YEC Failure News - Science Again Refutes YECism Without Even Trying

Enormous volumes of floodwater from the Missoula megafloods once poured over Dry Falls, which stretches 3.5 miles wide and drops 400 feet to a plunge pool now fed by groundwater.

Photo: Tamara Pico

Towering cliffs carved by the Missoula megafloods are found throughout the Channeled Scablands in eastern Washington.

Photo by Tamara Pico

Tilting of Earth’s crust governed the flow of ancient megafloods

Geologists led by Tamara Pico, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at University of California, Santa Cruz, have explained how the formation known as the Channeled Scablands, Washington, were formed in a series of cataclysmic floods called the Missoula megafloods. Although these were massive, nevertheless they were local to what is now Eastern Washington.

YECs often point excitedly at the effects of this water erosion as evidence of a global flood, just as they claim the Grand Canyon is, being too parochial to distinguish between a part of the USA and the entire planet. But the scientists have shown how this carving of long, deep channels and towering cliffs was caused by the changing weight of the ice sheets as they retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, causing the entire landscape to tilt and so changing the course of the megafloods.

As the UC Santa Cruz news release explains:

Malevolent Designer News - How Ebola is Designed to Hit Back Weeks, Months or Years After You Think You're Over It

Ebola can hide in your brain fluid and reactivate long after you think you're over it

Image credit: Maciej Frolow via Getty Images

Ebola Lurking in Brain Fluid Kills Monkeys Weeks After Recovery | The Scientist Magazine®

News this week that should awe and amaze devotees of the malevolent creator Creationists like to imagine creates everything and designs any modifications needed to its parasites to keep them making people suffer and die because a mythical couple ate one of its apples.

It is the news that the Ebola virus has been designed to hide in the fluid that surrounds, protects and nourishes our brain, from where it can launch a fresh attack many weeks after you think you've recovered from an earlier attack. Clearly, the divine malevolence is not going to give up easily in its determination to make as many people sick and die as possible, especially those living in West Africa. That'll teach them to think their immune systems, together with modern medical science, can beat it at its nasty little game.

Research published in Science Translational Medicine a few days ago explained how it performs this masterstroke. The study was carried out by a team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), led by Xiankun (Kevin) Zeng, Ph.D.

According to the USAMRIID new release:

Evolution News - A Little More is Added to the Human Evolution Story

UB 10749 vertebral body. (a) Superior view; (b) posterior view; (c) inferior view; (d) anterior view.

Prehistoric Migrations: New study presents ancient human vertebra discovered in Jordan Valley | Bar-Ilan University

A little more clarity was added to the story of archaic hominin migration out of Africa and into Eurasia with the publication few days ago in Scientific Reports, of the findings of a team of archaeologists led by researchers from Bar-Ilan University, and including specialists from Ono Academic College, The University of Tulsa, and the Israel Antiquities Authority.

It was the discovery that a 1.5 million-year-old fossilised vertebrae found at 'Ubeidiya, in the Jordan Valley near Kibbutz Beit Zera, in 1966, was that of large-bodied species of Homo aged about 6-12 years old as determined by the characteristic pattern of ossification. In adulthood, this individual would have been considerably bigger than the hominins found in Georgia and is more similar to archaic hominins found in East Africa, so supports the idea of successive waves of different species of hominin migrating out of Africa via the Levantine corridor.

From the Bar-Ilan University press release:

Trumpanzee QAnon Fruitloop News - Update on Covidiot Cirsten Weldon's COVID-19 Death

Cirsten Weldon, Pro-Trump, Antivaxx QAnon conspiracist.
Died of COVID-19, 04 Jan, 2022.

Cirsten Weldon, a prominent Trumpanzee and QAnon conspiracist and antivaxxer, who earned her living tell gullible fools that only idiots get vaccinated, died of COVID-19 on January 4, 2022, in Camarillo, California.

Her fellow conspiracy theorists have now dreamed up an even more preposterous conspiracy theory: that she is still alive and in 'protective custody' having faked her own death. I wonder if, like Elvis, she'll turn up working in a chip shop near you, in the not too distant future.

Is there no lower limit to the credulity of these idiots? Certainly QAnon hasn't found it yet. They even think Trump was a competent POTUS!

To begin with, as I reported at the time:

Hypocrisy News - Another Sex Scandal Rocks the French Catholic Church

Archbishop Michel Aupetit (former) Archbishop of Paris
Relationship with a woman was 'ambiguous'

© Ludovic Marin / AFP

Pope accepts Paris archbishop's resignation over "ambiguous" relationship

Probably the last thing the French Catholic Church wanted right now was another sex scandal involving a senior cleric, but that's just what they've got in the form of Archbishop Michel Aupetit, (former) Archbishop of Paris, who has resigned following the revelation that he had a sexual relationship with a women, despite his vow of celibacy and his requirement that all those under him in his archdiocese take the same vow.

The story of the consensual relationship was exposed by Le Point magazine. Aupetit denied that he had had a sexual relationship with the woman but told Le Point that the relationship was 'ambiguous' - a neat euphemism for clandestine sexual relations with a woman outside marriage and contrary to his oath as an ordained Catholic priest.

This came on top of the recent report which revealed that 3,000 French Catholic priests had sexually abused more than 200,000 children over the past 70 years and that there had been a widespread, systematic cover up. When abuse by lay members of Catholic schools and other institutions was taken into account, the number of abused children, almost all of which were young boys, rose to some 330,000.

Christian Bigotry News - A New 'Journal' to Try to Make Religion Look Less Hateful

New journal will spotlight queer and trans religious studies scholarship | News

In an effort to alter the general perception that religions, especially Christianity and Islam, are fundamentally hostile to anyone who doesn't fit their strict definitions of sexuality and conform to their strict rules on permitted sexual relationships, a couple of Christian theology professors have founded a new 'Journal' which will concentrate on publishing articles and papers exploring 'the full range of rich and complex connections between religion, gender, and sexuality'.

The journal, to be called QTR: A Journal of Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion, has been founded by Melissa M. Wilcox, a religious studies professor from University of California, Riverside (UCR) and Joseph Marchal, a religious studies professor at Ball State University in Indiana.

According to the UCR news release:

It's a Miracle! Not a Single Red Face as Lourdes Reopens After Closing for the Coronavirus Pandemic!

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

The shrine to Bernadette Soubirous, Lourdes, France

Lourdes resurrected: grotto reopens to pilgrims after two year Covid closure

Without the slightest sign of irony, the Catholic Church in France has re-opened the Lourdes faith-healing scam in the Hautes-Pyrénées region, which had been closed because of the Coronavirus pandemic. Lourdes, it may be remembered, sells quack cures for all manner of afflictions and illnesses, but is powerless to prevent people catching COVID-19, apparently.

The grotto was officially reopened on February 11, on the anniversary of the date in 1858 on which a young peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, or Sobirós, in the local language, Occitan, then spoken in the Languedoc region of France, whom many townspeople, including her own father, thought was mentally disturbed, claimed to have seen a vison of the Virgin Mary.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Beloved Sadist Designed Ovarian Cancer to Kill More Women

Killer T cells (red) and helper T cells (green) guarding tumour cells (light blue).

Image: Anniina Färkkilä

The secret hideouts of ovarian cancer revealed – Findings boost the development of precision therapies | University of Helsinki

Creationist mode:

In Finland in an average year, 550 women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer and 320 of them will die from it. Now researchers at Helsinki University Hospital have discovered why ovarian cancers are proving to be unresponsive to the latest immunotherapies which are giving good results in the treatment of other cancer - ovarian cancers have been designed to be good at hiding from our immune systems.

They do it by tricking the immune system into actively protecting them! Brilliant, eh?

And this was the immune system the same intelligent [sic] designer supposedly gave us to protect us from its nastier little creations, such as viruses, bacteria, fungi and cancers that it designed to make us suffer and die from. Or so Creationists who argue that noting in nature happens by chance or by a mindless, undirected process such as evolution by natural selection, but is the deliberate creation of an intelligent [sic] designer, have to believe.

Creationist mode:

So much for the childish superstitions and fairy tales that abound in fundamentalist religions.

The news release from Helsinki University explains the science:

Human Evolution - Modern Humans Were In Europe 54,000 Years Ago

Grotte Mandarin, Vallée du Rhône, France

© Ludovic Slimak

Neronian Points

© Laure Metz and Ludovic Slimak

Evidence of Europe’s first Homo sapiens found in French cave

Scientists led by Dr Ludovic Slimak of the Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and including Professor Chris Stringer, Research Leader in Human Evolution at the Natural History Museum in London, have discovered evidence of the earliest modern humans (Homo sapiens) in western Europe from a cave, known as Grotte Mandrin, in France’s Rhône Valley.

The date of this find, at 54,000 years pushes the first recorded presence of H. sapiens in Europe back by a bout 10,000 years. The evidence is in the form of a deciduous upper molar from a modern human child.

Apart from the early date for this fossil, other dental remains show a pattern of alternating

Missing Link News - A Triple Whammy for Half-Baked Creationists. How Sweet!

Mystery of sweetpotato origin uncovered, as missing link plant found by Oxford research | University of Oxford

Here is one of those scientific discoveries that should have every Creationist covering their eyes and ears and looking the other way, or simply invoking some wackadoodle conspiracy theory in order to dismiss it. What they won't do, is incorporate the new knowledge and adjust their opinion accordingly.

Their problem is because the discovery shatters three of their most cherished dogmas:

1. 'Macro-evolution' (i.e. a new taxon arising) is impossible.
2. No new information can arise by mutation.
3. There are no transitional forms.

The discovery is one of the parent species of the sweetpotato, Ipomoea batatas, an important food crop whose ancestry was unknown.

The problem was that the sweetpotato is a hexaploid plant, having six copies of each chromosome, instead of the usual two, in other words, its entire genome has been trebled. Polyploidy is common in plants and is a common way new species arise because a polyploid individual cannot normally interbreed with either of its parents. The problem was that there were no suitable candidate species for the parents of the sweetpotato - until now.

The normal way a polyploid species arises is because of a failure in the normal process which reduces the genome by half in each the gametes, which results in a gamete having the entire genome. If two of these gametes (pollen and ovule) happen to form a zygote, a tetraploid individual can be the result. The mystery was how a hexaploid species arose in the case of the sweetpotato. The assumption was that a tetraploid gamete from a tetraploid plant in which the reduction stage had failed must have fused with a diploid gamete from a diploid plant in which the reduction had also failed.

The problem was that there were no known tetraploid members of the Ipomoea genus so there was no known intermediate stage between diploidy and hexaploidy.

The University of Oxford news item explains:

Malevolent Designer News - God Still Hates Frogs!

Californian red-legged frog, Rana draytonii

Photo: Conservación de Fauna del Noroeste

The Frogs of Baja California | The UCSB Current

Creationist mode:

Long-term readers of this blog my recall how I wrote about a fungal infection, chytridiomycosis, that is devastating populations of frogs and other amphibians throughout the world. I concluded that, if as Creationists claim, these organisms are intelligently designed by a god, to do exactly what they do, the only conclusion was that this putative god must hate frogs and is trying to exterminate them, without going to the extremes it went to when it decided to exterminate another of its mistakes - humans - when in a fit of pique and a loss of self-control, it drowned everything else too.

I also wrote about the disease in my popular, illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: How Nature's God is not Good.

In that earlier blog from October 2013, I described how scientists had discovered just how clever the designer of the fungus had been. It had taken a common, normally harmless soil fungus of the widespread chytrid family, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) and modified it to not only infect the skin of amphibians but to paralyse their immune systems too, making it easier to kill its victims by thickening their skin so they are no longer able to breathe through it, and then use their dead bodies to make more fungi, to kill more amphibians. Sheer, genius, eh?

Now, nine years later, scientists working for the University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA (UC Santa Barbara), Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Tijuana, Mexico and Conservación de Fauna del Noroeste, A.C., Ensenada, Baja California, have discovered that, not only is the devastation continuing in both Southern California and Baja California but that there is something going on in Baja California that is enabling Bd to hit the frogs there much harder than it is hitting them in Southern California, despite the fact that the species are the same and the environment is very similar.

From the UCSB news release:

Covidiot News - Two More Very Good Reason to Be Vaccinated

As though any more evidence were needed, two papers out recently show just why it is important to get vaccinated, and, if necessary, boosted against the virus.

SARS-CoV-2COVID-19 infections increase risk of heart conditions up to a year later – Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

The first comes from Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, USA where, by analysing federal health data, researchers have found that people who have had COVID-19 are at increased risk of developing cardiovascular complications within the first month to a year after infection.

According to the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis:

Malevolent Designer News - How a Fungus and a Bacterium Work Together to Make Us Sick

The fungus Rhizopus germinates and forms hyphae as part of the infection process.

How do pathogens learn to be pathogens: partnerships between microbes leading to human disease | University of Exeter

Creationist mode:

Here is a discovery that should thrill devotees of the putative divine malevolence that intelligently [sic] designs the pathogens that make us sick. It is published in an open access paper in the journal Current Biology, by a team of researchers from the Universities of Birmingham, Exeter and Sheffield, led by Dr. Herbert Itabangi of Birmingham University School of Biosciences' Institute of Microbiology and Infection. It is the mechanism which enables a soil fungus to become pathogenic by allying itself with a bacterium in a symbiotic relationship.

The soil fungus is Rhizopus which, when it plays host to the bacterium, Ralstonia, can avoid being consumed by a predatory amoeba, Dictyostelium. Using the same trick, Rhizopus is able to avoid being consumed and destroyed by the cells of our immune system and so become pathogenic on humans and cause mucormycosis, and in particular the condition known as "black fungus", a complication of COVID-19.

As the Exeter University news release explains:

How Science Works (And Why Religion Doesn't)

The Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31). The small Messier 32 galaxy is seen above and slightly to the left (directly south) of the centre of M31, and Messier 110 is below and to the left. Above and to the left of M32 is the star HD 3914. This is an RGB image + some h alpha data. Captured in the Israeli desert (the Negev). Equipment: Celestron Cpc1100 Millburn wedge Starizona hyperstar Zwo asi294mc for imaging + asi178mc for guiding Finderscope for guiding Acquisition: 60 subs of 32 seconds for RGB 20 subs of 64 seconds for hydrogen alpha (This is an f/2 config) Captured with sharpcap and guided with phd2 Processing: Stacked in pixinsight Processed and enhanced in photoshop including noise reduction, sharpening etc.

By ;David (Deddy) Dayag - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Too many disk galaxies than theory allows — University of Bonn

Science's greatest strength, and the thing that seems to baffle Creationists most, is the way it constantly reassesses and revises its theories and never holds any opinion as sacred and unchallengeable. Religions, by contrast, have fundamental tenets, almost literally cast in tablets of stone, which, if they are ever seriously questioned, leads to internal conflict, schisms and often open violent hostilities. To question the fundamental beliefs of a religion is tantamount to leaving that religion.

Here, for example, we have scientists examining a fundamental theory in cosmology and concluding, quite amicably and dispassionately, that the generally accepted Standard Model of Cosmology is fundamentally flawed. What will happen now is that others will try to replicate these findings, a debate will ensue and, if necessary former ideas that were held to be true will be abandoned and revised, and, in all probability if they are proved to be correct, the scientists who made the discovery will be rewarded with prizes and plaudits and top jobs in prestigious institutes.

I don't pretend to be an expert in this subject, but what the cosmologists from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany, St Andrews University, Scotland, UK and Charles University in the Czech Republic believe they have shown is that there is a significant discrepancy between the number of disk galaxies that can be observed and what the 'Standard Model' predicts, therefore the Standard Model is wrong and needs revising. And they are proposing a new one which would require a far-reaching revision of other areas of physics. And all because the accepted Standard Model of Cosmology does not appear to model the reality it was designed to explain.

The Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn news release accompnying the team's open access publication in The Astrophysical Journal, explains: