Evolution News - Ancient DNA Reveals How Early Africans Lived

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Hora Rockshelter in Malawi, where recent excavations uncovered two of the individuals analyzed in a collaborative study of ancient DNA.

Photo credit: Jacob Davis.

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Mt. Hora in Malawi, where recent excavations at Hora Rockshelter uncovered two of the individuals analyzed in a collaborative study of ancient DNA.

Photo credit: Jacob Davis.

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Ostrich eggshell beads from Mlambalasi Rockshelter in Tanzania, where one of the individuals in the study was buried.

Photo credit: Jennifer Miller.

Ancient DNA reveals surprises about how early Africans lived, traveled and interacted | Rice News | News and Media Relations | Rice University

A new analysis by a large team of geneticists and anthropologists from several North American Universities, of remains, including DNA, recovered from a site in Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia, Africa, has revealed new details of the movements and interactions of Early Africans. The individuals whose remains were analysed lived between 18,000 and 5,000. This is more than twice the age of previously recovered human DNA from sub-Saharan Africa.

The study also reanalysed published data from 28 individuals buried at sites across the continent, generating new and improved data for 15 of them. The results are published, open access, in the journal Nature.

The Rice University press release accompanying this publication explains:

The result was an unprecedented dataset of DNA from ancient African foragers — people who hunted, gathered or fished. Their genetic legacy is difficult to reconstruct from present-day people because of the many population movements and mixtures that have occurred in the last few thousand years.

We've never been able to directly explore these proposed demographic shifts, until now," she said. “It has been difficult to reconstruct events in our deeper past using the DNA of people living today, and artifacts like stone tools and beads can’t tell us the whole story. Ancient DNA provides direct insight into the people themselves, which was the missing part of the puzzle.

Maybe it was because by that point, previously established social networks allowed for the flow of information and technologies without people having to move.

Assistant professor Elizabeth A. Sawchuk, co-author
Department of Anthropology
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada And Department of Anthropology
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY, USA

Thanks to this data, the researchers were able to outline major demographic shifts that took place between about 80,000 and 20,000 years ago. As far back as about 50,000 years ago, people from different regions of the continent moved and settled in other areas and developed alliances and networks over longer distances to trade, share information and even find reproductive partners. This social network helped them survive and thrive, the researchers wrote.

Our genetic study confirms an archaeological pattern of more local behavior in eastern Africa over time. At first people found reproductive partners from wide geographic and cultural pools. Later, they prioritized partners who lived closer, and who were potentially more culturally similar.

Assistant professor Jessica Thompson, co-author
Department of Anthropology and Peabody Museum of Natural History
Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
And Institute of Human Origins
School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.

Elizabeth Sawchuk, an author of the study who is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta and research assistant professor at Stony Brook University, said a dramatic cultural change took place during this timeframe, as beads, pigments and other symbolic art became common across Africa. Researchers long assumed that major changes in the archaeological record about 50,000 years ago reflected a shift in social networks and maybe even changes in population size. However, such hypotheses have remained difficult to test.

Humans began relying on each other in new ways, and this creativity and innovation might be what allowed people to thrive.

There are around 30 times more published ancient DNA sequences from Europe than from Africa. Given that Africa harbors the greatest human genetic diversity on the planet, we have much more to learn.

Assistant professor Mary E. Prendergast, co-author
Department of Genetics
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
And Department of Anthropology
Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

Mary Prendergast, an author of the paper and associate professor of anthropology at Rice University, said there are arguments that the development and expansion of long-distance trade networks around this time helped humans weather the last Ice Age.

[…]

By associating archaeological artifacts with ancient DNA, the researchers have created a remarkable framework for exploring the prehistory of humans in Africa," said Archaeology and Archaeometry program director John Yellen of the U.S. National Science Foundation, one of the funders behind this project. "This insight is charting a new way forward to understanding humanity and our complex shared history.

John Yellen
Archaeology and Archaeometry program director
U.S. National Science Foundation

Prendergast said the study provides a better understanding of how people moved and mingled in this part of Africa. Previously, the earliest African DNA came from what is now Morocco — but the individuals in this study lived as far from there as Bangladesh is from Norway, she noted.

[…]

This work shows why it’s so important to invest in the stewardship of human remains and archaeological artifacts in African museums.

Potiphar Kaliba, co-author
Research Director
Malawi Department of Museums and Monuments
Lilongwe, Malawi

The research team included scholars from Canada, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, the United States, Zambia and many other countries. Critical contributions to the study came from curators and co-authors at African museums who are responsible for protecting and preserving the remains.

Potiphar Kaliba, director of research at the Malawi Department of Museums and Monuments and an author of the study, noted that some of the skeletons sampled for the study were excavated a half-century ago, yet their DNA is preserved despite hot and humid climates in the tropics.

The main conclusions from the study is that there were two highly-diverged populations before about 80-20 thousand years ago: one in East Africa, one in Southern Africa and a ubiquitous population ancestral population that is represented today by the Central African rainforest hunter-gatherers. The team's findings are published, open access, in Nature:

a, Locations of individuals analysed in this study. The shapes and colours of the symbols correspond to the PCA in b. 1, Shum Laka; 2, Mota Cave; 3, Kakapel RS (Rockshelter); 4, Nyarindi RS; 5, Jawuoyo RS; 6, White Rock Point; 7, Panga ya Saidi; 8, Makangale Cave; 9, Kuumbi Cave; 10, Gishimangeda Cave; 11, Kisese II RS; 12, Mlambalasi RS; 13, Fingira; 14, Hora 1; 15, Chencherere II; 16, Kalemba RS; 17, Ballito Bay; 18, Faraoskop RS; 19, St Helena. b, PCA results. Axes were computed using present-day groups from eastern (Dinka pastoralists), southern (Juǀ'hoansi foragers) and central Africa (Mbuti foragers). Small circles represent present-day individuals; other symbols represent ancient individuals (larger points corresponding to earlier individuals and black outlines to newly reported individuals). The lowest-coverage individual (from Mlambalasi), shown with an asterisk, has the most uncertain position. The base map in a is from Natural Earth (https://www.naturalearthdata.com). E., east.

Abstract

Multiple lines of genetic and archaeological evidence suggest that there were major demographic changes in the terminal Late Pleistocene epoch and early Holocene epoch of sub-Saharan Africa^1,2,3,4. Inferences about this period are challenging to make because demographic shifts in the past 5,000 years have obscured the structures of more ancient populations^3,5. Here we present genome-wide ancient DNA data for six individuals from eastern and south-central Africa spanning the past approximately 18,000 years (doubling the time depth of sub-Saharan African ancient DNA), increase the data quality for 15 previously published ancient individuals and analyse these alongside data from 13 other published ancient individuals. The ancestry of the individuals in our study area can be modelled as a geographically structured mixture of three highly divergent source populations, probably reflecting Pleistocene interactions around 80–20 thousand years ago, including deeply diverged eastern and southern African lineages, plus a previously unappreciated ubiquitous distribution of ancestry that occurs in highest proportion today in central African rainforest hunter-gatherers. Once established, this structure remained highly stable, with limited long-range gene flow. These results provide a new line of genetic evidence in support of hypotheses that have emerged from archaeological analyses but remain contested, suggesting increasing regionalization at the end of the Pleistocene epoch.

Lipson, Mark; Sawchuk, Elizabeth A.; Thompson, Jessica C.; Oppenheimer, Jonas; Tryon, Christian A.; Ranhorn, Kathryn L.; de Luna,Kathryn M.; Sirak, Kendra A.; Olalde, Iñigo; Ambrose, Stanley H.; Arthur, John W.; Arthur, Kathryn J. W.; Ayodo, George; Bertacchi, Alex; Cerezo-Román, Jessica I.; Culleton, Brendan J.; Curtis, Matthew C.; Davis, Jacob; Gidna, Agness O.; Hanson, Annalys; Kaliba, Potiphar; Katongo, Maggie; Kwekason, Amandus; Laird, Myra F.; Lewis, Jason; Mabulla, Audax Z. P.; Mapemba, Fredrick; Morris, Alan; Mudenda, George; Mwafulirwa, Raphael; Mwangomba, Daudi; Ndiema, Emmanuel; Ogola, Christine; Schilt, Flora; Willoughby, Pamela R.; Wright, David K.; Zipkin, Andrew; Pinhasi, Ron; Kennett, Douglas J.; Manthi, Fredrick Kyalo; Rohland, Nadin; Patterson, Nick; Reich, David; Prendergast, Mary E.
Ancient DNA and deep population structure in sub-Saharan African foragers
Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04430-9

Copyright: © 2022 The authors. Published by Springer Nature Ltd.
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

The picture then is of a species that spread far and wide within Africa, as well as out of Africa into Eurasia and eventually beyond, to form relatively isolated populations that diverged enough to form genetically distinct populations but within which interbreeding was frequent enough to prevent divergence into sub-species or species, to produce a genetically diverse single pan-African human species. There is probably a great deal more to learn in terms of the interchange and spread of new technologies and cultures as well as about the patterns of migration as the climate changed.

Malevolent Designer News - How the Colorado Beetle Has Been Redesigned to Resist Pesticides

The Colorado potato beetle, Leptinotarsa decemlineata’s rapid spread, hardiness, and recognizable tiger-like stripes have caught global attention since it began infesting potatoes in the 1800s.

Photo: Zach Cohen

‘Super pest’ Colorado potato beetle has the genetic resources to sidestep our attacks

Scientists led by Professor Sean Schoville, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison's Entomology Department, have discovered the design modifications that enable the Colorado potato Beetle to resist just about all the insecticides humans have developed against it. As its name implies, the Colorado potato beetle is a major pest on the potato plant and can devastate crops. In the UK, it is considered so serious that it is compulsory to notify the police if you detect the adult or larval form of the beetle.

The new research shows that the beetle has evolved a whole range of genetic adaptations that give it the capability to quickly evolve resistance in a local population. As any intelligent [sic] design advocate will tell you, this doesn't happen by natural selection selecting from chance mutations, but must be intelligently designed by a magic designer. If this were true, it would raise the question of why this putative magic designer designed this pest on an essential human food crop in the first place, and now seems to have given it the ability to resist anything we can combat it with.

The researcher's findings are published, open access, in the journal, Molecular Biology and Evolution.

According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison's press release accompanying the publication:

Covidiot News - Two More Good Reasons To Get Vaccinated

Two more studies, published today in PLOS Medicine show that the reported risks of blood clots following vaccination with anti-COVID vaccination are minuscule and have been greatly exaggerated in the antivaxx disinformation campaigns.

The first study, by William Whiteley of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and colleagues from the BHF Data Science Centre, UK., found, for those under 70, the risk was of the order of 0.9 – 3 per million (varying by age and sex) for AstraZeneca ChAdOx1-S, which is about double the risk for non-vaccinated people. There was no statistically significant increase in the rate of blood clots with Pfizer BNT162b2.

This study analysed the electronic health records of 46 million adults in England of whom 21 million were vaccinated during the study time span, December 2020 to March 2021. For people aged 70 or over, the risks of arterial and venous thrombotic events were slightly lower in the 28 days following vaccination with either the Pfizer BNT162b2 or ChAdOx1-S vaccine.

The second paper, by Steven Kerr of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and colleagues, used a dataset of 11 million adults in England, Scotland, and Wales came to a similar conclusion.

Information provided ahead of publication by PLOS, explains:

Catholic Fraud News - Cardinal Becciu's Defence Team Accuse Pope Francis of Breaking the Vatican Laws!

Cardinal Angelo Becciu talking to journalists during a news conference in Rome. Defence lawyers are questioning the legitimacy of the Vatican tribunal where 10 people are on trial, including Becciu, on finance-related charges, arguing their clients can’t get a fair trial in an absolute monarchy where the pope has already intervened in the case and where prosecutors have failed to turn over key pieces of evidence.

Credit: AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia

Cardinal Becciu laments 'humiliation' after police raids tied to Vatican financial trial

Using a form of reasoning of which any Byzantine lawyer would be proud, the defence team for Enrico Crasso, one of those charged alongside (former) Cardinal Angelo Becciu with embezzlement, have petitioned the Vatican judges hearing the case against him to rule that the trial should be stopped and all charges rescinded because Pope Francis violated the Vatican's own legal system.

Their argument is that in exercising his right, as absolute ruler and head of the Vatican City state to issue four 'resctipta' to firstly allow the case to be brought against Becciu and to give prosecutors leeway in their treatment of witnesses and the defendants, to circumvent the archaic and convoluted procedures behind which the defendants in the case were hiding, Pope Francis has violated the Vatican's Legal system, so a fair trial under that system is now impossible. In effect, so the argument goes, Pope Francis has reduced the Vatican City to a lawless state.

Readers of this blog may remember how (former) Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, number three in the Vatican as Chief of Staff of the Vatican's Secretariate of State, was summarily sacked (or in Vatican terms, 'resigned his rights as a cardinal') and accused of embezzling Vatican funds in connection with a $225 million property deal in London in 2014.

As I reported at the time:

Creationism Failure News - A Significant Majority of Young Americans Don't Want Creationism Taught in US Public Schools

Mood of the Nation: How Americans think schools should teach about race, evolution and sex — APM Research Lab

The results of an interesting survey into American opinion on several hot topics was published a few days ago. The interesting thing from the perspective of what, almost unbelievably is still a controversial topic in the USA - the teaching of scientific evolutionary theory versus teaching Creationism in American public schools - was the difference between young and old, between the higher educated and the relatively less educated and between those with different political leanings.

Perhaps the most significant of those and the one that holds out most hope for the future of science education in the USA, is the difference by age group between those who believe only the scientific theory of evolution should be taught, those believing both the science and a 'biblical perspective' should be taught and those believing only biblical Creationism should be taught.

Oops! The Wrong Magic Spell has Doomed Thousands of Catholics to Hellfire, Apparently.

Casting a spell in the rite of baptism to ensure God knows you have the one true faith.
But the spell must be precise or it won't work!

A Catholic priest in Arizona resigned after discovering he'd incorrectly performed thousands of baptisms for over 20 years

The thing about protective magic spells is that they must be said exactly, without the slightest deviation or alteration, or they don't work, and when they are directed at an omniscient god, he/she doesn't understand them if even one word is wrong, so they don't work!

At least, this appears to be the official position of the Catholic Church, because Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, of Phoenix, Arizona, USA has informed thousands of people who assumed they had the protective spell of baptism cast on them by a parish priest, have no such protection because the said priest got one word of the spell wrong when performing the ritual, which also includes magic hand movements and magic water. In a letter to his distraught flock, Bishop Olmstead said:

Malevolent Designer News - Another Master Stroke by the Divine Malevolence?

Human monocyte derived macrophages incubated with Legionella pneumophila derived extracellular vesicles (white), endoplasmic reticulum (green); nucleus (blue), mitochondria (orange).

© Institut Pasteur

Legionellosis: a novel mechanism by which the bacterium Legionella pneumophila regulates the immune response of its host cells | Institut Pasteur

Researchers led by scientists from the Institut Pasteur, Université de Paris, have discovered how the pathogenic bacterium Legionella pneumophila, that caused the deadly Legionella disease, overcomes its victim's immune system. Any intelligent [sic] design advocate will tell you, this must have been the intended outcome when the bacterium was being designed because nothing in nature evolves without the intent and intervention of their omniscient, omnipotent divine malevolence.

The organism does this by secreting a small regulatory strand of RNA which facilitates the survival and proliferation of L. pneumophila during infection.

The team's findings are published, open access, in the journal Nature Communications.

In their press release accompanying the publication of their research paper, the team say:

Malevolent Designer News - Another Blunder by Creationism's Favourite Malevolence?

Despite its disastrous effects, COVID-19 offers some gifts to medicine – an immunology expert explains what it can teach us about autoimmune disease

Imagine being Creationism's malevolent designer!

You've worked really hard to create nasty little organisms like bacteria and viruses, and are probably feeling really pleased with yourself because of the suffering and chaos your latest creation, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has caused with its mega deaths and ruined economies, and the political opportunities it's given for the anti-democratic forces in the USA, trying to turn America into a right-wing totalitarian, Taliban-style theocracy.

You're also very proud of creating a human immune system that doesn't work very well and still lets your vicious little parasites through, and frequently goes wrong and causes lots of unpleasant auto-immune conditions that generally add to the suffering and misery in the world!

All in all, lots of lovely suffering to show your creation how much you hate it while you watch it suffer!

Then, just when you thought you could sit back and enjoy the spectacle, along comes a bunch of scientists and discover that the SARS-CoV-2 is a god-send when it comes to learning how to prevent those auto-immune conditions!

As Dario Ghersi, Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, University of Nebraska Omaha, Nebraska, USA says in his open access article in The Conversation:

Evolution News - Not All Fossils are Made of Stone, We Carry Some Inside Us

An artist’s impression of prehistoric animals from the early Cretaceous period.

Credit: Mark P Witton/Science Photo Library

Human genome: A virus has been 'fossilised' in our DNA for 106 million years | New Scientist

Fossils come in many forms, not just the mineralised remains embedded in ancient rocks or animal and plant remains preserved in amber. They can take the form of vestigial structures, deactivated atavistic genes which used to code for structures no longer used, ancient retroviruses which got inserted in the genome in ancient times and, as has been discovered by two Oxford University, UK, researchers, the remains of 'Maverick' viruses which infected our remote ancestors and, like ancient retroviruses, have been replicated in our genome, for no good reason.

Because these got inserted in the genome of our ancient ancestors, they also appear in the genomes of all the descendants of that remote ancestor and, as such are conclusive evidence of common descent. It's almost like some ancient scientist inserted a marker in the genome so we could work out the phylogenetic relationship between all mammals. The two Mavericks discovered by Jose Gabriel Nino Barreat and Aris Katzourakis of Oxford University's Department of Biology were inserted in the genome of the small early mammals that were around with dinosaurs. The first around 106 million years ago and the second about 2 million years later.

Religious Abuse News - It's Not Even Just Christians Who Abuse Minors.

Campers throw coloured chalk into the air during an event at URJ Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. A recent report was released discussing reports of sexual misconduct over the last 50 years around the nation.

Source: Religion News Service

Reform movement publishes extensive report on sexual misconduct in its youth programs

Another investigation into the sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable adults by a religious organization, and another sorry tale of facilitation and coverup.

This time it’s not the usual Christian organization such as the Catholic, Anglican or Baptist Churches in which such abuses are now almost accepted as routine, scarcely raising an eyebrow, but this time it is a Jewish organization - The Union for Reform Judaism. The investigation was conducted by the New York law firm Debevoise & Plimpton and is published in full^[PDF] on the organization's website. The report comes with a warning that some portions of the report are sensitive and graphic and is not intended for children.

Catholic Child Abuse News - A Czech Cardinal Apologist for Paedophiles Defends Pope Benedict XVI

Cardinal Dominik Duka of Prague
"'Only' 10% of abuse accusations against priests are proven to be true."

Czech cardinal accuses Germany's Cardinal Marx of 'betraying' Pope Benedict | National Catholic Reporter

The ambivalent view of the Catholic hierarchy towards child sex abuse by priests was brought into sharp focus a few days ago when Cardinal Dominik Duka of Prague, Czechia, accused Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich of 'harming Pope Benedict XVI's reputation' and calling on Marx to "take responsibility" for the report which revealed that the then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger of Munich and Freising was complicit in allowing four paedophile priests to continue practising as priests in his archdiocese.

Ratzinger was later promoted to Cardinal and transferred to Rome as head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, i.e., the then Pope John-Paul II's enforcer. It was in that post that he earned a reputation as the Pope's Pitbull and is widely believed to have tried to supress the growing claims that the Catholic Church was complicit in thousands of cases of child sexual abuse to protect the Church and avoid paying compensation to the victims.

Under his tenure, Catholic clerics were forbidden from revealing any information to the authorities which might harm the reputation of the Church on pain of excommunication, even if revealing such information was required by law in the host country. In effect, Ratzinger was telling Catholic clerics and other in holy orders that they owed allegiance only to the Church and ultimately to the Pope in the Vatican, and were therefore above the law of their host country.

The report also revealed that Pope Emeritus Benedict had appeared to try to mislead the enquiry by denying he was present at a meeting in 1980, during which the transfer of a convicted paedophile priest (Priest X in the report) from the diocese of Essen to the archdiocese of Munich was discussed - a denial that was later withdrawn when minutes of the meeting recording his presence were produced, but only after Pope Benedict had first tried to dismiss then as evidence only that something had n written down [sic] and not that he was present or was aware of the discussion.

Pope Benedict then claimed he had misremembered the meeting and still claims to have no recollection of discussing the case.

Cardinal Duka's curious argument appears to be that the then Archbishop Ratzinger had 'no jurisdiction' and that the investigation which revealed his complicity should not have been commissioned by the German. In a published statement, he says:

Munich betrayal for the second time

The publication of the Pope's letter is indeed a glimpse into the soul of the priest, the bishop and the Pope, who retrospectively evaluates his life, but no longer has the strength to comment on all his specifics.

The following is an analysis of the above-mentioned experts, who show us line by line how the so-called goodwill works in the Archdiocese of Munich. It is one of the biggest disappointments I have experienced in our Roman Catholic Church. To defile a person, to injure him unfairly and not even give him the opportunity to appreciate in his favour this so-called goodwill, which must have cost hundreds of thousands of euros, because it does not give the possibility of legal delay? I ask: what is it?

In my article, published in the German magazine Die Tagespost, I point out the following fact: that from all enrolment, every priest who studied ecclesiastical law, even a layman who graduated from the Faculty of Theology and attended an ecclesiastical law course, must understand that the then archbishop [of] Munich, Joseph Ratzinger, had no jurisdiction and no way to deal with the case - Priest X was the priest of the diocese of Essen.

That is why I protest and I really dare to call the Archbishop of Munich, his curia, but also the President of the German Episcopal Conference, to take responsibility for defaming and tarnishing the reputation of Pope Benedict XVI.

Dominik Cardinal Duka, Archbishop of Prague

Translation by Google Translate from the original in Czech.

But the accusation was not that, as Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Joseph Ratzinger had jurisdiction over 'Priest X' when he was predating on children in Essen, but that he was complicit in the removal of Priest X to his own jurisdiction in the archdiocese of Munich, where he was allowed to continue as a priest with access to more potential victims, and that he did nothing to inform the authorities or take steps to protect children in his archdiocese from a known predatory paedophile. The transfer of offending priests into other diocese where their reputation was unknown, was a standard way of covering up their crimes and facilitating their continued access to new, unsuspecting, victims.

And Duka's misleading apologetic does nothing to address the other three cases in which the report found Joseph Ratzinger to be complicit.

Duka himself is no stranger to accusations of being complicit in child abuse cases, so probably has some sympathy with the beleaguered Pope Benedict XVI. According to this report in Agenzia Nova, in 2019 he was suspected:

[…]of having covered up a case of sexual abuse that took place within the Dominican order. This was revealed by the information portal "Seznam.cz". The alleged victim, who remained anonymous, claims to have been abused for many years during his training to become a priest, and to have informed Cardinal Duka about him in time. However, the latter did not act in any way. The priest responsible for these abuses later left the Dominican order due to other allegations from many other alleged victims and died before facing trial. Cardinal Duka admits he remembers the event but justifies his failure to react because the priest at the time would have sworn on the cross that the young victim was lying. Duka says he is ready to cooperate with law enforcement.

In other words, Duka took the word of the priest and assumed his victims were lying, so did nothing to prevent him abusing more victims until the complaints became too many to dismiss them all as lies.

It's obvious from this and his attack on Cardinal Marx, that this odious Cardinal still thinks the most important thing is to protect the Church even at the expense of its victims, and suppress information about sexually predatory priests, and that his first instinct is to believe their victims are liars rather than believe an ordained priest would do such a thing. Clearly, he has learned nothing from the thousands of proven instances of abuse that have swamped Christian churches and bankrupted so many Catholic diocese with claims for compensation, and so is likely to allow it to continue under his watch.

There is no word so far of any action from Pope Francis, either in sanctioning Pope emeritus Benedict XVI for his negligence and attempt to mislead the German enquiry, or against those senior clerics who publicly display this readiness to tolerate paedophile Catholic priests and to dismiss their victims a liars.

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Malevolent Designer News - The Malevolent Designer's Next Move With SARS-CoV-2?

Monoclonal antibody-mediated neutralization of SARS-CoV-2:

The left panel illustrates the morphology of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and displaying the trimeric spike protein on its surface bound with antibodies. The right panel depicts the zoomed view of the trimeric spike protein (top view) in prefusion state bound with monoclonal antibodies. Each monomer of the spike protein shows the receptor binding domain (RBD) in green, orange and magenta, which contains a receptor binding motif in cyan on the top. Mutations emerged in the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants are shown in red. Here, the C309 (a parent of VIR-7831 or Sotrovimab) antibody is shown in blue, which is one of the antibodies in clinical use that is minimally impacted by the Omicron variant mutations.

Image Credit: Piyush Prakash, Anshumali Mittal, Vikash Verma, Arun Khatri (CC BY 4.0)

Mutations in SARS-CoV-2 spike protein receptor-binding domains may result in escape variants resistant to therapeutics and vaccines | PLOS Pathogens

Creationist mode:

In what may well prove to be a fruitless effort, Anshumali Mittal at the University of Pittsburgh, USA and colleagues have been trying to anticipate how Creationism's beloved pestilential mendacity is likely to modify its SARS-CoV-2 design to make it better at killing people and making others sick, despite the fact that many of them will now have a good degree of immunity, having either been vaccinated against it or acquired it naturally by surviving an earlier attack.

They have been doing so by working out what changes to the spike protein are most likely to enable the virus to evade the antibodies that our immune systems might throw at it in the future

Of course, as any worshiper of the evil genius behind the virus will tell you, it will never give up trying and will always manage to outwit medical science. It's almost exactly like it uses a random process that throws up an almost infinite range of mutations and combinations of mutations, and then something in the environment favours the ones which give most descendants, so even if they are the billion to one chance, the probability that they will arise and become predominant is virtually certain. Rather like repeatedly shuffling the pack and dealing four cards, then repeating until you get four of a kind. It might take days, but if you deal often enough, eventually you will get four of a kind.

Information released ahead of publication in PLOS Pathogens, the PLOS news release explains:

Pandemic News - Why We Need To Help Poor Countries Get Vaccinated and Have Access to Effective Treatment

Nadia Sam-Agudu, MD, lead author of the study.

2022 News - Multi-Country African Research Reports High Rates of COVID-19-Related Deaths Among Hospitalized Children and Adolescents | University of Maryland School of Medicine

An open access paper published recently in JAMA Pediatrics shows that African children and adolescents hospitalized with COVID-19 experience much higher mortality rates than Europeans or North Americans of the same age.

The study, led by Associate Professor Nadia Sam-Agudu, MD, of Maryland University School of Medicine (MUSOM), entitled, Assessment of Clinical Outcomes Among Children and Adolescents Hospitalized with COVID-19 in six Sub-Saharan African Countries, was conducted by a collaboration under AFREhealth (the African Forum for Research and Education in Health), a consortium of cross-disciplinary health personnel across Africa.

According to information supplied by the University of Maryland School of Medicine:

Covidiot News - If You Are Young and/or Poor, Get Vaccinated Now!

Excess years of life lost to COVID-19 and other causes of death by sex, neighbourhood deprivation, and region in England and Wales during 2020: A registry-based study

Communities in the North West of England experienced more than three times the excess years of life lost in the South West.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic hit hardest in deprived areas of England and Wales, with excess years of life lost more than three times as high in the North West than the South West of England. The research, publishing yesterday in the open access journal PLOS Medicine, also finds 11 times as many excess deaths in 15-44 year olds in the most deprived areas compared to the most affluent ones, and suggests that measuring years of life lost can be more informative for assessing inequalities resulting from the pandemic than looking at excess deaths alone.

According to information made available by PLOS ahead of publication:

Comparing the number of deaths during the pandemic with statistics from previous years can shed light on its impact, but looking at excess deaths alone underestimates years of life lost and does not account for the differences in ages at which people die in different social groups. Evangelos Kontopantelis at the University of Manchester and colleagues looked at mortality registers and estimated expected years of life lost during 2020, by sex, geographical region, and deprivation quintile, using data from Jan 2015 to December 2020.

The impact of the pandemic, when quantified using years of life lost, was higher than previously thought, on the most deprived areas of England and Wales, widening pre-existing health inequalities.

Evangelos Kontopantelis, lead author
Division of Informatics, Imaging and Data Sciences
University of Manchester, Manchester, England, UK
And NIHR School for Primary Care Research
University of Oxford, Oxford, England, UK

The team finds striking socioeconomic and geographical health inequalities, with 1,645 years of life lost per 100,000 of the population in the most deprived areas and 916 years per 100,000 people in the most affluent. London and the North West had the highest years of life lost with South Central and the South West lowest. These inequalities were also seen when examining excess deaths, especially in younger age groups: there were 11 times as many excess deaths in deprived compared to affluent areas in 15-44 year olds, three times as many in 45-64 year olds, almost twice as many in 65-74 year olds, 1.4 times more in 75-84 year olds and no significant difference in people over 85.

Looking at years of life lost is an effective way of determining unmet needs and the authors suggest this could be used for prioritising vaccine delivery and providing targeted financial and social support as part of immediate and longer-term recovery plans. Public health measures and wider socioeconomic interventions are needed to support communities that have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

In the abstract to their open access paper, the authors say:

Abstract

Background
Deaths in the first year of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in England and Wales were unevenly distributed socioeconomically and geographically. However, the full scale of inequalities may have been underestimated to date, as most measures of excess mortality do not adequately account for varying age profiles of deaths between social groups. We measured years of life lost (YLL) attributable to the pandemic, directly or indirectly, comparing mortality across geographic and socioeconomic groups.

Methods and findings
We used national mortality registers in England and Wales, from 27 December 2014 until 25 December 2020, covering 3,265,937 deaths. YLLs (main outcome) were calculated using 2019 single year sex-specific life tables for England and Wales. Interrupted time-series analyses, with panel time-series models, were used to estimate expected YLL by sex, geographical region, and deprivation quintile between 7 March 2020 and 25 December 2020 by cause: direct deaths (COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases), cardiovascular disease and diabetes, cancer, and other indirect deaths (all other causes). Excess YLL during the pandemic period were calculated by subtracting observed from expected values. Additional analyses focused on excess deaths for region and deprivation strata, by age-group. Between 7 March 2020 and 25 December 2020, there were an estimated 763,550 (95% CI: 696,826 to 830,273) excess YLL in England and Wales, equivalent to a 15% (95% CI: 14 to 16) increase in YLL compared to the equivalent time period in 2019. There was a strong deprivation gradient in all-cause excess YLL, with rates per 100,000 population ranging from 916 (95% CI: 820 to 1,012) for the least deprived quintile to 1,645 (95% CI: 1,472 to 1,819) for the most deprived. The differences in excess YLL between deprivation quintiles were greatest in younger age groups; for all-cause deaths, a mean of 9.1 years per death (95% CI: 8.2 to 10.0) were lost in the least deprived quintile, compared to 10.8 (95% CI: 10.0 to 11.6) in the most deprived; for COVID-19 and other respiratory deaths, a mean of 8.9 years per death (95% CI: 8.7 to 9.1) were lost in the least deprived quintile, compared to 11.2 (95% CI: 11.0 to 11.5) in the most deprived. For all-cause mortality, estimated deaths in the most deprived compared to the most affluent areas were much higher in younger age groups, but similar for those aged 85 or over. There was marked variability in both all-cause and direct excess YLL by region, with the highest rates in the North West. Limitations include the quasi-experimental nature of the research design and the requirement for accurate and timely recording.

Conclusions
In this study, we observed strong socioeconomic and geographical health inequalities in YLL, during the first calendar year of the COVID-19 pandemic. These were in line with long-standing existing inequalities in England and Wales, with the most deprived areas reporting the largest numbers in potential YLL.

Author summary

Why was this study done?

• The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic generated large numbers of excess deaths (additional deaths over those predicted from trends in previous years). These excess deaths were also unevenly distributed across different geographic areas and socioeconomic groups, exacerbating prepandemic inequalities.
• Up to a quarter of the excess deaths during the pandemic were attributable to coronary heart disease, dementia, and other noninfectious causes, and not directly to COVID-19 infection.
• Most measures of excess deaths do not fully account for differences in the ages at which people die in different social groups. If the pandemic killed disproportionally more young people in more deprived areas, then inequalities resulting from the pandemic will have been underestimated. Measuring years of life lost (YLL) rather than excess deaths would address this problem.

What did the researchers do and find?

• In England and Wales, there were an estimated 763,550 (95% CI: 696,826 to 830,273) excess YLL during the first 42 weeks of the pandemic, of which 15% were not directly attributed to COVID-19 or another respiratory cause.
• For all-cause mortality, estimated deaths in the most deprived compared to the most affluent areas were as follows: 11 times as many for 15- to 44-year-olds, 3 times as many for 45- to 64-year-olds, 40% higher in 75- to 84-year-olds, and not significantly higher for those aged 85 or over.
• This pattern of disproportionately higher mortality in younger age groups exacerbated prepandemic inequalities between the most and least deprived areas, and varied widely across regions, with the North West particularly affected.

What do these findings mean?

• Inequalities between socioeconomic and geographic groups resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic are more pronounced than previously reported.
• Future plans to manage pandemics, including decisions about vaccination rollout, should include an understanding of regional and socioeconomic variation in YLL and how this has exacerbated long-standing health inequalities.
• Immediate and longer-term recovery planning for communities and their health and social services should reflect historical disparities as well as the impact of the pandemic on YLL.
• Limitations of this study include the observational nature of the data and the need for accurate and timely recording of the deaths and their causes.

Kontopantelis E, Mamas MA, Webb RT, Castro A, Rutter MK, Gale CP, et al. (2022)
Excess years of life lost to COVID-19 and other causes of death by sex, neighbourhood deprivation, and region in England and Wales during 2020: A registry-based study.
PLoS Medicine 19(2): e1003904. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1003904

Copyright: © 2022 The authors. Published by PLOS
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

So, apart from what this says about social inequalities and deprivation in Britain, the message is perfectly clear. Pending the political solution to these inequalities, poor people and young people and especially poor young people should get vaccinated and/or boosted as soon as possible because for them the likely outcome is significantly worse than for people from less deprived backgrounds and the more prosperous areas of the UK.

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YEC Failure News - Science Again Refutes YECism Without Even Trying

Enormous volumes of floodwater from the Missoula megafloods once poured over Dry Falls, which stretches 3.5 miles wide and drops 400 feet to a plunge pool now fed by groundwater.

Photo: Tamara Pico

Towering cliffs carved by the Missoula megafloods are found throughout the Channeled Scablands in eastern Washington.

Photo by Tamara Pico

Tilting of Earth’s crust governed the flow of ancient megafloods

Geologists led by Tamara Pico, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at University of California, Santa Cruz, have explained how the formation known as the Channeled Scablands, Washington, were formed in a series of cataclysmic floods called the Missoula megafloods. Although these were massive, nevertheless they were local to what is now Eastern Washington.

YECs often point excitedly at the effects of this water erosion as evidence of a global flood, just as they claim the Grand Canyon is, being too parochial to distinguish between a part of the USA and the entire planet. But the scientists have shown how this carving of long, deep channels and towering cliffs was caused by the changing weight of the ice sheets as they retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, causing the entire landscape to tilt and so changing the course of the megafloods.

As the UC Santa Cruz news release explains:

Malevolent Designer News - How Ebola is Designed to Hit Back Weeks, Months or Years After You Think You're Over It

Ebola can hide in your brain fluid and reactivate long after you think you're over it

Image credit: Maciej Frolow via Getty Images

Ebola Lurking in Brain Fluid Kills Monkeys Weeks After Recovery | The Scientist Magazine®

News this week that should awe and amaze devotees of the malevolent creator Creationists like to imagine creates everything and designs any modifications needed to its parasites to keep them making people suffer and die because a mythical couple ate one of its apples.

It is the news that the Ebola virus has been designed to hide in the fluid that surrounds, protects and nourishes our brain, from where it can launch a fresh attack many weeks after you think you've recovered from an earlier attack. Clearly, the divine malevolence is not going to give up easily in its determination to make as many people sick and die as possible, especially those living in West Africa. That'll teach them to think their immune systems, together with modern medical science, can beat it at its nasty little game.

Research published in Science Translational Medicine a few days ago explained how it performs this masterstroke. The study was carried out by a team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), led by Xiankun (Kevin) Zeng, Ph.D.

According to the USAMRIID new release:

Evolution News - A Little More is Added to the Human Evolution Story

UB 10749 vertebral body. (a) Superior view; (b) posterior view; (c) inferior view; (d) anterior view.

Prehistoric Migrations: New study presents ancient human vertebra discovered in Jordan Valley | Bar-Ilan University

A little more clarity was added to the story of archaic hominin migration out of Africa and into Eurasia with the publication few days ago in Scientific Reports, of the findings of a team of archaeologists led by researchers from Bar-Ilan University, and including specialists from Ono Academic College, The University of Tulsa, and the Israel Antiquities Authority.

It was the discovery that a 1.5 million-year-old fossilised vertebrae found at 'Ubeidiya, in the Jordan Valley near Kibbutz Beit Zera, in 1966, was that of large-bodied species of Homo aged about 6-12 years old as determined by the characteristic pattern of ossification. In adulthood, this individual would have been considerably bigger than the hominins found in Georgia and is more similar to archaic hominins found in East Africa, so supports the idea of successive waves of different species of hominin migrating out of Africa via the Levantine corridor.

From the Bar-Ilan University press release:

Trumpanzee QAnon Fruitloop News - Update on Covidiot Cirsten Weldon's COVID-19 Death

Cirsten Weldon, Pro-Trump, Antivaxx QAnon conspiracist.
Died of COVID-19, 04 Jan, 2022.

Cirsten Weldon, a prominent Trumpanzee and QAnon conspiracist and antivaxxer, who earned her living tell gullible fools that only idiots get vaccinated, died of COVID-19 on January 4, 2022, in Camarillo, California.

Her fellow conspiracy theorists have now dreamed up an even more preposterous conspiracy theory: that she is still alive and in 'protective custody' having faked her own death. I wonder if, like Elvis, she'll turn up working in a chip shop near you, in the not too distant future.

Is there no lower limit to the credulity of these idiots? Certainly QAnon hasn't found it yet. They even think Trump was a competent POTUS!

To begin with, as I reported at the time:

Hypocrisy News - Another Sex Scandal Rocks the French Catholic Church

Archbishop Michel Aupetit (former) Archbishop of Paris
Relationship with a woman was 'ambiguous'

© Ludovic Marin / AFP

Pope accepts Paris archbishop's resignation over "ambiguous" relationship

Probably the last thing the French Catholic Church wanted right now was another sex scandal involving a senior cleric, but that's just what they've got in the form of Archbishop Michel Aupetit, (former) Archbishop of Paris, who has resigned following the revelation that he had a sexual relationship with a women, despite his vow of celibacy and his requirement that all those under him in his archdiocese take the same vow.

The story of the consensual relationship was exposed by Le Point magazine. Aupetit denied that he had had a sexual relationship with the woman but told Le Point that the relationship was 'ambiguous' - a neat euphemism for clandestine sexual relations with a woman outside marriage and contrary to his oath as an ordained Catholic priest.

This came on top of the recent report which revealed that 3,000 French Catholic priests had sexually abused more than 200,000 children over the past 70 years and that there had been a widespread, systematic cover up. When abuse by lay members of Catholic schools and other institutions was taken into account, the number of abused children, almost all of which were young boys, rose to some 330,000.

Christian Bigotry News - A New 'Journal' to Try to Make Religion Look Less Hateful

New journal will spotlight queer and trans religious studies scholarship | News

In an effort to alter the general perception that religions, especially Christianity and Islam, are fundamentally hostile to anyone who doesn't fit their strict definitions of sexuality and conform to their strict rules on permitted sexual relationships, a couple of Christian theology professors have founded a new 'Journal' which will concentrate on publishing articles and papers exploring 'the full range of rich and complex connections between religion, gender, and sexuality'.

The journal, to be called QTR: A Journal of Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion, has been founded by Melissa M. Wilcox, a religious studies professor from University of California, Riverside (UCR) and Joseph Marchal, a religious studies professor at Ball State University in Indiana.

According to the UCR news release:

It's a Miracle! Not a Single Red Face as Lourdes Reopens After Closing for the Coronavirus Pandemic!

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

The shrine to Bernadette Soubirous, Lourdes, France

Lourdes resurrected: grotto reopens to pilgrims after two year Covid closure

Without the slightest sign of irony, the Catholic Church in France has re-opened the Lourdes faith-healing scam in the Hautes-Pyrénées region, which had been closed because of the Coronavirus pandemic. Lourdes, it may be remembered, sells quack cures for all manner of afflictions and illnesses, but is powerless to prevent people catching COVID-19, apparently.

The grotto was officially reopened on February 11, on the anniversary of the date in 1858 on which a young peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, or Sobirós, in the local language, Occitan, then spoken in the Languedoc region of France, whom many townspeople, including her own father, thought was mentally disturbed, claimed to have seen a vison of the Virgin Mary.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Beloved Sadist Designed Ovarian Cancer to Kill More Women

Killer T cells (red) and helper T cells (green) guarding tumour cells (light blue).

Image: Anniina Färkkilä

The secret hideouts of ovarian cancer revealed – Findings boost the development of precision therapies | University of Helsinki

Creationist mode:

In Finland in an average year, 550 women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer and 320 of them will die from it. Now researchers at Helsinki University Hospital have discovered why ovarian cancers are proving to be unresponsive to the latest immunotherapies which are giving good results in the treatment of other cancer - ovarian cancers have been designed to be good at hiding from our immune systems.

They do it by tricking the immune system into actively protecting them! Brilliant, eh?

And this was the immune system the same intelligent [sic] designer supposedly gave us to protect us from its nastier little creations, such as viruses, bacteria, fungi and cancers that it designed to make us suffer and die from. Or so Creationists who argue that noting in nature happens by chance or by a mindless, undirected process such as evolution by natural selection, but is the deliberate creation of an intelligent [sic] designer, have to believe.

Creationist mode:

So much for the childish superstitions and fairy tales that abound in fundamentalist religions.

The news release from Helsinki University explains the science:

Human Evolution - Modern Humans Were In Europe 54,000 Years Ago

Grotte Mandarin, Vallée du Rhône, France

© Ludovic Slimak

Neronian Points

© Laure Metz and Ludovic Slimak

Evidence of Europe’s first Homo sapiens found in French cave

Scientists led by Dr Ludovic Slimak of the Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and including Professor Chris Stringer, Research Leader in Human Evolution at the Natural History Museum in London, have discovered evidence of the earliest modern humans (Homo sapiens) in western Europe from a cave, known as Grotte Mandrin, in France’s Rhône Valley.

The date of this find, at 54,000 years pushes the first recorded presence of H. sapiens in Europe back by a bout 10,000 years. The evidence is in the form of a deciduous upper molar from a modern human child.

Apart from the early date for this fossil, other dental remains show a pattern of alternating

Missing Link News - A Triple Whammy for Half-Baked Creationists. How Sweet!

Mystery of sweetpotato origin uncovered, as missing link plant found by Oxford research | University of Oxford

Here is one of those scientific discoveries that should have every Creationist covering their eyes and ears and looking the other way, or simply invoking some wackadoodle conspiracy theory in order to dismiss it. What they won't do, is incorporate the new knowledge and adjust their opinion accordingly.

Their problem is because the discovery shatters three of their most cherished dogmas:

1. 'Macro-evolution' (i.e. a new taxon arising) is impossible.
2. No new information can arise by mutation.
3. There are no transitional forms.

The discovery is one of the parent species of the sweetpotato, Ipomoea batatas, an important food crop whose ancestry was unknown.

The problem was that the sweetpotato is a hexaploid plant, having six copies of each chromosome, instead of the usual two, in other words, its entire genome has been trebled. Polyploidy is common in plants and is a common way new species arise because a polyploid individual cannot normally interbreed with either of its parents. The problem was that there were no suitable candidate species for the parents of the sweetpotato - until now.

The normal way a polyploid species arises is because of a failure in the normal process which reduces the genome by half in each the gametes, which results in a gamete having the entire genome. If two of these gametes (pollen and ovule) happen to form a zygote, a tetraploid individual can be the result. The mystery was how a hexaploid species arose in the case of the sweetpotato. The assumption was that a tetraploid gamete from a tetraploid plant in which the reduction stage had failed must have fused with a diploid gamete from a diploid plant in which the reduction had also failed.

The problem was that there were no known tetraploid members of the Ipomoea genus so there was no known intermediate stage between diploidy and hexaploidy.

The University of Oxford news item explains:

Malevolent Designer News - God Still Hates Frogs!

Californian red-legged frog, Rana draytonii

Photo: Conservación de Fauna del Noroeste

The Frogs of Baja California | The UCSB Current

Creationist mode:

Long-term readers of this blog my recall how I wrote about a fungal infection, chytridiomycosis, that is devastating populations of frogs and other amphibians throughout the world. I concluded that, if as Creationists claim, these organisms are intelligently designed by a god, to do exactly what they do, the only conclusion was that this putative god must hate frogs and is trying to exterminate them, without going to the extremes it went to when it decided to exterminate another of its mistakes - humans - when in a fit of pique and a loss of self-control, it drowned everything else too.

I also wrote about the disease in my popular, illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: How Nature's God is not Good.

In that earlier blog from October 2013, I described how scientists had discovered just how clever the designer of the fungus had been. It had taken a common, normally harmless soil fungus of the widespread chytrid family, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) and modified it to not only infect the skin of amphibians but to paralyse their immune systems too, making it easier to kill its victims by thickening their skin so they are no longer able to breathe through it, and then use their dead bodies to make more fungi, to kill more amphibians. Sheer, genius, eh?

Now, nine years later, scientists working for the University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA (UC Santa Barbara), Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Tijuana, Mexico and Conservación de Fauna del Noroeste, A.C., Ensenada, Baja California, have discovered that, not only is the devastation continuing in both Southern California and Baja California but that there is something going on in Baja California that is enabling Bd to hit the frogs there much harder than it is hitting them in Southern California, despite the fact that the species are the same and the environment is very similar.

From the UCSB news release:

Covidiot News - Two More Very Good Reason to Be Vaccinated

As though any more evidence were needed, two papers out recently show just why it is important to get vaccinated, and, if necessary, boosted against the virus.

SARS-CoV-2COVID-19 infections increase risk of heart conditions up to a year later – Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

The first comes from Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, USA where, by analysing federal health data, researchers have found that people who have had COVID-19 are at increased risk of developing cardiovascular complications within the first month to a year after infection.

According to the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis:

Malevolent Designer News - How a Fungus and a Bacterium Work Together to Make Us Sick

The fungus Rhizopus germinates and forms hyphae as part of the infection process.

How do pathogens learn to be pathogens: partnerships between microbes leading to human disease | University of Exeter

Creationist mode:

Here is a discovery that should thrill devotees of the putative divine malevolence that intelligently [sic] designs the pathogens that make us sick. It is published in an open access paper in the journal Current Biology, by a team of researchers from the Universities of Birmingham, Exeter and Sheffield, led by Dr. Herbert Itabangi of Birmingham University School of Biosciences' Institute of Microbiology and Infection. It is the mechanism which enables a soil fungus to become pathogenic by allying itself with a bacterium in a symbiotic relationship.

The soil fungus is Rhizopus which, when it plays host to the bacterium, Ralstonia, can avoid being consumed by a predatory amoeba, Dictyostelium. Using the same trick, Rhizopus is able to avoid being consumed and destroyed by the cells of our immune system and so become pathogenic on humans and cause mucormycosis, and in particular the condition known as "black fungus", a complication of COVID-19.

As the Exeter University news release explains:

How Science Works (And Why Religion Doesn't)

The Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31). The small Messier 32 galaxy is seen above and slightly to the left (directly south) of the centre of M31, and Messier 110 is below and to the left. Above and to the left of M32 is the star HD 3914. This is an RGB image + some h alpha data. Captured in the Israeli desert (the Negev). Equipment: Celestron Cpc1100 Millburn wedge Starizona hyperstar Zwo asi294mc for imaging + asi178mc for guiding Finderscope for guiding Acquisition: 60 subs of 32 seconds for RGB 20 subs of 64 seconds for hydrogen alpha (This is an f/2 config) Captured with sharpcap and guided with phd2 Processing: Stacked in pixinsight Processed and enhanced in photoshop including noise reduction, sharpening etc.

By ;David (Deddy) Dayag - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Too many disk galaxies than theory allows — University of Bonn

Science's greatest strength, and the thing that seems to baffle Creationists most, is the way it constantly reassesses and revises its theories and never holds any opinion as sacred and unchallengeable. Religions, by contrast, have fundamental tenets, almost literally cast in tablets of stone, which, if they are ever seriously questioned, leads to internal conflict, schisms and often open violent hostilities. To question the fundamental beliefs of a religion is tantamount to leaving that religion.

Here, for example, we have scientists examining a fundamental theory in cosmology and concluding, quite amicably and dispassionately, that the generally accepted Standard Model of Cosmology is fundamentally flawed. What will happen now is that others will try to replicate these findings, a debate will ensue and, if necessary former ideas that were held to be true will be abandoned and revised, and, in all probability if they are proved to be correct, the scientists who made the discovery will be rewarded with prizes and plaudits and top jobs in prestigious institutes.

I don't pretend to be an expert in this subject, but what the cosmologists from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany, St Andrews University, Scotland, UK and Charles University in the Czech Republic believe they have shown is that there is a significant discrepancy between the number of disk galaxies that can be observed and what the 'Standard Model' predicts, therefore the Standard Model is wrong and needs revising. And they are proposing a new one which would require a far-reaching revision of other areas of physics. And all because the accepted Standard Model of Cosmology does not appear to model the reality it was designed to explain.

The Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn news release accompnying the team's open access publication in The Astrophysical Journal, explains:

Malevolent Designer News - Is Creationism's Favourite Sadist Trying a New Tack?

New highly virulent and damaging HIV variant discovered in the Netherlands | University of Oxford

Creationist mode:

It's beginning to look like, in choosing quantity over quality, the divine sadist might have boobed with the Omicron variant of its SARS-CoV-2 virus as it seems to be a relatively mild disease compared to its earlier versions. It is very much more contagious, but the resulting infection is resulting in far fewer serious illnesses and deaths. It's still a nasty, dangerous little parasite that people need to be vaccinated against, but it iss beginning to look like a virus our health services can cope with.

So, is the realisation that it isn't causing as much death and destruction behind its recently detected super-duper new more dangerous version of HIV? HIV, as Creationists fundamentalist evangelicals were never slow to claim, was their beloved pestilential deity's attempt to punish homosexuals for the sexuality it gave them and was, in its heyday, a very serious virus that killed millions of homosexuals and heterosexuals alike, apart from lesbians who rarely, if ever, become infected during homosexual sex, and left countless children orphaned. Then medical science came up with treatments like antiretroviral drugs, which allow victims to live a relatively normal life and, better still, not pass it on to sexual partners.

Now though, according to scientists from the University of Oxford, UK, there is a much more dangerous and virulent variant, which has been detected in Holland, so it looks like any intelligence responsible for the design of these parasites has given the arms race spiral another twist, as though to resurrect one of its earlier attempts at mass killing.

According to the Oxford University news release: