Evolution News - Ecology Before the 'Cambrian Explosion'

A group of Ediacaran specimens of Fractofusus and Plumeropriscum from the “E” surface, Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve, Newfoundland, Canada.

Credit: Charlotte G. Kenchington (CC BY 4.0)

Creationists are fascinated by the so-called Cambrian Explosion, believing it to have happened over a very short time span and claiming it to be evidence of spontaneous creation of a wide variety of body plans. Of course, it took place over tens of millions of years and was preceded by the Ediacaran biota in which a number of novel body plans evolved in the second major wave of multicellular evolution.

Now, According to a study by Rebecca Eden, Andrea Manica1 and Emily G Mitchell of the Zoology Department, Cambridge University, UK, published today in the open access online journal, PLOS Biology, these early animals formed complex ecological communities more than 550 million years ago, setting the evolutionary stage for the Cambrian explosion.

The Ediacaran period is itself divided into three periods of evolutionary radiation, named after the locations where representative fossils have been found: the Avalon, White Sea and Nama radiation. The Avalon (575-565 million years ago), shows relatively limited ecological and morphological diversity, unlike the White Sea radiation which shows a large increase in morphological diversity, including probable bilateralism and with it an increase in ecological diversity and environmental influence. Some this was followed by a mass extinction leading to a loss of taxonomic diversity but the evolution of biomineralization, such as shells, in the third, Nama, radiation.

Biomineralization implies the need for protection and that implies the prior evolution of motility and predation and the beginnings of evolutionary arms races between predator and prey, and with that would have come environmental pressure to evolve sensory organs such as eyes. Predation also requires digestive and excretory systems.

According to information supplied by PLOS ahead of publication:

Evolution News - How the Environment Made a Difference with Penduline Tits

Eurasian penduline tit, Remiz pendulinus

Chinese penduline tit buries eggs to prevent them from blowin’ in the wind | Science Linx News | Science LinX | University of Groningen

First off, if you came here attracted by the title, hoping to see something about large busty substances, you're in the wrong place. This is about a couple of closely related birds known as the Eurasian and Chinese penduline tits and about how subtle differences in their environments can cause differences in behaviour that act as barriers to hybridisation and so reinforce the evolving divergence into different species. If you're so shallow as to be looking for the former on line, you're probably too shallow to be interested in the latter.

The Eurasian penduline tit, Remiz pendulinus, is so called because males build a relatively large, dangling (penduline) nest on the end of thin willow branches or reeds, often over water. He then tries to attract a female to use the nest and, if she approves, he mates with her, and she begins to lay a batch of eggs over the next 14 days but won't permit the male to enter the nest. This choice of location is probably to make it difficult for predators to reach the nest.

The strange thing is each day she covers the eggs in the bottom of the nest before going off to feed herself. This is thought to be due to inter-sex rivalry because either one or the other parent is going to take responsibility for the incubation of the eggs and rearing the chicks and the female needs the male to hang around to mate with her and the male needs her to stay and use his nest so his offspring are in the eggs she lays.

When the batch of eggs is complete, the female, more often than not, incubates them and the male leaves to find another mate, but frequently, it's the female who leaves the male to do the incubation and rearing. Very occasionally, neither parent takes responsibility, and the nest and eggs are abandoned. But the male won't start to incubate the eggs until the batch is complete. Burying the eggs is thought to be an evolved strategy for keeping the male interested until the batch is complete.

Chinese penduline tit, Remiz consobrinus

However, a closely related species, the Chinese penduline tit, Remiz consobrinus, has a different pattern of behaviour. The make builds the next in the same way and in a similar position to his Eurasian cousin, and attracts a female to use it. However, she doesn't exclude him from the nest but they both roost in it together at night, and both sexes share responsibility for incubation and rearing the chicks. But, like her Eurasian cousin, the female Chinese penduline tit still assiduously buries her eggs every day. The question is, if this isn't due to inter-sex rivalry as with the Eurasian species, what is it due to? The answer has turned out to be due to subtle environmental differences.

To investigate this difference and the lack of aggression between the sexes by which the Eurasian female keeps the male from entering the nest while she is laying her batch of eggs, Jia Zheng, who had completed her master’s degree under Professor Zhengwang Zhang, from Beijing Normal University, and was now completing her PhD at the University of Groningen, conducted a number of experiment to test out various hypotheses.

The Groningen University News release explains how she went about it:

Malevolent Designer News - Creationism's Favourite Malevolence Suffers Another Blow From Science

Congenital melanocytic nevus.
These can be very large and often involve the head, face or genitalia.

Skin drug treatments may regress dangerous birthmarks and prevent melanoma

Creationist mode:

The malevolent designer that creationists worship must be getting really pissed off with modern bio-medical scientist, the way they keep finding ways to combat the nasty things it designs to increase the suffering in the world, and all because someone scrumped one of its apples, allegedly.

Fresh from science's partial victory over the SARS-CoV-2 virus with which the divine malevolence caused a major pandemic, killing millions, ruining economies and businesses and making even the survivors suffer long-term complications, we have news that scientists led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), MA, USA may have come up with a treatment for a rare form of melanoma that about 20,000 babies a year are born with.

The congenital melanoma is usually in the form of a large mole or 'giant nevus' that covers part of the face, head or other parts of the body and carries a very high risk of becoming malignant. Because of the high risk of malignancy, the treatment up to now had been surgical removal, which was not always successful in that the melanoma could recur, and which often left a large, permanent scar. Congenital giant nevi are normally caused by a mutation in the gene NRAS, which, as any intelligent [sic] design creationist will tell you, only happens by design.

QAnon/COVID Conspiracy News - The Flights of Fancy Go Stratospheric

Dr Bryan Ardis, Chiropractor and acupuncturist.
"Covid-19 is not a virus, it's snake venom" [sic]

The King Cobra Venom Pandemic: Stew Peters Unveils a New COVID-19 Conspiracy Theory | Right Wing Watch

It's amazing how, the more QAnon's ludicrous conspiracy theories are debunked, the more risible they became in trying to justify them, like toddlers caught with their hands in the cookie jar, rather than admit the game's up and they've been rumbled.

The even more amazing thing is that adults, even adults holding responsible positions, like Representative Marjorie Taylor-Green (R-GA 13) and Senator Doug Mastriano (R-PA 33) continue to fall for these tactics.

One example of how far into the stratosphere QAnon conspiracists have gone in the justification for opposing measures to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic, which is about to achieved its millionth American death, on the grounds that it's all a plot, somehow linked to a Satanic, cannibalistic paedophile, deep state conspiracy run by Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and the Pope, and including Bill Gates, Andrew Faucci and others, is the so-called 'explosive report' by medical quackticioner, Dr. Bryan Ardis.

His 'explosive' report which he revealed on the far right Stew Peters Show, is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 is not a virus at all but a modified snake venom which is passed on deliberately in drinking water. Seriously!

Here is how he arrived at that conclusion, not by analysis of drinking water, or by subjecting samples of the virus to biochemical analysis, but by a form of logic of which any self-respecting toddler might be proud, until they grew up enough to cringe in embarrassment at their childish thinking.

Here is his 'reasoning':

SCOTUS Now Represents Only a Small Minority of American Religious Extremists.

Attitude towards abortion by religiosity and political leanings. States set to make abortion illegal in all circumstances will be complying with the opinion of Americans who attend church every week, especially Republicans.

Source

Personal Religiosity and Attitudes Toward Abortion

The evidence from Gallop is that, if SCOTUS as expected overturns the 1973 ruling in Roe v Wade and allows the criminalisation of abortions in all or most cases, they will be empowering states to impose the views of a small minority of religious extremists on the rest of America, as the following charts show.

SCOTUS, whose prime purpose is to uphold the Constitutional constraints on government action, will be explicitly endorsing a flagrant imposition of Conservative Christian dogma by incorporating it into state laws.

On every measure, the opinion that abortions should be illegal in all circumstances - including where pregnancy is the result of rape or incest or the woman is very young, and even when there is severe foetal abnormality such that independent life will be impossible or there is a serious risk to the woman's life - is an opinion not shared by most Americans. It's not even the majority opinion of those Americans who go to church every week.

YEC/Creationism - Notions in Crisis

A spatiotemporal interpretation of population differentiation in SW Asia and Europe based on our model and the geographic distribution of the genomes.
Colored shaded areas indicate approximate putative distributions of populations at different time points. The letters (A) to (H) indicate the chronological order of events; see main text for a detailed description. Note that warmer periods (Bølling and Allerød interstadials, Holocene) correspond to population range expansions while colder periods (LGM, Older Dryas) are associated with contractions. See also Figure S4 for additional f-statistics analyses supporting alternative connections between the Levant and the Aegean/Greece area.

Source: Zoledziewska M.;Sidore C.;Chiang C.W.K.;Sanna S.;Mulas A.;Steri M.;Busonero F.;Marcus J.H.;Marongiu M., et al. (2022)

Ancient DNA maps ‘dawn of farming’


The flood of evidence that YECism and Creationism are notions (I won't grace them with the scientific term, 'theories') in crisis continues with news that two of the largest assemblages of ancient human genomes have revealed that the origins of European farmers was in Turkey, but that population originated many thousands of years earlier from diverse hunter-gatherer populations in Europe and Asia.

Of course, there is absolutely no evidence that all humans are descended from a single founder couple who lived just a few thousand years ago in the Middle East, as creationism's favourite myths claim.

The advances in recovering high quality genomes from ancient remains would be terrifying creationist cult leaders if they weren't safe in the knowledge that their dupes would never dream of checking facts or reading scientific publications in case they had to admit they could be wrong, so articles in science magazine such as Nature or New Scientist will go unnoticed and ignored.

The evidence in question was published in two open access papers in Cell and BioRxiv a few days ago. These works build on the 2016 findings by Lazaridis, Iosif, et al, who showed that:

…the earliest populations of the Near East derived around half their ancestry from a ‘Basal Eurasian’ lineage that had little if any Neanderthal admixture and that separated from other non-African lineages before their separation from each other. The first farmers of the southern Levant (Israel and Jordan) and Zagros Mountains (Iran) were strongly genetically differentiated, and each descended from local hunter–gatherers. By the time of the Bronze Age, these two populations and Anatolian-related farmers had mixed with each other and with the hunter–gatherers of Europe to greatly reduce genetic differentiation. The impact of the Near Eastern farmers extended beyond the Near East: farmers related to those of Anatolia spread westward into Europe; farmers related to those of the Levant spread southward into East Africa; farmers related to those of Iran spread northward into the Eurasian steppe; and people related to both the early farmers of Iran and to the pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe spread eastward into South Asia.

Lying Christians News - David Barton Just Can't Stop

David Barton, pseudo-historian and Talibangelical liar

David Barton Falsely Claims Voter Turnout 'Was 100 Percent' in Early America Because 'Churches Ran the Communities' | Right Wing Watch

How can you tell when pseudo-historian and Talibangelical Christian extremist David Barton is lying again?

Well, I'll leave you to fill in the obvious punchline, but Barton epitomises the old adage that when you show the world you know you need to lie for your faith, you show the world you know your faith needs fools to believe falsehoods. As Mark Twain said, "Lying is trying to fool someone into believing something you know ain’t so!"

The question is, why does David Barton and his extremist Christian supporters need Americans to believe something they know ain’t so? The answer is because they don't want them believing things they know are so, of course.

Abiogenesis News - Closing in to Fill Creationism's Favourite Gap - No God Found.

a, tRNA structure showing selected ribose and nucleobase modifications. The 3′-amino acid-acylated adenosine is located at the CCA 3′ end in contemporary tRNAs. 5-Methylaminomethyl uridine, mnm5U, is found in the wobble position 34. The amino acid-modified carbamoyl adenosine, (m6)aa6A (aa, amino acid), is present at position 37 in certain tRNAs. b, General RNA–peptide synthesis cycle based on mnm5U and m6aa6A. The structures of oligonucleotides are simplified and only terminal nucleobases are drawn.

Source: Müller, F, et al (2022)
Nature 605, 279–284 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04676-3

The origin of life: a paradigm shift - LMU Munich

It doesn't seem to have dawned on creationists who forlornly claim, despite the daily torrent of evidence to the contrary, that the Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis. Far from the TOE being a 'theory in crisis', the reality is that it's the childish notion of creationism that's in crisis and which is being increasingly rejected even by religious people as a valid explanation for how life diverged. It's only by creative misrepresentation of the data, or by dismissing it out of hand, that creationist frauds are still able to pull the wool over the eyes of their credulous dupes, to maintain their cult’s superstitions.

One of their mainstays as an 'argument' which they invariably fall back on when confronted with unarguable evidence for evolution by natural selection and other mechanisms, is that none of the mechanisms explain the origin of 'life' itself (abiogenesis, life from non-life'), and without that, evolution would have nothing to work on. It is, of course, irrelevant to the mechanisms by which life diversified once replicators did get going, but, as usual with childish notions, the relevance of using the false dichotomy fallacy is lost on creationists who lack the critical thinking skills to spot the trick, and few if any of them could define the term 'life' in a scientifically meaningful way, anyway, so assume it means some magic ingredient that separates organic' molecules from inorganic ones. It is one of the last remaining gaps which they insist must contain their god and their belief is that, of all the gaps closed by science, this will be the one where a god is found. Their ever-shrinking little god has degenerated to the size of this one remaining gap. The magician that magicked 'life' from non-life and made them 'speshul'.

There are, of course, many possible alternative explanations for how a simple replicator could have got going and, indeed, there doesn't even need to be a single explanation since two or more replicators could have got together early on. If the result had given them an advantage over remaining separate, then this symbiosis would have been almost inevitable.

One of the more popular hypotheses amongst biologists is the 'RNA world hypothesis' that says, because RNA is still the functional unit of biological activity and it is simpler than DNA, it probably came first and DNA followed on as an evolved improvement, acting as RNA's data store and so became the functional organ of inheritance of genetic data.

This is the idea currently being expanded by a team at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany. Their work has just been published, open access in Nature. They believe they have solved one of the outstanding problems with the theory - how RNA began catalysing the production of chains of amino acids to form peptides and short proteins without the peptides it codes for - a classic chicken and egg conundrum.

Like all chicken and egg conundrums, if this scenario is correct, it turns out that neither of them came first; they both emerged simultaneously and part of a developing complex out of simple pre-existing precursors.

As the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität news release explains:

Malevolent Designer News - Creationism's Divine Malevolence Excels Itself With Toxoplasmosis

Toxoplasma gondii

Shutterstock

I thought devotees of creationism's malevolent designer might like to read about an astonishingly successful organism it allegedly created. It is the organism known to medical science and biology as Toxoplasma gondii, the organism responsible for the disease, toxoplasmosis.

According to the WHO over 1 million people in the European area alone become infected by it and, according to Professor Justine R. Smith, Professor of Eye & Vision Health, Flinders University, Australia and Assistant professor João M. Furtado, Assistant professor of Ophthalmology, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, writing in The Conversation, 30%-50% of the world's population could be infected by it, making it the most successful pathological organism known. Once infected a person carries it for life and it is one of the most zoonotic organisms, capable of infected almost any animal or bird.

Unintelligent Designer News - More on the Blunder That is RuBisCo

The enzyme rubisco is found in all plants and other photosynthesizing organisms. It plays a key role in fixing carbon from the air and has helped shape life on Earth.

Credit: Getty Images

Photosynthesis unaffected by increasing carbon dioxide channels in plant membranes | RIPE

Readers may recall how I wrote recently about the enzyme RuBisCo, and how, if they understood its significance, it would be a major embarrassment for devotees of creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer. To give it it's full chemical name, ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase is probably the least efficient enzyme in all biology and yet is absolutely essential for the energy almost all living things ultimately depend on.

It is responsible for 'fixing' the inorganic carbon in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) as the first stage in building the carbon chain that is the backbone of the organic sugar, glucose, which is the end product of photosynthesis, along with free Oxygen (O₂) as a by-product.

Indeed, so inefficient is RuBisCo that it is the reason there is so much green in the world, wherever there are growing plants. RuBisCo manages about 4 reactions a second against the hundreds or thousands of reactions that most other enzymes are capable of, and, because it frequently mistakes a molecule of O₂ for one of CO₂, it frequently wrecks the process and causes a loss of carbon. It can also go wrong and produce xylulose-1,5-bisphosphate which actually poisons it!

Because of this inefficiency, there is great pressure on scientists to come up with an alternative, or to develop an improved version, in order to increase food production, and, to that end, multiple universities and research institutes have established the RIPE Project, led by the University of Illinois, USA in partnership with The Australian National University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Lancaster University, UK, Louisiana State University, USA, University of California, Berkeley, USA, University of Cambridge, UK, University of Essex, UK, and U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service.

But one of the programs run by RIPE has just reported a failure. The researchers at the Division of Plant Sciences, Research School of Biology, The Australian National University, Acton, ACT, Australia, had been hoped that, if they could improve the supply of CO₂ to RuBisCo, they could improve its efficiency. However, they discovered that the limitation was not the availability of CO₂ itself but the ability of RuBisCo to utilise it that was the bottleneck in the process.

As the RIPE news release explains:

Evolution News - Why North American Fossils from 95 Million Years Ago Look Like Tropical Fossils

Cretaceous oysters of the genus Pycnodonte investigated in the new study. These specimens were collected in San Miguel County, Colorado (top left), Kane County, Utah (top right), Big Horn County, Wyoming (bottom left), and Natrona County, Wyoming (bottom right), with a penny for scale.

Image credit: Matt Jones

Bali-like temperatures in Wyoming? Fossils reveal tropically hot North America 95 million years ago | University of Michigan News

Gullible fools who have been conned into believing, despite all the evidence showing otherwise, that planet Earth is just a few thousand years old, for no better reason than their mummy and daddy had been fooled into believing it, will need to ignore this evidence as well.

It is evidence that not only were fossils of highly evolved species being laid down in Wyoming, USA, 95 million years ago, but that the climate there at that time was more like that in tropical regions of Earth today.

The new study, by researchers from the University of Michigan shows that much of western North America, 95 million years ago, was covered by a shallow sea as warm as today’s tropics. The existence of this sea coincided with the "Cretaceous Thermal Maximum", one of Earth's hottest periods in the past 100 million years.

According to information supplied by the University of Michigan:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Made a Parasite Better at Killing Children

The Kissing bug, Triatom infestans,
The main vector for Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite that causes Chagas disease.

Hybrid strains make insidious parasite more dangerous | Karolinska Institutet Nyheter

Creationist mode:

If you’re a divine malevolence and have gone to all the trouble to design a blood-born parasite like the trypanosome, Trypanosoma cruzi, especially for making people sick and die, and have even created a special means of passing it from one person to another to make sure as many people suffer as possible, such as the 'kissing bug', Triatom infestans, you're not going to just stand by and allow a potential victim's immune system (that you designed to protect them from your parasites), stop the trypanosome from doing its job and making them sick, are you?

Of course not!

Trypanosoma cruzi, the organism that causes Chagas disease

Credit: CDC/Dr. Myron G. Schultz

As we have seen before, most of these nasty little organisms that creationists believe were created by their favourite god, have been designed to evade or even suppress their host's immune system so they can make life as miserable, or as short, as possible.

A good example of this, and an example of the inventive genius of anything that designed it, is in fact Trypanosoma cruzi, the microorganism that causes Chagas disease, which affects millions of people in Central and South America, causing thousands of deaths every year. Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, have discovered just how brilliantly this parasite has been designed so it can continue to do what it was designed to do. They have shown that it can form new variants from hybrids of different strains that are often better at circumventing the immune system and causing disease.

As the Karolinska Institutet news item announcing the team's publication of their findings in the online journal, eLife, explains:

Malevolent Designer News - How a Mutation Made Us More Susceptible to Cancer

A single genetic mutation made humans more susceptible to cancer | New Scientist

Creationist mode:

Creationism’s favourite divine malevolence could have given humans the same protection from cancer that it gave to elephants, but it chose not to.

Instead, it gave us a mutated version of a gene that makes us more likely to develop life-threatening cancers when the replication mechanism it designed for our cells, goes wrong and the faulty DNA doesn't get repaired. This replication mechanism, where the entire genome is replicated even though most cells will use only a small fraction of it, is necessary because the designer used the same method for us multicellular animals that it created for single-celled organisms, so being massively wasteful and increasing the danger of something going wrong, of course, but that's a slightly different issue.

I have more to say on this phenomenon in my popular, illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good

What scientists have recently discovered is that the gene, BRCA2, which plays a key role in repairing the DNA when it isn't replicated properly, has been modified in humans to make it less effective at doing what it was designed to do in other mammals, including chimpanzees. This repair mechanism was already far less efficient than that in elephants which get multiple copies of these repairing genes, so, although they have very many more cells than us and so very many more cell replications as they grow, they very rarely get cancers.

Even in our closest relative, the other great apes, cancers are relatively rare. Between 1901 and 1932, of the 971 non-human primates that died in Philadelphia Zoo, only 8 were found to have tumours on autopsy. so there is no doubt that humans, supposedly the favourite creation of creationism's favourite creator, are designed to get cancers more than most mammals and the decision to design us that way was a choice.

Creationist must believe, because they are obliged to, that this change in the BRCA2 gene can't have been accidental because nothing happens in nature without the intention and involvement of their magic creator, so we can only assume it wants us to get cancer.

Creationist mode:

Now to the science, which, unlike creationism and the childish notion of intelligent design, makes sense of the facts:

Unintelligent Designer News - Another Arms Race between Bats and Owls is Another Problem for Batty Creationists

Greater mouse-eared bat, Myotis myotis

Bats mimic the sound of bees and hornets to scare away predators | New Scientist

Italian scientists have recently discovered a fascinating example of Batesian mimicry, using sound rather than colour and shape, to deter predators.

Batesian mimicry is where a species comes to resemble a harmful or distasteful species although being harmless and edible itself. Examples are the beetles and butterflies that resemble wasps, or the eyes on a butterfly's wings that resemble the eyes of a predatory animal. These often result in arms races where the predator evolves to be able to tell the difference, but the prey then evolves to improve the mimicry.

The phenomenon of arms races is a subject most intelligent [sic] design creationists understandably steer well clear of. They are almost invariably features of host-parasite and prey-predator relationships. A prey species will benefit from any changes that improve its ability to avoid being prey and a predator will benefit from any changes that improve its ability to catch its prey, so arms races are major drivers in evolution.

It's difficult to see how a single designer switching back and forth between two species, seeing every solution it has just designed for one species as a problem to be overcome for the other species, can possibly be regarded as the behaviour of an intelligent designer. Creationists, by the dogma of the religion they invariably subscribe to, are forbidden from explaining this as the acts of two or more competing creators, of course, so are obliged to continue to present their favourite god as, frankly, a rather stupid amnesiac, not knowing from one day to the next what it is supposed to be achieving and forgetting what the solution it designed yesterday was all for.

I cover these evolutionary arms races and the problem they present for intelligent [sic] design advocates in my popular book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax.

But enough of the problems creationists have in sustaining their childish superstition and the absurd mental gymnastics they need to perform.

The Lunatics Are Now Running the US Asylum

The impending SCOTUS ruling overturning the 1973 Roe vs Wade ruling that legalised abortion in all US states is a sign that the lunatics have taken over and are now running the asylum.

As I reported yesterday, the decision was based, at least in part on the false idea that a foetus suffers during the procedure. This claim was based on a 2020 discussion paper by British scientist, Dr Stuart Derbyshire, that wrongly claimed the work of the Italian professor of neuroscience, Giandomenico Iannetti, had shown that the foetus could feel pain even before its cerebral cortex had developed at 24 weeks.

SCOTUS were not told by the Lawyers representing evangelical Christian extremists that Professor Iannetti strongly refuted Derbyshire's claim, and he was not called to testify to that fact, nor even told that his work was being (mis)used to argue against a woman’s right to abortion - something of which he is strongly in favour.

A highly selective piece of scientific 'evidence', refuted by the majority of neuroscientist, was presented as the mainstream, consensus view of relevant medical experts. SCOTUS seems to have swallowed that, hook line and sinker and failed to consult expert medical opinion which could have given them a balanced view and corrected their misapprehension. They lapped up the pap they were fed because it told them what they wanted to hear to 'confirm' their preconceptions.

Their opinion is not a scientific, evidence-based ruling, but a prejudiced, preconceived religious opinion based on falsehoods and misrepresentation of the real science. The lunatics have taken over SCOTUS.

MAGA pastor/Trump cultist Shane Vaughn declares that conservatives are "always right." Why? "They're just smarter than liberals. Liberalism is a mental disease." pic.twitter.com/AsF43AzV3L

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) May 5, 2022

Another lunatic who wants to be running the show is MAGA/QAnon Trumpanzee cultist, Pastor Shane Vaughn, who has recently announced that "Conservatives are always right" because they are smarter than liberals who are suffering from a "mental disease". Why does he think they are smarter than liberals? Because they are always right, of course. Why are they always right? Because they are smarter than liberals. A neatly circular, self-referencing argument, not grounded at any point in reality, typical of the mental disorder we call narcissistic personality disorder or delusions of grandeur.

Famous examples of Shane Vaughn (real name, John Vaughn) always being right are:

• Being convicted of multiple instances of identity theft, fraud and other felonies when, as an insurance agent in Baton Rouge, he stole the identity of a child who had died aged 4 years, and defrauded, banks, pensioners and others. He had his licence to operate as an insurance agent revoked and was slapped with a $100,000 fine and a 3 years spell in jail. During the trial he was described as "a chameleon, changing his look and name repeatedly". In other words, a shyster and con artist - just the sort to start a megachurch and declare himself to be God's spokesperson.

How Right Wing Christians Fooled SCOTUS With False Witnessing

Professor Giandomenico Iannetti
Work misrepresented in evidence to SCOTUS

British scientist says US anti-abortion lawyers misused his work to attack Roe v Wade | Roe v Wade | The Guardian

If you're an American woman who is about to have her legal right to an abortion removed by the Supreme Court, you might like to know that the decision of the highest law officers of the state is based, at least in part, on lies told to them by lawyers representing fundamentalist Christians in order to mislead them about what the science shows. In other words, their decision is based not on scientific truth but on lies and misrepresentation by Christian extremists with a political agenda.

Commandment eight of the Ten Commandments forbids a Christian from bearing false witness (Exodus 20:15). This is later clarified in Exodus 23:1 to prohibit false testimony with "Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness." Yet American fundamentalist Christians, who demand everyone else be subject to these simplistic Bronze Age tribal laws, don't feel in the least constrained by them when they need an excuse to foist their barbaric rules on the rest of us.

For example, in their testimony to SCOTUS, which might have influenced them in their widely touted impending ruling effectively overturning Roe vs Wade and re-criminalising abortions, Christian lawyers acting for fundamentalist Christians who wish to impose their views on, and re-establish their control over, women in America, cited the British scientist, Dr Stuart Derbyshire, a British associate professor of psychology at the National University of Singapore. In a discussion paper in Journal of Medical Ethics in 2020, Derbyshire suggested that work by Giandomenico Iannetti, an Italian professor of neuroscience, who at the time was working in University College, London and Oxford University, showed that a foetus can feel pain prior to the development of the cerebral cortex at 24 weeks.

Vatican Financial Abuse News - Pell Gets His Revenge As the Stink of Corruption Increases

Cardinal Becciu
Gave a "somewhat incomplete" testimony to the Vatican court where he is accused of embezzlement.

Cardinal Pell highlights 'somewhat incomplete' account given by Cardinal Becciu at Vatican finance trial | Catholic News Agency

There was no hint of that alleged Christian love and forgiveness in the Vatican the other day when Cardinal Pell, former financial controller at the Vatican, put the boot in to Cardinal Becciu, once his detractor in his attempts to reorganise and regularise the Vatican's Byzantine finances, who is now on trial in the Vatican, charged with embezzlement.

In his testimony to the court, Pell accused Becciu of making a "somewhat incomplete" testimony - polite code for lying.

Regular readers may recall how Pell was originally brought in to clean up the Vatican's finances when the Vatican Bank was found to be laundering very large sums of money for organised crime under cover of the diplomatic immunity endowed on the Vatican as an independent state in its own right. The Vatican was reputedly on the verge of bankruptcy, not even having enough funds to pay for its day to day activities.

During the course of his investigations, Pell found that heads of departments in the Vatican had control of secret slush funds running into hundreds of millions of Euros, accountable only to them with no proper records of where the money came from or what it was spent on. When put under Pell's control, they restored the Vatican's finances to good health but in the course of this, Pell made many powerful enemies who resented being accountable and not have vast resources of their own to spend as they wished. One of these was Cardinal Becciu, who as sostituto of the Secretariat of State was effectively Pope Francis Chief of Staff.

Pell eventually ran into difficulties of his own when allegations of his involvement in the sexual abuse of minors began to circulate in Australia where he had been the senior Catholic cleric. At Pope Francis' insistence he returned to Australia to face charges of which he was initially convicted and given a custodial sentence, only to have the convictions quashed by the Australian Supreme Court on a technicality. Before he left Rome, Pell had signed up auditors PriceWaterhouseCoopers, to audit the Vatican's finances. Immediately on Pell's departure to Australia, Becciu celebrated by, for reasons which he has never satisfactorily explained, summarily cancelling the contract with PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Again for reason never explained, the Vatican's own internal auditor, Libero Milone, also resigned, so the Vatican accounts remained unaudited.

The reasons for this cancellation soon began to emerge however when Becciu began using a fund known as "Peters' Pence", which is donated to by Catholics in an annual fund-raising event in the belief that it is for the Pope to use for charitable purposes, for donations to, for example, his brother's Sardinia-based ‘refugee charity’, and to bail out a private hospital in Rome where his niece had recently been taken onto the staff, which was facing financial difficulties, and to pay €500,000 to a 'security advisor', Cecilia Marogna, known in the Italian press as “the cardinal’s lady”. Marogna was subsequently arrested in Milan and charged with embezzlement.

Becciu also invested heavily in a property deal in London which was to be his eventual downfall. According to a report in the online Catholic news magazine, The Crux:

The deal was brokered in 2014, while Becciu was the sostituto, through an Italian financier and drawing upon funds collected by “Peter’s Pence,” an annual appeal directed to Catholics around the world as a way to support the pope’s activity, especially his charitable works. The original deal was for 50 percent of the London property, but the Secretariat of State eventually soured on its relationship with the first financier and planned to purchase the rest of the property with the aid of another.

The Secretariat of State appealed to the Institute for the Works of Religion, the so-called “Vatican bank,” for a loan to finance that transaction, which triggered an internal investigation. In October 2019, Pope Francis authorized raids at Secretary of State as well as the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority (AIF), which monitors for suspicious financial transactions, and seven officials were either suspended or fired along with Becciu who was reported to have 'resigned' suddenly.

Not only did Becciu have to approve the deal, but he’s been accused of attempting to disguise the loans it required by cancelling them out on Vatican balance sheets against the value of the property, a practice prohibited by general accounting norms and specifically forbidden by legislation decreed by Pope Francis in 2014.

The upshot was that the businessman Raffaele Mincione, the owner of the London property in question - the former Harrods shop in Chelsea - was also charged with money-laundering and embezzlement, as was Gianluigi Torzi who had been enlisted to help push through the deal. He was also charged with extortion. Readers may recall how last April, Torzi successfully applied to Southwark Crown Court to have a freeze on his bank accounts lifted. Judge Tony Baumgartner cited the lies and inconsistencies in statements from Vatican officials as his reason for unfreezing the account. The Vatican subsequently applied to have Torizi extradited from the UK to face charges of embezzlement.

However, according to the Italian magazine, Il Messaggero at the time, Becciu's sacking was not over possible misuse of Vatican money in the London purchase, but over allegations of embezzlement, again involving the "Peter's Pence" slush fund, but this time in the form of a 'gift' of €100,000 to a charity run by Becciu's brother in Sardinia. The charity's official purpose it to help refugees, but the money appears to be unused and sitting in the charity's banks account (according to Il Messaggero).

Now the plot has thickened with Pell's testimony. The issue now is over Becciu's account of the payment of $AU 2.3 million [$1.6 million] to the Australian firm, Neustar, allegedly for the rights to the Internet domain name ‘.catholic’, supposedly from the Vatican Council for Social Communications, but Pell raised the question whether this was from that council or from the Secretariat of State. The suspicion now is that it may have been a device for channelling money to pay for Pell's defence in his struggle with the law over the allegations of child sexual abuse.

The murky world of Vatican finances continues to give off the noxious stink of corruption as yet more bubbles burst on the surface of that stinking cesspit in the heart of Rome.

Catholic Abuse News - California's Catholic Bishops go Whining to SCOTUS to Avoid Compensating Their Victims

The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles
Seat of Archbishop Jose H. Gomez

Credit: David Castor/public domain.

California Catholic dioceses ask Supreme Court to hear statute of limitations extension case | Catholic News Agency

In a desperate attempt to avoid paying out even more in compensation to the victims of predatory paedophile Catholic priest, nine of California's Catholic diocese and archdiocese have got together to petition SCOTUS to overrule the State of California's suspension of the statute of limitation (SOL) which bars victims from claiming for lapsed abuses. The state recently passed an order giving former victims a 3-year window of opportunity to register claims which would otherwise fall foul of the SOL.

Catholic priests often hide behind a SOL which serves them well, since many of their victims were young children at the time and at a time when sex was a taboo subject and society was more deferential to religious clerics than now, so children felt uncomfortable talking about their abuses. Indeed, that very culture was why so many priests felt confident they could get away with it. By the time their victims reached adulthood and the psychological effects of their abuse manifested themselves, it was too late to bring the case to court.

The bishops and archbishops behind the collective whinge are:

• Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles
• Bishop Kevin W. Vann of Orange
• Bishop Joseph V. Brennen of Fresno
• Bishop Daniel E. Garcia of Monterey
• Bishop Michael C. Barber of Oakland
• Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento
• Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco
• Bishop Oscar Cantú of San Jose
• Bishop Robert F. Vasa of Santa Rosa

In their petition, the bishops state:

Twenty years ago, California revived decades-old sexual-abuse claims, offering claimants a one-year window to sue even though the statute of limitations had expired long before. When that window closed at the end of 2003, the Catholic Church in California reached a series of settlements that paid out over a billion dollars without regard to the validity of any individual claim. The State tried to revive the same category of lapsed claims three more times between 2004 [*6] and 2018, but Governor Jerry Brown vetoed the bills each time. In 2019, however, the Legislature passed and Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation reviving the claims for a second time, expressly seeking to impose "additional punishment" on the Catholic Church and other institutions for their past acts. This time, defendants' past conduct is subject not only to claims for compensatory and punitive damages that were previously time-barred twice over, but also to additional penalties (in the form of "treble" damages) based on a newly defined category of "cover up" activity.

The final sentence shows that the real concern of these bishops and archbishops: as well as the new claims for compensation they could face, they could face additional claims for compensation for "cover up" activity. A theme running through many of these abuse cases is that the church systematically covered up and thereby facilitated the abuses. Known abusers were allowed to continue to work in positions which gave them access to more victims and those who knew of their predations failed to notify the law enforcement and child protection agencies.

Indeed, some of them were even party to the abuses themselves, having come through the same highly sexualised culture in Catholic seminaries. The objective was to defend the church at all costs and ignore any obligation they had for safeguarding against potential abuses. The sexual predilections of priests was ‘understandable’ given their ‘celibate’ lifestyle, so could be forgiven.

In the introduction to their 21-page petition, the petitioners make several statements of dubious validity. For example, in reference to the original one-year suspension of the the SOL three years ago:

After this one-year revival period ended, Petitioners reached a series of settlements that paid out more than a billion dollars to bring these matters [*9] to a close. To finance these settlements, they expended significant resources, sold vast swaths of Church property, and in some cases exhausted or relinquished insurance coverage for past and future abuse claims. In reaching these settlements, Petitioners relied on the explicit cutoff date in the California statute, which assured them that unasserted lapsed claims would be extinguished at the end of the one- year revival period.

That assurance proved to be false. In 2013, 2014, and 2018, the State attempted to enact additional revival statutes that would have allowed the same category of abuse claims to be asserted yet again.

In other words, we knew there were very many victims who had not come forward and we thought we had got away with those, so, it's not fair that these victims should also be given an opportunity to claim compensation. It is not true that the same victims would have been able to claim for the same abuses again although this statement clearly implies they would have. What this 3-year window offers victims is an opportunity to claim again against those who covered up their abusers’ crimes.

They go on to say:

After Governor Gavin Newsom took office, however, California enacted a new double-revival statute, now with a three-year revival window. This time, the new law not only revives old claims (including claims for punitive damages), but also adds [*10] new punishment in the form of treble damages for a novel category of "cover up" activity. As various legislators proclaimed, this "draconian" measure was designed to "drastically expand[] the actionable conduct" and to make defendants "hurt" by creating " another revival period" and by subjecting them to "additional punishment" for decades-old claims. Pet.App.166a, 170a, 177a, 179a.

California's double-revival statute violates the Constitution in two ways. First, it violates the Ex Post Facto Clause by imposing new punishments on past conduct and reviving claims for punitive damages. In Stogner v. California, 539 U.S. 607, 632-33 (2003), this Court identified punitive revivals as ex post facto violations. But California's courts, despite recognizing that the statute "has changed the legal consequences of past conduct," including by "imposing new or different liabilities," Pet.App.110a-11a, 123a-24a, have allowed these claims to proceed because they purportedly seek to impose only "civil" liability, Pet.App. 30a, 123a-24a. That holding conflicts with both this Court's precedents and the original understanding of the Ex Post Facto Clause, which prohibit retroactive punishment regardless of the label [*11] "civil" or "criminal," see E. Enters. v. Apfel, 524 U.S. 498, 538-39 (1998) (Thomas, J., concurring).

Second, the California statute also violates the Due Process Clause, which prohibits "retroactively . . . creat[ing] liability" by reviving certain time-barred claims. William Danzer & Co. v. Gulf & S.I.R. Co., 268 U.S. 633, 637 (1925). As an original matter, the Clause prohibited States from depriving defendants of ripened limitations defenses, which was understood to be a deprivation of property without due process of law. And while modern precedent has watered down that original rule, this Court's precedents still recognize that States cannot revive certain time-barred claims, particularly when it would impose a "special hardship[]." Chase Sec. Corp. v. Donaldson, 325 U.S. 304, 316 (1945). The paradigmatic example is when a State induces reliance on a statutory time bar but then pulls out the rug by reviving the expired claim, id.--exactly what happened here. Having made significant outlays in reliance on the cutoff date at the end of the last revival period, Petitioners now face potentially ruinous liability as a result of California's virtually unprecedented double-revival law.

[It's not obvious what the numbered asterisks in square brackets relate to in these quotations.]

Of course, the petitioners face 'potentially ruinous liability' not as a result of California's suspension of the SOL for 3 years, but because of the sexual predations of their paedophile priests, and in particular, for theirs and their predecessors’ criminal activity in covering up these abuses and failure to safeguard children in their care. And, again, they do not face renewed claims for abuses that have already been settled, but for new cases that can now come forward and especially for the 'new' offence of covering up.

An organisation which faces bankruptcy and an inability to continue because of its criminal activities does not deserve to continue, let alone have the highest court in the land guarantee their immunity from further claims for compensation on the grounds that they thought they had got away with it. The Catholic Church is massively wealthy but wants its victims to be denied adequate compensation in order to protect that wealth. Once again, the Catholic Church is putting the church and its finances above the needs of its victims.

What will be interesting is whether SCOTUS with its new right wing fundamentalist Christian majority, will come down on the side of abusers because they are Christians or on the side of their victims whom the law should be designed to protect.

Talibangelical News - Evangelical Christians Now Control SCOTUS

On abortion, few Americans take an absolutist view| Pew Research Center

The much trumpeted impending SCOTUS ruling effectively striking down Roe vs Wade and so making abortion illegal in America unless specifically decriminalised at state level, is widely at odds with American public opinion, but largely in line with the views of white evangelical Christians, showing the degree to which entitled white evangelical Christianity, with Donald Trump's help, has subverted SCOTUS.

While 61% of Americans are in favour of legalised abortions, only 37% oppose it. SCOTUS is representing only a minority of American extremists while ignoring the views of the vast majority. On this issue, if no other, SCOTUS can be seen to represent only a minority of Americans, who nevertheless feel entitled to have their views predominating.

This Pew Research survey show that, of all the religious groups in the USA, only the White Evangelicals back a ban on abortion. 73% of white evangelicals say their almost universal opposition to abortion is shaped by their religion, while only 28% of white, non-evangelical Protestants say their views have a religious basis and 7% of non-affiliated cite religion as shaping their views.

Quantum Evolution - How A Quantum Fluctuation Can Cause Mutation

The Double Helix of DNA

Getty Images

Quantum mechanics could explain why DNA can spontaneously mutate | University of Surrey

Another of creationism’s central dogmas was unintentionally laid to rest by science yesterday, when three scientists from Surrey University's Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre, which includes the famous science broadcaster, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, published a paper which showed that DNA can spontaneously mutate due to nothing more than a random quantum fluctuation. Creationist dogma insists, with no evidence to support it and in spite of evidence to the contrary, that no new information can arise in the genome without violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics [sic]. Don't ask! It's based on some half-baked notion that information is like energy and can't be created, or rather, in creation world, can only be created by magic.

But, as the Surrey University team say in their open access Communications Physics paper:

Due to the significance of the quantum tunnelling even at biological temperatures, we find that the canonical and tautomeric forms of G-C inter-convert over timescales far shorter than biological ones and hence thermal equilibrium is rapidly reached. Furthermore, we find a large tautomeric occupation probability of 1.73 × 10−4, suggesting that such proton transfer may well play a far more important role in DNA mutation than has hitherto been suggested.

The Surrey University news release explains what that means:

Evolution News - How the Cephalopods Evolved

The Hawaiian bobtail squid (Euprymna scolopes) is a model system for studying animal-bacterial symbiosis.

Credit: Tom Kleindinst

Squid and Octopus Genome Studies Reveal How Cephalopods’ Unique Traits Evolved | Marine Biological Laboratory

The cephalopods - octopuses, squids and their relatives - are often cited by creationists as something that can't be explained by mainstream evolutionary theory because they, allegedly, have a unique genome. I have even known creationists claim they prove special creation because their favourite creator god created them as a different lifeform. Mind you, I have also known people committed to other wackadoodle notions, claim that they are 'alien' species that arrived on Earth in alien spaceships.

Of course, they are, like all other classes of organisms on Earth, the result of an evolutionary process and there is nothing about their genome that can't be explained in other than standard biogenetic terms. They have exactly the same genetic 'code' as all other life on Earth.

However, that's not to say they don't have some unique characteristics, as these latest papers in Nature Communication show.

As the University of Chicago, Marine Biological Laboratory news release accompanying the two papers explains:

Evolution News - How the Black Rat's Environment was Provided By Humans

Black rats, Rattus rattus

Source: Wikipedia by Kilesson - own work. CC BY-SA 3.0

how the black rat colonised Europe in the Roman and Medieval periods - News and events, University of York

An open access paper published in Nature Communications yesterday, will be understood by anyone with even a basic understanding of evolutionary biology as an example of evolution in progress, but will probably be waved aside by creationists because the subject of it, the black rat, Rattus rattus, didn't change into a cat or a dog or even a new species.

The paper records how the black rat colonised Europe on two separate occasions, separated by a dramatic decline and extinction in some areas. Each rise and fall in population and each wave of expansion was facilitated by patterns of human habitation and trade because the species had evolved to benefit from just those human activities as a commensal species on human civilisation.

We’ve long known that the spread of rats is linked to human events, and we suspected that Roman expansion brought them north into Europe.

But one remarkable result of our study is quite how much of a single event this seems to have been: all of our Roman rat bones from England to Serbia form a single group in genetic terms.

When rats reappear in the Medieval period we see a completely different genetic signature – but again all of our samples from England to Hungary to Finland all group together. We couldn’t have hoped for clearer evidence of repeated colonisation of Europe.

Our results show how human-commensal species like the black rat, animals which flourish around human settlements, can act as ideal proxies for human historical processes.

Dr David Orton, co-author
Department of Archaeology
University of York, York, UK.

The modern dominance of brown rats has obscured the fascinating history of black rats in Europe. Generating genetic signatures of these ancient black rats reveals how closely black rat and human population dynamics mirror each other.

Alexandra Jamieson, co-first author
Palaeogenomics & Bio-Archaeology Research Network
Research Laboratory for Archaeology and History of Art
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

The study was conducted by a team led by scientists from the University of York along with colleagues from the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute, who conducted DNA analysis of archaeological remains. These showed that the rats expanded into Europe in two waves, each with a characteristic DNA signature, showing that they originated from two different populations.

This study is a great showcase of how the genetic background of human commensal species, like the black rat, could reflect historical or economic events. And more attention should be paid to these often neglected small animals.

He Yu, co-first author
Department of Archaeogenetics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany And School of Life Sciences
Peking University
Beijing, China

Archaeological black rat mandible.

Image credit: Ewan Chipping, University of York

The first wave occurred during the Roman Empire when the 'Pax Romana' created the stable conditions for population growth and trade with the black rat able to travel along trade routes and exploit human settlements, crops and refuse. With the collapse of the Roman Empire in the Early Middle Ages, the economy collapsed, the population fell, and along with it, the black rat population. This could have been precipitated by the 'Justinian Plague', an early form of the Black Death, caused by the bacterium, Yersinia pestis which killed about 20% of the population of Constantinople and affected the entire Mediterranean basin, Europe and the Near East.

The second wave came on the back of growth in long range trade in the Middle Ages and the growth of cities as centres of commerce. They have now declined again, this time probably because of competition from the closely related brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, which similarly evolved to be a commensal species on human civilisation, along with the house mouse, Mus musculus and is now the dominant rat in temperate Europe.

Copyright: © 2022 The authors. Published by Springer Nature, Ltd.
Open access

The team's paper was published open access yesterday in the journal Nature Communications:

Abstract

The distribution of the black rat (Rattus rattus) has been heavily influenced by its association with humans. The dispersal history of this non-native commensal rodent across Europe, however, remains poorly understood, and different introductions may have occurred during the Roman and medieval periods. Here, in order to reconstruct the population history of European black rats, we first generate a de novo genome assembly of the black rat. We then sequence 67 ancient and three modern black rat mitogenomes, and 36 ancient and three modern nuclear genomes from archaeological sites spanning the 1st-17th centuries CE in Europe and North Africa. Analyses of our newly reported sequences, together with published mitochondrial DNA sequences, confirm that black rats were introduced into the Mediterranean and Europe from Southwest Asia. Genomic analyses of the ancient rats reveal a population turnover in temperate Europe between the 6th and 10th centuries CE, coincident with an archaeologically attested decline in the black rat population. The near disappearance and re-emergence of black rats in Europe may have been the result of the breakdown of the Roman Empire, the First Plague Pandemic, and/or post-Roman climatic cooling.

A Population dynamics of the black rat (R. rattus), Asian house rat (R. tanezumi) and brown rat (R. norvegicus) estimated by PSMC, with 100 bootstrap replicates. B Demographic modelling of the divergence and migration among the black rat, Asian house rat and brown rat estimated by G-PhoCS. The values represent the average estimates of effective population sizes (in thousands), population divergence times (Mya) and the total migration rate through time. The 95% HPD range of all estimates are listed in Supplementary Data.

Yu, H., Jamieson, A., Hulme-Beaman, A. et al.
Palaeogenomic analysis of black rat (Rattus rattus) reveals multiple European introductions associated with human economic history.
Nat Commun 13, 2399 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-30009-z

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)

What is probably lost on creationists with their child-like understanding of evolution where one species changes into another, often by giving birth to it, or by changing physically into it like one of their transformer toys, is that findings such as this example of co-evolution where one species' evolutionary path is dependent on that of another species with which it has formed an alliance, is an illustration of how evolution works. Species do not normally evolve significantly in isolation from the other organisms in their ecosystem but move into and occupy niches as and when these become available, often, as in the case of the black rat, created by another organism.

The first major step in this process was of course, the evolution of the black rat to be able to occupy the niche humans were creating in their buildings, food stores, refuse and trade routes. Then, as these developed in Europe the black rat expanded into this newly available range. When that collapsed, the rats lost their habitat and their population crashed along with the human economy. And so the black rat's evolutionary future became dependent on human civilisation and economic activity, to expand its range again as the economy in Europe recovered to its previous level under the Roman Empire, during the Middle Ages, only to lose out again when the brown rat expanded its range in response to the opportunities human civilisation had provided.

In other words, a very nice illustration of evolution in progress, albeit one which creationists wouldn’t recognise or understand because they have a simplistic understanding of what evolution is.

Evolution News - When Lizards and Snakes Evolved

The fossil of Jurassic lizard Eichstaettisaurus.

Image credit: Jorge Herrera Flores

May: Researchers discover overlooked lizards | News and features | University of Bristol

With so many science papers casually and unintentionally refuting creationism just by revealing the facts, most weeks are bad weeks for creationists and their cults, but this week has been worse than most and it's only half done!

On top of the news of how environmental changes have been shown to influence evolution, just as the Theory of Evolution explains, we now have a paper which sheds more light on the evolution of the squamates (i.e. cold-blooded vertebrates with scales - snakes and lizards) and which shows the scientists involved have no doubts about the TOE being the grand unifying theory in biology that makes best sense of the data.

A collared lizard posing on a rock in Colorado.

Pahcal123 under CC BY-SA 4.0 license

This paper by scientists from the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP) and the University of Bristol, in the best traditions of science, challenges the previous consensus over just when this order radiated into its current diversity and pushes that back from the Cretaceous Era between 145.5 and 65.5 million years ago, into the Jurassic, between 201 and 145 million years ago. It had previously been assumed that the main period of evolutionary radiation had been part of the so-called Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution, when many terrestrial tetrapod groups like mammals, lizards and birds, apparently underwent a great diversification, triggered by the rise of flowering plants.

However, the research team led by Dr Arnau Bolet, palaeontologist at the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont and the University of Bristol, has shown that, although Jurassic squamate fossils are rare, it is possible to detect the more advanced features found in modern species in them, showing that the major phases of evolutionary diversification had occurred by then.

As the Bristol University press release accompanying the team's open access published paper in the online journal, eLife, explains:

Evolution News - How the Distribution of Alaska's Dinosaurs was Determined by Their Environment.

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Sedimentary deposits of the Prince Creek Formation are exposed in bluffs adjacent to the Colville River, on Alaska’s North Slope, in this July 2007 photograph. The sedimentary rocks represent prehistoric river channels, floodplains, lakes and ponds, and thin peat swamps.

Photo: Professor Paul J. McCarthy

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Sedimentary rocks of the Cantwell Formation, representing a prehistoric floodplain environment, are shown in this June 2017 photograph. Dinosaur tracks are visible at the base of the thick, upper sandstone bed.

Photo: Professor Paul J. Paul McCarthy

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Thick fossil soil in the Chignik Formation at Aniakchak Bay, southwest Alaska, is preserved beneath sandstone of a meandering river channel in this July 2021 photograph. Tree trunks that have turned to coal are visible at the top of the fossil soil in a few places.

Photo: Professor Paul J. Paul McCarthy

Precipitation helped drive distribution of Alaska dinosaurs | Geophysical Institute

It's been another terrible week for Creationists, especially those who have been deluded into the absurd notion that the Theory of Evolution is about to be replaced by their favourite childish superstition.

Following quickly on the heels of a paper by a team from Leipzig, Germany, showing that the evolution of plants was strongly influenced by major environmental changes caused by the extermination of large, herbivorous dinosaurs and the rise of large herbivorous mammals 25 million years later, exactly as the theory of Evolution predicts, we have news of another study, by scientists from the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA, Southern Methodist University, Texas, USA, Hokkaido University, Japan and the University of Kansas, USA, showing how the distribution of dinosaurs was affected by the environment in which they lived, just as the TOE predicts.