Rosa Rubicondior

Thursday, 9 October 2025

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

Butchering the carcass with small flint blades

AI-generated (ChatGPT 5)

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

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

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

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

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

Yellow and blue, old and new | ESA/Hubble

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

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

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

Creationism Refuted - Evolution of 'Language' in Birds.

Tawny-flanked prinia, Prinia subflava

By Bernard DUPONT, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pismis 24 (NIRCam Image)

NASA/JWST

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

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

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

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

Artist's reconstruction of the ancient Macromyzon siluricus leech.

EK Chan.

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

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

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

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

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

Artist’s impression of Cha 1107-7626.

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

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

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

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

View of Dry Island Buffalo Leap.

New tiny prehistoric fish species unlocks origins of catfish and carp

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Species of Ancient Hook-toothed Reptile Discovered | AMNH

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Mullally named as new Archbishop of Canterbury - BBC News

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

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

Hot springs in Japan give insight into ancient microbial life on Earth – ELSI｜EARTH-LIFE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

It’s been a dreadful week for creationists as yet another published paper undermines one of their favourite claims and further reduces the god-shaped gap on which they increasingly depend — the so-called abiogenesis gap. This argument rests on the delusional assumption that if science has not yet fully explained something, then it never will — and therefore creationism wins by default. The history of science, of course, shows the opposite: today’s mysteries are tomorrow’s discoveries.

This time, the blow comes from a publication in the journal Microbes and Environments, which describes how five hot springs in Japan provide natural analogues of the conditions in which the first living organisms could have evolved. These springs are rich in diverse chemical and thermal gradients, making them excellent testbeds for exploring how life can thrive in extreme conditions and use non-traditional energy sources.

The study was conducted by a team led by Fatima Li-Hau, then a graduate student at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI), Tokyo Institute of Science, with Associate Professor Shawn McGlynn as her supervisor. Their work focused on the microbial communities found in these hot springs, which range from moderately warm to boiling.

Creationism In Crisis - How Fungi Created The Conditions For Land Plants - A Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Top L. Chicken of the woods (Laetiporus sulphureus)

Top R. Sulphur tufts (Hypholoma fasciculare)

Bottom L. Common mould (Penicillium)

Bottom R. Mucor (microscopic view)

Fungi set the stage for life on land hundreds of millions of years earlier than thought | Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology OIST

In that vast expanse of pre-‘Creation Week’ history, when 99.9975% of Earth’s story had already unfolded, a pivotal event occurred that would set the planet on a path towards the astonishing diversity of life we see today. According to researchers led by scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan, that turning point was the evolution of multicellular fungi.

Unlike animals and plants, in which multicellularity appears to have arisen only once, fungi seem to have achieved it independently on at least five separate occasions, between 1.4 and 0.9 billion years ago.

This innovation allowed fungi to colonise land and begin transforming bare rock and rock debris into soil. That process, in turn, created the conditions that later enabled plants to establish themselves on land.

In addition to shedding light on how multicellularity evolved in fungi — a process that involved horizontal gene transfer — this research significantly extends the known timeline of fungal evolution, pushing it back by hundreds of millions of years.

Of course, the authors of Genesis, unaware of the distinction between plants and fungi and apparently thinking all plants were angiosperms, made no mention of fungi at all. Their myth betrays no understanding that plants are living organisms or that green plants depend on sunlight for photosynthesis, since it describes them as being created the day before the sun (Genesis 1:15-17). It names only angiosperms while ignoring ferns, mosses, and algae (Genesis 1:11-12), and later claims that “every living substance” outside the Ark was destroyed (Genesis 7:4), as though plants, like rocks, would somehow have survived unscathed, to provide food for the animals afterwards, despite no mention of their preservation during the flood genocide.

Science, as ever, tells a very different story — one based not on gap-filling tales but on evidence written in fungal DNA and preserved in the fossil record. It is a story of awe and wonder, not at the supposed magical powers of an imagined creator, but at the relentless processes of evolution: variation, natural selection, and the exploitation of opportunity, producing the extraordinary biodiversity we see today.

An artist's depiction of water erupting from the "tiger stripe" fractures in the surface of Enceladus's south pole

ESA - Cassini proves complex chemistry in Enceladus ocean

In a soccer manager’s jargon, this is squeaky bum time for creationists who cling to the notion that science will never demonstrate that abiogenesis is even possible, let alone explain how it happened.

Squeaky bum time for a football manager is when the team’s league position — and with it qualification for European tournaments, and often the manager’s job — hangs on a single unpredictable result.

So it is with creationism. One single piece of definitive evidence that life has arisen independently on another world in the Solar System, or on an exoplanet orbiting a distant sun, would comprehensively consign creationism to the dustbin of history where it has been struggling to avoid ending up since 1859. Such a discovery would refute the claim that ‘life from non-life’ is impossible. Instead, it would show that under the right conditions, life is simply a natural product of chemistry and physics.

And the signs are as dire for creationism as for the embattled football team that finds itself 2–0 down in stoppage time. Scientists at the European Space Agency have just announced the detection of possible signs of life in the ocean beneath the icy crust of one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus, as revealed by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. This follows close on the heels of strong evidence that life once existed on Mars.

The tentative evidence from Enceladus points to processes in its subsurface ocean producing organic precursors to amino acids — the basic building blocks of proteins and a fundamental requirement for prebiotic chemistry that could eventually lead to organised cells. Researchers also report the detection of previously unknown molecules, including aliphatic and (hetero)cyclic compounds, esters, alkenes, ethers, and tentatively nitrogen- and oxygen-bearing compounds.

These organics were detected by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) in ice crystals ejected in plumes through cracks in Enceladus’ ice covering. These plumes are thought to form when water seeps into the moon’s rocky core, is heated, and then forced back up to the ocean floor as hydrothermal vents — much like those found in Earth’s oceans. The hot water increases the pressure in the subsurface ocean until the ice cracks and jets of vapour and ice crystals erupt. Most fall back to the surface, but some escape Enceladus’ weak gravity and contribute to one of Saturn’s rings, within which the moon orbits.

Refuting Creationism - Evidence From Ancient China Buries the Bible Creation and Genocidal Flood Myths

Weisskopf, A., et al; (2015) (CC BY 4.0)

Ancient DNA reveals the population interactions and a Neolithic patrilineal community in Northern Yangtze Region | Nature Communications

The bad news for creationists continues unabated - because science continues unabated to reveal the truth.

Creationists like to insist that the Bible’s tales of creation and Noah’s flood are real history, not myth. But once again, science has delivered a devastating blow to that fantasy. A new open access paper in Nature Communications reports the DNA of 58 individuals from the Baligang archaeological site in central China, spanning from the Middle Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age (6,500 BP - 2,500 BP). Far from supporting the idea of a world repopulated just a few thousand years ago by Noah’s family, the evidence shows continuous human settlement, migration, and cultural development stretching back thousands of years before, during and after the supposed date of the Biblical flood - about 4,000 years BP.

The genetics reveal a population that was anything but “reset.” Northern and southern East Asian groups repeatedly mixed at Baligang, leaving detectable signatures of long-term population movement and exchange. Around 4,200 years ago, southern ancestry became especially prominent, signalling migration into the region. Burial evidence adds further depth: the males were closely related along the paternal line, while the females carried diverse maternal lineages—clear evidence of patrilineal clans drawing in women from outside communities. This is a picture of a complex, interconnected society developing steadily over time.

Left panel: short green irregular lines arranged in pairs. Right: Close up of one pair shows that the two strands form a cross shape. Paired chromosomes showing crossovers in a mouse oocyte.

Hunter lab.

Landmark Discovery Reveals How Chromosomes Are Passed From One Generation to the Next | UC Davis

This article continues my series exploring the many ways in which the human body demonstrates unintelligent design. Far from being the perfect handiwork of a benevolent creator, our anatomy and physiology are full of flaws, inefficiencies, and dangerous vulnerabilities. Each of these makes sense in light of evolution by natural selection—an opportunistic, short-term process that tinkers with existing structures—but they make no sense at all if we are supposed to be the product of an all-wise designer.

Creationists often argue from a position of ignorant incredulity, claiming that complexity implies intelligent design, when in fact the opposite is true. The hallmark of good, intelligent design is simplicity, for two very simple reasons: first, simple things are easier to construct and require fewer resources; and second, simple structures and processes have fewer potential points of failure, making them more reliable.

In short: complexity is evidence against intelligent design and in favour of a mindless, utilitarian, natural process such as evolution.

In addition to being minimally complex, another characteristic we would expect of something designed by an omniscient, maximally intelligent, and benevolent designer is that the process should work perfectly, every time, without fail.

The problem for creationists is that their favourite example of supposed intelligent design — the human body — is riddled with complexity in both its structures and processes. This complexity provides countless examples of systems that fail to perform adequately, or fail altogether, with varying frequency. Many failures occur in the layers of complexity needed to control or compensate for the inadequacies of other systems, and when those compensatory mechanisms themselves fail, the result can be a cascade of dysfunctions or processes running out of control. The consequences manifest as diseases, defects, and disabilities — hardly the work of an all-wise designer.

They are, however, exactly what we would expect from a mindless, utilitarian process like evolution, which prioritises short-term survival and reproduction, selecting only what is better — sometimes only marginally better — than what preceded it, rather than seeking optimal solutions. I have catalogued many such suboptimal compromises in the anatomy and physiology of the human body, and the problems that arise from them, in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design, one of my Unintelligent Design series.

Just yesterday, I wrote about research suggesting that autism may be a by-product of the rapid evolution of intelligence in humans. Now we have another striking example of extreme biological complexity which, when it goes wrong, can have catastrophic consequences: the production of eggs in women and sperm cells in men.

Refuting Creationism - How Earth Was Really Formed - No Magic Spells Required

Artistic illustration of the early formation phase of the solar system. At the time, the young sun (in the centre) was surrounded by a pro-planetary disc - a rotating collection of gas and dust.

No collision, no life: Earth probably needed supplies from space

According to creationists who treat the Bible as both science and history, the Earth was created ex nihilo as a small, flat world beneath a dome, sitting at the centre of the universe. This happened, they claim, when a male deity with magical powers spoke some special words – in a language no one else could have known, since no other sentient beings yet existed.

And all of this supposedly took place instantaneously, just 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Creationists also like to imagine that the Earth, and indeed the whole universe, was purpose-built and fine-tuned, with a grand plan designed so that they could live comfortably here and now.

The scientific reality, however, could not be more different.

Earth formed some 4 billion years ago, condensing out of an accretion disc around a young, second- or third-generation star – our Sun – amid the chaos of the early solar system. Planets jostled for stable orbits, minor planetoids collided or were absorbed, and gravity ruled everything.

Now, two scientists at the University of Bern have shown that the Earth which first emerged was dry, barren, and stripped of the essential building blocks of life. It was only thanks to a colossal chance collision with a wandering planetoid, rich in water and volatile elements such as hydrogen, carbon, and sulphur, that Earth acquired the raw ingredients for habitability. The debris from this impact later condensed to form the Moon, while the tilted axis of Earth’s rotation – which gives us our seasons – was another by-product of that chaotic event.

None of this was inevitable. It was the result of blind chance shaped only by natural forces such as gravity, directly refuting the creationist mantra that “order cannot come from chaos.” To insist it was all preordained as part of some cosmic plan to produce humans (and, more parochially, white Americans) is to deny the fragility of existence and the extraordinary good fortune of being alive now, able to appreciate the wonder of how it all came to be.

Atheists do not live for death; they live for life.

Refuting Creationism - How Autism May Be The Result Of Compromise In The Evolution Of Human Intelligence

Trump 'fact checking' his autism claim

How evolution explains autism rates in humans | EurekAlert!

If the human genome had been intelligently designed by an omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent supernatural deity, as creationists insist, it should be perfect and free from defects of any sort. In fact, it is difficult to see why there would be any variance in such an intelligently designed genome, let alone variance that causes genetic defects—unless those were intentionally included by the designer, who then cannot reasonably be described as omnibenevolent or omniscient.

If, however, the human genome is the product of hundreds of millions of years of gradual evolutionary processes — processes that prioritise survival and reproduction, with all the sub-optimal compromises that a utilitarian form of ‘design’ entails — then variance and defects are exactly what we would expect.

Creationists traditionally ignore questions about the origin of variance in a supposedly ‘perfect’ intelligently designed genome. The existence of genetic defects is usually explained away by resorting to Bible-literalist mythology about ‘The Fall’ — an abandonment of the Discovery Institute’s Wedge Strategy, which seeks to present creationism as real science rather than a fundamentalist religion dressed in a lab coat. News that autism may in fact be a by-product of the evolution of intelligence in humans will therefore be an even greater problem for creationists, who insist that our high intelligence sets us apart as the special creation of a perfect god.

Ironically, as well as possessing high intelligence, humans — unlike any other primates — also have autism and schizophrenia. It is this correlation that provides a clue to their shared evolutionary origins.

My book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design, lists lots of examples of how the human body is the result of these sub-optimal evolutionary compromises with all the problems that has produced. This example is just another instance and more evidence of the lack of intelligence in the process.

Eurhinosaurus mistelgauensis specimen from the Urwelt-Museum Oberfranken on a belemnite battleground. The fossil plate is about 4 m long.

Credit: Spicher et al (2025).

New Jurassic ichthyosaur species discovered in Mistelgau

It's shaping up to be another bad week for creationism, with the evidence for evolution on an old Earth continuing to accumulate, and evidence against any intelligence being involved in its evolution growing unabated. There is even a paper describing how and when Earth was really formed, and the contrast between that reality and the Bible’s version could hardly be greater.

This article looks at just one of these developments (more will follow). From the perspective of evolutionary biology, it is not especially remarkable—simply the description of a new species of extinct ichthyosaur, Eurhinosaurus mistelgauensis, from the Lower Jurassic (around 200 million years ago).

But for creationism, it serves as yet another stark reminder of how wrong the biblical creation story and timeline are. To put it bluntly, this fossil would not exist if the Bible’s story were true. It doesn’t take a genius to see how the fact of its existence bears on debates about the truth or falsity of Genesis—though creationists appear to struggle with this basic deductive logic.

Malevolent Designer News - How Candida Albicans (Thrush) Is Cleverly Designed to Infect Your Mouth - Evolution Or Malevolent Design?

The dose makes the difference - Leibniz-HKI

As has often been pointed out in these blog posts, the "evidence" offered by Discovery Institute fellows William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe for an intelligent designer can, by the same logic and using the same evidence, be interpreted as pointing to a theologically awkward malevolent designer. This is a line of reasoning routinely ignored by the "Cdesign proponentcists", who prefer to overlook the many examples of parasites and pathogens—and the evolutionary traits that make them so successful at invading and surviving within their hosts.

A fresh example that creationists will either have to ignore or blame on "The Fall" comes from researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology. They have shown that the fungus Candida albicans, which causes thrush, has evolved a highly sophisticated and "finely tuned" mechanism for infecting the human mouth while evading the immune system.

The stock creationist response is to shift responsibility onto the biblical myth of "The Fall," retreating into Bible literalism. Yet this is precisely the kind of literalism the Discovery Institute has been at pains to insist is not essential to the notion of intelligent design, which it markets as a scientific alternative to evolutionary theory—or "Darwinism," as they prefer to call it. This rhetorical sleight of hand was central to the Institute’s "Wedge Strategy," devised after the 1987 US Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard, which confirmed that teaching creationism in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

The new research reveals that C. albicans produces a toxin called candidalysin in carefully regulated doses that allow it to infiltrate the mucous lining of the mouth. Too little candidalysin, and the fungus would fail to establish itself; too much, and it would trigger an immune response strong enough to destroy it. Normally, C. albicans exists in a round, yeast-like form, but under the "right" conditions it can switch into the filamentous hyphal form typical of fungi. This transformation allows it to penetrate host tissues and, in immune-compromised patients, become life-threatening. It is in this invasive hyphal state that C. albicans produces candidalysin.

The production of hyphae, and therefore candidalysin, is controlled by the gene EED1. By any definition, EED1 would qualify as an example of "complex specified information" according to Dembski’s own formulation — evidence, according to the Discovery Institute, of supernatural intelligent design.

Minute witnesses from the primordial sea | ETH Zurich

Scientists at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich have discovered evidence that may force us to rethink how Ice Ages and complex life began. By studying tiny iron oxide grains called ooides, they found that dissolved carbon dioxide in the oceans between 1000 and 541 million years ago was 90–99 percent lower than today — far too low to have triggered an Ice Age or the rise of multicellular organisms.

For creationists, this creates a dilemma. Whatever did cause these events, it happened hundreds of millions of years earlier than their literal reading of the Bible allows. Science may revise its conclusions when new evidence emerges, but it is nowhere near as wrong as the Bible’s authors—who missed the truth by billions of years.

This difference highlights the contrast between science and religion. Science asks, “What does the evidence show?” and adapts accordingly. Religion demands blind faith, treating doubt as a weakness.

Creationists boast that their “truth” never changes, but the reality is that what doesn't change is the mind of a creationist who is immune to evidence, deductive logic and analytical reasoning. Refusing to change your mind in the light of evidence is intellectual bankruptcy - the hallmark of dogma, not wisdom.

Creationism Refuted - Scientists Revisit Some Old Fossils, Extend Scientific Knowledge - And Casually Refute Creationism Again

296-Million-Year-Old Fossil Unearthed in Brazil Sheds Light on Ancient Plant Mystery Hidden for Over Half a Century - Notícia

In another of those regular events in science, a team of researchers led by the University of Vale do Taquari – Univates, Rio Grande, Brazil, through the Graduate Program in Environment and Development (PPGAD), re-examined material held in the Univates Palaeontological Collection. Using modern equipment that was not available when the fossils were first studied more than 50 years ago, they uncovered new information – and, without intending to, once again demonstrated the weakness of creationist claims. As usual, creationism is refuted by the evidence.

What the team discovered were plant spores preserved in situ in fossils dating to between 298.9 and 252.17 million years ago – long before dinosaurs appeared and well before flowering plants evolved. At that time, the most advanced land plants were spore-bearing, like today’s mosses and ferns. This showed that the original classification as Lycopodites was incorrect. Instead, the fossils belonged to a new genus, which the team named Franscinella, giving the newly described Upper Palaeozoic plant the species name Franscinella riograndensis.

The significance extends further: the spores, now positively linked to this species, are index microfossils found in Permian strata of the Paraná Basin. Yet creationists routinely dismiss the use of index fossils in geochronology as “circular reasoning.” The ability to tie these spores directly to a particular species undermines that objection and strengthens their role in stratigraphy.

A spiral galaxy, NGC 7456. It shines brightly at the centre, and most of its disc also glows in warm colours. Its two spiral arms, which wind outwards from the centre, are made up mostly of large patches of bright blue specks. They also contain thin, reddish clouds of dust, and bright pink bubbles of glowing gas, where stars are forming. Distant galaxies can be seen around the galaxy as small orange spots, on a dark background.

A galaxy with lots to see | ESA/Hubble

For the Bible’s description of the Universe, try doing something creationists rarely seem to do – actually read it (you don’t need to read much!). In the very first chapter we find a story of a universe created from nothing by a few magic words. This universe is described as a small, flat, dome-covered world, with stars portrayed as tiny lights stuck to the dome. The Sun and Moon are described as lamps hanging from it. Later, we read of stars shaking loose and falling to Earth during earthquakes, and of the Moon hiding in a valley during the day (Genesis 1:6-10, Genesis 1:14-17, Joshua 10:12-14).

The contrast with what science has revealed could hardly be more stark. Given what we now know of the cosmos, the Bible’s account reads like the imaginative attempt of a five-year-old child asked to describe the Universe after a glance at the night sky. It can scarcely be regarded as a definitive scientific account of reality, and yet there are adults who still believe it is just that.

What this tells us about the education and credulity of those creationists who insist on believing such absurdities I will leave for readers to decide. Meanwhile, here is the NASA/ESA Hubble Picture of the Week to compare with the biblical version. It shows the spiral galaxy NGC 7456, located more than 51 million light-years away in the constellation Grus (the Crane). The image reveals glowing pink reservoirs of gas where new stars are forming, their light causing the surrounding gas to emit its tell-tale red glow.

Refuting Creationism - The Lengths Plants Will Go To Just To Get Pollinated - No Intelligence Needed

The grass fly visiting the flowers (A) and kleptoparasiting spider hunting ant (B)

Press Releases - SCHOOL OF SCIENCE THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO

The driving force behind evolution is reproductive success, so in a broad sense every adaptation can be seen as a reproductive strategy. Few, however, are as peculiar as that of Vincetoxicum nakaianum, a dogbane species native to Japan. Rather than relying on nectar rewards or visual lures to attract pollinators, this plant enlists the services of kleptoparasitic chloropid flies — insects that usually home in on the scent of injured prey in order to steal a meal.

In a remarkable twist, the flowers of V. nakaianum release chemical signals that closely mimic the odour of ants under attack by predators, especially spiders. Drawn in by what they perceive as the scent of a potential victim to exploit, the flies inadvertently collect and deposit pollen as they move from flower to flower. This unusual strategy has now been documented in detail in a study led by Ko Mochizuki of the University of Tokyo, published in Current Biology, and described in a University of Tokyo School of Science press release.

What makes this particularly striking is how roundabout and intricate the mechanism is. If an intelligent designer had set out to ensure pollination, far simpler methods are available — from bright colours and nectar rewards to direct reliance on wind. Instead, V. nakaianum has evolved a convoluted route, exploiting the specialised behaviour of flies that themselves depend on the predation of ants by spiders. Such elaborate, contingent solutions are precisely what we expect from evolution by natural selection acting over countless generations, not from foresightful design.

Key to the riddle of sleep may be linked to bacteria | WSU Insider | Washington State University

For an astonishing example of co-evolution — not just involving two organisms but a whole host that have co-evolved over millions of years — you need look no further than your own body, as a paper in *Frontiers in Neuroscience* by Erika L. English and James M. Krueger of Washington State University (WSU) shows. It reports the finding that sleep may be a co-evolved condition in which gut micro-organisms play a central role.

The researchers showed that, in mice, there is a close relationship between sleep patterns and the cyclical presence in the brain of a substance known as peptidoglycan (PG), normally found in the mesh-like walls of gut bacteria. Although co-evolutionary relationships are a well-established concept in evolutionary biology, this example illustrates just how intimate such relationships can become — to the point where it is difficult to say, in biological terms, which organism is the “product” of the other. To what extent are we the product of our gut bacteria, and to what extent are they the product of us?

Of course, creationism has nothing to say about this kind of co-evolution because the Bible is silent on the matter of micro-organisms or evolution. It contains nothing that wasn’t visible to its Bronze Age authors with the naked eye, or that lived outside the narrow confines of their limited experience. It was written by people with no appreciation of the history of life on Earth or of how it has been shaped by environmental change and ecological balances over deep time.

Refuting Creationism - North American Mammoths Interbred - 30,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Columbian Mammoths, Mammuthus colimbi with other Ice Age mammals.

Beth Zaiken

Hybrid mammoths roamed North America following interspecies breeding | Natural History Museum

An open access paper published in Biology Letters by an international team of palaeontologists, led by Marianne Dehasque of the Department of Organismal Biology, Uppsala University, Sweden, will no doubt bring joy to creationists who prefer to see the world in simple black-and-white terms. It shows that one of the usual definitions of species—a group that can reproduce only with one another—needs revising. The paper reports that the two North American species of mammoth—the northern woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) and the southern Columbian mammoth (M. columbi)—regularly interbred where their ranges overlapped, and that the offspring were fertile.

In the black-and-white, science-vs-creationism world of creationist thinking, this will be taken to mean that if science is wrong, then creationism must be right, by default.

Creationist joy will be short-lived, however, once they realise that this interbreeding took place long before they believe Earth was created, and that the researchers explain the findings in terms of how mammoths evolved and diversified. Indeed, the evidence supports the theory that the Columbian mammoth itself evolved from a hybrid population—one of the mechanisms of evolution that creationist dogma insists does not occur. Not only is there not the slightest hint that biologists are abandoning the Theory of Evolution (ToE) in favour of creationism—as creationist leaders have claimed for at least half a century—but the ToE is used to explain the observable facts, and it does so with consummate ease.

Refuting Creationism - A Jewellery Factory in France, At Least 32,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Late Neanderthals and early European Homo sapiens may have lived and worked together in southwest France.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5)

The oldest shell jewellery workshop in Western Europe | CNRS

The creationism cult took another blow yesterday with the publication of details of the oldest jewellery workshop yet found in Western Europe—dating to at least 32,000 years before the mythical six-day creation of everything from nothing. The site appears to have been used for the organised manufacture of shell ornaments, suggesting a society in which the production and trade of personal adornment already played an important role.

The discovery, made by a team of scientists from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Université de Bordeaux, the ministère de la Culture, and Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). It records the excavation of a Palaeolithic site in southwest France, dating from a period when Homo sapiens were spreading into the region and Neanderthals were in decline.

However, the evidence points to a more complex story — one of coexistence and cultural exchange, or even the absorption of Neanderthals into the expanding H. sapiens populations, with traditions and technologies merging. It also raises the possibility that H. sapiens had been established in the area far earlier, perhaps through an earlier migration wave.

Refuting Creationism - Why Consciousness Doesn't Need A God To Explain it

Major theories of consciousness may have been focusing on the wrong part of the brain

Spend a few days in a Creationism vs. Science group on social media and, before long, you’ll be told that science can’t explain consciousness—because, so the argument goes, matter can’t become self-aware, and consciousness can’t arise from nothing.

In other words, you’ll encounter yet another variation on the combined argument from incredulity, the “god of the gaps” fallacy, and the false dichotomy—presented as if they were sound logic against science, and, since only two possibilities are assumed, in favour of the locally popular version of a creator god.

The more fundamentalist creationists will, of course, also try to “prove” that only humans possess real consciousness, since this sets us apart from other animals and grants us the supposedly unique ability to worship their particular god.

But what creationists can never explain is this: if consciousness is not a function of neurophysiology — in other words, the product of chemistry and physics — why can it be abolished with chemicals such as anaesthetics, or by physical injury?

This makes it all the more interesting that a recent paper in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews by Peter Copple of the Consciousness and Cognition Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK, reviewing the sufficient conditions for consciousness, makes no suggestion that consciousness is divorced from neurophysiology or that it requires supernatural intervention to explain.

He makes similar points in an article in The Conversation, which is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence.

September: Newtonsaurus identification | News and features | University of Bristol

A newly-identified dinosaur from the Late Triassic of Wales has turned out to be hiding in plain sight. The fossil, discovered in 1899 and displayed for years in the National Museum of Wales, has only now been correctly recognised thanks to modern imaging technology unavailable to earlier researchers.

Originally described by Edwin Tully Newton in 1899 as Zanclodon cambrensis, the specimen has now been reclassified by a team of palaeontologists led by Owain Evans of Bristol University. Since the name Zanclodon is no longer used for early reptiles, the team have given it a new name: Newtonsaurus.

As always, discoveries like this present a problem for creationists. Fossils of species that lived tens or even hundreds of millions of years ago sit uneasily with their narrative that all life was magically created just a few thousand years ago. To preserve that story, they are forced into feats of mental gymnastics — whether by bearing false witness against scientists, rejecting well-established dating techniques, or simply dismissing the evidence outright as “wrong.”

The rocks, however, are not so easily ignored. Unlike ancient manuscripts, said to have been dictated by a god to prophets and accepted only on faith, the fossil record is physical, testable, and open to constant re-examination. Evidence can be checked, rechecked, and reassessed as methods improve — something faith alone cannot provide.

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