Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Is Adapting The Avian Flu Virus to Kill Marine Mammals

Dead elephant seals line a beach in Argentina in fall 2023.

Photo: Ralph Vanstreels/UC Davis

Avian Influenza Virus Is Adapting to Spread to Marine Mammals | UC Davis

Elephant seals lie dead on a beach in Argentina following an outbreak of avian influenza in the region.

Photo: Maxi Jonas.

As an example of creationist double-think and intellectual bankruptcy, their attitude toward parasites like viruses is a classic:

• "Only God is capable of designing organisms, so "Look at the trees!" and "What about irreducible complexity?"
• "Something else created parasites like bacteria, worms and viruses, because God wouldn't do something like that!"

Simultaneously committing blasphemy and refuting their own argument from teleology!

I wonder then how that rarest of animals, the intellectually honest creationist copes with the news that the creator of the avian flu virus, H5N1, is in the process of adapting it to kill marine mammals such as elephant seals, just as it adapted the SARS-CoV-2 virus from a bat virus to one that could kill humans and cause economic collapse.

Evidence that it is doing so, if you believe viruses are created and don't evolve naturally, which dogma forbids a creationist from believing, comes in the form of a study by scientists from University of California, Davis, and the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) in Argentina. The study, the first genomic characterization of H5N1 in marine wildlife on the Atlantic shore of South America, is published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases and is described in a UC Davis news release:

Malevolent Designer News - Creationism's Divine Malevolence Is Still Victimising Frogs

Foothill yellow-legged frog, Rana boylii

Photo Credit: Brome McCreary

Foothill yellow-legged frog, Rana boylii

Photo: Rebecca Fabbri/USFWS

Scientists assemble a richer picture of the plight and resilience of the foothill yellow-legged frog | The Current

Almost unnoticed by the general public and noticed only by biologists and wildlife conservationists, is a pandemic far more deadly than the Covid-19 pandemic, or even the Medieval Black Death.

It kills a very high percentage of its victims, has already exterminated whole populations of frogs and other amphibians, and has contributed significantly to the global mass extinction currently underway.

It is, of course, the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, which, along with a closely-related fungus, B. salamandrivorans, causes the fatal disease, chytridiomycosis, in frogs and other amphibians.

As an example of the work of creationism's divine malevolence, it takes some beating for its sheer malevolent nastiness. It infects the skin of these amphibians, through which they breath, and causes it to thicken and fail as a respiratory organ, leading to suffocation, multiple organ failure and death. Here is how I described it in my illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good:

Exterminating Frogs with a Fungus.

Most of the examples I’ve talked about so far have been organisms and viruses that affect humans, but we are far from being the only species that Creationism’s putative intelligent designer seems to have taken an intense dislike to. For example, the world’s frogs and other amphibians are currently being decimated by chytridiomycosis, caused by a couple of related Chytrid fungi, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis and B. salamandrivorans. It has been estimated that over 500 different species have been severely reduced in number by this fungal plague, with over 90 extinctions.

These fungi seem to have originated in an area of Southeast Asia by modification of a common, harmless, soil fungus. In that part of the world, the local population of amphibians seems to be resistant to the pathogenic forms of the fungi, suggesting that these fungi frequently become pathogenic and the local population have built up resistance to it.

According to research carried out by a team from the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, ACT, Australia, it was resistance in the local population which probably kept the disease from spreading more widely, until human agency intervened to change the environment. They have related the increased trade in amphibian species to the spread of the fungi all over the world where they found species with no evolved resistance (42).

Figure 5 Frog Victims of Chytrid Fungus

Illustration: Catherine Webber-Hounslow

Recently, another team found that one of the factors that could have made these fungi so successful is that the frog’s immune response seems to have worked against it. Researchers from the University of Central Florida and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) found that, in the frog Rana yavapaiensis, a species known to vary in its ability to survive attack by these fungi, those which showed an elevated immune response had a worse outcome that those with a lower response (43). Somehow, the frog’s ‘designed’ immune system was working against it and the fungi had been ‘designed’ to exploit this.

ID advocates would have us believe that, for reasons unknown, their putative intelligent designer has deliberately redesigned a soil fungus so it can overcome the immune system it designed to protect frogs from infections, and so exterminate over 90 species of amphibians that it designed earlier and severely endanger some 500 species in what has been described as the biggest single loss of biodiversity, albeit, aided and abetted by humans in this endeavour. Creationism’s intelligent designer must really hate the frogs it designed. Maybe a private definition of the word ‘intelligent’ is being employed here.

Now a team of researchers from multiple American wildlife and conservation agencies have looked in detail at the spread of this fungus in one particular frog which has declined so rapidly it is now an endangered species - the foothill yellow-legged frog, Rana boylii. This small frog's range once extended from Oregon to Baja California.

They have shown that human agency is implicated in the spread of this fungus by not only spreading it around the world in trade, as the earlier Australian study found (42), but with regard to the foothill yellow-legged frog specifically, by global warming, climate change and habitat destruction as more land is converted to agriculture. They have published their work, open access, in Royal Society Open Science. It is also explained in a University of California Santa Barbara, news release:

Up to only a few inches in length, with a lemon-hued belly, the foothill yellow-legged frog may seem unassuming. But its range once stretched from central Oregon to Baja California. In 2023, it was listed under the federal Endangered Species Act. Its rapidly decreasing range is due in part to a fungal pathogen called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd, that has devastated amphibians around the world.

A team of researchers, including UC Santa Barbara’s Andrea Adams, has conducted the most comprehensive study to date of disease dynamics in foothill yellow-legged frogs. The team’s data — sourced from both wild frogs and specimens in museum collections — enabled them to track patterns of infection across a large geographic range. In a study published in Royal Society Open Science, the researchers reveal that drought, rising temperatures and the increasing conversion of land for agriculture appear to be the largest factors driving Bd infection in this species.

The researchers aimed to assemble as much data as they could, both in space and time. They surveyed in the creeks and rivers of California and Oregon, where they swabbed wild yellow-legged frogs for the presence of Bd. It also led them into fluorescent-lit museum collections to sample specimens from as far back as the 1890s.

The team leveraged a large network of people and institutions to amass this wealth of samples.

Many foothill yellow-legged frog field researchers had data that they weren’t actively analyzing, and so we were able to bring all of this data together and get it into a usable format that we could use to paint a much bigger picture of what is, and was, going on with Bd in this species.

Andrea J. Adams, co-author.
Earth Research Institute
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA.

The researchers swabbed each frog’s skin to determine if the animal was infected. To test for Bd, they used a PCR test, similar to some tests for COVID. By searching for Bd DNA from thousands of samples, the researchers were able to identify infection rates and severity. Co-lead author Ryan Peek ran this information through statistical models, which accounted for climatic, geographic, biologic and land use variables. This enabled the team to track disease patterns across a large geographic range over roughly 120 years.

The team discovered that disease patterns of Bd aligned with historical frog declines. The pathogen began to spread in the 1940s from the southern coast of California, moving northward and eventually affecting nearly the entire region. The biggest factors driving infection seem to be drought, increasing temperatures and the use of ever more land for agriculture.

Bd is a fungus that is spread through spores in the water, but that spread may occur differently in foothill yellow-legged frogs in different regions and climates, the researchers found. In some places, drought increased infection, while in others, it did not, possibly because of the presence or absence of other species that can carry Bd and share the same water, such as American bullfrogs, a species introduced from eastern North America.
“

If you combine the fact that there are bullfrogs building up the number of spores that these frogs are exposed to, and then they’re all kind of stuck in these small pools together, that explains why drought matters. They are suddenly getting hit with a really large number of spores and getting sick and dying.

These findings open more questions about what was stopping transmission and what allowed it to happen later.

Dr. Anat M. Belasen, co-first author
Department of Integrative Biology
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
And Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology,
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.

What’s more, foothill yellow-legged frogs live exclusively in streams and rivers, not ponds and lakes. So the species is already stressed when these waterways shrink into isolated pools.

The progression of Bd in the foothill yellow-legged frog also differed from its course in other western amphibians. In many other species, the disease radiated from urban centers, rather than this clear south-to-north trend. What’s more, the disease showed up later in the foothill yellow-legged frog than in other species in its range.

Frogs switch from herbivores as tadpoles to carnivores as adults, which means they connect different nutrient cycles together in the food web. Their position at the center of the food chain also influences the ecosystem.

When you remove frogs from an ecosystem, what you get is less control of insects, things that the frogs would eat. There is also less food for things that eat the frogs, like snakes, birds and small mammals. It really throws things off and makes the ecosystem less stable and less functional.

“There are areas that have wet soils that would be alongside suitable habitat. In areas where more of those lands have been converted to agriculture, we see a higher risk of frogs being infected with the fungus.

Dr. Anat M. Belasen.

Co-author Jamie Bettaso swabs a wild foothill yellow-legged frog to test for fungal infection.

Photo Credit: Jamie Bettaso

The conversion of land for agriculture was another major factor influencing the spread of Bd. for these frogs.

In addition to disease hotspots, the team also identified a number of cold spots — areas where the pathogen is present but less influential. The existence of so many cold spots in different areas is a good sign, as it may mean that many areas have conditions suitable for keeping disease rates low, even as climate change increases temperatures and patterns of drought.

The authors are curious what might explain this clustering, especially when cold spots appear in unexpected locations: for example, places with similar habitat, land-use and climatic impacts as hotspots. It suggests there may be some genetic basis for the differences, whether on the pathogen side or the host side. Adams is currently researching the feasibility of reintroducing foothill yellow-legged frogs to Southern California.

The results of this paper shed a lot of light on the dynamics of where Bd occurs, what drives its spread and how the pathogen and frog may interact in the future.

We took a big snapshot of this species’ disease relationship through time. Earlier studies provided the researchers with glimpses into disease patterns in smaller geographic regions, “but now we have a much larger dataset that further confirms many of these patterns, and expands on them.

Andrea J. Adams.

More detail is given in the team's open access paper in Royal Society Open Science:

Abstract

Species with extensive geographical ranges pose special challenges to assessing drivers of wildlife disease, necessitating collaborative and large-scale analyses. The imperilled foothill yellow-legged frog (Rana boylii) inhabits a wide geographical range and variable conditions in rivers of California and Oregon (USA), and is considered threatened by the pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd). To assess drivers of Bd infections over time and space, we compiled over 2000 datapoints from R. boylii museum specimens (collected 1897–2005) and field samples (2005–2021) spanning 9° of latitude. We observed a south-to-north spread of Bd detections beginning in the 1940s and increase in prevalence from the 1940s to 1970s, coinciding with extirpation from southern latitudes. We detected eight high-prevalence geographical clusters through time that span the species' geographical range. Field-sampled male R. boylii exhibited the highest prevalence, and juveniles sampled in autumn exhibited the highest loads. Bd infection risk was highest in lower elevation rain-dominated watersheds, and with cool temperatures and low stream-flow conditions at the end of the dry season. Through a holistic assessment of relationships between infection risk, geographical context and time, we identify the locations and time periods where Bd mitigation and monitoring will be critical for conservation of this imperilled species.

1. Introduction

Threatened species with large geographical ranges often require unique, regional conservation strategies to combat stressors such as infectious disease. Pathogen surveys and reporting have become standard for North American wildlife diseases [1,2]; however, relative risk across a landscape and among populations within species remains difficult to anticipate, especially when data are collected by separate research groups [3]. Central reporting databases [4], synthetic analyses and retrospective surveys can help assess disease threats and identify high-risk populations.

Among the most significant wildlife diseases, amphibian chytridiomycosis caused by the fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) has contributed to declines of hundreds of species worldwide [5]; but see [6]. In North America, notable Bd-associated declines have occurred across the west including the southern Rocky Mountains [7,8], Arizona and New Mexico [9,10], Nevada [11] and California [12–14]. In several of these cases, infection outcomes varied widely among populations due to host-related and environmental factors including genetics, prior Bd exposure and abiotic conditions [15–17].

For the stream-dwelling foothill yellow-legged frog, Rana boylii, Bd's role in the species' changing abundance across its endemic range (California and Oregon, USA) is not well-understood. The species has declined for at least the last half-century, with extirpations reported from xeric lower latitudes [18], at the wetter northern range limit [19] and downstream of large dams range-wide [20]. A mix of abiotic and biotic factors influence Bd infection risk and disease dynamics in many systems, including elevation, latitude, climate, habitat quality and host characteristics [21]. The relative importance of these factors remains unclear in rivers with winter flood/summer drought flow regimes typical across R. boylii's geographical range. Bd is considered a significant potential threat to R. boylii [22] because it is implicated in the species' disappearance from rivers of California's South Coast [23] and in recent autumn die-offs of R. boylii in Central Coast streams [24,25]. A large-scale assessment of Bd infections is needed to clarify how infections relate to historical declines in some regions' rivers and persistence in others, identify clusters of increased infection risk across the species’ range, and evaluate how infection incidence and severity changes with the seasonality of the Mediterranean climate and across the diverse ecoregions that R. boylii occupies.

Here, we leverage data from over 2000 field and museum samples covering 124 years to synthesize knowledge and evaluate patterns of Bd infections in R. boylii. We use a combination of modelling approaches and spatial scan statistics to ask: (i) how are Bd detections in R. boylii are distributed over space and time, (ii) whether watersheds with high versus low Bd infection risk clustered historically and today, and (iii) how Bd infections are related to biotic and abiotic factors. Our results highlight priority populations for Bd mitigation, regions that are data-deficient and warrant further sampling and monitoring, and remaining gaps in our knowledge about Bd susceptibility in R. boylii. Our study serves as a resource for wildlife managers implementing disease mitigation and species recovery projects, such as re-introductions, and as an example of collaborative research to address conservation challenges in wide-ranging imperilled species.

Figure 1.
Distribution of R. boylii samples assayed for Bd infection. Diamonds show museum samples (collected 1897–2005), circles show field samples (2005–2021). Filled symbols indicate Bd-positive samples. (a) Sampling locations across California and Oregon, USA. Symbols overlap in some localities; see inset barplots for sample sizes. Rana boylii clades are outlined and labelled, with California Endangered Species Act status abbreviated in parentheses: SSC = Species of Special Concern, TH = Threatened, EN = Endangered. (b) Spatio-temporal spread of Bd detections. Symbol size indicates sample size at the HUC-12 (sub-watershed) level. Generalized additive model (GAM) of latitude∼capture year + sample size in Bd-positive samples is shown with black curved line (R² = 0.133).

Photo of R. boylii in Napa County, CA by Marina De León.

Belasen A. M., Peek R. A., Adams A. J., Russell I. D., De León M. E., Adams M. J., Bettaso J., Breedveld K. G. H., Catenazzi A., Dillingham C. P., Grear D. A., Halstead B. J., Johnson P. G., Kleeman P. M., Koo M. S., Koppl C. W., Lauder J. D., Padgett-Flohr G., Piovia-Scott J., Pope K. L., Vredenburg V., Westphal M., Wiseman K. and Kupferberg S. J. (2024)
Chytrid infections exhibit historical spread and contemporary seasonality in a declining stream-breeding frog
R. Soc. Open Sci.11. 231270. 231270 DOI: 10.1098/rsos.231270

Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by The Royal Society. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

It must be thrilling for devotees of the putative divine malevolence to see the stunning success it is having exterminating so many species of frog, but one can't help but wonder what the ancestral frog did to incur this wrath. Did it maybe eat a forbidden mosquito or spawn out of wedlock?

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The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax

ID is not a problem for science; rather science is a problem for ID. This book shows why. It exposes the fallacy of Intelligent Design by showing that, when examined in detail, biological systems are anything but intelligently designed. They show no signs of a plan and are quite ludicrously complex for whatever can be described as a purpose. The Intelligent Design movement relies on almost total ignorance of biological science and seemingly limitless credulity in its target marks. Its only real appeal appears to be to those who find science too difficult or too much trouble to learn yet want their opinions to be regarded as at least as important as those of scientists and experts in their fields.

Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle

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The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is Not Good

This book presents the reader with multiple examples of why, even if we accept Creationism's putative intelligent designer, any such entity can only be regarded as malevolent, designing ever-more ingenious ways to make life difficult for living things, including humans, for no other reason than the sheer pleasure of doing so. This putative creator has also given other creatures much better things like immune systems, eyesight and ability to regenerate limbs that it could have given to all its creation, including humans, but chose not to. This book will leave creationists with the dilemma of explaining why evolution by natural selection is the only plausible explanation for so many nasty little parasites that doesn't leave their creator looking like an ingenious, sadistic, misanthropic, malevolence finding ever more ways to increase pain and suffering in the world, and not the omnibenevolent, maximally good god that Creationists of all Abrahamic religions believe created everything. As with a previous book by this author, "The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax", this book comprehensively refutes any notion of intelligent design by anything resembling a loving, intelligent and maximally good god. Such evil could not exist in a universe created by such a god. Evil exists, therefore a maximally good, all-knowing, all-loving god does not.

Illustrated by Catherine Webber-Hounslow.

Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle

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Creationism in Crisis - Evolution By Loss Of Complexity - How A Mutation Cost Our Ancestors Their Tails

A mutation cost our simian ancestors their tails

Photo: Getty / Steve Adams

Change in Genetic Code May Explain How Human Ancestors Lost Tails | NYU Langone News

In that distant, pre-'Creation Week' history of Life On Earth, 25 million years before creationists think Earth was created out of nothing, and all living things on it were magicked into existence without ancestors, a 'jumping gene' inserted a short length of DNA termed AluY, into the gene which controls tail length in monkeys, and the resulting tailless monkeys went on to diversify into the apes - gibbons, siamangs, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and the hominins which were to evolve into the Australopithecines and the Homo genus, including Homo sapiens, all of which still possess that short insertion in the TBXT gene, which otherwise is identical to one of the gene which grow the tail of the simians.

As an example of design, it is one of the least intelligent, since, instead of removing all the genes required to grow a tail, the 'designer' simply broke an essential gene and left all the others to do nothing apart from having to be replicated in every cell in every ape that ever lived, as an example of the massive waste and unnecessary complexity that characterises an evolved process and gives the lie to any notion of any intelligence being involved.

By inserting the AluY snippet into a mouse BBXT gene the researchers found a variety of tail effects, including mice born without tails. They also showed that there was a small increase in the incidence on neural tube defects (spina bifida) in mice.

Quite why tailless would have been selected for during the evolution of these ancestors of the modern apes is a matter for speculation; maybe a tail was becoming an encumbrance for a brachiating mode of locomotion as opposed to running along the top of branches and jumping from branch to branch, which the smaller monkeys used, where a tail was an important balance organ. For a heavier ape hanging beneath the branches by its arms, there would have been less need for a balance organ and a tail would have been liable to damage and infection.

How this was discovered by a team led by researchers at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, is the subject of an open access paper in Nature and a NYU Langone Health news release:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Favourite Sadist May Use Climate Change To Increase The Suffering In The World

Nematode movement

Parasitic worms cause huge economic loss to farmers and can infest humans too.

Temperature, humidity may drive future transmission of parasitic worm infections | Penn State University

Creationists who believe nothing happens unless their invisible magic god wants it to have to have all manner of intellectual gymnastics to avoid giving it credit for all the nasty things to be found in nature, such as parasitic worms.

Their favourite strategy is the old trick of believing two mutually exclusive ideas simultaneously - that only their god is capable of designing living systems, so anything too complex for them to understand must have been created by it, whilst simultaneously believing that all pathogens are created by another entity, called 'Sin', no matter how complex or difficult to understand they may be.

And of course, they are forbidden by dogma to believe in more than one creator and must believe, also by dogma, that that creator is omni-everything - omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent - so they have to believe that whatever its designs do, they were designed to do it, and whatever the future may bring, they were aware of that whilst designing their creations.

What percentage of the surface of Earth is habitable to humans without special equipment? Approximately 29% of the Earth's surface is comprised of land, which is habitable to humans without special equipment. The remaining 71% is covered by water, primarily in the form of oceans, which generally require specialized equipment for prolonged habitation. Therefore, without considering other factors such as climate, terrain, and resources, roughly 29% of Earth's surface is habitable to humans without special equipment.

That means, creationists have no choice but to accept that the results of climate change were part of their designer creator's plan, as was the response of their creations to it. And one of those responses to climate change may be an increase in parasitic worms in parts of the world they have not been prevalent in before.

Many of these worms are, or have been, confined to the tropics and sub-tropical zones, and the northern and southern part of the world, where most advanced economies are based, have been relatively free from them. But, as Earth gets warmer, the 'habitable zone' for parasitic worms expands to incorporate more of the advanced economies, but the habitable zone for humans shrinks even further.

This is the prediction of a team of researchers from the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics and Department of Biology, The Pennsylvania State University (PennState), Pennsylvania, USA, and Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy, led by Professor Isabella Cattadori and Dr. Chiara Vanalli of PennState, who have just published their findings, open access, in the journal Ecology Letters. Their work is explained in a PennState news release:

Unintelligent Design - How The Same Function Evolved Twice - Once in Vertebrates And Again in Insects

Sunset over University of California - Irvine

Diagram of an insect compound eye.

Credit: Bugboy52.40 via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed)

UC Irvine study shows similarities and differences in human and insect vision formation – UCI News

Regardless of the different structures in the compound eyes of insects and the eyes of vertebrates, at the heart of them both is a light-sensitive molecule, 11-cis-retinal, also known as 'visual Chromophore', but these are produced in two different ways from the same starting compound - β-carotene - which in humans is obtained from eating plants like carrots which are rich in Vitamin A from which β-carotene is derived.

This is one of those examples which are so common in biology, of where, had it been intelligent, the same designer could have used a process it had designed earlier but did not, instead it designed an even more complex way of doing the same thing, giving the lie to claims that the same 'intelligent' designer designed living things, insects and vertebrates have two different ways to achieve the same product - 11-cis-retinal; the second being the more complicated of the two.


Although the earliest vertebrates appeared about 518 million years ago, so predating the first insects by about 130 million years, the creationists dogma of omniscience which they traditionally ascribe to their putative designer god, would mean this alleged designer was already aware of the less complex way to make 11-cis-retinal, when if supposedly designed the vertebrate method.

Besides, creationist dogma also says they were all created on the same day - 10,000 years ago.

Creationism in Crisis - What Made Snakes Able To Evolve So Quickly 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'?

Lialis burtonis. Not a snake, but a legless gecko.

Image credit: Pascal Title, University of Michigan/Stony Brook University.

A false boa, Pseudoboa nigra, eating a lava lizard, Tropidurus hispidus.

Image credit: Ivan Prates, University of Michigan.

Snakes do it faster, better: How a group of scaly, legless lizards hit the evolutionary jackpot | University of Michigan News

100 million years ago the ancestral snake was just another lizard but then suddenly (on the evolutionary timescale) something happened that enables snakes to diversify into thousands of different species while the other lizards plodded along slowly, diversifying at a much slower rate than the snakes.

But what was it that allowed this sudden radiation into so many species and why did it give the snakes the edge over their cousins the lizards? It was an event that an international team led by University of Michigan biologists have called an evolutionary singularity, in an analogy with whatever was at the start of the Big Bang.

The team has estimated that snakes have evolved up to three times faster than lizard, an ability that was facilitated by three things - an elongated body and loss of legs; enhanced sensory detection enabling them to find and track prey, and a flexible skull that enabled them to swallow large prey.

In an attempt to understand this, the team assembled a large database of lizard and snake diets from examining the stomach contents of tens of thousands of museum specimens. They also sequenced the partial genomes of almost 1,000 species from which they were able to construct the evolutionary trees of lizards and snakes.

Their findings are the subject of a paper in Science and of a news release from the University of Michigan:

Creationism in Crisis - Evolution Of The Carnivores 315-251 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Inostrancevia, a more advanced predatory synapsid and one of the first sabertoothed carnivores, from the late Permian (~259-252 Million years ago). (Display at the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada)

Credit: Suresh A. Singh

Dimetrodon, an early predatory synapsid from the early Permian (~298-272 Million years ago). (Display at the Royal Tyrell Museum, Canada).

Credit: Suresh A. Singh

February : Killer instinct drove evolution of mammals’ predatory ancestors | News and features | University of Bristol

The ancestors of all modern mammals, the synapsids, first appeared in the fossil record long before the dinosaurs. Some were vegetarian while others were the top land predators for 60 million years before being replaced by the dinosaurs. Their evolution followed the same pattern of an arms race with their prey species in which the carnivores had to get better at killing to survive.

This gives the lie to the claim of any involvement of a single intelligent designer in their evolution since no intelligent designer worthy of the name would compete with itself in an arms race in which there are no winners or losers while all the time additional complexity is needed to keep up.

Tell me all about the synapsids, please. Synapsids are a group of vertebrates that includes mammals and their extinct relatives. They are characterized by several key features, including a single temporal opening behind the eye socket, teeth set in sockets, and a more erect posture compared to earlier reptiles. Synapsids first appeared during the late Carboniferous period, about 315 million years ago, and they were a dominant group throughout much of the Permian and Triassic periods. Here are some key points about synapsids:

1. Evolutionary History: Synapsids evolved from reptilian ancestors, specifically from a group called the pelycosaurs. One of the most famous pelycosaurs is Dimetrodon, which lived during the early Permian period and is often mistakenly identified as a dinosaur. Synapsids evolved further into two main groups: the therapsids and the cynodonts.
2. Therapsids: This group includes the most mammal-like synapsids. They had more advanced jaw structures, with larger temporal fenestrae (openings behind the eye socket) and specialized teeth. Therapsids diversified during the Permian period, with some species evolving into large herbivores like the iconic sail-backed Dimetrodon, while others were carnivorous predators. Towards the end of the Permian, some therapsids gave rise to the first true mammals.
3. Cynodonts: Cynodonts were a subgroup of therapsids that emerged during the late Permian and diversified extensively during the Triassic period. They exhibited several mammalian characteristics, including a more upright posture, specialized teeth, and possibly hair-like structures. Some cynodonts were quite small and likely had a lifestyle similar to modern mammals, while others were larger predators.
4. Mammalian Evolution: The transition from cynodonts to true mammals occurred during the Triassic period. Early mammals retained many reptilian features but also displayed characteristics that are distinctly mammalian, such as lactation and specialized jaw joints. By the end of the Triassic period, mammals had become more diverse and widespread.
5. Impact on Evolutionary History: Synapsids, particularly therapsids and cynodonts, played a crucial role in evolutionary history. They were among the dominant land vertebrates during the Permian and Triassic periods, occupying various ecological niches as herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores. The extinction of many synapsid groups at the end of the Permian, possibly due to environmental changes and the effects of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event, paved the way for the rise of dinosaurs as the dominant land vertebrates during the Mesozoic Era.
6. Modern Descendants: The only surviving descendants of synapsids are mammals, which have diversified into a vast array of species occupying nearly every terrestrial and aquatic habitat on Earth. From tiny shrews to massive whales, modern mammals exhibit remarkable diversity in terms of size, shape, behavior, and ecological adaptations.

Overall, synapsids are a fascinating group of vertebrates that played a significant role in the evolutionary history of life on Earth, ultimately giving rise to the diverse and successful lineage of mammals that we see today.

Now a team of researchers from Bristol University, together with a colleague from the Open University, Milton Keynes, have traced the evolution of the carnivorous synapsid jaw and body size and discovered a major change in the jaw about 270 million years ago which would have been associated with a shift in the behaviour of these carnivores as they became better at killing their prey more quickly, so reducing the risk of injury.
Their findings are the subject of an open access paper in Communications Biology and is the subject of a Bristol University news release:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Permineralised dicotyledonous leaves (QMF 61184) in a leaf litter layer from QML 1775, Glencoe sub-basaltic silcrete, Capella District (Clermont Volcanic Province). The leaf shows raised primary and secondary venation indicating that this is abaxial leaf surface and a partially skeletonised leaf of the same species lies across the distal end of the leaf.

From: Rozefelds, Andrew C.; Webb, John; et al.(2024) (Fig 2.)

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

From: Rozefelds, Andrew C.; Webb, John; et al.(2024)

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:

Creationism in Crisis - 275 Million New Human Genetic Variants in USA Alone - Why So Many?

275 Million New Genetic Variants Identified in NIH Precision Medicine Data | All of Us Research Program | NIH

Researchers at the American NIH have identified 275 million previously unknown genetic variants in samples from 250,000 representative American adults who participated in their All of Us research program. Half the participants were of non-European ancestry. Nearly 4 million of these newly discovered variants are from areas of the genome tied to known disease risks.

Let's consider that from the point of view of someone who believes in intelligent [sic] design:

Why on Earth would an intelligent designer design so many variations on the same theme? An intelligent designer, especially one endowed with the foresight of omniscience and unlimited powers and who is omnibenevolent and perfect, would design the perfect solution to every problem, and stick with it, not design lots of different solutions to the same problem. And every iteration through the cycle of replication would produce an exact copy of that perfect design, so there is no logical way all those variations could be the result of random mutations which all happened to be equally good at whatever they did, so there was no element of selection involved.

Quite simply, lots of variations on the same theme are evidence not of intelligent design, but of utilitarian, mindless 'design' working without a plan and with no conception of the ideal or perfection. Variation is kept because it works; maybe not exactly as well as other alleles, but well enough for the carrier to survive and reproduce. Even if the differences are too small to play a significant part in evolution by natural selection, unless they are serious deleterious, genetic drift can account for them being a significant part of the species genome.

Creationism in Crisis - How An Ancient Retrovirus Evolved To Create The Vertebrate Brain

A myelinating oligodendrocyte (green)

Credit: Peggy Assinck,
ALTOS Labs-Cambridge Institute Of Science

Ancient retroviruses played a key role in the evolution of vertebrate brains | ScienceDaily

Schematic diagram of a neuron show the myelin sheath as the electrical insulator of the axon.

Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Extinct Late Devonian placoderm Bothriolepis canadensis. Myelin first appeared in these primitive early fish

Credit: Nobumichi Tamura / Stocktrek Images / Getty.

Creationists generally hate endogenous retrovirus (ERV's) because:

1. They are one of the strongest pieces of evidence of common descent appearing in the same locations in the genome of all organisms in a clade, forming nested hierarchies exactly as the Theory of Evolution predicts. The probability of the same viral DNA appearing in the same locus in all species in a clade by chance is, of course, so small it can be dismissed as an explanation.
2. They form a large part of the 'junk' DNA carried by all organisms, which, although a small proportion of it is transcribed into RNA, the RNA doesn't get translated into proteins and most of it doesn't serve any purpose. Some, but by no means all of it may have some regulatory functions.
3. Occasionally, an ancient ERV may have become exapted for some useful purpose unrelated to the original virus, so showing how new genetic information can enter a genome, flatly contradicting creationist's claims that no new information can arise within a genome because the second law of thermodynamics [sic] and Shannon Information Theory somehow forbids it.
4. An ERV serving a useful purpose also contradicts creationist claims that, while their favourite creator god is responsible for all the good stuff, another creator, called 'Sin', is responsible for the harmful stuff like parasites and viruses. Yet in those exapted ERVs we have viruses providing something that is beneficial and therefore, according to creationist dogma, must have been provided by their god!
5. Lastly, the examples of where ancient ERVs have mutated and provided some additional ability or function, such as enabling the formation of the myeline sheath in vertebrates, can't be regarded as detrimental mutations, yet creationist dogma, courtesy of the hapless Micheal J. Behe, is that all mutations are 'devolutionary'[sic].

How Science Works - Correcting Earlier Mistakes With Modern Technology

280-million-year-old Tridentinosaurus antiquus.
Black outline, not skin, but paint!

Latest News and Views from University College Cork (Coláiste na hOllscoile Corcaigh)

There are few things that creationist like more than reports of 'soft' tissues being found in ancient fossils, because they imagine this 'proves' the fossils are much younger than palaeontologists claim, and places them well within the 10,000 years they believe Earth has existed for. It's nonsense, of course, because fossilised 'soft' tissues are not the same as actual soft tissues since, under the right circumstances, there is nothing to prevent soft tissue being mineralised by the same processes that hard tissues are mineralised. The results are not soft; they are hard, mineralised fossils. The term 'soft tissue' simply relates to what they started out as, not what they ended up as.

That point is probably too subtle for most creationists to appreciate.

Given the propensity of creationist frauds to misrepresent the science to their dupes, it's perhaps surprising that they don't wave the fossil of Tridentinosaurus antiquus. as 'proof' of a young Earth because it was believed to have its skin preserved and was thought by some to be an example of the rare preservation of soft tissue in a fossil.

However, a paper in Palaeontology a few days ago, not only destroys that notion, but shows how the scientific method eventually corrects mistakes and even deliberate hoaxes, in much the same way that the scientific method eventually exposed the Piltdown hoax as a forgery.

This paper shows that what was interpreted as fossilised skin was actually black paint. Whether this was a deliberate attempt to mislead or simply an attempt to make the fossil stand out from the surrounding rock matrix in which it is embedded may never be known, but one thing of which we can be sure, is that it isn't fossilised skin, so there is no mystery for science too explain.

The fossil is embedded in volcanic rock, so the 'mystery' was how the skin survived the high temperatures involved in the production of the rock, and various theories were proposed for this, including the lizard-like reptile sheltering in a crack in the rock.

How the 'forgery' was exposed is the subject of the paper in Paleontology and a news release from the University of Cork, Ireland:

Creationism in Crisis - How The Fossil Record Provides Evidence For Evolution - No Magic Needed

Desert sand dune landscape of the Upper Cretaceous Djadokhta/Baruungoyot Formations
Foreground: the large-bodied monstersaurian lizard Estesia mongoliensis

Illustration by Nathan Dehaut

Desert sand dune landscape of the Upper Cretaceous Djadokhta/Baruungoyot Formations. Foreground: the large-bodied monstersaurian lizard Estesia mongoliensis predating on the enantiornithine bird Gobipteryx minuta.

Illustration by Nathan Dehaut

A Lighthouse in the Gobi Desert | Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County

We are regularly told by creationists who have either been fooled by a lie, or are trying to fool us with one, that biomedical scientists are increasingly rejecting the Theory of Evolution and replacing it with the notion of intelligent design.

This was, of course, the aim of the Discovery Institute's 26-year-old, 5-year[sic] strategy detailed in The Wedge to insert Bible literalism into mainstream science, apparently believing that for the first time in the history of science, a well-established scientific theory is going to be replaced by a an evidence-free superstition based on misrepresentation of the data and including unproven supernatural entities doing magic.

Intelligent design creationism, of course, doesn't meet the basic criteria to be called a science, which is why any scrutiny of the relevant scientific literature will find no hint that the TOE is inadequate for explaining the data or that magic explains it in a more scientifically satisfying way. Indeed, as I repeatedly show in these blog-posts, virtually every piece of scientific research casually refutes creationism by revealing the evidence and not a single peer-reviewed biomedical science paper ever concludes that intelligent design is the only way to explain the observations.

As Michael J Behe was forced to admit in the Kitzmiller case, "There are no peer-reviewed article by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred". And that situation has not changed since Behe effectively sank the Wedge Strategy with that grudging admission under oath in an American court. Instead, we find papers like this technical one in which a team of researchers led by Dr. Hank Woolley, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Dinosaur Institute, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, discuss and evaluate the degree to which exceptional collections of fossils, such as those found in the Gobi Desert of Central Asia can influence our understanding of evolutionary relationships between fossil groups - what they term the lagerstätten effect .

The team have explained their research in a news release from the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County: