Refuting Creationism - The Dynamics of a Forest Ecosystem - Or How LIfe Is Fine-Tuned For Its Environment

The impact of insect herbivory on biogeochemical cycling in broadleaved forests varies with temperature | US Forest Service Research and Development

An interesting piece of research by a large international team led by the Forest Service of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), has shown how herbivory by leaf-eating insects is part of a dynamic forest ecosystem, as the results of herbivory releases nutrients back into the soil from where they are recycled back into the forest canopy.

It is a lovely illustration of how, in contrast to what creationists claim is evidence that Earth is fine-tuned for life, it is actually life that fine tunes itself to fit the environment by an evolutionary process. There is nothing magical about it; it is simply the operation of basic laws of chemistry and physics, and the differential survival of those best fitted to live and reproduce within the ecosystem.

How the team did this research is the subject of an open access research paper in Nature Communications and is explained in a press release from USDA:

Refuting Creationism - What Caused The Transition From Ediacaran To Cambrian Biota? It's The Environment, Of Course

550-Million-year-old fossil hunting in Namibia

Artist's impression of the Ediacaran fauna

Sea level changes shaped early life on Earth, fossils show | The University of Edinburgh

What creationists will tell you about the Cambrian 'Explosion', i.e., the rapid radiation of different species with different body plans, is that it happened in an instant. One minute there was nothing; the next, lots of different species with lots of different body plans were swimming about eating one another and avoiding being eaten. This is a parody of course and depends on deliberately or otherwise, misunderstanding what the term 'Cambrian Explosion' means.

What it doesn't mean is that lots of different body plans suddenly appeared without ancestor and with no common ancestry. Creationist claims of spontaneous, magical creation are nonsense, of course. Not only did the Cambrian biota have ancestors, but those ancestors themselves had ancestors in the preceding 'Ediacaran' era, named after the Australian rocks in which their fossils were first found. And those Ediacaran multicellular organisms had ancestors in the form of single-celled organisms that gave rise to these colonial organisms.

What caused the transition from the sessile Ediacaran biota to the Cambrian biota was the evolution of mobility. Mobility creates the opportunity for predation so, unlike sessile organisms that depend on a supply of simple nutrients that have to be metabolized and make into structural materials, being able to predate on other organisms means they can obtain organic molecules already made by something else.

Refuting Creationism - How Worms Turned - Into Insects

Fig. 1: Anatomical overview of Youti yuanshi.

Ancient worm fossil solves mystery of how insects and spiders evolved - Durham University

To anyone who has ever looked at the segmented body of an annelid worm and the segmented body of an insect, particularly in its larval stage, that the latter is really the former with legs and (usually as an adult) wings should be obvious. The same can be said for annelid worms and centipedes and, for that matter, worms with legs and arachnids (spiders, scorpions and mites). But maybe the connection between arachnids and crabs or insects and barnacles is not so obvious, until you look at how the legs work and how they both have an exoskeleton instead of an endoskeleton like the vertebrates.

But then even the primitive ancestors of the vertebrates were segmented like the annelids, as we can see in the spinal column and the way nerves arise from the spinal cord.

But, tell a creationist that a segmented worm evolved into the arthropods, and they'll immediately demand to see the 'transitional' fossil, that they've been fooled into thinking must exist because every generation of every species is obliged to leave a fossil so there is a complete, unbroken record of evolution somewhere, because the Theory of Evolution says so. In fact, a complete, unbroken fossil record of every generation of an evolving species over time would look suspiciously like something other than chance was at work in creating fossils.

So, what we have are the snapshots at random points in time that are left in the geological column, and various dating methods that tell us how old the fossil is. The rest is simple common sense and joining the dots.

And one such snapshot has just been announced by researchers working at Durham University, UK, who have identified a species that is clearly partway between a segmented worm and an early arthropod (euarthropod). The newly-named Youti yuanshi is about the size of a poppy seed and fits neatly into one of creationism's beloved gaps. And, of course, it is exactly what the TOE predicts should have lived, because, as I said, the connection between segmented worms and segmented arthropods is obvious.

Unintelligent Design - Cancer in Birds - Malevolence, Incompetence or Evolution

Cancer affects virtually all multicellular organisms, birds included. A new study highlights the trade-off between investment in reproduction and DNA maintenance. Birds laying larger numbers of eggs have less resources available to ensure the integrity of their DNA, leaving them more vulnerable to cancer.

Graphic by Jason Drees

Canada goose eggs, Branta canadensis

Chrislotos

ASU researchers explore cancer susceptibility in birds | ASU News

Researchers at Arizona State University (ASU) have discovered a statistical link between the incidence of cancer in birds and their reproductive rates. As species, birds that lay more eggs are more liable to die of cancer.

The team attribute this to an evolutionary tradeoff between reproduction and survival. Those species which are more susceptible to cancer - which is a function of aging as the longer an individual lives the greater are its chances of developing a cancer - have evolutionary pressure to produce more offspring while young, where as those with a lower susceptibility can afford to expend less energy in reproducing and to spread it over a longer average lifespan.

This is easily understood as the result of an evolutionary process, as are cancers, which result from mistakes in cell replication, which is a sub-optimal, utilitarian process in multicellular organisms with specialised cells and tissues, resulting from inheriting the same mechanism that single-celled ancestors used so the whole genome is replicated in every cell, regardless of which genes those specialized cells will need.

Refuting Creationism - How a Mass Extinction 66 Million Year Before Creation Week Triggered The Rappid Evolution Of Birds

The Broad-billed Tody, Todus subulatus, is a member of the bird group Coraciimorphae.

Image credit: Daniel Field,
University of Cambridge

The Northern Flicker, Colaptes auratus, is a member of the bird group Coraciimorphae. Berv and co-authors identify this group of birds and others as having close ties to the end-Cretaceous mass extinction that occurred in the wake of the Chicxulub asteroid impact approximately 66 million years ago.

Image credit: Daniel Field, University of Cambridge

Mass extinction 66 million years ago triggered rapid evolution of bird genomes | University of Michigan News

Another major milestone in the history of life on Earth happened, like almost everything else, in that long pre-Creation Week history that creationists need to ignore. It was the mass extinction about 66 million years ago that killed the non-avian dinosaurs and most megafauna, leaving vacant niches that could be exploited by the descendants of survivors. It's no surprise to anyone who understands how evolution works, that this led to a proliferation of new species as existing species diversified to fill those niches.

That much was known already from the fossil record, but now a University of Michigan study has found how this maps onto changes in the genome of the major bird families, as a kind of DNA fossil, just as the TOE predicts.

The major difference between the different taxons is how developed the chicks are on hatching and how dependent they are on their parents. In ducks, geese, the ratites and ground-nesting birds such as the plovers, chickens and turkeys, the chicks are mobile and able to feed themselves (precocial) almost as soon as they've hatched. At the other end of the scale, many passerines are helpless on hatching and are entirely dependent on their parents for food and shelter (altricial) for several weeks.

As the birds evolved and diversified, they tended to become smaller and also more altricial. This reduction in body size and increased altriciality are reflected in the genomes. It was these transitional changed that the researchers detected.

These major changes were occurring within 3-5 million years after the mass extinction.

Malevolent Designer News - Is Creationism's Divine Malevolence Hedging Its Bets With SARS-CoV-2

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The virus that causes COVID-19 is widespread in wildlife, Virginia Tech scientists find | Virginia Tech News | Virginia Tech

If you've got money to invest, don't invest it all in one product. If that product fails you lose everything, so spread it around, that way you're reducing your risk and should have something left even if your main investment crashes. In other words, don't have all your eggs in one basket.

And Creationism's malevolent designer, who invested heavily in the SARS-CoV-2 virus as its preferred way to make people sick and die and to ruin national economies on a world-wide scale, understands that principle well. But the problem is, humans fought back and not only invented an effective vaccine that cut down the malevolence’s return on investment, but they also developed immunity which reduces the death toll down to a mere headache and feeling a bit lethargic for a few days.

Do you have any information on how many other species can also be infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus? Yes, many other species can be infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the virus responsible for COVID-19 in humans. Research has identified several animals that can be naturally or experimentally infected. Here is an overview of some of the species known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2:

1. Domestic Animals:
   • Cats: Both domestic and big cats (like lions and tigers in zoos) have been infected. Cats can also transmit the virus to each other.
   • Dogs: Some dogs have tested positive, but they generally show no or mild symptoms.
   • Ferrets: Highly susceptible and can transmit the virus to other ferrets.
   • Mink: Infected minks have been found on farms, with some cases leading to large outbreaks and human infections.
2. *Wildlife:
   • Big Cats: Lions, tigers, snow leopards, and cougars in zoos have contracted the virus.
   • White-tailed Deer: Studies have shown that these deer can be infected and spread the virus among themselves.
   • Non-Human Primates: Various species of monkeys, such as rhesus macaques, cynomolgus macaques, and marmosets, can be infected and exhibit symptoms similar to humans.
3. Laboratory Animals:
   • Hamsters: Both Syrian and Chinese hamsters are susceptible and can transmit the virus.
   • Mice: Wild-type mice are generally not susceptible, but genetically modified mice expressing the human ACE2 receptor can be infected.
   • Rabbits: Some susceptibility has been observed, although with mild or no symptoms.
   • Tree Shrews: Can be infected and are used in research studies.
4. Farm Animals:
   • Pigs: Some studies have shown low susceptibility with no significant symptoms.
   • Cows** and **Chickens: Generally considered not susceptible based on current evidence.

The list of species continues to evolve as more research is conducted. Surveillance and studies are ongoing to better understand the range of susceptible species, their role in the transmission of the virus, and the potential implications for human and animal health.

By the divine malevolence was crafty and hedged its bets by designing the virus so it also infects wild animals so it can build up a nice little nest egg with which to launch another big raid on the futures market which could pay dividends in terms of human lives and increased suffering. All it need do is give the virus a little tweak and we could have another pandemic to rival the 2020 one all over again.


We have known about the zoonotic abilities of the virus for some time - after all it is believed to have evolved in another species before transferring to humans in 2019, but a team of Virginia Tech researchers have discovered that it may be more widespread in the wild animal populations, especially those near human habitation, than was previously thought.

Their results are published, open access in the journal Nature Communications and are explained in a Virginia Tech news release:

The virus that causes COVID-19 is widespread in wildlife, Virginia Tech scientists find

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Six of 23 common wildlife species showed signs of SARS-CoV-2 infections in an examination of animals in Virginia, as revealed by tracking the virus’s genetic code.

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SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, is widespread among wildlife species, according to Virginia Tech research published today in Nature Communications. The virus was detected in six common backyard species and antibodies indicating prior exposure to the virus were found in five species with rates of exposure ranging from 40 to 60 percent depending on the species.

Genetic tracking in wild animals confirmed both the presence of SARS-CoV-2 and the existence of unique viral mutations with lineages closely matching variants circulating in humans at the time, further supporting human-to-animal transmission, the study found.

The highest exposure to SARS CoV-2 was found in animals near hiking trails and high-traffic public areas, suggesting the virus passed from humans to wildlife, according to scientists at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, the Department of Biological Sciences in Virginia Tech’s College of Science, and the Fralin Life Sciences Institute.

The findings highlight the identification of novel mutations in SARS-CoV-2 in wildlife and the need for broad surveillance. These mutations could be more harmful and transmissible, creating challenges for vaccine development.

The scientists stressed, however, that they found no evidence of the virus being transmitted from animals to humans, and people should not fear typical interactions with wildlife.

Investigators tested animals from 23 common Virginia species for both active infections and antibodies indicating previous infections. They found signs of the virus in deer mice, Virginia opossums, raccoons, groundhogs, Eastern cottontail rabbits, and Eastern red bats. The virus isolated from one opossum showed viral mutations that were previously unreported and can potentially impact how the virus affects humans and their immune response.

The virus can jump from humans to wildlife when we are in contact with them, like a hitchhiker switching rides to a new, more suitable host. The goal of the virus is to spread in order to survive. The virus aims to infect more humans, but vaccinations protect many humans. So the virus turns to animals, adapting and mutating to thrive in the new hosts.

Professor Carla Finkielstein, Co-corresponding author
Professor of biological sciences
Department of Biological Sciences
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA.

SARS CoV-2 infections were previously identified in wildlife, primarily in white-tailed deer and feral mink. The Virginia Tech study significantly expands the number of species examined and the understanding of virus transmission to and among wildlife. The data suggests exposure to the virus has been widespread in wildlife and that areas with high human activity may serve as points of contact for cross-species transmission.

This study was really motivated by seeing a large, important gap in our knowledge about SARS-CoV-2 transmission in a broader wildlife community. A lot of studies to date have focused on white-tailed deer while what is happening in much of our common backyard wildlife remains unknown.

Assistant Professor Joseph R. Hoyt, co-corresponding author
Assistant professor of biological sciences
Department of Biological Sciences
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA.

The research team collected 798 nasal and oral swabs across in Virginia from animals either live-trapped in the field and released, or being treated by wildlife rehabilitation centers. The team also obtained 126 blood samples from six species. The locations were chosen to compare the presence of the virus in animals in sites with varying levels of human activity, from urban areas to remote wilderness.

The study also identified two mice at the same site on the same day with the exact same variant, indicating they either both got it from the same human, or one infected the other.

Researchers are not certain about the means of transmission from humans to animals. One possibility is wastewater, but the Virginia Tech scientists believe trash receptacles and discarded food are more likely sources.

I think the big take home message is the virus is pretty ubiquitous. We found positives in a large suite of common backyard animals.

Dr Amanda R. Goldberg, first author
Department of Biological Sciences
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA.

While this study focused on the state of Virginia, many of the species that tested positive are common backyard wildlife found throughout North America. It is likely they are being exposed in other areas as well, and surveillance across a broader region is urgently needed, Hoyt said.

The virus is indifferent to whether its host walks on two legs or four. Its primary objective is survival. Mutations that do not confer a survival or replication advantage to the virus will not persist and will eventually disappear. We understood the critical importance of sequencing the genome of the virus infecting those species. It was a monumental task that could only be accomplished by a talented group of molecular biologists, bioinformaticians, and modelers in a state-of-the-art facility. I am proud of my team and my collaborators, their professionalism, and everything they contributed to ensure our success.

Professor Carla Finkielstein.

The Roanoke lab was established in April 2020 to expand COVID-19 testing.

Scientists should continue surveillance for these mutations and not dismiss them, the scientists said. More research is needed about how the virus is transmitted from humans to wildlife, how it might spread within a species, and perhaps from one species to another.

This study highlights the potentially large host range SARS-CoV-2 can have in nature and really how widespread it might be. There is a lot of work to be done to understand which species of wildlife, if any, will be important in the long-term maintenance of SARS-CoV-2 in humans.

Assistant Professor Joseph R. Hoyt.

But what we’ve already learned is that SARS CoV-2 is not only a human problem and that it takes a heck of a multidisciplinary team to address its impact on various species and ecosystems effectively.

Professor Carla Finkielstein.

The team will continue its research supported by a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

Other authors on the paper include:

• Kate Langwig, associate professor, Department of Biological Sciences, Fralin Life Sciences Institute
• James Weger-Lucarelli, assistant professor, Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology, Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine
• Anne Brown, associate professor, Department of Biochemistry
• Amanda Goldberg, former postdoctoral associate, Department of Biological Sciences
• Jeffrey Marano, graduate research assistant, Department of Biological Sciences
• Pallavi Rai, graduate research assistant, Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology, Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine
• Kelsi King, graduate research assistant, Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology
• Amanda Sharp, graduate research assistant, Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology
• Christopher Kailing, graduate research assistant, Department of Biological Sciences
• Macy Kailing, graduate research assistant, Department of Biological Sciences
• Members of the Virginia Tech Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory: Katherine L. Brown, Alessandro Ceci, Russell Briggs, Matthew G. Urbano, Clinton Roby

Details of the carrier species appear in the team's open access paper on Nature Communications:

Abstract
Pervasive SARS-CoV-2 infections in humans have led to multiple transmission events to animals. While SARS-CoV-2 has a potential broad wildlife host range, most documented infections have been in captive animals and a single wildlife species, the white-tailed deer. The full extent of SARS-CoV-2 exposure among wildlife communities and the factors that influence wildlife transmission risk remain unknown. We sampled 23 species of wildlife for SARS-CoV-2 and examined the effects of urbanization and human use on seropositivity. Here, we document positive detections of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in six species, including the deer mouse, Virginia opossum, raccoon, groundhog, Eastern cottontail, and Eastern red bat between May 2022–September 2023 across Virginia and Washington, D.C., USA. In addition, we found that sites with high human activity had three times higher seroprevalence than low human-use areas. We obtained SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences from nine individuals of six species which were assigned to seven Pango lineages of the Omicron variant. The close match to variants circulating in humans at the time suggests at least seven recent human-to-animal transmission events. Our data support that exposure to SARS-CoV-2 has been widespread in wildlife communities and suggests that areas with high human activity may serve as points of contact for cross-species transmission.

Introduction
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the causative agent of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), has resulted in over 771 million human cases and over six million deaths worldwide¹. As SARS-CoV-2 becomes endemic in humans, one of the greatest threats to public health is the resurgence of more virulent and transmissible variants. The considerable pathogen pressure imposed by the pandemic has caused concern as to whether SARS-CoV-2 will spill into wildlife populations, establish a sylvatic cycle, and potentially serve as a source for new variants.

Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to captive animals has been well documented^2,3,4, but detections in free-ranging wildlife are currently limited to only a few species including white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus^5,6,7), feral mink (Neovison vison⁸), and Eurasian river otters (Lutra lutra⁹). Experimental infections and modeling of the functional receptor for SARS-CoV-2 (angiotensin-converting enzyme 2: ACE2) have shown that numerous wildlife species may be competent hosts^{10,11,12,13,14,15}. However, it remains unexplored whether a diversity of wildlife species are infected in natural settings, where exposure to SARS-CoV-2 is likely to be indirect and at a lower exposure dose.

Since the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in 2019, numerous variants have been detected in humans and animals. Many variants that have become dominant have mutations that increase their infectivity in humans¹⁶, and may also impact the virus’s ability to infect new wildlife species. SARS-CoV-2 collected from white-tailed deer have included lineages circulating in humans, caused by human-to-deer transmission5, but have also included lineages with unique mutations suggestive of deer-to-deer transmission¹⁷. This implies that only minimal adaptation may be needed for transmission to occur among deer following initial human-to-animal transmission events¹⁸. Other human peridomestic species, such as deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus)^12,13 and skunks (Mephitis mephitis)¹⁴ have been shown to be capable of viral shedding in laboratory settings¹¹. Collectively, these studies raise important questions about the extent of human-to-wildlife transmission and the ability of other wildlife species to sustain transmission.

Establishment of SARS-CoV-2 infections in wildlife communities could result in novel mutations that increase virulence, transmissibility, or confer immune escape, negatively impacting both human and wildlife populations. Furthermore, as SARS-CoV-2 adapts to not only human hosts, but potentially a wide diversity of wildlife species, SARS-CoV-2 evolution may become more unpredictable¹⁹. This could present several challenges for human health, including concerns related to vaccine development targeting human-specific lineages, and novel impacts to pathogenicity and transmissibility of the virus.

Here, we examine how widespread SARS-CoV-2 exposure has been in wildlife communities between May 2022 and September 2023. We used quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) to examine 789 nasopharyngeal/oropharyngeal samples from 23 species sampled across Virginia and Washington D.C., USA and documented the presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in six of these species. In addition, we analyzed 126 serum samples from six species collected before and after the arrival of SARS-CoV-2 and detected neutralizing antibody titers in five of the six species. Finally, we detected an effect of urbanization and human use on seropositivity in animals, and examined genomic data associated with positive samples.

Goldberg, A.R., Langwig, K.E., Brown, K.L. et al.
Widespread exposure to SARS-CoV-2 in wildlife communities. Nat Commun 15, 6210 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49891-w

Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

The fact that this virus is so capable of infecting other species is a cause for concern because the wider it spreads and the more species it come into contact with, the greater the chance of it crossing over to new species, and the more species it infects, the greater the probability of new variants evolving that can transfer back into humans with unpredictable consequences.

Creationists must be very proud of the devious nastiness of their favorite malevolence.

Refuting Creationism - Interactions Between Earth’s Early Life Forms And The Environment - Over 500 million Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated image of what the ocean may have looked like during the Paleozoic era, around 500 million years ago.

AI-generated image of ancient phytoplankton in oxygen rich seawater.

Scientists Untangle Interactions Between the Earth’s Early Life Forms and the Environment over 500 million Years - College of Arts & Sciences at Syracuse University

One of creationism's problems is that, by insisting the Universe is only 10,000 years old or less, they place 99.9975% of Earth's history in that very long, pre-Creation period when, according to their mythology, there wasn't any history.

This, of course, is trivially easy to refute simply by finding evidence of something that happened during this period, and since almost all of history did, this is not much of challenge.

As I've remarked before, creationism is not a problem for science; science is a problem for creationism - which is why creationists spend almost all their time attacking science and lying about it to get new recruits, while all science need do is produce a few facts now and then - something it does incidentally, without even thinking about creationism.

Creationism Refuted - Cosmologists Are Changing Their minds Again - But It's Not What Creationists Hoped For

Artist's depiction of the spray of particles arising from the collision of two heavy atoms. As the hot subatomic soup cools, newly formed particles shower off into space.

Credit: Joseph Dominicus Lap

Smashing time with ALICE.
A picture shows the tracks of particles produced in a lead ion smashup in the Large Hadron Collider.

Image: ALICE/CERN

Discovery sheds light on the origins of matter in the early universe

Like all good scientists, cosmologists are re-examining what they thought they knew and, because there are new facts, they are allowing these facts to dictate their understanding. The issue is when exactly the matter in the Universe was created by natural forces.

But before creationists start celebrating, these cosmologists would laugh at the childish notion that it was all made by magic 10,000 years ago. In fact, the revision is over whether it was all produced in the first few picoseconds after the Big Bang, or 0.000001 seconds later. There is no doubt about whether the Big Bang happened or how long ago it happened and it was many orders of magnitude longer ago than Creationists like to imagine.

The problem is that in the immediate aftermath (and we are talking of picoseconds) the Universe was far too hot (some 250,000 times hotter than the sun's core) for even elementary particles to form in the high-energy electromagnetic field in which quarks couldn't even interact.

Unintelligent Designer News - Is Creationism's Incompetent Designer Also A Racist?

National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organization (NACCHO) logo

Torres Strait family on Thursday Island.

Image source: Let’s Learn about the Torres Strait Islands, Oz Publishing.

Lupus is more common and severe in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Learning why is crucial

The realisation that Australian Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders are not only more prone to the autoimmune condition lupus but suffer a more severe form of it than Europeans, would be an embarrassment for creationists if they were aware of it and understood the implications for some of their most cherished superstitions.

It has long been known that Africans and Asians are more prone to lupus, but this study shows that Australian Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders may have been singled out for special attention, if you believe these things are designed by creationism's putative designer.

In general terms. lupus is a failure if the immune system in that something triggers it to turn against the person instead of protecting them. As an example of design, it is an example of incompetence in the extreme. It's like creating an army to protect a country, only to have it turn on the people of that country and start massacring them, because it's mistaken them for invaders. This might be a feature of mal-formed banana republics, but it's hardly a sign of a well-designed civilised society.

But, of course, creationists have been primed to blame these design failures, like parasites, on the scientifically nonsensical 'genetic entropy' and 'devolution', but if that were to blame for the greater suffering of these Austronesians that would mean that they have 'devolved' further than other humans and so must have been subject to more 'genetic entropy'. But all humans have been around for the same length of time, whether you accept the science or believe the childish magic creation just a few thousand years ago, so what would cause this accelerated rate of 'genetic entropy' in a regional population?

Bible Blunders - Why the Bible Could Not Have Been Written Or Inspired By The God Described In It

What happens when matter is squashed to the brink of collapse? We weighed a neutron star to help NASA find out

Assuming you could speak whatever ancient form of Hamito-Semitic language the Bronze Age authors of Genesis spoke; what do you think they would say if you asked them how to weigh a neutron star?

They might just about grasp the meaning of 'weigh' but 'neutron' and 'star', let alone 'neutron star'?

The plain fact is that we not only speak a different language but have words for ideas and objects which would have been incomprehensible to people who thought the entire Universe was a small, flat planet with a dome over it, that contained nothing that couldn’t be found within a day or two's walks of their pastures in the Middle Eastern petty state of Canaan, later to split up into even smaller waring tribal area under the leadership of despotic warlords.

You could have done the same with words like 'electricity', 'atom', bacteria', 'virus', 'genes', 'energy', 'galaxy', 'thermodynamics', 'chemistry', 'physics' and, of course 'evolution'. These are all as absent from the Bible as are elephants, penguins, north and south-poles, democracy, civil rights, or gender equality, because the authors knew nothing about them and had no way of knowing anything about them.

It wasn't that they were stupid, after all it probably takes a lot of intelligence and a long apprenticeship to understand the needs of a herd of sheep and/or goats and where the best grazing is without encroaching on the neighbouring tribes grazing rights. My dear old maternal grandfather was a highly-respected third-generation shepherd in his day who was head-hunted to look after a prize-winning flock of Oxford Downs and given a cottage to live in, that his family then lived in for four generations. He was by no means a stupid man - simplistic in his understanding of many things. A fundamentalist Christian who knew the Bible by heart and took everything in it as 'Gospel truth' and misogynistic to the core, but not stupid.

But they not only lacked the technology (how can you learn about bacteria when you don't have glass good enough to make a microscope) but they believed they knew the answers already. They thought they knew the answers to the questions their limited horizons suggested - and the answer was always the same - a god did it (which god or gods didn't matter, it was the god or gods the rest of the tribe believed in), so what would you want a microscope for? there is nothing in water that you can't see, except water. There is nothing over the earth but the dome with the sun and moon and stars fixed to it, so why would you need a telescope to find out about galaxies?

Refuting Creationism - A Surfeit of Lamprey Evolution

Jawless lamprey

Image by T. Lawrence,
Great Lakes Fishery Commission

Petromyzon marinus, an invasive species in the North American Great Lakes.

Lampreys possess a ‘jaw-dropping’ evolutionary origin - Northwestern Now

It's a basic delusion of the creation cult that evolutionary biologists are turning their backs on the Theory of Evolution in favour of their childish notion of magic by a magic creator for which there is not an iota of scientific evidence. This probably tells us more about the ignorant gullibility of their target dupes and the contempt in which they are held by the cult leaders, than creationist frauds would want us to know.

The lie is designed to fool creationists into thinking that their childish superstition is ahead of science because their abysmal ignorance of the subject gives them a better understanding of biology than people who have university degrees in the subject and who use it every working day to reveal new facts and develop new medicines or more efficient agriculture, or simply to reveal the truth about the world we live in.

Creationists have also been fooled into thinking these millions of working biomedical scientists, their research assistants and staff of research institutes, together with those who publish the science journals, are all lying to mislead people because they 'hate' the imaginary, unproven creator, and none of them has ever broken ranks and blown the whistle on the 'deception'.

Meanwhile, in the grown-up world outside the creationist rabbit hole, real scientists are discovering facts that show how evolution from common ancestors involves genetic changes, just the way the Theory of Evolution predicts.

Unintelligent Design - The Divine Loser - Or How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Was Just Too Clever

Structure of Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis Virus

Ma, B., Huang, C., Ma, J. et al. (2021)

Evolution Tamed Once-Deadly Western Equine Encephalitis. Should We Still Worry? | Harvard Medical School

Creationism's divine malevolence is nothing if not sneaky and underhand, so we always need to be wary of what it is up to. For instance, following its early success with the western equine encephalitis virus (WEEV) in the early part of the 10th century, the virus seems to have lost its virulence and stopped infecting humans and horse, spending all its time in the body of the birds that were its reserve hiding places when it was at its most dangerous in the early 20th century.

The virus was spread by the divine malevolence’s favourite insect vector - mosquitoes, especially the usual suspects, the Culex and Aedes genera. In 1941 it accounted for3000 human cases with a mortality rate of 3-7%, but such has been its decline that there were only 600 human cases between 1964 and 2009 in the USA.

But is its designer merely biding its time and waiting for another chance to launch another attack on us, or is this an example of the malevolent designer being just a bit too clever, and having a plan that wasn't worth the paper on which it was written? We had a warning against complacency last year with an outbreak in Argentina and Uruguay with 2.400 horse cases and 103 human cases with a 10% morality rate in humans.

Malevonet Designer News - How Herpes Uses Sneak Tactics To Infect More People

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Skin blisters caused by herpes zoster (shingles)

Suppression of the host antiviral response by non-infectious varicella zoster virus extracellular vesicles | Journal of Virology

If you're going to design pathogens to overcome the immune system and make people sick, it helps that you know the weaknesses of the immune system you designed earlier to protect people from the pathogens you design.

To devotees of creationism's divine malevolence, the sheer brilliance of its designs is breathtaking, but the question they always avoid is why did it design the immune system with so many flaws and weak points in the first place? Was that merely incompetence, or did it intend to exploit them.

The redness of the rash may not be apparent on black or brown skin.

Creationists also carefully avoid questions about why any intelligent designer would have these arms races with itself, like someone with multiple personality syndrome and amnesia who constantly forgets what it designed yesterday and designs a new solution to the same problem today, and who sees the solutions to problems it designed yesterday as new problems to be solved today.

This is the supposed designer that creationists call 'intelligent', and which they would rather people believe in than have them accept the materialist explanation - mindless evolution proceeding without a plan in which one organism with its strengths and weaknesses is merely part of another organism's environment, presenting opportunities and threats, and selectors which pushes the population of organisms in a direction which makes them better fitted to survive and produce the next generation.

Rash around the eyes can be painful and may affect sight and hearing.

Alas, the excuses creationists try to make for this appearance of incompetent stupidity in design that parasites provide us with when we look below the superficial - genetic entropy and the ludicrous notion of 'devolution' - is demonstrably nonsensical, since an advantageous mutation can't logically be described as 'devolutionary' or somehow less perfect than its predecessor without private definitions of the words, 'perfect' and 'better' to mean the exact opposite of what normal people mean by them.

The latest example of a parasite appearing to be designed to increase the suffering in the world by sneaking past the incompetently designed immune system, if you believe in the childish 'intelligent design' notion, is the way the herpes virus that causes chicken pox and shingles manages to spread throughout the body where it lies dormant until something like illness, old age or infirmity triggers it to reactivate an cause shingles.

Unintelligent Design News - When Genes Misbehave - Another Design Blunder?

'Preparing the popular film of a Taube soaring above Rheims cathedral'

W. Heath-Robinson (1915)

‘Gene misbehaviour’ widespread in healthy population

Creationism's putative designer is like William Heath Robinson but without the competence.

Like creationism's putative designer, William Heath Robinson's 'irreducibly complex' designs are ludicrously over-complicated solutions to simple problems, but at least Heath-Robinson's machines look as though they would work if ever anyone constructed one.

Designed by creationism's supposed omniscient, omnipotent designer the bits of knotted string used to connect things together, and originally designed for a different purpose altogether, would have knots that came undone, or they would be made of elastic, or the chair used to stand something on to make it tall enough would have a broken leg.

The problem starts with the clunky workaround for the problem caused by using the same method for replicating cells in a multicellular organism that is used in single-celled organisms where the entire genome has to be duplicated in each daughter cell. But in a multicellular organism, where there is cell specialisation to gain any benefit from multicellularity, each specialist cell only needs a few genes, so the rest have to be switched off. Creationism's divine incompetence came up with the usual overly complex solution to this problem of its own making in the form of the epigenetic system, adding an unnecessary layer of complexity when the simple solution would have been to give each specialist cell just the genes it needs and no more.

And this become even more complicated when, during the life of a multicellular organism, specialist cells need to change slightly according to the needs of the organism as a whole, so a system of signals had been devised to tell the cells when to switch on some genes and switch off others. Another layer of complexity, and this is where things start to go wrong - the equivalent of Heath-Robinson's knotted string coming undone or stretching, or the chair supporting the entire structure starting to buckle.

Scientists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute's Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, UK, Cambridge University and AstraZeneca have discovered that genes are sometimes active when they should be switched off, even in healthy people.