Creationism in Crisis - Revealing The Mysteries of Earth's Fourth Mass Extinction - 200 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'.

Reconstruction of a Late Triassic ecosystem from Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. Published specimens and species preserved at Ghost Ranch were incorporated into the research team’s global ecological dataset.

Illustration: Victor O. Leshyk.

Skeleton of the early dinosaur Coelophysis bauri from the Late Triassic. The protracted restructuring of Early Jurassic terrestrial ecosystems coincided with the diversification of dinosaurs.

Image: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Mysteries of Earth’s ancient mass extinction event revealed

In that multi-billion year history of planet Earth, long before creationism's little god allegedly created a small, flat planet with a dome over it, and put living things on it, the real Earth had already had several mass extinctions when the ecosystem changed so radically and quickly that most species couldn't evolve fast enough to survive.

This give the lie to creationist claims that Earth is finely-tuned for life because, quite frankly, very few of the species that have evolved on it last more than a few million years before being killed off by one catastrophe or another that any omniscient deity worthy of the description could and should have foreseen and planned for.

The fourth of those mass extinctions occurred at the end of the Triassic period when a dramatic rise in greenhouse gasses due to volcanic activity led to rapid global warming and a significant shift in the planet’s biosphere, ending the Triassic period and launching the Jurassic.

The parallel with today when a rise in greenhouse gasses has been caused by industrial pollution and burning fossil fuels is striking.

Now a new insight into this mass extinction has been revealed by researchers from the University of Southern California's Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, using a novel "ecospace framework" method that categorizes animals beyond just their species. It accounts for ecological roles and behaviors — from flying or swimming predators to grazing herbivores and from ocean seafloor invertebrates to soil-dwelling animals on land.

As the press release from UCSDornsife explains:

Bigotry News - UK Christians May Retain The Right To Abuse Victims Of Their Choice

Christians gather to abuse women outside a Marie Stopes clinic in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

AFP/Getty

Women celebrating what they thought was a victory for their right to freedom from harassment and bigotry.

© Sister Support.

Ministers accused of watering down rules around abortion clinic buffer zones | Abortion | The Guardian

Last year, MPs in the House of Commons voted overwhelmingly to back an amendment to the Public Order Act which would have established 'safe zones' around clinics offering pregnancy termination services to women who need them.

This would have made it unlawful for anyone to harass or approach women entering the clinics in an attempt to prevent their access or to influence their choice by publicly shaming them.

Those routinely harassing women in this way are invariably Christians using various underhand tactics and disinformation and even threatening to photograph the women and post their picture on the social media. Women are routinely subjected to abuse and shouts of 'murderer' by sanctimonious bigots exercising what they claim is a God-given right to impose their views on others and deny others basic human rights.

The traditional passive-aggressive threat of 'praying' for the women and the foetus was used routinely with ostentations 'silent' prayer, clearly intended to shame and embarrass women. Only a Christian could weaponise 'prayer' while ignoring what Jesus allegedly told them about casting the first stone and not judging others.

Creationism in Crisis - Scientist Got A Date Wrong - But It's More Bad News For Creationists

A Pacific harbor seal swims through a kelp forest in Monterey Bay, California. Recently discovered fossils from Washington show that kelp forests flourished more than 32 million years ago along the Pacific Coast, long before seals and other animals appeared.

Reconstruction of the desmostylian, Paleoparadoxia tabatai

Credit: Nobu Tamura, via Wikipedia (CC BY 3.0)

Pacific kelp forests are far older than we thought | Berkeley

It used to be thought that the ecosystems along California's coasts, which are centred on kelp forests, evolved about 14 million years ago but the discovery of 32-million-year-old fossil kelp means that estimate needs to be revised to a time before the modern marine mammals, urchins, birds and molluscs which now depend on these ecosystems had evolved.

It also means that kelp was probably an important food for a now-extinct hippopotamus-sized marine mammals, the desmostylians, probable relatives of manatees, sea cows and their terrestrial relatives, elephants.

The 14-million-year-old estimate assumed that all components of an ecosystem co-evolve, but this finding shows that the same foundation can lead to different ecosystems to evolve around them, consistent with new niches providing evolutionary opportunities in which mutation and variance can be selected for. In other words, the meaning of the genetic information is changed by the environment.

The discovery of the fossil kelp holdfasts and its significance is explained in a published paper In Proceeding of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) and in a news release from the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley):

Malevolent Design - No Fun For Creationists As The Candida Family of Fungi Are Evolving To Keep Infecting Us

A Candida albicans cell forming a hyphal extension

Candida auris causes multidrug-resistant infections that can result in organ failure

Credit: Kateryna Kon/Science Photo Library

Candida evolution disclosed: new insights into fungal infections | IRB Barcelona

The Candida genus of fungi are related to yeasts (i.e., single-celled fungi) but are specialists at living in or on our bodies and are common infections in body cavities such as the mouth, anus, vagina and urethra and the genito-urinary and respiratory tract, and other moist areas like armpits, inner surfaces of joints like the elbow and knee, groins and fold beneath breasts and buttocks.

They can also become systemic infections causing organ failure and death, especially in people who are immune compromised for any reason. So, they are a threat to people who are in generally poor health, who have had transplants and need to take immunosuppressive drugs, or people receiving chemotherapy for cancer.

And, like some bacterial pathogens, they are good at evolving immunity to anti-fungal medication.

One species, Candida auris, has evolved multiple drug resistance and is now a serious threat to people in hospital for other conditions.

Now, a research group from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), led by the ICREA researcher Dr. Toni Gabaldón, has identified hundreds of genes subject to recent, clinically-relevant selection in six species of the fungal pathogen Candida. In other words, the genes that have given Candida species their clinically-relevant drug resistance.

First a little AI background to the Candida genus:

Creationism in Crisis - How Human Skin Colour Evolved in Africa Long Before 'Creation Week'

PIK Professor Sarah Tishkoff led a collaborative team of researchers who have discovered key insights into the molecular basis of skin color differences among Africans

Image: Courtesy of Sarah Tishkoff
and Alessia Ranciaro

1996 map of the major ethnolinguistic groups of Africa, by the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division (substantially based on G.P. Murdock, Africa, its peoples and their cultural history, 1959).

Source: Wikipedia

A molecular look at the mechanisms behind pigmentation variation | Penn Today

While creationism's god was creating a small flat Earth with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, the people of Africa were evolving and diversifying according to local conditions and gene flow between populations that has resulted in a whole range of skin tones and a genetic variance that is greater in a small population of Africans than in the whole of the extra-African population of the world, reflecting the genetic bottleneck of a small band of migrants moving out of Africa into Eurasia.

Africans had of course had several hundred thousand years to diversify prior to the mythical 'Creation Week' when creationists believe a magic man made of nothing came from nowhere and magicked a universe out of nothing with some magic words, spoken in a language that no-one understood because there was no-one to understand it.

Abiogenesis News - Going! Going! Gone! - How Creationism Favourite Gap Just Got Smaller

Geothermal hot spring in Haukadalur Valley, Iceland

ancient hot springs - Press Office - Newcastle University

Hardly any debate about evolution with a creationist will go more than a few exchanges before the creationist gives up trying the traditional fallacies and avoidance tactics and falls back onto ground he or she feels safer on - abiogenesis - with the demand that you explain how the first cell arose fully developed, with the parrot squawk assertion that 'you can't get life from non-life'.

But ask them to define 'life' and they'll break off the debate because it's a term creationists think involves something that science can't explain, but they've no idea what it is or why it should present science with a problem. Ask them to explain how dead food becomes living tissue through the process of digestion and metabolism, if it's impossible, and you probably won't hear from them again.

The gap creationists are trying to shoehorn their favourite creator god into is what they've been programmed to believe is unclosable by science, so it must have been done by the locally popular god. They will of course be unaware of the fallacy of the false dichotomy because it's probably what someone fooled them with, so they just assume it'll work on everyone else.

Unintelligent Design - The Heath-Robinson Contraption In A Western Honey Bee's Gut

Western honey bee,
Apis mellifera

Study shows western honey bee synthesizes food for its intestinal bacteria

A feature of creationism’s putative intelligent [sic] designer's designs is that they are almost always ingenious but overly complex for the task and often cobbled together from components designed for other purposes.

Just like a William Heath-Robinson contraption, where everyday objects such as a coal-scuttle full of coal, is a counterweight, every piece of string is made from short pieces of string knotted together and a simple task is made far more complicated than it need be.

And yet it works, just about, no matter how inefficiently, and removing just one component would make the whole thing fail - what creationists call 'irreducible complexity' but what a proper intelligent designer would probably call, 'bloody stupid'. Creationism's 'intelligent' [sic] designer wouldn't have lasted a term in design school.

Just such a Heath-Robinson machine has recently been discovered in the gut of the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera. Its purpose is to solve the problem of digesting the food the bee eats, for which it needs the help of 8 species of bacteria and other microorganisms that live in the bee's gut. Some of these bacteria are needed just to clean up the waste produced by other bacteria. 8 species is low compared to other species; humans, for example, need about 20 different species.

Apparently, giving bee's the same enzymes the bacteria use was far too simple and not nearly complex enough for the divine Heath-Robinson designer.

But even that wasn't complicated enough because one of the bacteria can't live on sugar alone, even though honey bees can, so the honey bee manufactures nutrients to feed to this bacteria.

How this was discovered was the subject of a recent paper in Nature Microbiology by a team of researchers led by Professor Philipp Engel in the University of Lausanne's Department of Fundamental Microbiology (DMF) in Dorigny. Their research is explained in a news release from the University of Lausanne (translated from French):

Creationism in Crisis - Sturgeons in Alberta 72 million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Credit: University of Alberta

72-million-year-old sturgeon discovered in Edmonton is a fossil first | Folio

Once upon a time, just a few thousand years ago, a magic man made of nothing appeared from nowhere and said some magic words that magicked a whole universe out of nothing. Right in the middle of that universe he made a small flat planet and put a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, then he magicked some people, some plants and some animals and this took him nearly a whole week. Even though he did it all with a few magic words, this made him so tired he needed a day off.

After a while he decided he didn't like what he had made because he had given the people free will and they were using it, so he drowned them all apart from a few, then started again without changing his original design, hoping things would turn out differently this time.

What he hadn't realised was that he had only gone and created this imaginary world in a small part of a really big Universe that had been there for billions of years and already had a planet with lots of animals on it, so, although he had started off 'going down' to chat to the humans he had magicked, he promptly disappeared, never to be seen again, almost as though he had gone back to being nothing. Meanwhile, the real planet in the real universe carried on the way it had always done, as though no magician had ever done anything magical.

One of those animals on the real planet was a fish called a sturgeon which lived in what is now Alberta, Canada, 75 million years before 'Creation Week', which is why scientist were able to find a fossil of it in rocks known to be between 84 and 72 million years old. It's little clues like this, and the complete lack of any evidence of magic, that tells us the story of that fantasy creation was wrong and made up by ignorant people who didn't know any better.

The discovery of the fossil sturgeon was announced in a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology last August and announced to the press in a news release just a couple of days ago:

Unintelligent Design - How Creationism's Heath-Robinson Designer's 'Design' Causes Cancer

Pit Head (c. 1930) William Heath Robinson

Deregulation of Alternative RNA Splicing Promotes Pancreatic Cancer Pr | Moffitt

William Heath-Robinson was an English eccentric illustrator of ridiculously over-complicated solutions for (mostly) imaginary problems. His 'labour-saving' devices often took more people to operate them than the labour they saved.

His designs usually incorporated the most unlikely of objects, such as pianos or stacks of books to stand on, bent sticks to hold things up, pulleys and levers, held together with pieces of string, which never failed to have a knot in them because they had been made from shorter lengths tied together. And the amazing thing was, when you looked at them, it looked though they really would work, and if you took any component away, the whole thing would fail.

What he probably didn't appreciate at the time, was how closely his 'intelligent' designs resembled the designs of creationism's putative designer, but they are almost perfect metaphors for the detail beneath the superficial appearance of design in living organisms, especially the processes and mechanisms that look irreducibly complex.

Take, for example, a consequence of the failure of a 'Heath-Robinson' mechanism for correcting a problem with how RNA is built using templates in DNA which are scattered over several sections of DNA instead of being in a single, contiguous lengths. The different fragments of RNA that this initially produces must then be spliced together (just like William Heath-Robinson's pieces of string).

And of course, being a 'Heath-Robinson' machine, even this little section of the process of protein production is not simple. Splicing is a complex process involving the protein, RBFOX2, and when this fails in pancreatic cells, the resulting faulty RNA molecules can lead to cancer and metastasis of those cancer cells is itself facilitated by reduced RBFOX2.

How the failure of this correction mechanism causes pancreatic cancer was discovered by an international team of researchers led by Assistant Professor, Karen Mann, Ph.D., of the Department of Molecular Oncology, Moffitt Cancer Center, Tampa, FL, 33612, USA, with colleagues from The Tisch Cancer Institute; St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital; the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore; and the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Of course, the real problem here isn't with the designer but the mindless design process that produces these over-complicated, utilitarian 'Heath-Robinson' solutions to problems. DNA is RNA's data store and, so long as it works better than what went before it, there is no pressure to sort out and 'defrag' the DNA, so the irreducibly complex 'Heath-Robinson' machine might fail and cause pancreatic cancer occasionally, but the proteins the pancreas produces are worth the occasional failures, and mindless evolution has no concern for the suffering caused.

Here is how the team described their findings in Nature:

Malevolent Designer News - The Brilliance of Creationism's Divine Sadist

Scanning electron micrograph of Salmonella typhimurium invading a human epithelial cell.

New insights into what helps Salmonella cause infections | Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology

Salmonella

The brilliance of creationism's favourite sadist was on display again recently, when researchers from the Department of Microbiology, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA, showed how the pathogen, Salmonella, is designed to not only survive being engulfed by the macrophages in our blood that are supposedly designed to protect us, but positively thrives and multiplies inside them. Although rarely fatal, Salmonella infection can be distressing and unpleasant with vomiting and diarrhoea, as I can attest from my childhood in rural Oxfordshire at a time when food and water hygiene left much to be desired.

So, it looks like creationism’s intelligent [sic] designer won that particular arms race with itself, in favour of the nasty pathogen designed to increase the suffering in the world. At least, that's the sort of nonsense creationists needs to believe to retain the childish belief that living things are made by a magic man in the sky.

The fact that salmonella can live happily inside a macrophage supposedly designed to kill pathogens has been known for some time, but what the University of Illinois researchers have discovered is just how it manages the trick. It's all down to the structure and function of the bacterium's surface membrane which detects and adjusts to the conditions in which the organism finds itself.
First, a little AI background on the pathogen:

Creationism in Crisis - Americans Are Now Abandoning Religion As Fast As Europeans Did A Generation Ago

Belief in Five Spiritual Entities Edges Down to New Lows

As the chart on the right shows, the decline in belief in God and Heaven has been the most dramatic, falling 16 percentage points in 22 years and the decline in belief in other magical entities like Angels and Satan has run in parallel, the differences being within the statistical error of the data.

What this reflects is the trend that has been apparent in American religious belief since about the mid 1960's where the younger generation have tended to be significantly less religious than their parents with belief in God and the importance of religion tending to increase in older generations. However, as people age, they tend to keep the religious beliefs they formed by the age of about 25-30. What these charts show then is the effect of the older generations dying and the younger generations moving up through the age groups, as the following chart shows:

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Have Worked Out How The Vertebrate Head Evolved - It wasn't Created By Magic

Laser scanning images of stage 24

Figure 3
Dynamics of head mesoderm cell clusters during individualization of the head muscles See also Figures S4 and S5.

(A–L) 3D reconstructions and laser scanning images of stage 24 (A–D), 25 (E–H), and 26 (I–L) lamprey embryos. The area enclosed by the white dotted line in (K) indicates velum mesoderm. Pink, mesoderm; light blue, dorsal inner mandibular mesoderm; green, ventral mandibular arch mesoderm; yellow, cavity in the mandibular mesoderm. Images show sagittal views.

(M) Comparison of rosettes and head mesoderm cell clusters in lamprey and amphioxus embryos. Right blue, somite rosette; blue, distinct head mesodermal cell clusters. DIMM, dorsal inner mandibular mesoderm; EOM, extraocular muscle; GS, gill slit; GV, ganglion trigeminal; HyAM, hyoid arch mesoderm; HyM, hyoid mesoderm; LLM, lower lip mesoderm; LPM, lateral plate mesoderm; MM, mandibular mesoderm; NHP, nasohypophyseal plate; Op, optic vesicle; OPM, oropharyngeal membrane; OV, otic vesicle; PHM, pharyngeal mesoderm; PMM, premandibular mesoderm; PP, pharyngeal pouch; S, somite; ULM, upper lip mesoderm; Vel, velum; VMAM, ventral mandibular arch mesoderm.

Onai, Takayuki et al. (2023)

Study on Lamprey Embryos Sheds Light on the Evolutionary Origin of Vertebrate Head ｜ UNIVERSITY OF FUKUI

Despite the almost daily claims in the social media by creationist dupes that mainstream biologists are abandoning the Theory of Evolution (TOE) in favour of creationism because it doesn't explain the facts, there is no sign whatsoever in the scientific literature of that happening. No serious biologist has ever published a peer-reviewed paper proposing that magic by a supernatural designer better explains the facts than the TOE.

Instead, just about every paper dealing with origins and development of species and their relationship to other species, has evolution firmly and inextricably embedded within it and the conclusions only ever make sense as the result of an evolutionary process. The belief that the TOE has been or is in the process of being, overthrown by creationism is a lie promulgated by the Deception Institute to claim success for the 'Wedge Strategy', which has been a monumental failure as fewer Americans now believe in creationism than did at the start of the campaign.

The paper recently published with open access in iScience illustrates just have firmly embedded the TOE is in biology. It concerns the early development of the vertebrate head, which has been a matter of conjecture in biology:

Some believe that the vertebrate head has developed as a result of modification of the segmental elements of the trunk, such as the vertebrae and somites. On the other hand, others believe that the vertebrate head has evolved as a new, unsegment body part, unrelated to other widely observed embryonic segments somites. Interestingly, previous studies on embryos have revealed the presence of some vestiges of somites in the head mesoderm (e.g., head cavities and somitomeres). However, homology between trunk somites and such head segments has been controversial.

Note the complete absence of any notion of magic creation in the controversy. The issue is over which tissues evolved into the beginnings of the vertebrate head.

The paper, by Japanese scientists led by Assistant Professor Takayuki Onai, of the Department of Anatomy, University of Fukui, School of Medical Sciences, Fukui, Japan, resolves that controversy by showing how the head of a lamprey embryo develops.

As the University of Fukui news release explains:

How Science Works - Correcting A Mistake With Modern Technology - But It's No Comfort For Creationists

Three-dimensional model of the only known picrodontid skull in top (left) and bottom (right) views. CT scan technology revealed previously unknown bones of the skull (colored on the right) that helped demonstrate that picrodontids are not primates as previously believed.

Figure 1. Three-dimensional models derived from µCT scan data of Zanycteris paleocenus (AMNH 17180) with descriptions and orientations of skeletal elements organized from left to right. (a) Cranium in dorsal and ventral views with basicranial region transparent showing original position of digitally extracted bones. Box illustrates left upper molars rotated into occlusal view with distolingual basin (asterisk) and postprotocingulum (arrow). (b) Three-dimensional model of right petrosal in ventral view, composite line drawing incorporating preserved morphology from right and left petrosal, and composite line drawing with major neurovascular structures; (c) R partial ectotympanic in oblique posterior and ventral view; (d) R partial alisphenoid/basisphenoid in lateral and ventral view. Scale bars, 1 mm. Abbreviations: C = upper canine; C a = upper canine alveolus; M = upper molar; P a = upper premolar alveolus.

New Research Sheds Light on an Old Fossil, Solving an Evolutionary Mystery | CUNY Graduate Center

The only certainty in science is that there are no certainties in science.

Unlike religions which provide unreasonable certainty in the absence of evidence and call it 'faith', science provides reasonable uncertainty and provisional opinion pending further evidence.

This was illustrated a couple of days ago by a paper published in Royal Society Biology Letters, which describes the reclassification of a middle Palaeocene placental mammal, known to science as a picrodontid, and known only from a partial cranium, some teeth and pieces of jawbone. This was discovered about 100 years ago and 50 years ago was classified as an early primate, in other words, close to the remote placental common ancestor of all the apes, monkeys, lemurs, tree shrews, etc.

Just to remind creationists: the middle Palaeocene lasted from about 66 million years before the mythical 'Creation Week' to 56 million years before the mythical creation of the Universe. It began a few million years after the non-avian dinosaurs all went extinct.

Creationism in Crisis - Eukaryote Fossils Were Highly Evolved 1.6 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

A soft summer evening in the Paleoproterozoic, as envisioned by DALL-E.

Photo Credit: DALL-E, prompt by Harrison Tasoff.

Limbunyasphaera operculata is a new species that shows a small door opening into the cell.

Photo Credit Riedman et al.

Even the oldest eukaryote fossils show dazzling diversity and complexity | The Current

By 1.64 billion years ago, eukaryote organisms had already evolved out of prokaryote cells and had diversified into a range of complex organisms. For creationists, this was more than 1.6 billion years before the Universe existed and way back in the dim and distant past before humans were supposedly magicked out of dirt in 'Creation Week.

The prevailing scientific consensus was that eukaryotes only diversified significantly about 800 million years ago, but a paper published in the Paleaontological Society's journal Papers in Palaeontology throws this back to double that age almost to the beginnings of eukaryote evolution. The paper is the work of palaeontologists from the Department of Earth Science, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, USA and the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences/Geotop, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

The team arrived at this conclusion by examining microfossils recovered from 430 samples from eight cores drilled by a prospecting company in Australia's Northern Territory. The cores used for this study spanned roughly 500 meters of stratigraphy, or 133 million years, with around 15 million years of significant deposition. They consisted of shale and mudstone: remnants of an ancient coastal ecosystem that alternated between shallow, subtidal mudflats and coastal lagoons.

The microfossils were extracted from the rock by disolving it in hydrofluoric acid, then examined under microscopes. The team recorded 26 taxa, including 10 previously undescribed species.

From the UC Santa Barbara news release: