Creationism in Crisis - How Bat Faces Evolved Under Selective Pressure of Food Resources - In Just 25 Million Years

Top left: Wrinkle-faced bat, Centurio senex (Fruit)
Bottom left: Jamaican fruit bat, Artibeus jamaicensis (Fruit)

Top right: Hairy-legged vampire bat, Diphylla ecaudata (Blood of birds)
Bottom right: Orange nectar bat, Lonchophylla robusta (Nectar)

Photographs: Sharlene Santana/University of Washington

Fruit, nectar, bugs and blood: How bat teeth and jaws evolved for a diverse dinnertime | UW News

The pale-faced bat, Phylloderma stenops, is a noctilionoid bat with an omnivorous diet.

Credit: Sharlene Santana/University of Washington

A side-view image of the skull of a greater spear-nosed bat, Phyllostomus hastatus, a noctilionoid species with an omnivorous diet.

Credit: Sharlene Santana/University of Washington

Just as Darwin's finches evolved different beaks to fit them for the differing food on the different Galapagos Islands, so the shape of bats' faces have evolved to fit them for the predominant food in their diet, in just 25 million years, which is a mere tick of the clock in geological time.

What this can tell us about the evolution of bats and especially their dentition is the subject of a study of the noctilionoid bats published in Nature Communications last August.

Catholic Sex Abuse News - Spanish Catholic Priests Sexually Abused Over 200,000 Children

Cardinal Enrique Pla y Deniel, Successor to Cardinal Gomá
Seen here giving the Nazi salute alongside Geralissimo Franco

Cardinal Isidro Gomá y Tomás, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain.

Cardinal Isidro Gomá y Tomás, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, when the Catholic Church was at the height of its power in Spain.

Spanish clergy sexually abused more than 200,000 children, inquiry estimates | Spain | The Guardian

The routine sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests is back in the news after an independent commission, led by Spain's national Ombudsman, former education minister, Ángel Gabilondo, has discovered that more than 200,000 minors have been sexually abused by Catholic priests since 1940.

This figure is an estimate based on extrapolating the figure of 0.8% of 8,000 Spanish adults in a survey who reported being sexually abused by Catholic priests before the age of 18 - a figure which rose to 1.13% (360,000 of Spain's 32 million adult population) if lay members of the church were included. Lay members of the church perform some of the duties of priests but are not ordained or under holy orders. As such, they come under the authority and control of senior church figured, usually the bishops, archbishops and cardinals in charge of diocese.

For most of the period, the Spanish Catholic Church was a privileged and protected institution that considered itself largely above the law - a position that derived from its active support and cooperation with General Frano's Fascist regime. During this period, the Catholic Church was given control of most of the influential and welfare aspects of Spanish life, including education, health and institutions such as orphanages, mother and baby homes and homes for single mothers, many of whom were themselves victims of sexual abuse.

Creationism in Crisis - Pigeons Can Solve Complex Problems More Quickly Than Humans

Feral pigeons can solve complex categorization problems that would trouble humans.

‘Dim-witted’ pigeons use the same principles as AI to solve tasks

The feral pigeon, Columba livia domestica. Dimwit or genius?

In yet another casual and unintentional refutation of creationist dogma, two psychology professors, one from Ohio State University and the other from the University of Iowa, have shown that humans were not created as the species with the highest intelligence, which creationists argue shows we were specially created, different to the other animals.

The researchers have shown that pigeons can solve complex problems that would be difficult for humans because pigeons use the same principles as artificial intelligence to crunch through the available options. The difference being that unlike humans who can extrapolate from solving one problem to general problem-solving similar problem, pigeons don't extrapolate from the particular to the general.

It appears then that the natural process of evolution produced a form of AI, long before humans developed machine learning and AI.

As explained in an Ohio State University news release by Jeff Grabmeier:

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:

Creationism in Crisis - How the Birth of the Atlantic Ocean Caused a Mass Extinction - 55 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Top left: The drilling ship "JOIDES Resolution" off the Norwegian coast.
Photo: Peter Betlem (IODP)

Bottom left: Geophysicists on the deck of the "JOIDES Resolution"
Photo: Sayantani Chatterjee (IODP)

Top right: The drilling ship "JOIDES Resolution" at sunrise.
Photo: Peter Betlem (IODP)

Bottom right: Sections of the cores.
Photo: Sandra Herrmann (IODP/JRSO)

Mid-North Atlantic hydrothermal vent

Past climate warming driven by hydrothermal vents - GEOMAR - Helmholtz-Zentrum für Ozeanforschung Kiel

In that very long period during which some 99.97% of Earth's history occurred prior to when creationists believe the Universe, Earth and life on it was created, the supercontinent, Pangea, split apart, then about 55 million years ago, North America and Eurasia drifted apart as did South America and Africa, opening up a rift which flooded to become the North and South Atlantic Oceans.

This coincided with an event called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) during which Earth's temperature rose by about 5-8 ^oC. causing a mass extinction. The exact cause of the PETM has been something of a puzzle for palaeontologists and geologists, until now.

Creationism in Crisis - Research Shows How Environment Drives Evolution - No Magic Required

Raining Cats and Dogs: Research Finds Global Precipitation Patterns a Driver for Animal Diversity

A team of researcher from Utah University's Department of Watershed Sciences in Quinney College of Natural Resources and the Ecology Center, led by Jaron Adkins, has investigated why there is a rich diversity of species in some areas and a paucity of species in others. Not surprisingly, given what we know of how diversity evolves due to environmental selectors, they found a close link between diversity and the environment, especially rainfall, and the result of rainfall, or a lack of it - plant growth.

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Got The Age of The Moon Wrong! But It's Not Good News For Creationists.

4.46 billion years old

The Moon is 40 million years older than previously thought - Northwestern Now

Scientists have recalculated the age of Earth's moon and found they got it wrong.

But, before creationists start jumping up and down with excitement, it's not good news.

The recalculated age shows the Moon to be, not 4.425 billion years old, but 40 million years older, at 4.46 billion years old. This now makes it 44.6 million percent older than the Universe, which, according to creationist superstition is only 10,000 years old, instead of the 44.25 million percent older that used to be thought.

This means, if creationists want to dispute this new age on the grounds that the dating method used was flawed, they need to show how the 'error' made 100 years look like 44.6 million years, in a universe moreover that they claim to be so finely tuned that altering any of the parameters by even a small amount would make life impossible. Radiometric dating of course depends on the decay rate of unstable isotopes which in turn depends on random quantum fluctuations in the strength of two of the four fundamental forces - the weak and strong nuclear forces.

This new age was arrived at by analysing the zircon crystals in the moon rock brought back by the Apollo 17 moon landing:

Creationism in Crisis - No Fun for Creationists in Evolving Fungi

Top left Mycena haematopus
Bottom left Mycena arcangeliana

Top right Mycena leaiana
Bottom right Mycena rubromarginata

Center: Mycena inclinata

Mycena purpureofusca

Fungal evolution discovered: Mycena can now invade living hosts – University of Copenhagen

An international team of mycologists led by Christoffer Bugge Harder of the Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway has discovered that a family of fungi, the Mycena or Mycenaceae, also known as the bonnet mushrooms, is in the process of evolving a change of life style from that of a saprophyte (i.e., feeding on dead and decaying plant matter, mostly wood) to becoming a symbiont, living in cooperative alliance with other plants, or even a parasite able to invade and live on living plant tissues.

First a brief background on the Mycena:

Creationism in Crisis - Observable Evolution in the Creeping Woodsorrel (Oxalis Corniculata)

Red-leaved form. Common in urban areas

Does Urbanization Trigger Plant Evolution? | CHIBADAI NEXT

Creeping woodsorrell (green-leaved form),
Oxalis corniculata.
Common in rural areas

This latest refutation of creationism is an example of observable evolution occurring in recent history. It shows how a species will evolve according to local environmental conditions. The definition of biological evolution is of course, changes in allele frequencies in a population over time, and need not include a phenotypic change at all. In this case though the change is the observed change in the leaf-colour of a species of plant, the creeping woodsorrel, Oxalis corniculata.

The traditional response by creationists to these examples is to try to get away with a different definition of biological evolution to include changes that biologists don't claim ever happen, such as an entirely new taxon arising in a single event, or one taxon changing into another, unrelated taxon. It matters not one iota to a creationists that they may have been corrected on this point numerous times, it's almost impossible to shift them away from their protective shell of pretending science makes claims science never makes and the definition of biological evolution is something so absurd that no sane person could accept it.

First, a short conversation with ChatGPT3.5 on the definition of biological evolution and why creationists need to misrepresent the science:

Creationism in Crisis - Disastrous Sea Level And Climate Changes - 385 Million Years Ago.

The Malvinoxhosan biota were a group of marine animals that thrived in cooler waters

2023-10 - Ancient sea level and climate changes led to major extinctions around South Africa - Wits University

A planet designed by a loving, omniscient designer would be stable and not subject to periodic bouts of mass extinction because the life on it couldn't cope with a massive environmental change.

And yet new research by Dr Cameron Penn-Clarke from the University of the Witwatersrand and Professor David Harper from Durham University has shown that a catastrophic environmental change in the Early Devonian caused the mass extinction of the Malvinoxhosan biota. This was in the 99.97% of Earth's history that occurred before the Universe was created out of nothing by magic, according to creationists.

The term 'Malvinoxhosan biota' foxed ChatGPT3.5:

Creationism in Crisis - Now Scientists and Philosophers have Discovered How Evolution Obeys a Fundamental Law of Nature

Scientists and philosophers team up to study concept of evolution beyond biological context | Carnegie Science

A paper written by a consortium of scientists and philosophers led by Carnegie’s Michael Wong and Robert Hazen, has outlined a law that some of us have been arguing is a fundamental law of evolution for many years. Their "law of increasing functional information" states:

The functional information of a system will increase (i.e., the system will evolve) if many different configurations of the system undergo selection for one or more functions.

Basically, in any selective environment, systems will tend towards structures that improve function by accumulating small (micro) differences which eventually result in large (macro) changes. In other words, replication in a selective environment will inevitably result in evolution towards greater fitness in that environment. Where that improved fitness comes from new or improved function then there will be an increase in complexity.

The exception to that law is in parasites where the whole system (the parasite-host complex) can become increasingly complex (by the host taking on many of the functions of the parasite) but the parasite itself can lose complexity.

The force driving that increase in complexity is, of course, natural selection, where selectors in the environment ensure those arrangements better suited to produce the next generation do so in preference to those less suited.

This fundamental law is of course, not restricted to biological systems but will operate in any situation where there is replication and selection, echoing something I wrote many years ago (Darwin's Powerful Science).

The consortium expresses this fundamental law as:

Creationism in Crisis - Women Hunted Too - Before Man-Made Religion Assigned Them a 'God-Given' Role

UD anthropology professor Sarah Lacy has proposed a new theory that challenges the familiar story that labor roles during ancient times were divided by sex and that men evolved to be hunters and women to be gatherers.

Woman the hunter | UDaily

Sarah Lacey, an anthropologist with Delaware University, USA, believes she has found evidence that, in hunter-gatherer societies, in contradiction to the traditional view which has men as the hunters and women as the gatherers, in fact, women played their part as hunters too.

This was before their assumed gender roles became formalised by religions which provided men with the excuses they needed to control women by declaring that 'God' had assigned them roles as man's 'help meet' and so subservient to men. Women were instructed that they should be obedient to a man's demands and fill the role of sex-slave, housekeeper and cook, because God said so:

And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

Genesis 2: 21-24

---

GENE 3.15. And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. GENE 3.16. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

Genesis 3: 15-16

As I related in my book, A History of Ireland: How Religion Poisoned Everything, in pre-Christian Gaelic society, under the 'Brehon Law' women had equal rights to men and could adopt leadership roles, own property and divorce abusive or unfaithful husbands - rights that were systematically stripped from them under the influence of Patricus (St Patrick, first bishop of Armagh), when he called an all-male meeting of Gaelic tribal petty kings and declared those rights to be contrary to God's Law in the Bible, and women should henceforth be subservient and obedient to men and never be in a position of leadership over them.

St. Patrick is reputedly responsible for abolishing the Brehon law or rather with integrating it with Christian Law by going through it line by line with a convention of tribal chiefs called for the purpose and striking out anything which did not accord with the Bible. Brehon law, from the Irish ‘breithim’ meaning ‘a judge’ was the system of law in use in Gaelic Ireland since ancient times – a Celtic Common Law, necessary to settle disputes between residents of different petty kingdoms or different tribal traditions. One effect of this was to reduce the status of women; depriving them of many of the rights they held under Brehon law, such as the right to divorce their husband, to own property and to occupy positions of leadership. St. Patrick’s brand of Christianity was to be strictly hierarchical, patriarchal and misogynistic, in line with the Bible and the teachings of St. Paul, although there were deviations from strict cannon law. Divorce, for example, though no longer available on demand, could still be granted for a wide variety of reasons (4).

Rosa Rubicondior, A History of Ireland: How Religion Poisoned Everything, pp. 8-9

Sarah Lacy, with her colleague, anthropologist Cara Ocobock, from the University of Notre Dame, have published their research in two papers in the journal American Anthropologist and an article in Scientific American. A news release from Delaware University explains their work:

Creationism in Crisis - What Is a 170-Million-Year-Old Pliosaur Doing on a 10,000-Year-Old Earth?

The oldest megapredatory pliosaur, Lorrainosaurus, in the ancient Middle Jurassic sea that covered what is today northern France 170 million years ago.

Artwork by Joschua Knüppe (Germany).

Model of the head of Lorrainosaurus keileni.

Model By 10 Tons

Ancient sea monster remains reveal oldest mega-predatory pliosaur | Uppsala University

Q. What is a 170-Million-Year-Old Pliosaur Doing on a 10,000-Year-Old Earth?

A. Refuting Creationism and showing it to be a childish counter-factual superstition, of course, like everything else that exited in the 99.97% of Earth's history that occurred before 'creation week'.

These fossils of this predatory marine reptile from the Mesozoic Era were recovered in 1983 from a road cutting near Metz, Loraine, France and have now been examined by an international team of palaeontologists from the Naturkunde-Museum Bielefeld in Germany, the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, the Natural History Museum in Luxembourg and The Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University in Sweden, co-led by Sven Sachs of Naturkunde-Museum Bielefeld, Germany and Daniel Madzia of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

They have shown them to be of a new pliosaur genus: Lorrainosaurus.

Creationism in Crisis - Why Earth is Fine Tuned for Extinction

An arid and uninhabitable planet awaits us - in 250 million years.

September: Nature Geoscience extreme heat | News and features | University of Bristol

Creationists like to imagine that Earth is fine-tuned for life. This belief depends on the parochial ignorance of the creationist of course, because they will be oblivious of the fact that, cozy though their small bit of the planet might be, most of it is uninhabitable by humans without specialist equipment, and even cloths and houses are required in the temperate areas. Human life would be impossible without modern technology in the oceans, deserts, arctic waste, the tops of high mountains or just a few thousand feet above the surface of the planet (this is why modern aircraft that fly at 30-60,000 feet need to be pressurised).

But a planet that is fine-tuned for life would also have an infinite life-span, not a time-limited one where the life-time is limited by entirely natural processes, such as plate tectonics and the solar cycle. In fact, the life span of Earth is a mere blink on a cosmic time-scale that is measured by the life of suns.

Long before the sun becomes a red giant and swallows up the inner planets at the end of its life, shortly before becoming a super nova and blowing away the outer planets, Earth's continents will have coalesced into another single super-continent, reminiscent of Pangea, and the climate will have made life untenable for most species of mammal, according to researcher at Bristol University.

The resulting increase in volcanic rifting and out-gassing, combined with 'continentality' and an increase in solar energy output, will result in a 'wet-bulb' temperature of >35^oC and a 'dry bulb' temperature of >40^oC - temperatures at which mammalian thermoregulation fails, leading to death in about 6 hours.

The team's findings are published open access in Nature Geoscience and explained in a Bristol University press release: