Refuting Creationisn - Understanding Consciousness - No God(s) Required

Study reveals how an anesthesia drug induces unconsciousness | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

One of creationism beloved gaps in which they try to shoehorn their ever-shrinking little god, is a scientific explanation for consciousness.

It is true that we don't yet have an explanation for consciousness but no gap in the scientific understanding of anything has ever been filled by a god, or to be more scientific, by an unproven, undetectable supernatural entity, so it's a strangely unrealistic view of science that any (or all) of creationism's gaps, real or imaginary are going to be the exception to the rule and somehow, one day, science is going to reveal the locally popular god in all its glory, having managed to hide itself for millennia.

Being inherently unfalsifiable, of course, there is no possible scientific methodology that could reveal any specified god as the indisputable cause of any phenomenon, so creationist belief that this is about to happen is delusional.

But back to the problem of consciousness.

Refuting Creationism - A Burrowing Dinosaur - 99 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fona herzogae.

Credit: Jorge Gonzalez.

Fona herzogae.

Credit: Jorge Gonzales

Life Underground Suited New Dinosaur Fine | NC State News

If you want to leave a fossil as evidence of your existence, live, or at least die, in a burrow.

If you want to refute creationism, arrange to die 99 million years before they believe the Universe existed.

That's what an otherwise unremarkable dinosaur that was about the size of a large dog, contrived to do in what is now Utah, USA. It, and its relatives, because so many of them died in their borrows, are preserved in exception detail compared to species that lived above ground where their bodies would have been scavenged and destroyed before they could be fossilised.

Creationism Refuted - Stardust Creation 1,300 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Cassiopeia A

JWST

Cassiopeia A

JWST Unveils Stunning Ejecta and CO Structures in Cassiopeia A's Young Supernova

Todays' refutation of creationism comes to us from the field of astronomy and in particular the details of what happened and is still happening in the expanding supernova remnant known as Cassiopeia A which has a super-dense body at its centre, probably a neutron star, the collapsed remains of the parent star.

A neutron star is the remains of an old star that was too large to collapse to a white dwarf but not large enough to become a black hole. In a neutron star, the pressure due to gravity is so intense that even atoms compress, and electrons are forced into protons to become neutrons, so the star becomes nothing but neutrons. Due to conservation of angular momentum a neutron star has a rotation rate in seconds or less.

Cassiopeia A (Cas A) was observed in the night sky 350 years ago. It is 11,000 light years away, so the light the explosion generated reached Earth 11,000 years after the explosion, which simple maths tells us happened 1,350 years before creationists think the Universe was created. It was of course an event in that long, 13.8 billion years pre-'Creation' history of the Universe when 99.99999% of its history, and 99.9975% of the history of Earth occurred.

A supernova like Cas A is the birthplace of star dust out of which Earth and everything on it is made. It is the stuff that connects us to the rest of the universe and to which we, or rather the atoms and molecules that we are made of, will return to be recycled into future planets around future suns, when our own sun swallows up the inner planets then goes supernova itself, and flings our atoms out into the cosmos to be recycled as new suns and planetary systems, maybe to be studied by cosmologists on some other planet wondering about that sudden flash of light in the Milky Way, that was the death of our sun.

As I said in What Makes You So Special? From the Big Bang to You:

Stars died and because they died, you live. You are made by stars out of stardust and in a very real sense; because you are made of the same stuff the Universe is made of and are a part of it, there is something even more wonderful about you. Through you, though not just through you, and maybe not just here on this small planet, the Universe has gained self–awareness and can begin to understand itself.

Through you it can stand on the surface of this beautiful little jewel in the cosmos, can look up in awe at itself and think "Wow!"

What Makes You So Special? From the Big Bang to You, page 152

Secular Humanism - Winning In Britain - Highest Number of MPs Ever Make A Secular Affirmation

300 MPs from the 2024 Parliament.

© House of Commons/Mark Crick.
Crown Copyright and CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Kier Starmer Labour Prime Minister and the latest in a long line of non-religious UK PMs

Highest number of MPs ever take secular affirmation – Humanists UK

An under-reported fact following the landslide victory for the Labour Party at the last election was the massively increased number of MPs in the Commons who have no religion. Roughly 40% of MPs chose to make a secular affirmation rather than swear a religious oath on taking their seats. This included Sir Kier Starmer and 50% of his cabinet ministers.

The list of openly non-religious Prime Ministers ever since the 1888 when the law requiring all MPs to take a religious oath was abolished, includes Ramsay McDonald, first Labour PM and former president of Humanists UK, David Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Clement Atlee and James Callaghan. It is almost exactly 100 years since Ramsay McDonald became the first PM to make a secular affirmation in 1924.

According to Humanists UK:

Antivaxxer Disinformation News - Flu-Like Symptoms After Vaccination Show The Vaccine is Working

COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects and Long-Term Neutralizing Antibody Response: A Prospective Cohort Study: Annals of Internal Medicine: Vol 0, No 0

According to data published in Annals of Internal Medicine, people who experience flu-like symptoms - chills, tiredness, headaches, and feeling unwell, after a COVID mRNA vaccination tend to have a higher antibody count. This was based on a prospective cohort study of 363 participants from the San Fransico Bay area of California, US, who were vaccinated in 2021 and self-reported their symptoms.

Those who reported these symptoms had antibody levels about 1.5 time those of people who had no such symptoms after 1 month and at least 6 months after vaccination. In addition to those with self-reported symptoms, comparable results were found in 147 people who were objectively assessed for elevated skin temperature and increased heart rate.

The conclusion is that rather than acting as a deterrent, these symptoms should not be a deterrent but should be welcomed as evidence that the vaccine has worked.

More details are given in the report in Annals of Internal Medicine:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Victimises Hibernating Bats

Hyphae and spores of the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome (in green) invading the lab grown skin cells of little brown bats.

Credit: Klein Lab / UW–Madison

A hibernating little brown bat,Myotis lucifugus, infected with white-nose syndrome.

Photo credit: Jonathan Mays

A stealth fungus has decimated North American bats but scientists may be a step closer to treating white-nose syndrome

Creationism's malevolent designer seems to be in two minds about bats.

On the one hand it gives them a super-duper immune system that means they can harbour viruses like the corona viruses, one of which became SARS-CoV-2 that caused COVID-19; on the other hand, it designs a nasty fungus that is currently decimating populations of bat in North America, against which even their super-duper, intelligently [sic] designed immune system is ineffective.

The fungus, known to science as Pseudogymnoascus destructans, which causes the disease known as white-nose syndrome, is an invasive organism that uses various strategies to invade the skin of hibernating bats with deadly consequences. It was first detected in a New York cave in 2006.

Creationism Refuted - Evidence of Hominin Activity in Southern Spain - 1.4 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Partial skeleton of an elephant (Mammuthus meridionalis) unearthed from layer 5 of the upper archaeological level of the late Early Pleistocene site of Fuente Nueva-3.

Credit: Palmqvist et al., Journal of Iberian Geology (2024)

Entrapment of an elephant in the quicksand of layer 5 of the upper archaeological level of the late Early Pleistocene site of Fuente Nueva-3.

Credit: Palmqvist et al., Journal of Iberian Geology (2024)

Prehistoric quicksand trap in Spain reveals doomed elephants and early scavenging behavior | Archaeology News Online Magazine

A team of archaeologists from Malaga University have uncovered the earliest evidence of ancient hominin activity in Europe - at 1.4 million years ago.

The evidence from the Fuente Nueva-3 archaeological site in Orce, southeastern Spain shows that hominins scavenged alongside giant hyenas for animals which became stuck in a quicksand trap in what is now the Guadix-Baza Depression.

The team included Professor of Paleontology Paul Palmqvist and Professor of Stratigraphy and Paleontology María Patrocinio Espigares. They showed that the site consisted of two distinct archaeological levels, an upper (UAL) and a lower (LAL) level, the latter of which contains a high density of manuports, while the UAL contains remains of megafauna such as mammoths, Mammuthus meridionalis, and many hyena coprolites, showing significant scavenging activity

Refuting Creationism - No Ancestral Couple, Not Even An Ancestral Species - All Modern Humans Are Hybrids

Reconstruction of a Neanderthal woman.

‘A history of contact’: Princeton geneticists are rewriting the narrative of Neanderthals and other ancient humans

Our understanding of our relationship with contemporaneous archaic hominins such as Neanderthals has changed over the past 25 years or so. It was once believed that, as separate species, there would have been no successful interbreeding, despite a few fossils suggesting a mixture of both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens feature, then Nobel Prize-winning Svante Pääbo's group at the Max Plank Institute analysed a Neanderthal genome and showed that modern Eurasia Homo sapiens have 2-3% Neanderthal DNA, so interbreeding must have taken place.

Since then, the same team has discovered a second extinct hominin, the Denisovans, and shown that they too interbred with Neanderthals in Eurasia and Homo sapiens in East and Southeast Asia, especially.

And now we know that Africans' too carry evidence of Neanderthal genetic ingression.

In other words, ever since Homo sapiens left Africa and moved into the territory of at least two archaic hominins, the descendants of an earlier migration out of Africa, probably Homo erectus, have behaved much like a ring species of incompletely speciated geographical subspecies where barriers to hybridization had not fully evolved.

Malevolent Designer - How A Respiratory Pathogen Manipulates Our Immune System.

Haemophilus influenzae (H. flu)

A microscopic view of Haemophilus influenzae bacteria.

Image: Adobe

Respiratory bacteria ‘turns off’ immune system to survive - UQ News - The University of Queensland, Australia

Regular readers may recall my recent article explaining how bowel cancer has been cleverly 'designed' to switch off our immune system to prevent the cancer cells from being detected and attacked.

Well, it seems this same technique has been employed by the malevolent designer to make a bacterial pathogen better at making us sick when it infects the lining of the respiratory system of vulnerable people.

Or at least that is what an intellectually honest intelligent [sic] design creationist has to believe (if there is such a thing) because, in rejecting the science that shows how organism's evolve by a mindless, unintelligent natural process without the involvement of supernatural magic, and attributing it all to their putative designer, they are tacitly accepting that it also designs parasites such as these bacterial pathogens.

And we can exclude Michael J. Behe's scientifically nonsensical notions of 'genetic entropy' and 'devolution' [sic] from some assumed created initial perfection - made possible by the religious dogma of 'The Fall', because an ability that conveys an advantage to a pathogen and makes it able to produce more offspring than what went before, can't logically be described as less perfect than something worse, and of course, there is no known mechanism which would cause a detrimental mutation to increase in the species gene pool, other than riding piggyback on a mutation that conveys a greater advantage.

Refuting Creationism - Evidence Of Species Selection In The Pyrenees - Untouched By The Legendary Global Flood

The location of Coro Trasito is indicated by the orange dot.

Map created using USGS ArcGIS Online Map Viewer.

The location of Coro Trasito is indicated by the orange dot.

Map created using USGS ArcGIS Online Map Viewer.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0306448.g001

Early Pyrenean Neolithic groups applied species selection strategies to produce bone artefacts - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - UAB Barcelona

Because the Bronze Age mythmakers made up a tale about it, creationists believe their all-loving god committed a global genocide against all living species by flooding the world to a depth sufficient to cover the highest mountain (i.e. at least 29,000 feet, the height of Everest) about 4,000 years ago or less. Such a flood would have obliterated all signs of human civilisation on the planet and covered it with a thick layer of sediment containing the fossils of all the animals and plants jumbled together, from disconnected land-masses.

The problem with that belief is that there is evidence of human activity from long before that time, even in places like the Pyrenees between Spain and France, where archaeologists are uncovering evidence of human habitation and domestication of animals 7,000 years ago, in caves such as the Coro Trasito, located 1,548 metres above sea level, in Huesca, Spain.

Refuting Creationism - LUCA Had Evolved 4.2 Billion Years Ago And Already Suffered From Viral Parasites

A digital representation illustrating how LUCA was already under attack from viruses even at 4.2 billion years ago.

Science Graphic Design

A digital representation illustrating how LUCA was already under attack from viruses even at 4.2 billion years ago.

Science Graphic Design

July: LUCA | News and features | University of Bristol

Contrary to the Bible's laughable model of a 10,000-year-old universe consisting of a small flat planet with a dome over it, containing nothing that was unknown to the Bronze Age hill farmers whose best guess became part of the Hebrew creation myth, scientists at the University of Bristol have shown that the last universal common ancestor of all living organisms (LUCA) had evolved within 400 million years of Earth forming some 4.6 billion years ago.

They have calculated that LUCA was about as complex as a prokaryote, had already evolved an immune system and was engaged in an arms race with viruses.

Refuting Creationism - Scientists Now have the Genome of a Mammoth from 42,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'.

Model of a Woolly mammoth

By Thomas Quine, via Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)

52,000-year-old wooly mammoth skin recovered from permafrost and found that it contained fossils of ancient chromosomes.

Love Dalén/Stockholm University

First ever 3D reconstruction of 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth chromosomes thanks to serendipitously freeze-dried skin | ScienceDaily

52,000 years ago, a full 42,000 years before creationism’s putative creator god created a universe comprised of a small flat planet with a dome over it, under which there was nothing that wasn't known to Bronze Age Canaanite hill farmers, a wooly mammoth somehow contrived to die and be quickly preserved in permafrost near what is now Belaya Gora, Sakha Republic, Siberia, where it was recovered in 2018, preserved in such a condition that skin cells could be identified under a microscope.

Mammoths, of course, along with their close relatives, elephants, were unknown to the authors of the tales in the Bible which creationists think are real history and science.

A microscope image of subdermal muscle from the ancient skin shows remnants of mammoth nuclei. The new study revealed that fossils of ancient chromosomes survive in this skin sample.

Elena Kizilova/Institute of Cytology and Genetics SB RAS

Carbon dating has shown the preserved mammoth to be more than 42,000 years old and an analysis of its mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) gives a date close to 52,000 years old.

The research team co-led by Marcela Sandoval-Velasco and Juan Antonio Rodríguez of the Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark, and Olga Dudchenko and Cynthia Pérez Estrada of The Center for Genome Architecture and Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA, used STAR Methods combined with Hi-C to analyse and reconstruct the genome from the ancient DNA (aDNA) recovered from the mammoth skin.

Creationism in Crisis - UK's Most Intact Dinosaur Fossil Was Living 125 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Jeremy Lockwood at the excavation site,
Compton Bay, Isle of Wight]

An artist’s impression of Comptonatus chasei.

Image credit: John Sibbick

Research reveals the most complete dinosaur discovered in the UK in a Century | University of Portsmouth

The fossil remains of a dinosaur, discovered in the cliffs of Compton Bay, Isle of Wight, England, have been shown to be a species new to science. The fossils were discovered in 2013 by the late fossil collector Nick Chase, who sadly died of cancer before his finds could be fully analysed. Nick Chase had a record of fossil discovery, including the most complete Iguanodon skull ever found, yet never had a new species named after him

That has now been rectified by retired GP and PhD student at the School of the Environment, Geography and Geosciences, University of Portsmouth, UK, Jeremy Lockwood, who helped with the dinosaur's excavation and has spent years analysing it to determine that it is a new species which he has named Comptonatus chasei. It has proven to be the most intact dinosaur ever discovered in Britain.

Together with David Martell, also of the School of the Environment, Geography and Geosciences, University of Portsmouth and Susannah Maidment of the Fossil Reptiles, Amphibians and Birds Section, Natural History Museum, London, UK, Dr Lockwood has published his findings, open access, in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. Their work is also explained in a University of Portsmouth press release:

Refuting Creationism - Extinct Giant Kangaroo Walked on All Fours - 2.5 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Imaginative AI reconstruction of a Protemnodon.

Illustration by Superinnovators x AI

July: Ancient large kangaroo moved mainly on four legs | News and features | University of Bristol

Science works because scientists, unlike religious fundamentalists, don't have fixed dogmas and doctrines they must adhere to and so are free to re-examine the evidence, reassess their conclusions and change their minds.

Unlike creationists, scientists are free to question, reassess and rethink without fear of a terrible fate awaiting them for having the temerity to question the cult dogma, or the social stigma, ostracism and in some cases threats of physical violence, that would be heaped upon a fundamentalist who questioned the basic tenets of the cult.

So, scientists are free from the sophophobia that charcterises creationism and which the cult leaders go to great lengths to inflict on their followers, and, unlike with creationism, the standing of a scientists who changes his or her mind with good reason goes up, while the social standing in creationist circles of a creationists who shows intellectual integrity and changes his or her mind will actually go down, in the prevailing anti-intellectual culture of the creationist cult!