As hunter-gatherer cultures began to eat more ruminants, they encountered anthrax more regularly than their primate ancestors.
Image credit: Abubakar Balogun/Provided
Creationist mode: 
When Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer created the anthrax bacteria, the purpose was to create an organism that would lay dormant in the soil for tens or hundreds of years and then, when eaten by a grazing animal such as sheep or cattle, it would produce a toxin which killed the unfortunate animal, so it's body could rot and produce millions more spores to lay dormant in the soil and so repeat the cycle endlessly. We know this because this is the result and an omniscient, omnipotent creator must know what the result of its creations will be, so creates them for that purpose and that purpose only.
Also, part of this intended outcome was that, as human culture evolved from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists with domesticated animals, humans too would catch anthrax from their domestic animals and die from the toxins the bacteria produce in their bodies. Humans were intended to catch anthrax by eating their cattle while their cattle caught it by grazing on anthrax-contaminated pastures.
Now researchers at Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine have discovered that Creationism's intelligent [sic] designer then went in for something it frequently does with the nasty little parasites it creates to kill us with - it started to have an arms race with itself to protect us from the bacteria it had created to harm us with, then by modifying the bacteria so they could overcome the defences if was giving us - just as today it is creating new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes COVID-19 so it can continue to make us sick despite the vaccines humans have created to defend themselves with.
Creationist mode: 
At least, that, if they follow the logic of their Creationist dogmas, is how Creationists have to view the relationship between anthrax and humans and other animals.
The grown-up, scientific explanation is that the relationship over time is the predictable result of an evolutionary process. The Cornell team have shown that humans evolved greater resistance against anthrax multiple times during history. As Lauren Cahoon Roberts, writing in Cornell Chronicle, explains:
The Cornell Team's findings are published in Nature Communications:We found evidence of multiple stages of adaptation in humans, which is one of the more important aspects of our discovery.Anthrax grabbed the nation’s attention when it was used in bioterrorism attacks in 2001, but the disease has haunted humans for much longer. Over millennia, humans and anthrax have co-evolved. According to a study in Nature Communications from the lab of Charles Danko, this resulted in humans, particularly humans of European descent, evolving fewer anthrax receptors that allow the disease to take hold in the body.
The ANTXR2 gene is fairly constrained in its expression level over 100 million years of evolution, but in humans, we saw this large decrease – and that’s what made it so interesting to us.
Our finding shows that there is genetic evidence that Europeans have been living with anthrax for a longer period of time allowing that population to build up a natural immunity against the disease due to natural selection.
Professor Charles Danko, PhD.
Robert N. Noyce Associate Professor in Life Science and Technology
Researcher with the Baker Institute of Animal Health.
Anthrax bacteria’s main host are ruminants such as cattle and sheep. The grazing animals inhale the bacteria spores and become infected, and soon die from toxins produced from the bacteria. The decaying carcass returns the bacteria to the soil and vegetation, repeating the cycle. How humans became entangled in this host-pathogen affair was not entirely clear, until the Danko team began diving into the genetic patterns.
Lauren Choate, former Danko lab doctoral student and currently a genomics fellow at the Mayo Clinic, explored genomic sequences from many species by examining both existing human population databases and running experiments on human and nonhuman primate samples.
She found that the gene expression for anthrax toxin receptor 2 (ANTXR2), which allows the toxin access into host cells, was abundant across the mammalian family tree, including primates. That wasn’t the case when it came to humans.
Essentially, Darwin’s law was at work: At the dawn of humans’ emergence in sub-Saharan Africa, hunter-gatherer cultures began to eat more and more ruminants, encountering anthrax more regularly than their primate ancestors. The disease would have wiped out many of these early humans, leaving survivors who had a natural genetic resistance to anthrax – i.e., fewer anthrax receptors.
Next, the lab looked at the gene expressions of different human populations, including those of European, Chinese, Japanese and Yoruba (a sub-Saharan African ethnic group) ancestry. They found that while all showed a reduction in anthrax receptor expression compared to most mammals, the European group had an even greater reduction – and a reduction in expression meant a reduced risk of the anthrax bacteria taking hold. This follows observations that Europeans seem to be less sensitive to anthrax toxins compared with Africans or Asians.
This follows the path of human migration and agricultural practices. For example, England was long plagued by “wool-sorter’s disease,” caused by the inhalation of anthrax spores from infected wool by working-class people who sorted wool in the 1800s.
AbstractClearly, whilst the scientific, evolutionary, explanation is probably obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of Darwinian evolution, what Creationists need to explain is why they reject that simple explanation in favour of one which leaves their putative creator god looking like an incompetent designer and a sadistic monster who creates these nasty organisms to harm us, then forgets what its purpose was and sets about redesigning our defences against its creations, then redesigns its organisms so they can carry on killing us as planned in a weird arms race with itself, like someone with a multiple personality disorder.
The advent of animal husbandry and hunting increased human exposure to zoonotic pathogens. To understand how a zoonotic disease may have influenced human evolution, we study changes in human expression of anthrax toxin receptor 2 (ANTXR2), which encodes a cell surface protein necessary for Bacillus anthracis virulence toxins to cause anthrax disease. In immune cells, ANTXR2 is 8-fold down-regulated in all available human samples compared to non-human primates, indicating regulatory changes early in the evolution of modern humans. We also observe multiple genetic signatures consistent with recent positive selection driving a European-specific decrease in ANTXR2 expression in multiple tissues affected by anthrax toxins. Our observations fit a model in which humans adapted to anthrax disease following early ecological changes associated with hunting and scavenging, as well as a second period of adaptation after the rise of modern agriculture.
Choate, Lauren A.; Barshad, Gilad; McMahon, Pierce W.; Said, Iskander; Rice, Edward J.; Munn, Paul R.; Lewis, James J.; Danko, Charles G.
Multiple stages of evolutionary change in anthrax toxin receptor expression in humans
Nature Communications, 12, 6590 (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26854-z
Copyright: © 2021 The authors. Published by Springer Nature Ltd.
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
Anthrax is another cruel, disgusting disease that tortures and kills both animals and humans. The creator is a sick minded, demented idiot. Mental degenerate and moral degenerate. The creator is also insane with a Jekyll and Hyde personality or a Split personality. Mentally blind, morally blind, immoral, amoral, non moral.
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