Refuting Creationism - How Ants Were Cultivating Crops 66 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'.

A lower-fungus-farming worker of the rare fungus-farming ant species Mycetophylax asper, collected in Santa Catarina, Brazil, in 2014, on its fungus garden.

Credit: Don Parsons.

Atta colombica queen

By Christian R. Linder - own photo, Barro Colorado Island, Panama (1999), CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Ant Agriculture Began 66 Million Years Ago in the Aftermath of the Asteroid That Doomed the Dinosaurs | Smithsonian Institution

One of the 'uniquely human' abilities that creationists traditionally cite in support of their childish superstition that humans were magically created out of dirt as a species separate from other animals, is the fact that humans for the most part, indulge in agriculture - i.e., we grow plants as food - or at least other people do. Most of us in the developed economies buy their produce in shops.

a Like all their other claims of human exceptionalism, it's a nonsense fairy tale, of course. Humans have some unique characteristics that make them a distinct species, but then so does every other species, by definition. There is nothing materially different about humans that makes them subject to different laws of chemistry and physics than other species, of course.
And in respect of agriculture, we are far from unique - ants have been at it for about 66 million years - well before creationists imagine the entire Universe was magically created from nothing by a magic god made of nothing. But this is hardly surprising, since some 99.9975% of the history of life on Earth happened before creationism's legendary 'Creation Week'.

Malevolent Designer News - How A Spider Manipulates Captured Firefles To Become Lures To Catch More Fireflies.

Araneus ventricosus with captured firefly, Abscondita terminalis

Photograph by Xinhua Fu

Abscondita terminalis

CC BY-NC 4.0.

Spider exploits firefly's flashing signals to lure more prey | ScienceDaily

Today comes news that may help cheer up those creationists who haven't managed to avoid all the unwelcome news for creationism that science keeps on producing. It's news of how, in a breathtaking display of brilliant nastiness, an orb web spider appears to have been designed to use captured fireflies to lure more fireflies to their death by manipulating the flashing light signals they display.

Mind you, this will make it harder for creationists to argue that their putative designer is one and the same god as the omnibenevolent creator god of the Bible and Qur'an. Along with the evidence of parasites, and especially parasites that turn their victims into zombies by taking control of their bodies, in some cases even after death, this news reinforces the impression of a hate-filled malevolent creator devising ever-more ingenious ways to kill its creation.

The spider/firefly news come from a team of researchers led by Xinhua Fu, from Huazhong Agricultural University, China. They found that male fireflies, which normally flash two lights in response to the female’s single flash, adopt the female signalling strategy when caught in the web of an orb web spider, Araneus ventricosus. What is not clear without further research is whether this is the result of being bitten by the spider or of simply being caught, but one way or another, it results in more male fireflies being lured to the spider's web.

This finding has just been published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology. It was also explained in information made available ahead of publication and reported in Science Daily:

Creationism in Crisis - More Lousy News For Creationists - Human Evolution Mapped In The Genome Of Head Lice Symbiotic Bacteria

Human head louse, Pediculus humanus capitis

Gilles San Martin via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Phylogenetic trees for primate lice and their vertebrate hosts redrawn from Reed et al . [9]. Trees are shown as cladograms with no branch length information, and are based on molecular and morphological data. Dashed lines between trees represent host-parasite associations. Humans are unique in being parasitized by two genera (Pediculus and Pthirus). (Herd, K.E., Barker, S.C. & Shao, R.(2015))

Photo credits: J. W. Demastes, T. Choe, and V. Smith.

Genomic Diversity in the Endosymbiotic Bacteria of Human Head Lice | Molecular Biology and Evolution | Oxford Academic

It's a basic principle of evolutionary biology that an obligate commensal, symbiotic or parasitic organism is evolutionary bound to the organism on which it is dependent, It follows then that the genomes of two or more organism in such a relationships will reflect the same major changes which drive evolution.

I have previously described how the evolutionary tree of the human head and body lice, Pediculus humanus, fits exactly on the evolutionary tree of Homo sapiens as we diverged from the common ancestor with chimpanzees. At the same time, our lice diverged from a common ancestor they share with the lice which are obligate parasites on chimpanzees, Pe. schaeffi.

Interestingly, our lice also reflect when we started wearing clothes having lost our body hair. This loss of body hair meant our lice became head lice which are closely related to the chimpanzee's body lice. When we started wearing clothes our lice diverged into two subspecies - head lice, Pe. h. capitis, and body lice, Pe. h. humanus.

And now, something even more interesting and confirmative of evolution, is the discovery that an obligate, symbiont bacteria on which the lice depends, shows exactly the same pattern of divergence, mapped onto the evolutionary tree of the lice.

The symbiotic bacterium, Candidatus Riesia pediculicola, in a typically Heath-Robinson solution to a problem which is a characteristic of mindless, unplanned evolution, and unlike anything an intelligent designer would design, is essential to the lice because they can't make essential B-vitamins and don't get them from the blood on which they exclusively feed.

And, incidentally, these bacteria have evolved by loss of genetic information - something that creationist frauds tell their dupes is impossible because "every loss of genes is invariably fatal" [sic].

This discovery is the subject of a recent open access paper in the journal Molecular Biology & Evolution:

Unintelligent Designer - How Creationism's Idiot Designer Competes With Itself To Overcome The Problems It Designs

Ornate Bella moth, Utetheisa ornatrix.

Photo: Andrei Sourakov.

Ornate Bella moth, Utetheisa ornatrix

Photo: Laura Gaudette via Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0)

Bella moths use poison to attract mates. Scientists are closer to finding out how – Research News

Imagine a man in your street who designs a brilliant defensive structure to put around your property to keep intruders out, and then invents a brilliant protective suit the intruder can wear so he or she can get through your defensive structure. He then designs an improvement in the defences that overcome the protection the suit provides, and, in a final display of madness, he brilliantly designs a remote control the intruder can use to switch off that improvement and so still burgle your property. He or she then uses the proceeds of the burglary to buy more suits and remote controls to give to friends and acquaintances so they can parasitise you too.

This is exactly the sort of mad inventor that creationists believe designs living organisms and the parasites that predate on them or, in the case of plants, eat their leaves, flowers and seeds. The plant gets given defensive chemicals that deter herbivores from eating them and even kills them if the deterrent doesn't work, and then it redesigns one of the organisms to eat the toxic plant not only with complete impunity, but to help it breed more successfully to produce more organisms to eat the toxic plant.

And it goes one step more and designs the organism so it uses the toxins to defend itself and even attract a mate! All very clever, but you can't help wondering what it’s doing it all for, exactly, and who's side is it on in these wasteful arms races of increasing complexity, like running up a down escalator in order to stand still.

An incomprehensible example of this (incomprehensible in terms of intelligent design; perfectly rational in terms of evolution by natural selection) was revealed a few days ago by researchers from the Department of Biophysics, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA together with colleagues from the Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA and the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA, who have shown how the Ornate Bella moth, Utetheisa ornatrix, detoxifies the deadly toxins, Pyrrolizidine alkaloids, used as a defence against being eaten by the rattlebox plant amongst others.

And, as a further example of idiot design, the rattlebox plant concentrates its toxin in the seeds - which makes them especially attractive to the bella moth caterpillars. A 'deterrent' that encourages predators to eat its seeds!

Malevolent Design - How a Bacterium Carries a Virus That Selectively Kills Male Insects And Only Allows Infected Females To Breed

How does a virus hijack insect sperm to control disease vectors and pests? | Penn State University

Wolbachia are a genus of bacteria that form a symbiotic relationship with about 50% of arthropod species, including insects and spiders but they can also manipulate the species for their own ends (in terms of breeding success). They are aided in this by a virus which is incorporated in their genome which has been shown to join forces with Wolbachia to ensure their own reproductive success in the form of females infected with the virus-bearing Wolbachia.

So completely have Wolbachia integrated with insects that one species of fruit fly has the entire Wolbachia genome incorporated into its own genome, making it, biologically, both bacterium and fruit fly.

One way Wolbachia ensure their own survival at the expense of the species of insect they infect is by making the sperm and egg incompatible if the female is not also a carrier of the right species of Wolbachia. And, to be on the safe side, two proteins produced by the virus break the sperm's DNA so any resulting embryo will be defective and will fail to develop. This ensures that only the females carrying the infection can breed, so increasing the Wolbachia and its virus in the gene pool.

The team who discovered this nasty little virus and how it acts selfishly, was co-led by Professor Seth R. Bordenstein, of the One Health Microbiome Center at Pennsylvania State University. They have published their findings in Science and described it in a Penn State News item.

But first, a little background on Wolbachia:

Creationism in Crisis - Like Humans, Bumblebees Learn Through Social Interaction And May Have Cumulative Culture

Bumblebees teaching each other to solve a complex puzzle

Buff-tailed Bumblebee, Bombus terrestris

Source: Wikipedia.

Bees master complex tasks through social interaction - Queen Mary University of London

A sacred Tenet of creationism is that we humans are a special creation by the creator of the universe who made everything just for us. They point to the many 'unique' traits and abilities of humans as evidence of this - the ability to teach and learn, to form cultures, even walking upright are frequently cited as examples. It's also a sacred Tenet of creationism that anything which might refute the sacred tenets of creationism must be ignore, hand-waved aside or misrepresented but never, ever acknowledged for what it is - a refutation of creationism.

So, we can expect one or more of those tactics for handling the cognitive dissonance that news that bumble bees can teach and learn and so have at least the basis for forming cumulative cultures. The news itself comes in the form of an open access research paper in Nature by a team Led by Dr Alice Bridges and Lars Chittka, Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary University of London.

The team showed that a complex, two-step task, which needed to be performed to receive a reward in the form of a sweet liquid could be learned by bees who were allowed to watch a trained 'demonstrator' perform the task. The bees not only learned how to perform the steps involved but that there was a reward to be had for doing so.

The 'demonstrators' had previously been trained by giving intermediate rewards as each stage was completed successfully, which were eventually withdrawn, leaving only the final reward. The experiment and its significance are explained in a Queen Mary University 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 - 250 Million Years of Butterfly And Moth Evolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creationism in Crisis - The Evolution of Batesian Mimicry in a New Zealand Stonefly

Similar ‘warning’ colouration of the non-toxic mimic Zelandoperla fenestrata stonefly (left), and cyanide-producing Austroperla cyrene (right).

A cyanide-producing Austroperla cyrene sits at the top of this picture, with a mimicking Zelandoperla fenestrata in the center and non-mimicking Zelandoperla fenestrata at the bottom.

Credit: University of Otago

When cheating pays – survival strategy of insect uncovered, News, University of Otago, New Zealand

I've written before about Batesian mimicry as an example of environment-driven evolution and how it depends on an evolutionary arms race - which makes no sense as the work of a single creator god, as creationists believe is responsible for the 'design' of all living organisms.

Batesian mimicry

Batesian mimicry is a fascinating concept in evolutionary biology named after the English naturalist Henry Walter Bates. It refers to a form of mimicry in which a harmless species closely resembles the appearance of a toxic or dangerous species to deceive predators. This phenomenon is commonly observed in the animal kingdom, particularly among insects, although it can also occur in other groups of organisms.

The key components of Batesian mimicry are:

1. Model Species: The toxic or harmful species that possesses some form of defense mechanism, such as toxicity, stinging, or bad taste. Predators learn to associate the distinct appearance of this model species with the negative consequences of attacking or consuming it.

The Humble Earwig - Not a Pest But a Kind And Caring Insect

The Humble Earwig

Not a Pest But A Kind and Caring Insect

Forficula auricularia

Credit: Pudding4brains/Wikipedia

Earwigs are the hero single mothers of the insect world – and good for your garden too

Of the more than 1000 species worldwide, only four are native to the UK, with a further three introduced species.

Earwigs are often regarded as garden pests because they can and sometimes do, damage growing plants and soft fruits such as strawberries, but what is not generally recognised is that they are predators on much more destructive pests such as aphids.

But there are a few things about these fascinating insects that mean they should command our respect and protection by leaving them undisturbed.