How Science Works - Changing Our Minds When the Evidence Changes

Jujube, Ziziphus jujuba.

Source: Alex___photo/Shutterstock

A new discovery shows major flowering plants are 150 million years older than previously thought

Although Creationists seem to be baffled by the concept of uncertainty and the idea that knowledge can only ever be provisional, in fact, this is what gives science it's great power. By contrast, religions, which depend on certainty in the face of a lack of evidence and where a 'crisis of faith', i.e., doubt due to an unwelcome intrusion of reality, is considered a bad thing, are still mired in the Bronze Age when the basic ideas were first codified by people who knew little but sought certainty in a confusing and frightening, seemingly magical world, so made some best guesses with what little knowledge they had.

So, it's never surprising and always reassuring when another science paper is published showing that the scientific consensus was wrong about something. Unlike with black and white Creationists thinking, right and wrong are not absolute terms in science. Scientific ideas can be mostly right but not absolutely right since there are no absolutes where there is uncertainty and without uncertainty there is no scientific progress. Rather, science is a self-correcting, ever improving search for the truth as revealed by evidence.

As we say, science is reasonable uncertainty, whereas religion is unreasonable certainty.

Unintelligent Design - One Hand Doesn't Know What The Other Is Doing

The FISH image - FISH stands for a visualisation method called fluorescence in situ hybridisation - shows amoebae infected simultaneously with the Viennavirus (for the first time isolated in this study and therefore named by the research team) and the bacterial symbiont. In the image, the amoebae are shown in magenta, their symbionts in cyan and DNA in yellow. The larger yellow structures are the virus factories, which are still in the initial phase here and cannot produce infectious viruses.

Credit: Patrick Arthofer

Bacteria provide immunity against giant viruses

Here we have a very nice example of the reality of biology that devotees of the childish intelligent [sic] design notion, must either ignore or explain away as an unexplained mystery if they are to retain their childish superstition.

Similar example abound in nature, when one looks beneath the superficial of course, as I showed in my popular book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax, but this is an especially nice one.

It involved an amoeba, a bacterium - chlamydia - 'designed' to infect the amoeba, and a giant virus, also designed to infect the amoeba. The problem is, when the amoeba is infected with chlamydia, it gains protection against the giant virus. This was discovered by scientists from the University of Vienna, Austria, and the Université de Poitiers in France, led by microbiologist Matthias Horn from the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science at the University of Vienna.

Giant viruses are unique in that they are several times larger than normal viruses and contain genes normally only found in cellular organisms such as bacteria, animals, plants and fungi. Fortunately, they are harmless to all but Protista such as amoebae which they infect then takeover to turn them into virus factories. Their only purpose seems to be to kill amoebae and produce more giant viruses. Biologists believe the reason for such a large, relatively complex virus is due to an evolutionary arms race between the virus and chlamydia, each vying for control of the host amoeba. The exact evolutionary pathway remains to be worked out, but it looks like another example of horizontal gene transfer.

Chlamydia are infectious bacteria which infect many species, including humans where they are a serious, sexually transmitted pathogen. The species that infects amoebae is closely related to the human pathogen and normally takes up residence in the amoeba where is slows down growth. In that respect it behaves like a parasite, but it also behaves like a symbiont when it protects the amoeba against infection by the giant virus.

So, let's just summarise what intelligent [sic] design advocates have to believe. This is based on the assumption that a designer such as the one believed in by Creationists, i.e. an omniscience, omnipotent creator god, would have known exactly what its creations would do, so designed them for that very purpose and no other:

Evolution News - How the Evolution of Land Plants Changed Earth's Environment.

Ferns were some of the first land plants to colonise the continents.

Credit: Dr Tom Gernon

Land plants changed Earth’s composition, say scientists | University of Southampton

Another piece of the story of how Earth came to be the way is today has been revealed by an international team of scientists led by led by Dr Christopher Spencer of Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and including researchers at the University of Southampton, Hampshire, UK, the University of Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK and the University of Geosciences, Wuhan, China.

They have shown how the evolution of land plants changed Earth's environment, paving the way for the eventual evolution of dinosaurs, 200 million years later, followed by birds and mammals and the diversity of vertebrates we see today.

And of course, it is entirely at odds with the account in the Bible which Creationists have been fooled into thinking is the way it happened. Obviously, magic was not involved anywhere in the process

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence is Spreading Rat Lung Worms To Humans

Platydemus manokwari, an introduced flatworm present in Hawai‘i, which can act as a paratenic host of the rat lungworm parasite and that has been implicated in causing rat lungworm disease in Okinawa.

Credit: Shinji Sugiura.

Slugs, snails are not alone in causing rat lungworm disease in humans | SOEST

These days, I seem to be constantly reporting on yet another way Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer has found to make us sick and generally cause an increase in the suffering in the world - if you believe the Creationist disinformation about biology.

Here we have yet another example.

As though the rat lungworm, Angiostrongylus cantonensis, wasn't nasty enough, especially when it infects humans and destroys the brain, the divine malevolence has been busy finding new ways to make sure humans become infected with this nasty little nematode, as reported by researchers from the Pacific Biosciences Research Center, University of Hawaii at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI, USA and the Royal Veterinary College, London, UK, who combed through nearly 140 scientific studies to show that slugs and snails are far from being the only possible vectors of the disease.

These so-called, paratenic hosts include 32 species of freshwater prawns/shrimp, crayfish, crabs, flatworms, fish, sea snakes, frogs, toads, lizards, centipedes, cattle and pigs. Of these, at least 13 species of prawns/shrimp, crabs, flatworms, fish, frogs, toads, lizards, and centipedes have been associated with causing rat lungworm disease in humans.

Although these paratenic hosts can become infected, the parasites remain in their immature form until eaten by a rodent, when they mature. If one of these paratenic hosts or an intermediate host such as a slug or snail is ingested by a human, the parasite continues to develop but only up to a point. That point is when they are in the person's brain, moving around and feeding on brain cells, then they die. The resulting brain damage and inflammation as the immune systems tries to cope with the dead worms is the cause of the symptoms of rat lung worm disease. Not usually fatal, but the process and debility it causes can be prolonged.

Here is what the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has to say about it:

Creationism In Crisis - More Bad News for Creationists as Scientists Use the TOE to Work Out How Mucus Evolved

The evolution of mucus: How did we get all this slime? - University at Buffalo

Fig. 1. Novel and previously known mucin genes in select mammalian species.
Phylogeny on the left represents the relationship between the species analyzed here [human (hg38), mouse (mm10), cow (bosTau9), and ferret (musFur1)]. Schematic karyotypes show the chromosomes in each species that harbor mucin genes. Mucin gene locations are indicated on each chromosome. Ancestral mucin genes that are orthologous in the four genomes are indicated in blue fonts. Lineage-specific mucins are indicated in green fonts. Mucin genes found within the SCPP gene family, all of which, except for MUC7, are lineage-specific are indicated in pink fonts. Note: Some of the orthologous genes carry different names in different species. For example, rodent Muc3 is orthologous to human MUC17. For those genes, we indicated in parentheses following the official gene annotation the name of the likely human ortholog based on sequence similarity and synteny. In ferrets, the “S” proceeding the putative chromosome number indicates on which Hi-C scaffold the mucin genes were found.

Source: Pajic, Petar; Shen, Shichen; Qu, Jun; May, et. al., 2022

Possibly not the most fascinating of subjects, especially if you're a Creationist fraud trying to convince your dupes that the theory of evolution is a theory in crisis due to not being able to explain stuff like the evolution of proteins, but scientists at the University of Buffalo, New York, USA, have worked out how the various forms of mucus, or slime, evolved.

And guess what! The Theory of Evolution was absolutely essential to understanding the process!

And even worse for creationist frauds who are trying to convince their dupes that the second law of thermodynamics somehow means that no new information can arise without the assistance of a magic creator, is the news that this evolution involved examples of gene doubling where a mistake in replication - a mutation - has provided the process of evolution with genetic 'information' that can be changed without harming the carrier of that mutation. In other words, mutation followed by natural selection has increased the amount of information in the genome by perfectly natural processes, with no need to include magic or a magic creator in the explanation.

The News release by Charlotte Hsu, from the University of Buffalo explains how the scientists made this discovery:

Science News - How We Know What Happened Millions of Years Ago.

Skull of Afropithecus turkanensis

Ken Ham, along with other Creationists frauds, have managed to convince their child-like followers that asking "Where you there?" of scientists who try to talk about the past, and particularly how the Universe, Earth and life on Earth came to be as they are, is some sort of rational rebuttal of the claim. The idea seems to be that we can only ever know anything happened if we were actually there to see it. If that were true, of course, forensic science would be useless and no criminal could ever be convicted by a jury unless all 12 of them witnessed the crime.

The tactic depends on Creationists not realising that deductive logic and objective analysis of the evidence is a perfectly valid way to determine what happened. Ask a Creationist who is trying out that fallacy, how they can be certain their great grandparents had sex if they weren't there to witness it, and they usually withdraw from the conversation, often hurling abuse and threats as they do so. Of course, theirs, their parents and their grandparents existence are all evidence that their great grandparents got close at least ones.

That was a long-winded introduction to a piece of research published recently in PNAS that reports how an international collaboration of scientists have shown how fossil teeth of pre-human African apes can be analysed to determine the climate changes that may have driven theirs, and eventually our, evolution.
The account of how they did this and its significance is explained in an article in The Conversation by Tanya M. Smith, Professor in the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution & Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University, Australia, and Daniel Green, a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Climate School, Columbia University, New York.

The article is reproduced here, reformatted for stylistic consistency, under a Creative Commons licence. The original article can be read here:

Why Scientific Evidence Doesn't Change a Fundamentalist's or Conspiracist's Mind

Fig. 2. Belief networks and development of interdependence over measurements.
The networks are shown for GM food (A) and childhood vaccines (B) and include moral beliefs (orange nodes) and social beliefs (green nodes). The ties represent the partial correlations between two beliefs controlled for all other beliefs. Blue (red) ties represent positive (negative) correlations, and the widths of the ties correspond to the strength of the correlations. The strength of the ties ranged from 0.02 (between the beliefs “Chi” and “Fam”) to 0.30 (between the beliefs “Med” and “Sci”) for GM food and from 0.02 (between the beliefs “Com” and “Jou”) to 0.28 (between the beliefs “OnE” and “OnC”), N = 979.

Study: new model for predicting belief change | Santa Fe Institute

Two reserchers at the Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, postdoctoral Fellows Jonas Dalege and Tamara van der Does, have developed a model to predict whether a person is likely to change his/her beliefs when presented with evidence-based information.

Those who have ever tried debating in the social media with Creationists, Antivaxxers, QAnon cultists or people who believe Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election, will be aware that people with these counter-factual beliefs are almost impossible to shift from those positions, no matter how strong the evidence presented to them.

The problem is our old friend, cognitive dissonance. Briefly, cognitive dissonance is the conflict or dissonance that is generated when firmly held belief meets contrary evidence. The result is emotional discomfort, sometimes amounting to a perceived threat, which needs to be resolved one way or another.

Why Religious Fundamentalists Won't Change Their Minds

Everyone, even scientists are prone to trying to cling to cherished beliefs, but this is especially noticeable with people who are wedded to extremist cult beliefs such as Creationism, Fundamentalist religions, and/or wackadoodle conspiracy theories such as the belief that the 2020 US presidential election was 'stollen', COVID-19 is a hoax or that 9/11 was a 'inside job', as anyone who tries to engage these deluded fools in the social media will quickly discover.

Reinforce that natural resistance to change with the paranoid idea that there is a mind-reading, invisible sky man who will punish you with unimaginable horrors for eternity for even thinking of doing so, and you have the explanation for this intellectual cowardice and scientific bankruptcy.

In this article reproduced from The Conversation, reprinted under a Creative Commons license and reformatted for stylistic consistency, Professor Keith M. Bellizzi, Professor of Human Development and Family Sciences, University of Connecticut, USA, explains this basic aspect of human psychology. The original article can be read here.

Malevolent Designer News - A Brief History of The Divine Malevolence's Favourite Pestilence

This is the second in a series looking at the history of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, taken from articles in The Conversation.

In the first of the series, I looked at how the SARS-CoV-1 virus that caused the short-lived SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic of 2002/2003 looks, from an Intelligent [sic] Design perspective (if you believe that superstitious nonsense), to have been a prototype which Creationism's divine malevolence built on to produce the much more devastating SARS-CoV-2 virus. This virus causes COVID-19 (Corona VIrus Disease 2019) and is still posing a serious threat to life, long-term health, health services and economies world-wide, almost 3 years after it was first detected, at the end of 2019.

SARS-CoV-2 is a member of the coronavirus family, so-called because they have prominent 'spike' proteins on their surface which give the virus particles a crown-like (corona) appearance under sufficient magnification. They are all RNA viruses that have a single strand of RNA as their functional genome. The spike proteins are used by the virus to lock onto the surface of cells, prise them open and inject their RNA into the cell, where it uses the cell's own metabolic processes to make more virus particles and kill the cell.

In this article reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency, Lindsay Broadbent, a Research Fellow at the School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences, Queen's University Belfast, explains the history of coronaviruses. The article is undated but reads as though it was written during the first lockdown in about April or May 2020.

The original article can be read here.

Malevolent Designer News - How SARS Was The Malevolent Designer's Prototype for SARS-CoV-2.

The 'original' SARS (SARS-CoV-1) threat lasted about 6 months and then it was over. So why did this virus apparently go extinct, yet it's close relative, SARS-CoV-2, remains a significant pandemic threat almost three years after it was first identified?

The answer seems to be in the way it is transmitted from one person to another. SARS patients were only infectious when they had symptoms and were relatively ill. This meant that they tended to self-isolate, because they didn't feel well enough to mix socially, and symptom-based measures such as compulsory isolation were effective control measures.

SARS-CoV-2, on the other hand can be asymptomatic for long enough for the victim to have mixed socially before becoming unwell, if at all, and SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted effectively by asymptomatic carriers.

From a Creationist perspective, the Malevolent Designer was just practicing with its SARS-CoV-1 prototype, and added refinements to its later version to overcome our early measures to contain it, which had worked well against its prototype.

The following article from The Conversation was written in 1920, when the pandemic was in its earlier phase and before the vaccines against it had been produced. It is reproduced here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here.

Evolution News - How Fungi Got Their Diverse Shapes

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August: Fungi evolution | News and features | University of Bristol

Scientists from Bristol University, UK, have shown that the current diversity in the shape of fungi was the result of bursts of evolutionary radiation, following increases in multicellular complexity.

Creationists will need to ignore the fact that this explanation shows how the Theory of Evolution is fundamental to understanding biodiversity, in complete contrast to what their reality-denying disinformation sources have been claiming for the last half century.

Sadly, the team's published paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution is behind an expensive paywall, but the Bristol University press release explains their method and basic findings:

Creationism - A Notion In Crisis - Now Its Human Evolution by LOSS of Complexity!

A Japanese macaque producing a coo call.

Credit: WRC/Hideki Sugiura

Simplified voice box enriches human speech | KYOTO UNIVERSITY

Question - How can you tell it's time to ditch a daft idea?

Answer - When its basic claims keep being refuted by science.

This is the problem, Creation Inc. (No donation too large; give till it hurts!) is now facing, as yet another basic axiom is refuted by scientific observation. To make matters worse for them, scientists led by researchers from Kyoto University, Japan, who discovered this latest refutation of Creationism, had no intention of doing so. Their intention was to reveal another factoid in the story of human evolution and, as so often, that factoid just happens to refute a basic Creationist claim.

Chimpanzee vocalization

The factoid in question was the discovery that what makes complex speech possible in humans, unlike in our closes relatives, the other Great Apes, was a modification to the voice box or larynx which involved losing specific vocal folds or cords in the larynx. In other words, a simplified, less complex larynx was the highly beneficial change that allowed early humans to develop speech and so communicate ideas and information and facilitate group cooperation and, ultimately civilisation, writing and science.

Malevolent Designer News - Medical Science Has Presented Creationism's Malevolent Designer with a New Challenge

Fabimycin prevents growth for over 300 strains of drug-resistant bacterial clinical isolates, including E. coli, shown here.

Credit: SciePro/Shutterstock.com

New drug candidate fights off more than 300 drug-resistant bacteria - American Chemical Society

It's a basic axiom of intelligent [sic] design creationism that evolution doesn't happen, so all change is the intentional design of a single creator (because, although they deny it's religion in disguise, the designer has to comply with basic Christian dogma, too, including a single creator god).

It that were true, news from the American Chemical Society, of a new drug that is proving to be effective against multiple drug-resistant bacteria, is a new challenge for Creationism's divine malevolence. It has been working hard, ever since the discovery of penicillin, to design ways in which its pathogens can continue to make us sick, by making them resistant to it and then to every other new antibiotic, in an arms race that looks exactly like the sort of evolutionary arms race that the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection predicts.

Of course, Creation Inc. (no donation too large) has devised all manner of convoluted mental gymnastics for its followers to use to explain this apparent mendacity away and to portray the designer of these pathogens and their resistance as something else, because the real creator is infinitely benevolent and would like nothing better than having us all healthy and happy. The excuse usually includes blaming the victim or his/her ancestor/family, or humanity as a whole, or something someone once did thousands of years ago according to religious superstitions, while still pretending this is a scientific explanation, so ID creationism is real science, which should be taught to school children in science class at tax-payer's expense.

So, what exactly is this new drug and how does it work? The American Chemical Society (ACS) news release explains:

Another Bible Blooper Exposed by Science.

One more clue to the Moon’s origin | ETH Zurich

There are several theories about the origin of the moon. The discovery of noble gases in lunar meteorites brings us one step closer to understanding its origin.

Image: Adobe Stock

Creationists and members of other Bible literalist cults regard the description of the formation of the cosmos and then Earth in the opening chapter of Genesis as the bast available description of reality, notwithstanding that it describes Earth as having a dome over it from which the creator god hung the moon as a lamp, so we would know it is night time.

And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Genesis 1:16-19

The problem these cultists have is that science continually and consistently proves this, and much else in the Bible, wrong - which is embarrassing for words of the supposed creator of it. Sadly, for them, it can't even be passed off as an allegory or a metaphor - the usual excuse when the Bible describes something that isn't so - because there is nothing that can be represented as a firmament to which the sun and moon are fixed, and the moon can't even be represented as a lamp, since a lamp has its own light, and the moon doesn't. Nor is the moon only visible at night, so if its purpose really was to tell us when it is night time, the putative creator couldn't even get that right!

Oops! Scientists Expose Another Creationist Lie

The fossilised remains of Keuppia, an extinct genus of octopus alongside an artist's impression of what the animal may have looked like

Credit (left): Jonathan Jackson/NHMUK
Credit (right): Smokeybjb, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia.

Rotting fish help solve mystery of how soft tissue fossils form | News | University of Leicester

As anyone who frequents social media Creationism vs Science groups will be familiar, Creationists love fossilised 'soft' tissue, which they claim shows Earth is just a few thousand years old because soft tissue would have rotted away before now if Earth really is billions of years old, like scientists say. Some Creationists will even try to pad out their soft tissue 'argument' with the lie that such fossils have been subjected to carbon 14 dating and found to be just a few thousand years old, forgetting for the moment that Creationist dogma requires that all radiometric dating techniques must be dismissed as fake because "radiometric (read C14) dating is a flawed concept, because it doesn’t work for anything older than 50,000 years".

It is, of course, nonsense, because what these so-called soft-tissue fossils are not, is soft. They are hard fossils of what had been soft tissue just as hard-tissue fossils are hard fossils of what had been hard tissue. The question for science was not why they are still soft, but how soft tissues, in certain rare conditions, remained intact and with such detail preserved for long enough to be replaced by minerals. In particular, why do some internal organs fare better than others in that process?

Now a team of scientists from Leicester University, UK, believe they have answered that by following the process of decay in a fish. The answer is to do with the pH of the tissue as it decays, which affects how readily it can be replaced with calcium phosphate, or apatite. As the news release from Leicester University explains:

God of the Gaps News - Creationism's Little Skrinking God Just Got a Lot Smaller

Olivine basalt

Source

Scientists announce a breakthrough in determining life's origin on Earth—and maybe Mars

The basic problem with Creationism's favourite 'argument' - 'the God of the Gaps' - is not only that it is based on two fallacies - the argument from ignorant incredulity and the false dichotomy fallacies, but also that it tends to disappear every time the gap is subjected to scientific scrutiny.

That's exactly what has just happened with one of their favourite gaps - the origin of living organisms, which they always conflate with the theory of evolution of which it is not and never was a part. Evolution is what happened after ‘life’, or more precisely, self-replication, got started.

Essentially, living organisms can trace their origins back to a self-replicating molecule because once that had arisen, everything else follows naturally by Darwinian natural selection acting on small variations in the copies (the sieve of natural selection acting on each generation to filter out the best at producing copies of themselves and remove those least able to). Just such a molecule known to exist is a short length of RNA which has been shown to self-catalyse copies of itself in a mixture of nucleotides, by nothing more complex than the operation of the basic laws of chemistry.

But the question is, how did such a molecule first assemble?

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Favourite Sadist is Making a Fungus Better at Harming Us.

Scanning electron micrograph of infectious yeast spores (purple) on the surface of the structure where they are produced following sexual reproduction (in blue, the basidium)

© Chaoyang Xue, Kasey Carroll, and Joseph Heitman (Duke University Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology); and Valerie Knowlton (North Carolina State University, Center for Electron Microscopy)

This is how highly resistant strains of fungi emerge - Newsportal - Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Creationist mode:

Something you can almost bet your house on is that, if there is a way to make sick people sicker or suffer more, Creationism's intelligent [sic] designer will find a way to do it. It will then take on the challenge of making sure it's design can continue to do its work despite the efforts of medical science to combat it with drugs to cure us of infections or to prevent us getting them.

An obvious case in point is the way it keeps redesigning the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 to make it more infectious and/or help it evade any immunity we may have got from previous infections or medical science's vaccines. Another example is the growing number of dangerous bacterial pathogens that are becoming antibiotic resistant.

Yet another example is the subject of this paper by scientists from Duke University in the USA and Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), Germany who have shown how a pathogenic fungus, Cryptococcus neoformans has developed resistance to the antibiotics of choice used to treat patients infected with it.

The news release from RUB explains the problem:

Unintelligent Design - More on Moths vs Bats Arms Races

Moths enlist additional troops in an evolutionary arms race – Florida Museum Science

Evolutionary arms races are the inevitable and predictable result of evolution by natural selection, but make absolutely no sense at all as the product of intelligent design by a single designer, so they are one of the strongest arguments against Creationism of the sort preached by the Discovery Institute and its hirelings.

Where is the intelligence in designing solutions to solutions you designed earlier and which you now regard as problems to be solved?

One of these many arms races to be found in nature is that between bats and moths. Now a new research paper by scientists from Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA with colleagues from Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA, and Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Patagonia Norte, Ingeniero White, Argentina, has shown that arms race is even more extensive that was previously known.

Fortunately, most of this occurs at night at sound frequencies above our hearing range, or summer nights would be a deafening cacophony of sound as bats use pulses of sonar to detect their staple diet, moths, and moths use screens of sound to deter and confuse bats, rather like a warplane uses chaff to confuse radar, or warn them that they have a bitter taste or other noxious defences, in a way analogous to warning colouration used by many diurnal prey species. To complicate things further, there are examples of the auditory equivalent of Batesian mimicry, where a harmless species mimics the signals of a harmful or distasteful one.

The news release from the Florida Museum explains the research findings:

Unintelligent Design - Moth vs Bat Evolutionary Arms Races

Prompted by a recent research paper which announced the discovery that many more moths use ultrasound to deter attack by bats than was previously recognised, I reproduce here an article from The Conversation by Professor David Jacobs of Cape Town University, South Africa, which I drew on for the section on arms races in my popular book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax.

These sorts of evolutionary arms races are the predictable and inevitable result of predator-prey and parasite-host relationships and are one of the strongest arguments against intelligent design.

The article is republished under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Explainer: the evolutionary arms race between bats and moths

Bats have adapted new hunting techniques in their pursuit of moths who in turn have developed defensive strategies.

Sarun T/Shutterstock

David Jacobs, University of Cape Town

In the struggle for survival, predators need to capture and consume prey, and prey have to avoid being eaten. Over evolutionary time this has evolved into a kind of arms race between the two, in which predators have evolved specialised weapons of attack and prey have evolved specialised defences. One particular example of this is the arms race between bats and moths.

The interaction between bats and their insect prey, in particular moths, is one of the most cited examples of such an evolutionary arms race. It comes with a twist – the weaponry used by each is largely based on sound and hearing.

Malevolent Designer News - Why Creationism's Divine Malevolence Gave Us Junk DNA

‘Junk’ DNA could lead to cancer by stopping copying of DNA - The Institute of Cancer Research, London

Creationists hate junk DNA because no intelligent designer would have included lots of DNA that does nothing apart from being replicated endlessly in every cell and passed on to each new generation. They also hate it because it contains 'fossil' relics from our remote ancestors and we share much of it with our close relatives, so it is very compelling evidence for evolution and common descent. The third reason they hate it is because it is available to mutate and occasionally give rise to new genetic 'information' when Creationist dogma says that no new genetic information can arise because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics' [sic].

So, creationist frauds put a great deal of effort into trying to debunk the idea that junk DNA really does do nothing. For that reason they should welcome this piece of research that shows that, far from doing nothing, junk DNA may actually cause cancer.

Yep! You read that right. Creationists such as Michael J. Behe will often use examples that, if they were intelligently designed, would portray the designer as a malevolent sadist who invents way to make his creation suffer.

For example, Behe has used both the flagellum of the bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli) which better equips it for causing food poisoning, and the resistance of the Plasmodium parasites that cause malaria to the drugs used to prevent it, as examples of 'irreducible complexity' which he claims must have been designed, so Creationists are used to portraying their putative creator as an evil sadist. The fact that, if we subscribe to their superstition and apply their logic we have here an example of their god deliberately causing cancers, should come as no surprise.