Creationism in Crisis - How Evolution Resulted in 8 Billion Humans

8 billion people: how evolution made it happen

Based on estimates by the History Database of the Global Environment and the UN.

Max Roser, CC BY-SA

This is the first of three blog posts dealing with human evolution, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency.

A few days ago, sometime during November 15th 2022, the human population of Earth exceeded 8 billion. In the following article by Professor Matthew Wills, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at the Milner Centre for Evolution, University of Bath, UK, explains how our large brains and complex social structures allowed this to happen.

Cultural or memetic evolution is of course closely analogous to genetic evolution, so human evolution can be seen as the result of gene-meme co-evolution, with cooperation and the evolution of social ethics being an important part of our success, enabling us to create organised urban societies and nation states having evolved sets of ethics in common.

Professor Wills' original article can be read here:

8 billion people: how evolution made it happen

Published: November 15, 2022 4.01pm GMT

One in 8 billion.

Credit: oneinchpunch/Shutterstock

Matthew Wills, University of Bath

November 15 2022 marks a milestone for our species, as the global population hits 8 billion. Just 70 years ago, within a human lifetime, there were only 2.5 billion of us. In AD1, fewer than one-third of a billion. So how have we been so successful?

Humans are not especially fast, strong or agile. Our senses are rather poor, even in comparison to domestic livestock and pets. Instead, large brains and the complex social structures they underpin are the secrets of our success. They have allowed us to change the rules of the evolutionary game that governs the fate of most species, enabling us to shape the environment in our favour.

But there have been many unintended consequences, and now we have raised the stakes so high that human-driven climate change has put millions of species at risk of extinction.

The golden toad (Incilius periglenes) is an extinct amphibian that was once abundant in a small area north of Monteverde, Costa Rica. Amphibians have extremely high rates of extinction in response to climate change and habitat fragmentation.

Understanding population growth

Legend has it the king of Chemakasherri, which is in modern day India, loved to play chess and challenged a travelling priest to a game. The king asked him what prize he would like if he won. The priest only wanted some rice. But this rice had to be counted in a precise way, with a single grain on the first square of the board, two on the second, four on the third, and so on. This seemed reasonable, and the wager was set.

A chessboard with each square containing twice the number of rice grains as the one before. K = a thousand, M = a million, G = a billion.

CC BY-SA

When the king lost, he told his servants to reward his guest as agreed. The first row of eight squares held 255 grains, but by the end of the third row, there were over 16.7 million grains. The king offered any other prize instead: even half his kingdom. To reach the last square he would need 18 quintillion grains of rice. That’s about 210 billion tonnes.

The king learned about exponential growth the hard way.

In the beginning

Our genus – Homo – had modest beginnings at square one around 2.3 million years ago. We originated in tiny, fragmented populations along the east African rift valley. Genetic and fossil evidence suggests Homo sapiens and our cousins the Neanderthals evolved from a common ancestor, possibly Homo heidelbergensis . Homo heidelbergensis had a brain slightly smaller than modern humans. Neanderthals had larger brains than us, but the regions devoted to thinking and social interactions were less well developed.

Facial reconstruction of Homo heidelbergensis.

CC BY-SA

When Homo heidelbergensis started travelling more widely, populations started to change from one another. The African lineage led to Homo sapiens, while migration into Europe around 500,000 years ago created the Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Scientists debate the extent to which later migrations of Homo sapiens out of Africa (between 200,000 and 60,000 years ago) displaced the Neanderthals or interbred with them. Modern humans who live outside Africa typically have around 2% Neanderthal DNA. It is close to zero in people from African backgrounds.

Reconstruction of Homo neanderthalensis.

CC BY-SA

If unchecked, all populations with more births than deaths grow exponentially. Our population does not double in each generation because the average number of children per couple is fewer than four. However, the pace of growth has been accelerating at an unprecedented rate. Those of us alive today are 7% of all the humans who ever existed since the origin of our species.

Why aren’t all species booming?

Biological intervention normally puts the brakes on population growth. Predator populations increase as their prey becomes more abundant, keeping numbers in check. Viruses and other disease agents sweep through populations and decimate them. Habitats become overcrowded. Or rapidly changing environments can turn the tables on once successful species and groups.

Thomas Malthus was famous for his 1798 essay ‘On the Principle of Population’.

Charles Darwin, like the 18th-century scholar Thomas Malthus before him, thought there might be a hard limit on human numbers. Malthus believed our growing population would eventually outpace our ability to produce food, leading to mass starvation. But he did not foresee 19th and 20th-century revolutions in agriculture and transport, or 21st-century advances in genetic technology that allowed us to keep making more food, however patchily, across the globe.

Our intelligence and ability to make tools and develop technologies helped us survive most of the threats our ancestors faced. Within about 8,500 years humans went from the first metal tools to AI and space exploration.

The catch

We are now kicking an increasingly heavy can down the road. The UN estimates that by 2050 there will be nearly 10 billion of us. One consequence of these vast numbers is that small changes in our behaviour can have huge effects on climate and habitats across the globe. The rising energy demands of each person today are on average twice what they were in 1900.

But what of our cousins, the Neanderthals? It turns out, in one sense, their fate was less dire than we might suppose. One measure of evolutionary success is the number of copies of your DNA that are dispersed. By this measure Neanderthals are more successful today than ever. When Neanderthal populations were last distinct from Homo sapiens (around 40,000 years ago) there were fewer than 150,000 of them. Even assuming a conservative average of 1% Neanderthal DNA in modern humans, there is at least 500 times as much in circulation today than at the time of their “extinction”.

Matthew Wills, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at the Milner Centre for Evolution, University of Bath

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

---

Thank you for sharing!

Tweet Link

Creationism in Crisis - Confirmation of the Role of Environmental Change in the First Mass Extinction

FSU researchers: Rapid fluctuations in oxygen levels coincided with Earth's first mass extinction - Florida State University News

Professor Nevin Kozik, PhD, of Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science – National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Florida State University, during fieldwork to investigate how rapid changes in marine oxygen levels may have played a significant role in driving Earth’s first mass extinction.

Fundamental to the Theory of Evolution (TOE) is the idea that environmental change causes evolutionary change, a consequence of which can be extinction, especially when change is too rapid for species to evolve adaptations to it. Environmental change can be very rapid (instantaneous in the case of a meteor strike, for example) but evolutionary change is characteristically very slow, needing many generations to produce a significant adaptation.

So, it's hardly surprising that a period of rapidly fluctuating marine oxygen levels about 443 million years ago, caused Earth's first mass extinction at the same time. Confirmation of that, and so of a prediction of the TOE, has now been produced by a team led by Florida State University (FSU) researchers.

The research depends on a fairly recent dating method for marine sediment that measures the proportion of thallium isotopes in the sediment, as explained by Owens, J.D; Neilson S.D; Horner, T.J., et al (2016)^[PDF]:

Creationism in Crisis - Yes! It's That Transitional Species Again

Tiktaalik roseae (artists impression)

If Creationism ranked as a serious scientific hypothesis, it would have been abandoned years ago because of the mass of evidence for an alternative theory - the Theory of Evolution. In fact, of course, in scientific circles, Creationism was never regarded as serious science because it entailed magical entities and was unfalsifiable, and was abandoned in 1859 when Darwin & Wallace first published their explanation for biodiversity and the existence of species.

Yet the childish superstition persists in the more backward and scientifically illiterate parts of the world, despite evidence of so many transitional species showing a clear evolutionary change from an earlier taxon to a later one. One such transition that has evidence in the fossil record is the evolutionary transition from lobe-finned fish to terrestrial vertebrates.

A key stage in the development of the terrestrial vertebrates was the transition onto land of air-breathing fish, so a key piece of conditioned denialism for Creationists is to claim there are no fossils showing this transition because their dogma dictates that there are no transitional fossils, for no better reason than Darwin said there should be some.

In fact, of course, there are very many of these fossils showing intermediate species, capable of crawling out onto land and of living in water.

I described this transition, and the ecological changes that facilitated it, in my book, What Makes You So Special: From the Big Bang to You, which deals with the science behind the formation of the Universe, of Earth and of life on Earth, and eventually to humans and the development of human cultures and civilisations, culminating ultimately in you, as a unique individual and beneficiary of that immense chain of causality. So, it's good to know this subject has now been made into a YouTube video, which entirely vindicates what I said:

Now, here is my description:

How Science Works - Self-Correcting by Critical Revision

Footprints Claimed as Evidence of Ice Age Humans in North America Need Better Dating, New Research Shows - DRI

The ancient human footprints found at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, the United States.

Bennett et al. (2021).

Here is an example of how science is self-correcting in that methods are critically scrutinised, especially if the reported results look far out of place with other known data. It's the sort of thing that Creationist frauds often find irresistible as something to misrepresent, as either science changing its mind, showing science to be unreliable, or scientists looking for an excuse to change the conclusion because it didn't conform to scientific 'dogma'. It's neither of those things, of course. It just one team of researchers offering a suggestion as to why another team might have been wrong.

It concerns a 2021 paper published in Science by a team from Institute for Studies in Landscapes and Human Evolution, Bournemouth University, Poole, Dorset, UK, led by Matthew R. Bennett which reported the discovery of human footprints preserved in sand deposits in White Sands National Park, New Mexico, USA, in the what had been the sediment in Lake Otero at the bottom of Tularosa Valley, which had been dated to between ~23 and 21 thousand years ago. The problem was, this placed them at the height of the last glacial maximum, long before other evidence suggested modern humans migrated into the Americas from Siberia.

That conclusion has now been challenged by a second team of scientists from The Desert Research Institute (DRI), Kansas State University, the University of Nevada, Reno, and Oregon State University, led by Professor Charles Oviatt, with some fairly hefty evidence. They have published their findings in the journal Quaternary Research.

Worldwide Plant Diversity - Interactive Map

International research team led by Göttingen University use advanced machine learning to model biodiversity - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Global distribution of plant species richness across the globe as predicted using the distribution 300,000 plant species across 830 regional floras worldwide.

Photo: New Phytologist

An international research team has produced an online interactive map of plant diversity.

Walking in Bagley Wood in November - Slide Show

1 of 24

2 of 24

3 of 24

4 of 24

5 of 24

6 of 24

7 of 24

8 of 24

9 of 24

10 of 24

11 of 24

12 of 24

13 of 24

14 of 24

15 of 24

16 of 24

17 of 24

18 of 24

19 of 24

20 of 24

21 of 24

22 of 24

23 of 24

24 of 24

Bagley Wood, near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK is a lightly managed ancient mixed broadleaf and conifer wood belonging to St Johns College, Oxford, who acquired it in 1557. Prior to that it had been owned by Abingdon Abbey between 955 and 1538. It is now used for field research by members of the University Zoology Department and is probably one of the most closely studied areas of woodland in Europe.

These photographs were taken on a sunny sunday afternoon in November on one of the warmest November days on record. Of particular note are the profusion of holly berries and the variety of fungi to be seen.

Walkers are welcome to use the wood but are politely requested to stay on the footpaths, to keep dogs on a lead and not to disturb the wildlife, so the woodland remains almost completely undisturbed.

A feature in Late Spring are the carpets of bluebells as well as the many nesting birds, especially finches, warblers, blackcaps, chiff chaffs and tits. In recent years, red kites and buzzards have both increased in numbers, and muntjac deer have become common.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Beloved Sadist Isn't Giving Up On its SARS-CoV-2 Virus

XBB and BQ.1: what we know about these two omicron 'cousins'

If you've fallen for the Intelligent Design hoax and so believe viruses like the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused COVID-19 were intelligently designed, you probably should be deeply in awe at the lengths to which your putative designer is going to find a super new version that can evade our antibodies acquired from vaccines and earlier infections - antibodies produced by an immune system you believe it created to protect us from the pathogens it creates to make us sick, obviously - and so make even more people sick, ruin even more economies and scupper economic recovery.

We've had in sequence since the initial wave, several waves as new variants emerged, including Delta and most successful to date, Omicron, which is now in the latest of several new subvarieties.

Of course, to anyone who understands evolution, this is nothing more than what is expected as the virus mutates within a selective environment and the most successful becomes the dominant variant. Mutations arise because of copying errors and hybrids arise when two different variants infect the same cell and their genomes get mixed up in their descendants.

To an ID cultist, however, this explanation must be rejected in favour of one in which their imaginary creator actively redesigns the virus to overcome new challenges.

In this article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistence, Victoria Easton, Virology Research and Teaching Fellow in the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Leeds, UK, looks at the emerging variants and discusses whether we should be concerned or not. The original article can be read here:

Decline of the Fundamentalists - How the 'Nones' are Taking Back US Politics for Democracy

Americans who aren't sure about God are a fast-growing force in politics – and they're typically even more politically active than white evangelicals

GSS study showing increase in American rious “Nones”
('Black Protestant' and 'Jewish' subsumed into 'Other faiths' to give 'Other affiliation'
'No religion' includes Atheists, Agnostics and spiritual but not affiliated to any religion).

With the raucous jabber of evangelicals drowning out other, quieter, more measured voices in American politics, a non-American like me could be forgiven for thinking they are the major force in US politics, and they have had some, hopefully short-term, successes such as getting Trump elected in 2016 and him then stuffing SCOTUS with right-wing Christian extremists who promptly overturned Roe vs Wade. But there are more measured and thoughtful voices also beginning to exert a moderating and humanitarian influence, especially in the Democratic Party. They are the growing number of 'Nones', or people with no religious affiliations.

Of course this include Atheists/Agnostics, but it also includes people for whom religion is a personal thing that doesn't require affiliation to any one organised religion, although studies have shown that 'None' tends to be a half-way house between religious and Atheist as the loss of group affiliation tends to free the individual to look dispassionately at the (lack of) evidence, free from peer-pressure, and draw the rational conclusion - there is no evidential reason for religious belief.

The evidence is that the 'Nones' could have been behind Biden's win in 2020, helping to secure swing states, since 1 in 5 Americans adults and more than 1 in 3 Democrat voters are now 'None', and since 'Nones' tend to be generally more informed, it would be surprising if they weren't having an effect on US politics.

In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency, Ryan Burge, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Eastern Illinois University, USA, gives his assessment of the impact the 'Nones' are now having on American politics. The original article can be read here:

The Trumpanzees are Losing it.

US midterms: America appears to have passed 'peak Trump'

This is beginning to look like the end times for Donald Trump and his Trumpanzee cult.

The mid-term elections which were supposed to deliver a 'red wave' of Repugnican candidates as Trumpanzees took control of both houses, failed to materialise and scarcely even resembled a dribble. It looks like the Democrats will retain control of the Senate and very many of the candidates publicly endorsed by Trump either lost or won by slim margins. To make matters worse for Trump personally, his arch rival for both the Repugnican choice for the 2024 presidential election and as leader of white right extremism, Ron DeSantis, won the gubernatorial race in Florida by a landslide, setting him up for a run at the presidency.

The Christian Bigots Are Revolting

Bishops openly repudiate the teaching of the Church of England - Christian Concern

Bishop of Oxford, Stephen Croft (left) and Andrea Williams, CEO of Christian Concern (right)

Like the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, or Church of England (CofE) in Britain is struggling to come to terms with the fact that society has moved on and no longer accepts the primitive Bronze Age moral code in the Bible. In order to stem the haemorrhage of members which has now left Anglicanism a minority cult in the UK with empty pews and derelict churches and not enough vicars to fill all the vacancies, reformers such as the Bishop of Oxford, Stephen Crofts, are trying to distance the church from that primitive barbarism, division, exclusion and hate that the Bible encourages. They are trying to make the CofE become more inclusive, embracing the humanist ethics that now form the basis of UK society, with same-sex marriages, sexual freedom, contraception and a woman's right to chose.

The problem for the CofE, like the Catholic church ,is that to catch up with modern society it has to abandon the fundamentals of the Early Medieval religion, yet, as its membership dwindles, the fanatical fundamentalists become proportionately more powerful within it. To those fundamentalists who are used to using the Bible to justify their smug bigotry and persecution of those who don't agree with them, to abandon the fundamentals is to abandon the faith altogether.

To these bigots the 'faith' is how they define it and they are not easily going to give up the basis for their entitled demand for the right to dictate to the rest of us.

This can be seen in a response by arch bigot, Andrea Williams, of Christian Concern, which represents the fundamentalist wing of Anglicanism, to proposed reforms in the CofE's attitude to same-sex marriage, with is dripping with condescension and the dogmatic assumption that their interpretation of their Bible is the definitive word of a god who empowered them to dictate to the rest of us.

Creationism in Crisis - New Pterosaur Species Found in Sub-Saharan Africa

New pterosaur species found in sub-Saharan Africa - SMU

SMU paleontologists helped find a new species of pterosaurs in Angola, where fossils of other large marine animals have been found. E. otyikokolo can be seen flying above the ocean in the ancient picture.

Artwork by Karen Carr Studio.

It must be difficult trying to maintain the necessary ignorance of the facts to be a Creationist who believes Earth was created as is just a few thousand years ago - rather like an idiot standing with his eyes shut, hoping if he can't see it, the onrushing avalanche won't affect him.

So, it's with great pleasure that I add another large boulder to that onrushing avalanche, in the form of news of a new species of pterosaur that lived on the coast of what is now Angola in West Africa, about 71.5 million years ago. It had a wing-span of almost 16 feet (4.8 metres).

Creationism in Crisis - The Evolution of Modern Human Intelligence.

When did we become fully human? What fossils and DNA tell us about the evolution of modern intelligence

My last couple of blog posts have delt with the evolution of human cultures by a process analogous to Darwinian evolution, which follows the pattern of our physical evolution with partial divergence, remerging, and hybridization with closely related species, and how the evidence utterly refutes the narrative in the Bible and the Qur'an and shows them to be nothing more than myths made up by ignorant people.

Being entirely ignorant of earlier cultures and seeing no need to explain cultural development, the Bible's authors saw no need to even make up tales to explain it. To them, humans had aleays been as they were in the Bronze Age. We now know better, of course.

This blog looks at how the elements of modern human cultures evolved much later in our history than when we became anatomically modern. It is, of course, debateable whether we became fully modern humans without fully modern cultures.

It turns out that the reason it took so long to evolve the elements of modern cultures was that there simply weren't enough of us to produce enough innovative geniuses - the Da Vincis, Einsteins, Newtons and Darwins of their day.

One of the explanations for why Neanderthals never developed more than simple stone technology was that they existed a small, scattered bands, so any new ideas tended to remain local and not spread across the entire species. If the local group died out, its ideas and any innovations died with them. This might well have been so for anatomically modern humans.

The following article by Nicholas R. Longrich, Senior Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology and Paleontology, University of Bath, Somerset, UK discusses this problem and outlines the development of human cultures. It is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here: