Refuting Creationism - Adding A Little Bit More To The Human Evolutionary Story

Top: Multiple views of MLP-3000-1, the newly discovered Paranthropus partial left mandible and molar crown. Bottom: MLP-3000-1 in side-by-side comparison with mandible fossils from other species — Australopithecus afarensis (A.L. 266-1), Paranthropus aethiopicus (OMO-57/4-1968-41 and OMO-18-1967-18), and early Homo (LD 350-1).

Alemseged Research Group

Two fragments of the newly discovered mandible specimen in the location they were originally found.

Alemseged Research Group.

New 2.6-million-year-old Paranthropus fossil reshapes understanding of early hominins | Biological Sciences Division | The University of Chicago

Research published two days ago in Nature by a team led by University of Chicago paleoanthropologist Professor Zeresenay Alemseged will dismay and delight creationists in about equal measure — especially those who manage to rationalise a fossil dating from about 2.6 million years before they believe Earth and everything on it was created — because it shows that scientists were wrong about something.

It is the news that the jawbone of an archaic hominin, Paranthropus, has been found in Ethiopia some 200 miles further north than the previously believed northern limit of these hominins.

Normally, to a binary-thinking creationist, science being wrong about even the most minor and unimportant detail is “proof” that science is wrong about everything. This childish belief probably stems from them having a single source-book which has been deemed to be inerrant, so even the slightest falsehood in it renders that claim untenable. They assume it is the same with science: that what scientists believe comes from supposedly inerrant textbooks written by “prophets” such as Charles Darwin, serving as the source-books from which all scientists get their information. So, if scientists are ever wrong, all the books from the science libraries of the world can be thrown in the waste bin, leaving creationism’s book of “inerrant” origin myths as the winner.

What they find hard to comprehend, apparently, is that scientific knowledge is cumulative, with current thinking always provisional, pending further confirmation or in need of revision in the light of new information, and that facts are neutral in any dispute, so can be objective referees. They fail to realise that because science works this way, scientists from all over the world will eventually converge on a single answer. Religions, by contrast, because they are not based on evidence but on the tenuous thread of interpretation of an ancient book which itself presents no evidence for its claims, continue to diversify into ever smaller sects, each claiming to have the one true answer but having no evidence to referee the dispute.

But of course, in the best scientific tradition, this jawbone simply adds richness to the hominin evolutionary story and raises the possibility that Paranthropus, like Australopithecus and Homo, was present in the Afar region of Ethiopia. And that opens up the intriguing possibility — given the propensity of hominins to diverge and then hybridise — that modern Homo sapiens could have some Paranthropus ancestry.

Unintelligent Design - Why Some People Suffer More From The Common Cold Than Others - Incompetent or Malevolent Design - Or Evolution?

Electron micrograph showing a human nasal epithelial cell releasing rhinovirus (blue).

Credit: Julien Amat, Bao Wang

Electron micrograph of differentiated human nasal epithelial organoids with cilia of multiciliated cells accentuated in blue.

Credit: Julien Amat, Bao Wang.

Why the same cold can be a sniffle for some and a crisis for others | Yale News

You might expect an intelligently designed system, created by an omnibenevolent designer, to work just as effectively for everybody and not badly for some and only just adequately for others. And yet, as so often with creationism, the facts are not at all what the theory predicts. In science this would be called falsification, but for creationists it is just another inconvenient fact to be ignored or blamed on ‘the Fall’ — or even on the victim.

According to a paper just published in Cell Press Blue, the reason some people suffer more from a cold caused by a rhinovirus is not so much because of differences in the virus, but because their bodies react differently. Some take control and prevent the spread of viruses to adjacent cells of the mucous membrane lining the nasal passages, whereas other people’s bodies fail to prevent the virus spreading.

The paper is by a team at Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA, led by Associate Professor Dr Ellen F. Foxman, PhD.

By growing organoids in vitro and infecting them with rhinoviruses, the team were able to show that whether the infection spreads depends on how quickly the infected cells are able to mount an interferon response. A good response limits the infection to just a few cells and the cold does not develop beyond a ‘sniffle’. Where the response is weak, the infection spreads and, in cases where the victim has an underlying respiratory condition such as asthma or COPD, the cold can develop into a serious illness.

Why the interferon response differs between individuals is not known with any certainty, but it could be due to a number of factors, including genetics. However, it is known that in patients with pre-existing respiratory conditions, the interferon response is inhibited.

That, of course, begs the question for ID creationists: why a system supposedly designed to protect us gets downgraded when it is most needed, and, if the difference is due to underlying genetics, why some people got better genes in this respect than others. Under the ID creationist paradigm, genes that produce any given output are deemed to hold ‘complex specified genetic information’ and, as such, are evidence for intelligent design.

Leaving aside the question of why any omnibenevolent designer would design viruses to make us sick and then design an immune response to prevent them doing so, we are left with the question of why this immune system does not always work very well and why some people have a worse version than others. If an omnibenevolent designer can design an effective immune system, why did it not give it to everyone? Does it actually want those people to suffer more from the viruses it supposedly designed?

The evolutionary explanation is, of course, straightforward, with none of the theological conundrums that plague creationism. Evolution does not seek out perfection and has no interest in equity. In the environment of an evolutionary arms race with viruses, the results are inevitably suboptimal and unevenly distributed throughout the population unless there is particularly strong selection pressure to drive the ‘best’ solution to fixation. It is also in the survival interests of viruses to tone down their victim’s responses, thereby reducing that selection pressure. The resulting trade-off and compromise is what we see today in the different responses to the same virus.

How Do We know The Bible Is Wrong? - We Look At The Real-World Evidence, Of Course!

An example of a binary star system

Hubble uncovers the secret of stars that defy ageing | ESA/Hubble

A paper in Nature Communications by an international research team of astronomers led by Professor Francesco R. Ferraro of the Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “Augusto Righi”, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Italy, reveals a universe utterly at odds with the description of it in the Bible. It should be a simple matter to compare this real universe with the one described in the Bible and draw the obvious conclusion from the glaring differences — but not, it seems, for creationists.

The connection between opinion and evidence appears to be lost on creationists who are determined to cling to patently wrong beliefs, despite the evidence, as though evidence has no right to intrude on their thought processes. In this worldview, truth is unrelated to real-world evidence and must comply with a creationist’s beliefs.

Let’s take a couple of simple examples and apply creationist “logic”.

Firstly: you need to cross a road. How do you know it’s safe before you step off the kerb?

You look at the evidence — how busy is the road? Are there any vehicles approaching, especially on your side? If there are, the evidence tells you that you can’t safely cross and need to wait.

Applying creationist “logic”: you ignore the evidence as unwanted and unwelcome and conclude that the road is safe to cross because you want it to be, and reality is obliged to comply.

What do you think your chances of surviving for long would be using that methodology?

Secondly: you’re waiting at a bus stop to catch a bus. How do you know the bus has arrived?

You can see the bus, of course. It has stopped in front of you and the doors have opened. Other passengers may be getting on or off, so you get on the bus and take your seat.

Applying creationist “logic”: you ignore the evidence and assume the bus must have arrived because you want it to have done so, so you step off the pavement and imagine you’re getting on a bus.

You now look pretty foolish and might even step into the path of the real bus you’ve been waiting for. What you almost certainly won’t do is get on the bus — because it isn’t there.

In both examples, only evidence reveals the real world, and creationist faith may let you down very badly, simply because creationist faith has no relationship to the real world. It reflects only blind imagination and wishful thinking, coupled with the absurd belief that the real world is obliged to comply with personal preferences. Evidence, on the other hand, is the real world, and a rational person allows evidence to determine their beliefs.

So now a third example: how do you know you can rely on the information in the Bible? You compare it with real-world evidence, of course, just as you would when crossing the road or catching a bus.

And if you do that, what do you find?

You find a description of the universe that bears no resemblance to the real universe — just as your faith in a safe and empty road bears no relationship to a real road, or your imaginary bus bears no relationship to a real bus. In other words, the real-world evidence is so far removed from the description in the Bible that the Bible is plainly, obviously, and irrefutably wrong. As such, it is utterly unreliable as a source of factual information about the universe.

What we see in the Bible is a description of a universe consisting of a small flat planet with a dome over it. We see a demon-haunted world that is just a few thousand years old and runs on magic. It has talking snakes and donkeys; it endorses slavery and misogyny, autocratic government and peremptory justice with no right of appeal, and a draconian penal system in which the penalty of choice is death for even minor transgressions. It describes virgin birth and promotes blood sacrifice as absolving people of responsibility for their wrongs.

And doubt itself is treated as a crime carrying the death penalty, as though the worst thing the authors could imagine was people questioning their claims.

With that in mind, let’s look at the real-world evidence as revealed by the European Space Agency (ESA) in conjunction with NASA and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and compare it with the Bible’s description of the universe:

Creationism Refuted - An Elephant Bone Tool from 470,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Map of Lower Paleolithic sites with published elephant-bone tools.

Simon A. Parfitt, Silvia M. Bello (2026).

Ancient humans made elephant bone tools in Europe half a million years ago | Natural History Museum

The problems for creationists deepened today with news that two scientists, Simon Parfitt of the UCL Institute of Archaeology and a Scientific Associate at the Natural History Museum, London, and Silvia M. Bello of the Natural History Museum, have discovered an elephant bone tool dating from roughly half a million years ago — the oldest such tool discovered in Europe, from a time before anatomically modern hominins had left Africa. They published their findings in Science Advances.

Of course, most creationists will be blissfully unaware of this discovery, as with all such archaeology, because there is no point in being a creationist if you are going to read the latest scientific discoveries. How is that going to help you cling to patently absurd beliefs despite all the evidence against you? Best just ignore it and dismiss it all as some sort of Satanic conspiracy aimed at making you show weakness and change your mind.

Nevertheless, the fact is that this elephant bone tool exists and has been dated to about 490,000 years before creationism’s favourite book of Bronze Age superstitions says Earth existed. It was used by archaic hominins, probably to sharpen dulled flint tools by gently knapping the cutting edges. It was discovered at Boxgrove, Kent, England, in the early 1990s but was not recognised as a tool until recently, when finds from the Boxgrove site were studied in detail using new technology such as 3D scans and scanning electron microscopy, which revealed impact notches with embedded flint fragments.

Bone, being softer than flint, would have been the material of choice for work where precision was important, and elephant bone, with its hard outer layer of compact bone making it more durable, would have been the bone of choice. However, elephants and mammoths were rare in what is now southern England 500,000 years ago, so these tools would have been valuable objects.

It is not clear which archaic hominins used these tools in southern England, but at 500,000 years ago it was probably one of the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans, which form the “muddle in the middle” of the human evolutionary story. Here the problem is not a lack of fossils but an abundance of them, showing varying mixtures of primitive and derived features typical of transitional species, coming somewhere between Homo erectus and Neanderthals. Candidates are H. heidelbergensis and H. antecessor.

The stone tools from Boxgrove are part of the widespread Acheulean technology, which originated in East Africa about 1.95 million years ago and spread across Africa and into western Eurasia after about 1.5 million years ago, persisting until between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago.

Creationism Refuted - How The Mammalian Ear Evolved - 250 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fossil study rewrites timeline of evolution of hearing in mammals | University of Chicago News

A recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) reports the discovery that an ancestor of mammals, a cynodont called Thrinaxodon liorhinus, had ear structures derived from redundant jaw bones that probably gave it an acute sense of hearing some 250 million years ago — around 50 million years earlier than previously believed. As nocturnal animals, a well-developed sense of hearing would have been hugely advantageous.

The research, by palaeontologists from the University of Chicago, used CT scans of the skull and jawbones of Thrinaxodon to simulate the effects of different sound pressures and frequencies on its anatomy.

Transitional fossils such as this are a major source of embarrassment to creationists because their Bronze Age mythology insists that all species were created fully formed, without ancestry, so there should never be any examples of species evolving or of existing structures being exapted over time for new functions.

Sadly for creationists, the fossil evidence paints an entirely different picture. It is a record of everything creationism predicts should not be there and everything evolution predicts will be. To most normal people, that sort of evidence should strongly suggest that creationism is wrong and that the Theory of Evolution is right.

It is rather like someone who does not believe in gravity stating that if you throw a stone into the air it will stay there and never fall back to Earth. A simple demonstration will establish the falsehood of that claim, just as the fossil record establishes the falsehood of creationist claims.

Background^ Cynodonts and the Evolution of the Mammalian Middle Ear. Cynodonts were a group of synapsid reptiles that lived from the Late Permian to the Early Jurassic and include the direct ancestors of mammals. Unlike true reptiles, cynodonts already showed many mammal-like features, including differentiated teeth, a more upright posture, a secondary palate, and increasingly complex jaw and skull anatomy. Fossils such as Thrinaxodon, Cynognathus, and later forms like Morganucodon document a clear, step-by-step transition from reptile-like synapsids to early mammals.

One of the most striking evolutionary changes recorded in this lineage is the origin of the mammalian middle ear. In reptiles, several small bones at the back of the lower jaw — notably the articular and quadrate — form part of the jaw joint. In mammals, these same bones are repurposed as the malleus and incus of the middle ear, joining the stapes to form the familiar three-bone hearing apparatus. This transformation did not occur suddenly; it unfolded gradually over tens of millions of years.

Fossil cynodonts preserve intermediate stages in which these jaw bones became progressively smaller, less involved in chewing, and increasingly specialised for sound transmission. Some transitional species even show a “double jaw joint,” with both the old reptilian joint and the new mammalian joint functioning simultaneously. This provides direct, physical evidence for exaptation — the evolutionary process in which structures originally evolved for one function are co-opted for a new one.

The result of this long transition was the highly sensitive mammalian middle ear, capable of detecting higher-frequency sounds far better than that of reptiles. This would have been particularly advantageous for small, nocturnal early mammals, allowing them to detect predators and prey in low-light conditions. Far from being a problem for evolutionary theory, the cynodont fossil record is one of its clearest and most elegant confirmations — and one of the most awkward facts for creationism to explain away.

Creationist Claim vs Reality: The Mammalian Middle Ear

Claim:
The mammalian middle ear is “irreducibly complex” and could not have evolved because all three bones — the malleus, incus, and stapes — must be present and perfectly arranged for hearing to work.

Reality:
The fossil record preserves multiple transitional stages showing exactly how the mammalian middle ear evolved from reptile-like jaw bones. In early synapsids and cynodonts, the articular and quadrate bones formed part of the jaw joint. Over time, these bones became progressively smaller and less involved in chewing, while increasingly specialised for transmitting sound.

Claim:
There are no transitional fossils showing this transformation.

Reality:
There are many. Fossils such as Thrinaxodon, Cynognathus, Diarthrognathus, and Morganucodon preserve intermediate anatomies, including species with a functioning “double jaw joint” — one reptilian and one mammalian — operating at the same time. This is exactly what gradual evolution predicts.

Claim:
Repurposing jaw bones for hearing would destroy their original function.

Reality:
It did not. For millions of years, both functions co-existed. As the new mammalian jaw joint (between the dentary and squamosal bones) took over the role of chewing, the old jaw joint bones were freed to specialise for sound transmission. This is a textbook example of exaptation, not a paradox.

Claim:
Complex biological structures appear suddenly.

Reality:
They do not. The step-by-step transformation of jaw bones into middle ear bones is one of the best-documented transitions in the entire fossil record. It is exactly the opposite of what creationism predicts — and exactly what evolutionary theory predicts.

The research is explained in an article in UChicago News by Matt Wood.

Fossil study rewrites timeline of evolution of hearing in mammals

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UChicago paleontologists use CT scanning and simulations to show how a 250-million-year-old mammal predecessor could hear like us

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One of the most important steps in the evolution of modern mammals was the development of highly sensitive hearing.

The middle ear of mammals, with an eardrum and several small bones, allows us to hear a broad range of frequencies and volumes, which was a big help to early, mostly nocturnal mammal ancestors as they tried to survive alongside dinosaurs.

New research by paleontologists from the University of Chicago shows that this modern mode of hearing evolved much earlier than previously thought. Working with detailed CT scans of the skull and jawbones of Thrinaxodon liorhinus, a 250-million-year-old mammal predecessor, they used engineering methods to simulate the effects of different sound pressures and frequencies on its anatomy.

Their models show the creature likely had an eardrum large enough to hear airborne sound effectively, nearly 50 million years before scientists previously thought this evolved in early mammals.

For almost a century, scientists have been trying to figure out how these animals could hear. These ideas have captivated the imagination of paleontologists who work in mammal evolution, but until now we haven’t had very strong biomechanical tests. Now, with our advances in computational biomechanics, we can start to say smart things about what the anatomy means for how this animal could hear.

Alec T. Wilken, lead author
Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy
The University of Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA.

Fossil specimen of the Thrinaxodon skull and jaw used for the study.

Photo by Matt Wood.

Testing a 50-year-old hypothesis

Thrinaxodon was a cynodont, a group of animals from the early Triassic period with features beginning to transition from reptiles to mammals. They had specialized teeth, changes to the palate and diaphragm to improve breathing and metabolism, and probably warm-bloodedness and fur.

In early cynodonts, including Thrinaxodon, the ear bones—malleus, incus, stapes—were attached to their jawbones. Later, these bones separated from the jaw to form a distinct middle ear, considered a key development in the evolution of modern mammals.

Simulations showed that sound waves applied to the eardrum of "Thrinaxodon" (top) would have enabled it to hear much more effectively than through bone conduction alone (bottom).

Infographic courtesy of April I. Neander, Alec Wilken

Fifty years ago, Edgar Allin, a paleontologist at the University of Illinois Chicago, first speculated that cynodonts like Thrinaxodon had a membrane suspended across a hooked structure on the jawbone that was a precursor to the modern eardrum. Until then, scientists who studied mammal evolution mostly believed that early cynodonts heard through bone conduction, or via so-called “jaw listening” where they set their mandibles on the ground to pick up vibrations.

While the eardrum idea was fascinating, there was no way to definitively test if such a structure could work to hear airborne sounds.

Turning fossils into an engineering problem

Modern imaging tools like CT scanning have revolutionized the field of paleontology, allowing scientists to unlock a wealth of information that wouldn’t have been possible through studying physical specimens alone.

Wilken and his advisors, Zhe-Xi Luo and Callum Ross, both professors of organismal biology and anatomy, took a well-known Thrinaxodon specimen from the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, and scanned it in UChicago’s PaleoCT Laboratory. The resulting 3D model gave them a highly detailed reconstruction of its skull and jawbones, with all the dimensions, shapes, angles and curves they needed to determine how a potential eardrum might function.

Next, they used a software tool called Strand7 to perform finite element analysis, an approach that breaks down a system into smaller parts with different physical characteristics. Such tools are usually used for complex engineering problems, like predicting stresses on bridges, aircraft and buildings, or analyzing heat distribution in engines. The team used the software to simulate how the anatomy of Thrinaxodon would respond to different sound pressures and frequencies, using a library of known properties about the thickness, density and flexibility of bones, ligaments, muscles and skin from living animals.

The results were loud and clear: Thrinaxodon, with an eardrum tucked into a crook on its jawbone, could definitely hear that way much more effectively than through bone conduction. The size and shape of its eardrum would have produced the right vibrations to move the ear bones and generate enough pressure to stimulate its auditory nerves and detect sound frequencies. While it still would have relied on some jaw listening, the eardrum was already responsible for most of its hearing.

Once we have the CT model from the fossil, we can take material properties from extant animals and make it as if our Thrinaxodon came alive. That hasn’t been possible before, and this software simulation showed us that vibration through sound is essentially the way this animal could hear.

Professor Zhe-Xi Luo, corresponding author.
Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy
The University of Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA.

Wilken said the new technology allowed them to answer an old question by turning it into an engineering problem.

That’s why this is such a cool problem to study. We took a high concept problem—that is, ‘how do ear bones wiggle in a 250-million-year-old fossil?’—and tested a simple hypothesis using these sophisticated tools. And it turns out in Thrinaxodon, the eardrum does just fine all by itself.

Alec T. Wilken.

Publication:

A.T. Wilken, C.C.G. Snipes, C.F. Ross, & Z. Luo.
Biomechanics of the mandibular middle ear of the cynodont Thrinaxodon and the evolution of mammal hearing
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (51) e2516082122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2516082122 (2025).

Significance
The middle ear of modern mammals is detached from the mandible and has a soft-tissue eardrum, which allows airborne sound to be heard across a wide range of frequencies. A rich fossil record shows that the middle ear bones of mammals evolved from the jaw bones of their synapsid predecessors, but how this transformation was associated with changes in hearing function is unknown. Our finite element analysis (FEA) of the harmonic response of the mandibular ear bones and soft-tissue eardrum of the synapsid Thrinaxodon suggests that this 250-Mya-old mammal precursor was already capable of tympanic hearing similar to extant mammals and provides evidence that this functional transition occurred very early in mammal evolutionary history.

Abstract
The middle ear of mammals is a major functional innovation, distinctive in that it is detached from the mandible and has a tympanic membrane supported by a ring-like ectotympanic. These novelties of the middle ear have enabled modern mammals to develop more sensitive hearing than all other tetrapods, especially at higher frequencies. Fossils from recent decades have clarified the evolution of the detached middle ear from the jaw bones of Paleozoic therapsids and Mesozoic cynodonts, and the evolution of the tympanum. These discoveries make it possible to answer important questions about the functional significance of these features. Here, we evaluate the relative hearing efficacy of a well-known cynodont precursor to mammals, Thrinaxodon liorhinus. Using finite element analysis (FEA), we calculated the harmonic response of the Thrinaxodon ear to bone-conducted and airborne sound and estimated the sound pressure level (SPL) at the stapedial footplate across a broad range of frequencies. We provide evidence that airborne sound received at the tympanum was the most effective mode of sound reception in Thrinaxodon. In contrast, bone conducted sound through the mandibular bones barely met our estimated hearing threshold. Our findings suggest that, like modern mammals, cynodonts were already reliant on a soft tissue tympanum to receive airborne sound, albeit with limited sensitivity to high frequencies. This is a detailed biomechanical evaluation of tympanum function in the cynodont predecessors of mammals and yields insight into the sequence of functional innovations during the evolution of mammal hearing.

A.T. Wilken, C.C.G. Snipes, C.F. Ross, & Z. Luo.
Biomechanics of the mandibular middle ear of the cynodont Thrinaxodon and the evolution of mammal hearing
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (51) e2516082122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2516082122 (2025).

© 2026 National Academy of Sciences of the USA.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

For creationists, this discovery is yet another reminder of how badly their Bronze Age mythology fails when confronted with real-world evidence. The evolutionary origin of the mammalian middle ear is no longer a theoretical reconstruction inferred from comparative anatomy; it is a physical, fossil-documented transition preserved in stone. The fact that Thrinaxodon already shows mammal-like hearing structures 250 million years ago simply pushes that transition even further back in time and fills in yet another gap that creationists like to pretend does not exist.

It also underlines a point that creationists have been trying to evade for decades: evolution does not require sudden leaps or the magical appearance of fully formed organs. What it requires is exactly what the fossil record shows — incremental modifications of existing structures, shaped by selection, and repurposed for new functions as circumstances change. Jaw bones that once transmitted bite forces gradually became exquisitely tuned instruments for transmitting sound. That is not a problem for evolutionary theory; it is one of its strongest empirical confirmations.

Worse still for Intelligent Design advocates, the researchers show no hesitation whatsoever in interpreting what they found within the framework of evolutionary biology. There is no hint of mystery, no appeal to unknown designers, and no suggestion that natural processes are inadequate to explain what is observed. Instead, the anatomy of Thrinaxodon fits neatly into a well-established evolutionary sequence that has been mapped out for decades and is now being refined in ever greater detail as new fossils and new technologies come to light.

So once again, we are left with a familiar contrast. Evolutionary biology makes clear, testable predictions about what we should find in the fossil record — and those predictions keep being confirmed. Creationism, by contrast, predicts that none of this should exist at all. When one worldview consistently matches the evidence and the other consistently fails, there is no honest ambiguity about which one is right.

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Malevolent Design - Creationists Dogged By Parasites Again - Evolution or Malevolence?

Cross section of a dog's heart showing heartworm.

The University of Sydney

Ancient ‘spaghetti’ in dogs’ hearts reveals surprising origins of heartworm | EurekAlert!

An international team of researchers led by scientists at the University of Sydney, NSW, Australia, have just published a paper in Communications Biology which reshapes our understanding of a widespread canine parasitic nematode, the heartworm, Dirofilaria immitis. It is also more bad news for creationists, and for the intelligent design cult in particular.

In particular, the team have shown that this parasite has probably been co-evolving with dogs since before they were domesticated. It had previously been assumed that human activity was responsible for the spread of these worms.

Applying all the criteria traditionally cited by ID creationists as ‘proof’ of intelligent design, any designer of this parasite emerges as a grotesque malevolence determined to make dogs suffer. There is also the problem, for ID creationists, of clear evidence of a co-evolutionary arms race — the hallmark of mindless evolution and the antithesis of intelligent design.

Heartworms are complex organisms, with a complex life cycle involving both the primary host — dogs — and a vector — mosquitoes — all of which must be present for the parasite to survive, thus conforming neatly to Michael J. Behe’s supposed ‘evidence for intelligent design’: irreducible complexity. There is also evidence of resistance both to the dog’s immune system and, more recently, to the veterinary drugs used to treat the infection, conforming equally well to William A. Dembski’s proposed ‘evidence for intelligent design’: complex specified genetic information. So, within the ID paradigm, the conclusion becomes unavoidable — heartworms have been intelligently designed and are being actively redesigned in order to continue making dogs suffer and to stay ahead in their arms race with veterinary science.

But of course, the biological evidence shows that these parasites are the product of a co-evolutionary process in which neither magic nor intent were involved. Nematode genes have no concern for the suffering they cause, nor for whether their host lives or dies, so long as it survives long enough to pass the parasites on to the next generation of dogs.

Although the evidence conforms exactly to what the Theory of Evolution predicts — and evolution remains the most parsimonious explanation, absolving any deities of responsibility — for some inexplicable reason the ID cult would prefer people to believe that these, and thousands of other parasites, were the handiwork of their favourite deity, who thus emerges as a divine malevolence; a complete contrast to the supposedly omnibenevolent god of the holy books that creationists worship.

Refuting Creationism - An Evolutionary Arms Race In Space - No Intelligence Involved

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

In this illustration, a phage — a type of virus that infects bacteria — rests on the surface of a host cell. Researchers at UW–Madison designed an experiment for the International Space Station to study how phage-bacteria interactions affect the health of the gut microbiome.

Microbes mutated in space hint at biomedical benefits to humans on Earth – UW–Madison News

In a striking demonstration of the theory of evolution in practice — and something that will have creationists once again insisting on redefining evolution as a theory about one creature turning into an entirely unrelated taxon — an experiment aboard the International Space Station has shown how subtle changes in the environment can dramatically alter an evolutionary trajectory. It also illustrates another major embarrassment for Intelligent Design creationists: evolutionary arms races. Arms races are, of course, utterly incompatible with the idea of an intelligent designer, since running to stand still in a race with yourself is a neat definition of insanity.

Unlike the creationist parody of evolution — carefully engineered to be unprovable because it does not describe what actually happens and what no biologist has ever claimed — the real scientific definition of evolution is simply a change in the frequency of different alleles in a population over time. A definition that creationists know to be irrefutable, hence their persistent attempts to redefine it so that they have something to attack.

The experiment, which had a parallel control on Earth, was designed to observe how bacteriophage viruses that parasitise bacteria and their hosts co-evolved in the microgravity environment of space.

The results have just been published in PLOS Biology. They show that both the T7 phage virus and the E. coli bacteria developed marked genomic differences compared with the Earth-bound populations. The space-station phages gradually accumulated specific mutations that enhanced infectivity or improved their ability to bind receptors on bacterial cells. Meanwhile, the space-station E. coli accumulated mutations that improved resistance to phages and enhanced survival in near-weightless conditions. In other words, what was observed was a genuine evolutionary arms race — and because the environments differed between the space-station populations and the Earth-bound populations, the divergence can be attributed directly to differences in gravity.

The results highlighted another intriguing angle: the mutations that phages and bacteria acquire in space don’t just reveal fundamental evolutionary dynamics, they can also have practical applications for human health on Earth. After 25 days aboard the ISS, both organisms returned with novel mutations not commonly seen under terrestrial gravity, including changes to bacterial surface proteins and corresponding phage adaptations to bind those altered surfaces.

Researchers then engineered phages carrying these space-derived mutations and tested them against bacterial pathogens responsible for urinary tract infections — many of which are now resistant to antibiotics — finding the space-influenced phages were notably effective at killing these otherwise resistant strains. This suggests that the unique selection pressures of microgravity may reveal evolutionary pathways that could be harnessed to design improved therapies for antibiotic-resistant infections back on Earth.

Abiogenesis News - How a Deadly Poison Could Have Created Pre-Biotic Organic Molecules

Frozen hydrogen cyanide ‘cobwebs’ offer clues to origin of life - American Chemical Society

Dedicated creationists will need to find yet another way to dismiss new research by three scientists from the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Their work shows that, under the right conditions, the deadly poison hydrogen cyanide (HCN) could have provided a medium in which pre-biotic organic molecules accumulated on the early Earth. The findings have been published in the journal ACS Central Science.

The difficulty this presents for creationists arises largely from their habitual black-and-white thinking. Abiogenesis must, in their view, either have occurred via some fully specified, preconceived mechanism or be declared “impossible”. Since the only process they are prepared to accept is supernatural intervention by a magic creator, the conclusion is predetermined: any natural explanation must be rejected out of hand.

That claim, however, is trivially easy to refute. Assertions of impossibility collapse as soon as a single plausible natural mechanism is demonstrated. It is not necessary to establish beyond doubt that a particular hypothetical process is exactly what happened on the early Earth; it is sufficient to show that such a process could have occurred without violating known chemistry or physics.

What the Gothenburg team have demonstrated is that, when frozen, the surfaces of hydrogen cyanide crystals become highly reactive and can catalyse chemical reactions that are not possible at higher temperatures. These reactions could have triggered a cascade of further processes, ultimately producing some of the molecular building blocks of proto-cells.

Nor do pre-biotic chemicals necessarily have to originate on Earth itself. Space is also a viable candidate environment: hydrogen cyanide is abundant in interstellar space, as is water, and the low temperatures required for these crystals to form are commonplace. In the presence of water, HCN can polymerise and give rise to amino acids and nucleobases.

Creationism Refuted - How New Genetic Information Causes Diseases

Study shows your genes determine how fast your DNA mutates with age | UCLA Health

Creationist dogma insists that new genetic information can only be created by their putative intelligent designer, so it should be deeply embarrassing for them to learn that certain stretches of our DNA lengthen as we age, that the rate at which this happens is influenced by genes, and that excessive expansion of these sequences can lead to serious liver or kidney diseases.

This was discovered by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the Broad Institute, and Harvard Medical School, who analysed whole-genome sequencing data from 490,416 UK Biobank participants and 414,830 participants in the All of Us Research Program. Their findings were published recently, open access, in Nature.

This research is particularly awkward for creationists because of their insistence on the supposedly ‘sacred’ principle that only their intelligent designer can add new information to a genome. If we concede that claim for the sake of argument, then this newly generated genetic information must have been created deliberately and designed to produce a specific outcome — unless creationism’s designer was simply fiddling about aimlessly. Having a specific outcome (as all genes do) is precisely what William A. Dembski of the Discovery Institute insists is evidence for intelligent design, by a neat process of circular reasoning that only creationists find persuasive.

We then have the additional fact that a high rate of expansion of these DNA sequences is controlled by genetic modifiers and does not occur if any of those genes is not functioning properly. In other words, the resulting liver and kidney diseases are due to what Michael J. Behe famously describes as proof of a designer god: ‘irreducible complexity’.

Still conceding creationist claims, then, Dembski’s and Behe’s own logic demonstrates that their intelligent designer deliberately causes these diseases of old age.

Creationists are further hoist by their own petard in that they traditionally blame disease on ‘The Fall’, thereby conceding that intelligent design creationism is a form of fundamentalist religion rather than science. At the same time, however, they insist that only their intelligent designer can produce the new genetic information responsible for the expansion of these DNA sequences, which neatly rules out the involvement of the vague, non-physical agency they refer to as ‘sin’.

This leaves creationists with an uncomfortable dilemma: either their designer god actively causes liver and kidney disease, or new genetic information can indeed be produced by natural processes in which their designer plays no part — in which case a major plank of creationism collapses. The alternative is to concede that their allegedly omnibenevolent god is directly responsible for serious diseases in elderly people.

It is scarcely worth pointing out the glaringly obvious fact that these outcomes are easily explained as the predictable result of an undirected evolutionary process that has no concept of perfection, inevitably settling for compromise and prioritising reproductive success early in life at the expense of longer-term health and wellbeing.

Unintelligent Design - How An Essential Vitamin Helps Cancer Resist Our Immune Response

Ludwig Cancer Research

Recent research has shown that a metabolite of vitamin A, retinoic acid, can quietly inhibit the immune system, making it less responsive to tumours. It also reduces the effectiveness of a promising anti-cancer immunotherapy.

This work, carried out by scientists at the Princeton University branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, has resulted in two papers. The first, published in Nature Immunology, describes how retinoic acid produced by the immune system’s dendritic cells (DCs) alters their behaviour, inducing a dangerous tolerance of tumours. The second, published open access in iScience, outlines progress in developing drugs that inhibit retinoic acid production.

To anyone who understands evolution and how it proceeds through a series of sub-optimal “it’ll do” solutions — constrained by what is available at the time and lacking any foresight — it will come as no surprise that the human body’s dependence on vitamin A comes with a downside. These are the inevitable compromises of evolutionary history. What is inexplicable, however, is this vulnerability in terms of intelligent design by an omniscient, omnipotent designer, who should have foreseen such dangers and engineered a better solution — unless, of course, the creation of favourable conditions for cancer was itself part of the design. And that, of course, leads to the theological problems ID creationism leads inexorably to, but ID advocates routinely ignore - a god who is incompetent, indifferent, powerless, or worse still malevolent.

How Science Works - Why Did The Woolly Rhino Go Extinct 4,000 Years Before Creation Week?

Woolly rhinoceros, Coelodonta antiquitatis
Grotte Chauvet, Ardèche, France

Source

Woolly rhinoceros, Coelodonta antiquitatis

By Mr Langlois10 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

DNA from wolf pup’s last meal reveals new facts about woolly rhino’s extinction

A new research paper published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, by a team led by palaeogeneticists from the Centre for Palaeogenetics, Stockholm, Sweden, may make uncomfortable reading for any creationists with the courage to read it.

Firstly, it deals with events from that long period of pre-“Creation Week” history — evidence which would not exist if the biblical Flood myth were true. Secondly, it illustrates how, in contrast to the claim that scientists are only permitted to publish findings that conform to a rigid scientific orthodoxy, researchers are perfectly willing to revise established ideas when new evidence demands it. In this case, the study shows that one aspect of what palaeobiologists thought they understood about the evolutionary history of Eurasian megafauna may be wrong.

How We Know The Bible is Wrong - Cosmology

NGC 2566, a spiral galaxy located in the constellation Puppis

potm2412a

These two galaxies are named NGC 4490 and NGC 4485, and they’re located about 24 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs). Aside from the Milky Way’s own dwarf companions (the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds), this is the closest known interacting dwarf-dwarf system where astronomers have directly observed both a gas bridge and resolved stellar populations. Together NGC 4490 and NGC 4485 form the system Arp 269, which is featured in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. At such a close distance (and with Webb’s impressive ability to peer through dusty cosmic clouds) these galaxies allow astronomers to witness up close the kinds of galaxy interactions that were common billions of years ago.

Source: potm2511a

Just a gentle reminder, if any were needed, that we can tell the Bible is wrong by comparing its descriptions with what we can observe. To take a silly-simple example that even a creationists should be able to understand: supposing I told you that the Bible had 7 chapters in three sections, the Old, Middle And New Testaments, and was just 50 pages long, you could simply look in the Bible and see that I was wrong. It would be no use me trying to claim that I was right really because my statement was an allegory or a metaphor, because you could see that it was neither; it was simply wrong, unequivocally and irrefutably so.

Well, it's the same with the description of the Universe in the Bible. We can look at the Universe now, using technology the Bronze Age authors of the Bible could never dream of, and see that it is nothing like the description in the Bible.

So, just as my whimsical description of the Bible was not even close, so we can see that the Bronze age authors of the Bible were not even close. The difference of course is that while my mistakes were deliberate, theirs were the result of ignorance.

So, let's see again how the Bible describes a small, flat universe consisting of a single planet with a sun and moon hanging over it, and the whole covered by a dome to keep the water out.

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

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

How the Bible's authors saw the Universe.

And now let's look at what some tiny fragments of the Universe are really like, as shown by the James Webb Space Telescope and published by the European Space Agency (ESA):