Evolution not only explains why humans share 98.7% of our DNA with chimpanzees
and bonobos, it also explains why so much of our basic culture has its
counterpart in those two species, and why so much of what we once wrongly
thought was unique to our species is to be found in those species too.
For example, we were once believed to be the only species able to construct and
use tools, or devise solutions to problems, but chimpanzees, as well as many
other unrelated species) are capable of those things too; we once thought we
were the only ape that routinely gathered food then shared it with others, but
bonobos do that too. Bonobos even offer food to strangers in a form of
hospitality that has its counterpart in the way we offer food and drink to
visitors in our homes. Captive bonobos have been shown to prefer to share their
food with another bonobo who has none, than to eat alone.
Continuing my exploration of the artificial intelligence app, Ask AI, here is the latest example if its ability to produces professional-looking essays to order.
Me:
Write a 1000 word essay on how religions evolve in human culture. With references
Ask Al Chat App:
Religions have been an integral part of human culture since the dawn of civilization. They have played a significant role in shaping human societies, providing a sense of meaning and purpose to people's lives, and offering guidance on how to live a good life. However, religions are not static entities, and they evolve over time in response to changes in society, culture, and human understanding of the world.
The evolution of religions can be observed in many ways. One way is through the study of religious texts, which can reveal changes in beliefs, practices, and values over time. For example, the Bible, the foundational text of Christianity, has undergone numerous translations, revisions, and interpretations throughout history, reflecting changes in the social, cultural, and political contexts of the communities that produced and consumed it.
Another way to understand the evolution of religions is to examine the historical context in which they emerge and develop. For example, the emergence of Buddhism in ancient India can be understood as a response to the social and religious conditions of the time, including the caste system, the dominance of Brahmanism, and the search for spiritual liberation.
Similarly, the rise of Islam in the 7th century can be understood as a response to the political and cultural context of Arabia, including the tribal conflicts, the decline of the Byzantine and Sassanid empires, and the need for a unifying ideology.
It seem the 'God of the gaps' explanation carries a great deal of weight, especially as an explanation for natural phenomenon such as disease, drought, floods, earthquakes, etc., in smaller societies. Only as societies get larger are these supernatural explanation used to explain man-made disasters such as war, theft, mass murders, etc.
It's also true that, while developed societies such as the USA tend to look for supernatural explanations for man-made disasters, they also, with better education tend to look to science to explain natural phenomena and less so to imaginary supernatural causes.
The result is that the search for gaps in which to sit their god becomes an obsession of those who benefit from people's superstition, such as fundamentalist televangelists and Creation cult leaders, who continually attack science looking to find gaps, either real or imaginary in which to sit their ever-shrinking god and keep the income stream flowing.
Quite why there should be a difference between larger and smaller societies is discussed in an article by Dr. Joshua Conrad Jackson, postdoctoral fellow, Kellogg School of Management, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA and Professor Brock Bastian, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Australia.
The article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here.
How Good Is It And Will It Upset Creationists With Science?
I've been playing with the Artificial Intelligence App, Ask AI, available from Google Playstore.
I have to say it is pretty good at retrieving information quickly and accurately and presenting it in a well-written form. The following each took about 5 seconds to generate.
But is it accurate? Judge for yourself. The following was produced in the form of a .png image which I pasted into MS OneNote and extracted the text using OneNote's OCR. The formatting is mine:
Figures published in PLOS a few days ago point to an astonishing success rate for the self-inflicted genocide campaign waged by the MAGA/Trumpanzee cult during the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2021.
Probably as a result of the antivaxx campaign and the evangelical Christian and Repugnican-led campaign against the measures to impede the spread of the virus and lower pressure on health services such as social distancing, prohibiting indoor gatherings and wearing face-masks, the 'excess deaths' gap between Europe and the USA grew even wider.
It won't be long in any debate forum with Creationists, or even theists who are not Bible literalists but still like to think their magic invisible friend created the Universe with them in mind, that someone will claim the Universe is fine-tuned for life. The claim is that there are about 30 constants which all have to have just the values they have for intelligent life to exist.
There are of course many problems with this claim, most of which the person making it will be completely unaware, having only read what they want to believe and not anything that might contradict their 'faith'.
The main ones are:
In effect, they are arguing that their putative creator god can only create life within very narrow parameters, and yet an omnipotent god who allegedly created the 'rules' should be capable of creating anything it wants to create in any given set of parameters. So, if the creator constrained by natural laws and incapable of working outside its limitations? If so, who or what set those limitations.
The fine-tuned argument is actually an argument against the existence of an omnipotent creator god, not for one.
Discussions about the existence of intelligent life can only be conducted in a Universe in which intelligent life exists, therefore, the fact that the debate is taking place means the Universe must be capable of giving rise to intelligent life. Trying to work out the probability of something happening that has already happened is statistical nonsense. The probability is 1 (certainty).
Assuming those constants do have a range of possible values (and that's only an assumption with no evidence ever presented), in order to calculate the probability of it having the value it has in this Universe, we would need to examine a large sample of universes. That of course is impossible, so, for all we know, the probability of any constant having its current value may be certainty, i.e. it might not be capable of having any other value. That the probability of it having its current value being unlikely, is merely an assumption - a claim without evidence which can be dismissed without evidence.
In this universe, the vast majority of it is highly hostile to life as we know it. Even in this planetary system, life can only exist on one planet, and intelligent (human) life can only exist on a fraction of the surface of this planet and within a few thousand feet of its surface without special equipment. So, far from being fine-tuned for life, almost all of it is fine-tuned to make life impossible.
Earth is not particularly well designed for human life (which is what Creationists men by 'intelligent life'). It is tectonically active which means it is subject to frequent natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis; humans cannot survive for long and without equipment in the oceans or at the top of mountains, in deserts of at the poles. Earth is subject to occasional cosmic disasters such as meteorite strikes and it orbits a sun which will one day destroy it by turning into a red giant, hence intelligent life such as that on Earth will only exist for a fraction of the time the Universe will exist.
There are very many more black holes in the Universe than there are humans, so it would be more logical to argue that the Universe is fine-tunes for making black holes.
One of the more hilarious arguments against science that I have had levelled at me by a Creationist is that you can't prove reality exists, and yet the whole of science claims to be a description of reality and the scientific method is an examination of it based on materialist principles.
The conversation was ended abruptly with the traditional condescending insult when I pointed out that he was trying to persuade me that reality doesn't exist in order to justify his belief in a creator of it!
Whether or not reality exists as we see and experience it, or whether what we see is an optical illusion or an emergent product of the underlying structural chaos of spacetime is irrelevant to our everyday lives, or course. If you're shot to death by a gun, or hit and killed by a bus, you're just as dead, whether or not the gun or bus actually exists.
Given that, for a male, the most important stage in ensuring more of your descendants survive to breed, than carriers of other alleles of your genes, is finding a mate and ensuring her eggs are the ones that develop into the next generation, carrying your genes, it is hardly surprising that the sex act would have evolved in ways that ensure more success.
Part of that strategy will be to minimise the chance of another male using the same mate, so she carries his offspring, not yours.
Nor is it surprising that the female in that interaction will be interested in selecting the best mate to ensure her offspring are the most successful. So, given a combination of those two forces, it is hardly surprising that the sex act would have evolved some strange practices and rituals, including cannibalism and even the death of the male.
If anyone should be looking forward to the next life where he will spend eternity with God, according to the teachings of the church he heads, it's Pope Francis.
And yet we see him tonight in Hospital desperately trying to put off that day as long as possible. Like so many evangelicals preachers who told us we could look forward to a blissful after-life if only we obeyed all the rules, paid the tythes and did what they told us, Pope Francis is in hospital in Rome where medical science will be used to delay his meeting with God as long as possible.
Prayer having failed to cure his chest infection, or at least been recognised as ineffective, the pontiff has turned to science for help.
Having supposedly been chosen personally by God, who inspired the cardinals in conclave to vote for him, to be his personal representative and mouthpiece on Earth, like all his predecessors, Pope Francis should be confident of his place in Heaven.
Unless he knows something we don't know, of course.
Childish Creationist superstition dictates that cult members believe humans were magically created without ancestors somewhere in the Middle East and that we have spread from there, following a genocidal flood a few thousand years ago.
It must be galling for them to learn then that the archaeological evidence is that we evolved over millions of years in Africa from a common ancestor of the chimpanzees and the Gorilla out of a genus of hominins known as the Australopithecines, anatomically intermediate between our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and archaic hominins such as Homo habilis and Homo erectus.
And yet the evidence is that much of what we are today is the result of our co-existence with the African megafauna of the time.
I have often made the point in these blog posts that if you want to understand why we are as we are today, think, 'East African plains'. It was there that we evolved from a clever ape to a tool-making, intelligent hominin, ready to take on the rest of the globe and exploit what it had to offer.
How the African environment, and in particular the presence of large herbivores, contributed to the evolution is the subject of an article in The Conversation by the author and academic, Professor Norman Owen-Smith, emeritus research professor of African Ecology, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence. The article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here.
News today of yet another casual and incidental refutation of some of the Creation cult's fundamentals.
First, a little anecdote from one of my previous lives.
Back in the 1980's I was managing a rural ambulance station, a role which included manning an emergency ambulance as part of a crew of two, so I spent a lot of time with a regular crew mate who was a fundamentalist Creationist 7th Day Adventist.
We rarely spoke about religion (in the UK religion is a private matter and not a suitable subject for discussion in the workplace and anyway, he regarded me as a lost cause, Satan having blinded me with science) but somehow we had got onto the subject of everything in nature being designed by God, and to illustrate his point, my crewmate pointed to a small holly tree that was growing near the front entrance to the station and said its growth pattern was set by God so it would grow according to his plan ("Look at the trees!" Yes, that was the level of his theology). It was Spring and the tree was in active growth.
So I asked if I would be able to change God's plan by changing the growth pattern of the tree. "Of course not! That would make you more powerful than God, and nothing can be!"
In an even earlier life, I had been a senior medical research technician and had studied plant physiology, amongst other sciences, as part of my degree course, so I knew a little bit about plant hormones called gibberellins and auxins.
So, I pointed out that if you look at a growing shoot, you will notice that the side shoots get longer the further away they are from the growing tip. I then snipped off the tip of the growing shoot with a pair of scissors and told him to watch what happened over the next few days. After a few days it was obvious that side-shoots were now forming and growing quickly near what had been the growing tip with the longer shoots now closer to the tip in the reverse of what was the normal pattern of growth. I had changed his god's plan, apparently and reversed the growth pattern of a holly tree.
Over the next few weeks, I saw my crew mate frequently examining the holly tree and snipping off growing shoot himself.
Eventually, he conceded that I (and now he) could change the growth pattern of a holly tree, and asked my how it had happened. I explained that the cells in the growing tip (the meristem cells that were differentiating into the different cell types as the shoot grew) produced a type of hormone called auxin which inhibited the side shoots closer to the tip but its effects were diluted lower down the shoot and eventually, in low concentration, they were growth stimulants. By clipping off the tip, we had removed the hormone, so the previously inhibited side shoots were now free to grow. The growth pattern is not controlled by his god but by physiological processes.
Eventually, my crew mate concluded that his god had devised the hormone system so we weren't playing God and tinkering with his plan for the holly tree after all. God was safely back in the growing tips of the holly tree where he belonged, according to 7th Day Adventists.
You can lead a horse to water…
That was by way of an introduction to the work of scientists from Bristol University, UK, who have discovered how the earliest vascular plants evolved the ability to branch - a key development in the evolution of multicellular plants. What they have discovered is fundamental to distantly-related plants, strongly indicating common ancestry.
To make matters worse for Creationists, it all happened over 400 million years before they believe the Universe existed!
Domesticated 'silver' variety of the red fox, Vulpes vulpes
In an open access paper
published a few days ago in Proceedings of the Royal Society B
two scientists from The Australian National University, Acton, ACT, Australia,
Ben Thomas Gleeson and Laura A. B. Wilson attempted to reconcile conflicting
scientific opinions regarding the evolution of features common to many
domesticated species, collectively known as the 'domestication syndrome'.
The results will upset Creationists for two main reasons:
The scientists are in no doubt that the cause is an evolutionary process,
albeit with one in which humans are the selectors and fitness is suitability
for human exploitation, giving the lie to the absurd claim that the Theory
of Evolution by natural selection is a theory in crisis.
Creationists believe all animals were created by a perfect, omniscient god
specifically for humankind to serve our needs. If that were true, there
would be no need to improve them for our purpose by the process of taming,
domestication and selective breeding, since they would have been tame and
perfectly designed for our purposes already, so there would be no
'domestication' syndrome'.
More bad news for Creationists comes in the form of fossil evidence showing that there were diversified marsupial mammals living in Australia 25 million years ago, and some of these were bizarre by today's standards.
Koalas had already diversified into several different species; the ancestral kangaroo was the size of a possum and a wombat-sized animal was soon to produce the largest ever marsupial, Diprotodon optatum which weighed about 2.5 tonnes. Central Australia was at the time a vast, lush forest, dominated by giant flightless birds and crocodiles.
All a far cry from the Creationist cult superstition about special creation just a few thousand years ago, not to mention the supposed global flood genocide even more recently, following which the marsupials all managed to get back to Australia but no other mammals, apart from bats, dingoes and humans, managed to make it there, and there they underwent warp-speed evolution to reach today's level of diversity, with several new species every generation, then stopped evolving completely just as humans began keeping records.
The evidence for those claims comes from the fossil record excavated from near Pwerte Marnte Marnte, south of Alice Springs, which is the subject of an article in The Conversation by three palaeontologists, Arthur Immanuel Crichton, PhD candidate, Aaron Camens, Lecturer in Palaeontology and Gavin Prideaux, Associate professor all of Flinders University, Australia.
Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here.
Craterostigma plantagineum, able to recover quickly from dehydration.
If they are to survive in an environment subject to prolonged periods of dry
weather, plants need to be able to survive without water for long periods and
then spring back to life again when the rains come.
Ho they do this was the subject of a recent study by researchers from the
universities of Bonn and Düsseldorf, Germany, and Michigan, USA, and, not
surprisingly to anyone who understands biology, they found that the genes giving
the so-called resurrection plant, Craterostigma plantagineum, this
ability evolved out of genes also present in other plants.
In doing so, they exposed the Creationist claim that no new information can
arise in a species genome without magic, otherwise it violates a fundamental law
of physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics [sic], forgetting for a moment that
even with magic, that Law would still be violated, assuming for the sake
of argument that it has anything to do with the amount of information in a
species genome. It doesn't, of course, but the frauds who feed their cult with
that sort of scientific gobbledygook know they love to think they sound all
sciency and knowledgeable, but, like parrots, won't understand the noises they
are making.
The resurrection plant Craterostigma plantagineum - in irrigated
condition (left), desiccated (center), and then "resurrected" (right).
So, what the scientists at Bonn found was that C. plantagineum not only
has the genes that other plants have so their seeds can be dehydrated but still
germinate, but that not only do they then not switch these genes off, but they
are present in multiple copies.
C. plantagineum is an octoploid species, meaning that unlike most plants
and all mammals which have just two copies of each gene,
C. plantagineum has eight. At some point during its evolution,
C. plantagineum doubled its genome, then doubled it again.
This gives the plant the ability to rapidly makes lots of the enzymes needed to
kick-start growth after dehydration.
But that's not all. The plants have multiple copies of other genes involved in
the kick-start process - the “early light inducible proteins” (ELIPs); in some
cases about 200 copies, in several small clusters in their genome. These are
rapidly activated by light and protect the cells from oxidative stress.
As the News release from Bonn University explains:
It's almost an article of faith in the Creationist Cult that flight can't have
evolved because the wing only works when fully formed, so must have been
intelligently designed in a single act of magic creation.
That's nonsense, of course, as gliding mammals and feathered dinosaurs have
shown.
Now a team of scientists, led by Dr. Charles Feigin, then of Princeton.
University, now of the University of Melbourne, have shown that the genes
controlling the development of mammalian powered flight and gliding are common
to all mammals, including marsupial gliders and humans, so must have been
present in an early common ancestor.
Because no known early mammals had flight, these genes must originally have had
some other function and have since been exapted for a different function.
The team's findings were
published yesterday, open access, in Science Advances.
The finding is the subject of an article in The Conversation by lead
author, Charles Feigin, Postdoctoral Fellow in Genomics and Evolution, The
University of Melbourne. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons
licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read
here.
Marsupials and other mammals separately evolved flight many times, and we
are finally learning how
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land on the next tree. Many groups of mammals seem
to have taken this evolutionary advice to heart. According to our
newly published paper in Science Advances, unrelated animals may even have used the same blueprints for building their
“wings”.
These evolutionary experiments happened in animals scattered all across the
mammalian family tree – including flying squirrels, marsupial possums and the
colugo (cousin of the primates). But they all have something in common. It’s a
special skin structure between their limbs called a patagium, or flight
membrane.
The fact these similar structures have arisen so many times (a process called
convergent evolution)
hints that the genetic underpinnings of patagia might predate flight. Indeed,
they could be shared by all mammals, even those living on the ground.
If this is true, studying patagia can help us to better understand the
incredible adaptability of mammals. We might also discover previously unknown
aspects of human genetics.
Sugar gliders are one of several mammals that have independently evolved
the ability to fly through the air.
apiguide/Shutterstock
A deceptively simple membrane
Despite being seemingly simple skin structures, patagia contain several
tissues, including hair, a rich array of
touch-sensitive neurons,
connective tissue and even thin sheets of muscle. But in the earliest stages of formation, these membranes are dominated by
the two main layers of the skin: the inner dermis and outer epidermis.
The patagium in sugar gliders (red arrow) forms after birth when the
newborn, or joey, is in its marsupial mother’s pouch.
Charles Feigin, Author provided
At first, they hardly differ from neighbouring skin. But at some point, the
skin on the animal’s sides starts to rapidly change, or differentiate. The
dermis undergoes a process called condensation, where cells bunch up and the
tissue becomes very dense. Meanwhile, the epidermis thickens in a process
called hyperplasia.
In some mammals, this differentiation happens when they are still an embryo in
the uterus. Incredibly though, in our main model species – the marsupial sugar
glider (Petaurus breviceps) – this process begins after birth, while they are in the mother’s pouch.
This provides us with an incredible window into patagium formation.
Starting with the sugar glider, we examined the behaviours of thousands of
genes active during the early development of the patagium, to try and div out
how this chain of events is kicked off.
We discovered that levels of a gene called Wnt5a are strongly correlated with
the onset of those early skin changes – condensation and hyperplasia. Through
a series of experiments involving cultured skin tissues and genetically
engineered laboratory mice, we showed that adding extra Wnt5a was all it took
to drive both of these early hallmarks of patagium formation.
Interestingly, when we extended our work to bats, we found extremely similar
patterns of Wnt5a activity in their developing lateral patagia to that in
sugar gliders. This was surprising, since bats (placental mammals) last shared
a common ancestor with the marsupial sugar glider around 160 million years
ago.
Perhaps even more remarkably, we found a nearly identical pattern in the outer
ear (or pinna) of lab mice. The pinna is a nearly universal trait among
mammals, including innumerable species with no flying ancestry.
Seba’s short-tailed bat has a lateral patagium (connected to the flank of
the body) activated by Wnt5a.
Together, these results suggest something profound. Wnt5a’s role in ushering
in the skin changes needed for a patagium likely evolved long before the first
mammal ever took to the air.
Originally, the gene had nothing to do with flight, instead contributing to
the development of seemingly unrelated traits. But because of shared ancestry,
most living mammals today inherited this Wnt5a-driven program. When species
like gliders and bats started on their separate journeys into the air, they
did so with a common “molecular toolkit”.
Not only that, but this same toolkit is likely present in humans and working
in ways we don’t fully understand yet.
There are definite limits to our recent work. First, we haven’t made a flying
mouse. This may sound like a joke, but demonstrates we still don’t fully
understand how a region of dense, thick skin becomes a thin and wide flight
membrane. Many more genes with unknown roles are bound to be involved.
Second, while we’ve shown a cause-and-effect relationship between Wnt5a and
patagium skin differentiation, we don’t know precisely how Wnt5a does it.
Moving forward, we hope to fill in these gaps by broadening the horizons of
our cross-species comparisons and by conducting more in-depth molecular
studies on patagium formation in sugar gliders.
For now though, our study presents an exciting new view of flight in mammals.
We may not be the strongest fliers, but trying is in our DNA.
Lateral flight membranes, or patagia, have evolved repeatedly in diverse mammalian lineages. While little is known about patagium development, its recurrent evolution may suggest a shared molecular basis. By combining transcriptomics, developmental experiments, and mouse transgenics, we demonstrate that lateral Wnt5a expression in the marsupial sugar glider (Petaurus breviceps) promotes the differentiation of its patagium primordium. We further show that this function of Wnt5a reprises ancestral roles in skin morphogenesis predating mammalian flight and has been convergently used during patagium evolution in eutherian bats. Moreover, we find that many genes involved in limb development have been redeployed during patagium outgrowth in both the sugar glider and bat. Together, our findings reveal that deeply conserved genetic toolkits contribute to the evolutionary transition to flight in mammals.
And another unintelligently designed argument for intelligent design creationism
lies in ruins, having failed to fly, leaving Creationists to explain why all
mammals. including humans, have the genes that are used to develop the mechanism
for flight in several different orders of mammals.
There has always been little doubt in scientific circles that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 is a zoonotic virus that evolved in another mammal and then transferred to humans.
The problem this causes for Creationism is that their dogma insists that evolution doesn't happen, and everything is created by their supposedly omniscient, omnipotent god, making this god look like a pestilential malevolence.
Some have tried to rationalise this belief by invoking a process, (or a substance) called 'sin' which also has the powers of sentient creation which their supposedly omnipotent god is powerless to control, apparently. This usually leaves the apologist for creationism floundering to explain how exactly this 'sin' thing creates living organisms which their dogma says can only be intelligently designed.
So, the brighter ones have been hoping to get away with the claim that the virus was invented by Chinese scientists in a laboratory in Wuhan. The problem with that notion is that it clashes with their assertion that science can't create life.
Ah well! You can't have everything!
And that claim, echoing former president Donald Trump's panicky response, calling it a 'Chinese Virus', as though viruses have nationality, and calling them names makes them go away, was given some credence recently when a review by the US Department of Energy [sic] concluded 'with low confidence' (in other words, with a high probability of being wrong, but we'll say it anyway!) that the virus did leak out of the Wuhan laboratory.
Being fully signed-up members of the Trumpanzee cult, most Creationists would love their idol, the serial adulterer, liar and crook, Donald Trump, America's worst ever president, to have been right.
But that 'conclusion' has now been debunked and we are back to the most probable explanation being zoonosis in a Chinese wet market where wild animals are sold for human consumption.
That is the conclusion of Dominic Dwyer, Director of Public Health Pathology, New South Wales Health Pathology, Westmead Hospital and University of Sydney, Australia, who was involved in the initial investigation of the origins of the virus early in the pandemic, writing in The Conversation.
His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons Licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original me be read here.
China’s only now revealed crucial COVID‑19 origins data. Earlier disclosure may have saved us 3 years of political argy‑bargy
First the US Department of Energy’s review gave more emphasis to the laboratory leak hypothesis than previously, although the confidence for this conclusion was low.
Second, and more importantly, is the release and analysis this week of viral and animal genetic material collected from the Huanan wet market in Wuhan, the place forever associated with the beginning of the pandemic.
It’s a subject close to me. I was the Australian representative on the international World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2. I went to Wuhan on a fact-finding mission in early 2021. I visited the now-closed market.
Now we have stronger evidence that places raccoon dogs at the market as a possible animal reservoir of SARS-CoV-2, potentially infecting humans.
The debate about the origin of the COVID-19 virus has been fierce. A report released today gives the strongest evidence so far supporting the animal origin, pointing to a specific animal - a racoon dog and even a specific location in the live animal market. @normanswan#abc730pic.twitter.com/oiXII4SWTK
If we’d had this evidence three years ago, we need to ask ourselves how different recent history would have been. We would have reduced the enormous energy, media frenzy and political argy-bargy about less likely hypotheses of the pandemic’s origins. We might have better focused our research attention.
Samples were taken from various places in the market, in January 2020, within weeks of the early COVID-19 cases in Wuhan. SARS-CoV-2 RNA and human DNA were identified in these environmental samples, although no animal swabs were positive for the virus.
This was presented to the WHO team investigating the origins of the pandemic in January 2021, of which I was part.
The work was published as a preprint (posted online, before being independently verified) in February 2022.
The underlying “metagenomic” data to support the conclusions in the preprint – that SARS-CoV-2 and human (but not animal) sequences were present – needed to be provided to allow further analyses. This is something that is generally required by journals and regarded as appropriate in the spirit of scientific openness and collaboration.
However, it wasn’t until early March 2023 that the international community had access to the data.
That’s when there was a “drop” of these environmental metagenomic sequences into the GISAID database, the international open access repository of viral sequences.
This allowed an independent team of international experts to analyse them. In a startling revelation, they identified large amounts of raccoon dog and other animal DNA in conjunction with SARS-CoV-2. Raccoon dogs can be readily infected with SARS-CoV-2 and can transmit it. The international team published their observations as a preprint earlier this week.
Raccoon dogs can be readily infected with SARS-CoV-2 and can transmit it.
Of note was the physical co-location of these virus and animal sequences in the corner of what is a very large market, the corner associated with early human cases. It is now known (but initially rejected by Chinese authorities) that wild and farmed animals were sold in this area of the market.
After the sequences were analysed by the international team, the Chinese scientists who had performed the market testing were contacted for comment and discussion – especially around the important observation that mixed in among the SARS-CoV-2 sequences were a large proportion of raccoon dog and other animal DNA.
The sequences were then withdrawn from the GISAID database within a few hours of the study authors being approached. This is perhaps unusual for an open database such as GISAID, and clarity could be sought why this occurred.
This latest work does not prove raccoon dogs were definitely the source of SARS-CoV-2. Presumably, they are likely to have been an intermediate host between bats and humans. Bats harbour many coronaviruses, including ones related to SARS-CoV-2.
However, the data fits the narrative of the animal/human connections of SARS-CoV-2.
This, along with other examination of animal links to SARS-CoV-2, should be taken in the context of the lack of robust data to support the other SARS-CoV-2 origins hypotheses, such as a laboratory leak, contaminated frozen food, and acquisition outside China. Bit by bit, the evidence supports animal origins of the outbreak, centred on the Huanan market in Wuhan.
The length of time taken for this early work to surface and the difficulty in accessing the raw data are unfortunate, points made recently by the WHO.
Sympathetically, one might say, the wrong analysis of the original data collected in early 2020 was undertaken and the researchers missed the animal links.
Cynically, (and without evidence) one might say that the significance of the data was recognised, but not made readily available. This is a question for the Chinese researchers at the Chinese Center for Disease Control to answer.
The data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention is no longer available on the GISAID database where it was found by scientists. https://t.co/fXT6zt02dm
If this had been identified in early 2020 then further studies to understand the viral origins in animals could have been undertaken.
Three years on, it is very difficult to do such studies, tracking backwards from the now closed market to the animal sources and the people who handled these animals.
Clearer answers would have taken some of the heat out of the debate around the possible viral origins. Of course, all hypotheses should remain on the table, but some of these could have been much better explored with earlier data.
Would it have changed the course of the pandemic? Probably not. The virus had already spread worldwide and adapted very well to human-to-human transmission by the time this work was available. However, it would have driven research in better directions and improved future pandemic planning.
Lessons for the future are obvious. Open disclosure of sequence data is the best way to undertake scientific investigation, especially for something of such international significance.
Making data unavailable, or not reaching out for assistance in complicated analyses, only slows the process.
The resulting political to and fro by all countries, particularly the US and China, has meant that suspicion has deepened, and progress slowed even further.
Although WHO has been criticised for errors in how it managed the pandemic, and in collating data to understand the origins and progress future research, it remains the best international agency to foster open sharing of data.
Scientists, for the most part, want to do the right thing and find the answers to important questions. Facilitating this is crucial.
Published by The Conversation. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
That just leaves Creationists with two possibilities: either their putative designer god malevolently designed the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the full, omniscient knowledge of what it would do, or the virus is a zoonotic species which probably evolved out of a bat virus, maybe via another mammal, albeit an evolutionary process facilitated unwittingly by the Chinese cultural practice of consuming a diverse range of wild mammals.
