Creationism in Crisis - Jumping Jehosaphat! It's Giant Kangaroos 30,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'!

Protemnodon viator

Impression of South-eastern South Australia during the Pleistocene
(~500 thousand years ago)

Peter Schouten

We found three new species of extinct giant kangaroo – and we don’t know why they died out when their cousins survived

Archaeologists have re-assesses the fossils of giant kangaroos that lived in the Pleistocene along with other megafauna such as giant goannas (an Australian lizard) or Megalania, Varanus priscus, that grew to 4 meters (about 13 feet) long and went extinct about 40,000 years ago along with much of the megafauna. One of these kangaroos, the short-faced kangaroo Procoptodon goliah grew to three metres (9.5 feet) and probably weighed over 250 kilograms (about 550 lbs).

Why these large animals went extinct and what part if any the arrival of Homo sapiens played any part in it is a matter of debate, but what is not a matter for debate is whether or not they existed and when. Their discovery is explained by Isaac A. R. Kerr, a Research Assistant in the Palaeontology Laboratory, Flinders University, Australia in an open access article in The Conversation. His article is reprinted here, reformatted for stylistic consistency, under a Creative Commons license:

Creationism in Crisis - How Rusty Patched Bumblebee Genes Show Evidence of Evolution Under Intense Selection Pressure

The rusty-patched bumblebee, Bombus affinis

Photo by Jay Watson

The rusty-patched bumblebee, once common in the United States, has declined from about 90% of its former range.

Photo by Jay Watson

Rusty-patched bumblebee’s struggle for survival found in its genes - Warner College of Natural Resources

Evolution, or more precisely change in allele frequency over time, inevitably records selection pressures on a species resulting in a genome which, when correctly read and compared to predecessors, should tell the story of changes in the species environment.

This principle is illustrated by the threatened species of bumblebee, the rusty patch bumblebee, Bombus affinis, which has recently declined by about 90% in the USA and is now considered an endangered species. If this rate of decline continues the species will probably be extinct within 20 years. This level of intense selection pressure has inevitably left its mark on the genome of the species.

On of the problems facing the species is the result of the way bees breed. The queen can normally produce two sorts of egg - a fertilised, diploid egg which will develop into a female and a haploid, unfertilised egg which will develop into a male or drone. The problem arises when there is a high level of inbreeding, due, for example, to a small population - which the bee is now facing. In that situation, the female can produce diploid males because both sets of chromosomes can be identical. Diploid males are normally sterile so reducing the breeding success of the local species.

Creationism in Crisis - A New Look at Bird Evolution - Not Whether, But How!

Wompoo fruit-dove from Queensland, Australia.

Credit: Daniel J. Field

A greater flamingo, Mallorca, Spain.

Credit: Daniel J. Field

We’ve had bird evolution all wrong - News - University of Florida

To a child-like black vs white creationist, science changing its mind is science admitting it was wrong - which means it's probably wrong this time too, so all of science can be dismissed as wrong. Unless of course, it's some pseudo-science purporting to support creationism, then it's absolutely incontrovertible proof of creationism, because there is nothing a creationist craves more than proof of creationism provided by the same science they despise so much when it refutes creationism yet again.

So, news that a team of researchers at Florida University have re-examined the genetic evidence for the evolution of birds and revised the family tree will be music to the ears of any creationist fraud looking for some science to misrepresent. However, this research does nothing of the sort, and merely confirms what we already know - that birds diversified from a common ancestor by an evolutionary process. The debate is never about whether that happened, but how and exactly when.

What misled taxonomists was a chunk of DNA that has remained more or less unchanged for some 60 million years. By a process which is poorly understood, this large chunk of DNA avoids recombination during the process of egg and sperm production. Using this section alone gave one family tree, which put doves and flamingoes as close cousins, but using the whole genome gave a different family tree which makes doves and flamingoes much more distantly related (though of course, still related by common ancestry).

The research team have published their findings, open access, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) and explain them in a University of Florida news release:

Creationism in Crisis - An Evolutionary 'Family Tree' For All Living Birds

Male wood duck, Aix sponsa

After 10 years of work, landmark study reveals new ‘tree of life’ for all birds living today

The results of a ten-year study, published today in Nature will come as a huge disappointment for any creationists who find the courage to read it (and who have the ability to understand what they're reading - which for creationists is probably asking too much.

Those still under the delusion that mainstream biologists are abandoning the TOE in favour of creationism with its magic and a suppositional supernatural entity, will be especially disappointed. Not only does it show birds have been around for very much longer than creationists believe the universe has been it also shows that the team of scientists are firmly committed to the Theory of Evolution as the only scientific explanation for biodiversity.

Two of the biologists who co-authored the paper along with a large international team of biologists, Jacqueline Nguyen, Scientific Officer in Ornithology, Australian Museum, and ARC DECRA Fellow, Flinders University and Simon Ho, Professor of Molecular Evolution, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney, have described their findings in an article in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Malevolent Designer - How Creationism's Putative Designer COULD Have Given Us A Mechanism to Prevent Heart Attacks But Chose Not To

Naked mole-rat, Heterocephalus glaber

Photo: TxanTxunai via Wikimedia Commons

Naked mole rats, Heterocephalus glaber - uniquely able to resist cardiac damage.

FMD - Secrets of the naked mole-rat: new study reveals how their unique metabolism protects them from heart attacks - Queen Mary University of London

Part of creationists mythology is the belief that humans stand at the pinnacle of creation, being the supreme creation of their putative designer. Even those who accept the evidence for evolution, like to imagine that somehow evolution was intended to result in humans being at the apex of it.

As you would expect of creationism, those beliefs are counter-factual and so are not supported by the evidence, and, if they are to be believed, paints their putative creator god in a very poor light, not the least because of the very many examples of where, if it had created humans and all the other species, humans come off at best second best, having inferior versions of organs and processes compared to many other species. I list several of these in my popular, illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, for example, the superior eye of the peregrine falcon, the superior immune system of bats and the fact that elephants and sharks rarely get cancer.
Now we have the example of naked mole rats which are able to suffer anoxia without sustaining damage to their cardiac muscles, so they rarely have heart attacks.

The damage during a heart attack, i.e., when a cardiac artery is blocked by a blood clot, is cell death due to being deprived of oxygen. But Naked mole rats have a unique cardiac metabolism and unique genes, that enable their cardiac muscle cells to survive a period of anoxia.

The reason for this, and the mechanism creationism's creative god could have given humans if it were real and is as omnibenevolent as creationists like to pretend, was discovered by researchers from London, Pretoria and Cambridge, led by Dr. Dunja Aksentijevic of the Centre for Biochemical Pharmacology, William Harvey Research Institute, Bart’s and the London Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK.

The team have just published their findings, open access, in the journal Nature Communications. It is also explained in a Queen Mary University news release:

Creationism in Crisis - Rice Paddy Snakes In Thailand Diversified About 2.5 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Hypsiscopus plumbeus

Photo: Bryan L. Stuart

Hypsiscopus murphyi sensu

Photo: Bryan Stuart

Rice paddy snake diversification was driven by geological and environmental factors in Thailand, molecular data suggests | KU News

In one of those far-away places that the simple-minded authors of the story in Genesis about a small flat Earth with a dome over it being magicked up out of nothing in the Middle East, 10,000 years ago, could never have guessed existed, and some 2.5 million years before they though Earth existed, major environmental changes were driving the diversification of a species of snake into several descendant species, just as the Theory of Evolution predicts.

If those simple-minded Bronze Age pastoralists had known about it and understood its significance in terms of the history of life on Earth and the dynamic geology of the planet, just imagine how different their imaginative tale would have been! As it was, they had to do their best with what little knowledge and understanding they had.

The snake in question was the Rice Paddy snake, otherwise known as a mud snake, and the far-away place was Thailand where the rise of the Khorat Plateau caused environmental changes that resulted in the evolutionary diversification of the Hypsiscopus genus.

The team of researchers from various American and Southeast Asian Universities, who have shown this link between environmental change and evolutionary radiation in a genus was led by Dr. Justin Bernstein, of the University of Kansas Center for Genomics. Their findings are published open access in Scientific Reports and are explained in a Kansas University news release:

How Science Works - Giraffes - A single Pan-African Species Or Several Distinct Species?

Giraffe trio crossing plain, Etosha, Namibia

Photo: Mogens Trolle

Reticulated giraffe, Buffalo Springs, Kenya. Photo: Mogens Trolle

Photo: Mogens Trolle

Gene flow in giraffes and what it means for their conservation – Department of Biology - University of Copenhagen

In an evolutionary picture that resembles that of humans, giraffes appear to have speciated, or partially speciates at different times and in different parts of their range, then hybridized, before splitting again with regular gene-flow between the groups.

Similarly, though over a greater range, humans seems to have partially speciated into isolated populations in Africa before coming together again and spreading to Eurasia as Homo erectus which then split into Neanderthals, Denisovans and possibly others before meeting up with H. sapiens coming out of Africa in a second wave, to interbreed with the Eurasian species. The result is genetically distinct populations with evidence of ancient hybridization and gene flow.

Because conservation efforts tend to be directed at the species level, it is important for giraffe conservation to determine whether there is a single pan-African species with local sub-species or whether there are four or more species, each with a smaller population and therefore more vulnerable to habitat destruction and extinction.

To try to resolve this issue, as part of the African Wildlife Genomics research framework led by research groups at the Department of Biology at the University of Copenhagen, scientist carried out an extensive genome analysis to establish whether the different populations have been genetically isolated for long enough to be regarded as distinct species, even though, in captivity, they freely interbreed.

The results were a little surprising but highlight the difficulty in determining whether speciation has occurred within a population where differentiation is still in progress and few barriers to hybridisation have arisen. The problem is compounded by the fact that there is not a fixed definition of species, although biologists understand what the term means in a given context.

I've previously written blog posts about this problem, using the Eurasian crows as an example - an article incidentally which was recommended reading for Scottish biology students doing their 'Highers'.

The researchers have published their findings open access in the online Cell Press journal, Current Biology and explain it in a news item from the University of Copenhagen Biology Department:

Creationism in Crisis - Evolution of Porcini Fungus

Porcini mushrooms Boletus Edulis

A tale of terroir: Porcinis evolved to the local environment – @theU

This illustration is a little misleading because mycelia are often much larger than any of their mushrooms that appear on the surface of the soil or tree stumps. Fungi can grow up to a half a mile of the thread-like hyphae a day. In fact, the largest known organism on the planet is the Humongous Fungus (Armillaria ostoyae) in The Malheur National Forest, Oregon, measuring 2,385 acres (3.72 square miles) in area. It is estimated to be between 1900 and 8650 years old.

Photo credit: FoodPrint.org

The edible porcine fungus (Boletus edulis) also known as the boletus or penny bun is highly prized culinary delicacy throughout much of Europe. However, there is something strange about it evolution, especially in North America, according to a new report in the journal New Phytologist.

Creationists should note here that the scientists who produced the report see this 'problem' entirely within the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection (TOE). The strangeness is not a problem for the theory but an example of how a fundamental principle of the theory - environmental selection - operates in North America.

The 'problem' is that while Boletus edulis exists in North America as a number of different varieties and genetically distinct populations, probably caused not so much by geographical isolation as environmental adaptation, albeit with regular ingress from surrounding populations, In Eurasia, a single genetic lineage dominates from Spain to Georgia to Scandinavia, so the interesting question is why does is the species genetically continuous in Eurasia but fragmented in North America; what is the difference between the two landmasses that causes this difference.

The Eurasian and North American populations are believed to have become separated during a period of climatic change and the onset of glaciation, 1.62–2.66 years ago. Attempts to segregate populations of Boletus edulis into distinct species based on phenotype have foundered on the genetic evidence, illustrating how small genetic differences can give large phenotypic differences and how a species in the process of speciating passes through a stage at which the diverging populations have not diverged sufficiently to qualify as new taxons because the practice of taxonomy tries to fit a continuous process into a series of distinct events.

The 'problem' is the subject of a free access paper in the journal New Phytologist by Keaton Tremble and Bryn T. M. Dentinger from Utah University, Utah, USA. together with J. I. Hoffman from Bielefeld University, Germany, and was described in a University of Utah press release:

Creationism in Crisis - 250 Million Years of Butterfly And Moth Evolution

Butterfly and moth genomes mostly unchanged despite 250 million years of evolution

It'll no doubt come as a surprise to those creationists who believe Earth was created from nothing by magic just about 10,000 years ago to learn that the butterflies and moths have been evolving for 250 million years.

It'll maybe come as a bigger surprise to those creationists who have been fooled into believing that the Theory of Evolution is being discarded by mainstream biologists in favour of their childish fairy tale of magic and supernatural spirits, that yet another group of mainstream biologists regard it as the foundation of modern biology, and are participating in the Darwin Tree of Life Project, which aims to sequence the genome of 70,000 eukaryote species from Britain and Ireland, to learn their evolutionary relationships.

This project also contributes to the much larger, Earth BioGenome Project.

One of the teams taking part in this project, based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, has just completed the sequencing of 200 high-quality genome of the Lepidoptera order of insects (moths and butterflies) and discovered some interesting facts about the evolution of the order, including that there are some elements in the genomes, which they term 'Merian elements' after the 17th century entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian, which have remained relatively stable over the 250 million years the order has been evolving.

The research is published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution and is described in a Welcome Sanger Institute news release:

Creationism in Crisis - The Billion-Year Evolutionary History of Plants On Earth

Since the first plants appeared, they have diversified into a vast range of forms, and sizes from pond scum to massive trees.

How did plants first evolve into all different shapes and sizes? We mapped a billion years of plant history to find out

Plants come in all manner of shapes and sizes, varying in complexity from simple single-celled algae, through mosses, liverworts and ferns to flowering plants and massive trees.

But how did they get this way?

A team of scientists led by Philip C J Donoghue, Professor of Palaeobiology, University of Bristol, James Clark, Research Associate, School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol and Sandy Hetherington, Plant Evolutionary Biologist, The University of Edinburgh, set out to answer this question by looking at certain traits in each major plant group. The traits ranged from fundamentals like the presence of roots, leaves or flowers to the fine details such as the surface topography of pollen grains. All in all, the team collected data on 548 traits from more than 400 living and fossil plants, amounting to more than 130,000 individual observations.

They then used this data to plot the positions of plants, living and extinct in a 'design space', i.e., the theoretical range of possible forms for each major group.

What they found was that there tended to be a burst of diversification soon after the evolution of a major new trait, with the new lineage then tending to settle down to improve on what they had, rather than to innovate - until the next major innovation.

This what we would expect from the way a major new trait, such as the evolution of pollen as the male reproductive cell which could be transferred to the female by wind, insects, etc., so freeing the plants from the need to live in water or damp conditions so the motile male cells could 'swim' to the female, as it still does with the gametophytes - mosses, liverworts and ferns.

This innovation meant plants were not free to diversify into the dryer land between rivers, lakes and coastal margins and so colonise much more of the planet.

The same phenomenon is seen in animals where, for example, terrestrial living freed the early amphibians from dependence on water, except to breed, and the evolution of eggs, freed them even from that dependence; the evolution of flight freed the birds and bats to diversify into the new niches now open to them.

The team's work was published, open access in Nature Plants and is the subject of an article in The Conversation by the three lead authors. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative |Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Unintelligent Design - The Late Devonian Mass-Extinction Or How Earth Is Badly Designed For Life

Artist’s impression of a Late Devonian landscape

Nicolas Primola

Fieldwork at Trail Island in East Greenland, near a Late Devonian rock outcrop.

Photo by John Marshall, University of Southampton

Study reshapes understanding of mass extinction in Late Devonian era: IU News

Way back 370 million years before the mythical 'Creation Week' the seas were full of life and angiosperm plants were rapidly replacing the tree ferns and other Tracheophytes and life was looking good, despite the fact that the single large landmass, Pangea, was on the point of breaking up.

Then something happened to cause another of those periodic mass extinctions that have punctuated Earth's long 'pre-Creation' history. What exactly it was has been the subject of ongoing debate by geologists, biologists and climatologists ever since evidence of it was found in the fossil record, particularly in Devonian rocks like those in Greenland.

But whatever the cause, it's not good news for creationists who have been duped by their cult leaders into believing Earth is fine-tuned for life by a designer god, and, by the circular reasoning that characterises creationism, therefore this fine-tuning 'proves' their designer god exists. A cynic might wonder, if faith is any good, why creationists are so desperate to find scientific 'proof' of their god that they perform all manner of ludicrous mental gymnastics and commit just about every logical fallacy in the book, to tell themselves and their target dupes that they have discovered it - and will be producing it any day now, real soon!

But that's by the by.

Sadly for creationists the evidence is that Earth is anything but finely tuned and perfect for life. The simple truth is that an Earth that was perfectly designed for life would never have extinctions, let alone mass extinctions like the ones that ended the Devonian and Cretaceous eras, and the one that's in progress right now. In fact, there would not even be biodiversity on such a planet because there would be no reason to adapt to adverse conditions because since these would not exist on a perfectly designed Earth, so life would not have progressed beyond the simplest of self-replicating molecules.

So, just for any creationists still under the delusion that Earth is finely tuned for life, here is a brief description of the Devonian and the mass extinction at the end of it:

Wonderful World - Ten Reasons to Like Spiders

Top left: Giant trapdoor spider Euoplos dignitas

Bottom left: European garden spider, Araneus diadematus

Top right: Gooty Sapphire Ornamental tarantula, Poecilotheria metallica

Bottom right: Banded Garden spider, Argiope trifasciata

Female house spider, Tegenaria domestica

Don't like spiders? Here are 10 reasons to change your mind

Back in the past, in what now seems like a lifetime ago, I managed the Emergency Operations Centre for my local Ambulance Service which was housed in a single-storey building in the grounds of the Church Hospital, Oxford. One of my nicknames was 'Spiderman' because of my fondness for spiders.

The roof space of this building was home to a population of 'house spider' or Tegenaria domestica, a good-sized one of which can be 4 inches or more across its outstretched legs. They frequently paid us a visit by coming through the light fittings or round the edges of the aircon unit.

The house spider is well-named, being one of those commensal species that, like barn swallows, can't exist without human habitation and so must have evolved after we became settled and built permanent dwellings.

Despite its large fangs, it is entirely harmless to humans, even if it does manage to pierce the skin - something I tried to impress on my staff, whose first response to one running across the floor was to stamp on it.

Despite this reassurance, one of my assistants was so arachnophobic she refused to enter the room until the spider was gone - although what she thought it would do to her was a mystery, so one of my tasks was to gently catch the spider in my hands and put it outside, whereupon I would deliver my famous (or maybe infamous) spider talk, in which I explained why spiders are such fascinating creatures - their very long evolutionary history from a common ancestor with scorpions; their multiple eyes (some for binocular vision and some for detecting movement) and above all their amazingly engineered webs.

Orb web spiders like the common garden spider, Araneus diadematus, make two sorts of silk - one to act as scaffolding and the radial threads of the web and sticky one to form the circular strands. Each thread of silk consists of multiple fine filaments that stretch very quickly to catch a flying insect without it bouncing off, then recoil slowly to avoid throwing the insect free. All this is controlled by the fine molecular structure and electrostatic bonds between the filaments. The result is a thread that, weight for weight, is stronger than steel.

One small spider that is common on walls and buildings in Oxford is the zebra spider, Salticus scenicus, a tiny black and white-striped spider, only a few millimeters long, that has amazing eyes. It is a hunting spider that preys on small insects, even some three times its size, by jumping on them. Its modus operandum is to crawl over the surface of walls and roofs and, when it sees its prey, it approaches slowly and when close enough, judges the distance perfectly and pounces. It will also jump across gaps, again with a perfectly judged jump, many times its own body length, rather like a human jumping the Grand Canyon from a standing start, but before it does so, it dabs the tip of its abdomen down to fix a 'safety line' of silk, just in case. To perform these feats, the zebra spider needs a high degree of visual acuity and binocular vison. The amazing thing about this spider is the way it overcomes the problem for visual acuity of such a small retina; it rapidly moves the retina up and down, effectively increasing its size.

The jump is accomplished, not by muscles in the legs, but by a sudden increase in haemocoelic blood pressure which straightens the front and back legs, so the spider always jumps with its legs extended.
I always hoped my spider talk would impress my staff enough to take an interest in spiders rather than seeing them as creepy-crawly things to be half-feared and killed simply for sharing the building with us. Alas, only one or two ever followed my example and picked them up to put them out of a window.

All that was by way of introduction to an article in The Conversation in which Leanda Denise Mason, an Associate Lecturer, Curtin University, Australia give her ten reasons to like spiders, or at least change your mind it you don't. Her article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here.

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Show How a Dynamic And Changing Earth Influenced Evolution Over Millions of 'Pre-Creation' Years

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

Landscape dynamics determine the evolution of biodiversity on Earth - The University of Sydney

A dynamic and changing Earth.

From Salles, T., Husson, L., Lorcery, M. et al. (2023

Again, it's the turn of geologists to refute creationism without even trying, like so many biologists do with their daily work.

Creationists insist that Earth is 'fine-tuned' for life; but as anyone who understands biology will know, life is 'fine-tuned' for Earth and the tuning process is called evolution by natural selection.

The observable fact that, over time, species have either evolved or gone extinct gives the lie to the 'fine-tuned for life' assertion because, if that were true, there would be no selection pressure for change and the fossil record would show no change.

In fact, the fossil record wouldn't exist as we know it because there would have been no evolution beyond the first free-living, single-celled prokaryote organisms because their environment would have been perfect for them.

Yet, as we know from daily observation, Earth is a changing and dynamic planet with periodic climate change, earthquakes and volcanoes caused by the slow process of plate tectonics, changing oxygen and carbon dioxide levels caused by the rise and fall of major ecosystems, and changing ocean currents caused by a number of different factors, not the least of which are climate change and plate tectonics. Then there are the cosmological changes caused by the Milankovitch cycles.

One of the consequences of this dynamic change is the way the Earth's surface is continually being recycled over geological time by erosion, transportation in water and sedimentation in ocean deposits as nutrients, then subduction and mountain-building and eventual resurfacing through volcanic activity. This gives changing levels of nutrients in the oceans that affect biodiversity both in the seas and on land.

This is the conclusion of a study by a team of geologists jointly led by Dr Tristan Salles of The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, and Dr Laurent Husson of Université Grenoble-Alpes, Grenoble, France. They have shown an association between changes in nutrient levels due to sedimentation and mass extinctions. Their findings are published open access in Nature and are explained in a University of Sydney news release:

Creationism in Crisis - How Snakes Evolved To Meet The Demands Of Their Habitat And Food Sources

There are more than 800 species of dipsadine snakes, ranging from less than 12 inches to more than 9 feet in length.

Photos: Gregory G. Pandelis.

Dipsas catesbyi, a snail-eating species

Snake skulls show how species adapt to prey - News Center - The University of Texas at Arlington

The ability to catch and consume prey species is a key aspect of evolutionary biology in carnivorous species, for obvious reasons, and so is a major source of divergence and radiation of species as each species become more and more specialised at catching different prey species.

An example of this was published recently in the journal BMC Ecology and Evolution in which three researcher, led by Gregory G. Pandelis of the Amphibian and Reptile Diversity Research Center, Department of Biology, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas, USA with two colleagues from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, showed a correlation between prey species and skull morphology in dipsadine snakes.

Creationism in Crisis - An Ancient 'Transitional' Species Rediscovered - An Egg-Laying Mammal

Attenborough's long-beaked echidna
photographed in the Cyclops Mountains of Indonesia's Papua Province.

Attenborough's long-beaked echidna, Zaglossus attenboroughi

Found at last: bizarre, egg-laying mammal finally rediscovered after 60 years | University of Oxford

Creationists are always clamouring for evidence of 'transitional' species or fossils, only to dismiss them as 'fully-formed species' so 'not transitional'. What they're demanding is that we show them something that no biologist ever claimed existed - a fossil of something that was half one species and half another - a croccoduck or a half human-half chimpanzee fossil, in other words evidence of their childish parody of evolution.

Instead, what we have is countless examples of species with archaic features and stem species showing characteristics of more primitive taxons and later species that would evolve from it. In fact, every fossil ever found is 'transitional' between its parent generation and its descendant population - a fact only understandable by those with a grasp of what evolution is and how it works over time.

And one such group of animals showing archaic features that show the transition from egg-laying reptiles and the mammals that evolved from them are the monotremes, egg-laying mammals such as the platypus and echidnas - vertebrates that are warm-blooded, have fur and feed their young on milk secreted by special glands on the female's body.

Creationism in Crisis - Research Shows How Environment Drives Evolution - No Magic Required

Raining Cats and Dogs: Research Finds Global Precipitation Patterns a Driver for Animal Diversity

A team of researcher from Utah University's Department of Watershed Sciences in Quinney College of Natural Resources and the Ecology Center, led by Jaron Adkins, has investigated why there is a rich diversity of species in some areas and a paucity of species in others. Not surprisingly, given what we know of how diversity evolves due to environmental selectors, they found a close link between diversity and the environment, especially rainfall, and the result of rainfall, or a lack of it - plant growth.

Creationism in Crisis - Disastrous Sea Level And Climate Changes - 385 Million Years Ago.

The Malvinoxhosan biota were a group of marine animals that thrived in cooler waters

2023-10 - Ancient sea level and climate changes led to major extinctions around South Africa - Wits University

A planet designed by a loving, omniscient designer would be stable and not subject to periodic bouts of mass extinction because the life on it couldn't cope with a massive environmental change.

And yet new research by Dr Cameron Penn-Clarke from the University of the Witwatersrand and Professor David Harper from Durham University has shown that a catastrophic environmental change in the Early Devonian caused the mass extinction of the Malvinoxhosan biota. This was in the 99.97% of Earth's history that occurred before the Universe was created out of nothing by magic, according to creationists.

The term 'Malvinoxhosan biota' foxed ChatGPT3.5:

Creationism in Crisis - Why Earth is Fine Tuned for Extinction

An arid and uninhabitable planet awaits us - in 250 million years.

September: Nature Geoscience extreme heat | News and features | University of Bristol

Creationists like to imagine that Earth is fine-tuned for life. This belief depends on the parochial ignorance of the creationist of course, because they will be oblivious of the fact that, cozy though their small bit of the planet might be, most of it is uninhabitable by humans without specialist equipment, and even cloths and houses are required in the temperate areas. Human life would be impossible without modern technology in the oceans, deserts, arctic waste, the tops of high mountains or just a few thousand feet above the surface of the planet (this is why modern aircraft that fly at 30-60,000 feet need to be pressurised).

But a planet that is fine-tuned for life would also have an infinite life-span, not a time-limited one where the life-time is limited by entirely natural processes, such as plate tectonics and the solar cycle. In fact, the life span of Earth is a mere blink on a cosmic time-scale that is measured by the life of suns.

Long before the sun becomes a red giant and swallows up the inner planets at the end of its life, shortly before becoming a super nova and blowing away the outer planets, Earth's continents will have coalesced into another single super-continent, reminiscent of Pangea, and the climate will have made life untenable for most species of mammal, according to researcher at Bristol University.

The resulting increase in volcanic rifting and out-gassing, combined with 'continentality' and an increase in solar energy output, will result in a 'wet-bulb' temperature of >35^oC and a 'dry bulb' temperature of >40^oC - temperatures at which mammalian thermoregulation fails, leading to death in about 6 hours.

The team's findings are published open access in Nature Geoscience and explained in a Bristol University press release:

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:

Creationism in Crisis - Complexity May be an Accidental Consequence of Evolution, Not its Inevitable Result.

It's reassuring to think humans are evolution's ultimate destination – but research shows we may be an accident

In the creationist parodies of the Theory of Evolution, evolution is presented as a theory that organisms become more and more complex and at the apex of evolution are human beings, the most complex of all species.

Of course, the real TOE says no such thing and claims about aims and purpose, with humans as the intended outcome, are childishly anthropocentric in the extreme. Nor is complexity the inevitable result of evolution since many species, especially parasites, have evolved with a loss of complexity and genetic information. But in general, ignoring parasites, much of evolution does include an increase in complexity, though not always an increase in genetic information. Many salamanders, such as the axolotl, have a much larger genome than humans and even the Christmas tree has a genome 7 times larger than the human genome.

The most complex organism, genetically speaking, is in fact a relatively simple, single-celled amoeba, Amoeba dubia, with a genome 60 times larger than the human genome.