Malevolent Designer - It's A Frog Eat Frog World Out There!

Green and golden frog, Litoria aurea, female eating a juvenile striped marsh frog, Limnodynastes peronii

Gould, J., & Beranek, C. T. (2024). (CC BY 4.0)

Meal or mate: Exploring the evidence of sexual cannibalism among amphibians - Gould - 2024 - Ecology and Evolution - Wiley Online Library

Figure 2
Adult female green and golden bell frogs, Litoria aurea, preying on adult spotted marsh frogs, Limnodynastes tasmaniensis in proximity to an exclusion fence on Kooragang Island, NSW, Australia. The females can be seen swallowing their frog prey vent first, with the back legs already consumed.

Gould, J., & Beranek, C. T. (2024). (CC BY 4.0)

Creationists who try to pretend to be the moral superior of other people like to pretend their imaginary creator friend has provided them with a set of objective morals, although bearing false witness to trick others into agreeing with them - something that their Bible says is wrong and something most honest people would agree with, seem to be one of them, as does abusing their opponents and even threatening strangers, as these are all part of the set of 'objective morals' on display in any on-line creationist or creation vs evolution group.

But even if the claim of there being a set of objective moral which their god has handed down to them (and only them) had any merit, you would expect it to be true for all species, not restricted to human cultures. After all, if eating people is wrong, then you would expect cannibalism to be unknown in the animal kingdom, and yet it's commonplace.

Creationism Refuted - Why Did The 'Creator' Get It So Wrong?

Domestic animals

A sample of cultivated root crops.

The fundamental problem for creationists is their dependence on a book that can so easily shown to be wrong on almost every level. It's rather like taking an imaginative story made up by an uneducated 6-year-old to explain the world as he or she saw it and pointing out the errors in it.

Trivially easy, especially for someone with a little education, especially in the relevant subject like biology, geology, cosmology and history.

One of the more glaring errors is very early on in the Bible narrative which describes how a magic creator created all the animals for human use. It comes mostly from the first version of creation. In this version, the animals were all created before a man and a woman who were both created together, and then the animals and plants were all given to them for 'meat'.

In the second version, a man was created alone, then the animals, then a woman.

Obviously, both can be true, but it is mostly from the first version that creationists get the idea that all the animals and plants in the world were created especially for them. And that's where things begin to fall apart on close inspection of the facts.

Here is how the story goes. The first version:

Malevolent Designer - Now Creationism's Divine Malevolence Is Throwing New Versions Of SARS-CoV-2 At Us

LB.1, or D-FLiRT, is the newest COVID subvariant. What do we know about it? Where has it come from?

Creationism's divine malevolence is not giving up on its stunningly successful SARS-CoV-2 virus that killed millions, made hundreds of millions suffer and wrecked economies worldwide in the worst pandemic since its 'Spanish Lady' influenza pandemic of 1918-19.

Just because medical science produced the very effective mRNA vaccines against in in record time, bringing the pandemic under control, and its effects down to manageable proportions, is no reason to give up on it and admit defeat.

It is now designing ever more variants, some of which, like the latest, LB.1 (aka D-FLiRT) is currently surging in parts of the world, having succeeded XBB, JN.1, FLiRT and FLuQE.

How Sars-CoV-2 needs to keep infecting people, or it will become extinct as its supply of hosts dries up by becoming resistant to it. How it keeps on evolving to keep infecting people by overcoming natural and acquired immunity as vaccines are updated to try to keep up with it, is the subject of an article in The Conversation by Professor Adrian Esterman, Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, University of South Australia. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons License, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Malevolent Designer News - How To Make Hospital Patients Even Sicker

Klebsiella pneumoniae

Klebsiella aerogenes

Scientists identify possible new transmission factor in hospital-acquired Klebsiella infections - Forsyth

Creationism's divine malevolence is nothing if not ingenious in its determination to increase the suffering in the world with its specially designed pathogens - parasitic microorganisms such as bacteria that cause diseases, sickness and death.

And what better location for increasing suffering is there than a hospital where people are already unwell and easy victims for more infections with life-threatening pathogens?

One of the nastier examples of just such a pathogen is Klebsiella, and not content with one species, creationism's favourite sadist have designed two - Klebsiella pneumoniae and K. aerogenes, both of which are multi-resistant, i.e. resistant to multiple antibiotics and both of which actually thrive and multiply rapidly in conditions where other bacteria are being killed off with antibiotics.

Malevolent Design - The Brilliance of Dengue - Designed To Make Us Suffer More

The nuclei of mosquito cells appear in blue. The red and green signal indicates the presence of two dengue virus proteins

Top left: The nuclei of human cells appear in blue. The green signal indicates the presence of a dengue virus protein. Top right: The nuclei of human cells appear in teal. The magenta signal indicates the presence of a dengue virus protein. Bottom left: The nuclei of human cells appear in grey. The red signal indicates the presence of a dengue virus protein. Bottom right: The nuclei of mosquito cells appear in blue. The red and green signal indicates the presence of two dengue virus proteins.

Exposing dengue’s invasion… | Stowers Institute for Medical Research

Today it's the turn of researchers at Oklahoma's Stowers Institute for Medical Research to expose the brilliance of creationism's divine malevolence in the way it's designed the Dengue virus to enable it to spread out of the tropics and infect more people. Currently, according to the World Health Oragnisation, the mosquito-borne virus, infects around 400 million people a year and there is no cure.

The Stowers Institute team led by Predoctoral Researcher Luciana Castellano in the lab of Associate Investigator Ariel Bazzini, Ph.D., has discovered how it, and hundreds of other viruses, replicate in their hosts.

Creationism't intelligent designer, for those who believe in magic, uses it's tried and tested mosquito delivery system, especially the Aedes eagypti mosquito which it used so successfully to spread the Zika virus to cause microcephaly in children.

The sneaky trick it used to get past the immune system it allegedly designed to protect us from things like its viruses, is breathtaking in its simplicity. In order to replicate inside a host cell, the virus needs some specific protein enzymes. It has the RNA code for these enzymes, but the problem is, the host's immune system would recognise those as foreign and launch an attack, so the virus uses the hosts enzymes. Proteins are coded for with a three-nucleotide code, one for each amino acid in the chain. However, the same amino acid can be coded for by several different triplet codes, some of which are more efficient than others. To ensure the cell makes its own enzymes for the virus, the virus uses less efficient codons in its own RNA!
This way, the virus tricks the cell into cooperating in its own destruction.

Neat, eh?

It's a classic example of how an apparently deleterious mutation works in favour of a parasite, and something creationists will find impossible to explain away with the biologically nonsensical 'genetic entropy' causing 'devolution' because the mutation was undoubtedly evolutionary, enabling the dengue virus (DENV) to produce very many more copies of itself than before, and something better can't be less perfect than the original.

Creationism in Crisis - Decline in Creationism in USA is Accelerating While Acceptance of Evolution Increases

Majority Still Credits God for Humankind, but Not Creationism Evidence of the continuing decline in creationism, which coincides with increased access to the Internet and exposure to creationist fundamentalists, was published by Gallop today.

The percentage of American adults who believe in creationism has fallen to a new low of just 37% (a figure which would be astonishingly high for most of the developed world where creationists languish in the lower few percentiles) while those who believe God played no part in the evolution of humans from less advanced life forms has risen to a new high of 24%.

The equivalent figures for 1999 were 47% and 9% respectively, and the signs are that these changes are accelerating.

Although correlation is not proof of causation, it is evidence of correlation and there is a strong correlation between access to the Internet (and so exposure of creationism to critical analysis, and exposure of the hypocrisy and inherent intellectual dishonesty of most creationists). This exposure has revealed that many creationists are using it as an excuse to pose as the superior of other people.

The arrogant assumption that the Universe was created with them in mind and that they have a special relationship with the creator of everything, so this provides an excuse to pose as more expert than the experts, without the bother of learning.

Good News For Creationists - Evidence That The Bible Is Hopelessly Wrong Has Been Destroyed

The first published results from Juukan Gorge show 47,000 years of Aboriginal heritage was destroyed in mining blast

On of the first pieces of good news for the creation cult emerged from Australia a couple of days ago. It was that one of the best pieces of evidence of continuous human occupation with no signs of ever being submerged in a flood, has been destroyed by mining activities.

It was an ancient rock shelter at Juukan Gorge in Puutu Kunti Kurrama Country in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, which had evidence of human occupation going back 47,000 years, i.e. 37,000 years before Bible literalist creationists believe the Universe was magicked up out of nothing, and 43,000 before it was supposedly submerged in deep flood water that would have obliterated any trace of human habitation.

It was the kind of solid, incontrovertible evidence of biblical errancy that keeps creationist cult leaders awake at night trying to make up lies to tell about it or discredit it in some way that a creationist will believe (not hard; just say the scientists hate God and make up lies, that'll make a creationist feel special).

How the site came to be destroyed and the attempts to recover the artifacts it contained is the subject of an article in The Conversation by Michael Slack, Director, Scarp Archaeology and Adjunct Associate Professor of Archaeology, James Cook University; Jordan Ralph, Adjunct Lecturer, Archaeology, Flinders University and Wallace Boone Law, Postdoctoral Researcher, Geospatial Science and Archaeology, University of Adelaide. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Evolution Observed As Killifish On Trinidad Respond To Predation

A stream in Trinidad, typical killifish habitat

Killifish are highly adaptable to their surroundings

Fish adjust reproduction in response to predators - News Center - The University of Texas at Arlington

The killifish on the Caribbean island of Trinidad are ideal subjects for studying evolution because they can quickly adapt to environmental change. Some have even become amphibious, spending time out of water, probably to avoid predation, while others lay their eggs out of water on damp moss as an evolved adaptation to predation. However, eggs out of water bear the additional risk of desiccation which needs to be balanced against the risk of predation in water.

This paper by Professor Matthew R. Walsh, a biology professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, USA and his laboratory technician, Christopher Roden shows that the eggs of fish that lay them out of water hatch earlier than those in water, reducing the risk of desiccation, showing how predation has driven a change in the rate of embryo development to reduce the risk of desiccation, while avoiding predation.

Their findings are published open access in Proceedings of the Royal Society B and explained in the University of Texas press release:

Refuting Creationism - The Bible Is Nonsense - So 42 Million-Year-Old Amber Tells Us

Spider attacking a wasp. Myanmar
(100 million years old)

Image credit: Dr. George Poinar Jr.
Earth Archives

Rare parasitic wasp.

Maria Blake

Australian amber has revealed ‘living fossils’ traced back to Gondwana 42 million years ago

Amber is especially good for preserving in exquisite details, small arthropods which don't fossilise well in rocks, like larger vertebrates with hard body parts, and we can be confident that the age of the fossil is the age of the amber in which it is preserved.

Some years ago, on holiday in Kassandria, Greece, I came across a small group of Mediterranean pines that were being use to collect the resin used to flavour the local wine, Retsina. This wine is something of an acquired taste but is best drunk chilled, with Greek food, on a warm summer evening at sunset, overlooking the Aegean - and probably after a bottle or two of Demestica.

The fascinating thing was how many ants had managed to get themselves trapped in the resin in the plastic containers it was draining into from the cuts in the tree bark.

There were so many that I can only assume that when ancient amber was being produced there were either fewer ants or less resin.

So, what can we tell from the fossils preserved in amber?

Partly from their occurrence in amber, we know that some 85% of all living species were arthropods, rather than the 0.3% of species that were the much more noticeable vertebrates. We can also tell where and when major orders evolved and how long some of them have existed for. Since amber is formed from tree resin, it follows that it only occurred after trees evolved and from the resin produced by specific species of tree in areas where these trees grew.

Refuting Creationism - Hibernating Social Snakes - 38 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fossilized skeleton of Hibernophis breithaupti,
which lived 38 million years ago

Photo: Jasmine Croghan

Newly discovered snake species provides insight into reptile social behaviour and development | Folio

The discovery of the new snake species has yielded insights into the evolution of modern snakes like the Amazon tree boa (left) and scrub python (right).

Photos: Michael Lee, Flinders University/South Australian Museum.

Red-sided garter snakes hibernate together in a hibernaculum.

Photo: Greg Schechter via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

A new paper published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society should give creationists cause to wonder if the people who wrote their favourite creation myth knew what they were talking about. That's assuming they have enough courage and intellectual integrity to consider that evidence trumps superstition and not the other way round, which is a big ask for most creationists as it would also mean their mummy and daddy could have been wrong too.

The evidence the new paper reveals is that of a collection of fossilised snakes found in Oligocene rocks in western Wyoming are those of a new species from 38 million years before creationists believe the Universe was created out of nothing by magic, when snakes had legs and could talk, and didn't have to eat nothing but dust [sic].

Refuting Creationism - Evolution By Hybridization May Be Commonplace in Plants

DR Lionel Di Santo samples black cottonwood, Populus trichocarpa in the coastal regions of the Pacific Northwest.

Credit: Penn State. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

The team found the black cottonwood-balsam poplar stable hybrid lineage after analyzing the genetic makeup of 546 poplar tree cuttings collected along seven transects ranging from Alaska to Wyoming, with collections in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, in between.

Credit: Penn State. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Discovery of a hybrid lineage offers clues to how trees adapt to climate change | Penn State University

Despite creationist dogma that say otherwise, evolution in a population can occur by hybridization, especially in plants, where it may be commonplace. Two related plants hybridize and the resulting offspring acquires additional combinations of genes which extend its capabilities, enabling it to survive environmental change or move into new niches, and forming a stable population with new allele frequencies.

And as though to rub salt into creationist wounds, some of these happened hundreds of thousands of years before creationism's legendary 'Creation Week', before which, on the say-so of some ignorant Bronze Age pastoralists who were unaware of anything more than a day or two's walk from the Canaanite Hills, creationists think there was once nothing out of which everything was created by some magic words, just a few thousand years ago.

They also hold the diametrically opposite views simultaneously, that evolution is impossible because the Second Law of Thermodynamics [sic] forbids it, and that evolution occurred as a massively accelerated rate in the last few thousand years, unnoticed by anyone, in which several whole new species arose in a single generation by magic.

Now a team led by Penn State University paleobotanists led by Associate Professor Jill Hamilton, from Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, have shown that a hybrid between black cottonwood, or Populus trichocarpa, and balsam poplar, Populus balsamifera, was able to move out of the wet coastal region to which most black cottonwood trees are restricted, into the arid lands to the east. This movement started about 800,000 years ago.

Antivaxxer CCOVIDiot News - How COVID Vaccines Reduced The Risk of Long Covid

The risk of long COVID has declined over the course of the pandemic, although it remains a persistent threat. Researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis identified vaccination as a primary factor in reducing the risk of long COVID.

Risk of long COVID declined over course of pandemic – Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

According to a report published today by scientists from Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, the risk of contracting long COVID after an infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus fell significantly when people were vaccinated. This was true for both the Delta and Omicron strains as well as for original.

The researchers attribute almost 72% of this reduction to the vaccines and the rest to changes in the SARS-CoV-2 virus and improved detection and management of infected patients. Their results are published in the New England Journal of Medicine and in a Washington University School of Medicine new release:

Creationism Refuted - How Rotifers Acquire New Genetic Information - No God(s) Needed

This rotifer has just survived a life-threatening infection. When a fungal disease attacked, she switched on hundreds of genes that her ancestors copied from microbes, including antibiotic recipes stolen from bacteria.

Credit:
C.G. Wilson, 2019

Small Animals Acquire Genes from Bacteria that Can Produce Antibiotics | Marine Biological Laboratory

Bdelloid rotifers, about a hair's width in size, are the only animals known to acquire a large number of genes from their environment (from bacteria, even plants). This study indicates they use some of those genes to resist disease.

Credit: C.G. Wilson

Q. Why are creationists obsessed with attacking science, but scientists are supremely indifferent to creationism?

A. Because creationism isn't a problem for science, but science is a problem for creationism.

Like just about every serious biologist publishing their research findings, refuting creationism was probably not even in the thinking of the biologists from University of Oxford, the University of Stirling and the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, Mass, USA, when they published their paper on how a type of rotifer resists fungal infections, but that's what they've just done.

It's a basic article of faith for creationists, promulgated by frauds who misrepresent information theory and conflate it with the laws of thermodynamics that an organism cannot acquire new genetic information without the intervention of a supernatural deity (who just happens to be the locally popular god as revealed in the locally popular books deemed to be holy by the locally popular church, mosque, synagogue, temple or gurdwara} because that would violate some assumed law akin to the law of conservation of energy - which has nothing to do with information or genetics

It is of course nonsense, as the evidence of gene and whole genome doubling, and horizontal gene transfer shows. Organisms can acquire new genetic information by simple chemistry and physics; and that new information is often available to be exapted for novel purposes.

Refuting Creationism - Humans Were Butchering A Giant Armadillo in Argentina - 11,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

21,000-year-old Neoesclerocalyptus fossils with man-made cut marks

UNLP scientists discover the oldest record of human presence in South America » UNLP

It's one of those moments that creationists like to pretend is a weakness of science - time to reconsider what we thought we knew and to update our understanding in the light of new evidence.

In short, time to do what a dogmatic, intellectually bankrupt creationist can never do - consider being wrong and changing our mind because the evidence has changed.

The reason for this reassessment is that the fossilised remains of a species of glyptodont or giant armadillo, a Neoesclerocalyptus, has been discovered on the bank of the Reconquista River, in Argentina that have been dated to 21,000 years ago, that bears the unmistakable cut marks of butchery by humans. Previously, the earliest incontrovertible evidence of humans in South America put it at about 16,000 years ago. The fossils were discovered and analysed by a team of palaeontologists led by scientists from the National University of La Plata, Argentina.

This is a clear 11,000 years before creationists believe the Universe was magicked into existence, and so puts this event in the 99.9975% of Earth's history that occurred before creationists believe it existed, based on the best guesses of parochial Middle-eastern pastoralists who believe the entire universe consisted of a small flat planet with a dome over it that contained nothing that wasn't known to the people who filled the gap in their knowledge with childish guesses.