The Pattern-Recognising Ape - Seeing Things That Aren't What They Seem

A composite image of the USS Jellyfish in Abell 2877 showing the optical Digitised Sky Survey (background) with XMM X-ray data (magenta overlay) and MWA 118 MHz radio data (red-yellow overlay).

Credit: Torrance Hodgson, ICRAR/Curtin University.

Astronomers see a ‘Space Jellyfish’ - ICRAR

In an interesting manifestation of the very human phenomenon of pareidolia (the ability to perceive things which are not really there in patterns) was published by The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) when announcing the findings of an Australian-Italian team using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope to observe a cluster of galaxies known as Abell 2877.

What they 'saw' was a space 'jellyfish'!

Pareidolia is responsible for, for example, the multiple images of Jesus and Mary on toast or in the mess left by a dropped ice-cream. In one case, a chance damp patch on a newly-platered toilet wall in Mali was interpreted as the image of Mohammad at prayer, attracting several high-profile celebrities and politicians to come to see the 'miracle'.

Biodiversity News - 4 New Species of Lichen Found

Micarea stellaris is one of the recently described lichen species. The name refers to ´star´ and comes from intensely shining crystals that are visible when studying it in polarised light.

Scale bar 1 mm.

Vuria, the highest peak in the Taita Hills, reaches to over two Kilometres heigh. Land use has fragmented mountain forests.

Photo: Aannina Kantelinen

Montane cloud forest, Taita Hills, Kenya

Photo: Petri Pellikka

Ngongoni antilopes benefit from the tree cover destroyed by elephants during the dry spells as it increases grasslands in the dry savannah plains surrounding verdant Taita Hills.

Photo: Petri Pellikka

Four lichen species new to science discovered in Kenyan cloud forests | University of Helsinki

The fragility of Earth's biodiversity was highlighted a few days ago by news that researchers from the University of Helsinki Finnish Museum of Natural History, Luomus and the National Museums of Kenya, have recently discovered four new species of lichen, all of the Micrarea genus, growing in the mountain forests in Kenya's Taita Hills. This unique environment is under threat from increasing land use which is fragmenting the forests.

From the University of Helsinki news release:

Evolution News - How to Make a Giraffe Without Using Magic

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Photo credit: Mogens Trolle

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Reticulated Giraffe, Buffalo Springs, Kenya.

Photo credit: Mogens Trolle

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Help Us Stand Tall for Giraffes.
The U.S. is one of the leading importers of giraffe parts. We need your help persuading America’s leaders to protect them before they’re gone.

Photo by Philippe Chantecaille

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"The Last Giraffes on Earth"

Source: The Atlantic

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Image credit: San Diego Zoo

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Giraffes, found throughout sub-Saharan Africa, are susceptible to poaching and habitat loss.

Photo credit: Beverley Joubert, National Geographic Image Collection

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Source

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Giraffes on the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya.

Credit: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

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Reticulated sub-species of Giraffe at Loisaba conservancy in Laikipia, Kenya. As across the rest of African, they have declined steadily in recent decades.

Credit: AFP/Tony Karumba

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Girafffes in the Masai Mara.

Credit: Manoj Shah/Getty
Source: BBC Wildlife

The Trouble of Being Tall – Biologisk Institut - Københavns Universitet

Researchers at the Biologisk Institut, University of Copenhagen, and Northwestern Polytechnical University in China have succeeded in sequencing the whole genome of the giraffe and in doing so have uncovered the mechanisms by which giraffes evolved their unique features.

Evolving a long neck and tall stature presented the giraffe with a number of physiological and anatomical challenges:

• A very high blood pressure is needed to pump blood up to the brain. The giraffe BP is about twice the normal BP for a mammal and would normally cause severe damage to the cardiovascular system.
• Standing up from a lying position is difficult, as is bending down to drink, making the giraffe especially vulnerable while sleeping and drinking.
• At about 5 metres above the ground, there is little role for a sense of smell.

The researchers found a number of evolved genetic features which help giraffes overcome these problems, including a version of the FGFRL1 with seven amino acid substitutions compared with the same gene in other ruminants. When tested in mice, this gene gave them added protection against damage from high blood pressure and more compact, denser bones. The team believe the function of this gene may have application in the treatment of high blood pressure in humans.

As the Biologisk Institut news release explains:

Malevolent Designer News - Making the Leishmania Parasite Better at Making You Sick

Leishmania infantum life cycle

Credit: Mariana Ruiz Villarreal / Wikipedia

Dogs infected with Leishmania parasites smell more attractive to female sand flies | Lancaster University

Here is one of those papers that leave intelligent [sic] design creationists with two choices: they can either pretend that a designer who can come up with these sorts of designs is not really malevolent and being ever-more inventive in its endeavour to make us sick, or they can absolve it of any culpability by accepting that these things are the inevitable result of a purely natural, amoral, undirected natural process, operating under nothing more than the laws of physics and chemistry.

Cutaneous leishmaniasis ulcer

Credit: Layne Harris
Wikipedia

It is the discovery that female sand flies, Lutzomyia longipalpis, which are the main vectors for transmitting the parasite that causes Leishmaniasis to humans, are more attracted to dogs which are carrying the parasites than those which are healthy, so increasing the probability of infecting humans.

The discovery is the work of two scientists, Professor Gordon Hamilton and Monica E. Staniek, of Lancaster University.

The new release from Lancaster University explains:

Evolution News - Recovering From Mass Extinction Events

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After The Great Dying, the ecosystem changed drastically, and included many Lystrosaurus.

© Xiaochong Guo

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The plant-eating pareiasaurs were preyed upon by sabre-toothed gorgonopsians. Both groups went extinct during The Great Dying.

© Xiaochong Guo

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By the end of the Permian, pareiasaurs had become large and armored for self-protection. This complex ecosystem collapsed during The Great Dying.

© Xiaochong Guo

New study investigates how life on land recovered after “The Great Dying” | California Academy of Sciences

Life on Earth is incredibly robust and has come close to extinction altogether a few times but has always managed to bounce back and diversify again from a few founder species. In fact, of course, it once did that from a few founder simple cells, gradually diversifying and becoming increasingly fitted for the various environments found on and in Earth.

This recent study, published open access a few days ago in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows how it struggled to do so after the "Great Dying" event of 252 million years ago during the end of the Permian period, when 19 out of every twenty species went extinct. Some ecosystems in which key members have gone extinct can sometimes take millions of years to recover. This should be a salutary warning to us as humanity generates another great extinction event in what scientists now call the Anthropocene.

The study was carried out by an international team of researchers from the China University of Geosciences, the California Academy of Sciences, the University of Bristol, Missouri University of Science and Technology, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The news release from the California Academy of Science explains:

Evolution News - How Sperms Remember

New research shows how a father's experience can be passed on to his offspring.

How sperm remember | Newsroom - McGill University

This is the sort of paper that Creationist frauds can use to fool their scientifically illiterate dupes. It will be presented as 'proof' that Darwin was wrong all along and his 'rival' Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was right.

Lamarck, in his attempt to explain inheritance and evolution, had proposed that traits acquired after conception could be passed to children. He famously claimed a blacksmith, by developing string arms, would have sons who also had strong arms and be good blacksmiths. (In a sense, he was right but the mechanism, at least in sentient species, is via memes, not some assumed physical factor (genes were not know about then)). He was of course wrong about giraffes getting longer necks by stretching to reach higher leaves and passing on the stretched neck to their offspring. There is no way an acacia tree can stretch to avoid its leaves being eaten by giraffes, so Lamarckian inheritance can't explain arms races of that sort, even if it had some basis.

Darwin, on the other hand, argued that it was traits inherited from parents that were passed on and that these were fixed at conception (with occasional variations which could be 'favoured' by the environment in 'natural selection').

However, in recent years the science of epigenetics has thrown up a few challenges to the idea of a purely Darwinian inheritance . Basically, epigenetics is the study of how genes are deactivated in specialised cells so that the cell only performs the specific punction of its speciality. As I'll explain later, epigenetics, far from being the gift creationists have been praying for which is going to refute the hated Darwinian mechanism of evolution by natural selection, but it represents a major challenge to the neo-Creationist invention, intelligent [sic] design.

Creationist thinking is often simplistic and binary so, for example, if Lamarck was a little bit right, he was entirely right and Darwin was completely wrong. As this paper shows, and as always with biology, the truth is much more nuanced than that, which is partly why creationists have difficulty with the subject.

But first this piece of research by scientists at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, led by Sarah Kimmins, PhD, of McGill's Faculty of Medicine, Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics. As the McGill news release explains:

Genetic error led humans to evolve bigger, but more vulnerable, brains

The skull of Australopithecus sediba, a species of Australopithecines, who were our ancestors and whose brains started to grow two to three million years ago.

Image credit: Australopithecus sediba by Brett Eloff,
Courtesy Profberger and Wits University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Genetic error led humans to evolve bigger, but more vulnerable, brains

If you're a creationist and need to protect yourself from the realities of science, then this is not for you. In particular, you should avoid reading the part highlighted in yellow below. The article quoted, from August 2018, refutes too many of your sacred dogmas, and without even trying:

• No new information can arise by mutation.
• All mutations are deleterious.
• The Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis, about to be overthrown and replaced by the evidence-free notion of intelligent [sic] design.
• And your newest one - all mutations are 'devolutionary' not progressive (&copy 2019 Michael J Behe/Discovery Institute) invented after this open access paper was published, by someone claiming to be a biologist and posing as an expert on evolutionary theory!

A group of scientists led by Professor Pierre Vanderhaeghen of the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology, Belgium have discovered genes which produce the super-sized human brain in the developing human fetus.

According to the article announcing the research, printed in Horizon, the EU Research & Innovation Magazine:

Trumpanzee False Prophet News - The Trump Delusion

Johnny Enslow, Prophet of God
"Trump is still President"

Johnny Enlow Insists Trump Has Been Secretly 'Ruling and Reigning' as the True President | Right Wing Watch

The distinction between religiosity and mental illness, if it's there at all, is often so blurred as to be indiscernible.

This was never more true than the case of the many Christian evangelicals who, whilst declaring themselves prophets of God, through whom God speaks, have now to come to terms with the fact that, to a man (or woman) they all prophesied, on God's authority, that Donald J Trumps would retain the presidency in November 2020. The reality is that their prophesies were false. Trump not only lost to the candidate who polled more votes than any other candidate in American political history, but, for the second time running, lost the popular vote.

Ever since then, every single prophesy by these frauds has proven false too. The courts never overturned the result; the 3vidence of 'massive electoral fraud' was never found; there never was a military coup or successful coup d’état by the Trumpanzees cult, despite trying, and Joe Biden is still president.

What a dissapointment! You felt sure that one more Trump term and you would finally gain the political power to which you're entitled! And it all went wrong when people voted the wrong way!

Evolution News - An Extreme Case of Evolved Mimicry

Two orange-yellow “blooms” at right are fungal mimics of flowers produced by yellow-eyed grasses, such as the one at left.

Credit: K. Wurdack/Smithsonian Institution

This Flower Is Really a Fungus in Disguise - Scientific American

This fascinating example of fungal parasitism comes from Guyana and was discovered by researchers from the Mycotoxin Prevention and Applied Microbiology Research Unit, National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research, Agricultural Research Service, US Department of Agriculture, Peoria, IL, USA.

It is produced by the novel fungus Fusarium xyrophilum which parasitizes two plant species of the Xyris genus, X. setigera and X. surinamensis, commonly known as yellow-eyed grass. Not only does the parasite mimic the petals of the flowers it mimics but also the scents they use to attract pollinating insects, so tricking bees and other pollinating insects into spreading the fungal spores instead of pollen.

The research team's findings were published last November in the journal, Fungal Genetics and Biology sadly, behind a paywall, however, the summary by the USDA Agricultural Research Service gives the following details:

Malevolent Designer News - Study Shows SARS-CoV-2 Transfer From Bats to Humans Was Relatively Easy

Natural selection in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in bats created a generalist virus and highly capable human pathogen

Creationist mode:

Well, it looks like the intelligent [sic] designer really thought it through before it created the bat virus that was to become the SARS-CoV-2 virus and cause a global pandemic to kill 2.6 million humans and infect 119.6 million more (latest figure at 14 Mar 2021).

According to scientists at the University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, Glasgow, United Kingdom, and colleagues, the move from bats into humans was relatively easy, all the heavy lifting being done in the ancestral bat virus.

As the PLOS press release explains:

Religious Abuse News - 100 Counts of Rape and Abuse in Christian Girls Home

Boyd and Stephanie Householder face more than 100 charges, including dozens relating to child neglect and abuse.

Missouri couple, who owned religious girls home, charged with over 100 counts of abuse, rape | State News | komu.com

Details are emerging of "horrific, sexual, physical, and mental abuse" of girls at a Cedar County, Missouri home for teenage girls run by Christian fundamentalists, Boyd and Stephanie Householder. The couple have been running the, now closed down, Circle of Hope Girls' Ranch boarding school for young ladies "who were destroying their lives through poor choices and behaviours", since 2006.

According to Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt's website:

Christian Hypocrisy News - Christian Apologist Sye ten Bruggencate Abused a Vulnerable Woman

Sye ten Buggencate,
(former) presuppositionalist apologist for Christianity

Christian Apologist Sye ten Bruggencate Took Advantage of a “Vulnerable Woman” | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

Anyone who has spent much time 'debating' with fundamentalist Christian apologists in social media will be familiar with the Canadian apologist, Sye ten Bruggencate, a leading proponent of the infuriatingly intellectually dishonest and childish 'presuppositional' school of apologetics.

Well, maybe no longer (at least for a while, anyway).

Someone dobbed him in regarding his inappropriate relationship with a vulnerable women and he has announced his withdrawal from 'ministry'. In other words, he's giving up lying for Jesus and suckering people with false arguments, because he's been caught... er... lying.

The details of the woman and who exactly dobbed Buggencate in to the elders of his Faith Presbyterian Church in Tillsonburg, Ontario, are sketchy and still emerging but he announced his 'retirement' on his website with a terse:

Evolution News - A Surfeit of Lampreys for Creationists

Artist’s reconstruction showing the life stages of the fossil lamprey Priscomyzon riniensis. It lived around 360 million years ago in a coastal lagoon. Clockwise from right: A tiny, yolk-sac carrying hatchling with its large eyes; a juvenile; and an adult showing its toothed sucker.

© Kristen Tietjen

Long-accepted theory of vertebrate origin upended by fossilized lamprey larvae | Canadian Museum of Nature

Here is a little news item of a sort that normally has Creationists' pulses racing while loudly declaring victory and the death of Darwin's hated Theory of Evolution. It is the discovery by a bunch of researchers with the Canadian Museum of Nature, the University of Chicago and the Albany Museum in South Africa that what we thought we knew of the early evolution of the vertebrates was wrong and, to coin a cliché, the textbooks now need to be rewritten.

The reality is though, that this is merely science doing its job and checking the facts and revising the information that we thought we had, now we know better.

What we thought was that the larvae of early lampreys were pretty much like the larvae of modern lampreys and thus represented a very primitive vertebrate, close to the basal vertebrates that all vertebrates subsequently evolved from.

From this recent research however, it appears that the larvae of early lampreys were not simple, blind filter-feeders with no mouth-parts as we thought and were really much more like their adult forms, complete with large eyes and a fully developed toothed suctorial disc for a mouth.

The news release from the Canadian Museum of Nature explains:

Malevolent Designer News - Making SARS-CoV-2 a Better Killer

With the new variant already detected in more than 50 countries worldwide, the analysis provides crucial information to governments and health officials to help prevent its spread.

Research news - Variant B.1.1.7 of COVID-19 associated with a significantly higher mortality rate, research shows - University of Exeter

News today that should thrill every devoted worshiper of the supposed creator deity who made the SARS-CoV-2 virus to kill us with!

Research "by epidemiologists from the Universities of Exeter and Bristol, has shown that the SARS-CoV-2 variant, B.1.1.7, is associated with a significantly higher mortality rate amongst adults diagnosed in the community compared to previously circulating strains."

So, from the point of view of someone who believes in intelligent [sic] design, where nothing evolves and everything is the deliberate result of design by this creative deity, it looks like this designer was quick to produce a new modification, almost immediately human medical science seems to have come up with a vaccine that gave us the ability to defend ourselves from its deadly creation.

This from the University of Exeter press release:

Malevolent Designer News - How Our Immune System Turns Against Us

A new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis implicates a type of immune cell — called a dendritic cell — in the development of chronic lung diseases that can follow after a respiratory viral infection. Shown is a stained section of mouse lung. Epithelial cells, which line the airway, are red. Dendritic cells are green. Any cell nuclei are blue.

Credit: Holzman Labs

Immune cell implicated in development of lung disease following viral infection – Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

Imagine a designer designing an aircraft with a vital system so designed that, on random occasions, vital systems failed spectacularly causing the plane to crash, killing everyone on board, not through accidents caused by inept design but deliberately, designed by its designer in the full knowledge of what it would do.

That's the sort of intelligent [sic] designer that Creationists worship, as we can see from this finding from Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, Missouri, USA. Creationists believe their putative intelligent [sic] designer is the Abrahamic god, whom they believe is omniscient, omnipotent and perfect in every way. They also believe it to be all-loving and wanting a maximally good world for its creation.

This means that there are certain fundamental axioms to which all ID advocates subscribe:

LGBTQ News - More People Rejecting Religious Dogma and Self-Identifying as Gay

LGBT Identification Rises to 5.6% in Latest U.S. Estimate

A Gallop poll surveying the number of American adults now self-identifying as gay illustrates the penetration of humanist ideals of tolerance, acceptance and freedom from the stigmatisation that religion inflicts on people, as they increasingly reject organised religions in an increasingly secular society.

Hopefully, the charts I have made from the data hop speak well enough for themselves, but perhaps the most noticeable aspect is how the younger the adults are the more likely they are to self-identify as gay. This is entirely consistent with other data which shows a marked correlation between age and rejection of organized religions, with the younger adults far more likely to self-identify as 'None' or non-affiliated. Very may of these will of course be Atheists or Agnostics.

It is clear that religions are losing their grip on Americans just as surely as they lost their grip on post-war Europeans, and no longer have ownership of the institution of marriage for example with even most 'moderate' Christian churches still opposed to the idea of same-sex marriages. Perhaps this is the explanation for the unedifying spectacle of the evangelical Christian abandonment of any pretence of morality in their desperate support for the odious, morally bankrupted Donald J. Trump and the sniff of political power and influence he gave them, amounting at time to hysterical, messianic worship.

Malevolent Designer News - Designing SARS-CoV-2 to Win the Arms Race

SARS-CoV-2 Virus particles (colour-enhanced)

Credit: NIH

New Study of Coronavirus Variants Predicts Virus Evolving to Escape Current Vaccines, Treatments | Columbia University Irving Medical Center

News today that should thrill any dedicated intelligent [sic] design creationist who worships the magic deity he/she believes creates all living things and designs them for a specific purpose and in full knowledge of what they will do.

Scientists at Columbia University Irving Medical School, New York, USA and the National Institute of Health (NIH), Bethesda, Maryland, USA have discovered that the SARS-CoV-2 virus will evolve to 'escape' the antibodies produced by the vaccines human medical science has developed to protect ourselves from it with. They are forecasting a continuing arms race with medical science continually playing catch-up to keep up with the virus as it evolves under the selection pressure of the presence of these antibodies in its environment.

Intelligent [sic] design Creationists of course reject that scientific explanation which acknowledges the role of evolution by natural selection, because the dogma of ID Creationism requires them to believe that no such thing is possible, so all change is the deliberate work of their putative magic designer who designed the virus for the specific purpose of killing people and making very many of us sick. Under this interpretation, the virus is constantly being redesigned to ensure it continues to do what it was designed to do. This arms race is not the result of a natural, mindless, amoral process but a deliberate campaign by this putative magic creator to outwit human medical science.

According to the Columbia University press release:

Evolution News - Another 'Non-Existent' Transitional Form

Reconstruction of the crown of Paratingia wuhaia sp. nov

'Pompeii of prehistoric plants' unlocks evolutionary secret - study

The debunking of Creationist dogma, by scientists who merely need to uncover the evidence to do so, continues unabated.

Today we have news of a spectacular collection of primitive plants discovered preserved beneath layers of volcanic ash, like the remains at Pompeii. These were discovered in China at Wuda, Inner Mongolia. The ash forms a layer 66cm thick and covered plants growing in a bog, preserving them in microscopic detail. Among those preserved as a species of tree fern bearing primitive, cone-like flowers, the beginnings of the flowering plants that dominate today.

The research team was led by Professor Jun Wang, Professor of Palaeobotany at Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology and included scientists from the University of Birmingham, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang Normal University, the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, the Centre of Palaeobiodiversity, Plzeň, Czech Republic, the University of Vienna, Indiana Geological and Water Survey, USA and Indiana University, USA.

From the Birmingham University Press release:

Spectacular fossil plants preserved within a volcanic ash fall in China have shed light on an evolutionary race 300 million years ago, which was eventually won by the seed-bearing plants that dominate so much of the Earth today.

New research into fossils found at the ‘Pompeii of prehistoric plants’, in Wuda, Inner Mongolia, reveals that the plants, called Noeggerathiales, were highly-evolved members of the lineage from which came seed plants.

Noeggerathiales were important peat-forming plants that lived around 325 to 251 million years ago. Understanding their relationships to other plant groups has been limited by poorly preserved examples until now.

The fossils found in China have allowed experts to work out that Noeggerathiales are more closely related to seed plants than to other fern groups.

Noeggerathiales were recognized as early as the 1930s, but scientists have treated them as a ‘taxonomic football’, endlessly kicked around without anyone identifying their place in the Story of Life.

The spectacular fossil plants found in China are becoming renowned as the plant equivalent of Pompeii. Thanks to this slice of life preserved in volcanic ash, we were able to reconstruct a new species of Noeggerathiales that finally settles the group’s affinity and evolutionary importance.

The fate of the Noeggerathiales is a stark reminder of what can happen when even very advanced life forms are faced with rapid environmental change.

Dr. Jason Hilton, Co-author
Reader in Palaeobiology
Insitute of Forest Research
University of Birmingham

No longer considered an evolutionary dead-end, they are now recognized as advanced tree-ferns that evolved complex cone-like structures from modified leaves. Despite their sophistication, Noeggerathiales fell victim to the profound environmental and climate changes of 251 million years ago that destroyed swamp ecosystems globally.

Co-author Dr. Jason Hilton, Reader in Palaeobiology at the University of Birmingham’s Institute of Forest Research, commented: “Noeggerathiales were recognized as early as the 1930s, but scientists have treated them as a ‘taxonomic football’, endlessly kicked around without anyone identifying their place in the Story of Life. “The spectacular fossil plants found in China are becoming renowned as the plant equivalent of Pompeii. Thanks to this slice of life preserved in volcanic ash, we were able to reconstruct a new species of Noeggerathiales that finally settles the group’s affinity and evolutionary importance.

[...]

“The fate of the Noeggerathiales is a stark reminder of what can happen when even very advanced life forms are faced with rapid environmental change.”

Many specimens were identified in excavations in 2006-2007 when a few leaves were visible on the surface of the ash. It looked they might be connected to each other and a stem below - we revealed the crown on site, but then extracted the specimens complete to take them back to the lab.

It has taken many years to study these fully and the additional specimens we have found more recently. The complete trees are the most impressive fossil plants I have seen and because of our careful work they are also some of the most important to science.

Professor Jun Wang, Lead author
Professor of Palaeobotany
Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology

The researchers studied complete Noeggerathiales preserved in a bed of volcanic ash 66 cm thick formed 298 million years ago, smothering all the plants growing in a nearby swamp.

The ash stopped the fossils from rotting or being consumed, and preserved many complete individuals in microscopic detail.

Lead-Author Jun Wang, Professor of Palaeobotany at Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, commented: “Many specimens were identified in excavations in 2006-2007 when a few leaves were visible on the surface of the ash. It looked they might be connected to each other and a stem below - we revealed the crown on site, but then extracted the specimens complete to take them back to the lab.

“It has taken many years to study these fully and the additional specimens we have found more recently. The complete trees are the most impressive fossil plants I have seen and because of our careful work they are also some of the most important to science.”

The researchers also deduced that that the ancestral lineage from which seed plants evolved diversified alongside the earliest seed plant radiation during the Devonian, Carboniferous and Permian periods, and did not rapidly die out as previously thought.

The research findings are published open access today in PNAS:

Significance

There were two heterosporous lignophyte lineages of which only one, the seed plants, survived the Permian–Triassic mass extinction. Based on exceptionally complete fossil trees from a 300-My-old volcanic ash, the enigmatic Noeggerathiales are now recognized as belonging to the other lineage. They diversified alongside the primary seed plant radiation and constitute seed plants’ closest relatives. Noeggerathiales are reconstructed as members of a plexus of free-sporing woody plants called progymnosperms, extending their age range by 60 My. Following the origin of seed plants, progymnosperms were previously thought to have become gradually less abundant before dying out in Carboniferous. We show they diversified and evolved complex morphologies including cone-like structures from modified leaves before going extinct at the Permian–Triassic extinction.

Abstract

Noeggerathiales are enigmatic plants that existed during Carboniferous and Permian times, ∼323 to 252 Mya. Although their morphology, diversity, and distribution are well known, their systematic affinity remained enigmatic because their anatomy was unknown. Here, we report from a 298-My-old volcanic ash deposit, an in situ, complete, anatomically preserved noeggerathialean. The plant resolves the group’s affinity and places it in a key evolutionary position within the seed plant sister group. Paratingia wuhaia sp. nov. is a small tree producing gymnospermous wood with a crown of pinnate, compound megaphyllous leaves and fertile shoots each with Ω-shaped vascular bundles. The heterosporous (containing both microspores and megaspores), bisporangiate fertile shoots appear cylindrical and cone-like, but their bilateral vasculature demonstrates that they are complex, three-dimensional sporophylls, representing leaf homologs that are unique to Noeggerathiales. The combination of heterospory and gymnospermous wood confirms that Paratingia, and thus the Noeggerathiales, are progymnosperms. Progymnosperms constitute the seed plant stem group, and Paratingia extends their range 60 My, to the end of the Permian. Cladistic analysis resolves the position of the Noeggerathiales as the most derived members of a heterosporous progymnosperm clade that are the seed plant sister group, altering our understanding of the relationships within the seed plant stem lineage and the transition from pteridophytic spore-based reproduction to the seed. Permian Noeggerathiales show that the heterosporous progymnosperm sister group to seed plants diversified alongside the primary radiation of seed plants for ∼110 My, independently evolving sophisticated cone-like fertile organs from modified leaves.

Wang, Jun; Hilton, Jason; Pfefferkorn, Hermann W.; Wang, Shijun; Zhang, Yi; Bek, Jiri; Pšenička, Josef; Seyfullah, Leyla J.; Dilcher, David
Ancient noeggerathialean reveals the seed plant sister group diversified alongside the primary seed plant radiation
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)>; March 16, 2021 118 (11) e2013442118; doi: 10.1073/pnas.2013442118

Copyright: © 2021 The authors. Published by The National Academy of Sciences
Open access Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).

And... once again we have one of those transitional species that creationist frauds tell their scientifically illiterate dupes don't exist and that their absence from the fossil record proves Darwin was wrong and predicted the downfall of his own theory by implying that it depended on the discovery of transitional forms for it's validity.

And these discoveries are made with such regularity that they could be the basis of an entire book. The only problem with that is that, as every evolutionary biologist understands, every fossil is transitional between the previous generation and the next because evolution is a process, not an event.

Where does one colour end and the next start?

As species evolve over time, there is no one time or place where one species turns into another and never a point where it is not the same species as its parents.

Evolution is a PROCESS not an event!

All fossils are transitional!

---

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Over-Represented Christians Still Not Privileged Enough

The difference between the percentage of each faith or none in the population and the percentage in Congress.

Data Source: Pew Research - Faith on the Hill

The religious composition of the 117th Congress | Pew Research Center

In their incessant search for martyrdom, fundamentalist Christians continually complain of being victimised; of being under-represented or of not having the same rights and privilges as others, so what are the facts?

Pew Research recently conducted a survey of the religious leanings/affiliations of elected members of the US Congress and compared the proportions of the various faiths to those of the general population. Not surprisingly to those who really are under-represented in the US legislature - the rapidly growing number of 'Nones' or non-affiliated Americans - not only are Christians more than adequately represented but it is actually the 'Nones' who lack representation in what is supposed to be a representative democracy.

For example, while Christians of all denominations form just 65% of the US adult population, they comprise 88.1% of the Congress. Similarly, Protestant of all denominations comprising 43% of US adults, get 55.4% of the House; Catholics, with 20% of the population get 29.8% of the House, and Jews, who comprise just 2% of adult Americans, get 6.2% if the seats in Congress. Anglicans and Presbyterians (1% and 2% of US adults respectively) get 4.9% and 4.5% of seats.

On the other hand, with the 'Nones' or non-affiliates now making up 26% of the US adult population, they get just 0.2% of the House! This is a massive under-representation almost amounting to disenfranchisement!

Evolution News - Chimpanzees Diversifying Into Subspecies

Chimpanzee dung samples were collected across Africa to determine if populations were recently connected despite historical barriers to gene flow.

© PanAf

Chimpanzees without borders | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Unlike humans who also occupy diverse habitats and have marked cultural differences but whose genetics form a gradient between groups, chimpanzees form much more sharply delineated difference to the extent that they form four subspecies. However, there are signs of a recent remixing of these groups, accelerated by human interference with their habitats. This is the conclusion of an international research team led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Pan spp. range map showing modern bonobo and chimpanzee geographic distribution.

User:Cody.pope, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

There is evidence that through our evolutionary history, humans probably also began to diversify into distinct subspecies or regional varieties, only to merge and remix later, in much the same way that we interbred with the much more diversified species of humans when we emerged from Africa and met the descendants of a first wave of migration by archaic hominins.

With chimpanzees, the divergence was less pronounced amongst the Pan troglodytes species than by the early extra-African humans, although the Pan genus did diverge into P. troglodytes (common chimpanzee) and P. paniscus (bonobo) in geographical isolation. The belief is that as the climate changed and the West African forests split up, chimpanzees became isolated in fragmented refugia and began to speciate.

Malevolent Designer News - The Pestilential Sadist is Hitting Back?

Physician assistant Philana Liang prepares a vial of COVID-19 vaccine on the Washington University Medical Campus. New research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has found that new variants of the virus that causes COVID-19 can evade antibodies that work against the original form of the virus that sparked the pandemic, potentially undermining the effectiveness of vaccines and antibody-based drugs now being used to prevent or treat COVID-19.

New evidence COVID-19 antibodies, vaccines less effective against variants – Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

Let's pretend there really is an intelligent [sic] designer designing things like the SARS-CoV-2 virus currently killing people throughout the world, like Creationists claim.

In that fantasy, what we are seeing right now is this designer hitting back against the fantastic response of medical science in developing a vaccine against its invention in record time, by redesigning its pet virus to be able to survive attack from the anti-bodies these vaccines produce. The same modification also allows the virus to re-infect those it didn't kill first time round and whose immune systems did what they were intelligently designed by the same designer to do - and make antibodies to protect us from its other creations- viruses and bacteria that were designed to parasitise us. (Seriously! Creationists regard this sort of pointless arms race as evidence of high intelligence and perfection in design!)

The thing is, these antibodies all work by attacking the 'spike' proteins that are part of the virus' protein coat and which are an important part of its ability to break into a cell to infect it and produce more copies of itself. So, our putative intelligent [sic] designer has modified the gene that makes this spike protein so it is no longer recognised by the antibodies.

At least this is the preferred interpretation by the Creationist industry promulgated by the Discovery Institute, apparently oblivious of, or indifferent to, the fact that this makes their putative designer god look like a malevolent sadist and its religion look like the worship of a monstrous evil. Clearly, there is a political agenda at work here in which even the reputation of their god is being sacrificed, just as the evangelical Christians abandoned any pretence of moral superiority by supporting the odious Donald J. Trump.

Today we have news that a team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, USA and Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX, USA have shown that three new, fast-spreading variants of the virus that cause COVID-19 can evade antibodies that work against the original form of the virus that sparked the pandemic.

Why Biodiversity Matters - Anti-Cancer Chemical from Blue-Green Algae

The cyanobacteria species that produces gatorbulin-1, tentatively identified as Lyngbya confervoides, forms these reddish-green, hair-like structures which are a collection of connected single cells rather than a true multicellular organism.

Photo: Raphael Ritson-Williams

Scientists Find Blue-Green Algae Chemical with Cancer Fighting Potential | Smithsonian Voices | National Museum of Natural History | Smithsonian Magazine

I've written several articles recently showing why biodiversity is important because, if for no other reason, it represents a potential untapped resource of useful chemicals such as antibiotics, fungicides, etc.

Now here's another one, this time yielding a potential anti-cancer drug.

It was found by a team of scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and University of Florida in blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, tentatively identified as Lyngbya confervoides, in the sea off south Florida. These cyanobacteria are simple organisms that form hair-like filaments which look superficially like plants but which are just simple chains of single cells with no specialisation or division of labour.

Evolution News - Unraveling the History of Limb Bones

How tetrapods acquired new bone characteristics as they transitioned from water to land.

(A) About 380 million years ago, lobe-finned tetrapods were still water-bound (top). Yet, lengthwise cross sections of their forelimb bones (bottom) show that they had already evolved limbs that elongate through calcified cartilage columns (dark blue) within the metaphysis – the area near the extremities of the bones that features a ‘growth plate’ formed of cartilage (light blue). Marrow processes — the blood vessels (red) between the mineralized columns in the growth plate — were also present at this stage. However they did not communicate freely with the open cavity inside the shaft.

(B) Tetrapods that first ventured onto land 360 million years ago (top) also elongated their limbs at the growth plate. Their bones do show evidence of marrow processes occurring within the metaphysis (bottom), but they still produce red blood cells via their liver and kidney. Indeed, a trait necessary for red blood cell production in the bone is missing: the blood vessels of the marrow processes open into small connected cavities in the bone rather than communicating with the open marrow cavity.

(C) Fully terrestrial tetrapods appeared 300 million years ago (top), and they retained the fan-like growth plate of their ancestors (bottom). However, the cavities within their bones indicate that the marrow processes were interconnected via blood vessels, and that they communicated with the bone marrow. This suggests that red blood cells were now produced within bone.

New light shed on the early evolution of limb-bone growth plate and bone marrow | eLife

An open access paper published in eLife a couple of days ago, sheds light on a mystery surrounding the evolution of the limb bones of terrestrial tetrapods; in particular the evolution of bone marrow and the transfer of red blood cell production into the bone marrow and away from the liver and kidneys, where they are normally produced in most aquatic vertebrates such as fish.

Using the powerful x-ray beam produced by the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, an internationa team of scientists led by Jordi Estefa of Department of Organismal Biology, Evolution and Development, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, examined the limb bones of fossil lobe-finned fish and early terrestrial tetrapods.

The eLife Digest explains:

For many aquatic creatures, the red blood cells that rush through their bodies are created in organs such as the liver or the kidney. In most land vertebrates however, blood-cell production occurs in the bone marrow. There, the process is shielded from the ultraviolet light or starker temperature changes experienced out of the water.

It is possible that this difference evolved long before the first animal with a backbone crawled out of the aquatic environment and faced new, harsher conditions: yet very little fossil evidence exists to support this idea. A definitive answer demands a close examination of fossils from the water-to-land transition including lobe-finned fish and early limbed vertebrates. To support the production of red blood cells, their fin and limb bones would have needed an internal cavity that can house a specific niche that opens onto a complex network of blood vessels.

Evolution News - Our Ancestors Walked (or Probably Crawled) With Dinosaurs

Artists impression of the newly discovered early primate species, Purgatorius mckeeveri.

Illustration by Andrey Atuchin

New Fossil Discovery Illuminates the Lives of the Earliest Primates

No matter what forgeries and inventions Creation frauds resort to to fool their dupes into believing humans lived amongst dinosaurs, we know they died out some 63, million years before even archaic pro-hominins were around. They were killed in the sudden Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event 66 million years ago.

However, dinosaurs did live alongside the earliest ancestors of the primates, according to the discovery by a team from the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Centre. This claim is based on an examination of fossil teeth found in the Hell Creek area of north-eastern Montana which have been dated to 65.9 million years old, in other words, to between 105,000 and 139,000 years after the dinosaurs vanished.

The extinction of the dinosaurs freed up lots of ecological niches that the early ancestors of the mammals were able to radiate into, giving rise to most of the stem species of modern mammalian families, including the primates.

The CUNY New release explains:

Evolution News - A 3.67 Million-Year-Old Hominin Skull CT Scan Shows Amazing Detail.

Fossil skull ("Little Foot")

New technology allows scientists first glimpse of intricate details of Little Foot’s life - - Diamond Light Source

It must be difficult for a dedicated creationist to have to live with these regular accounts of things happening many millions of years before their dogma requires them to believe the Universe existed, but then I suppose as would be Christian martyrs, they like a cross to bear.

So here for them then is yet another one. This is a scientific account of the amazingly detailed examination of a 3.67 million-year-old hominid skull from South Africa, using a new technology that allows fragile speciments to be non-destructively examined.

The skull is that of a female Australopithecine - a genus of hominin that were the immediate ancestors of the Homo genus, were widely distributed in eastern and southern Africa.
This examination was made possible by using a technology developed just a stone's throw from where I live, by Diamond Light Source - the UK's national synchrotron science facility at Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Southeast Oxfordshire.

The Diamond Light news release explains:

Abiogenesis News - That God-Shaped Gap is Getting Smaller!

A replicator made of tRNA-like sequences

© Kudella / LMU

Origin of life: The chicken-and-the-egg problem | News - LMU München

Another shovel-full of science just got thrown into Creationism's favourite God-shaped gap, abiogenesis.

A Team of German scientists led by Professor Dieter Braun of the Ludwig Maximilians Universität (LMU), München, have shown how to resolve the classic 'chicken and egg' conundrum when explaining the origins of living systems, that proteins are required for transcription of the genetic information, but their synthesis itself depends on transcription.

It involved Darwinian evolution at a molecular level! As always when science solves a problem, magic was found not to be required!

The LMU press release explains the problem:

Evolution News - Neanderthals Could Speak and Process Spoken Communication

3D model and virtual reconstruction of the ear in a modern human (left) and the Amud 1 Neandertal (right)

Image: Mercedes Conde-Valverde.

Neanderthals had the capacity to perceive and produce human speech | Binghamton News

When the ancestors of anatomically-modern non-Africans came out of Africa and met their Neanderthal sister species, they would probably have been able to communicate with them with speech. The fact that two related species of hominin could very probably use speech in exactly the same way, is strongly suggestive that our common ancestor could too, even if not to such a developed standard.

This is the conclusion of an international team of researchers including Binghamton University anthropology professor Rolf Quam and graduate student Alex Velez, and scientists from several Spanish universities and research institutions. The team was led by Professor Mercedes Conde-Valverde of Universidad de Alcalá, Spain.

Talibangelical Sore Losers - Three False Prophets for Trump

Three False Prophets

Robin Bullock "Joe Biden doesn't exist"
Shane Vaughn "Trump will serve 12 years as leader of the nation"	Jeff Jansen "Trump is still President. Military will return him to the White House this summer"

Robin Bullock declares President Biden isn't really there!

It's fast becoming a characteristic of Talibangelical Trumpanzee Christians that they find reality too difficult to cope with, so need to make up an alternative one.

Here, by way of illustration are three fundamentalist preachers struggling to come to terms with the fact that their idol, Donald J. Trump, lost the presidential election and that Joe Biden is the duly elected President of the United States of America.

First up we have Robin Bullock, a well-known fruitcake, who last November told his followers that God brought about the Covid-19 pandemic to punish people who voted for Hilary Clinton in 2016. Apparently, neither Robin Bullock nor God realised that most of those who caught the virus and died weren't even Americans because it's a pandemic, but Bullock managed to find this prophesied in the Book of Revelations (where anyone can find anything they want prophesied).

Imagine that! The book of Revelations contains prophesies about the outcome of an election in a country that didn't exist at the time it was written and about a democratic process that no-one then had even heard of! And it just happened to be exactly what Robin Bullock needed to justify his earlier false prophesies!

Malevolent Designer News - God Hates Koalas

Wild koala, Phascolarctos cinereus

© A. Gillet

Retroviruses are re-writing the koala genome and causing cancer - Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research

Intelligent [sic] Design Creationists are stuck with a dogma that denies the role of amoral, purposeless natural forces in nature and must ascribe everything to the deliberate intent of a magic deity, whom they equate to the supposedly all-loving god of the Bible.

This means of course that the devastation the koalas are suffering right now is the result of this putative magic designer's intention. As the press release from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Berlin, Germany, reports:

Koalas are facing multiple environmental and health issues which threaten their survival. Along with habitat loss - accelerated by last year’s devastating bush fires – domestic dog attacks and road accidents, they suffer from deadly chlamydial infections and extremely high frequency of cancer. An international team of scientists led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) now demonstrate that a retrovirus invading the koala germline explains the high frequency of koala cancer. The results are reported in the journal Nature Communications.