Creationism in Crisis - History Of The Human Malaria Parasite in 4,500 Years

Plasmodium falciparum

Plasmodium vivax

Photo Credit: CDC/ Steven Glenn, Laboratory & Consultation Division
via Wikipedia (Public domain)

Ancient Genomes reveal origin and spread of malaria | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Sometimes, I can almost feel sorry for creationists, if only most of them weren't such arrogant, obnoxious liars, more interested in winning more simpletons for their cult than in truth.

It must be difficult when none of the available real-world evidence can be shoehorned successfully into the absurd mythology they want to teach to school children at tax-payers' expense as a prelude to establishing a self-appointing theocracy unaccountable to no-one but themselves.

I have written many of articles in this blog, and will no doubt write a great many more, detailing events in the history of the universe and of life on Earth in the long period of time before creationist superstition says the Universe was created in 6 days of a mythical 'Creation Week'.

I also write regular articles showing how, if life is intelligently designed, the only conclusion must be that the designer is an incompetent idiot and a sadistic, pestilential malevolence with so many parasites seemingly designed to cause suffering in the world. Creationists have been taught to blame the latter, indeed all the nasty stuff in the Universe, on 'The Fall' and 'sin', and have even been given some scientifically nonsensical but sciencey-sounding parrot squawks, 'Genetic entropy' and 'devolution' to throw in at the appropriate time.

The problem there, apart from giving away the fact that creationism is a religious cult, not a science, is the fact that if that had even a slight degree of merit, parasitism should have begun at this mythical 'Fall'.

Admittedly, the Bible is vague about the timing but the clear impression of the Adam & Eve legend it that it happen within weeks, or months, maybe a year or so after 'Creation Week', and before they had any children to inherit it, but certainly not 4,500 years later, unless Adam & Eve were ancient beyond belief when they decided to 'sin'.

And yet, here we have clear scientific evidence that two of the nasty little family of parasites of the Plasmodium genus that cause so much human death and suffering in the form of malaria, weren't around until about 5,500 years ago - some 4,500 years after the alleged 'Fall'.

And creationists shouldn't forget how their guru, Michael J Behe, denied them the opportunity to blame 'Sin' and his other scientifically nonsensical 'explanations', by using what he falsely claimed could not have evolved, being 'irreducibly complex' - anti-malarial drug resistance in P. falciparum - as evidence that their god created it.

Covidiot News - Feeling Rough After A Covid Booster Not A Reason To Refuse One

Feeling Rough After Your COVID Shot? Congrats, It’s Working! | UC San Francisco

Despite a continuing high death toll from COVID-19 - 23,000 so far this year in the USA - only 25% of Americans had the booster last Autumn. This year, so far in the UK under 60% of 75+ age group invited have taken up the offer of a booster.

One of the reasons often cited is that the boosters make you feel rough for a day or two with flu-like symptoms of headache, aches and pains and general malaise, although, speaking from personal experience, I have never had anything like that, and I have had every booster offered. The worst I've had has been a slightly sore arm for a day or two with a little stiffness which is only there when I think about it. However, even the reported adverse reactions pass within a day or two. Now a new study has shown that this is a good sign because it shows the vaccine is working well to produce a high yield of antibodies.

The study, led by UC San Francisco, has found that the symptoms indicate a robust immune response that is likely to lessen the chances of infection. The findings, explained in a UC San Franciso press release, are published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

Creationism in Crisis - Elephants Know One Another by Name - Just Like Humans

Researchers found that elephants have arbitrary vocal labels for each other, similar to human names.

Credit: George Wittemyer

Elephants have names for each other like people do, new study shows - Warner College of Natural Resources

It's an article of faith in creationist cults that humans are a special creation, materially different to other animals and the evidence for this is that we have unique characteristics, ignoring for the moment that every species has unique characteristics, which is what makes them distinct species. And the list of 'uniquely human' characteristics which by creationist circular logic is 'evidence' of human uniqueness, includes language, culture, intelligence, the ability to make and use tools, a sense of self-identity, compassion, empathy, and love and affection.

The problem is, the items on this list keep on being found to not be unique to humans after all, but to be characteristic of lots of other species.

Malevolent Designer - How A Dangerous Pathogen Is Designed to Infect Our Lungs

Pseudomonas aeruginosa

The pathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa breaching through the respiratory epithelia of a human lung microtissue model, captured via Scanning Electron Microscopy.

Image: Benoit Laventie, Biozentrum, University of Basel.

Lung organoids unveil secret: How pathogens infect human lung tissue | University of Basel

A team at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel have shown how a dangerous pathogen gains access to tissues in the lungs, the better to infect them.

To an intelligent [sic] design creationist, there can only be one explanation for this - intelligent design.

To quickly dispense with the traditional excuse offered for this evidence of malevolence, if you subscribe to the intelligent design nonsense - to blame 'Sin' which was caused by 'The Fall', oblivious of the fact that this exposes the intelligent design argument as fundamentalist religion in disguise. Even given a spurious gloss of sciencey-sounding gibberish by Michael J Behe, with his 'genetic entropy' and 'scientifically nonsensical 'devolution' from some assumed created perfection, makes no sense and fails abysmally to rescue creationism from its obvious religious fundamentalism.

No mutation which conveys an advantage, and so progresses to fixation in the species gene pool, can possibly be regarded as 'devolutionary' or less perfect than what went before it, and of course, postulating some assumed initial created perfection simply underlines the religious fundamentalist and the intellectual contortions needed to try to shoehorn the facts into the superstition inherent in the notion.

So, we are left with malevolent intent as the only conclusion, if we subscribe to the intelligent design notion.

Bible Blunder - Or How We Know The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People

Supernovae circled in blue

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, JADES Collaboration

The JADES Deep Field uses observations taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as part of the JADES (JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey) program. A team of astronomers studying JADES data identified about 80 objects (circled in green) that changed in brightness over time. Most of these objects, known as transients, are the result of exploding stars or supernovae. Prior to this survey, only a handful of supernovae had been found above a redshift of 2, which corresponds to when the universe was only 3.3 billion years old — just 25% of its current age. The JADES sample contains many supernovae that exploded even further in the past, when the universe was less than 2 billion years old. It includes the farthest one ever spectroscopically confirmed, at a redshift of 3.6. Its progenitor star exploded when the universe was only 1.8 billion years old.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, JADES Collaboration.

NASA’s Webb Opens New Window on Supernova Science - NASA Science

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continues to allow scientists to witness events almost at the beginning of time - at least when the Universe was just 1.8 billion years old. This comes in the form of supernovae or exploding stars, the light from which has just reached the JWST's detectors, having taken some 12 billion years to get there.

How long does it take light to travel 2 meters? To determine how long it takes light to travel 2 meters, you can use the speed of light in a vacuum, which is approximately \( 299,792,458 \) meters per second. The formula to calculate the time it takes for light to travel a certain distance is: \[ \text{Time} = \frac{\text{Distance}}{\text{Speed}} \] Plugging in the values: \[ \text{Time} = \frac{2 \, \text{meters}}{299,792,458 \, \text{meters/second}} \] Let's calculate this: \[ \text{Time} \approx 6.67 \times 10^{-9} \, \text{seconds} \] So, it takes approximately 6.67 nanoseconds for light to travel 2 meters.

I have previously explained how witnessing an event, the information about which has taken billions of years to arrive is no less witnessing that event than witnessing an event in the same room, information about which took a few nanoseconds to reach us.

And what the cosmologists have seen is far more supernovae than was previously thought.

The recent press release from NASA explains how these events were seen:

‘A Supernova Discovery Machine’

To make these discoveries, the team analyzed imaging data obtained as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program. Webb is ideal for finding extremely distant supernovae because their light is stretched into longer wavelengths — a phenomenon known as cosmological redshift.

Prior to Webb’s launch, only a handful of supernovae had been found above a redshift of 2, which corresponds to when the universe was only 3.3 billion years old — just 25% of its current age. The JADES sample contains many supernovae that exploded even further in the past, when the universe was less than 2 billion years old.

Previously, researchers used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to view supernovae from when the universe was in the "young adult" stage. With JADES, scientists are seeing supernovae when the universe was in its “teens” or “pre-teens.” In the future, they hope to look back to the “toddler” or “infant” phase of the universe.

To discover the supernovae, the team compared multiple images taken up to one year apart and looked for sources that disappeared or appeared in those images. These objects that vary in observed brightness over time are called transients, and supernovae are a type of transient. In all, the JADES Transient Survey Sample team uncovered about 80 supernovae in a patch of sky only about the thickness of a grain of rice held at arm’s length. [my highlight]

Creationism in Crisis - How Hominoid Apes Co-Existed in Germany 12 million Years Before 'Creation Week'.

The 12-million-year-old Buronius tooth

Second great ape species discovered at Hammerschmiede fossil site | University of Tübingen

Teeth of Buronius manfredschmidi found in the Hammerschmiede.
Upper row: second upper molar. Bottom row: second lower premolar (from different angles). Scale bar corresponds to 10 mm.

Scientists have discovered the 11.6-million-year-old fossilised remains of a second hominoid ape in Germany, showing that at least two species of archaic ape were contemporaneous in the same habitat in Miocene Europe.

To give you some idea of how much history of Earth and life on it happened before creationists think it existed, spread your arms wide and imagine time, from the moment Earth formed in the accretion disk around the young sun at the tip of the middle finger of your left hand to the tip of the middle finger of your right hand. On that analogy, the whole of recorded human history would be wiped away with a single stroke of a nail-file on the nail of your right-hand middle finger!

In that tiny fraction of time, everyone you ever knew, everyone you ever heard of, indeed every person that has ever existed during the past 3-4,000 years lived their lives.

According to creationists, taking a book written in the fearful infancy of our species by ignorant people who knew only the few square miles they lived their entire lives in, as accurate history and real science, that tiny fragment of time is just under half of all that has ever existed. So, it is hardly surprising then that almost all of history and almost all of the evolution of life on Earth, happened in the time before creationists think there was a universe for it to happen in.

Creationism in Crisis - Parasitic Nematodes From Tens of Millions of Years Before 'Creation Week' and the Legendary 'Fall'!

False scorpion in Baltic amber
Arrows mark nematode parasites

Photo by George Poinar Jr.

False scorpion embedded in Baltic amber

Photo by George Poinar Jr.

Tiny roundworms carve out unique parasitic niche inside pseudoscorpion’s protective covering | Oregon State University

In their eagerness for simplistic answers and in line with their belief in never questioning those who supply them, creationists have swallowed the nonsense that somehow the notion of 'Sin' and 'The Fall', made to sound nice and sciencey with Michael J Behe's scientifically nonsensical notions of 'devolution' from an assumed initial perfection and 'genetic entropy', can explain parasites.

Parasites are, of course, entirely inconsistent with the notion of creation by an omnibenevolent, intelligent designer who wishes only to reduce the suffering in the world.

The problem for them is that they've also swallowed the nonsensical idea that is on a par with flatearthism - that Earth is only a few thousand years old and was created in 6 days in 'Creation Week' (although the exact dating and duration of that 'event' is as elastic as need be to explain the contradictory evidence).

But what then of the evidence that parasites existed way before this legendary 'Creation Week' and much earlier than the equally legendary 'Fall'?

In fact, as major environmental drivers of evolution, parasites are probably almost as old as the first cells and certainly, if we class predators as parasites on their prey, almost certainly account for the biodiversity seen in the Cambrian biota as predator and prey were the results of arms races.

And now, a scientist at Oregan State University, George Poinar Jr, has found that a group of arthropods known as false scorpions, were subjected to parasitism by a nematode worm. The victims and parasites were trapped in Baltic amber about 30 million years ago (The actual age is difficult to establish exactly for various reasons - see the panel on the right, but none of the geochronology techniques come anywhere near to 10,000 years.).

Unintelligent Design - A Tiny Fern With A Record-Breaking Genome

Tmesipteris oblanceolata

Genome over 50 times larger than a human genome

Record breaker: This tiny fern has the largest genome of any organism on Earth | Kew

Creationists know little of genetics or biology in general, so they are easy prey for frauds who lead their cult and take their money while fooling them into believing their ignorance makes them more expert than the experts and fully qualified to tell millions of working biomedical scientists that they've got it all wrong.

And one of the ideas they've been fooled with is the evolution is a process of increasing complexity and increasing genetic information. This is useful to the frauds who then sell them the idiotic notion that new genetic information can't arise because the Second Law of Thermodynamics [sic] makes it impossible. They also present complexity as evidence of intelligent design, which is also nonsensical, of course, because good intelligent, design is minimally complex.

So, many creationists believe the humans are the most complex organisms because they are the pinnacle of evolution, which is a again nonsensical because there is no such pinnacle; all species are equally well-adapted to their given environment and have been evolving, aimlessly, for the same period of time.

So, the logic of their misconception should be the assumption that humans should have at least one of the largest and most complex genomes of all living organisms or at least that genome size should equate to complexity and complexity to the ranking position in some sort of living hierarchy.

It might come as a shock then to discover that not only do humans have a fairly average size genome, far smaller than some 'primitive' salamanders, for instance, and certainly much small than some plants (e.g., the Norwegian spruce of Christmas tree). But the record genome size goes to a humble miniature fern from the French overseas territor of New Caledonia, Tmesipteris oblanceolata, with a genome size of 148.89 Gbp, or a little over 50 times the size of a human genome!

Creationism in Crisis - How The Nile Was Changing Its Course - During Creationism's Legendary Global Flood

The River Nile at Luxor (Ancient Thebes)

Crucial shift in River Nile’s evolution during ancient Egypt discovered | University of Southampton

The beautiful and timeless river Nile at Luxor, cradle of civilisation, where we spend a wonderful ten days some years ago having completed a river cruise from Luxor to Aswan and been driven back to our hotel in Luxor in a high-speed convoy with military escorts - for me, the high-point of the holiday; for my partner, not so much, especially when our driver insisted on stopping in the middle of nowhere to relieve himself behind a rock, leaving us alone in the car with our guardian soldier escort fingering his sub machine gun nervously.

But the lovely old River Nile has not always flowed in its present bed. From before, during and after creationism's legendary global flood through which Egyptian society appears to have come without harm and without leaving a single record, not even a hint of sediment in the Nile floodplain, the Nile has changed its course multiple times, according to recent research by an international team of archaeologists, which included researchers from Southampton University, England.

Creationism in Crisis - Darwinian Evolution in Giraffes Confirmed

Three giraffes in Masai Mara National Park.

Credit: Byrdyak/Wikimedia Commons.
All Rights Reserved.

Female Giraffe, Giraffa camelopardalis, browsing

Credit: Bernard DUPONT via Wikimedia (CC SA-2.0)

Food, not sex, drove the evolution of giraffes’ long neck, new study finds | Penn State University

In a nice illustration of how science works, there had been conflicting explanations for how the Giraffe evolved its long neck, but before creationists get over-excited neither of them were alternatives to evolution; the debate was about the precise drivers of evolution. That the giraffe's neck evolved from a shorter neck of a common ancestor with the related okapi was never in dispute.

One school of thought was the standard Darwinian view that it was the result of an arms race between giraffes and their preferred food plants; the other was slightly more complex, involving female sex selection and the way male giraffes use their necks against rival males with longer neck being a distinct advantage and the winner winning the favours of the females. Since the length of the neck is not strictly sex-linked, meaning it is mostly coded for by genes located on autosomes, rather than on the Y sex chromosome, both males and females benefit from this sex-selection, or so the second school of thought ran.

Now, a team of scientists led by Penn State biologists believe they have resolved this dispute buy, in the time-honoured scientific way, by examining the evidence and letting it speak for itself. What they found was that females actually have proportionately longer necks than males, so sex selection is unlikely to be the driver. However, what they observed was that females are better able to reach leaves in the crowns of trees and so get the more nutritious food, with obvious benefits for their offspring

The team have published their work, another incidental refutation of creationism that comes from revealing scientific facts, open access, in the journal Mammalian Biology. It is also explained in a Penn State University News release:

Liar! - UK General Election - How Sunak Lied To Us

Trust me, Gov!

Would I lie to you?

How Sunak came up with disputed Labour tax figures – and what’s wrong with them

When Rishi Sunak lied for his party he showed us two things:

• He knows the Tory Party depends on fools who'll believe falsehoods.
• He is in politics, not for the he can do for us with power but for what power can do for him.

Qualities of the spiv and conman, which, of course, endeared him to the Tory MPs, who chose him when Liz Truss crashed and burned both the economy and her career.

The lie of course, repeated by Penny Mordaunt last night, even though it had been refuted by the very Treasury civil servant they were pretending had calculated the figure, was that Labour's plans will cost the average household £2,000. (Note: not £2,000 a year, as was implied, but £2,000 over 4 years!).

But, as, Treasury permanent secretary James Bowler, revealed, the figure was based on costings supplied not by the Labour Party, or independent experts, but on notional figures dreamed up by Tory Party paid advisors who started with the £2,000 and calculated backwards, so the Treasury civil service came up with the required figure. He had warned that ministers should not present the figure as provided by the Treasury based on their estimated costings.

How Sunak's Tories tried this blatant lie as the opening salvo in his forlorn reelection campaign, is explained by Steve Schifferes, Honorary Research Fellow, City Political Economy Research Centre, City, University of London in an article in The Conversation. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism in Crisis - How Marine Worms Caused a Burst in Biodiversity - 480 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Marine worm

Getty Images

The Ordovician Biota

Johns Hopkins scientists pinpoint an unlikely hero in evolution: Worms | Hub

Creationists often try to misrepresent the so-called 'Cambrian Explosion' - the relatively rapid radiation of different taxa over a period of some 6 million years when the first hard body parts evolved and by the end of which all the progenitors of the main modern taxa had appeared - as a sudden event, happening almost overnight, where major taxons suddenly appeared without ancestors, as some sort of evidence of intelligent design.

This is nonsense of course, as the 'explosion' took some 6-10 million years and was preceded by the Ediacaran biota, but what they don't seem to realise is that this period was followed fairly soon after by another period of rapid evolution and increased biodiversity in the 'Ordovician Explosion' or the 'Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event' (GOBE) when the same basic forces that produced the Cambrian explosion continued for another 25 million years.

Creationism in Crisis - A Giant Pterosaur From Oxfordshire - About 155 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Artwork of a Jurassic pterosaur by University of Portsmouth student

Hamzah Imran

Gigantic Jurassic pterosaur fossil unearthed in Oxfordshire | University of Portsmouth

Part of a left wing first phalanx. The fossil was broken into three pieces but is still well-preserved

During the immense passage of time before 'Creation Week' as creationists call the legendary creation of a small universe consisting of a small flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle East, giant pterosaurs were in the sky over what is now the Vale of the White Horse in Oxfordshire.

The body of one of these monsters ended up buried in Kimmeridge Clay before that too became buried beneath alluvial gravel deposits forming in the proto-Thames valley around my adopted hometown of Abingdon.

Part of the fossilised skeleton, in the form of a partial left wing first phalanx (finger), was recovered in 2022 when a pit was being dug in the clay to form a sump and bank enclosure to replace the removed gravel in an open-cast gravel pit a few miles south of Abingdon. This has now been identified as an adult ctenochasmatoid - a group of pterosaurs known for their long, slender wings, long jaws and fine bristle-like teeth - by experts from Portsmouth and Leicester Universities.

How it came to be recovered and its significance, is the subject of a brief news release from the University of Portsmouth:

Creationism in Crisis - How Humans May Have Caused the Extinction of Woolly Rhinos - 20,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Pleistocene landscape in northern Spain with woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), equids, a woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis), and European cave lions (Panthera leo spelaea) with a reindeer carcass.

Image credit: Mauricio Antón.

Human activity contributed to woolly rhinoceros’ extinction | Newsroom | University of Adelaide

I spend a couple of days away from science papers writing about my other major interests, history and art, instead and what do I find? Scientists have only gone and produced six more papers which casually refute the childish superstition of creationism, so I will now need to spend a few days catching up.

The first of them deals with the findings that humans might well have been the cause of the extinction of the woolly rhinoceros, Coelodonta antiquitatis, in Eurasia, by causing their population to fragment and then collapse altogether over a period starting about 30,000 years ago and ending about 14,000 years ago . This was between 20,000 and 4,000 years before creationists think Earth was magicked up out of nothing by some magic words, spoken in a language that no-one else spoke, by a magic man who had magically self-assembled out of nothing, according to a design it had made before it existed.