Closing In On Abiogenesis - How Amino Acids Become Peptides in Water Droplets - No Magic Required

Professor R. Graham Cooks has studied the chemistry of water droplets for decades, discovering insights into cancer detection, drug discovery and early Earth chemistry.

Purdue University file photo/Andrew Hancock

A tripeptide (example Val-Gly-Ala) with green marked amino end (L-valine) and blue marked carboxyl end (L-alanine)

Chemistry professor R. Graham Cooks expands research of water droplet interfaces that offer the secret ingredient for building life - Purdue University Department of Chemistry

One of the puzzles of how the earliest proteins were built from amino acids was that the reaction of joining two amino acids together is a condensation reaction in which a molecule of water is eliminated when the -C-OH of one amino acid binds to the H₂N-C- of the other amino acid in what is known as a peptide bond:

-C-OH + H₂N-C- → -C-NH-C + H₂O;
but how could this happen in an aqueous solution?

In 2022, Professor R. Graham Cooks' team at Purdue University found the answer: It is due to the peculiar properties at the surface of droplets of water. Because of the way electrostatic forces align the water molecules at the surface, it behaves as though it is extremely dry, and highly acidic. These conditions provide the perfect conditions for a condensation reaction to occur, resulting in a peptides.

Droplets of water are everywhere in nature, from the spray of breaking waves, the splash of raindrops, waterfalls, trickling streams to aerosols of water in clouds and fog.

And Professor Cooks's team at Purdue have now shown that these conditions also occur at the macro, centimeter scale as water evaporates on, for example rocks or the margins of hydrothermal pools. They have also shown that these reactions, in the presence of oxazolones (produced by the dehydration of amino acids) preserve the chirality of the peptides so the resulting peptides are 'L' enantiomers, as found in all living organisms.

As the Purdue University press release says:

The study adds to the body of evidence that the surface of water drops represents a uniquely active physical and chemical system. Present are very high electric fields and extreme acidity that drives dehydration of amino acids to form peptides. Studies of the chemistry at water droplet interfaces offer new insights into the early stages of life's chemical evolution.

Significance

This study provides experimental evidence identifying oxazolones as the key intermediates in prebiotic peptide synthesis. These compounds yield the dipeptides upon reaction with water and generate tripeptides in the presence of other amino acids. These key steps in protein formation occur in pure water droplets. Amino acid chirality is preserved in forming the oxazolone and the addition of amino acids during peptide chain extension shows a strong chiral preference, viz. the aqueous droplet chemistry represents a simple route to chirally pure polypeptides. A direct connection between this intermediate and the dipeptide isomer, oxazolidinone, is demonstrated by simple hydration/dehydration. The oxazolone/oxazolidinone-mediated mechanism also occurs in macroscopic wet–dry cycling, establishing a strong connection between macroscopic and microscopic peptide synthesis.

Abstract

Peptide formation from amino acids is thermodynamically unfavorable but a recent study provided evidence that the reaction occurs at the air/solution interfaces of aqueous microdroplets. Here, we show that i) the suggested amino acid complex in microdroplets undergoes dehydration to form oxazolone; ii) addition of water to oxazolone forms the dipeptide; and iii) reaction of oxazolone with other amino acids forms tripeptides. Furthermore, the chirality of the reacting amino acids is preserved in the oxazolone product, and strong chiral selectivity is observed when converting the oxazolone to tripeptide. This last fact ensures that optically impure amino acids will undergo chain extension to generate pure homochiral peptides. Peptide formation in bulk by wet-dry cycling shares a common pathway with the microdroplet reaction, both involving the oxazolone intermediate.

Qiu, Lingqi; Cooks, R. Graham
Oxazolone mediated peptide chain extension and homochirality in aqueous microdroplets
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 121(2). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2309360120

© 2024 PNAS.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

And so that day that creationist frauds must be dreading, when science finally closes their favourite gap in which to force-fit their ever-shrinking little god finally slams as shut as all the other gaps it used to occupy in the minds of scientifically illiterate believers, gets a little closer. Only yesterday we learned how simple metabolic biochemical cycles can be produced from simple precursors, all of which were present on the pre-biotic Earth and without protein enzymes, and here we see how the proteins that could catalyse and improve those processes could also arise from simple precursors that were also present.

I wonder what disinformation the frauds who feed pseudo-science to the creation cult are preparing for that eventuality.

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Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It

This book explains why faith is a fallacy and serves no useful purpose other than providing an excuse for pretending to know things that are unknown. It also explains how losing faith liberates former sufferers from fear, delusion and the control of others, freeing them to see the world in a different light, to recognise the injustices that religions cause and to accept people for who they are, not which group they happened to be born in. A society based on atheist, Humanist principles would be a less divided, more inclusive, more peaceful society and one more appreciative of the one opportunity that life gives us to enjoy and wonder at the world we live in.

Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle

What Makes You So Special? From The Big Bang To You

How did you come to be here, now? This books takes you from the Big Bang to the evolution of modern humans and the history of human cultures, showing that science is an adventure of discovery and a source of limitless wonder, giving us richer and more rewarding appreciation of the phenomenal privilege of merely being alive and able to begin to understand it all.

Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle

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Malevolent Designer News - How The SARS-CoV-2 Virus Has Been Redesigned to Have Another Go

The emergence of JN.1 is an evolutionary ‘step change’ in the COVID pandemic. Why is this significant?

To anyone but a reality-denying creationist, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, is a classic example of evolution by natural selection, as it continually mutates and those mutations that make it more successful are retained, so it continually improves in its ability to infect and be passed on to another victim, so producing more offspring in the virus gene pool than rival versions.

The latest version to gain predominance, JN.1, currently spreading across the world, is yet another variation on the omicron version, which itself ousted delta as the predominant variety. This new improved version may prove to be so different to omicron that is should be given a new Greek letter designation.

One point that shouldn't go unnoticed is that because, unlike the original, the virus now exists in an environment in which most of its potential victims have a degree of immunity to it, either by vaccination or by previous infection. Because that immunity usually means the ability to produce antibodies to the 'spike' proteins on the surface of the virus, most of the mutations of progressively more successful variants are in the genes that code for those proteins - making it more difficult for antibodies to bind to them.

To a creationist, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, like all the other pathological viruses, presents the paradox of trying to believe their putative designer god is the supreme ruler of and creator of everything in, the universe and is the only entity capable of creating biological organisms, but, because it is omnibenevolent, it would not have designed SARS-CoV-2 and would not be responsible for continually redesigning it to continue making us sick, by evading the immune system it supposedly also designed to protect us from viruses and other pathogens.

Curiously, creationists who continually present what they think is evidence of design as evidence for their magic creator on the grounds that it is the only entity capable of biological design, never use evidence of malevolent design as evidence for the same magic creator. That has to be ascribed to another entity with even greater powers than their supposedly supreme-in-all-things god and with the ability to outwit it, even though that claim is blasphemous within their own religious beliefs. They need to hold those two diametrically opposite views of 'creation' simultaneously to continue to deny the evidence for evolution by natural selection of which the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a perfect example.

And those creationists who do actually believe the religion they purport to believe and who won't contemplate blasphemy, have no recourse but to believe that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not only designed by their putative designer god but that it also regularly updates it to continue making us sick despite the efforts of biomedical scientists, because the alternative it to accept the unthinkable and ascribe it all the a god-free natural process of evolution by natural selection, just as science claims.

The following article by Suman Majumdar, Associate Professor and Chief Health Officer - COVID and Health Emergencies, Burnet Institute; Brendan Crabb, Director and CEO, Burnet Institute; Emma Pakula, Senior Research and Policy Officer, Burnet Institute; and Stuart Turville, Associate Professor, Immunovirology and Pathogenesis Program, Kirby Institute, University of New South Wales, Australia, explains why the emergence of the JN.1 variant of SARS-CoV-2 is a significant evolutionary step change. It is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Abiogenesis News - Scientists Harness The Massive Computing Power of Blockchain Technology To Show How Metabolic Processes Arose

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

Chemists use the blockchain to simulate over 4 billion chemical reactions essential to the origins of life | ScienceDaily


As though to give a two-fingered salute to those creationist frauds who tell their dupes that scientists are turning their back on materialism and accepting that magic creation is a better explanation for abiogenesis and evolution than the operation of the laws of chemistry and physics, scientists from the Institute of Organic Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland with colleagues in IBS Center for Algorithmic and Robotized Synthesis, Ulsan, South Korea, have used the massive computing power of blockchain technology to simulate all possible reactions between pre-biotic chemicals such as water, methane and ammonia and their products, and shown that simple metabolic processes such as the citric acid cycle can arise without enzymes.

A few of these metabolic cycles were found to be capable of self-replication (believed to be a prerequisite for evolution) but these were comparatively few in number, so the scientists believe they may not have played a significant part on early abiogenesis.

These primitive metabolic processes could have provided the necessary energy for more complex processes to evolve including enzymes, each of which, if it catalyzed the reactions in the metabolic cycles, would have given it additional advantage and been quickly incorporated into the process.

the The scientists have published their findings in the Cell Press journal Chem and explain their research in a Cell Press news release.

First, a brief AI explanation of blockchain technology and its use in cryptocurrencies:

Unintelligent Design - How Ovulation Goes Wrong Because It Wasn't Intelligently Designed

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

Gene expression atlas captures where ovulation can go awry | Cornell Chronicle

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970, in what seems like a different lifetime now, I was a senior research assistant in the Oxford University/MRC Neuroendocrinology Research Unit, researching the hormonal control of ovulation in guinea pigs. Two of our tools were radioimmunoassays I had adapted for measuring extremely low levels of a hormone in guinea pig anterior pituitary glands known as luteinizing hormone (LH), and another similar assay for measuring the level of the steroid progesterone in guinea pig blood.

Sadly, having worked for close on two years towards producing a research paper with hundreds of assay results, thousands of microscope slides, hundreds of electron micrographs and a freezer full of samples waiting to be assayed, the government pulled the rug from under our feet by withdrawing our research funding, and I was made redundant, so my work was never published. Disillusioned and with a young family to support, I left research and perused a career in the NHS Ambulance Service instead - but that's a different story, and not relevant to the subject of this blogpost, which illustrates how much science has progressed in the last 50-60 years.

Researchers are no longer researching the hormonal control of ovulation but the fine details of the genetic control of the process of ovulation at the cell level, and what they've found is that the process is far from intelligently designed by anything resembling a perfect, omniscient, omnipotent designer. It is a process that is so complex that it can, and does, go wrong. An intelligent designer who didn't want random women to be unable to shed viable eggs, could have designed a less complicated process, but you can depend on creationism's putative intelligent[sic] designer to never do something simple when there is a far more complicated and wasteful way to achieve the same result.

The research, published a few days ago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was led by Iwijn De Vlaminck, associate professor of biomedical engineering in Cornell Engineering, and Yi Athena Ren, assistant professor of animal science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The paper’s lead author is Madhav Mantri, Ph.D., now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.

The team used a form of RNA tagging to map the gene expressions that occur during ovarian follicle maturation and ovulation in mice.

This spatial transcriptomics map depicts the cell types of a mouse ovary undergoing hormone-induced ovulation

The research is explained in a Cornell University Press release:

Bible Blunders - How Bronze Age Goat-Herders Described The Universe - And How It Really Is

N79, a star-forming region in the Large Megallanic Cloud

Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, O. Nayak, M. Meixner

The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 6-18

Galactic Genesis: Webb Space Telescope Reveals Massive Star-Forming Complex

If you asked any 6-year-old to draw a picture of what they thought the world with the sky, sun, moon and stars would look like if you could stand outside it, chances are they would come up with something not massively different to the way it is described in Genesis:

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good …

Genesis 1:6-10

And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.

Genesis 1:16-18

And it gets even more laughable when you read in Daniel:

Therefore the he goat waxed very great: and when he was strong, the great horn was broken; and for it came up four notable ones toward the four winds of heaven. And out of one of them came forth a little horn, which waxed exceeding great, toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the pleasant land. DANI And it waxed great, even to the host of heaven; and it cast down some of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them.

Daniel 8:8-10

And it doesn't get any better in the New Testament, where the authors also though Jesus would believe the stars would fall to Earth when they broke loose.

Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken.

Matthew 24:29
(Quoting Jesus)

And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken.

Mark 13:25
(Quoting Jesus)

And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

Revelation 6:13

Malevolent Designer News - How To Keep Ahead In The COVID Game Against Creationism's Divine Malevolence - Keep Being Boosted

How long does immunity last after a COVID infection?

Creationists stuck with the evidence of parasites and viruses that appear to be designed for two purposes only - making more copies of themselves and increasing the suffering in the world by making us sick and die - traditionally try to ride two horses. They blame something else, like 'The Fall' or 'Sin' for them, whilst still arguing that their putative designer god is supreme in all things and the only entity capable of creating complex organisms.

They also get in a terrible muddle when asked whether their 'designer' god included an immune system to protect us from these parasites when it designed us before 'The Fall', in which case it was planning for it all along, or whether there was a subsequent upgrade to V.1.2, in which case it couldn't have been omniscient and had to redo its design to account for the unforeseen.

But whatever rationalisation creationists can think up for these mutually contradictory beliefs, we are left with the fact that viruses like the SARS-CoV-2 virus and our immune system are locked in an arms race, in which human medical science has had to get involved because the immune system isn't fit for purpose, and the protection it gives us is only temporary.

Meanwhile, medical scientists, aware of the fact that evolution by natural selection is going to continually produce new variants of the virus and that these viruses may become better at evading our defences, continue to apply that knowledge and develop new vaccines against the latest variants.

The following article by Lara Herrero, Research Leader in Virology and Infectious Disease, and Wesley Freppel, Research Fellow, Institute for Glycomics, both of Griffith University, Australia explains why regular vaccination with boosters to keep out immune system primed for the latest iteration of the arms race with a latest version of the virus. The article is reproduced from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Malevolent Designer News - How Bacterial Pathogens Are Cleverly Designed to Invade Their Victim's Body

The exceptional secretion mechanism of Tc Toxins.

MPI MOPH

Functional model for Yen-Tc toxicity. Following ingestion of the Tc, it is likely that the surface-bound chitinases bind to and/or degrade the chitin-rich peritrophic membrane of the insect midgut. Cell surface recognition is likely facilitated by motifs within the A subunits prior to internalization. Similarities to the well characterized bacterial binary toxin systems (e.g., anthrax, cholera, diphtheria) suggest a mechanism involving receptor-mediated endocytosis followed by pore formation and translocation of the B and/or C components into the cytosol (I), although alternative mechanisms (e.g., II, III) cannot be ruled out.

Landsberg, MJ., Jones, SA., Rothnagel R., et al (2011)

24-01-18 | Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology

Imagine you're in charge of an invading army laying siege to your enemy's outer defences. How do you neutralise them?

One way would be to send a small group of soldiers, packed with high explosives and deadly toxins on a kamikaze mission into the defences, with instructions to detonate their explosives and so spread the toxins when inside to destroy the defences and kill the defenders. You could improve on that by removing any temptation the suicide bombers might have to not detonate their defences by automating the trigger to fire as soon as they encountered the defender.

That's exactly what a team at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology (MPI MOPH), Dortmund, Germany, have found bacteria use to gain access to their victim’s body and make their hosts sick and die. The team, led by Stefan Raunser, Director of MPI MOPH, have published their findings, open access, in Nature Microbiology. Their work is described in a MPI MOPH press release:

Creationism in Crisis - Flying Reptiles In The Mendip Hills - 200 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Artist’s impression of a gliding reptile Kuehneosaurus

Credit: Mike Cawthorne

Showing partial skeleton of gliding reptile Kuehneosaurus on rock from Emborough.

Credit: David Whiteside

January: Ancient flying reptiles | News and features | University of Bristol

200 million years, give or take a few thousand years, before creationists believe Earth and life on it were all created by magic from nothing in a week, gliding lizard-like reptiles related to ancestral crocodiles, were gliding from tree to tree, and probably hunting flying insects, in what is now the Mendip Hills, near Bristol, UK. The area around Bristol was then an archipelago of islands in a sub-tropical, shallow sea.

Fossil remains of these reptiles were found by University of Bristol Masters student Mike Cawthorne, researching numerous reptile fossils from limestone quarries, in what was then the biggest sub-tropical island at the time, called the Mendip Palaeo-island.

As the Bristol University press release explains:

The study, published today in Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, also records the presence of reptiles with complex teeth, the trilophosaur Variodens and the aquatic Pachystropheus that probably lived similarly to a modern-day otter likely eating shrimps and small fish.

The animals either fell or their bones were washed into caves and cracks in the limestone.

“All the beasts were small,” said Mike. “I had hoped to find some dinosaur bones, or even their isolated teeth, but in fact I found everything else but dinosaurs.

“The collections I studied had been made in the 1940s and 1950s when the quarries were still active, and palaeontologists were able to visit and see fresh rock faces and speak to the quarrymen.”

Professor Mike Benton, from Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, explained: “It took a lot of work identifying the fossil bones, most of which were separate and not in a skeleton.

“However, we have a lot of comparative material, and Mike Cawthorne was able to compare the isolated jaws and other bones with more complete specimens from the other sites around Bristol.

“He has shown that the Mendip Palaeo-island, which extended from Frome in the east to Weston-super-Mare in the west, nearly 30 km long, was home to diverse small reptiles feeding on the plants and insects.

“He didn’t find any dinosaur bones, but it’s likely that they were there because we have found dinosaur bones in other locations of the same geological age around Bristol.”

The area around Bristol 200 million years ago in the Late Triassic was an archipelago of small islands set in a warm sub-tropical sea.

Bristol’s Dr David Whiteside added: “The bones were collected by some great fossil finders in the 1940s and 1950s including Tom Fry, an amateur collector working for Bristol University and who generally cycled to the quarries and returned laden with heavy bags of rocks.

“The other collectors were the gifted researchers Walter Kühne, a German who was imprisoned in Great Britain in the 2nd world war, and Pamela L. Robinson from University College London. They gave their specimens to the Natural History Museum in London and the Geological collections of the University of Bristol.”

Abstract

During the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic, the area around Bristol and South Wales was an archipelago of islands occupied by diverse small-sized tetrapods. The largest of these palaeo-islands was Mendip Island, now forming the Mendip Hills, and the location of some famous fossiliferous sites. These sites have not been described in detail before, and we present new data on three of them. Highcroft has yielded only sparse remains of rhynchocephalians, and Batscombe famously the gliding reptile Kuehneosuchus latissimus. Emborough yielded the richest fauna of the three, abundant pseudosuchians including crocodylomorphs as well as the gliding reptile Kuehneosaurus latus, rare trilophosaurs, a probable thalattosaur, rhynchocephalians, and the mammal Kuehneotherium. These include some of the last known taxa of clades that died out in the end-Triassic mass extinction. We report a new taxon of sphenosuchid crocodylomorph similar to Saltoposuchus and a find of Pachystropheus, an aquatic reptile shared with Holwell and the bedded Rhaetian at Blue Anchor Point, Aust and Westbury Garden Cliff. The discovery of a fish vertebra strengthens the model of Emborough fissure filling in a marginal marine location. The Emborough fauna differs from coeval assemblages from Cromhall, Tytherington and Ruthin in the scarcity of sphenodontians and the absence or great rarity of procolophonids as well as the abundance of kuehneosaurids and crocodylomorphs.

1. Introduction

The Triassic (252–201 Ma) was a crucial time in the recovery, restructuring and diversification of vertebrate life (Benton and Wu, 2022). Many modern groups including lissamphibians, turtles, lizards, crocodiles, and mammals originated or diversified in the Late Triassic, part of the process of the recovery of life from the end-Permian mass extinction, but stimulated by the Carnian Pluvial Episode 233–232 Ma, following which climates became more arid, and the new groups, including dinosaurs, had opportunities to diversify (Brusatte et al., 2010; Chen and Benton, 2012; Benton et al., 2014; Bernardi et al., 2018; Dal Corso et al., 2020; Benton 2021; Benton and Wu, 2022).

The end-Triassic mass extinction (ETME), 201 Ma, was probably caused by sharp warming from greenhouse gases erupted by the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP), associated with the beginning of rifting and opening of the North Atlantic (Blackburn et al., 2013). The environmental crisis led to widespread extinctions of many tetrapod clades including procolophonids, placodonts, kuehneosaurids, thalattosaurs, allokotosaurians and phytosaurs. Many pseudosuchians such as the rauisuchids also became extinct but the Crocodylomorpha survived leading to the modern living crocodilians. Whether the ETME was a single crisis at the end of the Triassic or began minimally 100 ka before the earliest known eruptions (Davies et al., 2017) is debated. Indeed, there is good evidence for several earlier events, one at the Norian–Rhaetian boundary (Rigo et al., 2020.1) and one equivalent to the middle of the Cotham Member in the British Rhaetian succession (Wignall and Atkinson, 2020.2), both marked by carbon isotope excursions and evidence for substantial loss of marine species. The spacing of these events is entirely dependent on estimates of the duration of the Rhaetian, with its beginning variously dated at 205.7 Ma and 201.7 Ma, making the stage either 4.2 or 0.2 Myr in duration (Maron et al., 2015; Ruhl et al., 2020.3).

These considerations around the importance of the Triassic as a whole, and the Late Triassic in particular, in documenting the origin of modern ecosystems on land and in the sea, as well as the evidence for phased bursts of extinction through the Rhaetian, place fresh importance on understanding the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic fossil faunas found bordering the Bristol Channel, around Bristol and in South Wales. These faunas are preserved across a sub-tropical archipelago (Fig. 1) in fissure fillings, deposits of soil and other debris accumulated in karstic cave systems (Whiteside et al., 2016; Lovegrove et al., 2021.1). First finds were isolated bones of the sauropodomorph dinosaur Thecodontosaurus in the Worrall Road Quarries in Bristol (Riley and Stutchbury, 1836, Riley and Stutchbury, 1840; Ballell et al., 2020.4) and then mammal remains at Holwell Quarry (Moore, 1859), and later recognition by Charles Moore that these were Mesozoic-aged fissures eroded into Carboniferous limestone. The study of the fissures began again in the late 1930s and the 1940s with the work of Walter Kühne and his discoveries of mammal remains at Holwell and elsewhere (Kühne, 1949; Savage, 1993; Whiteside and Duffin, 2017.1; Benton et al., 2024).

Fig. 1. The Bristol palaeo-archipelago, showing island locations in the latest Triassic (early Rhaetian). Overview of the whole area, showing the Mendip Palaeoisland. The blue shallow seas between the islands are areas with deposition of the Westbury beds. Fissure fill localities are marked in red, bone beds in orange. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Map from Lovegrove et al. (2021.1).

The fissure faunas have been reviewed several times (Robinson, 1957a; Fraser, 1994; Whiteside et al., 2016), and one of the key land masses was the Mendip Palaeoisland (Lovegrove et al., 2021.1), the site of five fossiliferous fissure sites, namely Emborough, Batscombe, Highcroft, Holwell, and Windsor Hill (Fig. 1). These sites have been reported before (Robinson, 1957a; Fraser, 1994) although not extensively, but Emborough has been featured in several publications (Robinson, 1957a, Robinson, 1957.1b, Robinson, 1962) because of the remarkable specimens of kuehneosaurids, also abundantly represented at Batscombe. These unique finds, however, are not replicated at other fossiliferous fissure sites on the Mendip Island, even at Highcroft and Holwell (Fig. 1). Likewise, although Emborough has produced abundant remains of archosauromorphs, these are very rare at Holwell.

Our aim is to document three of the five Mendip Island fissure localities, Emborough, Batscombe, and Highcroft, whose terrestrial assemblages have not been published in detail before, and to present data on geology and taphonomy as well, to allow comparison with the other Late Triassic fissure faunas around Bristol and in South Wales.

Anatomical abbreviations. a, anterior; ac, anterior condyle; ace, acetabulum; amafe, anterior margin of antorbital fenestra; amp, amphicoelous; ampl, amphyplatyan; an, angular; ap, anterior projection; ar, articulation(s); artf, facet for the articular bone; at, attachment; bic, bicapitate; bs, basipterygoid; c capitulum; ca, capitelum; ce, centrum; cfo, coracoid foramen; cn, canal; co, condyle; cx, convex (surface); di, diapophysis; dis, distal; desf, surface contacting dentary; dpc, deltopectoral crest; dor, dorsal; ec, ectopterygoid; ect, ectepicondyle; ent, entepicondyle; er, erupting; fc, fibular contact; fcp, facial process; fct, facet; fl, flat surface; fla, flange; fo, foramen; fos, fossa; gl, glenoid; gr, groove; hd, head; itfe, inferior temporal fenestra; l, lateral; ls, ligament scar; mc, medial condyle; mk, meckelian; ml, midline; ms, muscle scar; ne, neural; palf, facet for the palatine; pc, pleuracrodont; pco, posterior condyle; pozy, postzygapophysis; pr, process; prz, prezygapophysis; pm, prominance; po, posterior; pp, parapophysis; prx, proximal; rid, ridge(s); saf, surangular facet; sar, sacral rib; sc, supinator crest; ser, serrations; sf, surface; sh, shallow; slf, shelf; sp, spine; spl, splenial; stfe, superior temporal fenestra; sut, suture; t tuberculum; th, tooth (teeth); tb, tubercle; tc, trochlear groove; tcn, tibia contact; tr, trochanter; tv, transverse; ven, ventral; vmaf, ventral margin for adductor fossa; wr, wear; zy, zygapophysis.

Institutional acronyms. AMNH, American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA; BRSMG, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol; BRSUG, University of Bristol, Geology Collection; NHMUK, Natural History Museum, London; SMNS, State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart, Germany; TTU, Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock; UCMP, University of California Museum of Palaeontology; UNC, Department of Geological Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Cawthorne, Michael; Whiteside, David I.; Benton, Michael J.
Latest Triassic terrestrial microvertebrate assemblages from caves on the Mendip palaeoisland, S.W. England, at Emborough, Batscombe and Highcroft Quarries
Proceedings of the Geologists' Association (2024) S0016787823000998. DOI:10.1016/j.pgeola.2023.12.003

Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by Elsevier B.V., Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

But then what did the authors of Genesis know about the climate in, and location of, what is now south-east England 200 million years earlier, when they didn't even know about Europe and thought Earth was small, flat and just a few thousand years old? This is why so much of it is now having to be reclassified as 'allegorical' or 'metaphorical' by mainstream Christians, leaving only a dwindling cult of fruitloop fanatics still believe it is the inerrant word of an omniscient creator god, laughable though that demonstrably absurd, childish notion is.

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Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It

This book explains why faith is a fallacy and serves no useful purpose other than providing an excuse for pretending to know things that are unknown. It also explains how losing faith liberates former sufferers from fear, delusion and the control of others, freeing them to see the world in a different light, to recognise the injustices that religions cause and to accept people for who they are, not which group they happened to be born in. A society based on atheist, Humanist principles would be a less divided, more inclusive, more peaceful society and one more appreciative of the one opportunity that life gives us to enjoy and wonder at the world we live in.

Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle

What Makes You So Special? From The Big Bang To You

How did you come to be here, now? This books takes you from the Big Bang to the evolution of modern humans and the history of human cultures, showing that science is an adventure of discovery and a source of limitless wonder, giving us richer and more rewarding appreciation of the phenomenal privilege of merely being alive and able to begin to understand it all.

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Creationism in Crisis - Hagfish Genome Shows How Genetic Information Arises Without Magic

Sixgill Hagfish,
Eptatretus hexatrema

Credit: Peter Southwood via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Hagfish, until now the only vertebrate that hadn't had its genome sequenced.

Image credit: Juan Pascual Anaya

January: Hagfish | News and features | University of Bristol

One of the mysteries of vertebrate evolution is from where did all the genetic information come, but a recently completed sequencing of the hagfish genome has solved that mystery.

Creationists traditionally parrot the claim that information can't increase without magic because of some half-baked notion that it is like energy, so is subject to the third law of thermodynamics, which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

But it only takes a moment's thought to realise that every time a cell replicates, the amount of genetic information normally doubles, without the help of magic, because it is simply a controlled organisation of existing matter. Similarly, if the genome gets doubled, or lengths of DNA get accidentally duplicated, this is simply the incorporation of existing matter into the resulting genome. No new matter is created yet the amount of information in the genome increases.

The other source of creationist confusion stems from them not understanding the difference between information and meaning. Meaning is information in the context of the environment. I'll illustrate this with a simple analogy:

How Science Works - Correcting A Mistake About Megalodons - But Still Biting A Chunk Out Of Creationism

The Megalodon may have neem slimmer but longer than this illustration shows.

Catmando/Shutterstock

The Megalodon was less mega than previously believed | News

A scientific principle that creationists seem to find baffling, is based on the intellectually honest position that opinion must be guided by evidence. It is that scientific opinion is always provisional and subject to change if the evidence changes, so evidence is frequently re-examined and reassesses, and scientific opinion is adjusted accordingly. This is why science textbooks are revised periodically and new editions produced, incorporating the newer thinking,

A simple analogy is that of driving to an airport to catch an important flight. You might check the expected driving time by checking in an old route planner from the 1950's, which might tell you the journey, in the days before traffic congestion, would take about 90 minutes, then you might check a few days before the flight, using an online route planner and learn that the journey will take about 2 hours at that time of day.

Do you just regard the 1950's version as an indisputable fact and plan your journey accordingly? How about the one a few days ago? No! A sensible person, regards both those as provisional pending more up-to-date information, and checks again on the day, when they might discover that there is a road closure and a diversion in place, or there is a serious incident on the motorway, reducing the traffic to a slow crawl for 20 miles, so the journey will now take 3 hours. Was the first estimate wrong? Which is the best estimate to go with now? The old ones based on information available at that time, which might have caused you to miss your flight, or the new one based on updated information?

On that analogy, creationists are in the position of using information not from the 1950s, but from the Bronze Age, some of it from a time before even the wheel was invented, let alone air-transport, motor cars or motorways!

In 2022, based on very scant information (a tooth and some vertebrae), a team of researchers estimated the size of an extinct shark, the megalodon (big tooth) shark, Otodus megalodon, to be at least 50 feet long, and possibly as much as 65 feet. This was based in the assumption that O. megalodon was like a scaled up great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, so its dimensions could be estimated by comparing what they had with those of C. carcharias.

Now a team or researchers co-led by biologist, Phillip Sternes of the University of California Riverside (UCR), and DePaul University paleobiology, Professor Kenshu Shimada, have reassessed the evidence and concludes that O. megalodon was slimmer than the great white but probably considerably longer than the earlier estimate. This greater length would probably have meant a more efficient digestive system having longer to digest food and extract nutrients from it, so its hunting and predation would have had less impact on the ecosystem than first thought. It would still have been an apex predator but maybe not as voracious as first thought.

Their research is published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, an explained in a UCR news release:

Creationism in Crisis - No Doubt That Lycophytes Evolved, The Question is How?

Spikemoss, Selaginella arbuscula, Hawaiʻi.

Credit: DutraElliott (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Marsh Clubmoss, Lycopodiella inundata, with sundew, Drosera rotundifolia.

Credit: Christian Fischer via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

A Window into Plant Evolution: The Unusual Genetic Journey of Lycophytes - Boyce Thompson Institute

Creationists who are desperate to believe they are winning the argument against evolution in the science community and converting biologists to believing in magic and a supernatural magician or two, will not want to read about the discovery by an international team of researchers concerning the evolution of a small group of plants known as lycophytes.

First, a brief introduction to lycophytes, courtesy of ChatGPT 3.5:

Malevolent Design - How The Divine Sadist Makes One in Three Infected Babies' Future Lives Difficult Even If They Recover From Bacterial Meningitis

Photo: Getty Images

Bacterial meningitis damages one in three children for life | Karolinska Institutet Nyheter

Left untreated, bacterial meningitis is usually fatal, but even if it is treated with antibiotics and the patient recovers, creationism's divine sadist who designed the bacteria, ensures one in three of them will be lefts with varying degrees of disability, including mental impairment, blindness, deafness or loss of motor control that will be with them for life.

This is the conclusion of a new study published two days ago in JAMA Network Open. It was conducted by a team under the leadership of Federico Iovino, associate professor in Medical Microbiology at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet.

The team compiled data on 3,500 people who contracted bacterial meningitis as children between 1987 and 2021 and compared them to just over 32,000 matched controls from the general population. The average follow-up time was 23 years.

As the news release from the Karolinska Institutet explains:

Creationism in Crisis - How Mammalian Brains All Work The Same Way - Just Like They Evolved From A Common Ancestor

MIT neuroscientists have found that the six anatomical layers of the mammalian brain cortex show distinct patterns of electrical activity which are consistent throughout the entire cortex and across several animal species, including humans.

Credit: Image: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT; iStock

Andrea Danti/Shutterstock.com

Study reveals a universal pattern of brain wave frequencies | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It's a central dogma of creationism that humans are a special form of life created distinct from all other animals. This is one of the appeals of creationism to those who have such a high opinion of themselves that they like to believe they were created by and have a special relationship with the creator of the entire Universe, which it created specifically with them in mind.

However, when we look for evidence of this biological difference, we find instead evidence that we have the same biology as all other mammals and have much more in common than the relatively small differences that, like all other species, place us in a separate taxon. The similarities for a nested hierarchy which shows how closely (or distantly) related we are to the other mammals, particularly, in descending order, the other African great apes, the other anthropoid apes, the old-world monkeys and the other primates.

But creationists particularly like to point to our greater intelligence and aesthetic appreciation of art and music, and our ability to communicate. However, they too can be shown to be fat from unique to humans, who differ in those respects only by degree. Having special abilities with an organ of our body no more makes us a special creation than an elephant's special abilities with its trunk makes elephants a special creation, or a dolphin's special abilities with sonar makes dolphins a special creation.

Now, a team of neuroscientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA and Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA have shown that there are six distinct layers of the mammalian brain cortex and that each of these is associated with the same distinctive pattern of electrical activity. Their results were the subject of an open access paper in Nature Neuroscience a few days ago.

Creationism in Crisis - When Creationists Believe The Universe Was Being Made From Nothing, People Were Chewing Gum and Eating Trout, Deer And Nuts In Scandinavia

Photo from the excavation site Huseby Klev at the Swedish west coast.

Photo: Bengt Nordquist

The plastelina casts for one of the chewing gums from Huseby Klev. The cast captures the teeth imprints from each side.

Photo: Verner Alexandersen.

Ancient chewing gum reveals stone age diet - Stockholm University

How could the Bible's authors possibly have known what people were doing in Scandinavia when they didn’t even know where Scandinavia was because they thought Earth was a small flat place with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, centred on the Middle East?

The answer is that they couldn't of course. Had they done so, they would have concocted much less parochial tales about the things they didn't understand and would have known that Earth was much older than the few thousand years they imagined.

But now we know much better than they did. For example, modern science is able to take the resin people were chewing on (probably to make glue from it) and analyse the DNA in it to see what they had been eating and what organisms they had living in their mouths. It turns out that just about the time when the Bible's authors were setting their creation tale, people in Scandinavia were eating trout, deer and hazelnuts, and suffering from pathogenic bacteria, oblivious of the creation allegedly going on far away in the Canaanite Hills.

Although creationists now tell us that pathogens and other parasites didn't exist before the supposed 'Fall' and must have been made since by a thing called 'Sin', there is no biblical support for this modern invention which has been hurriedly cobbled together to defend the alleged creator god from the charge of malevolence in the design of pathogens which do nothing other than make more copies of themselves and add to the suffering in the world.

Embarrassingly for those creationist apologists, the same study presents compelling evidence of commensal and pathogenic organisms in the mouths of these Scandinavians, just as there are today in modern humans, including bacteria that cause teeth to fall out.

How scientists discovered this is the subject of an open access paper in Scientific Reports and a news release from Stockholm University: