Creationism Refuted - The 'American Cheetah' Was Not A Cheetah - Convergent Evolution

An artistic rendering of two Miracinonyx, one in Beringia preying mainly on fish and one in the Lower 48 feeding on pronghorn antelope.

Credit: Julius Csotonyi (CC-BY SA)

The feline Miracinonyx trumani got its nickname, the “American cheetah,” from its slender, long-limbed body, reminiscent of an African cheetah. While the extinct Pleistocene predator did hunt down speedy prey, such as saiga antelope (illustrated), a new study shows some animals ate a diet of mostly fish, suggesting the species was more adaptable than previously thought.

Velizar Simeonovski

The extinct American ‘cheetah’ was not a cheetah after all | EurekAlert!

A cat can look rather like a cheetah without being a cheetah, and a predator with long legs need not spend its life chasing antelopes. That is the lesson from new research into the extinct “American cheetah”, Miracinonyx trumani, whose ancient DNA and dietary chemistry reveal a more complicated animal than its nickname suggests. It is also another example of why evolutionary relationships have to be investigated through evidence, rather than decided by resemblance and fitted into preconceived categories.

The study, led by Molly Cassatt-Johnstone of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and published in Current Biology, analysed ancient DNA from four specimens. It strengthens earlier evidence that Miracinonyx was more closely related to living pumas than to true cheetahs, with the puma and Miracinonyx lineages estimated to have separated approximately 2.6 million years ago. Its cheetah-like anatomy therefore reflects convergent evolution: the independent evolution of similar features in different lineages.

There is an immediate difficulty here for young-Earth creationism. The evolutionary separation of these cats occurred millions of years before the supposed “Creation Week”, while the three Yukon specimens themselves are approximately 31,000 years old. These were animals living, feeding and dying in an established ecosystem long before the entire universe supposedly existed according to a literal reading of Genesis. Their identification also extends the animal’s known distribution far into northern Canada. Science News.

An artistic rendering of Miracinonyx.

An artistic rending of Miracinonyx and the ecosystem they lived in.

Images by Julius Csotonyi (CC-BY SA)

The northern animals provide a further surprise. Their isotope signatures suggest substantial consumption of fish or other aquatic food, whereas the Wyoming specimen shows a pattern consistent with eating terrestrial herbivores. This does not establish whether the northern cats caught fish themselves or scavenged them, but it does undermine the assumption that *Miracinonyx* was necessarily a specialist in pursuing fast-running prey. Its ecology appears to have been considerably more flexible. Science News.

For creationists, simply assigning all these animals to a vaguely defined “cat kind” explains none of this. It does not account for the particular branching relationships preserved in their DNA, the estimated dates of their divergence, or the independent evolution of similar anatomy. A label can accommodate almost anything when its boundaries remain adjustable; a scientific explanation must account for the details and remain open to testing.

There is also a useful illustration here of how science corrects and refines its understanding. Researchers have tested an appealing comparison against genetic and chemical evidence and uncovered a richer evolutionary history. The result is an extinct puma relative with its own combination of anatomical features and ecological opportunities—an animal whose identity emerges from the evidence, rather than from the name we happened to give it.

Refuting Creationism - Bible Mythology Dead And Buried Beneath The Gondwana Supercontinent

Artists impression of the supercontinent Gondwana.

Source: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty (Royalty-free)

Reconstruction of Greater Gondwana at ca. 500 Ma or at 550 to 500 Ma compared with conventional paleogeographic interpretations (inset).

From: Tao Wang et al.(2026).

Gondwana really was a supercontinent. And it helped kick-start life on Earth

More than half a billion years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of biblical literalism, moving continents were reshaping the planet and helping to establish the environmental conditions in which early animals diversified. That is the inconvenient historical setting of new research into Gondwana: a vast continental assembly whose formation, geological activity and subsequent fragmentation belong to a timescale that bears no resemblance to the few thousand years allowed by young-Earth creationism.

A paper in Science Advances , by Tao Wang of the State Key Laboratory of Deep Earth and Mineral Exploration, Institute of Geology, Beijing, China, and colleagues, suggests that Gondwana was substantially larger than conventional reconstructions show. As co-author Bill Collins explains in his accompanying account in The Conversation, isotopic evidence in granites identifies ancient continental material now concealed beneath younger geological formations across much of Asia. Including these overlooked fragments increases Gondwana’s estimated share of Earth’s continental landmass to roughly 80 per cent, making it a supercontinent even under a restrictive definition of that term. This reconstruction concerns the world of approximately 550–500 million years ago.

Its significance extends beyond redrawing an ancient map. The researchers propose that the reorganisation of plate boundaries associated with Gondwana’s assembly established an enormous belt of volcanic activity. Sustained emissions of greenhouse gases could then have helped alter the climate, contributing to conditions favourable to the diversification of Cambrian life. This is a proposed connection between geological and biological change, rather than a demonstration that volcanism alone caused the Cambrian radiation.

One distinction matters here: despite the article’s headline, this concerns the diversification of life, not its original appearance. Life already had a long evolutionary history before the Cambrian, and animals existed before that period began. Nor was the Cambrian ‘explosion’ an instantaneous event resembling a magical creation. The term describes a geologically rapid evolutionary diversification, unfolding over millions of years.

For creationism, therefore, the problem is more substantial than another inconvenient date. Here is a testable account connecting the history of continents with the environmental context of biological evolution. Continents assemble, plate boundaries change, volcanoes influence the atmosphere, and organisms evolve in the resulting conditions. None of this requires foresight or a predetermined destination. It requires physical processes, evolving populations and the immense passage of time.

Refuting Creationism - The People of Sulawesi Were Chewing Betel Nuts Thousands Of Years Before Creationism's God 'Created The World'

Areca 'betel' nuts, Areca catechu

By Praveenmnaik - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Areca 'betel' nut (Areca catechu)

By LBM1948 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Ice Age origins of one of humanity’s oldest drug habits - Griffith News

One of the recurring problems for Bible-literalist creationism is that people were living ordinary human lives long before its chronology permits them to have existed. They were finding food, acquiring knowledge of local plants and developing habits that left recognisable traces on their bodies. Two ancient individuals from Sulawesi, Indonesia, now provide a particularly revealing example: their teeth preserve evidence of betel-nut consumption thousands of years before the supposed biblical Flood—and, in the older individual’s case, long before “Creation Week” itself.

The research, published in Science Advances, concerns two hunter-gatherers, one dated to approximately 25,000–16,000 years ago and the other to 7,600–6,300 years ago. Even the youngest end of the older specimen’s age range places that person well before the entire universe supposedly appeared, according to young-Earth creationism. The younger individual also predates the legendary genocidal Flood in conventional biblical chronologies; indeed, both individuals predate creation itself under the familiar approximately 6,000-year scheme. These are awkward people to accommodate in a history constructed from Genesis.

As the Griffith University news report, researchers detected arecoline, a psychoactive compound found in betel nut, in the individuals’ dental tissues. Both also had unusual rounded grooves in their teeth, interpreted as evidence of habitually sucking whole nuts. Experiments showed that soaking intact nuts in artificial saliva released enough of the compound to produce effects in laboratory receptor tests. Together, the chemical evidence, tooth wear and experiments make a strong case for an ancient practice of consuming a neuroactive plant.

Refuting Creationism - The Evidence For Denisovans Just Keeps Getting Better

Map showing the geographic locations of Denisovan fossils determined by molecular evidence. The colours of the map reflect a combination of elevation and environmental context.

From: Rao, H., Xing, S., Ruan, Q. et al. (2026).

Denisovan Radius Discovered for First Time in Southwest China----Chinese Academy of Sciences

Fragments of Denisovan teeth, and bones recovered from Bianfu Cave in Southwest China

From: Rao, H., Xing, S., Ruan, Q. et al. (2026).

Long before the universe supposedly existed, according to Young-Earth creationism, human relatives were making tools and processing animal carcasses in what is now south-western China. Two complementary papers in Nature reveal another chapter of this inconvenient prehistory, combining ancient proteins, fossil anatomy and archaeology to investigate the Denisovans of Bianfu Cave in Yunnan Province.

In the first paper, Huiyun Rao and colleagues identify five Denisovan remains: two teeth, two skull fragments and part of a radius, one of the forearm bones. These come from layers dated to approximately 167,000–134,000 years ago. The radius provides the first securely identified example of this bone from a Denisovan, adding valuable evidence about a human lineage whose skeleton remains frustratingly poorly known.

The identification depended on proteins preserved within the fossils. Researchers screened more than 60,000 bone fragments before selecting promising specimens for molecular analysis. Surviving protein sequences contained diagnostic Denisovan variants, allowing small fragments to acquire an evolutionary identity that their appearance alone could not securely establish. The study also places another confirmed Denisovan locality within a previously conspicuous gap in their known Asian distribution.

A second paper in Nature, by Qijun Ruan and colleagues examines the wider archaeological record. Evidence of cave use extends from approximately 190,000 to 70,000 years ago — a span of around 120,000 years. Its inhabitants hunted medium-sized and large animals, produced stone tools and made extensive use of bones without elaborate modification. These practices suggest practical exploitation of available materials in a landscape of coniferous forest and forest-steppe.

An important distinction remains: the identified Denisovan fossils cover only part of that longer sequence. Attributing the wider archaeological record to Denisovans is the researchers’ most economical interpretation, rather than direct proof that Denisovans occupied the cave throughout. Nor does the sequence establish uninterrupted residence. That qualification illustrates how scientific conclusions are bounded by the evidence.

Refuting Creationism - Creationists Bitten By Snapping Tasmanian Tiger

AI-depiction of a thylacine in the Tasmanian bush

ChatGPT 6 Astra

The last known Tasmanian tiger in footage digitised by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Photograph: National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

3D scans of Tasmanian tiger’s skull reveal it had crocodile-style snapping jaws

The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, has long been a textbook example of convergent evolution: a marsupial predator whose resemblance to a wolf evolved independently in a distant branch of the mammalian family tree. For creationists, such similarities offer an opportunity to invoke a designer reusing a successful design. But that explanation overlooks the more revealing question: how far does the resemblance go, and why do similarities in some features coexist with substantial differences in others?

New research led by Flinders University’s Professor Vera Weisbecker, published in Nature Communications, shows why describing the thylacine as a “marsupial wolf” can be misleading. Its skull combined features resembling those of different carnivores with an unusual specialisation of its own. As the university’s account explains, this animal was more closely related to kangaroos than to dogs, despite its superficially canine appearance.

Three-dimensional comparisons revealed a striking mixture. The back of the skull resembled that of larger canids, including wolves, while the long, slender snout looked more like that of smaller foxes and jackals. Yet the whole skull was disproportionately large for the animal carrying it. The researchers suggest that this combination supported rapid, forceful snapping bites at relatively small prey. Some features even invite comparison with crocodiles and other vertebrates that catch agile prey with elongated jaws. These are inferences from anatomy, rather than direct observations of hunting behaviour, but they undermine the familiar image of a predator equipped to overpower large animals in the manner of a wolf. The authors explain these findings in their article for The Conversation.
This is precisely where convergent evolution becomes more informative than a superficial resemblance. Natural selection acts on inherited anatomy, modifying structures already present in a lineage. Similar demands can favour similar features in distantly related animals, without producing identical bodies or requiring identical lifestyles. Each lineage brings its own evolutionary history, developmental constraints and available variation to the process. The result can be a mosaic of resemblance and difference.

Invoking a designer who sometimes copies a wolf, sometimes a fox and sometimes produces something quite different adds no testable explanation for that pattern. Descent with modification, by contrast, provides a framework for investigating both the shared features and the departures from them. The thylacine’s distinctive skull makes that investigation richer, while reminding us that evolutionary convergence need never amount to a complete anatomical duplicate.

The article in The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Why Nature Creates Fossils Of Different Ages In The Same Deposit - Unlike The Mythical Genocidal Flood

AI depiction of how shells accumulate in sediment

ChatGPT 6 Astra

Collection of creatures that can disturb sediment and relocate shells.

Florida Museum.

Paleontologists spent 20 years carbon-dating thousands of marine fossils, then used them to decode a process fundamental to Earth’s history – Research News

A fossil bed is not necessarily a collection of animals that lived and died together. Two shells lying side by side can belong to creatures whose lives were separated by hundreds or thousands of years. For creationists who interpret fossil-bearing deposits as the products of a single, year-long biblical Flood, that raises an awkward question: how much history is actually represented within a supposedly catastrophic snapshot?

An international study, published in PNAS, brings substantial evidence to bear on that question. Drawing on two decades of research, the team assembled dates for more than 7,500 marine fossils, obtained using radiocarbon dating and other methods. They investigated “time averaging”: the mixing of remains from different generations within the same assemblage.

Their principal finding was that sediment accumulation rate is the strongest predictor of this mixing. Where sediment accumulates slowly, remains from successive generations can collect before permanent burial. Faster accumulation generally limits that opportunity. Comparisons between observations and computer simulations showed that sedimentation exerted a stronger influence than the other factors examined, including mixing by burrowing animals and the destruction of skeletal remains. These findings concern the relatively recent fossil record; their application to much deeper time still requires testing.

The creationist response cannot therefore consist merely of declaring that the fossils were all buried by Noah’s Flood. Burial and death are different events. A sudden event could gather older shells and redeposit them, but that would concede that the resulting assemblage contains a history predating the catastrophe. It would still be necessary to explain the age differences, the source of the older material and the surrounding sedimentary evidence.

Nor does a vague appeal to “errors in carbon dating” solve the problem. An identical age offset applied to every specimen would leave their age differences intact. Other proposed errors would need to be specified, quantified and shown to account for the observed pattern. Simply assuming that inconvenient measurements must be wrong is not an explanation; it is a refusal to accept evidence.

The significance of this research is that the history preserved within fossil assemblages can be investigated and measured. Scientists can ask how much time a collection represents, identify the processes responsible and test their explanations against thousands of specimens. For Flood geology, the challenge is to produce an equally convincing account of those observations. A biblical narrative, however confidently repeated, supplies neither the measurements nor the explanation.

Creationism Refuted - How Mammalian Genes Combine to Produce New mRNA - No Magic Required

AI-generated depiction of a chimeric mRNA being formed from two different genes

ChatGPT 6 Astra

A watercolor painting depicts chimeric mRNAs.

Image: Hannah Davis/Jackson Lab.

Mammalian Genes Can Combine To Make Previously Unknown mRNAs, Proteins | Harvard Medical School

An immune system that saves your life in one circumstance can help kill you in another makes sense in the light of evolution: natural selection favours advantages whose benefits outweigh their costs under prevailing conditions, without guaranteeing safety in every eventuality. For creationists who present biological complexity as evidence of perfect intelligent design, however, such compromises require some explaining.

A new study published in Nature on 2 September 2026 provides a particularly revealing example. Researchers found that mammalian cells can join RNA sequences copied from separate genes into a combined message. One resulting protein improves antibacterial defence in mice, but also increases vulnerability to lethal inflammatory responses in experimental models of sepsis. The same molecular mechanism brings both protection and danger.

To understand the discovery, think of DNA as a collection of stored recipes. Messenger RNA, or mRNA, is a working copy that a cell uses to assemble a protein. Scientists have long known that cells can edit these copies, allowing a single gene to produce different proteins. Here, the researchers investigated messages containing material from different genes, sometimes located on different chromosomes. It is rather like making a new recipe by combining instructions from two separate cookbooks. The joining occurs at the RNA level; it does not require the original DNA recipes to merge.

These combined messages are called chimeric RNAs. Crucially, the team demonstrated that one produces a functional protein, named GSDMD–TMEM106A, during inflammation in mice. Most of the other candidate messages have yet to be shown to produce functional proteins, so the discovery should not be mistaken for proof that every detected combination has a useful role.

The evolutionary interest lies in the consequences. Strengthening an inflammatory response can help an animal resist infection, yet the resulting damage can become lethal. Weakening that response can reduce the danger from inflammation while leaving the animal less able to control bacteria. There is no simple setting at which “more immunity” always means “better health”.

This is precisely the sort of trade-off evolutionary biology helps us understand. Natural selection works with inherited mechanisms and their competing consequences; it has neither foresight nor a commitment to the welfare of every individual or to the perfect solution. The study does not reconstruct the evolutionary history of this particular protein, but its findings illustrate why a useful biological feature need not be harmless, let alone perfect. For intelligent-design advocates, the question is therefore more demanding than “Is it complicated?” It is why an allegedly flawless designer’s protective machinery comes with the capacity to inflict fatal damage on the organism it protects.

Creationism Refuted - A Cretaceous Dinosaur From Brazil With A Close Relative From Spain - From 120 Million Years Ago

AI-generated impression of Dasosaurus tocantinensis in the Cretaceous.

ChatGPT 6 Astra

Artistic reconstruction of the new dinosaur from Maranhão state. It was 20 meters long and had a European relative .

Paleoart: Jorge Blanco.

New long-necked dinosaur found in Northeast Brazil was a close relative of a European species

A newly described giant dinosaur from Brazil presents creationists with more than the familiar problem of a fossil vastly older than their supposed creation of the Universe. Its evolutionary relationships also preserve evidence of a world whose geography has changed profoundly: continents separating, ancestral populations dispersing, and related lineages following different evolutionary paths. This is precisely the sort of historical pattern we expect when common descent operates on a planet reshaped by plate tectonics.

The dinosaur, Dasosaurus tocantinensis, was approximately 20 metres long and lived around 120 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous. Its remains were discovered during construction of a road–rail terminal at Davinópolis, in the north-eastern Brazilian state of Maranhão. Described by Elver Luiz Mayer and colleagues in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, it has its closest known evolutionary relative in what is now Spain. The researchers interpret this affinity as evidence that its ancestors probably reached South America from Europe via North Africa between about 140 and 120 million years ago.

That proposed route needs to be understood against the geography of the time. Africa and South America had not yet completed their separation, and connections between landmasses offered opportunities for dispersal that the modern map conceals. The finding therefore concerns ancestral movements through an ancient landscape, rather than dinosaurs somehow crossing the present-day Atlantic.

The broader evolutionary principle is straightforward. Populations can spread when geographical connections permit; when barriers interrupt gene flow, their descendants can diverge. Consequently, relationships between species should reflect both their ancestry and the changing opportunities for movement and isolation. Evolutionary biology supplies the explanation for the branching relationships, while plate tectonics supplies the changing geographical setting. This particular fossil does not, by itself, prove that continental separation caused a specific speciation event, but its affinities fit the larger picture remarkably well.

For young-Earth creationism, the difficulty is therefore both chronological and explanatory. A dinosaur living 120 million years ago cannot be accommodated within a literal Genesis chronology. Nor does the assertion that a creator suddenly produced separate “kinds” explain why their anatomical relationships should correspond to ancient geographical connections. Common descent makes that correspondence intelligible; magical creation provides no comparable prediction.

What emerges is a history of life unfolding on a changing Earth, with neither continents nor their inhabitants fixed in their present arrangements. Understanding that history requires evidence, evolutionary relationships and deep time — all conspicuously absent from the biblical creation account.

Creationism Refuted - Arrowheads From Uzbekistan Shoot Creationism Down

Micropoints from Obi-Rakhmat, layers 20-21

From: Plisson H, et al (2025)

Obi-Rakhmat rock shelter

From: Plisson H, et al (2025)

Arrowhead points found in Central Asia could prove the presence of ‘Homo sapiens’ 80,000 years ago

A handful of tiny stone points from a rock shelter in Uzbekistan presents several difficulties for creationism. They come from deposits dated to around 80,000 years ago, placing their manufacture tens of thousands of years before the supposed creation of the Universe according to young-Earth biblical literalism. They belong to an archaeological record that demands an explanation grounded in prolonged human occupation and sediment accumulation. And their publication demonstrates something creationist propagandists routinely deny: scientists can publish evidence that challenges established interpretations of human history.

The research, by Hugues Plisson and an international team, appeared in PLOS One. Examining stone artefacts from the oldest occupation layers at Obi-Rakhmat, the researchers identified damage consistent with their use as projectile tips. Particularly intriguing are tiny triangular points whose dimensions suggest mounting on light, arrow-like shafts. The authors interpret these as possible evidence of archery approximately 80,000 years ago. Their further suggestion—that the technology indicates the presence of *Homo sapiens*—is an inference from archaeological comparisons, rather than a definitive identification of the toolmakers.

For young-Earth creationism, the chronological problem exists regardless of whether that interpretation ultimately prevails. Disagreement about which human population made an ancient weapon does nothing to bring its manufacture within a biblical timescale. Uncertainty about one aspect of the evidence is not uncertainty about everything, however useful that confusion might be to those trying to dismiss an inconvenient past.

The site also raises an awkward question for advocates of a recent, catastrophic global flood. Its archaeological sequence extends through more than ten metres of deposits representing tens of thousands of years. This is evidence of a lengthy local history that any alternative account must explain. It would be too sweeping to claim that no stone artefact could survive a flood; the stronger objection concerns the preservation and formation of the deposits in which those artefacts occur. Invoking a catastrophe that supposedly reshaped the entire Earth does not explain an ordered archaeological sequence merely by adding water to the story. The paper itself does not investigate Noah’s flood, but its findings add to the ancient history that biblical literalists must somehow compress into a few thousand years.

Refuting Creationism - Eocene Footprints In Antarctica Trample Creationism In The Mud

Artist's impression of the small mammal that left its mark in Antarctica

Credit: Álvaro Medina

This is what the small mammal that left its mark in Antarctica might have looked like.

Credit: Álvaro Medina

First Terrestrial Mammal Footprint Discovered in Antarctica

Sometimes, a small footprint exposes an enormous problem for creationism. In this case, it is a partial impression preserved in approximately 55.5-million-year-old volcanic sediment on what is now King George Island, Antarctica. Its age alone places it far outside the few thousand years allowed by a literal reading of Genesis. But its setting tells an equally significant story: an Antarctic landscape capable of supporting terrestrial mammals, profoundly different from the frozen continent we know today.

The discovery, described by Héctor Mansilla-Vera and colleagues in Polar Biology, comprises a partial forefoot-and-hindfoot impression. The researchers interpret its maker as a small carnivorous mammal, possibly a sparassodont—an extinct relative of marsupials otherwise known from South America. That identification remains tentative: the incomplete trace cannot establish a particular species or confidently identify the group. Nevertheless, it records a mammal walking across an Antarctic substrate, providing evidence of its presence where it lived, rather than bones or teeth transported after death. Javier Gelfo’s account of the research explains both the interpretation and its limitations.

This animal inhabited a warmer, forested Antarctica that retained land connections with South America. Antarctica was already at high southern latitudes; its subsequent transformation cannot simply be explained as a warm continent drifting towards the pole. The larger story involves the breakup of Gondwana, the loss of connections between continents, changing ocean circulation and a changing atmosphere.

As tectonic movements opened and deepened southern ocean gateways, they altered the movement of water and heat around Antarctica. Falling atmospheric carbon dioxide also played a major role in the cooling that culminated in extensive Antarctic glaciation around 34 million years ago. Geography and climate interacted over geological time to transform the conditions under which life could survive. Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

The challenge to creationism is therefore more precise than simply showing that Earth has changed. Biblical literalists themselves invoke catastrophic change through their Flood narrative. What confronts them here is evidence belonging to a much longer, independently reconstructed history: continents separating, connections disappearing, climates shifting and ecosystems being transformed over tens of millions of years. An appeal to an originally “perfect” creation explains none of those details.

This tiny trace offers a glimpse of life on a planet whose geography and habitability have never been permanent fixtures. Understanding it requires geology, palaeontology and climate science working together—and the willingness to distinguish what the evidence demonstrates from what it merely suggests.

An account and discussion of this research by Antonio García was published in La Brújula Verde. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism Refuted - How LUCA Got It's Enzymes - No Magic Required

Shared protein folds in primordial sea

AI-generated image (ChatGPT-6 Astra)

Metabolic networks provide clues about the earliest stages of enzyme evolution | Science Tokyo

Metabolic Reactions Reveal Early Enzyme Evolution

One of creationism’s more persistent claims is that evolution cannot produce “new genetic information” because doing so would violate the second law of thermodynamics. The proposed escape from this imaginary prohibition is, inevitably, a supernatural information-provider. But the second law contains no ban on mutations producing new biological functions. It concerns entropy: the total entropy of an isolated system cannot decrease. Living organisms exchange energy and matter with their surroundings, and their activities increase the entropy of those surroundings. Building DNA, growing a leaf and evolving a new enzyme require no suspension of physics. The thermodynamic principles are explained here.

The argument also trades on treating genetic “information” as though it were a mysterious substance that only intelligence can manufacture. Genes are physical sequences of DNA, and those sequences can change, duplicate and recombine. Following duplication, one copy can retain an established function while the other accumulates changes that enable a different or more specialised activity. Natural selection can favour useful variants. A new biological capability need not require an entirely new molecular structure, still less a miraculous delivery of instructions.

This is what makes a study by Tatsuya Corlett and colleagues, published in PNAS, particularly relevant. The researchers combined metabolic-reaction networks with protein-fold data to infer the relative order in which enzyme structures emerged. Their model points to a prominent early role for α/β folds—structures containing both alpha helices and beta sheets—and suggests that most oxygen-using enzymes arose through the adaptation of existing folds as oxygen became available. Evolution could expand its biochemical repertoire by modifying structures already present.

The creationist demand for something wholly unprecedented therefore misses how evolution works. Novelty can reside in a changed activity, a different molecular target or a new regulatory relationship. Retaining an ancestral protein framework does not make a newly evolved function any less new. Nor does calling the result “information” establish a thermodynamic obstacle to its origin.

The research also extends the investigation of our shared biochemical ancestry towards the interval before LUCA, the last universal common ancestor of living organisms. LUCA was not necessarily the first life: its enzymes already had an evolutionary history. These results are model-based historical inferences, rather than recovered pre-LUCA proteins or a direct measurement of increasing genetic information. Nevertheless, they offer a way to investigate that earlier history through the organisation of metabolism itself.

Creationism Refuted - Complex Symbiosis Between Animals And Microbes - 550 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Ediacaran tubular fossil Conotubus (inset: symbiotic chemosynthetic bacteria)

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 6 Astra)

Ancient fossil from China reveals animal-microbe partnerships dating back 550 million years

Some 550 million years ago, long before the world existed according to a literal reading of Genesis, an early animal may already have been exploiting the biochemical abilities of bacteria. New research on the Ediacaran tubular fossil Conotubus suggests that animal–microbe partnerships have a history extending back towards the beginnings of animal life. For creationism, the inconvenience is twofold: the immense timescale, and a biological arrangement that makes excellent evolutionary sense but raises awkward questions about supposedly intelligent design.

The study, led by Zhenfei Wang and Yongbo Peng of Nanjing University and published in PNAS, examined sulphur and molybdenum isotope signatures in fossils from southern China. These suggest an association with sulphur-oxidising bacteria, potentially supplying nutrition and helping the animal tolerate toxic, sulphide-rich conditions. This is a geochemical inference, rather than the discovery of preserved bacterial partners. If the interpretation is correct, however, it extends the fossil evidence for animal–microbe symbiosis backwards by roughly 100 million years, as co-author Peter Crockford explains in his account of the research in an article in The Conversation.

Creationists often present such interdependence as evidence of design, as though two organisms benefiting from one another could only be the result of someone planning the arrangement. But this overlooks an obvious question: why would an omniscient designer make an animal dependent on another organism for a useful biochemical function? Why not equip the animal itself with the necessary machinery? A partnership introduces additional requirements: the organisms must encounter one another or maintain their association across generations, exchange useful substances, and sustain conditions in which both can function. Each dependency creates something else that can fail.

There is a qualification here. Giving an animal bacterial capabilities would not necessarily be as simple as inserting a few genes into its genome. Genes operate within cellular systems; useful metabolism also requires appropriate regulation, enzymes, transport mechanisms and chemical conditions. Division of labour between organisms can therefore be highly effective. Nevertheless, these are constraints facing organisms produced by evolution. An allegedly omnipotent designer, able to specify the entire system from the outset, cannot readily be excused by invoking the limitations of inherited cellular machinery. Complexity alone is no evidence of intelligent planning, especially when it includes dependence on a separate organism to supply an essential service.

As I argued in The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax complexity is not the evidence for intelligent design that creationists like to think since the hallmark of good, intelligent design is minimal complexity. Complexity is evidence of evolved systems where suboptimal solutions to problems often need additional layers of complexity to mitigate failures.

Creationism Refuted - The People Of Gansu, China Did Not Have Ancestors In The Middle East - Another Bible Blunder

Depiction of Bronze Age Life in Gansu, China

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Astra)

Geographic locations of the studied sites in Gansu and nearby regions (color-filled circles) and published ancient sites in East Asia co-analyzed in this study (white-filled circles).

From: Shi H, Bennett E, Chen G, et al (2026)

Multidisciplinary Study Sheds Light on Agricultural Diffusion, Population Movement, and Funeral Practices in Ancient Gansu----Chinese Academy of Sciences

Archaeologists have long warned that “pots are not people”. The distribution of a particular style of pottery does not necessarily trace the movement of the people who first made it, because pots can be traded, copied or carried through a succession of neighbouring communities. Much the same principle applies to crops, livestock and agricultural techniques: wheat can travel without wheat farmers, sheep without shepherds, and an effective method can spread simply because other people adopt it.

Distinguishing between the movement of people and the movement of their culture is therefore essential when reconstructing prehistory. Agriculture sometimes spread by demic diffusion, in which expanding farming populations moved into new territory and brought their domesticates with them. In other cases, it spread principally by cultural diffusion, as existing populations acquired crops, animals or knowledge through trade, imitation and intermediate exchange networks. Archaeological remains alone do not always reveal which process occurred, but ancient DNA can now test the alternatives directly.

Gansu, in north-western China, provides an especially important case. Situated between the Yellow River basin, the Tibetan Plateau, the Mongolian Steppe and the routes leading towards Central Asia, the region became a major corridor of prehistoric trans-Eurasian exchange. Crops and livestock domesticated much farther west eventually appeared there, raising the obvious question of whether they arrived with migrating western farmers or passed between the established populations of Inner and East Asia.

A multidisciplinary study published in Cell has now examined genomic data from 149 people who lived at eleven Gansu sites between approximately 4,700 and 3,000 years ago. Western-derived crops or livestock were present at nine of those sites, yet the researchers found no corresponding influx of western Eurasian or Central Asian ancestry. The principal genetic components instead derived from populations associated with the Yellow River basin, the south-eastern Mongolian Plateau and the Tibetan Plateau. A few genetic outliers testify to regional mobility and contact, but not to wholesale population replacement.

The evidence therefore indicates that the western domesticates reached Gansu largely through cultural transmission—possibly along the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor or through chains of intermediary communities across the Mongolian Steppe. Crops, animals and ideas crossed Eurasia farther and more readily than the people among whom they had originated. The finding also shows why neither pottery, farming nor any other cultural innovation can safely be treated as a proxy for mass migration.

This carefully reconstructed picture bears little resemblance to the simplistic human history imagined by biblical literalists. It contains no recently dispersed descendants of a single family spreading from Babel with fixed cultures and divinely assigned identities. Instead, it reveals long-established, genetically differentiated populations connected by shifting networks of exchange, occasional mobility and selective cultural borrowing. People did not need to migrate en masse for useful innovations to spread across a continent.

Malevolent Design - How The Success Of A Honey Bee Parasite Is Assured - Malevolent Design Or Evolution?

Varroa desructor female.
Dorsal view (top); ventral view (bottom)

By USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab from Beltsville, Maryland, USA - Varroa destructor, 1_2019-09-06-19.12.07 ZS PMax UDR, Public Domain, Link

Varroa mites on honey bee pupa.

By Unknown author - Kika De La Garza Subtropical Agricultural Research Center
Weslaco, Texas, USA, Public Domain, Link

Varroa mites escape the evolutionary trap of haplodiploidy | Nature Communications

Creationists like to portray living things as products of a single act of creation in which every species was equipped with its characteristic form and method of reproduction from the outset. In that view, reproductive systems should be fixed features of separately created “kinds”, not historically contingent arrangements that can be remodelled by natural selection.

Biology reveals something very different. Even such fundamental characteristics as sex determination, chromosome number and the balance between sexual and asexual reproduction can evolve. Existing developmental mechanisms are modified, discarded or repurposed according to whether the resulting variations leave more descendants. Evolution has no predetermined direction, no obligation to proceed from “simple” to “complex” and no rule forbidding a lineage from reacquiring a feature resembling one possessed by its ancestors.

An international team of researchers has now discovered an especially striking example in Varroa destructor, the globally invasive parasitic mite that feeds on honeybees and transmits damaging viruses between them. Its reproductive system appears to have reversed what was once regarded as an evolutionary one-way street.

Like many mites, bees, wasps and ants, Varroa was believed to be haplodiploid. In conventional haplodiploidy, females develop from fertilised eggs and possess two sets of chromosomes, while males develop from unfertilised eggs and possess only one. Consequently, a haploid male can transmit only the single copy of each gene inherited from his mother.

That should present Varroa with a serious evolutionary handicap. A female mite enters a honeybee brood cell shortly before it is sealed and produces one son followed by several daughters. The siblings mate with one another inside the cell, producing generation after generation of extreme inbreeding. Combined with the population bottlenecks associated with invading new hosts and new geographical regions, this should rapidly erode genetic diversity and limit the parasite’s ability to adapt.

However, by tracing genetic variants through three-generation pedigrees, Nurit Eliash and colleagues discovered that Varroa is not conventionally haplodiploid after all. Its females produce sons parthenogenetically, but those sons initially inherit both copies of their mother’s genome and are effectively genetic clones of her. Although DNA is subsequently eliminated from some of the males’ body cells, their reproductive lineage retains access to both maternal copies, either of which can be transmitted to a daughter.

Refuting Creationism - The Pages Of Gospels Record Evolution Over 3,500 Years

Created in Northumbria in the eighth century, this copy of the Epistles of St Paul is among the oldest books held in the Trinity College Cambridge Library.

Credit: the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge

DNA of the ancient virus was extracted from millennium old sheepskin Bible parchment, now in the collections of the University of Cambridge.

Credit: the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge.

Hidden DNA in medieval gospels reveal history of deadly livestock virus - University College Dublin

Sometimes history leaves two very different records on the same page. One was deliberately written in ink by medieval scribes, copying stories that religious authorities declared to be sacred truth. The other was written unintentionally in molecules: fragments of viral DNA preserved in the animal skin on which those stories were written.

Unlike the supernatural claims in the text, this second record does not depend on faith, revelation or ecclesiastical authority. It can be extracted, sequenced and compared with DNA recovered from other archaeological specimens and from viruses circulating today. Ironically, manuscripts intended to preserve the Christian message have also preserved independently verifiable evidence of evolution.

As reported in Science Advances, an international research team led by scientists at University College Dublin has now recovered DNA from sheeppox virus (Capripoxvirus sheeppox) in medieval parchment manuscripts, including the approximately 1,000-year-old York Gospels, the earlier Corpus Glossary and other codices from Britain and continental Europe. Because parchment was manufactured from the skins of sheep, goats and cattle, each sheet can retain a molecular record of the animal from which it came—including traces of pathogens infecting it when it died. In several manuscripts, viral DNA occurred on several pages, suggesting that the skins of infected animals had been used in their manufacture.

Creationism In Crisis - Scientists Witness How First Complex Cells May Have Formed

3D segmentation analysis of the tomogram showing the identified inner membrane (blue), outer layer (teal), putative ribosomes (gray), extracellular fibers (light orange), and intracellular filament (light green).

From: Nobs S, Johnson M, Williams T, et al. (2026)

A composite image of the Asgard archaeon (inset) found within the microbial mats of Shark Bay, Western Australia.

Image: Iain Duggin, Debnath Ghosal, Brendan Burns

‘First contact’ that may have led to complex life on Earth finally witnessed by scientists

The origin of the eukaryotic cell was one of the most consequential transitions in the history of life. Every animal, plant, fungus and protist is composed of eukaryotic cells—cells containing a nucleus and an elaborate internal organisation that is absent from bacteria and archaea. Without that ancient evolutionary innovation, there would have been no plants, no animals and, of course, no humans.

Yet eukaryotic cells appear not to have arisen through the sudden creation of an entirely new kind of organism. The evidence increasingly indicates that they emerged through an extended evolutionary association between previously independent microorganisms. An archaeal host formed a close relationship with at least one bacterium, and a descendant of an alphaproteobacterium eventually became the mitochondrion—the energy-processing organelle still present in almost every eukaryotic cell. Other cellular features evolved before, during or after this extraordinary merger.

Precisely how that relationship began remains one of evolutionary biology’s most difficult questions. The event occurred billions of years ago, microorganisms rarely leave informative fossils, and the organisms involved have long since disappeared. Scientists must therefore reconstruct the process by combining comparative genomics, cell biology, phylogenetics and observations of living microorganisms whose biology may preserve clues to those ancient interactions.

Now an international research team led by scientists at the University of New South Wales, the University of Technology Sydney and the University of Melbourne has observed something tantalisingly suggestive. As described in an open-access paper in Current Biology, the researchers cultivated a previously unknown member of the Asgard archaea from a microbial mat associated with the stromatolites of Gathaagudu, or Shark Bay, Western Australia.

Creationism Refuted - Creationists Stung By Giant Scorpion - From 415 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Praearcturus gigas in a Devonian river

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Life reconstruction of Praearcturus gigas

© Franz Anthony

World’s largest scorpion revealed from 415-million-year-old fossils

Anyone attempting to reconcile Earth’s history with the creation myths in Genesis has another awkward fossil to explain: the remains of a scorpion that lived in Britain approximately 415 million years ago—more than 400 million years before the supposed biblical Creation Week.

The animal,Praearcturus gigas, inhabited the river channels and floodplains of what are now England and Wales during the Early Devonian Period. Although known only from fragmentary remains, its enormous pincers and body plates suggest that it may have approached a metre in length, making it the largest scorpion yet identified. One of its fossil claws is more than 15.9 centimetres long, while the preserved carapace is about 9.4 centimetres wide.

The fossils themselves are not a new discovery. Some were collected in the nineteenth century and have been held in the Natural History Museum’s collections for more than 150 years. First described in 1871,Praearcturus was originally classified as a giant isopod-like crustacean and was subsequently compared with several other arthropod groups. Its identity remained controversial because none of the known specimens preserves an entire animal, including the characteristic segmented tail and sting.

Now, as reported in Plaeontology, researchers from the Natural History Museum, the University of Manchester and Technological University Dublin have re-examined the specimens using detailed photography, anatomical comparisons and computed tomography. Features including its large claw-bearing pedipalps, the structure of its sternum and a stridulatory surface on one of its leg bases provide strong evidence that it was a true scorpion. The researchers also concluded that fossils previously namedBrontoscorpio anglicus andBennettarthra annwnensis probably belonged to the same species and should be treated as junior synonyms ofPraearcturus gigas.
Its age is established by its geological context. The specimens come from the St Maughans Formation of the Anglo-Welsh Basin, a sequence of river and floodplain deposits belonging to the Lochkovian Stage of the Early Devonian. Fossil spores place the relevant rocks within a recognised biological zone dated to approximately 415.8–412 million years ago. This was not the familiar green world of later geological periods: forests had not yet evolved, land plants were still small, and terrestrial ecosystems were only beginning to develop.

Creationism Refuted - Recovering DNA from Extinct Galápagos Giant Tortoises

The Pinzón saddleback tortoise, a small giant tortoise species native to Pinzón Island in the Galápagos characterized by a saddle-like curve in its shell.

Credit: Evelyn Jensen

Dome-shelled Galápagos giant tortoise, Chelonoidis nigra

By Mfield, Matthew Field, http://www.photography.mattfield.com - Own work,
CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Reading the giant tortoise DNA that time forgot | Yale News

Few places are more closely associated with evolutionary biology than the Galápagos Islands. Their isolation has repeatedly divided colonising populations into smaller groups, allowing mutation, genetic drift and natural selection to produce distinct island lineages. Yet their subsequent history has not always resembled a neatly branching tree. Occasional migration—and, more recently, the deliberate movement of animals by humans—has brought formerly isolated populations back into contact, permitting them to interbreed and exchange genes.

The evolutionary radiation of the Galápagos giant tortoises is a particularly striking example. Thirteen living and four extinct lineages are currently recognised within the Chelonoidis complex, each descended from the same ancestral colonisation but subsequently differentiated by geographical isolation. Unfortunately, centuries of exploitation by sailors and settlers devastated many populations, leaving some lineages represented only by bones preserved in museums.

Those remains retain a record of their evolutionary history, but reading it is difficult. DNA begins to fragment and chemically deteriorate after death, while contamination from microorganisms and people can overwhelm the surviving genetic material. In some of the museum specimens examined in a new study, researchers could read less than one per cent of the original genome—far too little for many conventional methods of genomic comparison.

However, a team led by researchers at Yale University has now developed a computational approach capable of extracting reliable evolutionary information from such exceptionally incomplete genomes. As described in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the researchers analysed dried bones from five historical specimens and placed their surviving DNA fragments upon a reference phylogeny constructed from high-quality genomes belonging to living and other historical tortoises.

Importantly, the researchers did not manufacture plausible sequences to fill the gaps. Their analytical pipeline was designed to recover the phylogenetic and population-genetic signal present in ultra-low-coverage genomes without imputing the missing genotypes. Even at sequencing depths as low as 0.008 times the genome, the surviving fragments contained enough mutually consistent information to reveal where the specimens belonged.

The results confirmed that the bones represented two evolutionarily distinct, now-extinct lineages: the former tortoises of Santa Fe and an extinct San Cristóbal lineage different from the population still living on that island. These were not merely unusual individuals belonging to surviving populations but genetically distinguishable branches of the wider Galápagos tortoise radiation.

Refuting Creationism - The Evolution of Complexity - No Magic Needed

Stomata on a leaf surface

Credit: Emilio Ermini, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Stomata on a leaf surface.

How plants evolved a molecular switch to cope with heat

Creationists routinely portray complex biochemical pathways as systems that must have been designed as complete working units. Remove one component, they argue, and the system ceases to function; therefore, by the presuppositional false dichotomy that characterises creationism, all the components must have been assembled simultaneously by an intelligent designer.

Evolution does not work by assembling entirely new systems from nothing, however. It modifies what is already present. Existing proteins acquire new interactions, mutations alter their stability or activity, and old signalling pathways are recruited for additional purposes. A comparatively small change can connect existing components and produce a new, environmentally responsive function.

An elegant example has now been described by Shao-Li Yang and colleagues from VIB, Ghent University, KU Leuven and collaborating institutions. Their study, published in Nature Plants, identifies a molecular pathway that helps Arabidopsis thaliana cool its leaves during heat stress. It also shows how evolution produced the regulatory switch by altering the electrical charge at a particular position in an existing protein.

Plants cannot escape into the shade when conditions become dangerously hot. One of their principal cooling mechanisms is transpiration: stomata—microscopic pores in the leaf surface—open, allowing water to evaporate and remove heat. This resembles sweating in animals, although excessive stomatal opening also risks dehydration. Plants must therefore regulate the process rather than simply leave their stomata permanently open.

The newly discovered pathway centres on UBP24, a protein belonging to a family of enzymes known as deubiquitylases. Ubiquitin molecules attached to a protein can help to determine its location, activity or destruction; deubiquitylases remove those molecular tags. Under high-temperature conditions, B4 RAF kinases activate another kinase, OPEN STOMATA 1, or OST1. OST1 then attaches a phosphate group to the amino acid serine at position 360 in UBP24.

Refuting Creationism - Refining The Details - How Did The Common Ancestor of Hominins And Chimps Climb Trees?

Speculative depiction of the last common ancestor of hominins and chimpanzees

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Researchers observed and confirmed with measurements that wild sooty mangabey monkeys in an Ivory Coast forest display foot bone flexibility that facilitates vertical climbing up skinny tree trunks to hide, forage or sleep.

Photo: W. Scott McGraw.

Last common ancestor, no matter its feet, could have been a vertical climber

One of the standard creationist tactics is to portray disagreement between scientists as evidence that the science itself is unreliable. Yet disagreement over the details of an evolutionary history is not disagreement over whether evolution occurred. On the contrary, it is often the means by which science advances: competing explanations are identified, their testable implications are examined, and evidence is gathered to determine which assumptions remain tenable.

A long-running example concerns the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, whose descendant lineages diverged some six to seven million years ago. Palaeoanthropologists agree that such an ancestor existed; the disagreement concerns what it looked like and how it moved. In particular, was its foot more like that of a modern African ape, with an ankle capable of substantial upward flexion during vertical climbing, or more like that of a monkey adapted principally to moving along branches?

That question matters because the evolution of habitual bipedalism cannot be understood without reconstructing the locomotion from which it developed. Fossilised foot and ankle bones preserve anatomical structure but not behaviour, so palaeoanthropologists must infer what their owners could do by comparing them with living primates. One influential assumption was that a primate needed a chimpanzee-like ankle to climb vertical tree trunks proficiently. A fossil with a more monkey-like foot might therefore be interpreted as evidence against frequent vertical climbing.

Luke D. Fannin, Carmen Pape and W. Scott McGraw have now tested that assumption with evidence from living animals. For their study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they recorded wild sooty mangabeys, Cercocebus atys, climbing trees in Côte d’Ivoire’s Taï Forest and measured the movements of their feet. Mangabeys lack the highly flexible ankle of a chimpanzee, yet they achieved an average of about 46 degrees of upward flexion through the middle of the foot—virtually the same range that chimpanzees achieve at the ankle.

In other words, two differently constructed feet can solve the same biomechanical problem in different ways. Chimpanzees flex chiefly at the ankle; mangabeys obtain comparable movement from the midfoot. This is a striking example of convergent evolution: similar selection pressures have produced functionally equivalent performances by modifying different parts of an inherited anatomical system.