Unintelligent Design - Eels

Back in 2013, I wrote a blog about the European Eel for Creationist children, not realising then that all Creationists think like children, or at least all Creationists you are ever likely to encounter on the social media. It is a good introduction to an article about eels in The Conversation by Dr Kylie Soanes, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Australia. My article was written in the days when intelligent [sic] design advocates were still hoping to get away with pretending ID was real science, not fundamentalist Christianity in disguise.

How The Eel Was Designed

The European Eel, Anguilla anguilla

The European Eel (Anguilla anguilla) is a wonderful example of how God, sorry, the Intelligent Designer works.

One day the Intelligent Designer decided to make a strange creature that looked like a snake, but which lived in water like a fish. He used gills like he had used for other fish so they could breathe in water and which He had decided not to use for some other animals which live in water, like seals, whales and turtles and He decided to include some small scales on their skin which don't seem to have any purpose because he designed them with a tough, slimy skin, but obviously these scales weren't there by accident.

But His most brilliant idea was how they were going to breed. He made it so they needed to spend many years living in rivers and lakes and places like paddy fields and even sewers to put on enough weight so they could go on a very long journey across the Atlantic all the way to the Sargasso Sea near America to lay their eggs, so the young eels have to travel all the way back to Europe again. This is obviously much more sensible than just laying their eggs in the rivers where they live, like most other fish do.

To make this journey, He designed eels so that, come the time for breeding, they strip their bodies down to the bare essentials - basically just the equipment for swimming, a large store of fat for the journey and a pair of gonads for reproducing. They have to take up to fifteen years getting fat enough before they do the journey and then they digest their own digestive system to make themselves lighter. This is obviously much better than needing to bother with eating on the journey through an ocean teeming with the sort of food they had been eating in the rivers they grew up in. As any experienced back-packer will tell you, it's obviously much better to be really big and fat before you start a long journey to save you having to bother eating on the way, and then doing away with your digestive system to make you lighter.

In fact, He brilliantly designed them to look like you would expect if they had once been sea-living at a time when their spawning ground was much closer to Europe but now someone had moved it all the way to America as though they were moving the sea bed around. The fact that very many of them don't survive the journey to the Sargasso Sea is all part of the plan obviously because this ensures that only those best at swimming to the Sargasso Sea get rewarded with breeding - and you can't say fairer than that.

He also made sure that they have no hope of ever returning once they've spawned because they can't eat and have used up all their fat, and He had another brilliant plan for them to go to all this trouble so most of their offspring would be eaten by other things on their journey back to Europe just as though their real purpose was to be food for other creatures.

Then, in a brilliant final move, the Intelligent Designer had the brilliant idea of designing a parasitic nematode worm which used to live only in a Japanese relative of the European eel but which He has now changed slightly so it now infects 80-100% of European eels, making it difficult for them to use the swim-bladders he had given them to make swimming easier, so the European eel is now an endangered species, as the number of young reaching Europe from the Sargasso Sea is down to a mere 2% of its former numbers in some places. But then who wants a lot of those ghastly slimy eels around, eh?

You have to hand it to God the Intelligent designer when He can come up with designs like that, don't you. Obviously, nothing like that could be produced by a mindless, natural, undirected, purposeless process like that silly Charles Darwin invented.

Now for Dr. Soanes' article, reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here:

Creationism in Crisis - How The 'Designer' of Photosynthesis Tried to Improve It's Mistake and Failed Again

Back to the future of photosynthesis | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

A 3d cartoon depiction of the activated RuBisCO from spinach in open form with active site accessible. The active site Lys175 residues are marked in pink, and a close-up of the residue is provided to the right for one of the monomers composing the enzyme.

Credit: Ericlin1337 - Own work CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Evolution, of course, doesn't have an intelligent designer because it's a purely natural, non-sentient process involving nothing more that the operation of chemistry and physics in a selective environment. However, Creationists insist that nothing happens without god-magic and the involvement of a sentient directing entity, even though the existence of such an entity has never been demonstrated or explained, and there are no authenticated accounts of it ever making anything happen that couldn't have happened without it.

So, let’s look at the evolution of photosynthesis and especially the essential enzyme RuBisCo and the implications of recent research by a team from the Max-Planck-Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany in collaboration with scientists from the University of Singapore.

Malevolent Designer News - Now Creationism's Divine Malevolence is Also Killing Birds With a Virus!

What is avian flu, the disease afflicting viral TikTok emu Emmanuel?

Barnacle and white fronted geese arriving on the Island of Islay from Greenland.

Source: RSPB

The COVID-19 pandemic caused by variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is not the only viral pandemic the world is currently experiencing. Many of the world's birds, both domesticated and wild are dying from a virus known as avian flu that is related to the virus that causes influenza in humans. Like the SARS-C0V-2, virus, the avian flu virus comes in a variety of versions and mutates to give successive waves of infection and reinfection. Also like the SARS-CoV-2 virus, avian flu is zoonotic. Two varieties in particular, H1N5 and H7N9, can be caught by humans and can cause us serious illness and even death. Not all variants kill their bird victims; some will just make them very unwell. In the case of domestic hens, it will reduce egg-laying, causing economic damage to egg producers.

The UK bird charity, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) is also reporting devastation in some UK wild bird populations, especially waterfowl and seabirds.

In the following article, Professor Marta Hernandez-Jover, Professor in Veterinary Epidemiology and Public Health at Charles Sturt University, Australia, explains what avian flu is, and what measures are being put in place in Australia to prevent outbreaks. Australia is fortunate in that migratory geese, one of the main avian orders that spread the virus, do not migrate to Australia. The article from The Conversation is reprinted under a Creative Commons License, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here:

Creationism in Crisis - Another Bad Day for the Cult as Scientists Use the TOE to Understand Viral Diversity

Phylogenetic reconstruction of the global RNA virosphere

Source: Neri, Uri; Wolf, Yuri I. et al.(2022)
(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

NLM Researchers Build Understanding of the Virus Universe Using Metatranscriptome Mining

A large team of researchers from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and collaborators from multiple institutions and the RNA Virus Discovery Consortium, have discovered new bacteriophage viruses including a variety of new clades that shed light on the evolution of viruses.

The most notable discovery is the dramatic increase in the number and diversity of viruses infecting bacteria that are shown to account for a much greater fraction of RNA viruses than we previously thought.

Dr. Eugene. V. Koonin, PhD, a co-author
National Center for Biotechnology Information
National Library of Medicine
National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

Despite the repeated claims of Creationist frauds, there is no sign of the Theory of Evolution being abandoned in favour of a bronze Age superstition involving magic, an unproven entity with no known modus operandum, and 'unknowable mysteries', the scientists interpret their findings using the TOE as the established scientific theory which best explains biodiversity, without the need for anything other than the operation of natural processes.

The study was conducted by data mining the results of 5,150 diverse metatranscriptomes which together contained the sequenced RNA of 2.5 million RNA viruses. The discoveries include viruses from several new taxons including two groups which constitute entirely new phyla.

The scientists have published their findings in the online journal Cell:

Evolution News - Why Are There 'Living Fossils?'

The American horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus

From coelacanths to crinoids: these 9 'living fossils' haven't changed in millions of years

Here is a article that Creationists can use to make fools of themselves with by showing they don't understand the subject about which they consider themselves to be leading experts.

It is about the so-called 'living fossils' - species that have remained superficially unchanged for tens, even hundreds of millions of years. I say superficially because there is no way to know how much evolution has occurred because we don't have samples of the species' DNA from millions of years ago, so we only have the physical appearance to go by and a great deal of evolution happens in genes that control the physiology or soft tissue and birdsstructures, not in the hard body-parts that more easily fossilise.

The other thing that Creationists make fools of themselves with is their naive assumption that there must be some rule in the Theory of Evolution which says species evolve at a more or less constant rate, so remaining unchanged means the TOE is wrong, conveniently forgetting that the handful of 'living fossils' are dwarfed by the millions of species with evidence of evolutionary change in just a few million years, including all living and extinct mammals and birds.

In the following article, the first thing to note is that all the examples of 'living fossils' are marine creatures, most of which inhabit the deep ocean floor or even buried in it. Away from mid-ocean ridges and the subduction zones around the edges of land masses, this is one of the most stable environments on Earth.

Since the primary driver of evolution is environmental change and maladaptation, producing opportunities for environmental selectors to select for or against genetic variations, a stable environment and/or near perfect adaptation means there will be little or no pressure to evolve. This is not a fault with the theory but a confirmation of it, in that it predicts that environmental change will drive evolutionary change, so it follows that environmental stability will result in little or no evolutionary change.

Here then is a sample of these 'living fossils' in an article from The Conversation by Alice Clement, Research Associate in the College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University, Australia. It is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here:

Biodiversity News - Australia's Exotic Invertebrates

Mating Repsimus scarab beetles

Credit: Nick Porch

Photos from the field: zooming in on Australia’s hidden world of exquisite mites, snails and beetles | The Conversation

Most people will be familiar with Australia's unique set of mega- (and not so mega) fauna such as kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, dingoes, wombats, marsupial mice, and of course the egg-laying monotremes, the platypus and the echidna or spiny ant-eater, but how many people are aware of the equally unique and often bizarre array of invertebrates, apart from the dangerous spiders, that is?

In this article in The Conversation, 'Photos from the Field' series, from January 2021 Nick Porch, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Earth Science, Deakin University, Australia, shares some photographs of a small sample of the several hundred thousand uniquely Australian organisms, most of which will be almost completely unknown, even to Australians.

Creationists might like to ignore the bits about 150 million years, Gondwana and allusions to plate tectonics, in the explanation for why Australian bugs tend to be more closely related to South American bugs than those from New Zealand. Evidence of evolution on an old Earth will probably upset them.

The article is reprinted here under a Creative commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistence. The original can be read here:

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?

The Recent Improvement in the Great Barrier Reef Might Not Be What it Seems.

Hyde Reef on the central Great Barrier Reef. Scientists have recorded the highest levels of coral cover in 36 years in parts of the reef.

Photograph: Australian Institute of Marine Science

One of the most biodiverse marine environments on Earth is Australia's Great Barrier Reef which has been in the news recently as an ecosystem under severe threat from climate-change related problems such as global warming and severe tropical cyclones, as well as the expanding range of the Crown of thorns starfish, which feeds on living coral, destroying large areas of it.

However, recent news seems to indicate that the central and northern sections of the Great Barrier Reef are showing encouraging signs of recovery, although the southern section remains under threat.

But the news might not be as good as the pictures seem to indicate, as Dr. Zoe Richards, PhD, senior research fellow at Curtain University, Western Australia and Marine Invertebrate Curator, Western Australian Museum, explains in an article in The Conversation. Her article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Record coral cover doesn’t necessarily mean the Great Barrier Reef is in good health (despite what you may have heard)

Shutterstock

Zoe Richards, Curtin University

In what seems like excellent news, coral cover in parts of the Great Barrier Reef is at a record high, according to new data from the Australian Institute of Marine Science. But this doesn’t necessarily mean our beloved reef is in good health.

In the north of the reef, coral cover usually fluctuates between 20% and 30%. Currently, it’s at 36%, the highest level recorded since monitoring began more than three decades ago.

This level of coral cover comes hot off the back of a disturbing decade that saw the reef endure six mass coral bleaching events, four severe tropical cyclones, active outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish, and water quality impacts following floods. So what’s going on?

High coral cover findings can be deceptive because they can result from only a few dominant species that grow rapidly after disturbance (such as mass bleaching). These same corals, however, are extremely susceptible to disturbance and are likely to die out within a few years.

The Great Barrier Reef Long-Term Monitoring annual summary | AIMS.

The data are robust

The Great Barrier Reef spans 2,300 kilometres, comprising more than 3,000 individual reefs. It is an exceptionally diverse ecosystem that features more than 12,000 animal species, plus many thousand more species of plankton and marine flora.

The reef has been teetering on the edge of receiving an “in-danger” listing from the World Heritage Committee. And it was recently described in the State of the Environment Report as being in a poor and deteriorating state.

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Read more:
This is Australia's most important report on the environment's deteriorating health. We present its grim findings

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To protect the Great Barrier Reef, we need to routinely monitor and report on its condition. The Australian Institute of Marine Science’s long-term monitoring program has been collating and delivering this information since 1985.

Its approach involves surveying a selection of reefs that represent different habitat types (inshore, midshelf, offshore) and management zones. The latest report provides a robust and valuable synopsis of how coral cover has changed at 87 reefs across three sectors (north, central and south) over the past 36 years.

2018: A bare patch of reef at Jiigurru, Lizard Island in 2018 after most of the corals died in the 2016/2017 coral bleaching event.

Andy Lewis, Author provided.

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2022: By 2022, the same patch of reef was covered by a vibrant array of plating Acropora corals.

Andy Lewis, Author provided.

The results

Overall, the long-term monitoring team found coral cover has increased on most reefs. The level of coral cover on reefs near Cape Grenville and Princess Charlotte Bay in the northern sector has bounced back from bleaching, with two reefs having more than 75% cover.

In the central sector, where coral cover has historically been lower than in the north and south, coral cover is now at a region-wide high, at 33%.

The southern sector has a dynamic coral cover record. In the late 1980s coral cover surpassed 40%, before dropping to a region-wide low of 12% in 2011 after Cyclone Hamish.

The region is currently experiencing outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish. And yet, coral cover in this area is still relatively high at 34%.

“Mature coral coverage”?

Rapid increases in cover in parts of the northern and central #GreaBarrierReef since mass coral bleaching in 2016/7 are driven by larval recruitment and fast growth of juvenile weedy corals.

You can’t replace a dead 50 year-old coral in 5 years. https://t.co/bysXqu5dep

— Terry Hughes (@ProfTerryHughes) August 4, 2022

Based on this robust data set, which shows increases in coral cover indicative of region-wide recovery, things must be looking up for the Great Barrier Reef – right?

Are we being catfished by coral cover?

In the Australian Institute of Marine Science’s report, reef recovery relates solely to an increase in coral cover, so let’s unpack this term.

Coral cover is a broad proxy metric that indicates habitat condition. It’s relatively easy data to collect and report on, and is the most widely used monitoring metric on coral reefs.

The finding of high coral cover may signify a reef in good condition, and an increase in coral cover after disturbance may signify a recovering reef.

Acropora hyacinthus, a pioneering species of coral at Lizard Island.

Zoe Richards, Author provided

But in this instance, it’s more likely the reef is being dominated by only few species, as the report states that branching and plating Acropora species have driven the recovery of coral cover.

Acropora coral are renowned for a “boom and bust” life cycle. After disturbances such as a cyclone, Acropora species function as pioneers. They quickly recruit and colonise bare space, and the laterally growing plate-like species can rapidly cover large areas.

Fast-growing Acropora corals tend to dominate during the early phase of recovery after disturbances such as the recent series of mass bleaching events. However, these same corals are often susceptible to wave damage, disease or coral bleaching and tend to go bust within a few years.

Juvenile branching Acropora colonising bare space after a bleaching event.

Zoe Richards, Author provided

Inferring that a reef has recovered by a person being towed behind a boat to obtain a rapid visual estimate of coral cover is like flying in a helicopter and saying a bushfire-hit forest has recovered because the canopy has grown back.

It provides no information about diversity, or the abundance and health of other animals and plants that live in and among the trees, or coral.

Cautious optimism

My study, published last year, examined 44 years of coral distribution records around Jiigurru, Lizard Island, at the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef.

It suggested that 28 of 368 species of hard coral recorded at that location haven’t been seen for at least a decade, and are at risk of local extinction.

Lizard Island is one location where coral cover has rapidly increased since the devastating 2016-17 bleaching event. Yet, there is still a real risk local extinctions of coral species have occurred.

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Read more:
Almost 60 coral species around Lizard Island are 'missing' – and a Great Barrier Reef extinction crisis could be next

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While there’s no data to prove or disprove it, it’s also probable that extinctions or local declines of coral-affiliated marine life, such as coral-eating fishes, crustaceans and molluscs have also occurred.

Without more information at the level of individual species, it is impossible to understand how much of the Great Barrier Reef has been lost, or recovered, since the last mass bleaching event.

Based on the coral cover data, it’s tempting to be optimistic. But given more frequent and severe heatwaves and cyclones are predicted in the future, it’s wise to be cautious about the reef’s perceived recovery or resilience.



Zoe Richards, Senior Research Fellow, Curtin University

Climate Emergency News - Temperature Change Will Impact on Bumble Bees

Climate change negatively impacting bumblebees: Study - SFU News - Simon Fraser University

A stark reminder of the effects of climate change and the danger this represents to life on Earth, was published recently in the form of a study into the effects of global warming on the population of bumblebees in North America. The study was conducted by scientists from Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada, led by Hanna Jackson, in collaboration with scientists from the U.S.-based Pollinator Partnership, the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, and the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California.

Their findings were published, open access, in the Royal Society's Biology Letter

bumblebees are essential pollinators on which many plants depend for their reproduction and without which many plants would not produce the next generation. They are also essential for pollinating a number of human food crops from oilseed rape to fruit, so a significant loss of bumblebees would be economically catastrophic.

The Simon Fraser University press release explains the team's methodology and main findings:

Evolution News - How Brown Bears and Polar Bears Diverged into Different Species

The subfossil jawbone of a polar bear that lived 115,000 to 130,000 years ago in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. A genomic study includes an analysis of DNA extracted from a tooth attached to this jawbone, which is now housed at the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo.

Credit: Photo by Karsten Sund, Natural History Museum (NHM), University of Oslo

How species form: What the tangled history of polar bear and brown bear relations tells us - Graduate School of Education - University at Buffalo

A new study by scientists led by Charlotte Lindqvist at University at Buffalo (UB) in the U.S.; Luis Herrera-Estrella at the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity (LANGEBIO) in Mexico and Texas Tech University in the U.S.; and Kalle Leppälä at the University of Oulu in Finland has shown that the evolutionary divergence of brown bears, Ursus arctos, and polar bears, Ursus maritimus, into different species, was every bit as complex as that of hominins into the single extant species, Homo sapiens.

This illustrates how evolutionary divergence is often a far from straightforward process, with several periods of partial speciation, remixing and convergence and separation again until, as today, we can end up with two species that can still interbreed, indicating that barrier to hybridization have not yet fully evolved.

This, of course, is exactly what we would expect of a slow process over time, but not speciation events such as creationists wrongly believe scientists think is how evolution works. This is perhaps best illustrated with the simple analogy of one colour changes into another in a rainbow spectrum where it is impossible to say exactly where one colour ends and the next begins:

Where does the colour change?

The team used an expanded DNA dataset — including DNA from an ancient polar bear tooth — to tease out the details As the University at Buffalo news release explains:

Unintelligent Designer News - Another Stupid Arms Race Discovered

Highly venomous Cape cobra, Naja nivea, in threat posture

Source: Times Newspapers
Photo: Willem van Zyl

Primates vs cobras: how our last common ancestor built venom resistance - UQ News - The University of Queensland, Australia

A team of researchers from Queensland University, Australia, and Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK, led by Associate Professor Bryan Fry, has discovered evidence of an evolutionary arms race between Afro-Asian primates and venomous snakes, especially the cobras, which has given us an increased resistance to the neurotoxin in cobra venom, compared to other mammals and the primates of Madagascar where there are no venomous snakes and South America where venomous snakes are usually small, nocturnal and burrowing.

In doing so, they have also produced yet more evidence of the evolutionary relationship between the other African apes and Homo sapiens, who together form the Hominidae clade, sharing a common ancestor in which this resistance is thought to have evolved. In members of this clade, the resistance is especially marked, though not complete since cobra venom can still kill us.

As primates from Africa gained the ability to walk upright and dispersed throughout Asia, they developed weapons to defend themselves against venomous snakes, this likely sparked an evolutionary arms race and evolving this venom resistance.

This was just one of many evolutionary defences – many primate groups appear to also have developed excellent eyesight, which is thought to have aided them in detecting and defending themselves against venomous snakes.
But Madagascan Lemurs and Central and South American monkeys, which live in regions that haven’t been colonised by or come in close contact with neurotoxic venomous snakes, didn’t evolve this kind of resistance to snake venoms and have poorer eyesight.
It’s been long-theorised that snakes have strongly influenced primate evolution, but we now have additional biological evidence to support this theory.

Richard Harris, lead-author
PhD candidate
Venom Evolution Lab
University of Queensland
Biological Sciences, St. Lucia, Brisbane, Australia

Our movement down from the trees and more commonly on land meant more interactions with venomous snakes, thus driving the evolutionary selection of this increased resistance.

It is important to note that this resistance is not absolute – we are not immune to cobra venom, just much less likely to die than other primates.

We have shown in other studies that resistance to snake venoms comes with what’s known as a fitness disadvantage, whereby the receptors don’t do their normal function as efficiently, so there is a fine balance to be struck where the gain has to outweigh the loss.

In this case, partial resistance was enough to gain the evolutionary advantage, but without the fitness disadvantage being too taxing.

We are increasingly recognising the importance snakes have played in the evolution of primates, including the way our brain is structured, aspects of language and even tool use.

This work reveals yet another piece in the puzzle of this complex arms race between snakes and primates.

Associate Professor, Dr. Bryan Fry, team leader and supervising author
Venom Evolution Lab
University of Queensland
Biological Sciences, St. Lucia, Brisbane, Australia

According the Queensland University News:

The team studied various snake toxin interactions with synthetic nerve receptors, comparing those of primates from Africa and Asia with those from Madagascar – which doesn’t have venomous snakes – and those from the Americas – where the cobra-related coral snakes are small, nocturnal and burrowing. Team leader Associate Professor Bryan Fry said the study also revealed that in the last common ancestor of chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans, this resistance was sharply increased.

One of the problems to be overcome as a species evolves resistance to a neurotoxic venom, stems from the way these venoms work. In the case of cobra venom it contains α-neurotoxins which target nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, binding to them, so blocking these essential metabolic pathways. Any changes which modify these receptors, so making the α-neurotoxins less effective, will also reduce the efficiency of the pathway of which these receptors are a part, so there is an inevitable evolutionary trade-off between this cost and any benefits from increased resistance.

A similar phenomenon is involved in the evolutionary arms race between Garter snakes and rough-skinned newts, only in this case it is a snake evolving resistance to a toxin produced by a potential prey species. I used this as an example of any creator of this system indulging stupidly in an arms race with itself, in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax.

We see this same stupidity in the arms race between the primates and cobras, reaching its peak in the Hominidae.

The teams report is published open access in BMC Biology:

Abstract

Background
Snakes and primates have a multi-layered coevolutionary history as predators, prey, and competitors with each other. Previous work has explored the Snake Detection Theory (SDT), which focuses on the role of snakes as predators of primates and argues that snakes have exerted a selection pressure for the origin of primates’ visual systems, a trait that sets primates apart from other mammals. However, primates also attack and kill snakes and so snakes must simultaneously avoid primates. This factor has been recently highlighted in regard to the movement of hominins into new geographic ranges potentially exerting a selection pressure leading to the evolution of spitting in cobras on three independent occasions.

Results
Here, we provide further evidence of coevolution between primates and snakes, whereby through frequent encounters and reciprocal antagonism with large, diurnally active neurotoxic elapid snakes, Afro-Asian primates have evolved an increased resistance to α-neurotoxins, which are toxins that target the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. In contrast, such resistance is not found in Lemuriformes in Madagascar, where venomous snakes are absent, or in Platyrrhini in the Americas, where encounters with neurotoxic elapids are unlikely since they are relatively small, fossorial, and nocturnal. Within the Afro-Asian primates, the increased resistance toward the neurotoxins was significantly amplified in the last common ancestor of chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans (clade Homininae). Comparative testing of venoms from Afro-Asian and American elapid snakes revealed an increase in α-neurotoxin resistance across Afro-Asian primates, which was likely selected against cobra venoms. Through structure-activity studies using native and mutant mimotopes of the α-1 nAChR receptor orthosteric site (loop C), we identified the specific amino acids responsible for conferring this increased level of resistance in hominine primates to the α-neurotoxins in cobra venom.

Conclusion
We have discovered a pattern of primate susceptibility toward α-neurotoxins that supports the theory of a reciprocal coevolutionary arms-race between venomous snakes and primates.

Harris, R.J., Nekaris, K.AI. & Fry, B.G.
Monkeying around with venom: an increased resistance to α-neurotoxins supports an evolutionary arms race between Afro-Asian primates and sympatric cobras.
BMC Biol 19, 253 (2021). DOI: 10.1186/s12915-021-01195-x

Copyright: © 2021 The authors. Published by Springer Nature
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

It is facts like this that expose Intelligent [sic] Design as a hoax aimed at scientifically illiterate fools who will remain wilfully ignorant of the very many arms races in nature which are one of the main drivers in evolution. Nothing that could conceivably be described as intelligent would indulge in a competitive arms race with itself and nothing that could be described as omni-benevolent would create the predator-prey and parasite-host relationships which give rise to these arms races in the first place.

On the other hand, evolutionary arms races are the inevitable, and entirely predictable, result of mindless, unplanned, evolution by natural selection.

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Malevolent Designer News - Making a Nastier Crop Parasite

Cowpea witchweed, Striga gesnerioides

The witchweed Striga gesnerioides and the cultivated cowpea: A geographical and historical analysis of their West African distribution points to the prevalence of agro-ecological factors and the parasite’s multilocal evolution potential

Creationist mode:

For admirers of Creationism's malevolent designer, the sheer inventiveness of their beloved malevolence must be breath-taking as science discovers more and more of the lengths it has gone to in order to increase the suffering of its creations.

Here, for example, is a parasitic plant, the cowpea witchweed, Striga gesnerioides, which seems carefully designed to maintain the poverty and malnutrition endemic to parts of Africa, as though malaria, sleeping sickness and other exotic diseases, and regular droughts weren't enough. The lengths it has gone to in this endeavour is revealed by a paper from scientists working for the Université de Montpellier, France, the Université Dan Dicko Dankoulodo de Maradi, Maradi, Niger and the Université Paris Diderot, France.

The importance of the cowpea as a crop is explained in the introduction to that open access paper:

Biodiversity News - 4 New Species of Lichen Found

Micarea stellaris is one of the recently described lichen species. The name refers to ´star´ and comes from intensely shining crystals that are visible when studying it in polarised light.

Scale bar 1 mm.

Vuria, the highest peak in the Taita Hills, reaches to over two Kilometres heigh. Land use has fragmented mountain forests.

Photo: Aannina Kantelinen

Montane cloud forest, Taita Hills, Kenya

Photo: Petri Pellikka

Ngongoni antilopes benefit from the tree cover destroyed by elephants during the dry spells as it increases grasslands in the dry savannah plains surrounding verdant Taita Hills.

Photo: Petri Pellikka

Four lichen species new to science discovered in Kenyan cloud forests | University of Helsinki

The fragility of Earth's biodiversity was highlighted a few days ago by news that researchers from the University of Helsinki Finnish Museum of Natural History, Luomus and the National Museums of Kenya, have recently discovered four new species of lichen, all of the Micrarea genus, growing in the mountain forests in Kenya's Taita Hills. This unique environment is under threat from increasing land use which is fragmenting the forests.

From the University of Helsinki news release:

Why Biodiversity Matters - Anti-Cancer Chemical from Blue-Green Algae

The cyanobacteria species that produces gatorbulin-1, tentatively identified as Lyngbya confervoides, forms these reddish-green, hair-like structures which are a collection of connected single cells rather than a true multicellular organism.

Photo: Raphael Ritson-Williams

Scientists Find Blue-Green Algae Chemical with Cancer Fighting Potential | Smithsonian Voices | National Museum of Natural History | Smithsonian Magazine

I've written several articles recently showing why biodiversity is important because, if for no other reason, it represents a potential untapped resource of useful chemicals such as antibiotics, fungicides, etc.

Now here's another one, this time yielding a potential anti-cancer drug.

It was found by a team of scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and University of Florida in blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, tentatively identified as Lyngbya confervoides, in the sea off south Florida. These cyanobacteria are simple organisms that form hair-like filaments which look superficially like plants but which are just simple chains of single cells with no specialisation or division of labour.

Another Newly-Discovered Substance Shows Why Biodiversity is Important

Leaf-cutter ants

New antifungal compound from ant farms - American Chemical Society

Following close on my article a few days ago on the antibiotic found in the skin of an Australian toadlet and how this demonstrates the need to maintain a rich biodiversity if only for the resource of natural medicines yet to be discovered in nature, we have another example of an unlikely compound being found - within the nest of leaf-cutter ants.

This time, it's an antifungal compound, produced by bacteria that live on the attine ants (ants of the Atta genus of what are more commonly known as leaf-cutter ants that farm fungi on a substrate of moist chewed-up leaf matter). The ants use this antifungal compound, called attinimicin, to keep their crop and its substrate free from fungal parasites.

A Newly-Discovered Antibiotic Shows Why a Rich Biodiversity is Vital

Australian Western toadlet, Uperoleia mjobergii

Toadlet peptide transforms into a deadly weapon against bacteria | EMBL

Researchers at The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, Germany, together with colleagues from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology - have discovered a potential powerful new form of antibiotic - in the skin of an Australian Amphibian, the Western toadlet, Uperoleia mjobergii.

This discovery highlights the vital importance of maintaining a rich biodiversity on Earth because, if nothing else, we could be losing valuable sources of new medicines and antibiotics.

It consists of a polypeptide (a short chain of amino acids) that, when they come into contact with the cell membrane of a bacterium, change to become powerful bactericides. The researchers found that the peptide self-assembles into a unique fibrous structure, which via a sophisticated structural adaptation mechanism can change its form in the presence of bacteria to protect the toadlet from infections.

Stupid Designer - Oak Joke

It always amuses me how creationists often resort to "It's all around you! You only have to open your eyes and look!", when asked for evidence of design in nature.

The simple truth is that if you really open your eyes and look, you find abundant evidence of stupidity in 'design' in nature. Even leaving aside the obvious evidence of callous indifference to suffering which if it were evidence of intent, would also be evidence of grotesque malevolence, there is abundant evidence 'all around you' that there is only dumb, unthinking and unplanned... I was going to say stupidity, but even that implies some sort of inept intent and culpability. It's just unthinking; literally mindless!

Walking our grandson to school this morning we came across this tree in the photographs. From the leaves and bark it looks to me like a species of oak. It's not the usual English oak, so I don't know what species it is, but the species isn't important. What is important is the fantastically wasteful method is uses to reproduce. Who in their right mind would regard this as an intelligent design?

Over it's lifetime, a tree needs to produce just one tree for the population to remain stable. Just a single tree over a lifetime of maybe a couple of hundred years!

You would expect good design to be efficient design. Who in their right mind would buy bread from a baker who is so bad at baking bread that you need to buy two, let alone tens or hundreds of thousands of loaves, just to get a slice that's fit to eat?

How Evolution Works - Squirrels and Pine Martens

Europen red squirrel, Sciurus vulgaris

Population crash in an invasive species following the recovery of a native predator: the case of the American grey squirrel and the European pine marten in Ireland | SpringerLink

Sometimes, evolution can produce intriguing and unexpected results. At first glance it may be hard to see why introducing a predator can result in an increase in the population of a species. This is especially pleasing when the species benefiting is a charming and endangered species, the European red squirrel and the predator is an almost equally beautiful member of the stoat family, the pine marten.

So, having been away from blogging for a couple of weeks with other distractions, it gives me considerable pleasure to write about this open access paper, albeit from 2014, which reports just that from Ireland.

Another of Those 'Non-existent' Transitional Forms!

Artist's impression of the amphibious ichthyosaur, Cartorhynchus lenticarpus, crawling over dry land

Credit: University of California at Davis.
Photograph: Stefano Broccoli/PA

A basal ichthyosauriform with a short snout from the Lower Triassic of China : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

I'm beginning to wonder if creationists are using a private definition of 'non-existent'; a definition that includes not only existent but lots of examples and evidence of existence. It's one of the weirdest aspects of creationism that relies so heavily on simple, repetitive denial of the evidence and the assertion that what can be clearly seen just isn't there, and yet it is firmly believed by so many people.

Here, for example, is yet another example of one of those transitional fossils that creationist fraud tell their willing dupes almost daily do not exist, even claiming that 'evolutionists' have been searching for years for one and have never found any. To be fair, this one was only reported a little over a year ago, so creationist frauds probably won't have thought up an excuse to dismiss it yet, so won't have mentioned it on one of their disinformation sites.

Nature Running Rings Around Creationists

'Fairy-Rings' in Western Australia

Discovery of fairy circles in Australia supports self-organization theory.

The two sacred chants of the creation industry are, "You can't get order from chaos, so order implies design!" and "Design needs a designer!" They are careful always to avoid saying 'biblical god' instead of 'designer' because they still like to pretend people don't know this is fundamentalist biblical creationism masquerading as science, of course.

Anyone who has seen a snowflake and knows that all the millions of different 'designs' of snowflakes all arise spontaneously from the chaotic distribution of water molecules in air under nothing more than the operation of physics and chemistry will know that claim is false but, as with so many other claims of the creation industry, being false is never seen as a reason not to keep repeating it.