Ancient Footprints - Lessons From A French Cave

Human and canine prints found in Chauvet Cave.

M.A. Garcia
Ichnologie générale de la grotte Chauvet
Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française (2005), 102-1 pp. 103-108

Ancient Footprints: The Oldest Evidence of Human-Canine Relationships - History and Artifacts
It's easy to make up eye-catching stories about the past, by imaginatively stringing together a few facts, but is it science?

Whispers of the Ancients

Deep within the labyrinthine recesses of the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, where the air hung thick with the scent of damp stone and ancient fires, an eight-year-old girl ventured forth. The elders had warned her — that part of the cave was forbidden. It was where the spirits of the great beasts dwelled, where their whispers echoed through the dark, and where even the bravest hunters dared not tread alone.

But the girl was no hunter—yet. And she was not alone.

By her side padded a massive wolf, its dark fur bristling as it moved with quiet confidence. They had grown together, these two—child and beast—inseparable since infancy, their bond forged in the flickering light of the hearth. The wolf was full-grown now, but the girl was still small, still fragile, her feet unsteady on the slick cave floor. Yet she pressed on, curiosity outweighing caution.

The torch in her hand sputtered as she stepped deeper into the shadows, its flame fed by a crude bundle of dried bark fibres and animal fat. The light danced across the walls, bringing to life the spirits of their ancestors—painted bison, galloping horses, towering mammoths—all shifting and writhing as if breathing. The girl had seen these images many times, had heard the shaman’s tales of how they held the souls of the animals her people hunted. But tonight, they seemed different. More alive. Watching.

Her wolf moved ahead, silent, its keen senses attuned to something unseen. The girl’s bare feet left faint imprints in the cool clay, slipping now and then, leaving streaks where she caught herself. Her companion, ever sure-footed, made no such mistakes. Their prints ran parallel, weaving through the traces of cave bears long gone—the ghosts of the great beasts that had once roamed this cavern.

Refuting Creationism - A Mass Extinction 252 Million Years Before 'Creation Week' - And Why Some Survived It

The End-Permian Mass Extinction

Ai-Generated Image (ChatGPT4)

Mastodonsaurus

Image: Mark P. Witton

March: Amphibians bounce-back from Earth’s greatest mass extinction | News and features | University of Bristol

The thing about mass extinctions, apart from the fact that they occurred so long before creationists dogma says there was even a universe, is that they refute any notions of a planet fine-tuned for life, or any notions of a perfect creator creating all life as it is today. In fact, it was the growing interest in palaeontology and the growing realisation that the fossil record contained so many extinct species, which caused people to start to question the notion of divine creation by a perfect god.

It was also the existence of so many intermediate fossils and series showing progressive change over time that fostered the idea of evolutionary change, although, until Darwin and Wallace thought of evolution by natural selection, how it worked was a matter of speculation.

The end-Permian mass extinction was one of the most significant events in the history of life on Earth - a history, 99.9975% of which occurred before creationists think their little god created the small flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle East, that creationists like to imagine was the entire universe.

However, fortunately for subsequent life on the planet, and without whom it is unlikely that humans would exist, a handful of species survived, most notably some amphibians.

New Book - The Evolution of Creationism: How Creationism Has Adapted To Survive

AI Generated image (ChatGPT4)

Creationism should have faded into obsolescence long ago, having been thoroughly disproven by the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution, in stark contrast to the total absence of evidence for a creator or any plausible explanation of how an unproven entity could create anything. Its continued persistence is primarily due to the efforts of a small group of vocal advocates who, in their pursuit of preserving their stake in the creationist movement, have abandoned any semblance of intellectual or personal integrity. These individuals have launched a concerted campaign of deliberate misrepresentation of science, while intentionally fostering profound ignorance among their audience to protect their interests.

The irony is that the creationist organisations such as the Deception Institute are having to adapt their tactics and make subtle changes to how they sell creationism in view of the (mostly) hostile changes in the legislative, educational and scientific environment in which they compete with science in the market place of ideas in exact mimicry of the natural evolutionary process they try to deny and misrepresent.

My latest book, written with the assistance of the AI client, ChatGPT4, the eighth in the series on Intelligent Design, describes how creationism has been adapted to try to compete with science in the struggle for the resource of public and scientific opinion on which it depends.

I use AI to research the subject and provide detailed descriptions of events and how the creationist movement has responded. AI can, in minutes, research and fact-check, then synthesise its findings into a few well-written paragraphs, something that would take weeks to do manually.

From the book's introduction:

Creationism has never been a static ideology. While the core belief in a divine creator remains unchanged, the arguments and strategies used to oppose evolution have continuously adapted. From early biblical literalism to modern Intelligent Design, the Anti-evolution movement has undergone significant transformations in response to scientific discoveries, legal challenges, and cultural shifts.

Refuting Creationism - A Giant Scorpion from 125 million years Before 'Creation Week'

Fossilized scorpions are extremely rare. J. longchengi is only the fourth terrestrial species found in China.

Image credit: NIGPAS

Jiangsu researchers discover 125-mln-year-old scorpion fossil | ENGLISH.JSCHINA.COM.CN

Some years ago, on holiday in Northern Greece, myself my eldest two children were exploring an old quarry which had been used as a local rubbish dump. I had come across it the day before and had told my children that this was just the sort of place to find scorpions. True to my prediction, as I turned over a flat piece of plywood, there in all their glory were two pale yellow scorpions! I gently pressed one down with a stick so my children could watch it sting the stick with a series of rapid jabs with its tail.

Fortunately, they were relatively small compared to the scorpions that lived in what is now China in the Mesozoic in that long period of history from before creationism's little god created a small flat planet with a dome over it, when 99.9975% of Earth's history happened, giant venomous scorpions lived in what is now China, 125 million years ago. Jeholia longchengi was around 4 inches (10 cm) long and was a key species within the food chain of the Cretaceous ecosystem.

Refuting Creationism - How Humans Had Reached All Seven Habitable Continents Thousands of Years Before 'Creation Week'.

A Chukchi reindeer herder.
The Chukchi are an ethnic group native to Siberia.

Image credit: Natalie Fobes via Getty Images.

Most scientists think that humans reached Australia at least 50,000 years ago. Here, an Indigenous man holds traditional weapons during a ceremonial dance at a festival in Cape York, Australia.

Image credit: chameleonseye via Getty Images.

When did modern humans reach each of the 7 continents? | Live Science

Modern humans had dispersed out of Africa and populated every continent except Antarctica, thousands of years before creationism's little god created a small flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle East and claimed it was the entire Universe, according to creationist mythology.

So, what was the timeline of this dispersion?

After our species, Homo sapiens, emerged in Africa at least 300,000 years ago, some eventually ventured out, trekking and voyaging across the world.

Malevolent Design - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Co-opted A Solutions For It's Own Incompetence, To Ensure Cancers Survive

The Pol-θ enzyme (blue) joins two parts of a broken DNA strand (yellow).
This process is mutagenic and can give rise to cancer.

Credit: Scripps Research

How a crucial DNA repair protein works—and what it means for cancer treatment | Scripps Research

According to creationist mythology, once upon a time a magic creator created animal life complete with DNA which needs to be replicated every time a cell divides for growth and/or repair.

Unfortunately, the process it designed to make this happen wasn't very well designed, so the resulting DNA is often broken or faulty. DNA can be broken in a number of ways, all of which could have been avoided by a more robust design, which should have been within the capabilities of an omniscient deity, capable of creating living organisms ex nihilo:

DNA double-strand breaks can occur in multiple phases of the cell cycle, not just mitosis. While replication stress is a major endogenous source, environmental factors like radiation, chemicals, and viruses can also introduce DSBs. Cells rely on homologous recombination (HR), non-homologous end joining (NHEJ), and alternative end joining (alt-EJ) to repair these breaks, though error-prone pathways like Pol θ-mediated repair contribute to mutagenesis.

Then, in a method typical of creationism's incompetent designer, which in every respect resembles a mindless utilitarian natural process, proceeding without a plan and settling for suboptimal solutions, it added yet another layer of complexity as a work-around for its failure, and designed the enzyme, polymerase θ (Pol-θ), which searches the DNA looking for faults. Unfortunately, due to suboptimal design, this too fails and produces cancers.

Malevolent Designer News - The Clever Way The Herpes Virus Gets Reactivated

UVA IDs Trigger for Those Annoying Cold Sore Flare-ups

The herpes viruses are ingenious designs of creationism's divine malevolence which are highly infectious and, once infected, you have them for life.

Of course, there is no point in designing a virus to just live inside its hosts cells doing nothing to increase the suffering in the world, so they come with a number of responses to various triggers which cause them to proliferate and start infecting other people.

Since these abilities are undoubtedly beneficial to the virus, there is no rational way that this can be presented as 'devolution' from some assumed created perfection - the forlorn attempt by Michael J. Behe to excuse the Christin god from culpability for parasites.

However, William A. Dembski, another Deception Institute Fellow, claims that anything which a gene produces must have been specified by an intelligent designer, so followers of the ID cult are obliged by dogma to give credit to their preferred creator deity for the herpes virus.

Now researchers at the University of Virginia have discovered a surprising way in which herpes can be reactivated, and, true to creationism's divine malevolence's form, it takes advantage of the hosts response to other infections and rides piggy-back on the hosts immune system - an immune system the same alleged designer designed to protect us from the viruses it designed to make us sick (if you believe that childish superstition).

The Herpes virus can respond to a protein produced by cells subject to stress which normally activates the immune system. However, the herpes virus is reactivated and starts producing lots of new virus particles, so the sufferer becomes infectious again and infects lots of other people. Then, job, jobbed, the herpes virus goes back into hiding to wait for the next chance to be reactivated and begin to replicate again, often many years later.

Malevolent Designer News - How Brain Cancer Turns Our Immune System Against Us

The Wistar Institute Discovers a Promising Target in Brain Cancer - The Wistar Institute

It's an old trick often used by creationism's divine malevolence to turn a host's immune system against it and instead work for the parasite.

And, according to a discovery by researchers at the Wistar Institute, this is exactly what one of the most aggressive forms of brain cancer does by reprogramming the white blood cells known as neutrophils, so they supress any further immune response to the cancer.

Of course, whether you accept that or not depends on whether you've fallen for the disinformation promulgated by Deception Institute fellows such as William A Dembski and other leading apologists for the intelligent design cult. Dembski, for example, promotes the notion that genes which produce any given functional protein only do so if they've been given 'complex specified information' to enable them to produce that particular protein.

His presuppositional circular reasoning goes something like, the output from a gene must have been intentional and intent implies sentience, so an intelligent designer must have supplied the information in order to achieve a desired outcome. This of course ignores the fact that mutation and selection occurs in a gene pool consisting of millions of cells and not as a single event in a single cell. In a population of a million cells, the million to one chance mutation arises on average once every cell generation.

A cancer, which is a collection of cells in a hostile environment, can evolve by natural selection to survive and replicate in that environment, so the outcome will depend on the result of an evolutionary arms race.

But, using Dembski's self-referencing logic, believers in intelligent design have to accept that the 'complex specified information' that enables brain tumours to reprogram neutrophils and so supress the immune system, must have been provided by an intelligent designer to achieve exactly that result, because, so he wrongly argues, mutation and natural selection alone can't produce a strategy for survival.

The bad news for supporters of Dembski's divine malevolence is that the discovery by researchers at the Wistar Institute may have tipped the balance in the arms race between human medical science and the malevolent designer in favour of human medical science, in that it suggests a form of treatment for this type of brain cancer.

The Bible's Bad Science - What The Bronze Age Pastoralists Could Never Have Guessed At

Andromeda

By Adam Evans. Uploaded by NotFromUtrecht,CC BY 2.0, Link

Andromeda

By Kanwar Singh - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

NASA's Hubble Provides Bird's-Eye View of Andromeda Galaxy's Ecosystem - NASA Science

Q. How do we know the Bible could not possibly have been written by the god described in it?

A. The Bible describes the god it purports to have been inspired by as all-knowing, yet there is a great deal the Bible gets wrong, and even more that is left out. Clearly, whoever wrote it was ignorant of a great deal and almost all of what little they thought they knew they got hopelessly wrong.

For example, the opening few verses of Genesis make it plain that the authors thought the Universe consisted of a small, flat planet, on which they and everything they knew about lived. This planet had a dome over it from which the sun and moon were hung and in which the stars were embedded. The Bible even described how these stars could be shaken loose during earthquakes whereupon they would fall down to Earth.

This description of the universe bears no resemblance to the real universe and is clearly a description of what someone standing on a hill in Canaan thought his universe consisted of. It could scarcely be further from the truth.

There is simply no reason for an omniscient god to have got it so wrong; it's not even of the category of a 'lie to children', like the planetary model of an atom, designed to foster understanding of some of the properties of atoms without the complication of having to understand some quantum physics. The small, flat planet with a dome over it at the centre of the universe provides nothing by way of a useful model with which we can explain observed phenomena.

It is wrong, plainly and simply, and as such has served throughout the centuries to confuse and mislead, to endarken rather than to enlighten us.

Bible Blunder - How Can Anyone Imagine Tales Like The Tower of Babel Are Real History?

The Tower of Babel as imagined by
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1526-1569)

Wikipedia - Originally from Google Art Project.
Public Domain, Link

Street children in Accra, Ghana, often speak multiple languages fluently.

How many languages can you learn at the same time? – Ghanaian babies grow up speaking two to six languages - University of Potsdam

Along with nonsense like the Jonah tale and the Exodus myth, the Tower of Babel story must rate as amongst the more ridiculous stories to have been bound up in a single book later declared to be the literal truth as revealed by a creator god.

These nonsense stories refute any notion of omniscient involvement in their telling. They were made up by people with minimal understanding of the subject about which they were writing, so, not surprisingly, they are unravelling as we discover more and see the magnitude of their errors and misunderstanding.

But the nonsense of the Tower of Babel tale should have been apparent to even the Bronze Age mythmakers who made it up as a simplistic attempt to explain the handful of different languages they were aware of, from their limited view of the world which saw everything within a few days walk of the Canaanite Hills as comprising the whole Earth.

That the story was poorly grafted onto other mythologies becomes apparent when you read the immediately preceding chapter, which explained how the descendants of the sons of Noah all spoke different languages, as though that were even remotely likely. Imaging your own family where you and your cousins and your and their children all speak different languages! Apparently, the authors of Genesis had no problem believing that was at all likely.

So, they concocted the following:

Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood. The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.

And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah. And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim.

By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations… (Genesis 10:1-5)

These are the sons of Ham, after their families, after their tongues, in their countries, and in their nations… (Genesis 10:20)

These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations. These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.(Genesis 10:31-32)

So, a whole chapter devoted to why there are so many different languages by constructing an unlikely family tree with each son in each generation speaking different languages. Unlikely though that silly tale is, we turn the page, and what do we see?

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. (Genesis 11:1)

Unintelligent Design - Flightless Birds Still Have Feathers for Flight

The extinct "elephant bird" of Madagascar.

Photo: Brian Choo

When birds lose the ability to fly, their bodies change faster than their feathers - Field Museum

As though designing birds with wings that they can't fly with wasn't stupid enough, it seems creationism's idiot designer designed them with flight feathers too. That is, if you believe the childish nonsense of special creation of species without ancestors, which is a central superstition of the creationist cult. And presumably, because it's also central to the cult that species don't evolve, it must be assumed that every extinct species was created without ancestors too, so they can't have evolved from ancestors either.

Which makes it all the more puzzling that a study has shown that as flightless birds became flightless over time, they tended to retain feathers that were characteristic of flying birds, and in particular, those of their flying relatives.

In other words, as flightlessness evolved, the last thing to change were their feathers.

Which begs thew question why creationism’s putative designer gave flightless birds feathers that looked as though they had been inherited from flying ancestors.

Of course, there is a rational explanation for this, and it doesn't involve magic creation by a blundering idiot behaving like a mindless process operating without a plan.

Failing Christianity - Decline in Faith Has Stalled in USA But is Set To Plunge Again

US Christian Decline May Be Stabilizing: 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study | Pew Research Center

It's mixed news from the USA which had looked as though it was following Europe, albeit a generation behind, in rejecting religion and becoming a substantially secular society with non-believers and non-affiliated 'spiritual' people in the clear majority. Even formerly strongly Catholic countries such as Spain and Ireland have experienced a massive haemorrhage of members since the clerical child sexual abuse scandals of recent decades broke.

Refuting Creationism - How The Ice Giants Created Complex Life In The Oceans

Glacial grooves stemming from the Wisconsin glaciation at Kelleys Island, Ohio

By Rmhermen, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Giant ice bulldozers: how ancient glaciers helped life evolve - News at Curtin | Curtin University, Perth, Australia

It's generally recognised that complex, multicellular life began in the oceans from colonies of single-celled organisms, but what isn't known is what environmental triggers promoted the evolution of this complexity.

Now researchers from Curtin University, Perth, Australia, in collaboration with the University of Portsmouth and St. Francis Xavier University, Canada, believe they have shown a correlation between this event, or series of events and the melting of vast ice sheets which covered Earth in a period known as snowball Earth. The trigger was not so much the melt-water and rise in sea levels as the minerals this melt-water brought with it. This sudden abundance of minerals was the result of the slow grinding of Earth's surface by giant glaciers as they gouged their way across the planet.

Refuting Creationism - Neanderthals Evolved By Loss of Genetic Information

Life appearance reconstruction of a Neanderthal male at the Natural History Museum of London.

Photo: Allan Henderson under CC BY 2.0.

Fig. 1: Summary of individuals included in the analyses.

a The geographical and chronological range of the Neanderthal clade individuals and modern humans included in the analysis. The symbols correspond to the n of individuals from each site and are colored as follows: blue = Sima de los Huesos; purple = Krapina; green = late Neanderthals; orange = modern humans. Orange ellipses correspond to the approximated geographical range of the extant modern human assemblage. Age estimates of fossil specimens are provided in Table 1. Background satellite image was downloaded from © Mapbox, © OpenStreetMap, © Maxar and rescaled to fit to figure panel size. b–e Three-dimensional models of the left semicircular canal and vestibule of selected individuals for the four groups considered in the present study.

The inner ear of Neanderthals reveals clues about their enigmatic origin

Creationists will confidently tell you that a loss of genetic information is invariably fatal so can play no part in evolution. They believe this because the frauds at the Discovery Institute have misled them into believing that every piece if DNA and therefore every piece of genetic information has a purpose.

And yet researchers have shown that it was a loss of genetic information following a population bottleneck that gave rise to the classic Neanderthals as a distinct species from their pre-Neanderthal ancestors.

This was the conclusion from a study led by Alessandro Urciuoli (Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and Mercedes Conde-Valverde (Cátedra de Otoacústica Evolutiva de HM Hospitales y la Universidad de Alcalá), researchers measured the morphological diversity in the structure of the inner ear responsible for our sense of balance: the semicircular canals.

Malevolent Designer - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Ensured Its Zika Virus Infects Developing Babies

Zika virus's non-structural protein NS1 (red) and mitochondria (green) travel through the tunneling nanotube (TNT, gray) from infected to uninfected placental cells.

Image: Mysorekar lab.

A representation of the surface of the Zika virus, with protruding envelope glycoproteins shown in red.

Kuhn and Rossmann research groups, Purdue University

Stealth virus: Zika virus builds tunnels to covertly infect cells of the placenta | BCM

I've written recently about the lengths creationism's divine malevolence must have gone to to ensure one of its nasty little parasitic pathogens, the zika virus, gets to infect as many of its potential victims as possible. Science has now revealed how it then ensures as many babies being carried by its pregnant victims as possible are infected, by sneaking past the maternal/foetal barrier in the placenta.

Zika, is, of course, the mosquito-borne virus that causes microcephaly and associated mental handicap in babies whose mothers were infected during pregnancy.

To ensure the success of this method of increasing the suffering in the world, the designer had a major problem of its own making to overcome - it had given the human foetus a placenta that included a barrier between its circulation and that of the mother. This barrier is normally sufficient to prevent viruses crossing over into the developing foetus, so clearly, if an many children with microcephaly as possible are born, the designer had to find a way to bypass this barrier.

It produced the ingenious method of creating microtubules (small tunnels) between the mother's cells and the foetus's cells in the placenta and simply passing through them!

Unusually for creationism's divine malevolence, which normally behaves like a mindless evolutionary process and reinvents a novel solution for the same problem encountered by a different species, this is the same sneaky method used by a few other viruses to pass from cell to cell in a sheet of tissue, without going outside and making themselves available for the immune system to detect and respond to.

Refuting Creationism - A Simple Mutation Could Have Given Us the Power of Speech.

;

Expression pattern of NOVA1 in the brain of a mouse. NOVA1 in green, nuclei (DAPI) in blue.

Darnell lab.

Model of the evolutionary timing for the 197th amino acid change in the NOVA1 gene, noting the Nova1^hu/hu mice generated in this study. Nova1^hu/hu mice express the modern human-specific amino acid in the NOVA1 protein. The bottom panel shows the corresponding position within the KH2 domain of the NOVA1 protein. Amino acids structurally proximal (<5 Å) to the 197th amino acid, as predicted by AlphaFold2, are highlighted in pink.

Tajima, Y., Vargas, C.D.M., Ito, K. et al (2024) (CC BY 4.0)

The Rockefeller University » A single protein may have helped shape the emergence of spoken language

In the simplistic creationist parody of evolution, intelligently designed to make cult members feel superior to real scientists, the evolution of something like speech in humans must have involved complex, specified, information, that humans alone have that other, lesser, species don't have. Of course, this could only be the result of intelligent design by a supreme intelligence who favours humans, its special creation, who can be whichever your favourite deity is, although it’s not religion because it doesn’t mention God or the Bible. Got it!

The surprising thing is that neither William A. Dembski, nor Michael J. Behe, leading Deception Institute fellows, have written a widely acclaimed (in creationist circles and in selected magazine and newspaper articles emanating from the Deception Institute, for its brilliant conclusive proof of the failure of 'Darwinism') book, detailing the sheer astounding complexity of the genetic basis for human speech, and how this proves we don't share a common ancestor with the African apes.

Perhaps they were aware already of the fact that the genetic basis for human speech involves, no such complexity, but just a single point mutation in a gene we share with the other apes and many other mammals.

Rather than proof of human exceptionalism, our ability to speak turns out to be evidence for common ancestry.

The mutation was discovered by researchers from The Rockefeller University and is a simple substitution of the amino acid isoleucine for valine, in the protein NOVA1 which resulted from the substitution of guanine (G) in the first position in the codon for isoleucine for adenine (A). So, the simplest of all mutations - a single point substitution of one nucleotide for another in a gene, may have enabled humans to speak.

Malevolent Designer News - How a Fungus Makes Its Host Destroy Its Own Brain

Beauveria bassiana on unidentified insect.

© Lisa Bennett (CC-BY 4.0)

Fungus ‘hacks’ natural immune system causing neurodegeneration in fruit flies - University of Birmingham

If we are to believe creationists, their god created insects such as fruit flies, Colorado beetles, etc., and then set about devising ways to kill them with, amongst other pathogens, fungi that infect them and destroy them from inside.

One of the problems this supposedly intelligent designer had to overcome was the immune system it had given the insects in order to protect them from the pathogens it was designing to kill them.

According to an open access paper just published in PLOS Biology by a team led by Professor Alicia Hidalgo from School of Biosciences, The University of Birmingham, one species of parasitic fungus, Beauveria bassiana, cleverly turns its host's immune system against its host, making it destroy its own brain. Although this fungus does not affect mammals, so poses no threat to humans, the team warns that it is possible that another fungus could use a similar technique against mammals, including humans.

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Are Questioning Human Evolution - But Not In The Way Creationists Had Hoped

Ai-Generated Image (ChatGPT4o)

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

A new model upends the decades-old “hard steps” theory that intelligent life was an incredibly improbable event and suggests that maybe it wasn't all that hard or improbable. The team of researchers said the new interpretation of humanity’s origin increases the probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

Credit: NASA. All Rights Reserved.

Does planetary evolution favor human-like life? Study ups odds we’re not alone | Penn State University

An interdisciplinary team of astrophysicists and geoscientists has questioned the evolution of a human-like intelligent species. But the question is not about whether, as creationists have been predicting for 50 plus years, but just how easy or difficult was it? That we evolved was never in any doubt.

The relevance of the easy/difficult question is that it affects our calculation of the probability of similar intelligent life evolving on other planets. If each step in its evolution was hard (the 'hard step' model), then we may be alone in the Universe; if easy, then the Universe could be teeming with life.

Unintelligent Design - A Bird-Brained Designer?

Birds Have Developed Complex Brains Independently from Mammals - campusa-magazine - UPV/EHU

You might expect an intelligent designer to use the same solution to the same problem. After all, no intelligent watchmaker would keep reinventing the movement he or she puts in watches. In fact, an expert horologist can look inside a good watch and tell you who make it, not because the maker's name is engraved inside the case but because the same watchmaker will have used the same design over and over again, maybe varying the outward appearance of the watch and adding some functions like date and phases of the moon, but the basic movement will be the same.

And this is how you can tell that whatever designed living organisms was not an intelligent designer, because whatever it is, it keeps designing different solutions to the same problems. For instance, having designed the basic vertebrate nervous system to have a brain at one end and a cord running through the spinal column, it would have used the same starting components when it came to giving some of those vertebrates the intelligence to make tools, solve puzzles and plan ahead.

Not so creationism's intelligent designer.

Like an amnesiac it seems to have forgotten whichever solution it designed first for the three vertebrate orders in which intelligence is to be found - birds, reptiles and mammals. Starting with the ancestral reptilian brain, the design process has produced two different ways of producing the pallium (the part of the brain responsible for cognition, learning and memory recall) in birds and mammals.

Refuting Creationism - A Mass Extinction of Plants Due To Climate Change - 5,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Flora and fauna in Siberia at the last glacial maximum

AI-generated image (ChatGPT4o)

Image of Lake Ilirney during field work in Chukotka, Russia

Photo: Alfred Wegener Institute / Luise Schulte.

Single view - AWI

10,000 years or so before creationism's little god created the small flat planet with a dome over it, thinking it was a universe, as described in the creation myth in the Bible, there was a mass extinction due to global climate change. In addition to the loss of the Ice Age megafauna, such as the woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave lions, etc. over most of Eurasia and North America when temperatures rose at the end of the last glaciation, we also lost a lot of the Ice Age-adapted plants.

But, because plants tend not to fossilise so readily as the bones of large mammals, we didn't know until now, just how extensive this loss was, and more importantly, what a similar rise in temperatures is going to mean for the extant flora.

To redress this gap, a team of researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), Germany, have analysed DNA recovered from plant remains in the sediment of lakes in Siberia and Alaska. In doing so, they have discovered how the temperature affects the way plants interact, tending to support one another in cold weather and competing with one another in warm weather. A rise in ambient temperature meant increasing competition and loss of mutual support.

Refuting Creationism - Where Europeans' Ancestors Came From - Thousands of Years Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Yamnayan life in the Pontic Area, 5000 years ago

AI-generated image (ChatGPT4o)

Reconstruction of Yamnayan life in the Pontic Area, 5000 years ago.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT4o).

New research based on an analysis of the genomes of 435 individuals has revealed the rich history of the ancestors of modern Europeans, especially the mixing of multiple ethnic groups in the Pontic Area - modern Ukraine - between 8,400 and 4,000 year ago which eventually gave rise to the Yamnaya people who get their name from the Russian for 'pit burial' (Yamna in Ukrainian).

Before the Yamnaya spread into Europe, they were preceded by two earlier waves of migration: firstly, hunter-gatherers who arrived about 45,000 years ago having interbred with and replaced the Neanderthals who had lived there for the previous 250,000 years. These were followed by farmers who came from the Middle East, starting about 9,000 years ago.

The Yamnaya, having formed a stable linguistic and cultural group, and either invented or copied ox-drawn carts and skilled horsemanship, which gave them great mobility, began to expand their range, probably under population pressure beginning about 5,300 years ago and lasting for some 1,800 years, eventually reaching all parts of Western Europe including the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles.

Malevolent Designer News - How Cancer is Cleverly Designed to Trick Our Immune System

Mitochondrial transfer and metabolic reprogramming of the tumor microenvironment aid cancer immune evasion

Mitochondrial transfer and metabolic reprogramming of the tumor microenvironment aid cancer immune evasion.

How Cancer Cells Trick the Immune System by Altering Mitochondria - Okayama University

There is an ongoing arms race between medical science and cancer - and guess whose side creationism's intelligent designer appears to be on.

Yep, it's the same intelligent designer who designed cancers in the first place by creating an error-prone DNA replication mechanism that goes wrong, as does the error-correction mechanism it designed to try to rectify its faulty design with an added layer of complexity. And one of the results of it going wrong is cancer.

One of the more hopeful treatments for cancer was a tailor-made immunotherapy in which specific antibodies to the cancer cells were used to attack the cancer and treat it like a parasitic pathogen, by training the immune system to recognise the cancer and attack and destroy it.

But, true to form, creationism's divine malevolence has hit back by designing a response by cancer cells to attack by cells of the immune system.

We can be sure this is the work of creationism's intelligent designer because William A Dembski, the Discovery Institute's flunky and pseudoscientist in residence, tells us that any genetic sequence that produces a function must have been given 'specified information' in the form of the DNA that codes for that specific protein because, so he claims, specified information is too complex to have evolved.

Refuting Creationism - Human Cannibalism In Europe - 8,000 Before Creation Week

The entrance to the Maszycka Cave in southern Poland

Photo: Darek Bobak

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The 18,000-year-old discoveries from the Maszycka Cave include decorated hunting tools made of bone and antler.

Photo: Darek Bobak.

Information for the Media - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

A good 8,000 years before creationism's little god created the small flat planet with a dome over it as described in Genesis, modern humans were painting wonderful paintings in caves in France and Spain, and cannibalising other humans in what is now southern Poland.

These people were the Magdalenian, a pan-European culture that existed during the Last Glacial Maximum, who are widely regarded as having a form of religion and belief in an afterlife, or at least a spiritual connection to the animals they hunted and depicted on cave walls. However, judging by their cannibalism and casual disposal of human remains along with the bones of the species they hunted for food, and the fact that they decorated and used human bones as utilities such a drinking cups made from human skull caps, they may not have had much regard for the dead.

Creationism Refuted - The Real Universe Shows Us The Bible's Authors Just Make Stuff Up -

Euclid image of a bright Einstein ring around galaxy NGC 6505

Close-up of the Einstein ring around galaxy NGC 6505

ESA - Euclid discovers a stunning Einstein ring

No matter how much you insist that words meant something different in those days, or the description is a poetic allegory or a metaphor the meaning of which is beyond us, the early verses of the Bible clearly and unambiguously describe a universe consisting of a small flat planet with a dome over it with the sun, moon and stars stuck to the underside of the dome.

This, of course, is a childlike description of what the authors saw as they looked up into the sky and saw what looked like a dome, and Earth was more or less flat, give or take a few low hills, so that is what, in their child-like naivety, they described:

How the Bible's authors saw the Universe.

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

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And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 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 1.14-18

Now, as we learn more about the Universe as we develop increasingly sophisticated scientific instruments for examining it, we discover just how childishly naïve the Bible's authors were and so show to anyone interested in truth that the Bible could not possibly have been written or inspired by the creator god described in it, unless that god wanted to mislead us so that it would take humanity another three thousand years or more to discover its lies - and what would have been the point of that?

Mind you, the same creator god could have told us about germs, atoms or electricity or how to make a steam engine or a motor car, but either chose not to or didn't know about those things, because the people who invented it didn't know about those things either. What 'science' there is in the Bible is no better than the primitive understanding of Bronze Age pastoralists.

Abiogenesis News - Closing Another of Creationism's God-Shaped Gaps - Still No God Found

Formation of polyester protocells under early Earth-like conditions Polyester microdroplets, possible precursors to life, were formed from alpha-hydroxy acids (αHAs) in early Earth-like conditions even at low reaction volume, low reactant concentrations, and/or high NaCl or KCl concentrations.

Credit: Associate Professor Tony Z. Jia

How life’s building blocks took shape on early Earth: the limits of membraneless polyester protocell formation – ELSI｜EARTH-LIFE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

Creationism’ ever-shrinking little god that sits in the abiogenesis gap, just got smaller with the news that researchers led by PhD student Mahendran Sithamparam of the Space Science Center (ANGKASA), Institute of Climate Change, National University of Malaysia, working at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) in the Institute of Science, Tokyo, Japan, have shown how primitive protocells could have formed under a wide range of realistic probiotic Earth conditions. The research team included scientists from Taiwan and China.

The research showed that membraneless protocells could have formed by polymerization of alpha-hydroxy acids (αHAs) to form polyester microdroplets, not to be confused with the modern plastic polyester. These polymers were polymers of esters - simple organic compounds which are chemically similar to the monomers that make modern polyester fibres.

Unintelligent Design - How Creationism's Heath-Robinson Designer Muddles Through But Still Messes Up.

spB^d-II complex at average resolutions of 3.2 and 3.1 Å.

Quality control during splicing: When an error in the precursor mRNA is detected, the spliceosome is blocked, the recruited control factors interrupt the “normal” cycle, and a molecular short circuit causes the spliceosome to disassemble.

© K. Wild, K. Soni, I. Sinning.

Spliceosome: How Cells Avoid Errors When Manufacturing mRNA

Q. How can you tell when something is designed by a supreme intelligence with the inerrant ability of foresight?

A. It works perfectly, without errors and does exactly what it was intended to do, nothing more and nothing less.

Q. How can you tell when something is 'designed' by a natural, utilitarian process like evolution by natural selection?

A. It works most of the time, even if not very efficiently, is over-complex and so prone to errors and doesn't anticipate change. It also frequently requires additional layers of complexity to compensate for its errors and inefficiency.

Sadly for intelligent design advocates, structures and processes found in nature are almost never perfect and free from errors and, when examined closely, are seen to be error-prone, suboptimal and requiring additional complexity to compensate for the errors and inefficiencies. And these error-correction mechanisms are themselves error-prone and prone to failure.

One such mechanism, the details of which have just been worked out by researchers at the Heidelberg University Biochemistry Center (BZH) in collaboration with colleagues from the Australian National University, is the system of spliceosomes found in eukaryote cells, that correct the errors in messenger RNA (mRNA) before they are transcribed into functional proteins.

The reason these large nuclear proteins are required is because the DNA the mRNA is transcribed from is contains 'introns' - small sequences that are not part of the gene being coded for. Imagine a computer database of words, which, when a retrieved, inserts random letters in the middle of the word.

Refuting Creationism - 183-Million-Year-Old Fossilised Soft Tissue - Stand By For Creationist Lies

The tip of the right flipper with two scales along the trailing edge.

Image: Klaus Nilkens/Urwelt-Museum Hauff

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Soft tissue from a 183 Million-Year-Old Jurassic Plesiosaur analysed | Lund University

Some palaeontology finds must seem like a god-send to creationist cult leaders looking for something to misrepresent to their dupes, but it has been a few years since Dr. Mary Higby Schweitzer's team reported finding 'soft' tissue in a fossilised dinosaur bone.

Creationists routinely misrepresent this discovery, particularly the discovery of soft-tissue structures in fossilised dinosaur bones. Schweitzer and her team found microscopic structures resembling blood vessels, cells, and proteins in well-preserved fossils, which creationists have seized upon as supposed evidence that dinosaurs lived only a few thousand years ago, rather than tens of millions. However, their claims are based on a fundamental misunderstanding—or deliberate misrepresentation—of both the science and Schweitzer’s own conclusions.

Far from supporting a young Earth, Schweitzer’s findings actually highlight the remarkable durability of biological molecules under specific conditions. Her research suggests that iron particles from haemoglobin help preserve proteins by acting as a natural fixative, similar to formaldehyde. This explains how soft-tissue structures can persist for millions of years without requiring the fossils to be "recent," as creationists falsely claim. Despite Schweitzer’s repeated clarifications that her discoveries do not challenge the vast timescales of evolutionary history, creationists continue to misquote her work to fit their pre-existing religious narratives.

This distortion is part of a broader pattern in which creationists cherry-pick scientific findings, strip them of context, and twist them to manufacture doubt about evolutionary theory. Rather than engaging with the scientific explanations provided by Schweitzer and other researchers, they rely on misleading rhetoric to persuade those unfamiliar with the complexities of molecular preservation. In doing so, they not only misrepresent the science but also the integrity of the scientists behind it. Some creationists even claim the tissue was carbon dated to just a few thousand years old. This is a lie since no such dating was performed because carbon dating is only accurate on specimens less than about 50,000 years old and is never used to date fossils because the original carbon from the living animal is lost in the mineralisation process.

And now we have something else for the frauds to fool their dupes with and win new ignorant simpletons into the creationist cult.

It comes in the form of a report by researchers at Lund University in Sweden which concerns 'soft' tissue found in a fossilised plesiosaur. However, and this is something that creationists will ignore in their eagerness to misrepresent the find - the fossilised tissue is fossilised hard parts of skin, such as scales. There is no question of the fossils being soft tissue. Creationists will also dismiss the fact that the fossil is 183 million years old and will claim the presence of soft tissue 'proves' the dating method is flawed because it must only be a few thousand years old.