Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Home In On Evolution Of Photosynthesis 1.75 Billion Years Ago

Image of Navifusa majensis, a microfossil from the McDermott Formation in Australia. This 1.75 billion-year-old microfossil contains thylakoids, which identify it as a cyanobacterium.

Credit: Emmanuelle Javaux

Images of N. majensis microfossils.

Demoulin, C.F., Lara, Y.J., Lambion, A. et al.(2024)

The evolution of photosynthesis better documented thanks to the discovery of the oldest thylakoids in fossil cyanobacteria

Way back in the dim and distant past in that vast expanse of pre-'Creation Week' history of life on Earth, simple bacteria were evolving a way to use the energy in sunlight to turn the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into the basic building block of carbohydrates, glucose.

The process that was evolving was destined to transform life on Earth when the 'cyanobacteria' took up residence in archaea and turned them into simple algae, the progenitors of all plant-life on earth and responsible for so much greenery away from desert and polar regions.

And now scientists working at the Early Life Traces & Evolution laboratory of the Astrobiology Research Unit at Liège University (ULiège), Belgium have pushed back the earliest date for these pioneer bacteria in the fossil record to 1.75 Billion years by identifying thylakoids membranes, essential for early photosynthesis, in microfossils in rock formations in Australia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Canada.

Their discovery is explained in a ULiège press release:

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Show LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) Lived 4.32-4.52 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Figure 1: A schematic tree of life with the primary domains, the Archaea and Bacteria shown in purple and blue, respectively and the secondary domain, Eukaryotes in green. The figure highlights key nodes in the tree of life that have been calibrated against absolute time scales of Earth history. Estimates are given in Ga referring to billions of years (or giga annum).

Looking for ‘LUCA’ and the timing of cellular evolution - NIOZ

My previous two blog posts dealt firstly with the discovery of Neanderthal art in a cave in France which had been sealed with river debris since at least 40,000 years before creationism's supposed 'Creation Week' and secondly with the discovery of fossil trilobites in Thailand in rocks independently dated to about 490 million years before 'Creation Week'.

This one is bound to send creationists into deep denialism, shouting abuse at the fact and bearing false witness against the scientists who discovered it; it is the dating of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), i.e., the primitive free-living organism from which all life on Earth is descended, to between 4.32 and at the most 4.52 billion years ago, in other words, to soon after Earth was really formed.

This of course means that abiogenesis occurred quite quickly once Earth had coalesced from the accretion disc around the new sun and had recovered from the collision with another minor planet which gave rise to the moon and tilted Earth on its axis.

Biologists Tara Mahendrarajah of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) and senior author Anja Spang discovered this, in collaboration with colleagues from Universities in Bristol, Hungary and Tokyo.

The research is published open access in Nature Communications and is explained in an NIOZ press release entitled "Looking For 'LUCA' and the timing of cellular evolution":

Creationism in Crisis - Complex Life Evolved 2.4 Billion Years Before The Mythical 'Creation Week' - And Another Gap Closes...

Nodules of microfossilierous black chert are scattered throughout a rock outcrop.

Credit: Provided by Erica Barlow.
All Rights Reserved.

Microfossils are contained within black chert like the ones seen here.

Credit: Professor Erica V. Barlow. All Rights Reserved.

Window to the past: New microfossils suggest earlier rise in complex life | Penn State University

In that vast passage of time before the mythical "Creation Week" when 99.97% of Earth History occurred, some events that were highly significant for the evolution of life on Earth were happening. One of these was the Great Oxidation Event or GOE, which was to change the course of evolutionary history and put it on a trajectory that led to the evolution of multicellularity and to all the biodiversity of multicellular plants, fungi and animals that we see today.

The GOE happened when proliferating cyanobacteria, which had been evolving for a billion years or more, started using photosynthesis to create sugar from carbon dioxide, water and solar energy, and pollute the atmosphere with their toxic waste, oxygen. It was a major environmental change, causing Earth's first mass extinction. To anyone who understands the link between environmental change and evolution, it won't come as a surprise to learn that it was accompanied by a major evolutionary change in living organisms - the change from prokaryote to eukaryote cells.

What and when was the Great Oxidation Event in Earth's history, and what were its consequences for life on Earth? The Great Oxidation Event, often abbreviated as GOE, was a significant period in Earth's history during which there was a substantial increase in atmospheric oxygen levels. It is estimated to have occurred approximately 2.4 billion to 2.3 billion years ago, in the Proterozoic Eon, specifically during the Paleoproterozoic era. The consequences of the Great Oxidation Event for life on Earth were profound and multifaceted:

Creationism in Crisis - How Microscopic Organisms Were Evolving Half a Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fossil plankton from half a billion years ago. These tiny algae measure much less than a millimetre in size. They evolved their colonial structure to avoid being eaten by early animals.

Credit: THP Harvey

Algae-like fossils show colonial arrangement"

Bizarre new fossils shed light on ancient plankton | News | University of Leicester

A scientist at the University of Leicester, UK, has discovered a new type of fossil, that lived half a billion years ago in the Cambrian Era. It resembles an algae but shows evidence of the beginnings of colonial existence as groups of cells joined together to form larger masses.

It was part of the Cambrian biota which evolved at a time of increasing competition between predatory and prey species, after multicellular life had evolved motility and the ability to hunt and consume other life forms, so exterminating the Ediacaran biota that preceded it.

Evolving the ability to group together into larger masses could have happened because doing so made it harder for a predator to consume the algae-like organisms.

In their obsessive search for something to discredit the Theory of Evolution, creationists often abandon one or more of their basic dogmas, confident that their target dupes won't realise they don’t have a coherent set of ideas with which to counter the vast body of science that established the TOE beyond a shadow of doubt.

This cavalier approach to truth also demonstrates the truism that there is no truth agenda in creationism; it’s all about recruiting more people into the cult in the childish belief that a fantasy becomes more and more true, as more and more people are fooled into believing it - a childish way of seeking safety in numbers.

A classic example of this is the absurd claim that the so-called 'Cambrian Explosion', which actually lasted several million years, was a literal explosion of life forms that arose overnight without ancestors. They believe this shows the work or a creator and simultaneously refutes the idea of common origins and the evolution of multicellular life from single-celled organisms.

And of course, it abandons the notion of a 10,000-year-old Earth and the mythical account in Genesis of how and when life on Earth was created, in which there is no mention of the Cambrian biota or anything resembling it.

First, a little background to the era in which these newly-discovered organisms lived:

Unintelligent Design News - The Needless Complexity of Acoels-Microalgae Symbiosis

Acoel, a primitive flatworm-like multicellular marine organism

Photo: Christopher Laumer

A simple, multicellular, acoel.

Shining a light on tiny, solar-powered animals | Hokkaido University

Let's step into fantasy land and assume the creationist superstition of an intelligent [sic] designer is true for a moment.

Once upon a time this designer designed photosynthesis and put it in the cyanobacteria, which meant they were able to live on sunlight and carbon dioxide (CO₂whilst giving off oxygen as a waste product. It didn't do a particularly decent job of it and included probably the least efficient known enzyme, ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCo), but that’s another story.

Later on, it decided simple plants called algae also needed to live on sunlight and CO₂, so what did it do? Instead of doing what any normal intelligent designer would do and give them the same process it gave to the cyanobacteria, it put lots of cyanobacteria inside the algae, where they became the chloroplasts! Apparently, the simple solution wasn't complex enough.

Later on, this same designer decided a group of primitive multicellular marine flatworm-like organisms called acoels also needed to live on sunlight and CO₂, so what did it do? Did it give them the same process it had designed for the cyanobacteria? Of course not! Did if put cyanobacteria into the cells of the acoels like it had the algae? Of course not! Those would be simple solutions to the problem.

This time it didn’t even needlessly increased the complexity of acoels by putting whole algae, containing the cyanobacteria, inside the acoel cells. It went for an even more complex solution. Bizarrely, it actually designed the acoels to find and capture photosynthetic algae and insert them into their own cells!

So much for creationists superstitions and their idiotic insistence that maximal complexity is evidence of intelligent design, not minimal complexity, as any normal intelligent designer would design for. Needless complexity is actually evidence for unintelligent design.

Malevolent Designer News - How A Deadly Superbug Is 'Designed' To Make Us Sick

Staphylococcus aureus

CDC

Scanning electron micrograph of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria being engulfed by an immune cell known as a neutrophil.

Credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health

Researchers discover genes behind antibiotic resistance in deadly superbug infections | Doherty Website

Scientists based at the Docherty Institute, Melbourne University, Victoria, Australia have discovered just how devious any designer of the deadly super bug, Staphylococcus aureus, also known as Golden staph, would need to have been to come up with such a clever way to make us sick and die.

Curiously, for people who purport to worship the putative designer of all living things, creationists would have us believe that the designer is just such a mendacious malevolence, rather than have us believe that a natural process such as evolution by natural selection is responsible for parasites and the way they evade our immune systems - also, so creationists claim, designed by the same designer, making it look like a bumbling incompetent amnesiac than a supremely intelligent deity.

First, a brief background on S. aureus and MRSA:

Creationism in Crisis - A Newly-Discovered Non-Genetic Mode for Inheritance, But It's No Comfort For Creationists

Because babies acquire their first gut microbes passing through their mother’s birth canal, mothers’ microbiomes form the basis of their offspring’s.

Photo: Sarah Chai/Pexels

Hardship affects the gut microbiome across generations | UCLA

Human gut microbiome

Source

The old scientific debate from the early 19th century between Darwinian evolution and Lamarckian evolution all hinged on whether characteristics acquired after birth could be inherited by offspring, as Lamarck thought, or whether what we inherit from our parents is a variation (within limits) of what they inherited from their parents:

Darwinian and Lamarckian evolution are two contrasting theories of evolution that were proposed in the past. Though both sought to explain the process of biological change over time, they differ in their fundamental mechanisms and assumptions.

1. Darwinian Evolution (Theory of Natural Selection):
   • Proposed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in the mid-19th century.
   • Central concept: Natural selection is the main driving force behind evolution.
   • Mechanism: Variation exists within populations, and individuals with traits better suited to the environment are more likely to survive and reproduce. Over time, these advantageous traits become more common in the population, while less favorable traits are selected against.
   • Inheritance of acquired characteristics: Darwinian evolution does not rely on the inheritance of traits acquired during an organism's lifetime. Instead, it is based on the passing down of genetic information from parents to offspring.
   • Example: Consider a population of giraffes with varying neck lengths. If the environment favors individuals with longer necks (e.g., taller trees for feeding), those with longer necks have a survival advantage and are more likely to pass on their long-necked genes to the next generation.
2. Lamarckian Evolution (Theory of Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics):
   • Proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the early 19th century.
   • Central concept: Evolution is driven by an organism's effort to adapt to its environment and the inheritance of acquired traits.
   • Mechanism: Lamarck proposed that if an organism acquires new characteristics or traits during its lifetime due to its environment's demands, these acquired traits can be passed on to its offspring.
   • Example: Lamarck suggested that if a giraffe stretches its neck throughout its lifetime to reach higher leaves, the elongated neck acquired during its life will be passed on to its offspring, leading to the gradual evolution of longer-necked giraffes over generations.

The key difference between the two theories lies in their view on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Darwinian evolution relies on natural selection acting on existing genetic variation, while Lamarckian evolution suggests that acquired traits during an individual's lifetime can be inherited by their offspring, driving evolutionary change. Lamarckian evolution, however, has been largely discredited by modern genetics and molecular biology, as it does not align with the principles of inheritance through genes and DNA. Instead, the modern understanding of evolution is based on the principles proposed by Darwin, which include the processes of mutation, genetic variation, and natural selection acting on heritable traits.

ChatGPT3 "What is the difference between Darwinian and Lamarckian evolution?" [Response to user request]
Retrieved from https://chat.openai.com/

That debate has now been opened up again in an unexpected way with the news that an international team of scientists led by UCLA psychologists has shown that information produced during hardship suffered by a woman during pregnancy can be passed on to her baby via its microbiome.

Malevolent Designer News - How Food Poisoning Must Look Intelligently Designed to a Creationist

Scanning electron micrograph of Providencia alcalifaciens

Source: Wikipedia (Public domain)

Providencia alcalifaciens growing on culture medium

New insights on bacteria that causes food poisoning | Osaka Metropolitan University

The thing about believing in intelligent design, if that's what Christian and Islamic creationists genuinely do, is that you have to believe the bad stuff is designed by the designer of the good stuff because your religion only allows you to believe in one supreme designer, or you have to believe there is some other entity or force capable of intelligently designing things against which your putative supreme designer is powerless.

The other entity or force is capable of altering your supreme designer's plans at will and there is not a thing the supreme designer can do about it. Even the bizarre and morally repugnant blood sacrifice of its own son didn't give it sufficient power to overcome this rival designer, apparently.

The logic then of insisting there is only one intelligent designer is that the same designer that designs parasites that make us sick, designed our immune system to protect us from its malevolent designs. It needs a private definition of the word 'intelligent' to define that as intelligent design.

As this latest piece of research shows, some bacteria, in this case those that cause food poisoning not only have genes that produce the toxins that make us sick have also been designed to share these genes even with other species, and creationists dogma dictates that creationists believe this can't have evolved by a mindless process, so must be the design by ab intelligence that can only be described as malevolent.

The research was conducted by scientists at the Graduate School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Osaka Prefecture University, Osaka, Japan, with colleagues from the School of Environment and Life Sciences, Independent University Bangladesh (IUB), Bashundhara, Dhaka, Bangladesh and the Department of Pediatrics, Mizushima Central Hospital, Okayama, Japan.

The work is explained in a brief press release from Osaka Metropolitan University: