Is Creationism true? Or is Darwinism true? And why would it have to be one or the other? It seems it hasn't occurred to many people that both might be wrong. Since both of them, despite what they might claim, are more about ideology than science, it shouldn't really be too surprising that science doesn't really support either, at least not in the form they're presented.

Most people who believe in Creationism do so because they were raised Christians, and they believe in the Bible (a bit too literally at that). On the other hand, there seem to be three main reasons why people believe in Darwinism: they've been taught it at school, they only have a vague sense of the underlying science (or the lack thereof, as we'll see), and/or they're convinced Creationism is nonsense and believe their only other option is Darwinism. There are, however, some serious problems with all three of these justifications.

First, the way Darwinism is taught in schools is extremely deceptive and would require an article of its own, but I will outline what's wrong with Darwinism in general and with the way it is presented to us.

Second, the vague knowledge of the science and facts relevant to evolution that most people have actually prevents them from seeing the countless problems of Darwinism. The notion that organisms evolved step by step is easy to swallow when you have no clear idea what exactly these steps would have to be and how exactly the mechanism of evolution is supposed to work. Without a clear sense of what the cell looks like, what it contains, how complex it is, how it works, and what DNA does, you're only left with the talking points that affirm that it all really does work and that science has proved it (and that only ignorant people question it.) You rarely get to hear how flimsy this science actually is, how elusive the proofs are, and how many scientists disagree with the mainstream narrative. Anti-Darwinian ideas are often literally banned from schools, usually on the false premise that they're not scientific. True scientific reasoning is sorely lacking in Darwinism itself however.

Third, Darwinism and Creationism aren't our only choices. This is not an election where you have to choose between two candidates. Just like with a choice between two presidential candidates, if you allow yourself to be convinced that those are your only options, you've already lost. The assumptions that anyone who isn't a Darwinist must be a Creationist and that if you're not a Creationist, you have to be a Darwinist, are false.

There's Creationism, there's Darwinism, and then there's the truth. This rarely noticed third option is what I want to focus on in this article. And to find the truth, we must identify the lies. I won't talk about Creationism, because it's based on a fictional book and it's about trying to fit facts into the book's narrative. Besides, no amount of proof will move Creationists from their beliefs. My point is to show to people who passively believe Darwinism is true but have never done any serious research to confirm or deny this, that Darwinism has massive flaws and identifying them doesn't have to lead us towards Creationism.

My basis for the argument against Darwinism is science, especially scientific discoveries from the last few decades. Darwinism is stuck in the first half of the 20th century. There's no need to invoke God to show that Darwinian evolution doesn't work as described. Science does the job. Believing in the ability of Darwinism to explain evolution is not about how much you know but about how much you're willing to ignore.

It should also be noted that, in general, we're talking about things for which there is often insufficient clear evidence, and much of the evidence we have is subject to interpretation. Different people have different interpretations of the same facts, largely influenced by their particular world views and beliefs. Some things we know for sure, but many things are much less clear. In any theory of evolution we are by definition dealing with events and processes that occurred long ago, and we can study some of them only from scattered pieces of evidence that don't include the complete context required to understand them fully. In many cases, we must simply acknowledge that we don't know and that our differing beliefs are based on theories and speculations.

I will divide this article into three main parts: what exactly the Darwinian process of evolution is and how it's supposed to work, why it doesn't and can't do what it claims to do, and what that means for us.

Contrary to expectations, some deep-water fish species see in colour, researchers have discovered.

The depths of the ocean are unimaginably dark. Any remaining light from the surface is mostly blue and thus, it has long been assumed, for the denizens of the deep the world is dim, drab and monochromatic.

But now an international team of scientists have found the assumption to be wrong, after discovering that many deep-sea fish species come equipped with a range of previously unknown vision-related proteins.

Vertebrates use sight for just about everything: from foraging and avoiding being eaten by passing predators, to navigation and choosing a mate. This vision is based on two types of photoreceptor cells: rods and cones. The cells contain light-sensitive proteins called opsins, which come in several varieties.

Cones deal with bright light situations and have four kinds of opsins, while rods are more specialised for low light conditions and in 99% of vertebrates contain only one opsin type. This means that most vertebrates are near colour-blind in dim light.

It had been long thought that deep sea fish, living between 200 and 1500 metres below the surface, were in the same situation.

Research published in the journal Science reveals some remarkable exceptions.

Statistical analysis of fossil data shows that it is unlikely that Australopithecus sediba, a nearly two-million-year-old, apelike fossil from South Africa, is the direct ancestor of Homo, the genus to which modern-day humans belong.

The research by paleontologists from the University of Chicago, published this week in Science Advances, concludes by suggesting that Australopithecus afarensis, of the famous "Lucy" skeleton, is still the most likely ancestor to the genus Homo.

The first A. sediba fossils were unearthed near Johannesburg in 2008. Hundreds of fragments of the species have since been discovered, all dating to roughly two million years ago. The oldest known Homofossil, the jawbone of an as yet unnamed species found in Ethiopia, is 2.8 million years old, predating A. sediba by 800,000 years.

More than 160 million years ago, the forests of ancient China were home to a bizarre predator: a tiny dinosaur that glided from tree to tree with leathery, bat-like wings. The newfound fossil, unveiled today in the journal Nature, is just the second feathered dinosaur found with signs of large membranes on its wings. Fitting, then, that the animal's newly assigned genus name is Ambopteryx: Latin for "both wings."

"The most exciting thing, for me, is that it shows that some dinosaurs evolved very different structures to become volant," or capable of some form of flight, says lead study author Min Wang, a paleontologist at China's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.

Ambopteryx is now the best known fossil of a scansoriopterygid (scan-soary-OP-teh-rigid), an oddball group of nonavian dinosaurs that includes Yi qi, the first dinosaur ever found with bat-like wings. That fossil find-announced in 2015 by study coauthor Xing Xu, the IVPP's deputy director-reshaped how scientists understood the evolution of flight.

The word "scallop" usually evokes a juicy, round adductor muscle - a seafood delicacy. So it isn't widely known that scallops have up to 200 tiny eyes along the edge of the mantle lining their shells. The complexities of these mollusk eyes are still being unveiled. A new study published in Current Biology reveals that scallop eyes have pupils that dilate and contract in response to light, making them far more dynamic than previously believed.

"It's just surprising how much we're finding out about how complex and how functional these scallop eyes are," says Todd Oakley, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The optics of scallop eyes are set up very differently than our own ocular organs. As light enters into the scallop eye, it passes through the pupil, a lens, two retinas (distal and proximal), and then reaches a mirror made of crystals of guanine at the back of the eye. The curved mirror reflects the light onto the interior surface of the retinas, where neural signals are generated and sent to a small visceral ganglion, or a cluster of nerve cells, whose main job is to control the scallop's gut and adductor muscle. The structure of a scallop's eye is similar to the optics systems found in advanced telescopes.

A new type of money that allows users to make decisions based on information arriving at different locations and times, and that could also protect against attacks from quantum computers, has been proposed by a researcher at the University of Cambridge.

The theoretical framework, dubbed 'S-money', could ensure completely unforgeable and secure authentication, and allow faster and more flexible responses than any existing financial technology, harnessing the combined power of quantum theory and relativity. In fact, it could conceivably make it possible to conduct commerce across the Solar System and beyond, without long time lags, although commerce on a galactic scale is a fanciful notion at this point.

Researchers aim to begin testing its practicality on a smaller, Earth-bound scale later this year. S-money requires very fast computations, but may be feasible with current computing technology. Details are published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

"It's a slightly different way of thinking about money: instead of something that we hold in our hands or in our bank accounts, money could be thought of as something that you need to get to a certain point in space and time, in response to data that's coming from lots of other points in space and time," said Professor Adrian Kent, from Cambridge's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, who authored the paper.

One of the most significant events in computer security happened in April 2017, when a still-unidentified group calling itself the Shadow Brokers published a trove of the National Security Agency's most coveted hacking tools. The leak and the subsequent repurposing of the exploits in the WannaCry and NotPetya worms that shut down computers worldwide made the theft arguably one of the NSA's biggest operational mistakes ever.

On Monday, security firm Symantec reported that two of those advanced hacking tools were used against a host of targets starting in March 2016, fourteen months prior to the Shadow Brokers leak. An advanced persistent threat hacking group that Symantec has been tracking since 2010 somehow got access to a variant of the NSA-developed "DoublePulsar" backdoor and one of the Windows exploits the NSA used to remotely install it on targeted computers.

Killing NOBUS

The revelation that the powerful NSA tools were being repurposed much earlier than previously thought is sure to touch off a new round of criticism about the agency's inability to secure its arsenal.

"This definitely should bring additional criticism of the ability to protect their tools," Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker who is now a cofounder of Rendition Infosec, told Ars. "If they didn't lose the tools from a direct compromise, then the exploits were intercepted in transit or they were independently discovered. All of this completely kills the NOBUS argument."

"NOBUS" is shorthand for nobody but us, a mantra NSA officials use to justify their practice of privately stockpiling certain exploits rather than reporting the underlying vulnerabilities so they can be fixed.

Something strange is happening off the coast of Portugal, and scientists have now proposed a groundbreaking explanation.

For years, João Duarte has puzzled over a seemingly boring underwater expanse off the coast of Portugal. In 1969, this site spawned a massive earthquake that rattled the shore and sparked a tsunami. But you would never know why just from looking at the broad, featureless surface of the seabed. Duarte, a marine geologist from the Instituto Dom Luiz at the University of Lisbon, wanted to find out what was going on.

Now, 50 years after the event, he may finally have an answer: The bottom of the tectonic plate off Portugal's coast seems to be peeling away from its top. This action may be providing the necessary spark for one plate to start grinding beneath another in what's known as a subduction zone, according to computer simulations Duarte presented in April at the European Geosciences Union meeting.

If confirmed, the new work would be the first time an oceanic plate has been caught in the act of peeling - and it may mark one of the earliest stages of the Atlantic Ocean shrinking, sending Europe inching toward Canada as predicted by some models of tectonic activity. (Find out what scientists think will happen when Earth's tectonic plates grind to a halt.)

"It's certainly an interesting story," says the University of Oslo's Fabio Crameri, who was not part of the research team but who attended the EGU lecture. Duarte presented some strong arguments, he says, but he cautions that the model needs further testing-not an easy feat when your data comes from a natural process that works at the speed at which fingernails grow.

Ancient recipe for deep-earth version of photosynthesis is more common than previously known, scientists find

At the top of a mountain in southwest Turkey, the ground spits fire. Known as the Flames of Chimaera, they have burned for millenniums. Local myth long held that these fires were the breath of a monster - part goat, part snake, part lion.

Today we know the fuel for this flaming mountaintop is gas escaping from deep within the earth. But it does not come from the decay of ancient plant, algae or animal life, like fossil fuels.

Instead, this gas comes from a chemical reaction inside rocks. And a series of studies published by a group of international scientists known as the Deep Carbon Observatory is showing that this source of gas is more common on our planet than previously known.

"We have discovered these unusual types of methane in many, many sites. It's not a rare phenomenon," said Giuseppe Etiope, a member of the group who helped discover the cause of the Flames of Chimaera in 2014.

Over the past decade, the observatory's community of scientists has found hundreds of gas deposits in more than 20 countries and several spots at the bottom of the sea that are similar to the Flames of Chimaera.

On a blizzarding March day on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Alvin "Willy" Crawford's heart gave out.

Among the many things his brother Darrell "Dusty" Crawford wanted to tell him before he died, one thing, in particular, is needling him.

At Willy's urging, Crawford had his DNA tested.

"He's the one who encouraged me to do this, and he wanted to compare our results," Crawford said. "I just wish I could have shown it to him. It would have blown him away."

Crawford had his DNA tested through CRI Genetics, which aims to provide customers with a "biogeographical ancestry," a description of where their genes fit into the overall story of the species.