Transitional Form News - Precambrian Common Ancestor of Insects, Arachnids, and Nematode Worms

3D laser scans enable the researchers to study the fossils’ shape and curvature.

Droser Lab/UCR

Researchers Scott Evans (left) and Ian Hughes examine a fossil bed at Nilpena Ediacara National Park.

Droser Lab/UCR.

Tiny worm makes for big evolutionary discovery | UCR News | UC Riverside

The refutation of creationism continues today with news of another one of those 'non-existent' transitional species that turn up with monotonous regularity only to be dismissed by creationists as 'not transitional but fully formed' with now two gaps in the record where there was originally one, or by simply dismissing the dating method as unreliable and coincidentally wrong by an order of magnitude sufficient to make 6-10,000 years look like x-million years.
Another big disappointment for creationists is the fact that this one is from before the Cambrian when their traditional disinformation claims lots of species popped into existence without ancestors by magic in a single event called the 'Cambrian explosion'. The Cambrian 'explosion' was of course a period of some 6-10 million years during which many of the basic body plans of multicellular organisms evolved.

This fossil however was before then and was clearly the ancestral stem species from which a whole range of Cambrian organism, collectively known as Ecdysozoa evolved. These are a group of organisms with an outer cuticle which is shed periodically as the organism grows. The vast group includes nematode worms and arthropods such as insects, spiders, crustaceans like crabs, shrimps, lobsters, and the horseshow crab. So, this discovery, which the palaeontologists have named Uncus dzaugisi sits at the base of this branch of the evolutionary tree. It resembled a nematode worm.

Tell me all about the Ecdysozoa, please. Ecdysozoa is a major clade of animals within the larger group known as Protostomia, distinguished by their unique mode of growth, which involves periodic moulting of an external cuticle. The term "ecdysozoa" comes from the Greek word ecdysis, meaning "to strip off" or "to shed," referring to this moulting process.

Characteristics of Ecdysozoa

1. Moulting (Ecdysis):
   • The defining feature of Ecdysozoans is the shedding of their cuticle—a tough, non-living outer layer made of proteins, polysaccharides (like chitin), or collagen. This process allows them to grow, as the rigid cuticle limits continuous size increase.
   • After moulting, a new, larger cuticle is secreted, which hardens over time.
2. Body Structure:
   • Many have a hydrostatic skeleton, relying on fluid pressure in their body cavity for movement and structure.
   • Most lack cilia or flagella in their adult form, distinguishing them from other protostomes.
3. Diversity:
   • The group includes some of the most diverse and abundant organisms on Earth, ranging from microscopic species to large, visible ones.
4. Nervous System:
   • Typically, they have a ventral nerve cord and a dorsal brain, with varied sensory adaptations.

---

Major Groups Within Ecdysozoa
Ecdysozoa includes eight phyla, with two of the most well-known being Arthropoda and Nematoda:

1. Arthropoda
   • The largest and most diverse group of animals, including insects, arachnids, crustaceans, and myriapods.
   • They have segmented bodies, jointed appendages, and a hard exoskeleton.
   • Examples: Butterflies, crabs, spiders, centipedes.
2. Nematoda (Roundworms)
   • Microscopic to macroscopic worms with a cylindrical, unsegmented body.
   • Found in nearly every habitat on Earth, often as parasites in plants and animals.
   • Examples: Caenorhabditis elegans (a model organism), Ascaris (a human intestinal parasite).
3. Tardigrada (Water Bears)
   • Microscopic, water-dwelling animals known for their extreme resilience to harsh environments.
   • They can survive desiccation, radiation, and even the vacuum of space.
4. Onychophora (Velvet Worms)
   • Segmented, soft-bodied terrestrial animals with slime glands used for capturing prey.
5. Priapulida
   • Marine worms with a tubular body, often found burrowing in sediment.
6. Kinorhyncha
   • Tiny, segmented marine animals often referred to as "mud dragons."
7. Loricifera
   • Microscopic animals inhabiting marine sediment, with a complex, retractable body.
8. Nematomorpha (Horsehair Worms)
   • Parasites as larvae, often controlling the behaviour of their insect hosts.

---

Evolution and Phylogeny

• Ecdysozoa was proposed as a clade in 1997, based on molecular evidence (notably studies of ribosomal RNA).
• They share a common ancestor with other protostomes but diverged early to adopt their unique moulting strategy.
• Their evolutionary success is evident in their sheer numbers and adaptability, especially in arthropods.

---

Ecological and Economic Importance

1. Ecological Roles:
   • Many ecdysozoans are key components of ecosystems as decomposers, predators, prey, and parasites.
   • Insects, a subgroup of arthropods, are critical for pollination and nutrient cycling.
2. Economic Impact:
   • Beneficial: Insects (e.g., bees) aid in agriculture, while nematodes play a role in soil health.
   • Harmful: Some ecdysozoans are pests or parasites causing diseases in humans, animals, and crops.

---

Fun Facts

• Tardigrades can enter a state called cryptobiosis, surviving for decades without water or food.
• Arthropods are the most successful phylum, with over a million described species, and likely many more undiscovered.
• Nematodes may account for about 80% of individual animals on Earth.

The discovery was made by a team from University of California, Riverside (UCR), led by Professor Mary Droser a distinguished professor of geology. The have explained their findings in the journal, Current Biology, and in a UCR press release:

Tiny worm makes for big evolutionary discovery

---

UC Riverside scientists have described ‘Uncus,’ the oldest ecdysozoan and the first from the Precambrian period

---

Everyone has a past. That includes the millions of species of insects, arachnids, and nematode worms that make up a major animal group called the Ecdysozoa. Until recently, details about this group’s most distant past have been elusive. But a UC Riverside-led team has now identified the oldest known ecdysozoan in the fossil record and the only one from the Precambrian period. Their discovery of Uncus dzaugisi, a worm-like creature rarely over a few centimeters in length, is described in a paper published today in Current Biology.

Scientists have hypothesized for decades that this group must be older than the Cambrian, but until now its origins have remained enigmatic. This discovery reconciles a major gap between predictions based on molecular data and the lack of described ecdysozoans prior to the rich Cambrian fossils record and adds to our understanding of the evolution of animal life.

Mary L. Droser, co-author Earth and Planetary Sciences University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA , USA.

The ecdysozoans are the largest and most species-rich animal group on Earth, encompassing more than half of all animals. Characterized by their cuticle — a tough external skeleton that is periodically shed — the group comprises three subgroups: nematodes, which are microscopic worms; arthropods, which include insects, spiders, and crustaceans; and scalidophora, an eclectic group of small, scaly marine creatures.

Like many modern-day animal groups, ecdysozoans were prevalent in the Cambrian fossil record and we can see evidence of all three subgroups right at the beginning of this period, about 540 million years ago. We know they didn’t just appear out of nowhere, and so the ancestors of all ecdysozoans must have been present during the preceding Ediacaran period.

Ian V. Hughes, first author
Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.

DNA-based analyses, used to predict the age of animal groups by comparing them with their closest living relatives, have corroborated this hypothesis. Yet ecdysozoan fossil animals have remained hidden among scores of animal fossils paleontologists have discovered from the Ediacaran Period.

Top: Uncus fossil from Nilpena Ediacara National Park. The numbers correspond to the coordinates of this fossil on the fossil bed surface. Bottom: 3D laser scans enable the researchers to study the fossils’ shape and curvature.

Droser Lab/UCR.

Ediacaran animals, which lived 635-538 million years ago, were ocean dwellers; their remains preserved as cast-like impressions on the seabed that later hardened to rock. Hughes said uncovering them is a labor-intensive, delicate process that involves peeling back rock layers, flipping them over, dusting them off, and piecing them back together to get “a really nice snapshot of the sea floor.”

This excavation process has only been done at Nilpena Ediacara National Park in South Australia, a site Droser and her team have been working at for 25 years that is known for its beautifully preserved Ediacaran fossils.

Nilpena is perhaps the best fossil site for understanding early animal evolution in the world because the fossils occur during a period of heightened diversity and we are able to excavate extensive layers of rock that preserve these snapshots. The layer where we found Uncus is particularly exciting because the sediment grains are so small that we really see all the details of the fossils preserved there.

Assistant Professor Scott Evans, co-author
Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA.

While the team didn’t set out to find an early ecdysozoan during their 2018 excavation, they were drawn to a mysterious worm-like impression that they dubbed “fishhook.”

Sometimes we make dramatic discoveries and sometimes we excavate an entire bed and say ‘hmmm, I’ve been looking at that thing, what do you think?’ That’s what happened here. We had all sort of noticed this fishhook squiggle on the rock. It was pretty prominent because it was really, really deep.

Because it was deep, we knew it wasn’t smooshed easily so it must have had a pretty rigid body. At this point we knew this was a new fossil animal and it belong to the Ecdysozoa.

Ian V. Hughes

After seeing more of the worm-like squiggles the team paid closer attention, taking note of fishhook’s characteristics. Other defining characteristics include its distinct curvature and the fact that it could move around — seen by trace fossils in the surrounding area. Paul De Ley, an associate professor of nematology at UCR, confirmed its fit as an early nematode and ruled out other worm types.

The team called the new animal Uncus, which means “hook” in Latin, noting in the paper its similarities to modern-day nematodes. Hughes said the team was excited to find evidence of what scientists had long predicted; that ecdysozoans existed in the Ediacaran Period.

It’s also really important for our understanding of what these early animal groups would have looked like and their lifestyle, especially as the ecdysozoans would really come to dominate the marine ecosystem in the Cambrian.

Ian V. Hughes

The paper is titled “An Ediacaran bilateran with an ecdysozoan affinity from South Australia.” Funding for the research came from NASA.

Highlights

• A new, motile bilaterian is described from the Ediacaran of South Australia
• Features including morphology and movement suggest an ecdysozoan affinity
• This discovery firmly places ecdysozoans in the Precambrian

Summary
Molecular clocks and Cambrian-derived metazoans strongly suggest a Neoproterozoic origin of many animal clades.^1,2,3,4 However, fossil bilaterians are rare in the Ediacaran, and no definitive ecdysozoan body fossils are known from the Precambrian. Notably, the base of the Cambrian is characterized by an abundance of trace fossils attributed to priapulid worms,^5,6 suggesting that major divisions among ecdysozoan groups occurred prior to this time. This is supported by ichnofossils from the latest Ediacaran or early Cambrian left by a plausible nematoid,^7,8,9 although definitively attributing this inferred behavior to crown-Nematoida remains contentious in the absence of body fossils.¹⁰ Given the high probability of the evolution of Ecdysozoa in the Proterozoic, the otherwise prolific fossil record of the Ecdysozoa, and the identification of more than 100 distinct Ediacaran genera, it is striking that no Ediacaran body fossils have been confidently assigned to this group. Here, we describe Uncus dzaugisi gen. et. sp. nov. from the Ediacara Member (South Australia), a smooth, vermiform organism with distinct curvature and anterior-posterior differentiation. The depth of relief of Uncus is unique among Ediacara fossils and consistent with a rigid outer cuticle. Ecological relationships and associated trace fossils demonstrate that Uncus was motile. Body morphology and the inferred style of movement are consistent with Nematoida, providing strong evidence for at least an ecdysozoan affinity. This validates the Precambrian origin of Ecdysozoa, reconciling a major gap between predicted patterns of animal evolution and the fossil record.⁴

Hughes, Ian V.; Evans, Scott D.; Droser, Mary L.
An Ediacaran bilaterian with an ecdysozoan affinity from South Australia
Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.10.030

© 2024 Elsevier.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

I think my favourite quote from one of the scientists is "We know they didn’t just appear out of nowhere, and so the ancestors of all ecdysozoans must have been present during the preceding Ediacaran period", which just about describes the difference between someone who knows the Theory of Evolution is correct because he understands the evidence for it, and a creationists who believes in fully formed living organisms made from nothing, magically popping into existence from nowhere, with magic spells cast by an unproven supernatural deity their mummy and daddy told them about.

The ancestral form, the transitional species, was in exactly for rock formation of exactly the right age which the theory of evolutionary decent with modifiction from a common ancester predicted.

And in case a creationist is tempted to try the 'radiometric dating is flawed/wrong/faked fallacy. The Ediacaran rock formation these fossils were found in was independently dated several different ways that all converged on a 98-million-year span from 635 to 538 million years ago known as the Ediacaran. The Most important being the Uranium-Lead (U-Pb) dating of zircons found in the layers of volcanic ash sandwiched within the rocks. To compress 600 million years of radioactive decay into less than 6-10,000 years would have caused Earth's rocks to melt and the seas to boil away. And the weak nuclear force would have been so weak that atoms could not have formed, let alone life, and there would have been no planet and no universe to fine tune for it either.

---

Advertisement

Refuting Creationism: Why Creationism Fails In Both Its Science And Its Theology

A systematic refutation of creationism, exposing the childish parodies, fallacies and pseudo-science that underpins it. This book takes the reader through the major themes of creationism from the Big Bang, through abiogenesis and the origin of the genetic code, the evidence for evolution, falsifying the claims of creationism with scientific evidence. Also exposed is the deliberate disinformation to be found on creationist websites and publications and the absurdity of the belief that the Bible, particularly the origin myths in Genesis, is real science and genuine history, written or inspired by an omniscient, inerrant creator god

Available in Hardcover, Paperback, or ebook for Kindle

Advertisement

The Failure of Creationism: The Theory That Never Was

An exposé of the failure of creationism and especially the Discovery Institute's Wedge Strategy, showing that the Theory of Evolution is as central to biomedical science today as it was when the DI launched its disinformation campaign in 1991. Creationism is not a science; it is religious fundamentalism and, as was shown in the Kitzmiller case, Intelligent design is creationism dressed in a lab coat.

Available in paperback, hardcover, or ebook for Kindle

Advertisement

Thank you for sharing!

Tweet Link

Unintelligent Design - How Evolution Rescued an Unintelligent Heath-Robinson Design Blunder

A WashU researcher hand pollinates Arabidopsis.

Photo: Joe Angeles/WashU

How plants evolved multiple ways to override genetic instructions - The Source - Washington University in St. Louis

The thing about evolution that distinguishes it from intelligent design is that evolution is utilitarian. It settles for something that works better than what preceded it, which is different from designing a perfect solution to a problem. Near enough is good enough because anything which is an improvement gets pushed up the frequency listing in the gene pool. So, organisms over time have accumulated sub-optimal systems that sometimes fail and cause other problems.

One of those systems is the way DNA is replicated - which is so error prone that error correction mechanisms have evolved over time, but they don't always work either, so we have the phenomenon of the 'jumping genes' that get inserted in the wrong place in the genome, sometime in the middle of a functional gene or in a control section adjacent to a functional gene, causing genetic defects.

So, in the best Heath-Robinson approach to design, rather than abandoning that design and starting again, the way any intelligent designer would do, another layer of complexity is needed to try to mitigate the occasion when the system fails.

So, what organisms have evolved over the years is a process for neutralising these 'jumping genes' by attaching methyl groups to one of the bases which prevents it being transcribed. This is a part of the epigenetic system by which the specialised cells of multicellular organisms turn of unwanted genes and only allow the genes for their speciality to be active - a layer of complexity needed because the way cells replicate was inherited from their single-celled ancestors where the whole genome needs to be included in every daughter cell.

Animals, such as mammals have two enzymes which attach this methyl group depending on the DNA 'context', but plants have multiple enzymes for doing the same thing. The question is why do plants need these multiple enzymes?

Malevolent Designer News - How To Make Hospital Patients Even Sicker

Klebsiella pneumoniae

Klebsiella aerogenes

Scientists identify possible new transmission factor in hospital-acquired Klebsiella infections - Forsyth

Creationism's divine malevolence is nothing if not ingenious in its determination to increase the suffering in the world with its specially designed pathogens - parasitic microorganisms such as bacteria that cause diseases, sickness and death.

And what better location for increasing suffering is there than a hospital where people are already unwell and easy victims for more infections with life-threatening pathogens?

One of the nastier examples of just such a pathogen is Klebsiella, and not content with one species, creationism's favourite sadist have designed two - Klebsiella pneumoniae and K. aerogenes, both of which are multi-resistant, i.e. resistant to multiple antibiotics and both of which actually thrive and multiply rapidly in conditions where other bacteria are being killed off with antibiotics.

How Science Works - And Why Religion Doesn't - Dark Matter - Building Testable Hypotheses

Map of the distribution of dark matter in the Universe.
The bright areas represent its highest concentrations - which is where galaxies form

N Jeffrey/Dark Energy Collaboration

Dark Matter

‘Dark stars’: dark matter may form exploding stars – and observing the damage could help reveal what it’s made of

Dark matter is known to exists, and yet no-one knows what it is.

Creationists, in a desperate attempt to reduce science to the same status as their evidence-free superstition, will claim this shows that science is a religion really. But that childish claim soon disintegrates when we understand how scientists can know that dark matter exists when they don't know what it is.

Unlike religion's god(s), scientists can measure dark matter's effects on stuff they know more about, like the 'normal' matter that you and I are made of - atoms and molecules of which stars, galaxies and super-clusters are made of. They can see the gravitational effects of dark matter, so there must be something with enough mass to produce that gravitational effect.

Theists, on the other hand can never demonstrate any effects of the god(s) they believe in and are reduced to presuppositional claims and assertions, designating their god(s) as the cause of things they don't understand - the god of the gaps false dichotomy fallacy that passes for religious apologetics.

So, what are these effects that dark matter exerts?

The gravity produced by dark matter is what holds spinning galaxies together and prevents the detectable matter in them from flying outwards by the centrifugal force of rotation. It also produces gravitational 'lensing', which is the effect of light being bent by a large mass to act like a giant lens and make distant objects look closer.

So, we know dark matter is out there even though we don't know what it is, so scientists try to work out what it could be composed of and make predictions of what this stuff would do if it existed. This is the testable hypothesis. The trick is to construct experiments to test those hypotheses.

In the following article, Andreea Font, Reader in Theoretical Astrophysics, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK, outlines some of the current hypotheses that seek to explain dark matter. Her article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Why Religious People Find Atheism and Science Hard To Understand - Study Shows Atheists Are Generally More Intelligent Than Religious People

Why Are Religious People (Generally) Less Intelligent? | Psychology Today

One of the frustrating things about trying to debate with religious people in the social media, especially fundamentalists and creationists, is that they seem to have difficulty understanding simple logic such as the idea that the only reason for belief is evidence or the fact that lots of people believe something doesn't affect the truth of the belief.

There is also the impression (actually, it’s more than an impression, it seems to be a characteristic) that they think ignored evidence can be disregarded, so they will never read an article showing their beliefs to be wrong.

They generally seem more easily fooled by, for example, believing that an internet source supports them, when it is almost a rule that a link to a science paper provided by a fundamentalist will always say the opposite to what they claim it says, or that the ridiculous parody of science they've been fed by a creationist disinformation site such as AnswersInGenesis.com that no sane person would believe, is actually what real scientists believe. They have simply swallowed a lie and didn't see any need to check.

So, why do so many fundamentalists come across as limited in their ability to assimilate information and use it as the basis for opinions, other than an arrogant assumption that their beliefs must be true because they believe them, so no evidence is required and any contradictory evidence can be dismissed out of hand as 'wrong' or 'lies' or part of a giant conspiracy, and why do so many creationists came across as having the thinking ability of a toddler with a teleological view of the universe where even elementary particles are sentient and need to be told how to behave and which rules they must obey?

A meta-analysis of 63 earlier studies showed a statistically significant negative correlation between IQ and religiosity.

Creationism in Crisis - Urban Great Tits Have Beome Paler Than Their Rural Relatives

Urban (left) and rural (right) great tits, Parus major

Photo: Caroline Isaksson

European great tit, Parus major.

Source

Urban great tits have paler plumage than their forest-living relatives | Lund University

In an example of how the environment, and in this case probably the availability of different food items, can cause changes on which natural selection can act, a study by an international team or reserchers led by Pablo Salmón of Lund University, Sweden, has shown that great tits, Parus major living in an urban environment have paler breasts than those living in a forest environment.

Although this is probably not an evolutionary change, i.e., a change in the frequency of alleles in the population gene pools, as the cause is probably dietary difference, it illustrates how an environmental change can produce changes in features on which natural selection can act to bring about true evolutionary changes, and so begin the process of allopatric speciation.

Of course, there will be creationists who will misrepresent the scientific fact of evolution, either deliberately, or mendaciously in order to mislead others, who will dismiss this as "not evolution", not for the reason given above but because "they're still great tits/still birds" and haven't grown a new structure or turned into an unrelated taxon.

The research is explained in a Lund University press release:

Creationism in Crisis - Fijian Folk Tale Has Nothing About a Global Flood or The God Who Allegedly Caused It!

Nabukelevu (Mount Washington)

Jaejay77 via Wikimedia CC BY-SA 4.0

Nabukelevu, Kadav, Fiji.
Eruption remembered in riddles and fantastical oral traditions.

A dramatic volcano eruption changed lives in Fiji 2,500 years ago. 100 generations have kept the story alive

2,500 years ago, just 1,500 years after creationists believe the human population of the world had been reduced to just 8 people in a genocidal flood, there was a volcanic eruption on one end of the island of Kadavu in the south of the group of Pacific islands now known as the Fijian Islands.

The people who were already living there, having presumably migrated there from the Middle East in just 1,500 years, remembered the details of the eruption and passed them on, complete with the local gods to whom they attributed the events, not in writing, but encoded in riddles and a symbolic oral tradition which "included fantastic beings flying through the sky, fighting each another furiously and noisily, drinking the ocean dry, and throwing giant spears with force enough to leave massive holes in rocky headlands", according to research by a group of scientists including Professor Patrick Nunn of the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia.

Curiously, if the Bible tales of a global flood had been true, people to whom a local volcanic eruption was such an important event in their history that they remembered it in such an elaborate way, regarded a genocidal global flood as not worth a mention, and the god who allegedly caused it as unworthy of inclusion in their pantheon.

This is the ludicrously unlikely scenario that creationists have to try to rationalise in order to avoid considering that their favourite Bronze Age fairy tales are anything other than literal truths.

The research which has decoded the Fijian oral traditions is the subject of an article by Professor Nunn in The Conversation. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Unintelligent Designer News - How Trees Evolved Sub-optimal and Complex Seed Dispersal Mechanisms

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

A seed survival story: How trees keep ‘friends’ close and ‘enemies’ guessing | Penn State University

Hawes, the fruit of the common hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna, in an English hedgerow in Autumn

Hips (Rosa Canina) and blackberries (Rubus Fruticosus)

© 2023 Rosa Rubicondior

Back in November 2013 (was it really nearly ten years ago?!) I wrote a blog post which anticipated this latest piece of research. It was all about how a symbiotic relationship between birds and flowering plants had evolved in which the plants provide birds with food in exchange for them dispersing their seeds, and how this incidentally led to us evolving colour vision.

Lessons From Nature - How Birds and Berries Gave Us Colour Vision

Now this research by a large international team led by Assistant Professor Tong Qiu, of the College of Agricultural Sciences, Penn State University, has looked at the dynamics of this relationship in which trees need to balance the loss of seeds by consumption and their dispersal by those same consumers, and how this balance can change in years of plenty (mast years) and lean years.

The relationship is complex and sub-optimal, exactly as might be expected of an evolved system, but not of an intelligently designed system, which would be optimized and minimally complex to avoid the unnecessary waste of the naturally evolved system. Climate too plays a part in the complex, especially the occurrence of summer drought.

The research is explained in a Penn State News release:

How Science Works - Looking For Evidence That the Current Consensus May be Wrong or Incomplete

How Science Works

Looking For Evidence That the Current Consensus May be Wrong or Incomplete

The small red dot highlighted inside the white box on this James Webb Space Telescope image is an early galaxy, seen as it looked just 350 million years after the Big Bang.

James Webb Space Telescope Images Challenge Theories of How Universe Evolved | College of Natural Sciences

Science is reasonable uncertainty
Religion is unreasonable certainty.

Images of six candidate massive galaxies, seen 500-800 million years after the Big Bang.
These are more massive that the theory predicts.

Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/I. Labbe

The great strength of science is scientists' willingness to re-examine what they think they know and to change their mind when the evidence changes. Science values truth over certainty, so all scientific knowledge is provisional and contingent on not being falsified.

Religion, by contrast, sells certainty and theists value certainty over truth, more so at the fundamentalist extreme, where intellectual dishonesty and sleights of hand to gain followers are rewarded and admired (as the many extremely wealthy televangelists in the USA, to whom lying is second nature, attest). Intellectually bankrupt creationists prefer a comforting lie to an uncomfortable truth. Scientists, on the other hand, can make their name and gain kudos and scientific respect by successfully challenging the consensus view with convincing evidence and exposed frauds are cast into academic oblivion.

To see this in action, try to get a creationist to accept that a glaring contradiction in the Bible means that one or other verse must be wrong because both mutually exclusive contradictory statements can't both be right.

For example, the contradictory accounts of what Judas did with the 30 pieces of silver, how he died, who bought the 'field of blood' and why was it so-called?

Artificial Intelligence - How Good Is It And Will It Upset Creationists With Science?

Artificial Intelligence

How Good Is It And Will It Upset Creationists With Science?

I've been playing with the Artificial Intelligence App, Ask AI, available from Google Playstore.

I have to say it is pretty good at retrieving information quickly and accurately and presenting it in a well-written form. The following each took about 5 seconds to generate.

But is it accurate? Judge for yourself. The following was produced in the form of a .png image which I pasted into MS OneNote and extracted the text using OneNote's OCR. The formatting is mine:

Wacky Woo News - The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Wacky Woo News

The Loopy Things People Can Be Made To Believe

Starseeds: psychologists on why some people think they're aliens living on Earth

P.T. Barnum, the 'Greatest Showman' and half-owner of Barnum & Bailey Circus reputedly said, "There's a sucker born every minute".

Sometimes though, especially reading the comments of Creationists and religious fundamentalist in the social media, that would seem to be on the conservative side, with tens, or even hundreds, of millions apparently believing in magic and evil demons; that evidence is forged; that scientists are all evil, mad and part of a vast conspiracy; that reality is an illusion, but not to them, and that inerrant knowledge just pops itself into their brain if they have an open mind, so the best expertise comes from pristine ignorance. I've even had a Creationist tell me that Jesus tells him what to believe, curiously, it always coincides with what Ken Ham tells him to believe.

So what is the psychology behind these wackadoodle fantasy beliefs, other than the acute manifestations of clinical psychosis?

Malevolent Designer News: Marburg - Another, Even More Deadly Pandemic in Waiting?

Malevolent Designer News

Marburg
Another, Even More Deadly Pandemic in Waiting?

Marburg virus particles

What is Marburg virus and should we be worried?

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently confirmed an outbreak of Marburg disease - in Kie Ntem Province of the West African country of Equatorial Guinea. Marburg disease is a haemorrhagic fever which is frequently fatal in humans. So far, 9 victims have died and a further 16 people are suspected of being infected. 200 contacts of these victims have so far been traced and put into quarantine by the WHO.

Marburg is a filovirus like the related ebola, and has a fatality ratio of 88%. It is highly infectious and easily transmitted. At the moment there is insufficient data to compare its infectivity with that of ebola.

What is a filovirus?

The big concern is that this virus could break out of its endemic stronghold in West Africa and, like the SARS-CoV-2 Virus, become a major pandemic in a world in which health services are already overstretched, still dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, which is far from over.

Embarrassingly for intelligent [sic] design Creationists, it is central to their cult think that all life is the work of their supposed designer deity, which, being omniscient, only ever designs organisms like viruses in the full knowledge of what they will do; de facto it designs them to do exactly what they do. In other words, if Marburg does become a major pandemic, that is exactly what it intended when it designed it.

The following article by Professor C Raina MacIntyre, NHMRC Principal Research Fellow, Head, Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney, explains what Marburg is, and discusses whether we should be worried. The article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license and reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Favourite Sadist is Spreading Antimicrobial Resistance

Genomic analysis of sewage from 101 countries reveals global landscape of antimicrobial resistance | Nature Communications

During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists realised the value of analysing the sewerage outflow from major population centres to monitor the prevalence of the virus and its variants in the population. This technique can also be used to monitor microbial prevalence and variants such as antimicrobial resistance.

Now a team of researchers at the Danish Technical University (DTU) has used data from these analyses to produce a map of microbial resistance at the level of resistance genes, rather than of resistant species.

From a Creationist perspective, what this is measuring is how well their pestilential malevolence is doing in its arms race against medical science to ensure its pathogens retain their ability to make us sick.

The results of the meta-analysis were surprising in that it showed the same genes were present in different species and in different places, indicating that exchange of genes between species is more frequent and extensive than was previously thought.

From the DTU News release:

Unintelligent Designer News - Podcast Now Available

Well, the live show went okay, despite a slight technical hitch with getting the presentation video to run, which gave more time for debate but, sadly, less time for the video. So here it is for anyone who wants to see the entire thing.

Also, the entire show can be viewed again here:

As I said, my book, "The Malevolent Designer: Exposing the Intelligent Design Hoax", contains many more examples of the things in nature that show there was no intelligence or design in what we can observe.

An illustrated companion book, "The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good", is also available in hardcover, paperback or ebook for Kindle, as are my other books on science and religion.

---

Thank you for sharing!

Tweet Link

Creationism in Crisis - Confirmation of the Role of Environmental Change in the First Mass Extinction

FSU researchers: Rapid fluctuations in oxygen levels coincided with Earth's first mass extinction - Florida State University News

Professor Nevin Kozik, PhD, of Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science – National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Florida State University, during fieldwork to investigate how rapid changes in marine oxygen levels may have played a significant role in driving Earth’s first mass extinction.

Fundamental to the Theory of Evolution (TOE) is the idea that environmental change causes evolutionary change, a consequence of which can be extinction, especially when change is too rapid for species to evolve adaptations to it. Environmental change can be very rapid (instantaneous in the case of a meteor strike, for example) but evolutionary change is characteristically very slow, needing many generations to produce a significant adaptation.

So, it's hardly surprising that a period of rapidly fluctuating marine oxygen levels about 443 million years ago, caused Earth's first mass extinction at the same time. Confirmation of that, and so of a prediction of the TOE, has now been produced by a team led by Florida State University (FSU) researchers.

The research depends on a fairly recent dating method for marine sediment that measures the proportion of thallium isotopes in the sediment, as explained by Owens, J.D; Neilson S.D; Horner, T.J., et al (2016)^[PDF]:

Creationism in Crisis - Multiple Origins of Mesopotamian People

Upper Mesopotamia, the fusion center of Neolithic cultures | Gazette Hacettepe -

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Johann Wenzel Peter (1745-1829), Vatican Museum

Upper Mesopotamia, the fusion center of Neolithic cultures | Gazette Hacettepe

My last blog post dealt with how human cultures evolved by a process which, while maybe not being identical with Darwinian evolution by natural selection, is closely analogous to it, and how it reflected diverse origins in diverse populations affected by wide environmental differences across the range of human habitation.

This is in complete contrast to the narrow culture assumed in the Bible where there is no attempt to explain human cultural origins or even any awareness that it is something to be explained, just as the origin of living creatures and even the Earth itself needed to be explained, albeit with the naïve guesses of people ignorant of science and little or no understanding of biology, geology or cosmology.

This post should disturb Creationists even further because it flies in the face of anything the Bible implies about human origins. Bible literalist Creationists must believe that all humans are derived ultimately from a single couple, magically created in a 'garden' somewhere in the Middle East.

Bible scholars traditionally place this 'Garden of Eden' somewhere in Mesopotamia, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, citing:

The LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

Genesis 2: 9-14:

The problem for Creationists is that a team of Turkish researchers from Hacettepe University and Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey have just shown that the people living in that area between 10,500 and 9,500 years ago had a genetic and cultural makeup that indicates multiple origins from across the 'Fertile Crescent' and that the area was a melting pot and fusion centre, rather than an origin. This conclusion came from an analysis of the DNA extracted from the remains of 13 individuals together with cultural artifacts excavated at Çayönü Hill in the Ergani district of Diyarbakır between 8,500-7,500 BC.

Çayönü Hill, Ergani district of Diyarbakır, Iraq.

As the Hacettepe University news release explains:

Çayönü Hill was first discovered in 1963 by Halet Çambel and Robert J. Braidwood. The excavations that Prof. Dr. Çambel started systematically in 1968 were continued with a break from time to time. During the excavations conducted under the direction of Prof. Dr. Aslı Erim Özdoğan, it was determined that the first settlement in the region started approximately 12,000 years ago and that the region was inhabited until 6,000 years ago. During this long settlement, Çayönü Hill hosted different cultures. Archaeological remains show that the region has a dynamic cultural structure and that the architectural structures have changed over time. In addition, anthropological studies revealed that early examples of various modifications applied to the body, such as artificial skull shaping and trepanation, existed in this culture.

Researchers set out to understand the genetic makeup of people with this dynamic cultural structure. It is known that DNA molecules in human remains exposed to high temperatures due to climatic conditions throughout Mesopotamia are very difficult to preserve. Therefore, in ancient DNA studies carried out to date, the region was only represented by the genome of a single individual from the Boncuklu Tarla excavation site. Dr. Lecturer Füsun Özer stated that under these conditions, Çayönü individuals had a higher level of DNA preservation than expected and continued: “We scanned 33 skeletons from Çayönü Hill, dated between 10,500 and 9,500 years ago, for DNA conservation. Of these, 13 individuals had enough DNA molecules to allow genome analysis. In this region, it was surprising for us to get close to 40 percent success from such old individuals.”

This study, carried out in Upper Mesopotamia, in the northernmost part of the Fertile Crescent, the center of domestication of plants and animals, revealed that the region was a center of attraction during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Period, and people from the surrounding geographies mingled in the region. The genetic makeup of the people of the region bears traces from the eastern and western sides of the Fertile Crescent.

The central location of Upper Mesopotamia in Southwest Asia is also reflected in the gene pool of the society. The demographic patterns of the Central Anatolian Neolithic societies in the east and west of the Fertile Crescent, represented by the Zagros Neolithic societies, appear as a mixture in this region.

Dr. Ezgi Altınışık, first-author Human-G Laboratory
Department of Anthropology
Hacettepe University, Beytepe, Ankara, Turkey.

Although genetic diversity is observed to be high, no major change is observed in the genetic structure of the population during the 1,000 years examined. Despite this, the fact that a two-year-old girl is genetically closer to the communities living on the eastern side of the Fertile Crescent reveals that people from outside came to Çayönü and could live in this village. The etching mark found on the parietal bone of this girl presents the first example of the tradition still practiced today. Prof. Dr. Yılmaz Selim Erdal, one of the research team, stated that cauterization as a treatment tool is a common practice in Anatolia, and the Çayönü example is one of the oldest examples of this practice. This specimen, with traces of infection on its inner surface, indicates that it was probably treated with a method including magical-ritual application in order to eliminate the negativities caused by the infection. Erdal stated that, together with the trepanation sample found in Çayönü, these data indicate that Mesopotamia had a very dynamic and somewhat complex cultural dynamic in the Neolithic Age.

Another important finding from the study was to determine kinship relationships in Early Neolithic communities. In the Early Neolithic Period, it was a common tradition to bury the dead in the floors of houses in and around Anatolia. The kinship analyzes [sic] revealed that the individuals buried in the same house in Çayönü were mostly close relatives. Prof. Dr. Mehmet Somel from the Department of Biological Sciences at Middle East Technical University said that they interpreted these results as the social structure of society being organized within the framework of biological kinship. It is seen that this family-centered burial tradition observed in Early Neolithic communities has changed over time, and in some settlements from the Late Neolithic period such as Çatalhöyük, social ties besides biological kinship play a role in burial in the same place.

Finally, researchers sought to analyze how Upper Mesopotamian peoples influenced surrounding communities in later periods. Archaeological studies indicated that Upper Mesopotamia culturally influenced Anatolia during the Late Neolithic period. Genetic analyzes [sic] also revealed that some of the ancestors of people who lived in Central Anatolia (Çatalhöyük) and Marmara (Barcın Höyük) 1,000 years after Çayönü came from Upper Mesopotamia. This shows that people of relatively distant geographies interact not only with the exchange of ideas from afar, but also with human movement.

Fig. 1. Spatiotemporal distribution of the samples and the population structure of Neolithic Southwest Asia.
(A) Timeline of ancient Southwest Asian individuals used in the analyses. Colored horizontal bars at the bottom represent the subperiods of the Neolithic Era in Southwest Asia. (B) The map shows EP and Neolithic populations from Southwest Asia. Shaded areas mark PPN period cultural zones (referred to as the Aceramic period in C Anatolia). (C) Çayönü building types and their approximate dates of use, considered as evidence for Çayönü’s cultural openness and ingenuity. Modified from (112). (D) The first two dimensions of the MDS plot of genetic distances. The MDS summarizes the genetic distance matrix among ancient genomes calculated as (1 − outgroup f3) values. Outgroup f3-statistics were calculated as f3(Yoruba; individual1, individual2). The labels represent the following sites: Anatolia EP: Pınarbaşı; Anatolia PPN: Boncuklu and Aşıklı Höyük; Anatolia PN: Çatalhöyük and Barcın Höyük; Levant EP: Natufian; Levant PPN: Ain’ Ghazal, Kfar HaHoresh, Motza, and Ba’ja; C Zagros N (Central Zagros Neolithic): Ganj Dareh, Tepe Abdul, and Wezmeh Cave; S Caucasus EP (South Caucasus EP): Kotias and Satsurblia. See note S5 for a definition of “Anatolia.” PPNA, Pre-pottery Neolithic A; PPNB, Pre-pottery Neolithic B; PPNC, Pre-pottery Neolithic C.

Altınışık, N. Ezgi; Kazancı, Duygu Deniz; Aydoğan, Ayça, et al. (2022)

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

Details are given in the abstract to the team's open access paper publish in Science Advances:

Abstract

Upper Mesopotamia played a key role in the Neolithic Transition in Southwest Asia through marked innovations in symbolism, technology, and diet. We present 13 ancient genomes (c. 8500 to 7500 cal BCE) from Pre-Pottery Neolithic Çayönü in the Tigris basin together with bioarchaeological and material culture data. Our findings reveal that Çayönü was a genetically diverse population, carrying mixed ancestry from western and eastern Fertile Crescent, and that the community received immigrants. Our results further suggest that the community was organized along biological family lines. We document bodily interventions such as head shaping and cauterization among the individuals examined, reflecting Çayönü’s cultural ingenuity. Last, we identify Upper Mesopotamia as the likely source of eastern gene flow into Neolithic Anatolia, in line with material culture evidence. We hypothesize that Upper Mesopotamia’s cultural dynamism during the Neolithic Transition was the product not only of its fertile lands but also of its interregional demographic connections.

Altınışık, N. Ezgi; Kazancı, Duygu Deniz; Aydoğan, Ayça, et al. (2022) A genomic snapshot of demographic and cultural dynamism in Upper Mesopotamia during the Neolithic Transition
Science Advances; 8(44), eabo3609. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo3609

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

It probably wasn't the intention of the researchers to refute the Bible so comprehensively, yet they did so, simply by revealing the truth, as is so often the case with scientific discoveries.

Not only was there never a founding couple (as though that idea ever carried any merit) but the people in the area at the time in which the tale was set had multiple origins from much earlier populations and cultures. Of course, the Bible's authors were entirely ignorant of the facts and the evolutionary history of the people about whom they wrote, and simply made up stories to explain the unknown - and of course, as with so much else, got it hopelessly wrong.

And of course, without Adam and Eve, there was no original sin, no need for salvation and redemption and no need for Jesus, and yet the hideous superstition of vicarious redemption through a human blood sacrifice, and the need to be reconciled with an irascible god to avoid eternal torture, is still used by parasitic priests and imams to control and terrorise ignorant and superstitious people and to justify their demand to be allowed to make laws governing the rest of us and run society in their interest.

Religion teaches us not the think.
Science teaches us how to think. Tweet

---

Thank you for sharing!

Tweet Link