The World Health Organization (WHO) recently confirmed an outbreak of Marburg disease - in Kie Ntem Province of the West African country of Equatorial Guinea. Marburg disease is a haemorrhagic fever which is frequently fatal in humans. So far, 9 victims have died and a further 16 people are suspected of being infected. 200 contacts of these victims have so far been traced and put into quarantine by the WHO.
Marburg is a filovirus like the related ebola, and has a fatality ratio of 88%. It is highly infectious and easily transmitted. At the moment there is insufficient data to compare its infectivity with that of ebola.
The big concern is that this virus could break out of its endemic stronghold in West Africa and, like the SARS-CoV-2 Virus, become a major pandemic in a world in which health services are already overstretched, still dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, which is far from over.
Embarrassingly for intelligent [sic] design Creationists, it is central to their cult think that all life is the work of their supposed designer deity, which, being omniscient, only ever designs organisms like viruses in the full knowledge of what they will do; de facto it designs them to do exactly what they do. In other words, if Marburg does become a major pandemic, that is exactly what it intended when it designed it.
The following article by Professor C Raina MacIntyre, NHMRC Principal Research Fellow, Head, Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney, explains what Marburg is, and discusses whether we should be worried. The article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license and reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here:
Another nail has been driven into the coffin of the absurd Creationist notion that humans are a unique creation of a magic creator who endowed us with special qualities not given to other species. One of these supposed unique species is sentience, which includes a sense of self, so only humans are supposedly able to understand that they have some special purpose, while all other life-forms are unaware of, for example, their own existence and mortality.
And of course, not being sentient they are not capable of having emotions and run entirely on instinct and reflexes.
The nail was driven in quite casually and without the intention of refuting creationism, like so much else in science, simply by exposing the facts. The facts are once again diametrically opposite to what Creationists believe. The research team showed that a species of fish known as the bluestreak cleaner wrasse, Labroides dimidiatus, has a sense of self to the extent that it recognises photographs of itself by recognising its own face.
Perhaps even more surprising was the fact that, when the photograph was 'shopped' to make it look there was a parasite attached to their throat, the wrasses rubbed themselves to try to remove it! This shows a remarkable degree of self-awareness and sentience, especially since mirrors are not part of their natural environment.
The team that made this discovery was led by Professor Masanori Kohda from the Graduate School of Science at the Osaka Metropolitan University. They showed that cleaner wrasses recognise themselves in photographs the same way humans do - by recognising their own face. These fish were chosen as research subjects because they appear to recognise strangers in their midst and drive them away, while tolerating others of their own companion group. In this way individuals maintain and defend their 'cleaning stations' where other fish come to be cleaned of parasites, even from inside the mouth of predatory fish.
The research is described in the Osaka Metropolitan University press release:
A big step forward in vertebrate cognitive function research
A research team led by Specially Appointed Professor Masanori Kohda from the Graduate School of Science at the Osaka Metropolitan University has demonstrated that fish think “it’s me” when they see themselves in a picture, for the first time in animals. The researchers found that the determining factor was not seeing their own body but seeing their face. These findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This study is the first to demonstrate that fish have an internal sense of self. Since the target animal is a fish, this finding suggests that nearly all social vertebrates also have this higher sense of self.
Professor Masanori Kohda, lead author
Laboratory of Animal Sociology
Department of Biology and Geosciences
Graduate School of Science
Osaka City University, Osaka, Japan
In this study, relevant experiments were conducted with Labroides dimidiatus, commonly known as a cleaner fish, which are known to be able to recognize themselves in mirrors and regularly attack other unfamiliar cleaner fish who intrude on their territory. Each cleaner fish was presented with four photographs: a photo of themselves; a photo of an unfamiliar cleaner; a photo of their own face on an unfamiliar cleaner’s body; and a photo of unfamiliar cleaner’s face on their own body. Interestingly, the cleaner fish did not attack photos with their own faces but did attack those with the faces of unfamiliar cleaner fish. Together these results indicate that the cleaner fish determined who was in the photograph based on the face in the photo but not the body in the similar way humans do.
To negate the possibility that the fish considered photographs of themselves as very close companions, a photograph mark-test was conducted. Fish were presented with a photograph where a parasite-like mark was placed on their throat. Six of the eight individuals that saw the photograph of themselves with a parasite mark were observed to rub their throats to clean it off. While showing those same fish pictures of themselves without parasite marks or of a familiar cleaner fish with parasite marks did not cause them to rub their throats.
Some animals have the capacity for mirror self-recognition, but implications for self-awareness remain controversial. Here, we show that cleaner fish, Labroides dimidiatus, likely recognize their own mirror image using a mental image of the self-face comparable to humans. Mirror-naïve fish frequently attacked photographs of both themselves and strangers. In contrast, after passing the mirror test, aggression against their own photograph and composite photographs of own face/stranger body declined, but aggression remained toward unfamiliar and composite photographs of stranger face/own body. Our results suggest that cleaner fish with MSR ability can recognize their own mirror image based on a mental image of their own face, rather than by comparing body movements in the mirror. This study demonstrates how animals recognize self-images.
Abstract
Some animals have the remarkable capacity for mirror self-recognition (MSR), yet any implications for self-awareness remain uncertain and controversial. This is largely because explicit tests of the two potential mechanisms underlying MSR are still lacking: mental image of the self and kinesthetic visual matching. Here, we test the hypothesis that MSR ability in cleaner fish, Labroides dimidiatus, is associated with a mental image of the self, in particular the self-face, like in humans. Mirror-naive fish initially attacked photograph models of both themselves and unfamiliar strangers. In contrast, after all fish had passed the mirror mark test, fish did not attack their own (motionless) images, but still frequently attacked those of unfamiliar individuals. When fish were exposed to composite photographs, the self-face/unfamiliar body were not attacked, but photographs of unfamiliar face/self-body were attacked, demonstrating that cleaner fish with MSR capacity recognize their own facial characteristics in photographs. Additionally, when presented with self-photographs with a mark placed on the throat, unmarked mirror-experienced cleaner fish demonstrated throat-scraping behaviors. When combined, our results provide clear evidence that cleaner fish recognize themselves in photographs and that the likely mechanism for MSR is associated with a mental image of the self-face, not a kinesthetic visual-matching model. Humans are also capable of having a mental image of the self-face, which is considered an example of private self-awareness. We demonstrate that combining mirror test experiments with photographs has enormous potential to further our understanding of the evolution of cognitive processes and private self-awareness across nonhuman animals.
It's worth repeating what Professor Kohda said: because this ability is present in a fish, it is likely to be present in all social vertebrates - a far cry from what Creationist frauds tell their credulous dupes to make them feel special.
Imagine you're a Creationist fraud trying to convince your credulous cult that a magic man in the sky made humans specially and flattering your target marks by citing our high intelligence as evidence of our difference, as though we are the only species to have something that makes us unique (like every other species has). Then along come a bunch of clever scientists and shows that another, very distantly related species, a cockatoo, is also highly intelligent.
The conclusion any sensible person is going to draw from this is that intelligence is not unique to humans but is an evolved trait that has arisen in many distantly related species such as octopuses, bees, birds, and several mammals. That it has arisen independently can be concluded from the fact that it is a relatively rare trait. If it had evolved from a remote last common ancestor of cephalopods, insects, birds and mammals it would be almost universal in the animal kingdom, not unusual.
How then do you fool a sensible person into thinking humans are unique with a unique design which includes high intelligence, when the evidence shows otherwise? Well, you don't, of course. As a dedicated confidence trickster and fraud, your target market is the lower few percentiles of the IQ curve and those whose thinking ability has been inhibited by theophobic psychosis, also known as religious fundamentalism, an acute anxiety disorder normally caused by mental abuse in childhood, so you simply ignore the evidence, confident that they are very unlikely to read it, but if they do they won’t understand its significance and will wave it aside because it doesn’t support them.
You will have targeted that demographic specifically because of their inability to evaluate complex evidence and draw valid conclusions from it, or to change their minds from those opinions foisted on them by childhood conditioning and maintained by the terror of thinking they could be wrong under the watchful eye of an invisible mind-reading sky bogeyman who has a uniquely terrifying punishment waiting for doubters.
So here then is an account of how a species of bird, the Goffin's cockatoo, Cacatua goffiniana, not only quickly learns to use two different tools to solve a problem with a two-stage solution, but then remember what tools it needs for the task and selects them to take with it when leaving to perform the task.
If there is anything Creationism's intelligent [sic] designer is notable for, it's never missing an opportunity to make more people sick with its specially designed pathological parasites. Take for example, the simple pleasure of sharing a Jacuzzi with friends and neighbours.
Of course, if it’s anything like the miserable old pleasure-hating deity of the Christian Bible or the Qur’an, the malevolent designer probably hates the idea of semi-naked people having fun in a hot tub together, drinking wine and maybe even touching one another. I'm reliably informed that Australians even make love in them!
We've often discussed the possibility of a Jacuzzi in our back garden, especially as we have nice neighbours who would undoubtedly join us in one with a glass or two of wine if invited. There are few things more relaxing than sparkling white wine and the tickle of bubbles rising up underneath you, especially on a balmy summer evening.
However, having read the following article by Primrose Freestone, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Microbiology, University of Leicester, I think I'll forego that pleasure in favour of sun loungers around a fire pit.
The article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistence. The original can be read here.
The evolution of cultivated wheat presents challenges most Creationists will avoid if possible. The first and perhaps most obvious challenge is why has wheat needed to be improved by cultivation and human selection if, as Creationists believe, it was created by a perfect, omniscient designer for the benefit of humans? Did the designer not foresee the future needs of humans or anticipate the problem of feeding a large population from a crop with inadequate yields?
The second is that fact that, despite the ludicrous Creationists' insistence that the Theory of Evolution (TOE) is a theory in crisis, and about to be overthrown as a scientific theory by their superstition, including magic and an unproven magical entity, the only viable explanation for the changes which have occurred over time is selection by human agency, in other words a form of accelerated evolution by natural selection and primitive genetic engineering by people who knew nothing of genetics, just like the natural environment.
Awnless wheat, similar to that which first appeared about 2,000 years ago.
Archaeological records show that, for about 10,000 following the first cultivation of wild wheat in Mesopotamia about 12,000 years ago, wheat grains had long awns, then about 2000 years ago, wheat diversified into awned and awnless or very short awned varieties.
Clearly, given the length of time awned whet was grown, there was not strong selection for awnless wheat, so why did the different varieties evolve, apparently suited to different environmental conditions. This was the question a study, published in the journal Trends in Plant Science, co-led by the University of Barcelona, the Agrotecnio centre and the University of Lleida, set out to answer. Creationists might note that nowhere does magic or a magic entity appear in the explanation, which depends in its entirety on the workings of the TOE.
The research and its significance are explained in a University of Barcelona news release:
Earwigs are often regarded as garden pests because they can and sometimes do, damage growing plants and soft fruits such as strawberries, but what is not generally recognised is that they are predators on much more destructive pests such as aphids.
But there are a few things about these fascinating insects that mean they should command our respect and protection by leaving them undisturbed.
It's a source of embarrassment to the scientists concerned, and no doubt a small crumb of comfort to those anti-science extremist propagandists trying to fool scientifically illiterate simpletons into thinking science is unreliable, that scientists have discovered a major mistake.
To those who understand science and how scientific opinion is always contingent and subject to revision and where nothing is ever cast in tablets of stone; where the only certainty is that there are no certainties, it is always rewarding and reassuring when mistakes are discovered and corrected because this shows the scientific method is working.
Just such an example came to light recently when scientists revisited the site where a fossil, thought at the time it was first discovered to be highly significant, had been found. What they discovered was that the ‘’ not only was nothing of the sort, but was actually in an advanced state of decay and peeling off the wall of the cave in which it had been found about a year earlier - things no self-respecting fossil should be doing.
It turned out that the 'fossil' was the recent remains of a wild honeybee (Apis dorsata) hive which, when discovered, bore a remarkable resemblance to an Ediacaran fossil, Dickinsonia tenuis, only previously known from South Australia. The implications for the age of the rock formation in which it was appeared to solve the problem of accurate dating of the rock formation and its origins in the ancient supercontinent, Gondwanaland, some 550 million years ago.
For the first time in a census of England and Wales, less than half of the population (46.2%, 27.5 million people) described themselves as “Christian”, a 13.1 percentage point decrease from 59.3% (33.3 million) in 2011; despite this decrease, “Christian” remained the most common response to the religion question.
Figures released recently by the UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) show that in the 2021 census, in answer to a voluntary question, less than half (46.2%) of the 56.0 million people who answered (94%) self-identified as 'Christian'. This represents a 13.1 percentage point decrease from the figure for 2011 for the same voluntary question.
The second most common answer was 'no religion', up by 12 percentage points from 25.2% (2011) to 37.2%.
Reports recently submitted to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) by the Northern Ireland based child rights advocacy group, The Children's Law Center (CLC) demonstrate how religion continues to poisoning community relations, maintain divisions and hostility and deprive people of basic human rights, in Northern Ireland.
Despite years of progress following the end of the 'troubles' with the 'Good Friday' Belfast Agreement and the establishment of a power-sharing executive to administer devolved political power, the major source of intercommunal tension continues to be religion. The single most important barrier to the removal of religion as a source of hostility is the de facto segregation of primary and secondary education because of the insistence by the main Christian churches that they are not only influential in, but have control of education.
Despite a poll in 2012 which showed that 71% of the people of Northern Ireland believe an integrated education system should be the "primary model for the education system" and a 2016 UNCRC recommendation that Northern Ireland "actively promote a fully integrated education system" to facilitate "social integration, 93% of children in the province still attend faith schools while the few fully integrated schools can't meet the demand. In effect, parents have no choice but to send their children to be indoctrinated into one or other of two mutually hostile camps.
In 2016, the UNCRC also recommended ending the legally mandated collective worship in Northern Ireland schools where, unlike in England and Wales, even children over the age of 16 have no right to withdraw themselves from collective worship. Last year the High Court in Northern Ireland agreed that this situation is incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. Although parents can withdraw their children from collective worship, the process is often difficult, and children rarely receive an alternative period of equal educational value. Children are also required to reveal details of their beliefs, in violation of their right to privacy, and often face stigmatisation and prejudice.
As part of their religious education syllabus, faith schools are permitted to include their religion's orthodox teaching on relationships and sex education, leaving LGBTQ+ students feeling that they are the victims of homophobic bullying and demonisation, again in violation of their basic human rights.
There is no requirement for Northern Ireland's schools to teach evolution in science class and, unlike in England, where state-funded schools are forbidden from teaching scientifically discredited superstitions like creationism and intelligent design as science, no such bar exists in Northern Ireland where creationism in its various forms can be presented to children as a valid alternative to the scientific view, and the Christian Bible can be taught as real science and history.
Indeed, the state is complicit in misleading children and depriving them of a sound, evidence-based education, or an objective view of religions, because schools are required to teach RE "based on the holy scriptures", with the syllabus designed by the "four main Christian churches", without non-religious, or non-Christian input. Religions besides Christianity are described as "other religions", illustrating Christianity's privileged position. There is no provision to objectively evaluate the claims of the various religions or make an meaningful comparison between them and the non-religious view of the world.
Despite the diminishing role and influence of religion in both the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, religion continues to hold sway in Northern Ireland, and in doing so, continues to foment and encourage intercommunal tension and strife while pretending to be peacemakers. Clearly, the interests of the priests and the churches is paramount and the interests of the people comes way down the list of priorities.
It is yet more bad news for those few dupes who still believe the absurd Creationist lie that the Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis and about to be replaced by their childish superstition complete with magic and unproven supernatural entities.
In their correspondence, the authors, Edward J. Larson, of the Department of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA and Larry Witham of Burtonsville, Maryland, USA, report on the findings of a survey which shows that disbelief [in a god] is almost total amongst "top natural scientists".
The authors repeated the survey conducted in 1914 by the eminent psychiatrist, James H. Leuba, in which he found that 58% of 1000 randomly selected scientist expressed doubt or disbelief in the existence of God and that this figure rose to near 70% among the 400 "greater" scientists in his sample.
On repeating his survey 20 years later in 1933 (published in 1934), Leuba found that these percentages had risen to 67 and 85, respectively. He attributed this higher level of disbelief in the "greater" scientists to their "superior knowledge, understanding, and experience". This view was echoed by Peter Atkins of Oxford University in his comment on Larson's and Witham's 1996 paper, in which he said, "“You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs. But I don't think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because they are such alien categories of knowledge.”
It was in response to this and similar comments that Larson & Witham decided to rerun the second phase of Leuba's study to compare the religious beliefs of "greater" and "lesser" scientists. They defined "greater" scientists as those belonging to the US National Academy of Sciences:
The significance of the discovery of human remains in a Welsh cave almost exactly 200 years ago to the day, on 18 January, 1823, was entirely missed because the Oxford University Palaeontologist, William Buckland, was also an Anglican priest who believed the Bible to be the inerrant word of a creator god and so literal history.
Today, this is something only believed by scientifically illiterate Creationists and those made too afraid by childhood indoctrination to question it or acknowledge the evidence to the contrary.
After changing his mind several times, Buckland concluded on scant evidence that the skeletal remains were that of a female prostitute who had drowned in the Biblical flood and whose body had got washed into the cave along with the other animal remains found there, because this was the only way he could think of to fit the facts into the Bible narrative.
In fact, the body is that of a man of about 25-28, who died about 33,000 years ago and so is the earliest example of a ceremonial burial in Western Europe. In taking the remains, together with the artifacts found with them, back to Oxford and failing to recognise their cultural significance to Wales, he so deprived Wales of a cultural icon.
The story of how the Bible, or rather the mistaken belief that the Bible is literal history, mislead 19th Century palaeontologists is told by Ffion Reynolds, Honorary Research Fellow, and Jacqui Mulville, Professor in Bioarchaeology and Head of Archaeology and Conservation, both of Cardiff University, in an article in The Conversation. The article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
Your genes haven't always been human. In fact most of them have spent far more time not being human than they have being human.
This is because you inherited them from your parents and their parents before them, going right back to before your ancestors were human; before they were mammals, before they were vertebrates, and even before they were multicellular organisms.
You are the product of billions of passes through the sieve of selection and at every pass your gene-line passed the fitness test. Your genes are good at surviving; and you are unique in the history of the cosmos. The likelihood of you being alive at all is almost vanishingly small and yet here you are. Never before has anyone with your combination of genes, your collection of atoms and your history existed.
And you never will again.
Almost all your genes have spent much longer being something else than they have being human. Your ancestors were there when Europe and Africa split off from the Americas. They were there as small mammal-like reptiles when dinosaurs ruled the earth. They saw pterodactyls flying overhead. They survived the mass-extinction which ended the dinosaurs’ reign and they saw the birds and the bats grow wings and take to the air.
Your ancestors swam in the Cambrian seas and crawled out onto the land as early air-gulping fish destined to become four–legged animals with lungs. Your ancestors lived through the Carboniferous era when dense forests of tree ferns grew in steaming jungles where dragonflies with meter-wide wings flew. They saw the trees fall and form the piles of vegetation destined to be coal as the climate changed and the Carboniferous forests collapsed. They saw the first flowering plants as plants and insects formed their mutual-benefit society.
Your ancestors lived through the first great toxic waste disaster when the cyanobacteria produced oxygen and triggered a mass extinction; and they learned to turn it to their advantage by evolving aerobic respiration.
Your ancestors were bacteria; maybe they were archaea; they may have been the strange Ediacarans which were the earliest known multi-cellular organisms. In almost every one of your cells, in your genes, you carry a record of your evolution, of the entire human evolution story, and of a great deal of the evolution story of every other living thing.
Your journey through space and time has been an adventure of disasters, adaptation, survival and recovery, many, many times you will have been on the brink of extinction - the fate of 99% of all known ancient species - yet your ancestors survived and because they were good at surviving you are here and now.
In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence, Alice Clement, Research Associate in the College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University, Australia, identifies five key features we have inherited from remote ancestors. These are:
Bipedal walking, including changes to our pelvis - inherited from archaic hominins.
Openings in our skull, inherited from our synapsid ancestors, which includes relatives of the Dimetrodon.
Five fingers and toes, inherited from our fish ancestors that first emerged onto land.
Teeth, inherited from early jawed fish from the Silurian, about 14 million years ago.
The spinal chord and vetebrae, inherited from early chordates which evolved a 'notocord', some 500 million years ago.
The original article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency.
Creationists are obliged by the dogma of their cult to believe that nothing in genetics happens by chance, so everything about an individual’s genetic makeup is the deliberate creation of their putative designer. Indeed, this creator choses the exact sperm that will fertilise the ovum to produce the intended individual complete with the precise genetic makeup of that individual, including any mutations that arise in the creation of the sperm and ovum.
So it must come as something of a shock to creationists to discover that their putative creator appear to randomly create individuals with genes that predispose them to genetic defects and illnesses that mean they will inevitably suffer through no fault of their own, and apparently regardless of how they have lived their lives. In fact, since these are inherited at conception, the predisposition must be at the capricious will of the creator of it.
One such genetic condition was recently discovered by an international team of researchers co-led by immunogeneticist Rubén Martínez-Barricarte from Vanderbilt University Medical Center who have discovered a new genetic disorder that causes immunodeficiency and profound susceptibility to opportunistic infections including a life-threatening fungal pneumonia.
The consortium's finding is reported, open access, in Science Immunology.
According to a news release by Bill Snyder of Vanderbilt University:
In a very neat example of how much information can be obtained by forensic examination and deductive logic, a team of paleoarchaeologists have shown that because climate change, profound though it was at times, never changed the food or distribution of the animals they hunted, Neanderthals in France never needed to change their hunting strategies.
This conclusion was arrived at after examining the microwear on the surface of the teeth of the remains of hunted animals found at the Combe-Grenal site in France. This microwear showed that, during the few weeks before they were killed, they ate the same vegetation regardless of the climate on the European tundra as the climate fluctuated widely during the Middle Palaeolithic from around 150,000 to 45,000 years ago when Neanderthals intermittently occupied the site.
The scientists' findings are published open access in PLoS ONE.
The once common European brown hare, Lepus europeaeus has declined by 80% in the UK in recent years, and, as the Chinese year of the Rabbit is about to begin, it's not the only threatened species of the order Lagomorpha, to which rabbits, hares and other related species belong.
In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, Emma Sherratt, Senior Research Fellow in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Adelaide, Australia, list just a few of the 108 lagomorphs, two-thirds of which were already threatened by climate change. Now the number endangered has risen from 13 to 16.
Her original article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency.
In a paper published in Science last May, a team of research biologists led by Timothée Bonnet of the Australian National University presented evidence that should create consternation and anguish amongst Creationist frauds intent on convincing their cult members that the Theory of Evolution is somehow in crisis and being increasingly rejected by research biologists in favour of their childish origin myth. It reports the finding that evolution is proceeding even faster than anyone previously thought.
Of course, the definition they used for evolution is the standard scientific one of change in allele frequency over time, not the absurd Creationist notion that it means one species suddenly changing into another, or even organisms changing into humans via a few 'intermediate species'.
One of the studies, on great tits, was carried out just a stones throw from where I live, in Wytham Wood, near Oxford, one of the most intensively studied areas of woodland in the world, belonging as it does to Oxford University.
The research and its significance were reported in an article in The Conversation written by lead author, Timothée Bonnet, researcher in evolutionary biology (DECRA fellow), Australian National University. The article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence. It is reformatted for stylistic consistency.
Evolution is defined as change in allele frequency in a population over time. It is not a single event but a slow process which often needs a long period of time to be observed. Speciation may be the incidental result of this process of change over time but it is not the purpose of it, nor is it required for evolution to be occurring.
It doesn't seem to matter to a Creationist that observable examples of evolution in progress, in other words, examples of observed change in allele frequency in the population over time, can be found throughout nature, because they will simply dismiss it by redefining evolution as the childish notion of a sudden change of one species into another. So, for example, evolutionary changes in Australian feral domestic cats will be dismissed as, "But they're still cats!"
In fact, feral domestic cats are not the only species that can be observed evolving in Australia where a combination of the founder effect, genetic drift and natural selection in the unique Australian environment are causing introduced species to diverge from their ancestral species. In the following article, Bill Bateman, Associate professor, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia, describes a number of examples of observable evolutionary change.
Creationists who have been fooled into believing that evolution is a theory in crisis and biologists are abandoning it in favour of their childish superstition including magic and a supernatural entity should note the complete lack of any evidence for that idiotic notion. The article describes evolutionary changes and the causes of them which are entirely consistent with the scientific Theory of Evolution. No-where are magic or supernatural entities invoked to explain the observations.
With the exception of only a few, relatively minor, changes to our genome, such as loss of skin pigmentation and changes to hair and eye colour, and the ingression of Neanderthal and Denisovan genes, non-African humans differ little from the first Homo sapiens to venture out of Africa, where they had evolved as a tropical species. Today, humans are the only Great Ape to live outside of the tropics.
And yet we have managed to live in northern climates with shorter days in winter and sub-zero temperatures in which the earliest members of our species would probably not survive a night without special measures.
With our physical and physiological makeup differing so little from our African forebears, what has enabled us to survive in these hostile conditions to which we were so mal adapted? The answer is that an additional layer of evolution is operating alongside genetic evolution - memetic, or cultural, evolution - so-called gene-meme co-evolution.
Memetic evolution has taken us from the bands of hunter-gatherers huddled round a campfire and sheltering in caves and rock overhangs, to a modern urbanised, hi-tec species living in centrally heated buildings or dressing in warm clothing and entirely dependent on science and technology for our survival. Put us naked out in the open on a cold winter night and few of us would survive, let alone thrive, and survival without cloths and shelter would be impossible on the arctic tundra even in summer.
In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation, Laura Buck, Lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology, and Kyoko Yamaguchi, Senior Lecturer in Human Genetics, both of Liverpool John Moores University, explain how we and our cousin species, the Neanderthals adapted to the very non-African conditions they found themselves in.
The article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency; the original can be read here.
By analysing the genomes of more than 2,800 individuals who lived in Europe over the last 10,000 years, scientists at the Institut Pasteur, Université Paris Cité, the CNRS and the Collège de France, in collaboration with the Imagine Institute and The Rockefeller University, USA, have traced how the European human immune system has evolved over that period. The increase in frequency of most of the mutations that are advantageous in defending against pathogens were dated to after the Bronze Age, 4,500 years ago.
The scientists also observed that most of the mutations conferring a higher risk of developing inflammatory disorders have become more frequent over the past 10,000 years, suggesting that there is an evolutionary trade-off between greater immunity and greater risk of auto-immune, inflammatory disorders.
This trade-off, is, of course, something that we would not expect to see if the immune system had been improved by an intelligent designer, unless the designer malevolently intended us to suffer from auto-immune conditions.
The evolutionary explanation for this is simply that most of the benefit of a strong immune system manifests in childhood and early adulthood, before the individual has been exposed to environmental pathogens and built up a library of antibodies, and before they have had chance to produce offspring, when selection pressures are thus higher, whereas most of the detriment of auto-immune inflammatory conditions tends to occur in later life, after the individual has reproduced, when the selection pressure is thus much lower.
The research has just been published open access in the journal Cell Genomics.
The research and its significance are explained in a news release from the Institut Pasteur:
Unlike creationism which, because it depends on magic and unproven, unfalsifiable magic supernatural entities, is incapable of making falsifiable predictions, the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection (TOE) predicts that, from the same starting point, the same environmental changes will produce the same or very similar phenotypic changes, such as that recently reported for populations of lizards in Puerto Rico.
A paper recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), reports on a case of parallel evolution between populations of the Puerto Rican crested anole, Anolis cristatellus, where unconnected populations in urban areas have evolved very similar adaptations to an urban environment compared to those living in a forest environment. The paper reports the findings of a team of researchers led by assistant professor of biology, Kristin Winchell, of New York University (NYU), NY, USA.
The NYU news release explains the research and its significance:
A supporter of President Donald Trump, seen wearing a QAnon shirt, is confronted by Capitol Police officers outside the Senate Chamber during the invasion of the U.S. Capitol
Credit: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
It's probably hard for rationl people to understand why some people fall for such ludicrous conspiracy theories as the QAnon hoax that Donald Trump was fighting the Satanic cannibalistic paedophile ring led by Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama that is secretly running the 'deep state', or that the 2020 election was stolen (apparently without leaving a trace of evidence that would stand up in court). The same fruit loops have also been convinced that the odious liar, crook, serial adulterer, and incompetent narcissist, Trump was send by God to fight Satan and that God had told various self-appointed 'prophets' that Trump would win by a landslide in 2020, so he must have done really.
As it became more and more apparent just how badly Trump lost, being the only presidential candidate in American political history to lose the popular vote twice and that Joe Biden had won it by a record margin, so the conspiracy theories became more and more lurid.
So why do some credulous fools fall for these unlikely theories, usually involving vast secret conspiracies such as the entire scientific community together with all their technical and administrative staff and everyone involved in publishing scientific books, periodicals and papers, or senior military leaders and heads of government of even hostile states, together with their advisors and civil service?
In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, Daniel Jolley, Assistant Professor in Social Psychology, University of Nottingham, UK and Anthony, Lantian, Associate Professor in Psychology, Université Paris Nanterre – Université Paris Lumières, France, explain the psychology and the social causes of this gullibility and readiness to believe the patently absurd. The article, the original of which can be read here, is reformatted for stylistic consistence.
As is entirely predictable from the Theory of Evolution, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that has caused the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, has mutated to produce an even more infectious version - a subvariant of the Omicron variant, given the variant name XBB.1.5 and nicknames 'kraken', under the suggested new protocol of naming significant variants after Greek mythological creatures instead of letters of the Greek alphabet..
This appears to have originated in the USA where a large number of people have resisted getting vaccinated due to the politically-motivated antivaxx campaign by the far right supporters of failed president, Donald Trump,. Trump declared the pandemic to be a hoax and COVID-19 to be a mild illness, early on in the pandemic, when he was out of his depth and panicking over how to cope with the emergency. Having acted out of spite and motivated by racism and a desire to expunge his achievements, Trump had stupidly dismantled the contingencies for just such a pandemic put in place by his hated African-American predecessor, Barak Obama.
Inhibited from doing so by his narcissistic personality disorder, Trump was then unable to admit he got it wrong and his cronies in the Repugnican Party and the evangelical white Christian sects set about campaigning against any measures to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, including establishing the QAnon cult to promulgate disinformation.
The upshot is a high degree of vaccine scepticism in the USA with a significant majority being vaccinated - a recipe for producing lots of new variants in the unvaccinated population which will then find a niche in the vaccinated population, if they can evade the antibodies.
But is this variant anything to be overly concerned about?
In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence, Dr. Grace C Roberts, a research fellow in virology at the University of Leeds, assesses the risks from this new variant for the world in general and the UK in particular. The article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here.
The ‘kraken’ COVID variant XBB.1.5 is rising quickly in the US – here’s what it could mean for the UK
The heavily mutated omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was first detected in late 2021.
Due to the many mutations in the spike protein (a protein on the surface of SARS-CoV-2 that allows the virus to attach to our cells) omicron was able to quickly become the dominant SARS-CoV-2 variant. These mutations allowed it to bind to respiratory cells more tightly than previous variants, rendering it more infectious.
Owing to the dominance of omicron, thanks to these mutations, the past several months have seen the emergence of many subvariants of omicron (scientists have identified more than 650 to date).
The latest variant to worry health professionals and virologists alike is XBB.1.5, nicknamed “kraken” by a group of scientists that has been naming new variants after mythological creatures to make the virus’ evolution more accessible to the public. Here’s what we know about it.
XBB.1.5 is a derivative of the XBB variant of omicron. XBB was never designated as a variant of concern by the World Health Organization because data shows that, while XBB’s mutations enable it to evade our immune systems better than previous omicron subvariants, it doesn’t appear to be causing an increase in infection rates.
In addition to the mutations that XBB.1 has, XBB.1.5 also carries a mutation called S486P in the spike protein region. Preliminary laboratory studies, yet to be peer-reviewed, have shown that, similar to XBB.1, XBB.1.5 is less sensitive to antibodies acquired from vaccination than previous variants XBB and BQ1.1. So it’s very good at evading our immune response.
The same preprint showed that XBB.1.5 was able to bind to ACE2 (the receptor the virus uses to infect our cells) more strongly than these earlier variants. This is the characteristic that made the original omicron variant so infectious and so dominant.
Having first been detected in October 2022 in the US, XBB.1.5 has spread rapidly in the country and is now responsible for around 28% of all new infections. Elsewhere, XBB.1.5 has been detected in at least 23 countries, including the UK. But according to the most recent data, it accounts for only 4% of COVID infections in England.
Given what we’re seeing in the US, it’s likely that XBB.1.5 will become the dominant strain in the UK and Europe in time. But as there are always differences in populations (for example, vaccination rates and social behaviour) it’s hard to predict exactly how things will play out.
XBB.1.5 is rife in the US, but not in the UK and Europe at this stage.
Though some of XBB.1.5’s characteristics are concerning, the real-world infection data is not showing an overall increase in infections or deaths globally or in the US (where XBB.1.5. is rife) at present.
It’s too early to tell whether infections from XBB.1.5 are more severe than previous variants, however experts agree that there is no evidence at this stage that it poses any higher risk than variants that have come before it.
Experts also agree that vaccination will continue to protect against serious disease and death from XBB.1.5.
With a new variant, there’s always the risk it will affect clinically vulnerable people more severely. Older people and those with conditions that affect their immune systems mount weaker responses to COVID vaccines, so are less protected than the “healthy” population. This means variants that spread more easily or can better evade our immune system may be more likely to infect these people if they’re exposed.
So, while COVID continues to circulate, it’s best to take extra precautions when meeting vulnerable people such as wearing a mask, washing your hands thoroughly, ventilating the space that you are in (or even meeting outdoors), and not meeting them at all if you are ill.
Published by The Conversation. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
It almost goes without saying that for a Creationists to claim intelligent [sic] design at work with these new variants is a tacit admission that their beloved creator god is malevolently designing ways to ensure its virus continues to make people sick and die and to disrupt economies indiscriminately across the world. That Creationists prefer us to have this view of their god rather than accept the science of evolution by mutation and natural selection betrays a hidden political agenda behind Creationism that requites people to distrust science and be misinformed about it.
A rice field in Bengal, India. Rice is a staple crop for billions of people, but it has proved difficult to bring high-yield hybrid rice strainers to farmers. UC Davis scientists have developed a method to propagate hybrid rice as cloned seeds, reducing costs for growers and allowing them to save improved seed from season to season.
Getty Images
A paper published a couple of weeks ago should have been a major embarrassment to Creationists who believe the Bible tale that a perfect, supremely intelligent designer designed all the plants and animals of the world for mankind.
If that were the case, why have a team of scientists at UC Davis managed to improve the rice plant - a basic staple in the diet of many people.
In fact, of course, the rice plant, like all human crops and just about every domestic animal, has been improved immeasurably in the few tens of thousands of years since humans transitioned from hunter-gatherers to cattle-herders and farmers.
Epicurus (341-270 BCE)
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
If they had been intelligently designed, especially by an omniscient, omnipotent god, they would be perfectly fit for purpose already with no room for improvement. The fact that they aren't, should suggest to Creationists that there is a problem with their notion, since there was self-evidently no omniscient, omnipotent intelligence involved.
Human domestic animals and cultivated crops have been produced by selective breeding, and now genetic engineering, from the wild types that evolved without a plan and fitted only for maximising the number in the next generation. Nothing, and no-one bred wild rice, wild cattle, wild corn or wild sheep for human consumption or ease of harvest and storage. We did that from whatever starting point the natural processes of evolution had provided.
To anyone who understand it, it presents what amounts to the Epicurus Paradox all over again.
The research and its significance is explained in an article by Andy Fell in UC Davis News:
A picture taken on September 6, 2021, shows the reconstruction of the face of the oldest Neanderthal found in the Netherlands, nicknamed Krijn, on display at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden.
Bart Maat/ANP/AFP Via Getty Images
The idea of common origins of related species is a fundamental part of the Theory of Evolution, supported by both countless examples of nested hierarchies and the science of cladistics.
Creationists need to resort to unproven claims of common design, to explain the same or closely similar structures and processes being found in related species. In contrast to the scientific explanation of observable evidence of natural processes with no plan, no intent and no magical mysteries, Creationists need to invoke an unproven, unexplained and unfalsifiable magic supernatural entity, claiming this to be the better of the two for no other reason than that their mummy and daddy believed it and it makes them feel special.
Just such an example of the evidence of common origins has recently been published in Nature Ecology & Evolution which shows that both modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthals had the same rapid evolution of the organisation of the brain that is believed to be responsible for high levels of cognitive ability.
The fact that this is present in two closely related species is highly suggestive that it was present at least in their last common ancestor. It also suggests that Neanderthals had a level of cognitive ability on a par with modern humans.
The research and its significance is the subject of an article in The Conversation by three of the researchers, Professor Stephen Wroe, University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia; Dr. Gabriele Sansalone, Institute of Marine Sciences, National Research Council, Messina, Italy, and Professor Pasquale Raia, Department of Earth Sciences, Environment and Resources, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Monte Sant’Angelo, Naples, Italy. That article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here.
