Unintelligent Design - How XY Sex Determination Causes Speciation to Avoid Extinction

Did sex drive mammal evolution? How one species can become two

Wild platypus, in a Tasmanian stream.

By Klaus - Flickr: Wild Platypus 4, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

Within a few million years, humans will either be extinct or will have diversified into two or more species. As I explained in my previous post, the gradual degeneration of the Y chromosome, that is carried only by males and which is essential to trigger the development of a male foetus, is degenerating at a rate which will see it disappear altogether within about 5 million years. Since our lineage split from that of the platypus, some, 845 genes have been lost, leaving only 55 active genes and a lot of non-functional junk DNA.

Disappearance of the Y chromosome has already happened in an unknown number of mammals, particularly those with a short generation time such as many rodents, leading to their extinction. With no DNA, there is no way to determine if this was the cause of extinction, and in any case, extinction, at least locally, could occur very quickly if caused by a lost Y chromosome or at least the one remaining essential gene responsible for sex determination.

However, some rodents, especially some Eastern European and Asian mole voles and Japanese spiny rats evolved an alternative method of sex determination, so, unless humans evolve a similar replacement, they too will go extinct.

The replacement in the rodents was a sequence of DNA adjacent to a gene known as the SOX9 gene located on one of the autosomes which controls the development of maleness in the developing foetus. This gene is activated by the SRY gene on the Y chromosome, so, with no Y chromosome and no replacement, no males and no reproduction.

However, there is a problem which will arise during the replacement of Y with some other mechanism, and that mechanism could vary by region. During that period there will be at least two mutually exclusive methods for determining the sex of the offspring, during which any hybrids will be unable to reproduce even if they are viable. This means there will be an evolutionary 'war' between these two methods, during which any mechanism which acts as a barrier to hybridization will give the carriers an advantage because they won't be producing sterile offspring.

These evolving barriers will quickly cause the emerging species to diversify, so, even if humans survive the loss of their Y chromosome, there will inevitably be two or more species of humans.

This has already happened in those families of rodents such as the Eastern European mole voles and the Japanese spiny rats where some species have an alternative sex determination mechanism involving a SOX9 enhancer in males on the same chromosome as the SOX9 gene and the loss of the Y chromosome, so the chromosome with the SOX9 enhancer has picked up the sex-determining baton, while related species have retained the XY method.

The enhancer consists of a simple duplication of a short sequence of DNA that is present in mice but in which it has no known function. Somehow, this activates the SOX9 gene at the right time, taking over the function of the Y Chromosome’s SRY gene.

In the following article reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence, professor Jenny Graves Jenny Graves, Distinguished Professor of Genetics, La Trobe University, Australia, explains that it could have been the cause of divergence between the marsupials and the monotremes and between the marsupials and the placental mammals, and so this played a key role in major steps in our own evolution.

The article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here:

Unintelligent Design - Humans On The Path To Extinction, By Design!

Men are slowly losing their Y chromosome, but a new sex gene discovery in spiny rats brings hope for humanity

Northern mole vole, Ellobius talpinus.
Males have lost their Y chromosome

Credit: Mikhail Kolesnikov and Marina Korobchenko), Free Software Foundation

Unless the intention was the eventual extinction of the species, no intelligent designer, especially one granted the power of omniscient foresight, would design sex-determinism by a method that guarantees extinction will happen eventually, unless a new method is devised just in time to prevent it.

And yet that appears to be the result of the current XY chromosomes method used by all mammals except the monotremes and a few exceptional rodents of which more later. The problem is that the Y chromosome, which is carried by males, is a degenerate and degenerating chromosome, unlike its sex-determining pair, the X Chromosome, of which females have two copies.

Wikipedia - XY sex-determination system

Over time, almost all the genes formerly carried by the Y chromosome have been lost, so, unlike the X Chromosome with about 900 genes, the Y chromosome in humans only has 55 genes and a lot of junk DNA that does nothing at all. The platypus, on the other hand, in which the X and Y chromosomes are perfectly normal paired chromosomes like all the other mammalian chromosomes, both pairs have the full complement of genes. (Sex determination in platypuses is more like that of birds and involves other chromosome pairs). Se we can deduce that in the 166 million years since humans and platypuses diverged from a common ancestor, the Y chromosome has lost 845 genes. If this rate of loss is projected into the future, the human Y chromosome will disappear in 11 million years.

Why does the Y Chromosome tend to degenerate and lose genes if this is disadvantageous? The answer is connected to the way normal chromosomes get rid of deleterious mutations and unwanted intrusions of junk 'jumping genes', and one of the advantages of sexual reproduction - they replace the unwanted stuff for the good stuff on the other one of the pair. However, the Y chromosome has no pair, so is stuck with mutations and junk. Meanwhile, functional genes can migrate to other chromosomes, so the Y chromosome tends to lose quality and quantity over time.

Creationism in Crisis - 275,000 Year-Old Neanderthal Footprints From Spain

Recently found 'Neanderthal footprints' in the South of Spain could be 275,000 years old

Homo heidelbergensis (The Broken Hill skull)
One of the suspect species

The Natural History Museum, London, UK

Some 270,000 years before Creationists believe Earth was magicked into existence, hominins were walking about in what is now Southwestern Spain, leaving footprints in mud that were quickly covered over and preserved by blown sand gto form a protective sand dune. Over time the sand dune solidified into the Asperillo cliff

When first discovered the footprints at Matalascañas, Huelva , Southwest Spain, were dated to around 106,000 ± 19,000 years based on a previous study to determine the age of the Asperillo cliff.

Embarrassing though even that relatively recent dating is for Creationists, the team have now revised the date of the footprints by dating the surface in which they were made, using a technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence, which basically measures when the surface was last exposed to sunlight before being buried for a prolonged period. This gave a date of 295,800 ± 17,000 years.

Wikipedia - Optically stimulated luminescence.

The significance of this new date is that rather than being made by Neanderthals from the Upper Pleistocene as was first thought, these tracks were made by ancestor of the Neanderthals, or early Neanderthals from the Middle Pleistocene, during a period known to geologists as the transition from Marine Isotope Stage 9 (MIS-9) to MIS-8 when there was a sudden cooling then warming of the climate in the Iberian Peninsula.

Wikipedia - Marine isotope stages.

The authors have published their revised findings, open access, in the journal Scientific Reports and written an article in The Conversation. That article is reprinted below under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here:

Biodiversity News - How Man-Made Climate Change is Damaging German Beech Forests.

Press release: Climate change in the forests of northern Germany - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Typical beech forest in northern Germany: the scientists took samples of wood from dominant trees at 30 locations.

Photo: Banzragch Bat-Enerel

Scientists from Germany have shown the negative effects of man-made climate change on the health of beech trees in German forests. These forests are important wild-life refuges with a rich and complex ecosystem, so any damage to the health of the trees will have a major impact of the biodiversity of Central Europe.

The scientists took samples of wood from major trees in 30 different locations so that comparisons could be made between areas with different average rainfall levels. They then analysed the tree rings to obtain a retrospective measure of tree growth.

The news release from Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, describes the study and its significant findings:

Human Rights News - Women Fighting Back Against the Chritian Fundies Who Took a Basic Human Right Away

SCOTUS overturned Roe v Wade, despite strong popular support for retaining it.

Pro-choice crowdfunding has surged in the U.S. — but donating that way has risks

America women, who had the basic human right to bodily autonomy taken away from them by Christian extremists who now dominate SCOTUS, are fighting back through crowdfunding.

They need to do this to raise money for travel out of a Repugnican-run state that doesn't respect their basic human rights, to a Democrat-run state where pregnancy termination services are still legal and a woman’s right to choose is recognised and valued over a Christian fundamentalist's assumed right to control others.

• How Right Wing Christians Fooled SCOTUS With False Witnessing
• SCOTUS Now Represents Only a Small Minority of American Religious Extremists.
• Confidence in U.S. Supreme Court Sinks to Historic Low

However, there are risks, not the least of which are retaliatory measures by extremists seeking to constrain even the right to travel in order to restrict a woman's right to choose, and pressure on social media platforms to deny women the ability to crowdfund their freedom-seeking trips. In an ominous foreshadowing of what a fundamentalist theocracy would be like, not content with forcing their religion on the people in the states they run, extremists also seek to impose it on people who have rejected them at the ballot box.

In the following article reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, Professor Jeremy Snyder, Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Canada, examines the sharp increase in crowd-sourced funding by women seeking abortion services outside their home states. The article is reformatted for stylistic consistence. The original may be read here:

Trumpanzee Cult News - Trump or Desantis? The Nutjobs May Decide It.

Evangelical Christians are crucial voters in Republican primaries. Would they support DeSantis or Trump?

The American Christian far right now has two dogs in the fight for the position of Repugnican candidate in 2024 - the odious, epitome of a sore loser, former president, Donald Trump and the evangelical white supremacist, governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, who emerged the stronger of the two in the mid-term disaster for Trumpanzee Repugnicans, where candidates who publicly bought into Trump's Big Lie of a stolen election, fared badly.

But is there much to choose between them? To someone like me from outside the USA, there doesn't appear to be a fag-paper's difference between Trump and DeSantis. They both appeal to the hate-filled, neo-fascist, human rights denying, white Christian evangelicals and misogynistic pro-life hypocrites who blame God and the Bible, and thank Trump and his stooges in SCOTUS, for their legalised denial of a woman's right to bodily autonomy.

What will come next? A ban on contraception? Legalised persecution of anyone who isn't heterosexual? Prohibitions on voting for anyone who isn't a white evangelical Christian? The abolition of democracy itself?

Seems a bit exaggerated? All of these have been advocated by the Christian far right at various time very recently and many of them see it as the entire reason for the 'culture war'!

Dominating the judiciary isn't enough for these privileged extremist who will only settle for a Taliban-style self-selecting theocracy which dominates both the Executive and the Legislature, which will be mere rubber stamps for the dictates of the self-appointed evangelical cult leaders. At least one popular televangelist with a huge following has already claimed to a cheering audience that God told him the government should be accountable to him, not the people.

How these extremists, who still form a significant block of American voters, despite the growing rejection of organised religions in the USA, will divide between the two candidates, then unite behind the winner, is still an open question, as is the question of how far their repugnant extremism will push people into the Democrat camp.

One frightening aspect of Christian fundamentalism the USA, is that many of them, the so-called dispensationalists, saw the relocation of the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by Trump as the first move in setting the precondition for an apocalyptic war, and believe Donald Trump will complete that process. In that war they believe they alone will be saved and 'raptured' to a place of safety until it is safe to return to Earth where they will have everything for themselves and all those who disagreed with them will be dead - the greatest thing they can imagine!

If these self-possessed, entitled nutters gain the political powers they crave, they will have control of the biggest nuclear arsenal on the planet, with enough warheads to destroy all life several time over, all under the command of a narcissistic psychopath with an acute personality disorder, the self-control of a toddler and his own private nuclear bunker.

The stakes in 2024 really are that high!

Fundamentally Racist Christianity
What does Rapture Theology Say About Christians?

In the following article reprinted from The Conversation, Professor David Smith, Associate Professor in American Politics and Foreign Policy, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney, gives his assessment of the prospects, and to what extent the unpopular (even amongst Repugnicans) state bans on abortion will affect the outcome of November 2024.

The article, which can be read here, has been reformatted fos stylistic consistency.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Favourite Sadist is Spreading Antimicrobial Resistance

Genomic analysis of sewage from 101 countries reveals global landscape of antimicrobial resistance | Nature Communications

During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists realised the value of analysing the sewerage outflow from major population centres to monitor the prevalence of the virus and its variants in the population. This technique can also be used to monitor microbial prevalence and variants such as antimicrobial resistance.

Now a team of researchers at the Danish Technical University (DTU) has used data from these analyses to produce a map of microbial resistance at the level of resistance genes, rather than of resistant species.

From a Creationist perspective, what this is measuring is how well their pestilential malevolence is doing in its arms race against medical science to ensure its pathogens retain their ability to make us sick.

The results of the meta-analysis were surprising in that it showed the same genes were present in different species and in different places, indicating that exchange of genes between species is more frequent and extensive than was previously thought.

From the DTU News release:

Creationism in Crisis - How Evolution Evolved Intelligently Without a Creator

Intelligent design without a creator? Why evolution may be smarter than we thought

The evolution of evolvability is a fascinating aspect of the Theory of Evolution. For example, the evolution of sexual reproduction seems counter-intuitive because it involves two copies of each allele, with the original often dominating, so any advantage from a beneficial mutation can be lost because it isn't expressed in the phenotype, while a deleterious mutation can be shielded from selection by a dominant allele.

However, because it also involves cross-over between chromosomes it can give rise to new combinations of alleles allowing evolution to 'experiment', with different evolutionary lines coming together to produce synergy where the total is greater than the sum of the parts, so sexual reproduction almost certainly evolved because it gave greater evolvability, i.e. it gave the organisms greater resilience in a changing environment.

Evolution is a process, not an event, and, as such, it can be improved (evolved) to maximise efficiency. Indeed, the mechanism of random change being tested in a selective environment makes that evolution inevitable. In the same way that machine learning is the process which underpins artificial intelligence, so evolution is the process by which species respond to environmental changes. Both processes can be improved by a natural evolutionary process, without the need for supernatural intervention.

In the following article from 2016, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, Professor Richard A. Watson, Associate Professor, Institute for Life Sciences/Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK, explains how evolution could be evolving with an evolved natural intelligence which enables it to solve problems without the ability to look ahead the way an intelligent designer would work.

The article has been reformatted for stylistic consistence. The original can be read here:

Malevolent Designer News - How The SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant Was Made

Where did Omicron come from?: Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin

Fig. 2
Gradual emergence followed by exponential spread of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant in Africa

Fischer, C., et al (2022)

Devoted folowers of Creationism's intelligent [sic] designer, whom they credit for creating everything, will normally cite examples of multiple mutations which give rise to a new capability such as resistence to antibiotics or anti-malarial drugs as evidence of design because the probability of so many mutations arising is vanishingly small.

What they ignore is the fact that the multiple advantageous mutations can accumulate over time in the population and don't need to arise as a single event in a single organism, like their phoney maths models.

In fact, one of their gurus, Michale J Behe wrote a book, The Edge of Evolution based on just that mathematical deception, and was roundly exposed as a fraud by Kenneth R. Miller for doing so.

How Creationists Lie To Us - Michael J. Behe

A classic example of this phenomenon in respect of the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to give rise to the highly infection Omicron variant, which also has the ability to evade the immunity we have either from vaccinations or acquired naturally by pervious infections, was published yesterday in the Journal Science.

The Omicron variant has about 50 mutations which together give it these abilities and a group of researchers from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and a network of African institutions, led by Professor Jan Felix Drexler, has shown how Omicron almost certainly arose slowly across the viral population in Africa, accumulating a few mutations in local populations, which then eventually came together as the 50 mutations in Omicron which then took off with exponential growth, spreading very rappidly acroos African then the world at large.

Key to this accumulation of mutations was the growign population of humans with immunity which acted as environmental selectors favouring the mutations, just as the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the Theory of Evolution predicts.

This illustrates a feature of evolution that Creationists have to ignore - the ability of populations to accumulate different, parallel lines of mutations with each generation increasing the probability of a chance combination of two or more different lines arising.
As the news release from Charité Universitätsmedizin explains:

Creationism in Crisis - How Asia's Mammals Evolved

The evolution of Asia’s mammals was dictated by ancient climate change and rising mountains | Field Museum

Lead author Anderson Feijó holding a plateau pika in Tibet.
Photograph: Danping Mu.

Carrying traps in the Hengduan Mountains.
Photograph:Anderson Feijó.

No doubt to the consternation of any Creationist fraud trying to sell the idea that the Theory of Evolution (TOE) is about to be overthrown and replaced by their favourite Bronze Age fairy tale, researchers from Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History and the Chinese Academy of Science, used their knowledge of evolution to hypothesise that the main evolutionary changes in Asian mammals was directly related to major geoclimatic changes. To test their hypothesis, they mapped the known evolutionary changes in Asian mammals onto the known geoclimatic changes across the continent, and found there was a very good fit.

This will come as no surprise to anyone who understands how environmental change drives evolutionary change because environmental change inevitably involves a change in the environmental selectors operating on the organisms subject to it.

The Field Museum news release explains the research and its significance:

Creationism in Crisis - Old World Flycatchers’ Family Tree Mapped

Old World flycatchers’ family tree mapped - Uppsala University, Sweden

European robin, Erithacus rubecula

Photograph: Tomas Carlberg

In yet another casual refutation of the plaintive Creationist assertion that the Theory of Evolution (TOE) is about to be overthrown by their childish Bronze Age superstition, scientists from Uppsala and Gothenburg Universities, Sweden and Florida University, USA, have produced a family tree of the Old World flycatchers - a family of birds that includes the European Robin.

In doing so, they found not the slightest hint that the TOE is inadequate to explain the observations. In fact, as expected, it is entirely consistent with what they found.

As the article in Uppsala University news by Elin Bäckström explains:

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Debate How Evolution Works, Not Whether it Happens

Charles Darwin by George Richmond (1809-1895)

Wikimedia Commons

The study of evolution is fracturing – and that may be a good thing

Creationists who have been fooled into believing that the Theory of Evolution (TOE) is being increasingly rejected by mainstream scientists will undoubtedly take some comfort from the fact that there is an ongoing, and increasing debate amongst serious biologists about the theory.

Sadly for Creationists, however, the debate isn't about whether species evolved and are evolving or whether they were made by magic; it's about how exactly evolution happens.

Debate, is of course, healthy and essential within science. It is the Darwinian environment in which scientific ideas evolve and improve, because, science, unlike religion, is based on the idea that when the facts change, opinions should change to accommodate the new information.

In other words, the debate is about the detail, not the fact. No serious biologist is in any doubt about the fact of evolutionary change being the cause of speciation, and why species changes over time and vary between populations under the influence of environmental selectors, just as Darwin and Wallace outlined in 1859.

In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, Professor Erik Svensson of Lund University, Sweden, explains the background to the debate, why debate is healthy and how it poses no threat to the basic idea of evolutions. The article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here.

Unintelligent Designer News - Podcast Now Available

Well, the live show went okay, despite a slight technical hitch with getting the presentation video to run, which gave more time for debate but, sadly, less time for the video. So here it is for anyone who wants to see the entire thing.

Also, the entire show can be viewed again here:

As I said, my book, "The Malevolent Designer: Exposing the Intelligent Design Hoax", contains many more examples of the things in nature that show there was no intelligence or design in what we can observe.

An illustrated companion book, "The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good", is also available in hardcover, paperback or ebook for Kindle, as are my other books on science and religion.

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Creationism in Crisis - How the Arthropod Brain Evolved 525 million Years Ago

525-million-year-old fossil defies textbook explanation for brain evolution | University of Arizona News

Artist's impression if Cardiodictyon catenulum

Credit: Nicholas Strausfeld

A paper published a couple of days ago in Science closes yet another of those gaps so beloved of Creationists who fool their dupes with the false dichotomy fallacy that, if science hasn't explained something, the only alternative on offer is that their version of a creator god did it. This save them the bother of producing any evidence for their pet superstition and keeps their dupes believing that they have better answers than science does and so are much more clever than those elitist scientists with their big words. If there is one thing Creationists can't stand it's uncertainty, with the dreadful prospect that they might have to change their minds if the evidence changes.

The paper was written by a group of scientists led by Nicholas Strausfeld, a Regents Professor in the University of Arizona Department of Neuroscience, and Frank Hirth, a reader of evolutionary neuroscience at King's College London. It describes a fossil of Cardiodictyon catenulum, a 1.5 cm long, worm-like arthropod, found in China's southern Yunnan province. Close detailed analysis has revealed delicately preserved nervous system, including a brain. This is believed to be the oldest fossilised brain so far discovered.

The University of Arizona News describes the research and its significance: