F Rosa Rubicondior: Botany
Showing posts with label Botany. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Botany. Show all posts

Tuesday 5 March 2024

Creationism in Crisis - A Mystery In Plant Evolution - 125 Million Years In The Making In That Long Pre-'Creation Week' History Of Life On Earth



A 'Ginormous' tomato produced by an unregulated CLV3 gene.

An evolutionary mystery 125 million years in the making | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

In an example of one of those lovely gaps in the record of the evolution of a species into which creationists try to shoehorn their ever-shrinking and increasingly homeless little god, there is something about the evolution of tomatoes and Arabidopsis thaliana that scientists can't yet explain.

But the problem for creationists is that this gap is somewhere in the evolutionary history of these plants that occurred almost 125 million years before creationism’s god decided to create a small flat planet with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, centred on the Middle East, in what creationists like to call 'Creation Week'.

The problem comes from the fact that what creationists think is a science and history text book was written by ignorant people who knew nothing of the world outside their small part of it and who had no idea about the history of the planet or of life on it, so they wrote an imaginative story to fill the gap in their knowledge and understanding, and, quite understandably, got almost every aspect of it complete wrong.

And of course, they would never have imagined that one day someone almost as ignorant as they were, would gather their tales into a book and declare it to be the inerrant word of a god - an idea that would be hilarious if it wasn't taken seriously by adults who can become dangerously violent when their superstition is questions.

The mystery that Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) biologists have uncovered is that sometime during the last 125 million years, tomatoes and Arabidopsis thaliana plants experienced an extreme genetic makeover. Just what happened remains unclear. But the mystery surrounds CLV3, a gene key to healthy plant growth and development.

CLV3 controls the growth of fruit in these plants and, if uncontrolled will result in large, even gigantic, fruits, so there is an evolutionary trade-off between a few large fruits and lots of smaller fruits. The mystery is just how and why this balance was achieved differently in two distantly-related plants.

As the CSHL press release explains:

Thursday 22 February 2024

Creationism in Crisis - Fossil Plants from Australia, from 30 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'


Impression of lobed Proteaceae leaf (SAM P59649) from the Stuart Creek fluvial silcrete, South Australia.

A botanical Pompeii: we found spectacular Australian plant fossils from 30 million years ago

With so much of Earth's long history recorded in the geology, it’s quite astonishing that there are grown adults who still believe Earth is about 10,000 years old and was created out of noting, along with everything on it, in 6 days, with a few magic words, and that the science which shows otherwise is false or even forged.

It's even more astonishing that many of those people will live in technologically advanced societies that take products of science such as modern medicines, air transport, electricity, computers, radio and telephone communications and satellite navigation systems for granted and will never have any doubt about the truth of the science that created them.

Yet here we have yet more evidence that there were plants growing and leaving fossilised remains, 30 million years before creationists believe 'Creation Week' happened. And all they will have by the way of rationalising the facts with their evidence free-superstition is to lie about the science and claim the scientists used a flawed dating method that somehow managed to make 10,000 years look like 30 million years, or they lied about their results for some nefarious reason as part of a multi-million person conspiracy about which no-one ever breaks ranks and blows the whistle, even though they would gain instant fame and fortune if ever they did so.

And the same creationists who will tell that lie are the same people who hang on every word of a small handful of pseudo scientists who have taken an oath to always reach a required conclusion in their work, regardless of what the facts really reveal, as a condition of their employment.

How and where these fossils were found and dated, and the geological processes of silicification that preserved them, is the subject of a recent paper in the journal Gondwana Research. Andrew Rozefelds, Adjunct Assoc Professor in Central Queensland University and Principal Curator Geosciences Queensland Museum, CQ University Australia, lead author of the paper in Gondwana Research has also written about the research in an article in The Conversation, reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Friday 9 February 2024

Unintelligent Design - The Heath Robinson Way Legumes Get Nitrates


Mechanism of Plants Obtain Nitrogen by Supplying Iron to Symbiotic Bacteria | Research News - University of Tsukuba

Creationism's 'intelligent' designer is nothing if not inventive. In fact, it's so inventive that it keeps on reinventing things it's already invented and designing new ways to do things it's already designed a way to do. It's almost exactly like it has no way of remembering what it did yesterday and using those designs and inventions today - a bit like a motor-car manufacturer who reinvents the wheel, or the steering mechanism every time it designs a new model.

Take, for example, the way most plants obtain the essential nitrates they need to make proteins. Nitrogen is abundant in the atmosphere (about 79%) where it exists as diatomic molecules N2, in which form plants can't assimilate it. Instead they depend on soil bacteria, the 'nitrogen-fixing' bacteria such as Azotobacter and Clostridium which convert N2, into ammonium (NH4+ which forms salts with other minerals in the soil, in which form it can be taken in through the roots of plants. Apparently, it was too simple to give plants the same metabolic pathways that the nitrogen-fixing bacteria have so they could make their own ammonium, so a more complex and less energy-efficient way to get nitrates into plants had to be invented.

A small amount of ammonia (NH3 is also produced by the action of lightening on atmospheric nitrogen and this, together with nitrates produced by industrial pollution is dissolved in rainwater and finds its way into the soil. Other bacteria, fungi and other soil organisms also release nitrates from decaying plant and animal matter in the soil.

Monday 5 February 2024

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Are Understanding More About How Plants Evolve and Diversify - No God-Magic Required


Ecological Diversification in an Adaptive Radiation of Plants: The Role of De Novo Mutation and Introgression | Molecular Biology and Evolution | Oxford Academic
An effective way to refute the counter-factual claims of a wackaddodle cult like creationism is simply to reveal the facts and show how different they are to the cult beliefs. Sadly, this approach won't convince many creationists of course, especially those too arrogant to think their beliefs can be contradicted with mere facts, because part of being a creationist is to hold the self-idolatrous belief that your beliefs are inerrant, so trump anything science can produce, but one can but try.

In fact, researchers in biomedical sciences don't even try, they have more important things to do than try to convince fools who reject evidence before they see it and who are proud of the fact that nothing can make them change their minds. Scientists just discover the facts and add to the mountain of evidence that creationists have been conditioned to ignore or dismiss as lies or otherwise relegate to the realm of the unimportant.

For example, this week’s edition of Oxford University Press' journal Molecular Biology & Evolution has 10 different open access papers dealing with the minutia of evolution and not one of them shows any sign that the scientists are abandoning the Theory of Evolution as not fit for purpose and adopting instead, creationism's childish superstition complete with magic and unproven supernatural entities, as creationist cult leaders regularly tell their dupes.

None of these papers mention creationism or point out how the research findings refute it, of course, because they are written for people who understand the science, so don't need that to be pointed out to them. These are:

Monday 29 January 2024

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:

Creationism in Crisis - How An Iconic Australian Plant Originated in Africa - 132 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'


Banksia spinosa inflorescence

Banksias are iconic Australian plants, but their ancestors actually came from North Africa

No real scientists these days sets out to refute creationism as such, but most do anyway, because creationism is so counter-factual that almost any scientific facts, especially in the fields of biology, cosmology, archaeology, geology and palaeontology refute it. It takes a resolute and determined ignoramus to not be aware of that. The problem creationists have is that they get all their beliefs from an ancient text that is demonstrably wrong, even when explained away as allegorical or metaphorical. It is neither. It is quite simply wrong on every level.

So, creationists are left desperately trying to defend the childishly absurd claim that the entire Universe, including Earth and all living things on it, were all created out of nothing in a few days, about 10,000 years ago, by a magic man also made of nothing who designed himself before he existed then self-assembled according to that plan, with all the complexity and information needed to create and micromanage an entire Universe.

This, despite the fact that there are fossil remains of plants and animals from hundred, even thousands of millions of years before then and despite the fact that all the evidence points to a long, slow, evolutionary process of divergence from a common ancestor that lived well over a billion years ago, which was itself the result of a symbiotic associations of much earlier organisms.

One such paper, which casually and incidentally refutes creationism, recently published in Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics by three Australian botanists and plant ecologists and a South African Professor of botany, traces the origin of the family of iconic Australian plants, the Banksias, to North West Africa, 132 million years ago.

The story of this migration meshes in with the sciences of plate tectonics and oceanography allowing the plants to migrate across then contiguous land masses from what is now North West Africa to what is now Australia via South America and Antarctica, as land-masses split and diverged and sea-levels rose and fell to reveal land bridges where there is now ocean.

How they discovered this is the subject of an article in The Conversation by the four scientists. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Saturday 27 January 2024

Unintelligent Design - The Unintelligent Evolution of Sea Grasses 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'


Little Neptune Grass (Cymodocea nodosa).

Photo: Thorsten Reusch, GEOMAR
Use it or lose it: How seagrasses conquered the sea - GEOMAR - Helmholtz-Zentrum für Ozeanforschung Kiel

Sea grasses are the only flowering plants to become fully submerged, having evolved from three independent lineages some 100 million years ago in fresh water and transitioned into marine plants. This appears to have been facilitated some 86 million years ago by a whole genome tripling, which created plenty of spare DNA which could mutate harmlessly to create new genetic information - something deemed 'impossible' by creationist dogma. Since then, they have undergone further evolutionary adaptation by gene loss - something else that creationist dogma says is impossible.

Now an international group of 38 researchers coordinated by Professor Dr. Yves Van de Peer, Ghent University, Belgium, Professor Dr. Jeanine Olsen, University of Groningen, Netherlands, Professor Dr. Thorsten Reusch, GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Germany, Dr. Gabriele Procaccini, Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn of Napoli, Italy, and the Joint Genome Institute, Berkeley, California, United States of America, sequenced and analyzed the genomes of three of the most important seagrass species – the iconic Mediterranean endemic Neptune grass (Posidonia oceanica), the broadly distributed Little Neptune grass (Cymodocea nodosa) and the Caribbean endemic Turtlegrass (Thalassia testudinum), to discover what evolutionary changes had enabled this transition.

Anyone who has holidayed on the Mediterranean coast may be familiar with the 'Poseidon balls' that wash up on beaches. These example of emergence of order from chaos are the result of the fibrous remains of Poseidon grass leaves being rolled along the seabed at the tidal interface to form long rolls which then break up and get rolled further into balls, as I relate here.

But the question the team addressed was not how the Poseidon balls form but how did the sea grasses evolve? This is the subject of their paper in Nature Plants and a press release from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Germany:

Monday 22 January 2024

Creationism in Crisis - No Doubt That Lycophytes Evolved, The Question is How?


Marsh Clubmoss, Lycopodiella inundata, with sundew, Drosera rotundifolia.
Credit: Christian Fischer via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
A Window into Plant Evolution: The Unusual Genetic Journey of Lycophytes - Boyce Thompson Institute

Creationists who are desperate to believe they are winning the argument against evolution in the science community and converting biologists to believing in magic and a supernatural magician or two, will not want to read about the discovery by an international team of researchers concerning the evolution of a small group of plants known as lycophytes.

First, a brief introduction to lycophytes, courtesy of ChatGPT 3.5:

Monday 1 January 2024

Unintelligent Design - Another Ludicrously Complex Arms Race, This Time Between Plants And A Predatory Fungus


Discovery: plants use “trojan horse” to fight mold invasions | News Running epigenetics a close second for the most obvious evidence on unintelligent design in nature is the ubiquitous arms race; Arms races are a major component of evolutionary biology, easily understandable in terms of evolution by natural selection. One organism (call it Organism A) predates on, or parasitises another (call it Organism B); this creates an advantage for Organism B in avoiding being eaten of serving as the host of Organism A, so any functional defense mechanism is selected for by natural selection. This in turn creates an advantage for Organism A to evolve a mechanism for overcoming Organism B's defences, and so on until a state of equilibrium is achieved in which either one or the other organism is no longer able to evolve further.

This can lead to some extreme adaptations such as the stupidly long neck and legs of the giraffe which is a response to acacia trees evolving longer trunks to place their leaves, flowers and seeds beyond the reach of giraffes. In the process, acacia trees need to produce masses of cellulose to build the trunk and pump water much higher against gravity than if they were low-growing bushes, and giraffes have to maintain a very high blood pressure to keep their brain supplied with oxygen while drinking water places them at risk of predation by lions because they can't stand up and raise their heads quickly or they will lose consciousness. And they need the additional complexity of special valves in their neck veins to maintain a high blood pressure to their brain.

Now, take away acacia trees (imagine a sudden virus that wipes them out) and the giraffe is no longer superbly adapted for its environment; instead, it is severely handicapped, and might even find feeding from an alternative source difficult.

Another arms race can be seen at the moment is where the SARS-CoV-2 virus is evolving new variants every few months in response to growing herd immunity in its hosts, the human population, due to vaccinations and sub-lethal infections. The virus is getting better at evading our antibodies for long enough for us to pass on the infection to someone else and is tending to be less lethal, so we survive to infect others, even being asymptomatic. Gradually the virus will evolve to become a relatively mild infection that most of us will catch as often as we catch the common cold, and only especially vulnerable people will be made seriously ill by it.

These are just two examples of hundreds of similar arms races in nature; there are even arms races between sexes of the same species as females evolve strategies to retain the ability to only mate with a male of her choice, while males evolve strategies to deprive her of that ability.

But how on Earth can this be explained in terms of design by a single designer, or, including the creationists fallback excuse for parasites, two designers - their supposedly omnipotent, omniscient god and 'Sin'? Would not an omnipotent, omniscient god know in advance what Sin's next response would be and create a design that it couldn't overcome, so an arms race never started in the first place? Or are we to believe that creationism’s god and this 'Sin' thing are equal in all things yet able to conceal their next move from something all-knowing, but powerless to stop its rival? In other words, neither omniscient nor omnipotent.

The notion of intelligent design is quite simply incompatible with the evidence of arms races, for which evolution provides a ready answer.

I have devoted the whole of chapter 3 to arms races in nature in my popular, illustrated book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax, but what it doesn't include is this recently discovered arms race between plants and a parasitic fungus, Botrytis cinerea, or gray mold.

Monday 25 December 2023

Malevolent Design - Parasitic Mistletoe - Unintelligent Design, Malevolent Creation Or Evolution?


Mistletoe haustorium on a birth branch.
At a time of giving and receiving, our many Australian mistletoes do it too

Mistletoe is a hemiparasitic plant and obligate parasite on many different species of tree. It can kill a heavily infested tree. Although mistletoe is photosynthetic, so produces its own sugars, it is dependent on its host for water and the nutrients such as nitrates and other minerals that the host plant obtains from soil. There is no evidence that mistletoe gives anything back to the host in the form of sugars.

Mistletoes and similar parasitic plants obtain the nutrients from their host via a structure called a haustorium which infiltrates the host tissues and forms a close association with the vascular bundles.

But why would an intelligent designer create all the complexity needed for a parasitic lifestyle when it had supposedly designed other plants to obtain nutrients from the soil, and simply added another layer of complexity between the host's roots and the parasitic plant's tissues to achieve the same result? In fact, this is just another example of the needless complexity that characterises evolved systems and distinguishes them from intelligently designed systems, which are characteristically minimally complex.
And it hasn't just done it once! There are over 100 parasitic species of similar plants in Australia alone, which I'll come to next, but first, a little AI background on mistletoe:

Wednesday 6 December 2023

Malevolent Designer News - How A Bacterium Is 'Intelligently Designed' To Turn Plants Into Zombies


The Life Cycle of a 26S Proteasome.

From Infamy to Ingenuity – Bacterial Hijack Mechanisms as Advanced Genetic Tools | John Innes Centre

Scientists working at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, Norfolk, UK., have worked out the sneaky way a bacterium converts an internal cell mechanism in plants to suit its own purpose at the expense of the host, in another example of how a parasite can zombify its host.

Creationists looking at this mechanism from the arrogant perspective that sees their own ignorant incredulity as scientific data, would conclude that it must be intelligently designed, but would then need to perform intellectual summersaults to explain why, even though their own putative creator god is the only supernatural entity capable of designing complex living organisms, something called 'Sin' also creates complex living organisms, so their omnipotent god is not responsible for parasites.

The parasitic Phytoplasma bacterium is transmitted by insects and causes diseases like Aster Yellows, significantly diminishing yields in leaf crops including oilseed rape, lettuce, carrots, grapevines, onions, and a variety of ornamental and vegetable crops worldwide. It is also responsible for the familiar 'witches' brooms' in trees in which the plant produces a proliferation of thin branches and leave.

How it does this is explained in an open access research paper in PNAS. It does it by hijacking the protein recycling function of a cell organelles, the 26S proteasome, so first a little AI background about the 26S proteasomes:

Friday 1 December 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Evolution of a Carnivorous Pitcher Plant by Gene Duplication - New Genetic Information Created Naturally

Genomic study sheds light on how carnivorous Asian pitcher plants acquired signature insect trap - University at Buffalo
East Asian pitcher plants capture insects using their highly specialized pitcher-shaped leaves, which may have resulted from duplicated genomes.

Photo: Pierre-Louis Stenger.
Genomic study sheds light on how carnivorous Asian pitcher plants acquired signature insect trap - University at Buffalo

Unlike so many biology, geology and palaeontology papers published recently, this paper doesn't refute creationism by showing how much of Earth's history occurred before creationism's mythical 'Creation Week', although the genetic changes almost certainly did occur in the long period of 'pre-Creation' history.

Instead, it refutes two more of creationism's favourite fallacies:
  1. Genetic information can't be created without the magical assistance of a creator god. This is a fundamental axiom, taught to creationists by cult leaders such as William Dembski, who fooled them by equating 'information' with energy and citing the Third Law of Thermodynamics. It's a belief clung to despite the repeated evidence of gene duplication and repurposing of resulting redundancy.
  2. The fallacy of irreducible complexity which wrongly assumes that a complex system must have arisen as a single event and was so highly unlikely that a magic god must have created it. This is taught to them by another cult leader, Michael J. Behe, despite the evidence that 'irreducibly complex' systems can and do arise by exaptation of pre-existing, redundant structures or steps in a metabolic pathway that arise in parallel in the species gene pool, not all at once in a single event in one individual or cell.
The paper, by a large team of researchers that included Victor Albert, PhD, Empire Innovation Professor in the University at Buffalo Department of Biological Sciences, within the College of Arts and Sciences, concerns the evolution of the carnivorous East Asian pitcher plant, Nepenthes gracilis, in particular the 'pitcher' traps and the condition of dioecy, which is unique in this genus of plants.

And, just in case creationists declare that mere gene duplication wouldn't create enough new genetic information, this species doesn't have just one or a few genes duplicated and repurposed; they don't even stick with a whole genome duplication, They actually have five whole genome duplications making them decaploid, an extreme example of polyploidy!

Sunday 19 November 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Why Did Some Plants Survived The Mass Extinction That Killed The Dinosaurs? - Evolution!


A fossilised cycad
New Nicholas Researcher Finds Plants That Survived Dinosaur Extinction Pulled Nitrogen from Air | Duke Today

About 65 million years before creationists think Earth existed, about 75% of living species were wiped out in what is known as the K-Pg extinction event. This was caused by a massive meteor, believed to be about 9 miles wide, that hit Earth on the edge of the Yucatan peninsula in what is now Mexico, throwing up billions of tons of sulphurous dust and gas high into the atmosphere, blotting out the sun and plunging Earth into a decade or more of darkness and winter conditions.
Along with most of the animal life, most of the plants were exterminated too. Up to that point, the predominant plant life had consisted of species of cycads on which the herbivorous dinosaurs had browsed.

But just a few cycads survived. The mystery was why? What enabled those few to survive when all the others died?

Scientists now think it had something to do with the fact that the survivors all appeared to have formed an alliance with nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria in their roots, in much the same way that legumes have. How this gave them an advantage is unknown, but it is probably no coincidence that the descendants of the survivors all have this symbiotic relationship with cyanobacteria.

This was discovered by a team of researchers led by Michael A. Kipp of the Division of Earth and Climate Sciences, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA. and is the subject of a paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Knowing that modern cycads are nitrogen fixers, Professor Kipp reasoned that this means the nitrogen in their tissues is derived from atmospheric nitrogen rather than mineral nitrates in the soil, so, measuring the nitrogen isotope ratios in their fossils should tell us something about the changes in atmospheric nitrogen isotopes over time. However, he discovered that only a few species of fossil cycads had isotope signatures similar to that of living cycads because most of them were not nitrogen fixers. He also realised that those that were nitrogen fixers were the ancestors of living cycads. In other words, only the nitrogen fixers survived the K-Pg extinction.

This is an example of how evolution can give a species an unexpected advantage in a situation that was unplanned and unforeseeable, but which was so instantaneous that the process of evolution couldn’t possibly have provided a solution. So the species without that advantage went extinct and the evolutionary trajectory of those was changed forever, just as it was for the large reptiles, most of which died out, the avian dinosaurs which became birds, small mammals that became all today's mammals from pygmy shrews to blue whales, and the angiosperms which evolved into grasses and flowering plants that diversified into thousands of species, some in association with pollinating insects, birds and even bats.

First, some AI background information.

Thursday 2 November 2023

Unintelligent Design - Now it's Plants Designed to Live in Deserts


Appearance of the shrub, branches, and surfaces of T. aphylla. (A) A photograph of T. aphylla located across the coastal sabkha of the United Arab Emirates. (B) A close-up view of the branches. (C) A branch recorded in the late morning (11 a.m.) was encrusted with salt crystals. (D) A branch recorded in the early morning (8 a.m.) showed condensed water droplets. (E and F) Scanning electron microscopic images of the surfaces of leaves with salt crystals (E) and a zoomed image of a single salt gland (F). The length of the scale bars in panels B, C, D, E, and F are 5 mm, 3 mm, 3 mm, 1 mm, and 50 µm, respectively.

NYU Abu Dhabi Researchers Reveal How Common Desert Shrub Efficiently Harvests Water from the Air - NYU Abu Dhabi

Yesterday it was fish 'designed' to live in a desert that demonstrated how biological 'design' is a bottom-up process where, in this case, a fish, is faced with increasing desertification of its environment and only those fit for living in the environment survive to breed, so, over time, and with whatever increased complexity evolves, we have fish 'designed for living in a desert.

An intelligent designer, on the other hand, starting with a desert, would be insane to imagine that what was needed was a fish to live in it, and then set about designing all the complexity and elaborate workarounds for the problems it has needlessly created for itself.

And today, we have another example, in the form of a plant that also lives in a desert, so needs an alternative source of water.

What intelligent designer not in need of responsible adult supervision, would look at a desert and think, "I know what that needs - plants!", then try to solve the problem of, being a plant, it needs water which is singularly lacking in a desert, so it designs a ludicrously complicated way to get water, instead of simply designing the plant to live where there is enough water for it, using the method it has already used successfully in just about every other plant.

Monday 23 October 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Observable Evolution in the Creeping Woodsorrel (Oxalis Corniculata)


Does Urbanization Trigger Plant Evolution? | CHIBADAI NEXT

Creeping woodsorrell (green-leaved form),
Oxalis corniculata.
Common in rural areas
This latest refutation of creationism is an example of observable evolution occurring in recent history. It shows how a species will evolve according to local environmental conditions. The definition of biological evolution is of course, changes in allele frequencies in a population over time, and need not include a phenotypic change at all. In this case though the change is the observed change in the leaf-colour of a species of plant, the creeping woodsorrel, Oxalis corniculata.

The traditional response by creationists to these examples is to try to get away with a different definition of biological evolution to include changes that biologists don't claim ever happen, such as an entirely new taxon arising in a single event, or one taxon changing into another, unrelated taxon. It matters not one iota to a creationists that they may have been corrected on this point numerous times, it's almost impossible to shift them away from their protective shell of pretending science makes claims science never makes and the definition of biological evolution is something so absurd that no sane person could accept it.

First, a short conversation with ChatGPT3.5 on the definition of biological evolution and why creationists need to misrepresent the science:

Wednesday 11 October 2023

Unintelligent Design - How Evolution Keeps on Reinventing the Wheel


Benzoxazinoids are produced in very different plants, such as the zebra plant Aphelandra squarrosa (left), the golden dead-nettle Lamium galeobdolon (right) and maize. Comparative studies of the plant metabolites and the genes expressed have now demonstrated how flexible plant metabolism is. The formation of benzoxazinoids in the three species is based on different enzyme classes and has thus evolved independently of one another.

© Karin Groten, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology
Nature is inventive - the same substance is produced differently by plants | Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology

Imagine for a moment that you're a supremely intelligent designer and you just designed a metabolic pathway for producing a substance in plants that is intended to deter other creatures you designed earlier to eat the plants, from eating them.

No! I know that's not an intelligent thing to do but work with me on this one!

Then, the same problem you've created which the animals you've designed doing what you've designed them to do, and eating other plants you've designed, so how do you solve that problem?

Being intelligent, you give those plants the same metabolic pathway to produce the same deterrent substances you've just designed, don't you?

Well, yes, if you were truly intelligent you would, but not if you're creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer. If you're creationism’s putative intelligent [sic] designer, you set about creating entirely new metabolic pathways for each plant to produce the same deterrent chemicals! In metaphorical design terms, it’s the equivalent of inventing the wheel anew every time you need to put wheels on a cart.

Would you employ such a designer?

Creationists regard this as supreme intelligence - which probably tells us a great deal about creationists and probably explains why they're creationists in the first place.

You might think this example is made up to make creationists look even more gullible, but it's actually based on real science as revealed recently by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Jena, Germany. These researchers have found that distantly related plants use different enzymes and different biochemical pathways to produce the defence compounds, benzoxazinoids, and with different enzymes come different sets of genes.

The researchers found that these biochemical pathways have evolved in plants at least three time and don't have their origins in a common ancestor.

Friday 22 September 2023

Creationism in Crisis - A Parasitic Plant That Evolved by LOSS of Genetic Information!


This parasitic plant convinces hosts to grow into its own flesh—it’s also an extreme example of genome shrinkage | UBC Science - Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia

I wonder if creationists ever puzzle over the fact that science never produces any evidence supporting their dogmas and superstitions; instead, science repeatedly finds evidence the flatly contradicts them. It takes a special form of delusion and self-deception to dismiss all that contrary evidence and stick with an evidence-free notion.

Just such a creation-refuting piece of science has just been published in the journal Nature Plants. It concerns the evolution of the parasitic plants, the Balanophora and in particular, the discovery that during their evolution they lost 38% of their genome.

Despite the fact that many parasites have undergone a genome reduction during their evolution to a parasitic life-style, creationist dogma dictates that mutations and loss of genes are always deleterious, or 'devolutionary' (©Michael J Behe) a nonsensical term which tries to relate biology to the biblical myth of 'The Fall' because Behe has now abandoned the futile attempt to prove that evolution isn't a natural process in which no gods or supernatural entities are involved.

Parasitism is also a refutation of the childish notion of intelligent [sic] design, especially by a supposedly omni-benevolent designer, because no intelligent designer would design the inevitable arms race that characterises a parasite-host relationship, unless that designer was both malevolent and extremely stupid.

First, a little about the Balanophora:

Friday 15 September 2023

Creationism in Crisis - How Flowering Plants Survived the Mass Extinction That Killed the Dinosaurs


Dog rose, Rosa canina.
Descendant of a K-Pg mass extinction survivor.
Nature’s great survivors: Flowering plants survived the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs

Despite creationist claims that their putative creator god created Earth and set the parameters of the universe to make it perfect for human life, Earth is not a very safe place to live. Most of it is actually hostile to human life, being either too cold, too hot, under water or too high for there to be enough partial pressure of oxygen to survive for long.

It is also subject to regular, non-discriminatory natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, droughts, or devastating floods. In the last few days, tens of thousands of people have dies in Morocco and Libya because of natural disasters.

And Earth is occasionally hit by an asteroid that changes the climate so radically that a mass extinction occurs, like the one, 66 million years ago, that exterminated all the dinosaurs except for a few feathered varieties that went on to become birds - the K-T extinction, more correctly known as the K-Pg extinction or boundary. (K is the initial letter of the German word for Cretaceous, and Pg is for Paleogene, which used to be called the Triassic)

Thursday 31 August 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Use Algae to Work Out How Plants Evolved in 600 Million Years


Mesotaenium endlicherianum
Closest to the first algae to colonize the land
Press release: Algae provide clues about 600 million years of plant evolution

No doubt to the discomfort of creationists, a team of researchers led by Professor Jan de Vries of the University of Göttingen, Germany, have worked out how terrestrial plants have evolved in the 600 million years since the first marine algae colonize the land. This colonization is believed to have occurred just once, so all terrestrial plants are descended from that single colonizing species.

Note the question was not whether, but how this evolutionary process occurred. There was never a shadow of doubt that it was an evolutionary process in which there was no evidence of magic or supernatural interference with chemistry and physics.

Using the results of a series of experiments that have been running in the research lab in Gottingen for over 25 years, the team were able to identify key evolutionary changes that occurred as a prequel to land colonization and which are still to be found in terrestrial plants after 600 million years of evolutionary diversification.

Creationists must now draw on their repertoire of rehearsed dismissals of the science to cope with these finding and maintain the myth that land plants were created as is in one day about 8000 years ago, and have not evolved since:
  • Redefine evolution ("They're still plants!").
  • The dates are wrong ("Radiometric dating is flawed; it wasn’t hundreds of millions; it was just hundreds of years!").
  • The scientists are lying ("It's a Satanic conspiracy to turn people away from Jesus!")

First a little AI background on marine algae and when the transition to terrestrial living occurred:

Wednesday 23 August 2023

Creationism in Crisis - How a Deleterious Gene Can Survive in a Population


Coyote tobacco, Nicotiana attenuata

It all depends on the genetic diversity | Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology

Mutations in genes that are essential for defence against predator attack are usually deleterious and would be expected to be quickly eliminated from a population, however, occasionally, the same mutation can convey an advantage which it is able to assert in conditions where predator populations are low, and this is especially true if wide genetic diversity within the population makes it more likely that the mutation can operate synergistically with other genes.

This can lead to a dynamic situation in which, in periods of low predation, the mutation can increase, or at least remain at a stable level in the population, and, in periods of high predation, it can be reduced. This dynamic can result in deleterious genes being retained in a population for much longer than would be expected if they were wholly deleterious.

An example of this was found recently by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Jena, Germany, in a wild member of the tobacco family, Nicotiana attenuata. Their finding is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS)

The research and its significance are explained in a press release:
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