenly giving rise to a completely unrelated species in a single step — their parody of so-called “macro-evolution.”

But the case of the Iberian harvester ant (Messor ibericus) presents a real problem for this narrative. Here the definition of “kind” only needs to extend as far as members of a single genus. That still doesn’t rescue creationists, because this ant has evolved a remarkably complex reproductive strategy that undermines any notion of intelligent design and raises awkward questions about what a “kind” even is. Queens of M. ibericus can only reproduce successfully with males of a related species, Messor structor.

Such interspecies dependence is not unknown in either the animal or plant kingdoms, but M. ibericus takes it a step further. When a queen produces male offspring — instead of the usual sterile female workers — those males may be either M. ibericus or M. structor. In other words, she is doing precisely what creationists constantly demand as “evidence for evolution” - one species producing offspring of another species.

Refuting Creationism - Observed Evolution of Plants on A Volcanic Island

P. oleracea on Nishinoshima

Nishinoshima Island

Scientists trace origins of now extinct plant population from volcanically active Nishinoshima | EurekAlert!

Scientisst have a remarkable way to verify one of the fundamental principles of evolutionary biology - the 'founder effect' and how it contributes to allopatric speciation - a process that is hotly disputed by creationists who dogmatically refuse to accept any evidence for evolutionary diversification.

The great thing about science is that its theories can be tested and verified. Even better, they are frequently shown to be correct through evidence. This is in stark contrast to faith as a means of determining truth. Faith is not based on evidence, so it cannot be independently verified; in logical terms, it is unfalsifiable.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be falsified, but rather that there are no tests which, if failed, would demonstrate it false. Take, for example, the creationist claim that “God did it.” How could such a claim ever be tested? With no objective evidence beyond subjective feelings, anecdotes, or alleged personal experiences, there is nothing to examine. And if such a claim were challenged, it could always be shielded with further untestable assertions: “God is untestable,” “God is beyond science,” and so on.

By contrast, evolutionary biology offers theories that are not only testable but also repeatedly confirmed. One such theory is the founder effect. This occurs when a new habitat is colonised by only a small sample of a parent population. Two important factors follow:

1. The new sample is unlikely to perfectly represent the genetic diversity of the parent population, so it will begin with a different allele profile.
2. For the new colony to succeed, the founding individuals must already be somewhat pre-adapted to the environment. Those less well-suited are eliminated, while those better adapted survive and reproduce. Over successive generations, this natural selection creates a population increasingly fit for its new environment. The result is a wave of adaptation and divergence from the parent stock — the essence of allopatric speciation.

The natural “laboratory” for studying this process exists in the form of Nishinoshima, a remote Japanese island subject to frequent volcanic eruptions. Each eruption wipes the island clean of vegetation, effectively resetting the ecosystem and creating opportunities for colonisation by founder populations from elsewhere.

By careful genetic analysis of the, now extinct, Nishinoshima population of Portulaca oleracea, the team were able to show that the parent population was on nearby Chichijima, another volcanic island, however, the Nishinoshima population differed markedly from the parent population, and were derived from a very small founder population. In addition, there was evidence of genetic drift, which is much more significant in a small population than in a larger one - exactly as the Theory of Evolution predicts. Genetic drift is the process where, by chance alone, a neutral allele can increase or decrease in the population. The smaller the population the more quickly an allele can progress to fixation in the population or be eliminated. (for more detail on this, see the Introduction to my book, Twenty Reasons To Reject Creationism: Understanding Evolution (ISBN 13: ISBN-13 : 979-8306548166).

Now, researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have reported the results of this natural experiment, and they align precisely with what evolutionary theory predicts.

Refuting Creationism - Beyond The Comprehension Of The Bible's Authors

The 'Cigar Galaxy' (Messier 82). A close-in view of the centre of galaxy M82. Bright, bluish light radiating from the centre is due to stars actively forming there. A thick lane of gas, black in the centre and red around the edges, crosses the centre and blocks much of the light. Thinner strands and clumps of reddish dust cover much of the rest of the view.

The smouldering heart of a celestial cigar | ESA/Hubble

Location of the Cigar Nebula (M82).

Here we have yet another image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released by the European Space Agency—not to belittle the Bible’s account of creation in Genesis, though that happens automatically. The biblical description reflects the view of a pre-scientific people who imagined a flat Earth under a solid dome, with stars as tiny lights stuck to it and the Sun and Moon moving across the sky like lamps hung for our benefit. It reads exactly like the report of someone told to look up and describe what they see without any understanding of what lies beyond.

Modern astronomy shows us something utterly different. The universe is not a small stage with a few lights above it, but a vast, dynamic cosmos shaped by natural processes. Stars are born, live, and die in titanic cycles of creation and destruction; galaxies collide and merge; black holes sculpt their surroundings with unimaginable power.

This particular image, ESA’s Picture of the Week, captures the so-called Cigar Galaxy (Messier 82), a starburst galaxy just 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear). Here we see the turbulent heart of a galaxy where new stars are forming in great swathes, driving winds of gas and dust thousands of light-years into space.

The contrast could not be greater: a childlike tale of a sky-dome with a few lights versus the grandeur of a living universe billions of years old and on a scale our ancestors could never have imagined. Contrast the Bible's description with that of ESA's description of the image:

Refuting Creationism - Origins of the People of Papua New-Guinea

Male Huli tribe member in Tari area of Papua New Guinea in traditional clothes and face paint.

Image Credit: By Amy Nichole Harris / Shutterstock

New AI Study Clarifies the Origins of Papua New Guineans | University of Tartu

A team of researchers led by Dr. Mayukh Mondal of the Centre for Genomics, Evolution & Medicine, Institute of Genomics, University of Tartu, Estonia, have used AI-powered demographic modelling to estimate the genetic ancestry of the people of Papua New Guinea (PNG), whose origins have long been debated.

Papua New Guineans have physical features that differ noticeably from many Asian populations, and some superficial similarities to sub-Saharan Africans have led to speculation that they might descend from a very early migration out of Africa, predating most other non-African Homo sapiens. This new study strongly challenges that hypothesis: it attributes PNG’s genetic distinctiveness instead to a substantial Denisovan admixture followed by a prolonged period of isolation, a severe population bottleneck, and slower population growth.

According to the creationist mythologies, all human beings alive today descend from Adam and Eve—or, in some versions, from Noah and his family after a global flood. If that were literally true, then all living humans would share a very narrow genetic base: mitochondrial DNA (passed via the maternal line) would be limited to a very small number of variants, and all males would share essentially the same Y-chromosome (barring mutation) tracing back to the same male ancestor.

However, the observable facts are that human genetic diversity is much richer than those narratives predict. The mitochondrial DNA lineages in living people trace back to multiple distinct haplogroups with divergence times of tens to hundreds of thousands of years within Africa and beyond into archaic ancestors; similarly, Y-chromosome diversity indicates many lineages. Our human genome tells a far more complex story: long periods of evolution in isolation, multiple migrations, re-mixing, and interbreeding with related hominin species.

The same applies to other species which creationists mythology insists are the descendants of a small number of survivors of the same genocidal flood. Few living species show evidence of such a narrow genetic bottleneck, which would probably have resulted in far too much inbreeding resulting in extinction for most of them.

All non-African humans today are descended from the major “Out-of-Africa” (OOA) migration(s) of Homo sapiens. As populations moved into Eurasia, they interbred first with Neanderthals, then with Denisovans. Underlying all this, there is also the possibility of genetic contributions from even earlier human migrations (e.g. H. erectus) into the ancestors of Neanderthals, Denisovans, or earlier modern humans. Given the evidence that hominin populations often interbred when they came into contact, it would be surprising if there were no admixture between H. erectus (or similar early lineages) and the predecessors of Neanderthals and Denisovans (often thought to include H. heidelbergensis or H. antecessor).

Refuting Creationism - 242-Million-Year-Old 'Transitional' Lizard Fossil

Agriodontosaurus helsbypetrae reconstruction

Image credit: Bob Nicholls

Agriodontosaurus helsbypetrae fossil (BRSUG 29950-14) in its sandstone matrix.

September: World's oldest lizard | News and features | University of Bristol

Here is yet another fossil that will give creationists a lot to think about. It’s a fossil of the earliest known lepidosaur — the group that includes lizards, snakes, and the tuatara of New Zealand. It is ∼242 million years old and was found in a sandstone deposit in Devon, in southwest Britain. It was picked up on a beach in Devon in 2015, and has been examined by a team from the University of Bristol.

At that age it is very close to the stem of the order Lepidosauria. However, it already displays some “advanced” features, and some of the assumed primitive features are already absent.

One of the primitive features often discussed is the lower temporal bar — a bony rod running between the cheek and the jaw hinge—which is present in the tuatara but absent (“open”) in modern lizards and snakes. This opening gives greater flexibility to the skull, allowing more motion for feeding. Also, many modern lizards have palatal teeth (teeth on the roof of the mouth) which help grip prey.

The fossil skull (from Agriodontosaurus helsbypetrae) has no skull hinge and no palatal teeth, but it does have an open lower temporal bar. In other words, this is a transitional species: it has a mosaic of primitive and derived traits—a pattern Darwin predicted, but which creationists generally dismiss. To creationists, fossils are often denied, mischaracterised, or claimed to be “just as they were created a few thousand years ago.” But this specimen is clear evidence of evolutionary change.

Meanwhile, the evidence of fossil ages—dating back hundreds of millions of years—refutes the idea of a young Earth (~ thousands of years), which cannot be reconciled with the geological, biological, and radiometric data.

None of that undermines the real discovery: an early lepidosaur with a mosaic of features lived in what is now Devon, UK, in the Middle Triassic, about 242 million years ago. As always, in rational enquiry, solid evidence must take priority over magical or mythological claims.

Refuting Creationism - How Rodent Thumbnails Allowed Them to Be So Successful.

Thumbnail of the kangaroo rat.

Rafaela V. Missagia et al. (2025)

Most rodents have thumbnails instead of claws. It might help explain how they took over the world. | EurekAlert!

The discovery that ancient rodents evolved a thumbnail in place of a claw helps explain why they are the most successful mammalian order on the planet. That small anatomical change opened up a whole new range of ecological niches, triggering an explosive radiation of new rodent species.

This fact alone should worry creationists who cling to a child-like understanding of science. Their favourite avoidance tactic—when pressed for an example of evolution—is to retreat hastily down their rabbit hole with the familiar cry: “Ah! But that’s not real, ‘macro’-evolution. That’s just variation within a ‘kind’.”

Of course, creationists are consistently reticent about defining what they mean by “macro-evolution,” or explaining how the processes that supposedly produce it differ from those of normal evolution. In scientific terms, evolution is simply a change in allele frequencies in a population over time. There is no separate mechanism for “macro” versus “micro.”

So here’s the awkward question for them: was the evolution of the thumbnail from a claw a case of “macro-evolution” or not?

According to the new research, led by Rafaela Missagi of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, with collaborators from the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago, USA), Northwestern University (Chicago, USA), and the Natural History Museum (London, UK), this change was pivotal. It allowed rodents to diversify into countless species—just as the elongation of bat fingers into wings enabled bats to radiate into hundreds of species. Crucially, in both cases no “new structures” were created from nothing; existing ones were repurposed.

This sort of question usually sends creationists scurrying for cover, chanting Bible verses as they go.

Unlike creationist dogma, which collapses under this kind of scrutiny, the new findings provide yet another vindication of evolutionary theory. Evolution predicts that when a new function arises, it can open up new ecological opportunities, leading to rapid diversification. Not because there is a plan, but because natural selection now has something new to work on.

Wonderful Planet - Scilly Isles Cameras Reveal Life In UK Coastal Waters

Scilly Isles cameras give glimpse of ‘natural’ UK waters - News

Reef habitat type.

Photo: Dr Owen M. Exeter.

This post is a bit of a change from my usual fare, where I’m busy pulling apart the pseudo-science of creationism with its reliance on magic and one ancient book of myths from a small Bronze Age tribe. Today, instead, I want to share something more uplifting: a glimpse of the rich and colourful life thriving in Britain’s coastal waters.

The footage comes from the Isles of Scilly, a protected area lying just off the tip of Cornwall in the far southwest of Britain. Thanks to the Gulf Stream, these islands enjoy a climate that feels almost Mediterranean — a rare treat for the UK!

A team from the University of Exeter’s Centre for Ecology and Conservation set up remote cameras around the islands to see what they could capture. This was a proof-of-concept project designed to test new ways of monitoring coastal ecosystems. The results didn’t disappoint. Their findings have just been published open-access in the Ecological Society of America’s journal Ecological Applications.

Malevolent Design - How Our Gut Microbiome is 'Designed' to Destroy Our Kidneys - Malevolence or Evolution?

Kidney fibrosis linked to molecule made by gut bacteria – News Bureau

Mostly, our gut microbes are beneficial or at least neutral because we have co-evolved and reached an accommodation. One benefit we derive from their presence is that they make life difficult for potentially harmful organisms, if only by monopolising the available resources and occupying the niches in our gut.

There is a downside, of course, as in any evolved system, which is inevitably a compromise and can tip over into pathology under certain circumstances. But overall, because the disadvantages are more than compensated for by the benefits, the system has evolved and been maintained.

However, a newly discovered downside is that a Staphylococcus species may be implicated in one of the serious complications of diabetes mellitus (DM) — kidney fibrosis and ultimately kidney failure. The discovery was made by researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Mie University in Japan, co-led by Professor Isaac Cann of Illinois and Professor Esteban Gabazza of Mie University. The bacterium is believed to produce corisin — a small peptide — which is found at high levels in patients with diabetic kidney fibrosis. The researchers have just published their findings, open access, in Nature Communications.

For creationists, this sort of discovery is always a problem, one they normally ignore or blame on “Eve’s sin,” revealing ID creationism for what it is — Bible literalism in a lab coat — which must retreat into mystical theology when faced with problems ID cannot address. Yet creationists also claim that their omniscient creator god is personally responsible for the design of organisms such as Staphylococcus. That would mean it knowingly endowed Staphylococcus with the genes to make corisin, along with all the harmful consequences.

Taking William A. Dembski’s “complex specified genetic information,” which supposedly produces a specific outcome, at face value, the staphylococcal genes are equally “proof” of intelligent design. And so we end up with an unresolved paradox for ID creationism: “complex specified” genes that do us harm, standing as evidence of malevolent design.

Refuting Creationism - A Cheesy Tease For Creationists - Observed Evolution in Cheese-Rind Fungi

Original green mould.

Evolved white mould several years later.

Cheese Fungi Help Unlock Secrets of Evolution | Tufts Now

Bayley Hazen Blue

Scientists have found a textbook example of evolution in progress—in the very mould used to mature cheese in caves.

“Show me an example of witnessed evolution!” is one of the stock demands from creationists in online debates. But it’s a trick request. No sooner is an example given than they hurriedly shift the goalposts, redefining evolution into a childish caricature. Instead of the real scientific process, they demand to see a cow turn into a whale overnight, or a mouse suddenly grow wings—some grotesque parody of “macro-evolution” that no biologist has ever claimed happens. Ironically, if such nonsense did occur, it would actually falsify the theory of evolution rather than confirm it.

This intellectual dishonesty is the lifeblood of creationist rhetoric. Their arguments only work by preying on scientific illiteracy in their audience, peddling strawmen and false definitions to cover the absence of any evidence for their own claims.

Meanwhile, science continues as it always has, with evolution properly defined as a change in allele frequency in a population’s gene pool over time. And right on cue, another clear demonstration has just been published in Current Biology.

The researchers studied the fungus Penicillium solitum, which is used to ripen cheese, by following its population over eight years in the controlled cave environment of Jasper Hill Farm. By comparing samples collected in 2016 with those taken more recently, they were able to track both visible and genetic changes in the mould over time.

What they found was striking. The rind colour, once a leafy green, had shifted to a chalky white. Genetic analysis showed this was due to repeated mutations in a pigment-producing gene called alb1, which is responsible for melanin production. In the dark, cave-like conditions, melanin offered no advantage, so natural selection favoured lineages that conserved energy by not producing it. The loss of pigment arose independently several times, through different mutations—including both point mutations and the disruption of the gene by mobile DNA elements.

This is evolution at its most direct: heritable changes in the genetic make-up of a population, producing visible differences in response to environmental conditions. It illustrates a well-known principle called relaxed selection—when a trait is no longer useful, natural selection no longer preserves it, and the trait may fade away. In this case, the shift also altered the appearance and sensory qualities of the cheese, underlining how evolutionary change can have immediate, practical consequences.

Refuting Creationism - DNA Reveals How Mastodons Had Diversified in North America - A Hundred Thousand Years Before 'Creation Week'

Mastodons lived in Arctic and Subarctic North America during an interglacial period when the area was covered in forests and wetlands.

Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Ancient DNA reveals deeply complex Mastodon family and repeated migrations driven by climate change - Brighter World

Creationism is rooted in Bronze Age mythology and rests on a single source, the Bible, whose only claim to authority is its own demonstrably false assertion that it is the inerrant word of a creator god.

This is a claim anyone could make, and it collapses when its statements are compared with the observable world.

For example, biblical genealogies, beginning with a mythical first couple created from dust without ancestors, imply that Earth is only a few thousand years old. In reality, geological and astronomical evidence shows that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and the fossil record demonstrates that life was flourishing hundreds of millions of years before the Bible implies creation began.

One striking piece of evidence comes from an analysis of mastodon DNA, which shows that between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago mastodons in North America had already diversified into several genetically distinct populations.

Refuting Creationism - Dinosaur Eggs From 85 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Egg clutch sampled for chronological studies.

Credit Dr. Bi Zhao

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Dinosaur egg fossil sampled for geochronology.

Credit: Dr Bi Zhao

Newly dated 85-million-year-old dino eggs could improve understanding of Cretaceous climate

The dating of a clutch of fossil dinosaur eggs will leave creationists scrambling for excuses to dismiss the evidence and cling to the childish notion that Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old, created ex nihilo by magic, with all extant and extinct species brought into existence without ancestors just a few days later. In other words, this discovery is yet another small addition to the mountain of evidence showing that the biblical creation story was the work of ignorant Bronze Age people trying to make sense of the world around them, not the word of an omniscient creator god who would have known better.

An added problem for creationists is that the research team used a new method of dating the eggs based on measuring when the eggshell itself formed, rather than relying solely on dating the rock in which the eggs were embedded. The difficulty with the latter approach is that, while it gives the age of the surrounding rock, the mineral grains in that rock may predate the eggs and could have been transported there by water or wind.

The new technique is conceptually similar to the uranium–lead (U–Pb) method used to date zircon crystals in volcanic tuff. Tiny amounts of uranium, which readily substitute into the crystal lattice, are incorporated when the zircon forms, but lead is excluded. Over time, uranium isotopes decay into stable isotopes of lead. Thus, any lead present within a zircon crystal must have come from radioactive decay, and by measuring the ratio of uranium to lead isotopes, scientists can calculate the crystal’s age with high precision.

A very similar process occurs in the carbonate of dinosaur eggshells: uranium is incorporated during formation, but lead is excluded. Measuring uranium–lead isotope ratios in the shell carbonate therefore provides a direct and highly accurate age for the eggs themselves, leaving little room for error.

Refuting Creationism - A Picture of Reality Far Removed From The Childish Tale In The Bible

LMC N44C

ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray, J. Maíz Apellániz

LMC N44C
Stars in a star cluster shine brightly blue, with four-pointed spikes radiating from them. The centre shows a small, crowded group of stars while a larger group lies out of view on the left. The nebula is mostly thick, smoky clouds of gas, lit up in blue tones by the stars. Clumps of dust hover before and around the stars; they are mostly dark, but lit around their edges where the starlight erodes them.

ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray, J. Maíz Apellániz

Cloudy cluster | ESA/Hubble

This week’s NASA/European Space Agency (ESA) Hubble picture of the week is a stunning cloudy starscape from an impressive star cluster. The scene lies within the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy about 160,000 light-years away in the southern constellations Dorado and Mensa. With a mass equal to 10–20% of that of the Milky Way, the LMC is the largest of the dozens of small galaxies orbiting our own.

The light captured in this image began its journey 160,000 years ago, when early Homo sapiens were making their first tentative steps beyond Africa, following in the paths of Homo erectus and encountering Neanderthals, who had already lived in Eurasia for some 100,000 years.

That very distance — 160,000 light-years — alone undermines the biblical timeline. The contrast between this breathtaking glimpse of just a tiny fragment of the universe and the childishly naïve picture painted in Genesis is a near-superfluous refutation of the idea that its description came from an all-knowing creator.

Refuting Creationism - Tool-Making Humans In Indonesia - 1 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Stone tools from Sulawesi, dated to over 1.04mya, scale bars are 10mm.Credit: M W Moore

Credit: M W Moore

Map of Southeast Asia showing the location of Calio in southern Sulawesi.

Oldest evidence of humans on ‘Hobbit’s’ island neighbour discovered – who they were remains a mystery - Griffith News

Archaeologists led by Budianto Hakim of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) and Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution have uncovered evidence of tool-making on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi dating back 1.04 million years. The identity of the toolmakers remains unknown, as no hominin fossils have yet been found on the island. Their discovery has just been published open-access in Nature.

The most likely candidates are Homo erectus or a descendant population that adapted to Sulawesi’s distinctive environment. The island lies close to Flores, home of the diminutive ‘Hobbit’ (H. floresiensis), thought to have evolved from H. erectus through island dwarfism, a process that also produced the miniature elephants of Flores. A related discovery was made in 2019 on Luzon in the Philippines, where H. luzonensis—another likely offshoot of H. erectus—was identified. It is therefore entirely plausible that H. erectus, or one of its evolutionary branches, was present and making tools on Sulawesi more than a million years ago.

For creationists, such finds are troublesome because they align seamlessly with evolutionary theory, showing hominins branching, adapting, and diversifying in different environments, just as Darwin and Wallace first described in 1859. They also highlight the profound role of environment in shaping evolutionary outcomes.

For science, the discovery is particularly significant because it implies that an early hominin was capable of undertaking sea crossings across the formidable ‘Wallace Line’—a biogeographic boundary that long isolated the fauna of Australasia from mainland Asia by preventing the natural dispersal of terrestrial animals.

'Refuting Creationism - Scientists Have Found Strong Evidence of Life On Mars!

The Jezero Crater as it may have looked billions of years ago, when it was a lake.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

'Potential biosignatures' found in ancient Mars lake | Imperial News | Imperial College London

Scientists analysing data from NASA’s Perseverance rover have reported a tantalising discovery from Jezero Crater on Mars: rocks rich in minerals and chemical patterns that could represent potential biosignatures — the traces left behind by ancient life. The findings, published by an international team led from Imperial College London, point to the remains of an ancient lake where conditions may once have been favourable for microbial life to take hold.

The evidence comes from mudstones, clays, silica, iron-phosphate and iron-sulphide nodules, along with carbon compounds that appear to have undergone redox reactions. On Earth, such processes are often associated with biology, though the researchers are careful to stress that non-biological explanations are still possible. It will take the return of rock samples to Earth, with far more powerful laboratory techniques, before firm conclusions can be reached.

Refuting Creationism - How Bronze Age Brittons Refute the Bible Flood Tale

East Chisenbury midden under excavation.

Credit: Cardiff University

Landscape location of All Cannings Cross midden.

Credit: Cardiff University.

The Age of Feasting: Late Bronze Age networks developed through massive food festivals, with animals brought from far and wide | EurekAlert!

Archaeologists from Cardiff University have published the largest study of its kind into animal remains from Late Bronze Age Britain, and their findings reveal a surprisingly complex picture of feasting, farming, and far-reaching social networks. The research, published in iScience, reports on multi-isotope analysis of more than 3,500 bones from six prehistoric middens in Wiltshire and the Thames Valley. These vast heaps of discarded remains are the archaeological traces of large communal feasts held some 3,000 years ago.

The team found that the animals consumed—cattle, pigs, and sheep—were not all raised locally. Some were brought from considerable distances, suggesting both a sophisticated agricultural economy and a culture in which travel and exchange linked communities across southern Britain. Such large-scale gatherings, the researchers conclude, were central to forging alliances, maintaining social bonds, and reinforcing ritual practices in the closing centuries of the Bronze Age.

In other words, these middens are the material testimony of thriving societies in Britain whose development ran seamlessly from the Neolithic into the Bronze Age, without any trace of a catastrophic global flood. If Genesis were literal history, such sites could not exist. But they do. The Cardiff findings are therefore another piece of hard archaeological evidence that exposes the biblical flood as a myth, not a record of real events.

Far from being isolated farming villages, Late Bronze Age communities in Britain were enmeshed in a dynamic cultural landscape with trade and ritual at its heart. I have previously written about the political control and economic development in Britain being sufficient to command and supply the manpower needed to undertake massive civil engineering projects such as building Stonehenge and Silbury Hill. Silbury Hill alone took an estimates 18 million man-hours to build (i.e. 500 men working for 15 years) - a level of political and economic development which would have been impossible within the Bible's framework.

And here lies the striking problem for biblical literalism. If we take the chronology given in Genesis at face value, Noah’s Flood is supposed to have occurred around 2348 BCE. By that reckoning, all humans and animals on earth, save those aboard the Ark, were annihilated. The Late Bronze Age middens, however, date to between 1200 and 800 BCE—well after the supposed global deluge. The isotope evidence shows continuity of local herds, supplemented by long-distance transport of animals, not a sudden repopulation from a single Middle Eastern source.

Creationism Refuted - Scientists See A Planet Being Born - No God(s) Involved

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A growing baby planet photographed for first time in a ring of darkness | University of Arizona News

Astronomers led by University of Arizona’s Laird Close, alongside Leiden Observatory graduate student Richelle van Capelleveen, have directly observed a planet in the making — WISPIT 2b — nested within the rings of a protoplanetary disk around a young Sun-like star in the constellation Aquila, about 430 light-years away. The planet is confirmed to be about five times Jupiter’s mass, actively accreting gas, and clearing a prominent gap in the disk. This observation aligns almost perfectly with the long-standing scientific model of planet formation—and stands in stark contrast to the biblical narrative of instant land-mass creation, involving no orbit, disk, or extended evolutionary process.

This discovery will be depressing news for creationists, especially when contrasted with the biblical account of Earth’s creation — where magic words allegedly call a small, flat land mass into existence consisting of a few square miles of land around the Canaanite Hills, with no hint of orbiting a star or forming within a protoplanetary disk. The stark mismatch extends beyond metaphor — the actual physical process astronomers observe has no room for magic, and more importantly, aligns precisely with predictions from scientific theories of planetary formation.

Refuting Creationism - How The Placenta is the Product of Sub-Optimal Evolutionary Compromise.

Cooperation and Competition: How Fetal and Maternal Cells Evolved to Work Together - UConn Today

Creationists often imagine the human body as the handiwork of a supreme intelligence, carefully engineered for optimal function. Yet the reality revealed by biology is far messier. Our anatomy and physiology are riddled with compromises, inefficiencies, and vulnerabilities that make far more sense as the outcomes of evolutionary processes than as the products of intelligent design. I give multiple examples of the results of these sub-optimal evolutionary compromises in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design. One striking example lies in the complex relationship between mother and foetus during pregnancy, where cooperation and conflict are locked in an evolutionary arms race.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Associate Professor Kshitiz of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Connecticut, together with postdoctoral fellows Yasir Suhail and Wenqiang Du, Gunter Wagner of Yale, and Junaid Afzal of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), have shown how the interface between mother and foetus in the placenta is the product of evolutionary arms races—not the result of intelligent design, as creationists like to imagine.

Firstly, there is the need for the developing foetus to obtain an adequate supply of nutrients, which requires its placental cells to penetrate into the lining of the mother’s uterus.

Secondly, there is the need for the mother to defend herself against invasion by what her body recognises as a ‘foreign’ organism, part of her evolved immune response. Finally, there is the overarching evolutionary imperative of successful reproduction, which entails the birth of healthy offspring.

What the team discovered is that the inevitable evolutionary compromise involves the foetus’s placental cells producing a protein that suppresses the mother’s immune response. This suppression works only because the mother’s cells have evolved to cooperate, allowing the foetal protein to function.

In other words, the mother’s cells have evolved a strategy for permitting the foetus to dampen her immune system—an immune system that itself evolved in the ancestors of placental mammals. This situation can hardly be credited to the act of a supreme intelligence.

Refuting Creationism - What Dinosaur Teeth Tell Us About Life - From 150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Giraffatitan

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Photo of teeth in a jaw section of Giraffatitan from Tanzania (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, MB.R.2180.20.5). The light-coloured area is the dentin, which has been exposed by tooth wear.

Image Credit: Jan Kersten, Freie Universität Berlin, Fachrichtung Paläontologie.

What Dinosaur Teeth Reveal About Life 150 Million Years Ago - Information for Media and Journalists | Freie Universität Berlin

An international team of researchers, led by Dr Daniela E. Winkler (postdoctoral researcher at Kiel University), Dr Emanuel Tschopp (visiting scientist at the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change and research associate at Freie Universität Berlin), and André Saleiro (PhD student at NOVA University Lisbon), has shed new light on the diet and movements of the 150-million-year-old long-necked dinosaur, Giraffatitan.

By using high-resolution microscopy to examine patterns of microscopic wear on fossilised teeth, the team could reconstruct not only what Giraffatitan ate, but also how it foraged and where it roamed. The results show that these enormous sauropods fed on a wide range of vegetation, from soft leaves to tougher plant material, indicating a flexible feeding strategy. The wear patterns also suggest that the animals migrated across different habitats, rather than remaining in one area, allowing them to exploit seasonal changes in plant availability. This paints a picture of a highly adaptable browser, capable of sustaining its gigantic size by ranging widely across the Jurassic landscape.

In many ways, their lifestyle resembles that of today’s elephants or giraffes, which travel long distances to reach food and switch between different types of vegetation depending on what is available. Like elephants stripping branches or giraffes plucking leaves from the tops of trees, Giraffatitan used its immense neck to access food that other animals could not, helping to reduce competition and maintain the balance of its ecosystem.

They also represent an interesting example of convergent evolution where two unrelated species, in this case a dinosaur and giraffes, converge on the same solution to the same environmental problem - how to reach the leaves at the top of tall trees, so avoiding competition with other browsing animals - long necks and long front legs.

As ever, such discoveries are impossible to reconcile with creationist notions of a young Earth, supposedly only 6,000–10,000 years old. Yet this is merely one more example of the widening gulf between the reality uncovered by science and the superstitions preserved in ancient texts. These texts, after all, were written by Bronze Age pastoralists who imagined the universe as a flat disc beneath a dome, bounded by the few square miles they could walk in a couple of days across the Canaanite hills.

Refuting Creationism - A Potted History of Egypt Shows No Sign Of A Global Flood

Pottery vessel in which the Nuwayrat individual was discovered.

Morez Jacobs, A. et al. (2025). Nature (CC-BY 4.0)

We decoded the oldest genetic data from an Egyptian; a man buried around 4,500 years ago – what it told us

Geographic location of the Nuwayrat cemetery (red dot) and the previously sequenced Third Intermediate Period individuals from Abusir el-Meleq²⁰ (purple diamond).

Round about the time when the Bible’s timeline claims there was a global genocidal flood deep enough to cover the highest mountains, the body of a man was being interred in a large earthenware pot in a tomb in Egypt. If there had been a flood such as that described in the Bible, this burial would have been swept away or at least buried under a deep layer of sediment containing the jumbled remains of animals and plants killed in the flood — including species from disconnected landmasses, since there would have been no barriers to how far they could have been transported by the floodwaters.

Yet none of this appears to be true. Egyptian civilisation, which can trace its origins back to around 5,500 BCE, continued unbroken, with no record of a flood other than the annual Nile inundations on which their agriculture depended, until Egypt was absorbed first into the Greek Empire of Alexander and then into the Roman Empire. There is quite simply no record of a global flood in any Egyptian sources, and no evidence that the country was repopulated by people radiating out from a centre somewhere in the Middle East who could miraculously read and write in the hieroglyphics used by pre-“Flood” Egyptians.

Instead, we now have the genetic evidence of the man’s DNA, which tells a story of Egyptian origins that includes both North African and Mesopotamian ancestry.

How the remains of this pot burial were discovered and analysed is the subject of an open-access paper in Nature by an international team of archaeologists led by Dr Adeline Morez Jacobs, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padua, Italy, and a visiting lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, UK.

Dr Morez has also described the research and its significance in an open-access article in The Conversation, in the form of an interview. This article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Refuting Creationism - Scientists Recover Ancient Bacterial DNA - On Million-Year-Old Mammoth Teeth

Steppe Mammoths

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Ancient mammoth remains yield the world's oldest host-associated bacterial DNA - Stockholm University

Parasite–host relationships are a nightmare for creationists. Their usual escape hatch is “The Fall”, but that undermines the Discovery Institute’s claim that intelligent design is science rather than Bible-literalist dogma in a lab coat. It also raises the obvious question: if parasites only appeared 6,000–10,000 years ago, how did they spread so quickly—and why do we find fossil evidence of parasitism millions of years old?

Creationists cope by dismissing science as a conspiracy, waving away radiometric dating, or pushing myths such as dinosaur fossils being “carbon-dated” [sic] to a few thousand years old. So creationism persists, despite the vast amount of evidence against it, by a combination of wilful ignorance, disinformation and a lack of critical thinking skills.

Now creationists must also ignore new research from Stockholm University, where scientists isolated bacterial DNA from the teeth of woolly and steppe mammoths. They showed these bacteria evolved into the ancestors of those infecting modern elephants—evidence of parasites a million years before “Creation Week”, and of co-evolution continuing right up to today’s elephants, the descendants of those mammoths.

Incidentally, neither mammoths nor modern elephants are mentioned in the Bible, reflecting the parochial ignorance of its authors - a fact often overlooked in depictions of animals boarding Noah's Ark, which usually includes a pair of elephants!

Refuting Creationism - How Baby Pterosaurs Met Their Death - 150 Million Years Before "Eve's Sin"

An artist’s impression of a tiny Pterodactylus hatchling struggling against a raging tropical storm, inspired by fossil discoveries.

Artwork by Rudolf Hima.

Lucky II, another hatchling Pterodactylus, preserved as a part and partial counterpart under UV light. Like the other individual, it has a fractured wing, providing rare insight into how even the youngest pterosaurs experienced injuries.

150-million-year post-mortem reveals baby pterosaurs perished in a violent storm | News | University of Leicester

The Bible hints at the notion that human death only entered the world through "The Fall," as seen in Romans 5:12 and 1 Corinthians 15:22; however, it says nothing about the possibility of plant or animal death prior to that. Setting aside the tautology that humans cannot die before being created, some creationist fundamentalists regard this as a profound New Testament revelation absent from Genesis, inferring that no death whatsoever occurred before the Fall. This interpretation often serves as a psychological counterbalance: death is unpleasant and unexpected in a supposedly perfect, evil-free world.

Creationists need to believe absurdities to cope with believing absurdities.

I'm not concerned about people clinging to absurd delusions for comfort, but what does concern me is the fact, confirmed by recent history, that those capable of believing absurdities can be persuaded to commit atrocities, often underpinned by the very book from which their delusions derive.

In a recent blog post, I mentioned the absurdity of believing that the food consumed by people or animals somehow remained alive through and after digestion. Additionally, the fossil record unequivocally demonstrates that plants and animals died tens to hundreds of millions of years before creationists' "creation week".

Now, paleontologists from the University of Leicester, led by Robert S. H. Smyth, have shed new light on why two juvenile pterosaurs in the 150-million-year-old Solnhofen Limestone of southern Germany died and were preserved in such extraordinary detail. These Solnhofen deposits are known for exquisitely preserved fossils, especially juveniles, but few intact adult remains.

A forensic-style examination revealed broken wing bones on the hatchlings - somewhat ironically nicknamed “Lucky” and “Lucky II” - consistent with storm-induced injuries, possibly from being hurled by powerful winds. These fractures likely prevented flight, causing them to crash into a lagoon, drown, and be rapidly buried by sediment washed in by the same storm—thus preserving them in remarkable fidelity.

These findings explain why juvenile pterosaurs are disproportionately represented in the Solnhofen fossil assemblage: young, relatively flight-inexperienced individuals suffered catastrophic outcomes during storms, while adults—better flyers—were less likely to meet the same fate, and their remains were more likely scavenged or fragmented before preservation.

Creationism Refuted - How Micro-oranisms Acquire New Genetic Information - Millions of Times A Day

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Researchers Quantify Rate of Essential Evolutionary Process - Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences

Researchers at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences (East Boothbay, Maine, USA) have recently quantified a remarkable evolutionary process: a typical marine microorganism acquires and retains approximately 13% of its genes per million years through horizontal (lateral) gene transfer. This rate corresponds to roughly 250 genes exchanged and retained per litre of seawater each day

These transferred genes include those that provide either a selective advantage or are sufficiently neutral to persist via genetic drift—both well-established mechanisms of evolutionary change.

Some creationist arguments misapply Shannon Information Theory, claiming that gaining new genetic information violates the laws of thermodynamics. However, such arguments disregard key biological realities: cells are open systems capable of energy and material exchange; genome duplication and horizontal transfer are well-documented evolutionary processes; and substituting one nucleic acid for another does not create matter ex nihilo - facts of which any qualified biological scientists should be aware.

Furthermore, the successful retention and spread of horizontally acquired genes within microbial genomes provide clear, empirical evidence of Darwinian evolution in action. Although Charles Darwin formulated his theory without the concept of genes — speaking instead of 'heritable traits' — his mechanism of natural selection precisely explains how heritable variations can spread through populations over time.

This study also highlights that microorganisms can evolve not only through mutation and selection but also by acquiring pre-adapted genes from their environment, often from distantly related organisms. Consequently, these newly acquired genes can propagate rapidly within the recipient lineage.

The findings further challenge traditional microbial taxonomy, blurring species boundaries at the genetic level: horizontally transferred genes may function just as effectively in their new hosts as they did in their original genomes, thanks to the universality of underlying molecular machinery (e.g., replication and translation systems).

Refuting Creationism - Why Plant-Mimicking Insects Make a Fool of ID Creationists

Paleoart illustration showing the two species' leaf mimicry
among Anomozamites in the Daohugou biota.

Image by NIGPAS.

Leaf-mimicking orthopteran fossils of Prophalangopsidae from the Daohugou biota.

Image by NIGPAS.

Scientists Discover 165-Ma Jurassic Orthopterans with Leaf Mimicry, First for Co-preserved Insect-Plant Fossils----Chinese Academy of Sciences

When we think of leaf mimicry, we usually picture modern insects like stick insects or katydids blending seamlessly into their surroundings. But new fossil discoveries show that this evolutionary trick is far older than we might imagine. In fact, insects were already disguising themselves as leaves 165 million years ago, during the Jurassic, long before flowering plants even appeared.

Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have uncovered an astonishing fossil example of close mimicry between three species of orthopteran insects—a group that includes grasshoppers, crickets, and katydids — and the leaves of an extinct cycad-like seed-bearing plant, almost certainly the very plant on which they lived. These fossils come from the 165-million-year-old Daohugou Biota of Inner Mongolia, northeastern China.

Instances of defensive mimicry or camouflage are exactly what one would expect from evolution by natural selection. In fact, it would be more surprising if potential prey species hadn’t evolved some form of defence. To an intelligent design advocate, however, such examples are awkward to explain—unless one imagines a forgetful designer who repeatedly undermines his own work. Why design predators that rely on a given prey species for food, and then deliberately design prey that are difficult for those predators to find? An arms race against oneself is hardly the hallmark of an intelligent mind.

And yet, arms races are precisely what we observe throughout the natural world — whether in competition for resources, the struggle for the fittest mate, parasite–host dynamics, or, as in this case, the evolutionary contest between predator and prey.

Refuting Creationism - Evolutionary Divergence and Hybridization in Mediterranean Shearwaters

Critically endangered Balearic shearwater,
Puffinus mauritanicus

Credit: Kirk Zufelt

The Balearic shearwater (Puffinus mauretanicus, above) and the Mediterranean shearwater (Puffinus yelkouan, below) are two shearwater taxa that are genetically similar despite displaying morphological and migratory differences. The new study shows that these two taxa have undergone recurrent episodes of divergence and hybridization during the Pleistocene glacial and interglacial cycles, respectively. This serves as a key example of how hybridization can help preserve genetic diversity and evolutionary potential in threatened taxa.

Credit: Victor Paris

Hybridization between species has been crucial to the survival of Europe’s most threatened seabird - Current events - University of Barcelona

Like the story of human evolution, that of two seabirds in the shearwater family living in the Mediterranean shows a history of divergence, followed by episodes of hybridization and genetic remixing. Normally, from a conservation perspective, hybridization is considered a problem because it can erode the distinctiveness of threatened species, diluting unique traits.

However, in the case of the Mediterranean shearwater (Puffinus yelkouan) and the critically endangered Balearic shearwater (Puffinus mauretanicus), hybridization has had the opposite effect. By introducing genetic diversity into the Balearic shearwater, it may have improved the species’ chances of survival, potentially making the difference between persistence and extinction.

This evolutionary story sits uneasily with the worldview of Bible-literalist creationists. The very fact of species interbreeding undermines the notion of fixed, separately created “kinds.” It also contradicts the idea that a few thousand years ago all life was destroyed in a global flood, followed by a period of hyper-rapid diversification into the species we see today—a process which, according to creationist claims, left no trace in the fossil record. If hybridization had occurred during that supposed burst of post-Flood diversification, it would simply have blurred the lines between “kinds,” creating variation within species rather than producing the multitude of distinct species we observe today. In other words, the evidence shows that life’s history is one of gradual divergence, occasional genetic exchange, and long-term adaptation—not sudden, discrete acts of “special creation.”

A recent study led by Professors Julio Rozas, Marta Riutort, and Jacob González-Solís of the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute of the University of Barcelona (IRBio), together with Joan Ferrer Obiol of the University of Milan, has revealed how this evolutionary pattern unfolded. Using genomic analysis, they showed that the two shearwater species have gone through repeated cycles of divergence and hybridization, largely driven by the glacial–interglacial rhythms of the Pleistocene. Each cycle of isolation and secondary contact left genetic signatures that are still visible today.

The researchers found a clear gradient of genetic differentiation across the Mediterranean, with hybrid populations becoming increasingly common as one moves westwards, culminating in the Balearic Islands of Ibiza and Formentera. Intriguingly, the shearwater population on Menorca is genetically closer to P. yelkouan than to P. mauretanicus, reflecting its history of admixture. Far from being detrimental, this interbreeding has enriched the Balearic shearwater’s genome, reducing inbreeding risks and helping to preserve adaptive traits that may otherwise have been lost.

Malevolent Design - How The Poxvirus is 'Intelligently Designed' To Rapidly Multiply

A Survival Kit for Smallpox Viruses - Universität Würzburg

The tRNA ensures the cohesion of the polymerase and the associated factors; without it, they would not arrange themselves in this way.

Image: Clemens Grimm.

Researchers at Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg (JMU) have discovered that poxviruses have developed a unique strategy to multiply rapidly after infecting a host cell. They achieve this by assembling a large protein complex with the help of a transfer RNA (tRNA) molecule. Remarkably, this is the first known example of a ‘chaperone’ function being carried out by a tRNA rather than a protein. Each component of the assembly plays a specific role in the production of new poxviruses. Crucially, the complex only functions when all parts are correctly assembled, and the tRNA is indispensable for this construction.

In other words, the tRNA provides the essential element of the complex, which some might describe—using the Discovery Institute’s own terms—as containing “complex specified information” and forming an “irreducibly complex” system essential to the virus’s success.

By that same logic, it follows that the viruses responsible for smallpox and mpox (monkeypox) must have been intelligently designed. This leaves creationists with an unenviable dilemma:

• Accept the Discovery Institute’s definitions and admit their designer created deadly viruses — theologically awkward.
• Claim another intelligence designs life, beyond their god’s control — even more awkward.
• Abandon the Institute’s “evidence” for intelligent design — politically awkward.