One of the mysteries of microbiology and epidemiology, is why a virulent strain of Vibrio cholerae (the bacterium that causes cholera) has remained so stable ever since it emerged in 1961 in Indonesia, causing the seventh global cholera pandemic. this strain, known as 7PET, is now the predominant strain, out-competing the other strains and infecting an estimated 1.3 - 4 million people a year, of which between 21,000 and 143,000 die.
The reason for those wide-ranging estimates is because many of the deaths from cholera are in remoter areas of mostly third-world countries where sanitation is poor, health-care is hard to obtain, and many of the victims are children, so the cause of death is often not known with any certainty.
The traditional response of creationists to anything concerning the evolution of parasites like V. cholerae is to blame 'Sin'. The more sophisticated creationists who have realised that this is a blasphemy because it implies the existence of another creator over which their supposedly omnipotent, omni-benevolent god is powerless, so they simply blame this 'sin' thing for allowing 'genetic entropy' to cause an organism to 'devolve' (it would be a serious blasphemy to call it 'evolution' so Michael J Behe and the Deception Institute had put their heads together and come up with the term 'devolution' instead, which makes it look like the exact opposite of 'evolution'. Stupidly, this devise claims that everything was created perfectly and, when Adam & Eve 'sinned', somehow this opened the door to 'sin', which apparently took their 'omniscient' god by surprise, even though it had given its alleged creations immune systems in anticipation of the effects of 'Sin'.
But of course, we can dismiss that half-baked notion which no serious biomedical scientist would take seriously because there is no mechanism for a deleterious (i.e, 'devolutionarly' trait to accumulate in the species gene pool, and whatever it is about V. cholerae that gives it the edge over other strains, can't rationally be described as 'devolutionary', or a move away from some notional initial perfection, because there can't be anything better than perfect, and yet the 7PET strain of V. cholerae is better at doing the two things it appears to have been designed to do - making more people sick and making more copies of itself than the other strains.
Chromosomes during mitosis (white). In orange, a centromere is visible consisting of two subdomains (arrows), each bound to a discrete bundle of microtubules (magenta).
Two microscopy images of chromosomes. The left image shows chromosomes during mitosis (white). In orange, a centromere is visible consisting of two subdomains (arrows), each bound to a discrete bundle of microtubules (magenta). The right image depicts a dividing cancer cell showing a missegregating chromosome in the middle. The two centromere subdomains (arrows) of this chromosome appear split.
Credit: Carlos Sacristan Lopez. Copyright: Hubrecht Institute.
Creationists, who, generally speaking, know little or nothing of biology and don't want to either because the risk of wondering it they could be wrong is far too great, are easily fooled by the frauds with a vested interest in keeping them simultaneously ignorant and imagining they have a deeper understanding than the millions of educated, working biomedical scientists who apply the Theory of Evolution every day of their working lives.
One thing they've been fooled into believing is that there is some sort of perfection in design inside a cell and that same designer is responsible for everything about living organisms.
But, in the last few years, under the onslaught of science, the frauds have needed to fall back from the demonstrably false notion of perfection of design in view if cancers, diseases and parasites, and now blame something for these obvious imperfections, which, by definition, could not be the products of a perfect designer god, do they have invented the biologically nonsensical notion of 'genetic entropy' and devolution caused by 'Sin' over which their omnipotent, omnibenevolent designer god is powerless.
And, again under the onslaught of science, the frauds have also conceded that evolution does indeed happen and happened at a massively accelerated rate to account for all the biodiversity produced by a small number of survivors of a genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago.
An example of evolution if progress this week comes from a team of researchers from the universities of Tartu (Estonia), Toulouse (France), and Papua New Guinea. They have carried out an extensive analysis on blood samples from two populations in Papua New-Guinea who have remained isolated for the 50,000 years since Homo sapiens arrived on the Island.
One group occupies the highlands and the other group lives in the lowlands, making this a living laboratory to measure the effects of the different environments on the genomes of the two populations.
Different environments provide different drivers of evolutionary adaptation; for instance, the highlanders have adapted to a low oxygen partial pressure and comparatively few pathogens and an absence of mosquitoes; while the lowlands have both mosquitoes and a higher level of endemic pathogens. How each group has adapted to these different environments provides a text-book example of how the environment drives evolution and how isolation results in divergence.
Chimpanzees are famous for making and using tools, especially sticks, for obtaining nutritional foods like grubs and termites, but using them takes time, just like a human child needs to develop motor skills to use tools such as pens and pencils with sufficient dexterity.
How they do so, and the stages they go through, was described recently in an open access paper in PLOS Biology by a team of animal behaviourists from l'Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod (The Marc Jeannerod Institute of Cognitive Sciences), Lyon, France; the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, and the German Primate Center, Göttingen, Germany, who analyzed film of wild chimpanzees making and using stick tools in the Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire.
They concluded that, like human children, acquiring motor skills is not just a matter of practice, important though that it, but also depends on a protracted childhood during which they observe and copy adults with the necessary skills. In other words, young chimpanzees learn skill from their parents and elders, like a human apprentice.
The team's work was explained in information made available ahead of publication by PLOS, and published in SciTechDaily.com:
In the first few months of 2020, when the news was full of overflowing hospitals, doctors and nurses dying, shortages of personal protection equipment, respirators and oxygen cylinders and people dying in the streets from COVID-19, going outside was a hazardous business.
I well remember the first time I ventured outside as I had to go to my bank. I put on a face mask and plastic gloves before I got out of my car; parking charges had been suspended because using the ticket machine was too hazardous, and besides there no-one to refill it or even issue the spot fines for non-display of the parking ticket.
I walked from the car-park, through an almost empty pedestrianized shopping precinct, crossing to the far side to avoid a queue of anxious-looking people in facemasks, standing two metres apart, waiting to be admitted one at a time to a pharmacy - one of the only shops open.
It was surreal; the air we breathed had suddenly become toxic and touching any surface meant using a hand-cleansing anti-viral gel before we touched our face or handled anything else. Only essential shops were open. As soon as we came in the house, we used the hand-cleanser on the hall table then went straight to the bathroom to wash our hands with soap for the recommended 20 seconds - our hands had never been so clean.
When we had our weekly groceries delivered, we had them put in our garage, put on plastic gloves to put frozen food in the freezer, and of course washed our hands immediately, and left the rest for several hours before touching them, to allow the virus to die. Soon, all available delivery slots were taken by vulnerable people, and we had to use click and collect.
Our son, who was on a visit from the Czech Republic when the pandemic hit, got stranded here by the ban on travel, until, in April 2020, the Czech government arranged a repatriation coach for Czech nationals, with strict quarantine regulations. His Czech mother-in-law had made some face masks for him for the journey, but they arrived two weeks later. I drove him to Victoria in London through eerily empty streets, fully prepared to pay any fixed penalty for making a ‘non-essential’ journey. Trafalgar square, normally packed with people, was deserted and the normally heavily congested streets of London were strangely empty. Nothing moved on the M40 motorway.
Life had become strange and rather frightening, and we lost 50 lbs in weight to give ourselves a better chance if we caught the virus. We had gotten used to click and collect food shopping as a weekly routine - checking which local supermarket had a vacant slot, sometime needing to go as far afield as Reading or Wantage to find one. Gradually the restrictions were eased, but Christmas was a write-off. We got used to wearing face covering in public, using hand-cleanser as we entered any building and maintaining a 2-meter distance. Arrows on walkways showed us which side to walk on.
And we did twice-weekly lateral flow tests with the free test-kits we ordered online and dutifully reported the results to the NHS.
Then, in February 2021, we got the long-awaited phone call inviting us to get the new COVID vaccine and on Saturday, 6 February, 2021, everything changed. We had the first of our two vaccinations at a mass-vaccination centre in a social centre in a village some 5 miles away. It felt like a weight had been lifted from our shoulders; we had gotten through the pandemic! In 10-14 days, we would be protected against the more severe form of COVID-19. Medical science, in the form of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, had delivered humanity from the worst of the pandemic and made it possible to begin to restore normal life.
Last year, after having had just about every booster going in spring and autumn, we both caught COVID-19 on a trip to France - it was a mild, flue like infection that lasted about a week - nothing worse than a 'bit of a cold'. Without the protection of the vaccines, the outcome could have been very different.
And soon we are going to Czechia to visit our son, free from any worries or restrictions on travel; Czechia that 4 years ago, our son could only enter in a sealed, specially quarantined coach. What has made the difference is the vaccines, manufactured by pharmaceutical companies using techniques developed by the Oxford scientists in association with AstraZeneca (AZ).
And now, the European Union has decided to withdraw authorization for the AZ. Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health, University of Southampton, explains why in an article in The Conversation, reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine withdrawn – right to the end it was the victim of misinformation
AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine withdrawn – right to the end it was the victim of misinformation
This EU announcement was preceded by an application from AstraZeneca on March 27 2024 to withdraw the EU marketing authorisation. This development has been covered in various media outlets as primarily related to the known “adverse events”, namely a very small risk of blood clots. However, other factors are far more likely to be driving this decision.
The first AstraZeneca vaccine dose, outside of clinical trials, was administered on January 4 2021. In that year, about 2.5 billion doses were administered, and an estimated 6.3 million lives saved.
It was a key product at the peak of the pandemic. This includes during the emergence of the delta variant in India, across the first half of 2021 where, amid significant global supply issues, the AstraZeneca vaccine was one of the few tools available during that humanitarian crisis.
Professor Sarah Gilbert led the Oxford University team that produced the AZ vaccine.
This COVID vaccine, like those from Pfizer, Moderna, Novavax and others, went through the appropriate levels of testing. The phase 3 trials (where the vaccine is tested on thousands of people) showed the AstraZeneca product was safe and effective. It was distributed in many countries in Europe in early 2021, including the UK.
The potential adverse events related to blood clots were publicly reported in February 2021, with, for example, the UK government and the drugs regulator (the MHRA) then publishing a statement about its continued use on March 18 2021.
This was a time when COVID levels were extremely high, and getting higher, with around 4 million confirmed new cases globally per week.
It is well established that COVID itself caused a significantly increased risk of these related blood clots and also thrombocytopenia (low platelet count). An August 2021, analysis of 30 million vaccinated people in the UK showed that the risks of thrombocytopenic events were much higher following a COVID infection, compared with any COVID-related vaccine.
From that study, the British Heart Foundation describe how for every 10 million people who are vaccinated with AstraZeneca, there are 66 extra cases of blood clots in the veins and seven extra cases of a rare type of blood clot in the brain. By comparisons, infection with COVID is estimated to cause 12,614 extra cases of blood clots in the veins and 20 cases of rare blood clots in the brain.
To put this into some perspective, these vaccine-associated blood clot rates are much lower than many widely prescribed medicines. For example, the combined contraception pill, prescribed widely to women, has blood clot-related risks of around one in 1,000. With women taking postmenopausal hormone therapy, around one in 300 per year are likely to develop a blood clot.
Poor public profile
The AstraZeneca vaccine did suffer from a poor public profile, arguably much of it undeserved. There was some poor quality reporting in Germany in January 2021, with claims that the vaccine was only “8% effective in the elderly”. This claim was widely repeated, but it turns out that 8% figure referred to the percentage of people aged over 65 years in the study and not the efficacy measure.
The antivaccine lobby had a field day with fuelling the “infodemic”, including other false claims such as fabricated links between the vaccine and female infertility. As with the blood clots, COVID infection is known to increase the risks of infertility, but there is no link between infertility and the vaccine.
For individuals and families likely to have been injured by any medicine, including any of the COVID vaccines, compensation schemes are available. Many claimants report difficulties and frustrations with accessing the compensation. This is an area where the government-led schemes should be more transparent, and also where the misinformation from the anti-vaccine lobby hinders those groups they are claiming to support.
So, why would AstraZeneca withdraw this high-profile product? One reason for the withdrawal is likely to be that other COVID vaccines, such as Pfizer and Moderna, are essentially better products.
AstraZeneca is very good, but the mRNA versions have better effectiveness and safety levels.
The initial concerns around the difficulties of the specialist refrigeration needed to transport and store the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been overcome, including in low-income countries. The mRNA vaccines are also easier to update when new variants emerge.
With those factors, orders for the AstraZeneca vaccine are probably much lower now than they were in previous years. It is being overlooked in favour of better-performing vaccines.
For the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, perhaps it’s time has indeed passed. But it has been a safe and effective vaccine and a key part of the pandemic response for most countries around the world.
Correction. The sentence that read: It is well established that COVID itself caused a significantly increased risk of these related blood clots (thrombocytopenia). Now says: It is well established that COVID itself caused a significantly increased risk of these related blood clots and also thrombocytopenia (low platelet count). Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health, University of Southampton
Published by The Conversation. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
Because of the widespread claim by antivaxxer propagandists and purveyors of disinformation, that the AZ vaccine had not been fully tested and was somehow 'experimental', the full AZ test methodology and results are in the following PDF of the open access report in The Lancet:
Once sexual reproduction had become established in multicellular organisms, there was selection pressure to determine the gender of a developing embryo, so the result was either genetically male or genetically female. In humans and other mammals, for example, this is achieved by the XY Chromosomes, which, unlike all the other chromosomes (autosomes) are not paired. A zygote with 2X (homozygous) becomes a female and a zygote with XY (heterozygous) becomes male. Because the zygote gets either one or the other of these chromosomes from each parent these are the only combinations possible, so we never see a YY zygote.
Snake venom is usually a potent cocktail of multiple different toxins, 'designed' to kill, mostly small vertebrate prey very quickly, so the snake can strike, then wait for the prey to become paralyzed or die before it can go very far.
The reason for this rich cocktail is an interesting piece of evolutionary biology that would embarrass any creationist with the courage to learn about it. It is the result of repeated arms races between the snake and its prey species. Not only that, but it involves new genetic information arising, by gene duplication and mutations - contrary to creationist dogma that such a thing is impossible.
As one prey species starts to evolve resistance there is selection pressure on the snake to change its venom to overcome the resistance or loose one source of food, but, there must be a balance between retaining one food species but loosing several others if the changed venom is less effective against them. Resistance usually arises when there is a change in receptor sites on cell surfaces, on which the venom acts so the active venom molecule doesn't bind to it.
Attempts to give legal protection to religious people to practice their religion without fear of discrimination in Australia have run up against a predictable problem - Christians demanding the right to victimise, exclude and bully LGBTQ+ people and claiming it as their right under the anti-discrimination law.
We had a similar problem in UK some years ago when the ECHR was incorporated into UK law as the Human Rights Act, which, amongst other things, gave people the protection to practice their religion, free from discrimination as a basic human right. It also gave people freedom from discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexual orientation.
The two rights quickly came into conflict when Christians began demanding the right to carry on their tradition of bullying, victimizing and excluding gays, or denying them goods and services, on the grounds that denying them that right, deprived them of their privileged right to deprive other people of their human rights and decide to whom the law of the land applied.
This was clarified by the European Court which ruled that freedom from discrimination did not include the freedom to discriminate against others of your choosing on the grounds that your religion entitled you to do so. Human right applied to all and did not grant special privileges or exemptions to any group, no matter how entitled they felt to them.
Nevertheless, the argument rumbles on and Christian extremists are still lobbying for changes to the Human Rights Act or its abolition, to restore their right to bully and victimise minorities of their choice and decide who is entitled to what in society. The same bigots would react with outraged indignation if Muslims were demanding the right to impose Sharia on society or Jewish groups were lobbying for the right to impose Halakhah on the rest of us
In Australia, where this issue has recently emerged, it has done so against a growing distrust for organized religion, at least partly because of their record of bullying and discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community, and also because of the recent child sex-abuse scandals that have engulfed the Christian churches in Australia. It is these routine abuses of children and their subsequent cover ups by church authorities who often acted to facilitate them, that has probably cost the churches the trust of, especially, women in Australia.
A recent report found one in three Australian women had no trust at all in organised religion, a figure which rose to one in two for women between the ages of 18-29. Even one in ten religious women had no trust at all in organized religion and two in three LGBTQ+ women have no trust at all in organized religions.
The fact that so many Australian women are concerned about the treatment of LGBTQ+ by organized religion illustrates how far Australian cultural ethics have moved on, leaving Medieval Christian ethics struggling to keep up and faced with the familiar old dilemma of abandoning the old dogmas (and so in the eyes of purists, ceasing to be the religion they recognise) but retaining the support of the more enlightened elements in society or retaining their 'purity' and so keeping the die-hards but losing popular support in the process. Their problem is exacerbated by the fact that, as more and more moderate and progressive members leave in despair at the bigotry of the purists, so the purists become a larger proportion of the remaining members, and so the more powerful voices within the churches.
This quickly sets up the exponential declines we have seen in Europe, especially recently in Ireland and Spain where the decline in the power and influence of the Catholic Church has been in freefall since the child sexual abuse scandals broke and the Church tried to maintain its opposition to basic human rights such as same-sex marriages, family planning services and a woman's right to choose.
Incidentally, this illustrates how society doesn't get its morals from God and the church; they evolve as society evolves and the churches act as a break on progress trying to hold society back in order to retain control and its 'entitled' privileges. The Christian churches are anchored in the past and try to keep society there too. Eventually, religion is left so far behind that it becomes an irrelevance to the majority of the population. History shows this is the eventual fate of all religions and will be that of Christianity too.
This catastrophic decline in Australia, from the point of view of the churches, is illustrated in this chart which shows how net trust (i.e., the balance of those who trust the churches minus those who don't, fell from +3% in 1991 to -49% in 2018.
Gleeson, K. & Ashton, L. (2024). Trust in Religion among Women in Australia: A Quantitative Analysis. https://doi.org/10.60836/5jz3-t630
The authors of the report, Kate Gleeson, Associate Professor of Law, Macquarie University and Luke Ashton, Research Assistant, Institute for Public Policy and Governance, University of Technology Sydney have written about their findings in an open access article in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic purposes:
Crisis of faith: why Australian women have so little trust in religious institutions
The Albanese government is weighing up the costs of delivering an election promise to protect religious people from discrimination in Commonwealth law. Such protections were relatively uncontroversial when included in state anti-discrimination laws. However, the religious discrimination debate became toxic under former prime minister Scott Morrison when it became tied to
the rights of religious schools to discriminate against LGBTIQ+ staff and students.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said the government has draft legislation ready to go. However, it won’t introduce it without bipartisan support because, “now is not the time to have a divisive debate, especially with the rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia”.
Religious discrimination might not be addressed by the Australian parliament any time soon. Albanese must first persuade Opposition Leader Peter Dutton to support legislation to protect both religious people and LGBTIQ+ staff and students at religious schools.
Our new research report, Trust in Religion among Women in Australia, highlights some electoral realities relevant to legislating to protect religion in Australia today. The report analyses data from the nationally representative Australian Cooperative Election Survey, taken from May 2–18 2022. We surveyed 1,044 voters, of whom 531 were women. While we analysed the data for both men and women, we found that women are significantly more likely than men to express distrust in religion, and so our report focussed on them.
Our findings present a bleak picture for religious organisations hoping to gain political traction based on trust in their ability to act ethically and responsibly.
Child abuse scandals have played a big part in eroding the trust of women in particular.
When compared internationally, Australians – particularly women – have very low trust in organised religion. This gendered outcome makes Australia an outlier in the Western world and is likely related to women’s concerns for children in the care of religious organisations. Key findings include:
about one-third of Australian women have no trust in organised religion and religious leaders
distrust is highest among younger women: almost half of all women aged 18-29 have no trust in religious leaders
among religious women, around 10% have no trust in organised religion and religious leaders, while around half have “not very much trust” in either
LGBTIQ+ women have some of the lowest levels of trust in Australia. Almost two-thirds have no trust in religious leaders
Women living in outer regional and remote Australia are significantly more likely to distrust religion than women living in cities and inner regional areas.
Child abuse scandals have eroded trust
Consistent with international studies, our research indicates religious child abuse scandals have greatly affected trust. Australian women are highly sceptical about the capacity of religious leaders to protect the children in their care. In fact, almost half report low, or no, trust.
They also doubt the ability of religious leaders to respond to the findings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Over half report low, or no, trust in this. Concern for children is highest among LGBTIQ+ women, likely reflecting concerns about discrimination against LGBTIQ+ school children, as well as child abuse.
Trust affects how women view the role of religion in the public sphere. We found that about four in five women who have no trust in religion believe religious organisations should no longer be granted tax-exempt status by the government. Around two-thirds of this group also believe the government should stop funding religious schools.
Similarly, two-thirds of women with no trust in religion think religious organisations should play a smaller role, or no role at all, in counselling in schools. Around 60% of this group also think religious organisations should play a smaller role, or no role at all, in primary and high school education.
Can trust be regained?
The report concludes that organised religion is facing a profound crisis of trust, particularly among women. Concerns for children are paramount in shaping women’s opinions about religious organisations and the services they offer. The high level of distrust among younger women suggests the crisis is generational and cannot be corrected without dedicated interventions on the part of religious organisations and governments.
If left unchecked, this crisis has the potential to undermine the social and economic fabric of Australia, given the prominence of religious organisations in the provision of education, healthcare, and social services.
Religious organisations must work to establish or regain the trust of the electorate, especially among regional and remote communities. The current national emergency of violence against women perhaps provides one opportunity for religious organisations to build this trust. This is especially so given the pivotal role they now play in the outsourced domestic violence services sector, which was once community-run.
Politically, this crisis of trust does not bode well for governments seeking support for any legislation that might appear to offer greater protections to organised religion.
In particular, any protections that are perceived to encroach on children’s rights will almost certainly be rejected by those large sections of the Australian electorate reporting low or no trust in religion. Albanese will need to get the balance right.
Kate Gleeson, Associate Professor of Law, Macquarie University and Luke Ashton, Research Assistant, Institute for Public Policy and Governance, University of Technology Sydney
Published by The Conversation. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
Although this article is about Australia and deals with the Australian legislature's difficulty in reconciling the opposing forces of social progress and Christian reactionary bigotry, it reflects the situation throughout much of the Christian world, and which will eventually be faced in the Islamic world too.
As religious superstition loses its grip on society, society will either drags it kicking and screaming into the future, or consign it to the dustbin of history along with all the other irrelevant and unwanted religions that failed to keep up, also held back, no doubt by their increasingly internally powerful but externally despised, die-hard fundamentalists and dogmatic purists.
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Few places in Europe or elsewhere were more pious than Medieval England, but still creationism's pestilential malevolence continued to make people suffer with diseases such as bubonic plague, tuberculosis and the related leprosy. Even the extreme measures taken by believers to atone for imaginary transgressions that had brought about the Black Death had failed to assuage the putative designer god who was believed to be visiting this pestilence upon people.
The superstitious Bible-based belief in evil spirits and 'sin' as the cause of disease led to the social stigma that made the disease so feared and led to the isolation of sufferers in lepper colonies, and often reduced to begging to stay alive. Poor nutrition and poor sanitation led to a worsening of the condition and, although these counter-measures were visibly ineffective, such was the belief in the Bible that it was inconceivable that the disease could be caused by anything other than 'sin' and evil demons being permitted to enter the victim.
The modern equivalent of this victim-blaming superstition can be found in the modern creationist tactic of blaming 'Sin' and 'genetic entropy' for parasites, with demons being replaced by 'entropy' to make it sound sciencey. It is of course, Bible-based superstition without supporting evidence.
And now, if you believe that stuff, there is evidence that creationism's putative designer god designed M. leprae to also infect red squirrels so they would act as a repository to spread leprosy. Red squirrels were common in those days and were often captured in the wild for pets or pelts. Their skins, when used for clothing, would have carried M. leprae and infected anyone who wore them - a brilliant strategy, if you hate people and want them to be sick, suffer and die.
To start at the beginning because that's always a good place to start, plants need to get water and nutrients up to their leaves, so their 'designer' gave them a vascular system but without a pump, so, to maintain the upward flow, they need to evaporate away (or transpire) the water that just arrived in their leaves. They do this through tiny pores (or stomata; singular=stoma) that are just about visible to the naked eye, and clearly visible under a hand lens or a microscope.
These stomata are guarded by guard cells, one on either side, which can swell to close the stoma or shrink to allow the stoma to open, as the need arises.
However, these stomata are an open invitation to sap-sucking arthropods such as mites and aphids, which are cleverly designed, reputedly by the same designer that designed the stomata, which can push their mouthparts into the stoma to get at the nutrient-rich watery contents of the leaf.
So, having designed these sap-suckers to exploit the transport system it designed for plants, creationism's putative designer clearly saw the sap-suckers it had designed as a problem to be solved.
How it added this Heath-Robinson layer of additional complexity to solve the problem the earlier layer of complexity had caused is the subject of a research paper by a collaboration of researchers from the Centre for Plant Biotechnology and Genomics (CBGP), Spain, and Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge University (SLCU), Cambridge, UK and a news release from Cambridge University:
Despite their protestations that their god doesn't create pathogens - some other creative entity does that, apparently - they have been in love with Escherichia coli, or E. coli ever since their guru and Deception Insitute flunky, Michael J Behe, persuaded them that he had 'proved' their god exists and designs things because he couldn't work out how the E. coli flagellum could have evolved - so God did it!
There problem then, courtesy of Michael J Behe is that they have accepted that, if there was a designer involved in E. coli's design, it is the god that Michael J Behe 'proved' designed it, so their god designs pathogens, and even designs clever way to make them good at making us sick.
With that in mind, which creationist is going to argue against Michael J Behe's clever 'proof' that their god designs things so must exist, and insist that it isn't also behind the newly discovered way it manages to cause urinary tract infections (UTIs)?
The discovery that they can live, reproduce, and do their nasty thing in the otherwise near-sterile urinary tract, was made by researchers at the laboratory of Professor Harry Mobley in the University of Michigan Medical School.
Having been filtered by the kidneys, while urine contains some chemicals such as metabolites, it is about as sterile as it gets, with anything in it entering through the urethral meatus, in women, stupidly placed near the anus and inside the vulva where it can become infected during sexual intercourse by a penis cleverly designed with a foreskin to harbour pathogens under.
It has now been discovered that E. coli is also cleverly 'designed' to grab the nutrients it needs but can't manufacture itself by have a highly efficient transport system for taking them from its victims at a rate of thousands of molecules a second. One of the genes responsible for this, codes for an enzyme known as ATP-binding cassette (ABC).
Typical of creationism's 'intelligent' [sic] designer, if you believe in such a thing, is the Heath-Robinson workaround for the lack of genes for manufacturing these amino acids, where the parasite needs an energy-intensive ATP-based transport system, complete with multi-layered back-up systems to keep them working - the needless waste and needless complexity, so typical of evolved systems and the antithesis of intelligently designed systems.
The researchers have published their findings, open access, in the journal PNAS and explained them in a University of Michigan news release:
One of the prerequisites for irreducible complexity to emerge naturally without needing a designer is for the components to be there either as part of a pre-existing structure, or as the result of neutral mutations that have been retained because there is no selection pressure to get rid of them.
This was the situation the first land plants found themselves in about 550 million years ago when gene and genome duplication had created redundant genes that could mutate, diversify, and eventually provide the complex metabolic machinery to enable the marine algae to colonize the land and so beginning the greening of the planet. The result was the appearance of a sudden, one-off event that created the ancestor of land plants.
This is the conclusion of a large international team led by scientists from the Universities of Göttingen and Nebraska–Lincoln, who have published their findings, open access, in the journal Nature Genetics and explained it in a University of Göttingen news release:
These days, no serious scientist sets out to prove the Bible is wrong; discovering truth does that anyway - for anyone who can join the dots and do the simple logic. For example, humans could not have domesticated dogs some 23,000 years ago in Siberia by domesticating the local variety of grey wolf, if the Universe is just 10,000 years old.
And yet a paper published recently in the journal Molecular Biology & Evolution shows that they did exactly that.
In the context of mitochondrial DNA, what are haplotypes?
In the context of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), haplotypes refer to specific combinations of genetic variants or polymorphisms within the mitochondrial genome. Unlike nuclear DNA, which is inherited from both parents, mtDNA is passed down exclusively from the mother to all of her offspring. This maternal inheritance pattern makes mtDNA useful for studying ancestry, population genetics, and evolutionary history.
A haplotype represents a unique combination of nucleotide variations or mutations along the mtDNA sequence. By analyzing these haplotypes, researchers can track maternal lineages, study population migrations, and infer evolutionary relationships among different groups of individuals. Haplotypes are often used in studies of human populations, as well as in forensic genetics and medical research related to mitochondrial disorders.
Refuting the Bible was almost certainly not the intention of the authors, jointly led by Songmei Hu, of Joint International Research Laboratory of Environmental and Social Archaeology, Shandong University, Qingdao, China, and Xijun Ni and Qiaomei Fu, both of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Center for Excellence in Life and Paleoenvironment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, but the facts they discovered do just that. They had set out to resolve the question of where exactly dogs had been domesticated, based on an analysis of the mitochondrial DNA.
Mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) is inherited through the maternal line, so an analysis of the geographical and temporal distribution of the various haplotypes of mDNA and how they relate to one another should give an indication of where and when the ancestral haplotype lived.
How the team did this is explained in their paper:
Apart from some feathered dinosaurs that were destined to become birds, one of the few land vertebrates to survive the catastrophe that wiped out the remaining large dinosaurs and marine reptiles at the K-Pg boundary, was to go one to give rise to the entire mammalian order. They were small fury, probably nocturnal insectivores.
The fossil of one of these, from 65 million years ago (at about the time of the K-Pg mass extinction), has recently been discovered by Denver Museum of Nature scientists in Colorado, at Corral Bluffs, near Colorado Springs.
According to a press release from Denver Museum of Nature & Science:
Denver Museum of Nature & Science researchers are excited to announce the fossil discovery of a species of a 65-million-year-old mammal that was collected in the Corral Bluffs area on the edge of Colorado Springs. The newly discovered species, named Militocodon lydae, is part of a group of animals that gave rise to all modern hoofed mammals, including deer, cows and pigs.
The fossil skull and jaws of Militocodon lydae were uncovered from rocks dating back to just after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Roughly the size of a chinchilla, Militocodon lydae provides important clues about the explosive diversification of mammals in the wake of the dinosaur extinction.
Rocks from this interval of time have a notoriously poor fossil record and the discovery and description of a fossil mammal skull is an important step forward in documenting the earliest diversification of mammals after Earth’s last mass extinction.
Dr. Tyler Lyson, co-author
Museum Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology
Department of Earth Sciences
Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Denver, CO, USA.
How and when life rebounded in the aftermath of the extinction of the dinosaurs has been shrouded in mystery due to a poor fossil record. But thanks to an extraordinary discovery of remarkably complete fossils from Corral Bluffs, as well a recently awarded collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation's Frontier Research in Earth Sciences, Museum scientists and collaborators are now able to paint a vivid picture of how and when life rebounded after Earth’s darkest hour.
The study, published in April 2024, was led by Dr. Lucas Weaver, Kent State University, and Jordan Crowell, The Graduate Center, City University of New York. The researchers named the mammal Militocodon lydae in honor of two extraordinary contributors to the Corral Bluffs project: volunteer and retired Colorado Springs teacher Sharon Milito and Museum supporter and champion of Colorado Springs Lyda Hill.
