Rosa Rubicondior

Saturday, 7 October 2023

Creationism in Crisis - How Grasses Acquired New Genetic Information - By Horizontal Gene Transfer

Natural GM crops: grasses take evolutionary shortcut by borrowing genes from their neighbours | News | The University of Sheffield

Alloteropsis semialata, acquired genes by lateral transfer from other species.

Despite Creationist dogma that no new genetic information can arise in a genome without the active intervention of a magic man in the sky, who can magically create information at will, there are several known mechanisms by which this can occur - for example, gene or even whole genome duplication, which leaves spare DNA which can mutate without harming the carrier and which, when filtered through the sieve of natural selection, can give rise to novel genes and new genetic information.

And there is horizontal gene transfer, normally thought of in terms of bacteria sharing genes in the form of plasmids with other bacteria, even from a different species. And scientists are constantly discovering new examples of horizontal gene transfer, sometimes with startling results such as the fruit fly, Drosophila ananassae which has the entire genome of the bacterium Wolbachia incorporated into its genome.

Now a team of researchers at the University of Sheffield, UK, have discovered that the evolution of grasses included frequent horizontal (or lateral) gene transfer, the effects of which were to enable them to grow taller and faster. This is a natural version of genetic modification. The research is reported in the journal New Phytologist and explained in the University of Sheffield press release:

Creationism in Crisis - More Evidence of The Positive Psychological Benefits of Awe-Inspiring Science - No Religion Required

Awe-inspiring science can have a positive effect on mental wellbeing, new research finds - Press Releases

Creationists and other religious fundamentalists claim a monopoly on 'spirituality', for example this article on a Jehovah's Witness (aka, liars for Jesus) website which claims you can't be spiritual without believing in their god.

Unbelievably, they cite the Bible in support of that claim, not any real-world observations, experiments or surveys.

However, many scientists, not the least of which are Richard Dawkins, Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan, cite an understanding of science as a source of deep spirituality, a sense of awe and wonder, of oneness with the world and a genuine perspective and appreciation of being alive.

Indeed, my book, What Makes You So Special: From the Big Bang to You is intended to give the reader this sense of awe and wonder from a basic understanding of the scientific processes that led from the Big Bang to the reader's existence here and now, and concludes with the following:

Your journey through space and time has been an adventure of disasters, adaptation, survival and recovery, many, many times you will have been on the brink of extinction - the fate of 99% of all known ancient species - yet your ancestors survived and because they were good at surviving you are here and now. You will live for a mere flash in the time-scale of the Universe but in the vast darkness of the cosmos there can surely be few flashes as bright as your bright spark of consciousness.

Be proud. Be very proud. But at the same time be humbled by the enormity of the events which produced you and the fragility of it all.

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

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

You are special. You are unique and you were nearly 14 billion years in the making.

That is your story. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Rosa Rubicondior, What Makes You So Special, page 152

And perhaps Carl Sagan said it better and more succinctly with:

When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.

Carl Sagan, (2011). The demon-haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark. Ballantine Books. (Original work published 1996)

And of course, as Albert Einstein famously said in a letter to J. Dispentier, when refuting false claims that he was a theist or even a Christian:

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
Albert Einstein. Letter to J. Dispentiere, March 24, 1954 Source: Wikipedia - Albert Einstein's Religious Views.

And now we have experimental evidence from psychologists that science can be a source of spiritual experience, with all the psychological benefits, as some people claim religion to be. The paper, reporting on three linked studies, by researchers at the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick, UK, is published open access in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and is explained in a Warwick University press release:

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Have Identified a Likely Human Migration Route Out of Africa - 70,000 Years Before Creationists Think Humans Existed

Early Human Migrants Followed Lush Corridor-Route Out Of Africa | University of Southampton

Fig. 1. Map showing archaeological, paleoclimatological, and paleoenvironmental records from the Levant and Arabia mentioned in the text.

(A) The arrows indicate the suggested routes of human dispersals out of Africa [see (, )]. The blue squares show sites with human fossils and footprints in northern Arabia, including those at Al Wusta paleolake () and Alathar paleolake (), respectively. The green circles refer to paleolake/wetland sediments in the western desert of Egypt and Arabia, namely: Bir Tirfawi and Bir Sahara (), Khall Amayshan (), Mundafan (), Khujaymah (), and Saiwan (). The green triangles show speleothem deposition in caves in the eastern desert of Egypt, including Saqia cave (), Wadi Sannur (), and in southern Arabia including Hoti cave in Oman and Mukkala cave in Yemen (, ). The main dated archaeological site in southeastern Arabia is Jebel Faya in the UAE (blue rhombus) (, ).

(B) Digital elevation model map of the Levant showing the location of the study areas (yellow stars) along the Jordan Rift Valley (Wadi Gharandal and Gregra) and in the Jordanian Plateau (Wadi Hasa), and the paleolakes and speleothem records in the region. Paleolakes are represented by green circles, namely: Qa'a Azraq (), Jurf Ed Darawish (, ), Lake Elji (), Qa'a Jafr (, ), and Qa'a Mudawwara (). Speleothem records in the Levant include Soreq cave (green triangle) (, ), and the blue squares show sites with human fossils including Skhul and Qafzeh caves (). The source of digital elevation model data is derived from www.gscloud.cn.

Abbas, M; Lai, Z; Jansen, J.D., et al (2023) (CC BY-NC 4.0)

According to creationist cult dogma, humans were created by magic 8-10,000 years ago. 70,000 years before that, modern humans were migrating out of Africa, having evolved there during the previous tens of millions of years, according to palaeontological, archaeological and genetic evidence.

There are several possible routes by which they could have migrated into Eurasia and from there into the rest of the world, and archaeologists have just reported finding just one such route up the East African coast, across the Sinai Peninsula, down the Red Sea coast of Arabia, through what is now Yemen and Oman and from there to Coastal South Asia.

An alternative route could have been to cross the narrow sea crossing at the southern end of the Red Sea, to southern Arabia and then go north to the Jordan Valley or along the southern coast of Arabia to Oman.

This conclusion comes from the fact that at that time, the Jordan Valley was a “well-watered corridor” which funneled hunter-gatherers through The Levant towards western Asia and northern Arabia via Jordan. Wandering tribes of hunter-gatherer have no particular destination in mind and would have migrated through where the environment provided food and water, so a watered corridor would naturally provide such a route.

This discovery was made by researchers from the University of Southampton (UK) and Shantou University (China), together with colleagues in Jordan, Australia and the Czech Republic. It is published open access in Science Advances and is explained in a press release from Southampton University:

Creationism in Crisis - How Science is Fighting Creationism's Divine Malevolence With Nobel Prize-Winning Science

Nobel prize in medicine awarded to mRNA pioneers – here's how their discovery was integral to COVID vaccine development

Of course, no serious biologist things they are fighting and invisible magic creator in the sky who is actively designing parasites to harm us, or designing anything else, for that matter, but creationists believe that's just what they are doing.

Some even go so far as claiming scientists, together with their technical staff and publishers, are all part of a secret Satanic conspiracy to mislead people about what their god has created, including the parasites and the suffering and misery they cause, apparently.

So, this piece of research must come across to genuine creationists who really do believe what their cult mandates them to believe, as scientists waging a war on their god's creation.

The war, of course, is a war that medical science has always waged against suffering and the causes of suffering, because increasing the sum total of happiness, but reducing the unhappiness in the world, is basic humanist morality - something that would appear to be lacking in creationists' putative intelligent [sic] designer.

A particularly successful recent war was the war against the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic still raging throughout the world, but thanks to the success of medical science, in a much less virulent form, most people having been protected by the mRNA vaccine developed by Nobel Prize-winning scientists, Dr Katalin Karikó and Dr Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania and a massive world-wide effort to find a vaccine.

First a little about mRNA vaccines:

Creationism in Crisis - Killer Whales Exibit 'Uniquely Human' Behaviour

Why Are Killer Whales Harassing and Killing Porpoises Without Eating Them? | UC Davis

A pod of Southern Resident orcas

Photo: NOAA Fisheries.

The problem creationists have with trying to cling to a counter-factual superstition like theirs is that so many facts run counter to it. To normal people, that might be considered a good reason to reassess their opinions and drop those shown to be at odds with the facts and form some based on reality instead.

Not so creationists. To a creationist, the thought of being wrong is an existential threat which, if allowed to develop, would destroy their entire world view which has them at the centre of a specially created universe, the creator of which holds them in high regard. Dropping this childish belief would mean they don't feel as important as they think they are and would maybe have to think the unthinkable - a universe which doesn't have them at the centre of it and eventual oblivion in which the world continues to exist and function without them in it or able to observe it from a privileged position.

The Salish Sea. Location for the study.

All my recent blog posts, especially the 'Creationism in Crisis' series, have shown instances where scientific research has revealed facts which refute basic creationist articles of faith and cult dogmas, and this one is no exception. It deals with a core dogma - that humans were a special creation, created in some material way differently to all other life forms, to which they bear no relationship.

Traditionally, creationists cite examples of how humans are unique, having characteristics shared by no other species - ignoring the fact that that pretty much defines a species and the same case can be made for every other species. One of these is of course another creationist sacred cow - humans have social ethics and a conscience, which creationist dogma asserts could only have come from their particular creator god - the same god whom they believe inflicted a mass genocide on Earth and creates parasites, apparently.

Explaining social ethics, or pr-social behaviour, and a conscience which motivates pro-social behaviour, rewarded by endorphins, is not difficult for science to explain as the result of gene-meme co-evolution in a cooperative species that could not survive as individuals without the support of a social group.

And, to reinforce that, we now have evidence of pro-social behaviour and human-like activities in another species - the orca or killer whale.

At least, that's the explanation for an observed change in behaviour of a pod of orca in the Salish Sea, described in a paper published, open access, in Marine Mammal Science. The investigating team was co-led by Deborah Giles of Wild Orca and Sarah Teman of the SeaDoc Society, a program of University of California Davis (UCDavis) School of Veterinary Medicine.

First a little background on the Southern Resident killer whales, the subject of the study:

Extinction News - How Britain is Exterminating its Wildlife - And What is to be Done

Norfolk damsel fly, Now extinct in UK.

One in six UK species threatened with extinction – here's what we could lose (plus how to save them)

One of the great crimes of the Abrahamic religions is the allegedly 'God-given' dominion over the entire planet Earth, its wildlife, its mineral wealth and its land and sea to humankind, to be treated as free and there for the sole benefit of humankind with no other purpose.

In the British Isles this has resulted in a landscape dominated by towns and cities, agriculture and monoclonal forestry, and coastal waters where anything edible is hoovered up and consumed, leaving, in many cases, stocks too small and immature, or too scarce to maintain a stable population, let alone recover.

And our waste in the form of single-use plastics, sewerage, industrial waste such as CO₂ and heavy metals, agricultural run-off containing artificial fertilisers, have polluted and destroyed many waterways. Agricultural monocultures have produced virtual deserts, so far as many species are concerned and destroyed soil structure with over-use of pesticides and artificial fertilisers has led, in a few years, to loss of precious topsoil that took hundreds of thousands of years to create and ploughed-up water-meadows have gone, taking their biodiversity with them.

Consequently, our wild bird, wild mammal, insect and wild plant populations have been in steep and accelerating decline for most of the last two centuries.

According to the following report, we are now faced with the extinction of 1,500 of our 10,000 species. The report, "State of Nature" is the result of a collaboration between a large number of British and Irish conservation and wildlife charities. It can be read here:
The State of Nature report referred to in the article may be read here:

Creationism in Crisis - Complexity May be an Accidental Consequence of Evolution, Not its Inevitable Result.

It's reassuring to think humans are evolution's ultimate destination – but research shows we may be an accident

In the creationist parodies of the Theory of Evolution, evolution is presented as a theory that organisms become more and more complex and at the apex of evolution are human beings, the most complex of all species.

Of course, the real TOE says no such thing and claims about aims and purpose, with humans as the intended outcome, are childishly anthropocentric in the extreme. Nor is complexity the inevitable result of evolution since many species, especially parasites, have evolved with a loss of complexity and genetic information. But in general, ignoring parasites, much of evolution does include an increase in complexity, though not always an increase in genetic information. Many salamanders, such as the axolotl, have a much larger genome than humans and even the Christmas tree has a genome 7 times larger than the human genome.

The most complex organism, genetically speaking, is in fact a relatively simple, single-celled amoeba, Amoeba dubia, with a genome 60 times larger than the human genome.

Creationism in Crisis - Increased Complexity Does Not Always Mean Increased Diversity

Study shows birds that have evolved greater complexity are less biodiverse

Flamingoes and geese
High skeletal complexity, low species diversity

The creation cult has fooled its members into believing that evolution, as defined by science, always involves increasing complexity. They do this because it's easier then to argue that either greater complexity implies intelligent design because systems become 'irreducibly complex' or because it implies that science is claiming that new structures can arise by evolution which contravenes some half-baked notion about new information contravening the second law of thermodynamics by equating 'information' to energy in a closed system.

This claim is blatantly untrue, of course, as any study of parasites will show, since parasites normally evolve by loss of complexity and genetic information, as I reported recently, and repeatedly point out in my illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, which, judging by the misleading, lying and hysterical 'reviews' on Amazon is still causing panic in the creationist cult.

If that claim of increasing complexity leading to increased structures were true, we would expect it to always lead to increased biodiversity, which is exactly what we often see, but the truth is not as black and white as creationist frauds need to present it to their simplistic dupes.

As a new study by researchers at the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath have shown, in birds, evolution often results in less diversity and greater specialisation, as species adapt to new niche opportunities or environmental change. Their findings are published, open access, in Nature Communications.

As the press release from Bath University explains:

Creationism in Crisis - People Migrated to Siberia and Europe 40,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'!

Chikoy National Park

Source: Anderey sledopit, via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Pollen analysis suggests peopling of Siberia and Europe by modern humans occurred during a major Pleistocene warming spell | The University of Kansas

The latest piece of science to refute creationism without even trying, is the discovery that modern humans migrated to Siberia and Europe during a relatively warm period during the Pleistocene, about 40-50,000 years ago.

According to creationist superstition, there was to be another 40,000 years before their putative creator god, who had existed for infinite time and, being all-knowing, always knew what it would do and how it would do it, finally found enough time to create the Universe out of nothing, then did the whole thing in 6 days.

The evidence comes in the form of an analysis of pollen in sediment in Lake Baikal which shows that the region briefly became forested, facilitating human migration from South-east Asia into Siberia and from thence westward into Europe.

The research, by Professor Ted Goebel, professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, together with colleagues, Koji Shichi of the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute in Kochi, Japan, Masami Izuho of Tokyo Metropolitan University, Hachioji, Japan; and Kenji Kashiwaya of Kanazawa University, Kanazawa, Japan, is published in Science Advances and explained in a University of Kansas press release.

First a little about the Pleistocene to set the context for the research findings:

Creationism in Crisis - How African Genetic Diversity Refutes Creationist Origin Myths - It's Those Pesky Facts Again!

San people, Southern Africa

Probing the deep genetic structure of Africa | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Creationist dupes believe that all human life on Earth was reduced to a small band of 8 related individuals who survived a global genocidal flood and then got off a boat in Turkey and repopulated Earth from there.

Their problem is that this ludicrously implausible tale gives us a testable hypothesis - that an analysis of human genetics should show this bottle neck and the distribution of humans from that geographical point. We would also expect the greatest diversity to be found around the area of modern Turkey.

And of course, this hypothesis is easily and repeatedly falsified, which normally spells the death of any scientific hypothesis.

The scientific explanation for human origins is that modern Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and spread to the rest of the world from there, preceded, probably by archaic hominids such as H. erectus. A hypothesis stemming from this theory is that the greatest genetic diversity is to be found in Africa, because humans have been evolving there for longer than anywhere else. A recent refutation of it was found in an analysis of the genome of ancient people in the Angola/Namib region of Africa, which also validates the 'out of Africa' theory of human origins.

The work was done by a research team from the University of Bern in Switzerland, the University of Porto in Portugal and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. The Maz Planck Institute News release explains it:

Upper image shows shaping marks on the tapered side and surface of Part 2 as seen on excavation (Fig. 4). Lower image shows loss of definition during storage. The arrows in the Lower image correspond with the area to the left of centre on the Upper image.

Barham, L., Duller, G.A.T., Candy, I. et al. (2023)

Archaeologists discover world's oldest wooden structure - News - University of Liverpool

Yet more embarrassment for creationists as archaeologists announce the discovery of the remains of the world's oldest known wooden structure to date.

It was discovered in Africa, and has been dated to at least 476,000 years old, i.e., about 466,000 years longer that Earth has existed, according to creationist superstition.

This age places the structure in a time before anatomically-modern hominins had evolved, so showing that at least one archaic species of hominin had mastered the skill of shaping wood and making structures out of it, using nothing but stone and bone tools. Some of the timbers show evidence of jointing.

The discovery was made by a team led by Professor Larry Barham, from the University of Liverpool's Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, as part of the University of Liverpool's 'Deep Roots of Humanity' research project.

The news was announced in an open access paper in the journal Nature and in a University of Liverpool press release:

Creationism in Crisis - A Parasitic Plant That Evolved by LOSS of Genetic Information!

Balanophora fungosa

coenobita (https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/24169269)
Via Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0)

This parasitic plant convinces hosts to grow into its own flesh—it’s also an extreme example of genome shrinkage | UBC Science - Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia

I wonder if creationists ever puzzle over the fact that science never produces any evidence supporting their dogmas and superstitions; instead, science repeatedly finds evidence the flatly contradicts them. It takes a special form of delusion and self-deception to dismiss all that contrary evidence and stick with an evidence-free notion.

Just such a creation-refuting piece of science has just been published in the journal Nature Plants. It concerns the evolution of the parasitic plants, the Balanophora and in particular, the discovery that during their evolution they lost 38% of their genome.

Despite the fact that many parasites have undergone a genome reduction during their evolution to a parasitic life-style, creationist dogma dictates that mutations and loss of genes are always deleterious, or 'devolutionary' (^©Michael J Behe) a nonsensical term which tries to relate biology to the biblical myth of 'The Fall' because Behe has now abandoned the futile attempt to prove that evolution isn't a natural process in which no gods or supernatural entities are involved.

Parasitism is also a refutation of the childish notion of intelligent [sic] design, especially by a supposedly omni-benevolent designer, because no intelligent designer would design the inevitable arms race that characterises a parasite-host relationship, unless that designer was both malevolent and extremely stupid.

First, a little about the Balanophora:

Creationism in Crisis - Evidence of Common Origins Found in Microscopic Sea Creatures

Trichoplax adhaerens.

Eitel M, Osigus H-J, DeSalle R, Schierwater B (2013)
Global Diversity of the Placozoa.
PLoS ONE 8(4): e57131, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0057131

Tiny sea creatures reveal the ancient origins of neurons | Centre for Genomic Regulation (CGR)

Sad news today for any creationist trying desperately to cling to the childish notion that humans were created by magic without ancestors just a few thousand years ago and so are a special form of life, not related to any other.

It comes in the form of an open access paper in the online journal Cell announcing that researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST), Barcelona, Spain have found evidence of the ancient origins of neurons in microscopic sea creatures, the placozoans, the size of a grain of sand.

These simple, multicellular creatures are in many ways transitional between single-celled and multicellular organisms.

Creationism in Crisis - How The Malevolent Designer Kills Mother & Child During Pregnancy

Western News - In major breakthrough, Western, Brown researchers close in on preeclampsia cure

In a major breakthrough, scientists have identified the cause of preeclampsia, the leading cause of mortality during pregnancy.

And once again a scientific breakthrough exposes the utter nonsense that is intelligent [sic] design creationism.

Preeclampsia affects up to 8% of women during pregnancy. If left untreated it can lead to eclampsia (an epileptiform fit) in the later stages of pregnancy, which can result in the death of both mother and baby.

Creationism in Crisis - The Universe is Much Grander and More Magnificant Than Any Religion's Prophets Ever Told Us.

Maisie’s Galaxy.
Not as old as previously thought

NASA (representative image)

Collaboration with global team confirms, disproves distant galaxies | RIT

Cosmologists are making discoveries about the age and nature of celestial bodies almost daily and, as with all science, as the information improves, theories and knowledge are either being abandoned or confirmed, so our understanding of reality improves - which is the entire point of scientific research.

This is in marked contrast with religions, where 'research' consists of trying to find new ways to stick to ancient belief and all apologetics presuppose the answer.

For instance, compare theology to a 'philosophy' based on the assumption that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden who created everything and who demand adoration and worship as the price for not doing something unspeakably unpleasant to you when you die (assuming you'd know about it and could experience it, even though you're dead and won't have a body with a sensory system and functioning brain to experience it with)!

Sound extremely childish and risible?

Yes, it does, doesn't it! And yet theologians command respect and power in society, far greater than should be given to someone because they have an imaginary friend and spends their time trying to make excuses for not having any definitive evidence for their beliefs.

What is giving cosmology this power is the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) which is sending back hugely improved data of a much higher quality and reliability of anything cosmologists have had to work with before.

For example, in a paper published in Nature a few days ago, by a team of scientists including researchers from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA, cosmologists showed that there are very many more ancient galaxies whose red shift dates them to the very early universe, but that a candidate for the oldest such galaxy is in fact much younger than previously thought. This is because the JWST is able to measure the red shift with far greater accuracy than was previously possible.

Creationism in Crists - How Prey Perception Directs Evolution

Lapwing, green plover or peewit, Vanellus vanellus

Habitat geometry rather than visual acuity limits the visibility of a ground‐nesting bird's clutch to terrestrial predators - Hancock - 2023 - Ecology and Evolution - Wiley Online Library

If you're going to perpetuate your genes through time, you need to arrange things so the next generation doesn't get eaten, because that ends your gene line. To do that, you need to ensure you arrange things so any potential predator has difficulty finding the next generation, at least before they've managed to breed.

I appreciate these concepts are difficult for creationists to grasp, but a paper out today shows the importance of catering for the perception of potential prey on your offspring, if you want then to survive and breed.

It concerns the siting of lapwing nests and eggs.

The northern lapwing, Vanellus vanellus, green plover or peewit (from their call), is a ground-nesting bird, which, until about 40 years ago was common in my part of Oxfordshire, UK. They formed vast flocks in the Autumn that would put on impressive displays as twilight approached, as they twisted and turned in flight (hence their name, lapwing) giving the flock a twinkling appearance as they exposed their white underwings, then twisted to hide them, confusing any potential predator such as peregrine falcons. Since then, they have been in rapid decline, probably due to habitat destruction and change in agricultural land management, and these vast flocks are no more.

Creationism in Crisis - Now It's an 800,000 Year History of the Sahara Desert With Periods of Greening

Changes of vegetation between humid and arid phases in North Africa. Vegetation zones are based on the minimum precipitation requirements of each vegetation type.

Image: Jani Närhi / University of Helsinki

September: Sahara Desert greening | News and features | University of Bristol

Scientists led by Dr Edward Armstrong, a climate scientist with Bristol University, UK, have successfully modelled the climate history of North Africa and shown that the Sahara Desert had periods of greening, with rivers, lakes and savannah-like grasslands.

These periods of greening explain the evidence of water-dependent species such as hippos. Their research is published open access in the journal Nature Communications.
This evidence adds support to the 'Sahara Pump' hypothesis:

Dog rose, Rosa canina.
Descendant of a K-Pg mass extinction survivor.

Nature’s great survivors: Flowering plants survived the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs

Despite creationist claims that their putative creator god created Earth and set the parameters of the universe to make it perfect for human life, Earth is not a very safe place to live. Most of it is actually hostile to human life, being either too cold, too hot, under water or too high for there to be enough partial pressure of oxygen to survive for long.

It is also subject to regular, non-discriminatory natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, droughts, or devastating floods. In the last few days, tens of thousands of people have dies in Morocco and Libya because of natural disasters.

And Earth is occasionally hit by an asteroid that changes the climate so radically that a mass extinction occurs, like the one, 66 million years ago, that exterminated all the dinosaurs except for a few feathered varieties that went on to become birds - the K-T extinction, more correctly known as the K-Pg extinction or boundary. (K is the initial letter of the German word for Cretaceous, and Pg is for Paleogene, which used to be called the Triassic)

Creationism in Crisis - Evidence of the Earliest Deep-Sea Vertebrates Found - Those Gaps in the Record Just Keep on Closing!

Fossilized sea-floor traces resembling those made by modern bottom-feeding fish suggest that fish colonized the deep sea as early as 130 million years ago—80 million years earlier than the earliest known fossilized deep-sea fish.

The earliest deep-sea vertebrates revealed by unusual fossils

The refutation of several key creationist claims continues with news that a team of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and British scientists, led by palaeontologist Andrea Baucon of Genoa University, Italy, have discovered strong evidence of the existence of fish, 130 million years ago, pushing back the earliest known vertebrate presence in the abyssal plain by 20 million years.

Just to remind creationists, 130 million years is 130,000 times longer than they believe Earth has existed. Although all dating methods return a range of dates with a predictable variance, none of them has a lower limit anywhere approaching that magnitude.

The evidence, found in the Apennine mountains that run down the centre of Italy consists of the pits and tail-fin drag marks left in the silt in deep-ocean floor, of which the Apennines are now composed.

Creationism in Crisis - No-One Mourns For The Old Dead Gods of Arabia - Part 2

Mirrored building at the ancient al Ula Maraya archaeological site, Saudi Arabia

7,000-year-old animal bones, human remains found in enigmatic stone structure in Arabia | Live Science

Archaeologists are uncovering evidence of religious rituals in Norther Arabia, 3000 years before creationists believe Earth and humans were created!

Creationists love to point to the fact that all cultures, ancient and modern, tend to have religion as a central element to the culture, as though that fact somehow proves the locally popular god is real.

Of course, it also points to the fact that we have evolved to 'fail safe' and assume agency where there is none, to naively believe what our parents believe, to accept simplistic answers to complex questions and find it impossible to imagine total oblivion at death.

But, ask a creationists to explain why we should accept the locally popular god is the only real one and all the ancient gods are false, and they will probably cite much of that list as reasons why they had false beliefs, stopping short of going just one god (or one pantheon) further and applying that logic to their own god(s), citing all sorts of nebulous reasons why they believe in their particular god(s).

The team found animal horns from a variety of animals, including cattle and caprines, or animals in the goat family, at the site.

Image credit: Wael Abu-Azizeh et al. 2022/RCU

So, it must be embarrassing to realise that those nebulous reasons were very probably cited by believers in those ancient gods as 'proof' that they existed.

Did the sun not rise in the morning because they had performed the right rituals? Did the crops not fail when they had failed to chant the right prayers in exactly the right way at the right time, or had broken the rules in some other way?

Did the gods not reward them by helping them prevail in battle or punish them for an assumed transgression when they lost a battle?

And could they too not 'look at the trees' and marvel at the wonders their gods had created? And did their priests not also have the power of prophesy and claim they heard the god(s) speaking to them?

One thing we can be sure about is that belief in their god(s) was a strong motivation for rituals associated with life, death and probably animal husbandry, as it is for believers today. The evidence for that is in the artifacts they left behind as discovered by archaeology, such as that currently going on at al Ula in the Ashar Valley in Northern Arabia, where researchers have now discovered evidence of ritual sacrifice and burials in the remains of stone structures known as mustatils, which are believed to have been used for religious purposes.

To add to the embarrassment for creationists, these structures have been dated to about 7,000 years ago, i.e., some 3,000 years before Earth and humans were created!

Regular readers may recall how the archaeological site in Northern Arabia, close to the Fertile Crescent was the subject of a blog post here last March. Now the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCA), set up to investigate the site, has produced an update. It concerns the remain, both animal and human, found in some of the graves associated with the buildings.

As the RCA news release reports:

Scanning electron micrograph of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria being engulfed by an immune cell known as a neutrophil.

Credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health

Researchers discover genes behind antibiotic resistance in deadly superbug infections | Doherty Website

Scientists based at the Docherty Institute, Melbourne University, Victoria, Australia have discovered just how devious any designer of the deadly super bug, Staphylococcus aureus, also known as Golden staph, would need to have been to come up with such a clever way to make us sick and die.

Curiously, for people who purport to worship the putative designer of all living things, creationists would have us believe that the designer is just such a mendacious malevolence, rather than have us believe that a natural process such as evolution by natural selection is responsible for parasites and the way they evade our immune systems - also, so creationists claim, designed by the same designer, making it look like a bumbling incompetent amnesiac than a supremely intelligent deity.

First, a brief background on S. aureus and MRSA:

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