Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Have Shown How Mosquitoes Evolved in Another Casual Refutation of Creationism With Facts

Researchers scoured academic literature and used new genomic techniques to create the mosquito family tree.

Photo credit: Matt Bertone, NC State University.

Aedes eagypti

Anopheles stephensi

Anopheles albimanus

Ochlerotatus notoscriptus

Study Elucidates Evolution of Mosquitoes and Their Hosts | NC State News

It's proving to be another terrible week for the creation cult with yet another science paper that casually, and without any intention on the part of the authors, utterly refutes some basic creationist cult dogmas.

This paper deal with the evolution of the mosquitoes and the parasite-host relationship that refute intelligent design ideas with their arms races, needless complexity and prolific waste, in addition to their refutation of the notion of an omnibenevolent designer.

And of course, as we've come to expect, almost all that evolutionary history occurred millions of years before creationists think the Universe was magically created out of nothing by a magic man made of nothing who popped up from nowhere, in the days when nothing was something that existed. This magic, invisible man then allegedly created every living thing without ancestors, pretty much as we find it today, but on a flat Earth with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out. Seriously!

The point has already been made by others many times before: creationism is not a problem for science; science is a problem for creationism; and this paper is just one more drop in the tsunami engulfing the cult.

First, a little AI background on mosquitoes:

What do you know about the evolution, classification and lifestyle of mosquitoes? Mosquitoes are a diverse group of insects belonging to the family Culicidae within the order Diptera (flies and mosquitoes). They have a fascinating evolutionary history, a complex classification system, and a distinct lifestyle. Here's an overview:

Evolution:

1. Origins: Mosquitoes are believed to have evolved around 226 million years ago during the Jurassic period. Fossil evidence indicates that they have been around for a very long time.
2. Adaptations: Over millions of years, mosquitoes have evolved various adaptations, including specialized mouthparts called proboscis for piercing and sucking blood. Only female mosquitoes feed on blood, and they have evolved this behavior to obtain the necessary nutrients for egg development.

Classification:

Mosquitoes are classified into various genera and species based on morphological and genetic characteristics. Some common genera include Anopheles, Aedes, Culex, and many more. These genera often contain numerous species, and some of these are vectors for diseases like malaria, dengue, and Zika. The classification of mosquitoes can be quite complex, with frequent updates as new species are discovered.

Lifestyle:

1. Feeding Habits: Female mosquitoes are known for their blood-feeding behavior. They use their specialized proboscis to pierce the skin and feed on the blood of humans and animals. Male mosquitoes, on the other hand, primarily feed on nectar and other sugary substances.
2. Reproduction: After obtaining a blood meal, female mosquitoes lay eggs in water, where they hatch into larvae. The larvae go through several developmental stages before pupating and emerging as adult mosquitoes.
3. Disease Vectors: Some mosquito species are responsible for transmitting diseases to humans and animals. For example, Anopheles mosquitoes are known for transmitting the malaria parasite, while Aedes mosquitoes are vectors for viruses like dengue, Zika, and chikungunya.
4. Ecological Role: Mosquitoes play a role in various ecosystems. As larvae, they are filter feeders, helping to clean water bodies. Adult mosquitoes serve as a food source for many animals, such as birds, bats, and insects.
5. Sensory Abilities: Mosquitoes are highly adapted to locate hosts for blood-feeding. They are attracted to their hosts by the carbon dioxide they exhale, body heat, and chemical cues emitted by the skin. They use sensory organs, including antennae and specialized mouthparts, to locate and feed on their hosts.
6. Life Cycle: The mosquito life cycle includes four stages: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. Depending on environmental conditions, this cycle can take a few days to several weeks to complete.
7. Habitat: Mosquitoes are found in various habitats, including freshwater sources like ponds, lakes, and marshes where their larvae develop. Some species prefer urban environments, while others thrive in more rural or natural settings.
8. Seasonality: Mosquito activity can be seasonal, with their abundance often peaking during warmer months. However, in some regions, where temperatures remain mild or stable year-round, mosquito activity can persist throughout the year.

It's important to note that while mosquitoes are an integral part of many ecosystems, they can also be a significant public health concern due to their role as disease vectors. Efforts to control mosquito populations often focus on reducing their impact on human health while minimizing harm to the environment.

The research into the evolutionary relationships between the different species of mosquito was carried out by researchers at North Carolina State University, together with international collaborators. Their findings are published, open access, in Nature Communications and described in a North Carolina University news release by Mick Kulikowski:

Study Elucidates Evolution of Mosquitoes and Their Hosts

Researchers at North Carolina State University and global collaborators have mapped the mosquito’s tree of life, a major step toward understanding important traits, such as how the insects choose their hosts, feed on blood and spread disease. The findings will help researchers make better predictions to model disease transmission and understand what makes some mosquitoes better disease carriers than others. The research suggests that mosquito evolution over the past 200 million years mirrors the Earth’s history of shifting land masses and changing host organisms, says Dr. Brian Wiegmann, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Entomology at NC State and corresponding author of a paper describing the mosquito family tree, published in Nature Communications.

This ongoing project builds a big-data resource that mines the academic literature with published observations of the sources of blood mosquitoes drink, from animals as diverse as fish to humans. It focuses explicitly on data collection to infer aspects of mosquito biology in a contextualized way. That means linking up the family, or phylogenetic, tree with the narrative of life on Earth: geologic history, climate history and organism history.

Professor Brian M. Wiegmann, corresponding author
William Neal Reynolds Professor of Entomology
Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology
North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA.

While the researchers pored over the academic literature to capture as much published information about mosquitoes as possible, new genomic sequencing techniques also allowed them to take decades-old mosquitoes – some held in place by pins inside insect collections – and capture a great deal of information on their genetic similarities from just fragments of their genetic blueprints, or genomes.

A lot of research goes into the important mosquitoes and there’s not much known about the incredible mosquito diversity across the globe. We now have the tools to sample genetic information more rapidly and very thoroughly. And so the time was right to take a big stab at putting the disease vectors and the well-known mosquitoes into the context they evolved in.

Professor Brian M. Wiegmann

Piecing the genetic and published information together gave the researchers a few notable findings and these can be evaluated against current patterns and distributions. Mosquitoes are an ancient group – around 217 million years old – that probably originated in South America before it was South America, on one big land mass called Gondwana that hadn’t yet split apart.

Major events like continental drift certainly influenced the diversification of mosquitoes.

The genomic data confirms that blood feeding evolved very early, before some vertebrate groups, like mammals and birds, were flourishing on Earth. Mosquitoes evolved right along with them with a new feeding strategy of developing hypodermic needles for mouths and feeding on blood in order for females to have plenty of protein to develop mature eggs.

Professor Brian M. Wiegmann

And while no mosquito gut contents exist from hundreds of millions of years ago, Wiegmann says that dinosaurs likely provided blood meals for mosquitoes.

Before mammals became the main hosts on Earth, there had to be something else that mosquitoes fed on. Our research suggests that mosquitoes started out feeding on amphibians and then moved onto other groups – reptiles and birds – as those groups flourished during the Jurassic Era between about 200 million and 145 million years ago.

Professor Brian M. Wiegmann

Wiegmann said work on the mosquito family tree will continue.

The family tree ends up being a road map for the kinds of adaptations that led to why some mosquitoes are such important vectors of disease and others are not,” Wiegmann said. “If we figure out which are the bad mosquitoes and put them in the context that led to the success of being vectors of human disease, then we can understand more about how similar pathways may be taken, or how we can predict why some mosquitoes are carriers of viruses and other are not.

Professor Brian M. Wiegmann

Technical details and the evolutionary relationships the researchers revealed are reported in their open access paper in Nature Communications:

Abstract

Mosquitoes have profoundly affected human history and continue to threaten human health through the transmission of a diverse array of pathogens. The phylogeny of mosquitoes has remained poorly characterized due to difficulty in taxonomic sampling and limited availability of genomic data beyond the most important vector species. Here, we used phylogenomic analysis of 709 single copy ortholog groups from 256 mosquito species to produce a strongly supported phylogeny that resolves the position of the major disease vector species and the major mosquito lineages. Our analyses support an origin of mosquitoes in the early Triassic (217 MYA [highest posterior density region: 188–250 MYA]), considerably older than previous estimates. Moreover, we utilize an extensive database of host associations for mosquitoes to show that mosquitoes have shifted to feeding upon the blood of mammals numerous times, and that mosquito diversification and host-use patterns within major lineages appear to coincide in earth history both with major continental drift events and with the diversification of vertebrate classes.

Fig. 1: Phylogenetic relationships among major lineages of mosquitoes (Culicidae), as inferred by maximum likelihood and dated using a fossil-calibrated relaxed clock analysis.

The analysis is based on the analysis of amino acid sequences of 709 genes (525,000 aligned sites) from 256 species and calibrated at seven time points^{30,70,94,95,96,97,98}. Two Chaoborid outgroups were used to root the phylogeny. Horizontal gray boxes indicate major clades confined to the Americas, whose divergence times correlate with the dates of major geological events. Bars on nodes are 95% HPDs. Paleogeographic reconstructions are from PALEOMAP⁹⁹, and colored bars correspond to the biogeographic region of the species listed, as indicated in the world map below. In the inset, tribes have been collapsed for easier viewing, and the proportion of genera sampled are indicated by gray triangles. Support values are SH-like aLRT and Ultrafast Bootstrap values and are only shown if branch support was below 99. A The common ancestor of the Chaoboridae and the Culicidae. B The common ancestor of all extant Culicidae. C The common ancestor of all Anopheles in our analysis. D The common ancestor of all Culex in our analysis. E The common ancestor of the tribe Aedini. F The common ancestor of all Aedes (Stegomyia) sampled in our analysis. Lettered annotations are discussed in greater detail in the text.

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Fig. 2: Macroevolutionary analyses of host associations for blood-feeding in mosquitoes based on 293,308 bloodmeal records from 422 different mosquito species.

A The maximum host association score among several genera indicating that many genera have a high degree of class-level host association, although there are exceptions. Each point is a species in a given genus. Boxplots for each genus show median max host association values as black bars, along with interquartile ranges as boxes. Whiskers are drawn to +/−1.5 times the interquartile range. B Vertebrate host association contains significant phylogenetic signal as estimated by a phylogenetic Mantel test (shown) and multivariate Blomberg’s K = 0.06, P < 0.027. Among the Culicinae, closely related species have more similar blood-hosts, as indicated by the red bar (significance at an alpha value of 0.05), while more distant lineages differ in blood-host, as indicated by the blue bar. Dashed lines are bootstrapped (1000 replicates) 95% confidence intervals around the estimate of phylogenetic signal (shown as a solid line). C Ancestral state reconstruction on blood-host association in the Culicidae. Our models suggest an amphibian feeding ancestor for all Culicidae. Gray and white bands indicate geologic time periods. D Origin and diversification of extant family-level lineages from major vertebrate classes reconstructed from mean lineage through time estimates from VertLife.org posterior phylogenetic estimates. Many major extant lineages of reptiles and amphibians originated during the Jurassic and Cretaceous^92,93, while most modern mammals and birds originated in the late Cretaceous and Paleogene^33,91.

As can be seen, the evolution and divergence into different mosquito species maps closely onto the major geological changes during the previous 210 million years since the first mosquitoes appeared in the fossil record, and onto the rise and fall of the major vertebrate orders from fish, through amphibians and reptiles to mammals and birds - whenever a new source of blood evolved. And, as the number of available prey species proliferated, so the number of mosquito species proliferated.

Creationists will need to ignore the fact that the genetic evidence of evolution and its timing is supported by the geological evidence and indirectly by the fossil record of the evolution of the vertebrates.

Ah! But they're still mosquitoes! So, no change in 'kind', you'll hear them shout, ignoring the timescale over which it occurred. But several new genera evolved in the period too, so what exactly is a 'kind'? Are the Aedini, the Culisetini and the Anophelinae the same 'kind' of mosquito? If so, what taxonomic grouping does the term 'kind' include, or is it so wide that all birds are the same 'kind' and all carnivora, including bears, seals, cats and dogs are the same kind? If the latter, why does the Bible refer to different kinds of bird:

And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray, And the vulture, and the kite after his kind; Every raven after his kind; And the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind, And the little owl, and the cormorant, and the great owl, And the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle, And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat. All fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination unto you.

Leviticus 11: 11-20

Yep! Bats are birds and some fowl go on all fours, apparently! Mind you, this is by the same author who thought hares chew the cud! (Leviticus 11:6), so what do you expect?

No wonder, when their favourite biology 'textbook' is so hopelessly muddled on the issue, you can never get a creationist to define 'kind'.

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