Creationism in Crisis - Hippos Were Living Near Rome About Half a Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Modern hippos, Hippopotamus amphibius, arose from African ancestors during the Quaternary and were present in Europe during the Pleistocene.

Photo: Sue Roehl/Flickr

Modern Hippopotamus, Hippopotamus amphibius, present in Europe in the Pleistocene

Earliest known European common hippopotamus fossil reveals their Middle Pleistocene dispersal | EurekAlert!

One of the easiest predictions to make is that, in the next few days there will be more science papers casually refuting creationism, without the slightest intention of doing so on the part of the authors.

This is inevitable, of course, because creationism is so profoundly counter-factual that just about every fact is inconsistent with creationism, so, by merely revealing the facts, scientists refute creationism.

And today's example is the revelation that there were hippos living around Rome during the Pleistocene, about half a million years before creationist superstition says Earth was magicked up out of nothing in 'Creation week'. The amazing thing isn't that there were Hippos living near Rome half a million years ago, but the fact that there are grown adults who believe the creationist superstition of a 'Creation Week' 10,000 years ago, before which, there was nothing and nowhere for anything to happen in.

This news comes in the form of an open access paper in PLOS ONE by Beniamino Mecozzi of the Sapienza University of Rome, and colleagues, and a press release from PLoS:

Unintelligent Design - A Bat That Has Non-Penetrative Sex

A common serotinus, Eptesicus serotinus

© Alona Shulenko

An 'intelligently designed' device for making holes in Swiss Cheese

William Heath-Robinson

Discovery of a new method of mating: a bat reveals its secret to us, size XXL - L · NEWS

It's almost as though creationism's putative designer took lessons from William Heath-Robinson, and then lost its sense of humour, the ludicrously complicated ways it designs to carry out simple tasks.

The evolutionary advantage of penetrative sex is that the male is able to deposit sperm close to the egg, using his penis, and the female is able to exercise a degree of selection in her choice of who is to father her babies. It is a considerable advantage over the more primitive forms of external fertilisation such as those used by amphibians where the sperm is shed onto the eggs as the female lays them, or by fish, where the sperm is deposited near the eggs and then swims towards them. The later method, especially, frequently allows opportunist males to sneak in and fertilise some of the eggs when another male has done all the work.

However, for reasons which are not entirely clear, most male birds have lost their penis and deposit their sperm into the female's reproductive opening by a 'cloacal kiss', a notable exception being the swans, geese and ducks which have retained a penis and sex is penetrative. This may be because a strategy used by male members of this order of birds is forcible penetration or, frankly, rape.

Of course, being unintelligently designed, birds lost their penis, not by simply losing the genes that grow one during embryonic development, but by have a gene that literally kills the growing penis soon after it starts to develop. Inhibit that gene in chickens and the male chick is born with a penis. Give it to a goose, and the male gosling is born without one.

William Heath-Robinson

And now, in what looks like another example of unintelligent design (by that I mean, of course, evolution) there is a species of bat in which the male's penis is too big to penetrate the female, so he uses it to transfer his sperm into the vagina by pressing the tip against her vulva and holding it there until the deed is done. which usually takes about 53 minutes but can take over 12 hours.

The bat is the common serotinus, Eptesicus serotinus. It is the only known example of non-penetrative sex in a mammal. Quite why it evolved is something of a mystery, but it could be something to do with needing to get round the female's tail membrane resulting in a penis that, when erect is 22% of the bat's body length. The tip is large and bulbous and almost seems designed to prevent penetration.

The study began when Nicolas Fasel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, and his colleagues noticed that the serotine bat has a rather large and unusual penis. When erect, it is 22% of the bat’s head–body length and has a bulbous, heart-shaped tip. “We were thinking it would be really difficult for it to enter anything,” he says.

It is described in a University of Lausanne (UNIL) news release and published Current Biology:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creationism in Crisis - Newly Discovered Species of Trilobite Aid in Dating Rocks - To 490 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'.

Ten newly discovered species of trilobites, hidden for 490 million years in a little-studied part of Thailand, could be the missing pieces in an intricate puzzle of ancient world geography.

Artist's rendering of a trilobite based on preserved soft body parts.

Nobu Tamura

Trilobites rise from the ashes to reveal ancient map | News

In my last blog post I wrote about the fact that Neanderthals were making marks, interpreted as art, on the wall of a French cave, 40,000 years before creationists believe Earth was created. This blog post is about creatures that lived much further into 'pre-Creation' history, some 490 million years 'pre-Creation' to be precise.

It's also about how the rocks in which their fossils were found were dated and how this means that fossils of these species can now be used to date other rocks, giving the lie to creationist claims that dating rock using 'index' fossils is circular reasoning. And dating those rock formations leads to a new understanding of the details of plate tectonics as the ancient continent, Gondwana, broke up.

Trilobites as a group are known to have diversified and diverged relatively quickly and became extinct relatively quickly too, so each species lived only for a few million years. This means, if we know when the species lived, we can date the rocks they are found in to within a few million years.

The fossils are of ten species of trilobite that are new to science which were found in layers of ancient volcanic ash between layers of sandstone in a little-studied area of Thailand. The ash layer forms greenish 'tuffs' which contains crystals of zircon produced during the volcanic eruption. Zircon crystals are extremely durable and remain unchanged embedded within the rocks. Trapped inside them are atoms of the radioactive isotopes of uranium, ²³⁸U and ²³⁵U, (both of which have very long half-lives and decay to stable isotopes of lead, which remains trapped within the zircon crystal lattice as a permanent record of what proportion of uranium has decayed to lead and which remain, giving a very precise date of the formation of the rock.

Creationism in Crisis - Neanderthals Were Creating Art in Caves in France, At Least 40,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'.

Finger markings on the wall of La Roche-Cotard cave in the Loire Valley, France

Fig 12. The Circular Panel.

Marquet J-C, Freiesleben TH, Thomsen KJ, Murray AS, Calligaro M, Macaire J-J, et al. (2023)

Neanderthals were the world’s first artists | University of Basel

It's shaping up to be another of those terrible weeks for the creation cult, as yet more scientific papers are published that show just how much of Earth's history happened in that vast period of time before 'Creation Week' - the 7 days about 10,000 years ago that creationists believe the Universe, Earth, and all living things were created by magic out of nothing.

The first of these is a mere 40,000 years before 'Creation Week' when hominins - probably Neanderthals - were making marks on a cave wall in La Roche-Cotard in the Loire Valley, France, in what may be some of the earliest examples of human art.

The La Roche-Cotard cave remained sealed by mud and soil sediments from the Loire for over 50,000 years (i.e., about 10,000 years before Homo sapiens appeared in Europe) until rediscovered in 1974 by French archaeologist Jean-Claude Marquet.

The markings have now been dated by an international team from France, Denmark Switzerland, Portugal and Hungary, which included Jean-Claude Marquet of Université de Tours, Tours, France and archaeologist Dorota Wojtczak from University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland.

They have published their findings open access in PLOS ONE. Its significance is explained in a University of Basle news release by Christian Heuss:

Creationism in Crisis - More Elegant Grandeur That The Little Gods' Prophets Never Told Us About

Part of the Sagittarius C region near the Milky Way’s core, revealing a dense star-forming area with numerous protostars and infrared-dark clouds.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope

Hidden Wonders: Webb Space Telescope Detects Unexplained Structures in Heart of Milky Way

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead, they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

Carl Sagan,
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 6-10

Compare the following images taken by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope with the way the founding prophets of the Abrahamic religions described the Universe.

Creationism in Crisis - Which Side Should a True-Believing Creationist Be On? The 'Designer' Who Designs Resistance Or The Scientists?

Plasmodium falciparum parasites in a blood smear

Diagram of the complex eukaryote, Plasmodium falciparum

New approaches in the fight against drug resistance in malaria | FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

Despite asking creationists multiple times how they reconcile believing that their putative intelligent [sic] designer designs complex organisms, such as the parasite, Plasmodium falciparum which cause malaria, with their belief that this putative designer is the supposedly omnibenevolent god if the Bible and Qur'an, I can never get a rational answer.

Most often they resort to the fallback claim that parasites and the suffering they cause were not created by their putative intelligent designer, but by another designer they call 'Sin', which of course is nonsensical and borders on blasphemy because it denies the supremacy of their supposed designer god, and allows for another designer over whom their supposedly omnipotent god is powerless.

But, to their embarrassment, if they manage to do the joined-up thinking, their guru, Michael J. Behe - who has the status of a 'brilliant scientist' in creationist circles - wrote a book, The Edge of Evolution in which he argued (wrongly) that the development of anti-malarial drug resistance in Plasmodium falciparum must have been intelligently designed, using the 'big scary numbers' tactic of arguing that the likelihood of each of the five steps needed arising by chance was so small, that the chances of all five of them occurring in the right sequence is so infinitesimally small that it couldn't have happened by chance alone, so needed divine intervention.

The fact that he used bad biology and even worse maths, in effect assuming that all the mutations had to happen together in as single cell as a single event, instead of in parallel across the species gene pool, as was shown by microbiologist Kenneth R Miller, is by the by, since creationists generally treat anything Michael J Behe says as proven science, they are stuck with his claim that their god is responsible for anti-malarial drug resistance in the malaria parasite - which infects about 20 million people, mostly children annually, and kills 700,000 of them.

Creationists also believe, contrary to the claim that humans have free will, that their god has a plan for each of us, so presumably planned to have those people die of malaria, and that to oppose their god's divine plan in any way is to oppose their god.

So, again a question I can never get a rational response to, is what should a true-believing creationist support - the god whom they believe creates parasites like malaria as part of its divine plan, or the biomedical scientists who work to thwart that plan?

This is of course, the sort of dilemmas that creationists need to avoid rather than have people accept that parasites like Plasmodium falciparum are the result of a mindless, amoral evolutionary process.

By contrast, and devoid of the sort of muddle, holding mutually exclusive views simultaneously, and dilemmas that creationism, with its evidence-free superstitions, gets itself into, the scientific view, supported by evidence, is:

Creationism in Crisis - Bonobos Show Cooperative Behaviour - And Another 'Uniquely Human' Trait... Isn't

Bonobos offer insight into evolution of cooperation — Harvard Gazette

The researchers considered grooming behaviors of bonobos an indicator of out-group cooperation.

Photos by Martin Surbeck

One by one the human traits that creationists like to cite as evidence of our special creation, apart from the other animals, are being shown to be anything but unique, and very often it turns out that they are in fact evidence of common descent, being present in our closest relatives.

In this case, bonobos have been shown by two Harvard researchers to form relationships for mutual benefit not only with immediate kin groups but across them and even with strangers, something that was thought to be uniquely human, requiring intelligence, empathy, a sense of 'self' and an ability to predict different outcomes from different options.

This conclusion comes as a result of two years of data collection in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the only place where endangered bonobos exist in the wild in a population of about 20,000.

The findings of senior author, Assistant Professor Martin Surbeck and first author, Martin Surbeck of Harvard's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, are published open access in Science.

The research and its significance are explained in an article in the Harvard Gazette by Anne J. Manning:

Superstition News - Why Religions Are Mass Superstitions

Top: Buddhism
Bottom: Hinduism

Center: Catholic Christianity

Top: Islam (Sufism)
Bottom: Orthodox Judaism

Aztec human sacrifice ritual
(cf. the Christian blood sacrifice, or crucifixion)

3 Reasons Why Superstitions Work | Psychology Today

In an article in Psychology Today, as part of a series on magical thinking, American psychologist, Dr Mark Travers, PhD, explains why people are superstitious. It's clear from his explanations that religions perfectly fit the definition of superstition and the reasons people are superstitious also explains why people are religious.

I've précised his article below and added my own commentary to show how his definition and explanation of superstition fits the definition of religion and explains religious rituals.

Key points:

• There are deep psychological reasons why many people engage in superstitions.
• Superstitions can give people a sense of control or comfort.
• They can also serve as personalized coping mechanisms.

First, his definition of superstition:

Superstition is the belief in supernatural causality, where certain actions, objects, or rituals are believed to bring about specific outcomes, whether good or bad. While some may dismiss superstitions as irrational, there are deep psychological reasons why many engage in such beliefs. The enduring allure of superstitions transcends time and culture, offering insights into our desire for control and order in a chaotic world.

Creationism in Crisis - Why Did Some Plants Survived The Mass Extinction That Killed The Dinosaurs? - Evolution!

Modern cycads - the descendants of the survivors

A fossilised cycad

New Nicholas Researcher Finds Plants That Survived Dinosaur Extinction Pulled Nitrogen from Air | Duke Today

About 65 million years before creationists think Earth existed, about 75% of living species were wiped out in what is known as the K-Pg extinction event. This was caused by a massive meteor, believed to be about 9 miles wide, that hit Earth on the edge of the Yucatan peninsula in what is now Mexico, throwing up billions of tons of sulphurous dust and gas high into the atmosphere, blotting out the sun and plunging Earth into a decade or more of darkness and winter conditions.
Along with most of the animal life, most of the plants were exterminated too. Up to that point, the predominant plant life had consisted of species of cycads on which the herbivorous dinosaurs had browsed.

But just a few cycads survived. The mystery was why? What enabled those few to survive when all the others died?

Scientists now think it had something to do with the fact that the survivors all appeared to have formed an alliance with nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria in their roots, in much the same way that legumes have. How this gave them an advantage is unknown, but it is probably no coincidence that the descendants of the survivors all have this symbiotic relationship with cyanobacteria.

This was discovered by a team of researchers led by Michael A. Kipp of the Division of Earth and Climate Sciences, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA. and is the subject of a paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Knowing that modern cycads are nitrogen fixers, Professor Kipp reasoned that this means the nitrogen in their tissues is derived from atmospheric nitrogen rather than mineral nitrates in the soil, so, measuring the nitrogen isotope ratios in their fossils should tell us something about the changes in atmospheric nitrogen isotopes over time. However, he discovered that only a few species of fossil cycads had isotope signatures similar to that of living cycads because most of them were not nitrogen fixers. He also realised that those that were nitrogen fixers were the ancestors of living cycads. In other words, only the nitrogen fixers survived the K-Pg extinction.

This is an example of how evolution can give a species an unexpected advantage in a situation that was unplanned and unforeseeable, but which was so instantaneous that the process of evolution couldn’t possibly have provided a solution. So the species without that advantage went extinct and the evolutionary trajectory of those was changed forever, just as it was for the large reptiles, most of which died out, the avian dinosaurs which became birds, small mammals that became all today's mammals from pygmy shrews to blue whales, and the angiosperms which evolved into grasses and flowering plants that diversified into thousands of species, some in association with pollinating insects, birds and even bats.

First, some AI background information.

Creationism in Crisis - The Multiple Origins of Homo Sapiens Over Hundreds of Thousands of Years

View of the village of Kuboes, on the border of South Africa and Namibia. DNA samples were collected from Nama individuals who have historically lived in the region.

Photo: Brenna Henn/UC Davis

Nama women of Namibia
The Nama are an indigenous population known to carry exceptional levels of genetic diversity compared to other modern groups.

New UC Davis Research Using DNA Changes Origin of Human Species, Researchers Suggest | UC Davis

In an article which passed beneath my radar last May, a team of anthropologists led by Professor Brenna Henn of the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis, cast doubt on the theory that modern humans all originated in a single population in East Africa.

Instead, they propose a model in which early Homo sapiens spread across Africa forming partially isolated populations, between which there was limited gene flow by interbreeding.

The earliest split which is still detectable in the DNA of contemporary people occurred between 120,000 to 135,000 years ago after two or more weakly genetically differentiated populations had been mixing for hundreds of thousands of years.

Before creationists start to get over-excited by the news that earlier scientists might have been wrong about the exact details of the evolution of modern humans, they should break the habit of a lifetime and find the courage to read the abstract to the paper in Nature, which makes it clear that the debate is about the details of our evolutionary origins in Africa. There is no serious doubt about the truth of that explanation.

As a UC Davis press release explains:

Creationism in Crisis - Damselflies Evolved Their Colours At Least 5 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

The common bluetail damselfly Ischnura elegans

Photo: Erik Svensson

Common bluetail damselflies, Ischnura elegans

Credit: Quartl, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Scientists have solved the damselfly colour mystery | Lund University

So much history, especially the evolutionary history of life on Earth, occurred before the mythical Creation Week, when creationists believe a magic man who existed when nothing existed made the universe out of that nothing, that it’s difficult to keep up with it all.

Here, for example, is a scientific account of how damselflies evolved their colours at least 5 million years before Creation Week, by an evolutionary process guaranteed to have creationists going into abject denialism and lying to one another about it in their echo chambers, if not throwing a tantrum, stamping their feet and shouting abuse at the facts to make them go away, or at the scientists who discovered the facts.

The bluetail damselfly, like many other damsel flies is sexually dimorphic with males being brightly coloured and the females more drab, usually brown. Females of the common bluetail occur in three color forms, one of which mimics the male, and the mystery was how, why and when did this evolve? Note here how a creationist would simply declare they were designed that way by a god whose purpose in doing so is unknowable, whilst science looks for the how and why, and so discovers a much more satisfying answer than the creationist one which makes them satisfied with not knowing.

By comparing the genome of the common bluetail, Ischnura elegans with that of a close tropical relative, Ischnura senegalensis, the scientists were able to show that the colour differences are due to mutations in a specific genetic region on chromosome 13 that arose at least 5 million years ago, so the question resolves down to why was it retained? In other words, what were the environmental selectors that spread the mutations in the population then conserved them for 5 million years?

The research was conducted by scientists at Lund University, Sweden, under biologist Professor Erik Svensson with colleagues at Stockholm University, Sweden, Institut Pasteur, Université Paris Cité, Paris, France, the University of Rennes, France and Tohoku and Chiba Universities, Japan. Their findings are published, open access, in Nature Ecology & Evolution and its significance is explained in a Lund University press release:

Creationism in Crisis - 120 Million-Year-Old Bird Footprints Trample on Creationist Mythology

Bird footprints in Cretaceous rocks on Australia's South Coast

One of the Early Cretaceous bird tracks that clearly shows all four toes, including the rear toe, or hallux. The track is nearly 10 centimeters wide and is similar in size and form to tracks made by modern-day green herons.

Photo by Melissa Lowery.

Birds set foot near South Pole in Early Cretaceous, Australian tracks show

Some more of that long history of 'pre-Creation' life on Earth was revealed a couple of days ago when an international team of researchers led by Professor Anthony Martin, of Emory University’s Department of Environmental Sciences, and including researchers from Monash University and the Museums Victoria Research Institute in Australia; the Benemérita Normal School of Coahuila in Mexico; and the Smithsonian Institution, published their discovery of 27 bird tracks which vary in form and size in Early Cretaceous rocks. The tracks range from seven to fourteen centimetres wide and resemble those of modern shore birds such as small herons, waders and oystercatchers.

The discovery is published open access in PLOS ONE.

They were found in the Wonthaggi Formation south of Melbourne. The rocky coastal strata mark where the ancient supercontinent Gondwana began to break up around 100 million years ago when Australia separated from Antarctica and are the oldest bird tracks so far found.

At the time, in the rift valley that was opening up between Australia and what was to become Antarctica, the valley would have contained rivers which were subject to drastic seasonal changes between very cold, winters and several months of perpetual darkness and relatively warm summers when the river flood plain would have been home to migrant waders.

The tracks were made in successive stratigraphic layers which suggests seasonal flooding followed by gentle covering with silt or sand which preserved the footprints.

The Wonthaggi Formation is famous for its variety of polar dinosaur bones, although bird-fossil finds are extremely rare. The Cretaceous strata of the formation has yielded only one tiny bird bone — a wishbone — and a few feathers.

Birds have such thin and tiny bones. Think of the likelihood of a sparrow being preserved in the geologic record as opposed to an elephant.

Professor Anthony Martin.

Malevolent Designer News - 16 More Nasties For Devotees of the Divine Sadist To Enjoy

Figure 1.16 new species of endoparasitic wasps have been added to the group, Loboscelidia, based on their unique physical characteristics. Scale bar = 0.5 mmc

Credit: Yu Hisasue et al. (2023)
European Journal of Taxonomy

Male wasp of the Loboscelidia genus, a relative of the 16 newly-described Vietnamese species or endoparasitic wasps.

16 strange new parasitoid wasp species discovered in Vietnam | Research Results | KYUSHU UNIVERSITY

Creationist devotees of the divine sadist whom they believe creates all the parasites that increase the suffering in the world, will be thrilled to learn that 16 more endoparasitic wasps have been discovered.

These are all endoparasitic on other insects and lay their eggs inside their victims' eggs where their grubs can then consume the growing embryo. Their strange appearance is thought to be because they have evolved from a myrmecophilous species that mimicked the appearance or ants.

All these were discovered in Vietnam by entomologists from Kyushu University, Japan, and Vietnam’s National Museum of Nature. Their discovery is described in a Kyushu University news release: