A discovery by scientists at the University of California San Diego School of Biological Science has scuppered yet another creationist fallacy, usually backup up by a blatant misrepresentation of what Darwin actually said (as though that matters anyway).
Creationists like to try to fool their dupes with the lie that Darwin admitted that the eye could not be explained by evolution, as though Darwin was a secret intelligent design creationist who let it slip in a book he wrote, and repeated that blunder in several editions. The quote you'll often see attributed to Darwin is:
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
But Darwin, in typical style, was merely setting out the problem before giving the solution. What you'll never see posted by a creationist is the full quote, which continues:
Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.
Charles Darwin, “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life," first edition (1859). Chapter 6, "Difficulties on Theory", page 187, 6th edition, page 217.
Since then, numerous experiments have shown how a patch of light-sensitive cells will quickly evolve into a functional eye if there is a benefit to each step. In other words, Darwinian gradualism perfectly explains the evolution of the eye.
Stages in the evolution of the vertebrate eye
All that remains to explain is the evolution of light-sensitive cells.
And this was done by the University of California San Diego team, who show that mammals acquired light-sensitivity, in a way that also refutes another creationist lie.
They acquired it by horizontal gene transfer. Horizontal gene transfer is the way genes can cross from one taxon to another, giving the lie to creationists dogma which states that new information can only arise withing a genome with the assistance of a magic designer.
The team have shown that the protein needed by cells to respond to light comes from simple bacteria, and, because it is not present in other vertebrates, but have entered the genome of the last common ancestor of mammals.
The University of California, San Diego news release explains the research:
Creationists in the social media tend to be one of two sorts:
Fools who have been misled by the fallacies frauds promulgate to try to discredit the Theory of Evolution, often for political and/or financial gain. These tend to be scientifically illiterate, often willfully, so, and find learning and critical thinking difficult. They typically tend to think teleologically, like toddlers, so seek answers which involve agency. Nothing happens in their world unless it either wants to or something else tells it too.
Frauds looking for scientifically illiterate, teleological thinkers to recruit for their cult by promulgating fallacies and disinformation about science in general and the Theory of Evolution in particular, to make their victims believe they know better than the experts.
Some examples of the fallacies used by the frauds to trick the fools are listed by AI's ChatGPT-3 language model, after a qualifying statement:
If they weren't ignorant of it and hadn't been given strategies for dismissing inconvenient facts, the work of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, would be spreading fear and despondency throughout the creationist cults.
This is the Institute the first brought us news that anatomically modern humans interbred with both Neanderthals and Denisovans before they became extinct about 40,000 years ago, and which has developed techniques for extracting and analyzing DNA from ancient remains and showing the ancient origins of humans from long before creationist superstition says humans were magically created as a single couple who had no ancestors, just a few thousand years ago, creating an incestuous family from which we are all supposedly descended.
The work of the Max Planck Institute is showing that not only is the modern human species, Homo sapiens, much older than that, it is more genetically diverse than would be the case if the superstition had any basis in fact. And, far from being the descendants of a single founder couple, all non-African humans are the descendants not even of a single founder species but from hybrids of at least three different species, so ruling out a single founder couple that could have committed the central article of faith for all Christians - the Original Sin.
And now the Institute brings us news that a Mongolian empire in Central Asia, which co-existed some 2000 years ago with the Roman Empire, and before then with the Egyptian civilization, was comprised of multiethnic peoples that had been incorporated into the empire to give it a genetic diversity that was far greater than would be the case had the Earth really been repopulated from another incestuous family, following a genocidal global flood just a couple of thousand years earlier.
First, a little about the Xiongnu:
The Xiongnu Confederation was a nomadic confederation that existed from the 3rd century BCE to the late 1st century CE in present-day Mongolia, Siberia, and Central Asia. They were known for their military prowess, and their interactions with China were important in shaping both Chinese and Central Asian history.
The origins of the Xiongnu are not well understood, but they are believed to have emerged from various tribes in the region around the Ordos Plateau in northern China. By the 3rd century BCE, the Xiongnu had become a powerful confederation under the leadership of their first known leader, Touman.
The Xiongnu were known for their skill in horseback riding and archery, and they were able to conquer many neighboring tribes and states. They also had a complex political system that included a ruling council, with the leader (shanyu) at the top, and a social hierarchy based on military merit.
The Xiongnu frequently raided the Han Dynasty in China, and the two powers engaged in intermittent warfare for several centuries. The Han Dynasty eventually established a policy of appeasement towards the Xiongnu, which involved paying them tribute and marrying Han princesses to Xiongnu leaders.
The Xiongnu also had significant cultural and economic interactions with other neighboring states, including the Yuezhi, the Wusun, and the Xianbei. These interactions played an important role in the spread of Buddhism and other cultural and religious practices across Central Asia.
In the late 1st century CE, the Xiongnu Confederation began to decline due to internal conflicts and external pressures from the expanding Han Dynasty and other neighboring states. The Xiongnu were eventually conquered by the Han Dynasty, and the remnants of the confederation merged with other groups to form the Xianbei confederation.
References:
Di Cosmo, N. (2002). Ancient China and its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History. Cambridge University Press.
Kradin, N. N. (2010). Xiongnu Empire. In P. C. K. Lam (Ed.), Historical Dictionary of the Mongol World Empire (pp. 363-366). The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
Loewe, M. (1986). The Former Han Dynasty. In D. Twitchett & M. Loewe (Eds.), The Cambridge History of China: Volume 1, The Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 BC-AD 220 (pp. 103-222). Cambridge University Press.
ChatGPT. (2023, April 16). All about the Xiongnu confederation, with references, please [Response to a user question]. OpenAI. https://openai.com/
As the Max Planck Institute news release explains:
The far right in politics have never been bothered about truth.
They have no concerns about the scientific validity of the claimed scientific basis for their belief in their superiority over other peoples. It's whatever excuse they think they can get away with that's importan,t and more often than not, religion provides that excuse for them.
So, while simultaneously appealing to the Christian fundamentalists who reject Darwinian evolution on doctrinaire grounds, they sell the notion of white supremacy and male superiority over women based on Darwin's social ideas, so-called social Darwinism, that Darwin got from the Christian culture he grew up in.
While Social Darwinism has been rejected by the egalitarian left in politics as having no scientific basis, it is ironic that this is the only aspect of 'Darwinism'; that the far-right embraces, but it's closeness to Christian fundamentalism makes it doubly attractive to them.
Charles Darwin, who trained for the priesthood as a young man before turning to biology, was a man of his age and took it as established fact that there was a racial hierarchy in the world and that men were naturally superior to women, because that was the reality he saw, but the reality he saw was the result of 18 centuries of Christianity. Rather than question those basic cultural assumption on which English and European imperialism depended, and which seemed to be borne out by its success in dominating the world, he looked for a scientific basis for them in the framework of the evolutionary biology he and Wallace had identified as the explanation for biodiversity and the origin of species.
Darwin was right about a great deal, but fundamentally wrong about the biological superiority of white males. Indeed, given that all species, and all races have been evolving for the same length of time, and the process of evolution has no goal but is shaped by the prevailing local environment, it makes no sense at all to talk about one species or race being more highly evolved than another. All living organisms are more or less perfectly adapted by natural selection to fit their evolutionary niche and when their environment changes, the pressure to adapt changes. There is no pinnacle; no supreme achievement of evolution. All species are liable to find themselves less than perfectly adapted to a changing environment in different places at different times and to evolve accordingly.
But Darwin saw a hierarchy, both racial and sexual - and a hierarchy that the Christian religion he was raised in accepted as the natural order and promulgated it as the right and proper form of society, much as white supremacist Christians do today, so he saw his task as explaining what he saw rather than explaining why the 'natural order' was an illusion created by circumstance. In the words of the Anglican hymn, written in 1848, just 11 years before Darwin's Origin of Species was published:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.
The circumstance was, as Jared Diamond points out in his book, Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years due to the good fortune of Europeans having several domesticable animals in Eurasia so Europeans had horsepower for work whereas much of the rest of the world never had more than manpower. Europeans also co-evolved with a range of viruses, mostly acquired by living in close proximity to domestic animals, so when they came into contact with the rest of the world, their germs devastated their societies and weakened their resistance to colonial powers.
As Diamond points out, had Bantus been able to domesticate rhinoceroses, imaging the consequences for history if Roman legions had come up against Bantu cavalries mounted in rhinoceroses. We would probably now have far right Africans trying to justify their colonization and Africanization of Eurasia and carrying off millions of white West Europeans into slavery in Africa where their descendants were being treated as a social underclass, as proving the biological superiority of the black races and why the 'white lives matter' campaign is dangerous radical extremism aimed at overthrowing the God-given order (the god being some West African local god which featured in their origin myths). White sports people would be being taunted with monkey noises and thrown bananas while thanking the West African god for their sporting success.
And enlightened scientists such as the author of the following article would be campaigning for an end to the pervading black supremacist thinking in science and decrying the influence of a black evolutionary biologist who, 170 year ago wrote a book explaining why black men were the superior form of the species and why black culture was superior to the primitive cultures of the pale-skinned races.
The author is Rui Diogo, Associate Professor of Anatomy, Howard University. His article from The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
Racist and sexist depictions of human evolution still permeate science, education and popular culture today
Human evolution is typically depicted with a progressive whitening of the skin, despite a lack of evidence to support it.
Systemic racism and sexism have permeated civilization since the rise of agriculture, when people started living in one place for a long time. Early Western scientists, such as Aristotle in ancient Greece, were indoctrinated with the ethnocentric and misogynistic narratives that permeated their society. More than 2,000 years after Aristotle’s writings, English naturalist Charles Darwin also extrapolated the sexist and racist narratives he heard and read in his youth to the natural world.
Darwin presented his biased views as scientific facts, such as in his 1871 book “The Descent of Man,” where he described his belief that men are evolutionarily superior to women, Europeans superior to non-Europeans and hierarchical civilizations superior to small egalitarian societies. In that book, which continues to be studied in schools and natural history museums, he considered “the hideous ornaments and the equally hideous music admired by most savages” to be “not so highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, in birds,” and compared the appearance of Africans to the New World monkey Pithecia satanas.
Science isn’t immune to sexism and racism.
“The Descent of Man” was published during a moment of societal turmoil in continental Europe. In France, the working class Paris Commune took to the streets asking for radical social change, including the overturning of societal hierarchies. Darwin’s claims that the subjugation of the poor, non-Europeans and women was the natural result of evolutionary progress were music to the ears of the elites and those in power within academia. Science historian Janet Browne wrote that Darwin’s meteoric rise within Victorian society did not occur despite his racist and sexist writings but in great part because of them.
It is not coincidence that Darwin had a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, an honor emblematic of English power, and was publicly commemorated as a symbol of “English success in conquering nature and civilizing the globe during Victoria’s long reign.”
Despite the significant societal changes that have occurred in the last 150 years, sexist and racist narratives are still common in science, medicine and education. As a teacher and researcher at Howard University, I am interested in combining my main fields of study, biology and anthropology, to discuss broader societal issues. In research I recently published with my colleague Fatimah Jackson and three medical students at Howard University, we show how racist and sexist narratives are not a thing of the past: They are still present in scientific papers, textbooks, museums and educational materials.
From museums to scientific papers
One example of how biased narratives are still present in science today is the numerous depictions of human evolution as a linear trend from darker and more “primitive” human beings to more “evolved” ones with a lighter skin tone. Natural history museums, websites and UNESCO heritage sites have all shown this trend.
The fact that such depictions are not scientifically accurate does not discourage their continued circulation. Roughly 11% of people living today are “white,” or European descendants. Images showing a linear progression to whiteness do not accurately represent either human evolution or what living humans look like today, as a whole. Furthermore, there is no scientific evidence supporting a progressive skin whitening. Lighter skin pigmentation chiefly evolved within just a few groups that migrated to non-African regions with high or low latitudes, such as the northern regions of America, Europe and Asia.
Illustrations of human evolution tend to depict progressive skin whitening.
Sexist narratives also still permeate academia. For example, in a 2021 paper on a famous early human fossil found in the Sierra de Atapuerca archaeological site in Spain, researchers examined the canine teeth of the remains and found that it was actually that of a girl between 9 and 11 years old. It was previously believed that the fossil was a boy due to a popular 2002 book by one of the authors of that paper, paleoanthropologist José María Bermúdez de Castro. What is particularly telling is that the study authors recognized that there was no scientific reason for the fossil remains to have been designated as a male in the first place. The decision, they wrote, “arose randomly.”
But these choices are not truly “random.” Depictions of human evolution frequently only show men. In the few cases where women are depicted, they tend to be shown as passive mothers, not as active inventors, cave painters or food gatherers, despite available anthropological data showing that pre-historical women were all those things.
Another example of sexist narratives in science is how researchers continue to discuss the “puzzling” evolution of the female orgasm. Darwin constructed narratives about how women were evolutionarily “coy” and sexually passive, even though he acknowledged that females actively select their sexual partners in most mammalian species. As a Victorian, it was difficult for him to accept that women could play an active part in choosing a partner, so he argued that such roles only applied to women in early human evolution. According to Darwin, men later began to sexually select women.
Sexist narratives about women being more “coy” and “less sexual,” including the idea of the female orgasm as an evolutionary puzzle, are contradicted by a wide range of evidence. For instance, women are the ones who actually more frequently experience multiple orgasms as well as more complex, elaborate and intense orgasms on average, compared to men. Women are not biologically less sexual, but sexist stereotypes were accepted as scientific fact.
The vicious cycle of systemic racism and sexism
Educational materials, including textbooks and anatomical atlases used by science and medical students, play a crucial role in perpetuating biased narratives. For example, the 2017 edition of “Netter Atlas of Human Anatomy,” commonly used by medical students and clinical professionals, includes about 180 divs that show skin color. Of those, the vast majority show male individuals with white skin, and only two show individuals with “darker” skin. This perpetuates the depiction of white men as the anatomical prototype of the human species and fails to display the full anatomical diversity of people.
Textbooks and educational materials can perpetuate the biases of their creators in science and society.
Authors of teaching materials for children also replicate the biases in scientific publications, museums and textbooks. For example, the cover of a 2016 coloring book entitled “The Evolution of Living Things”“ shows human evolution as a linear trend from darker "primitive” creatures to a “civilized” Western man. Indoctrination comes full circle when the children using such books become scientists, journalists, museum curators, politicians, authors or illustrators.
One of the key characteristics of systemic racism and sexism is that it is unconsciously perpetuated by people who often don’t realize that the narratives and choices they make are biased. Academics can address long-standing racist, sexist and Western-centric biases by being both more alert and proactive in detecting and correcting these influences in their work. Allowing inaccurate narratives to continue to circulate in science, medicine, education and the media perpetuates not only these narratives in future generations, but also the discrimination, oppression and atrocities that have been justified by them in the past.
Rui Diogo, Associate Professor of Anatomy, Howard University
Revising Our View of Why Humans Evolved an Upright Stature
Artistic rendering of the open woodland habitat reconstruction at Moroto II with Morotopithecus bishopi vertically climbing with infant on back and juvenile below.
Here we have another example of scientists challenging the accepted consensus which, unlike my last example which concerned a fundamental model of cosmology, this time concerns conflicting ideas of hominid evolution.
Not, as creationists like to delude themselves, by rejecting the whole concept of evolution in favour of their magical superstition, but the precise mechanism by which we, or rather our ancestors, evolved an upright stature and a bipedal gait. That this is an evolved feature is beyond doubt.
The scientific consensus is that human ancestors evolved an upright posture as a result of a combination of factors, including the need to adapt to an increasingly savannah-like environment, as well as the need to free up the hands for tool use and other activities.
One theory suggests that the shift to bipedalism allowed early hominins to better see over tall grasses and detect predators, while also freeing up their hands for tool use and other tasks. Another theory proposes that upright posture evolved as a means of thermoregulation in hot environments, allowing early hominins to better dissipate heat through a smaller surface area exposed to the sun.
There is also evidence to suggest that the development of bipedalism was a gradual process, with multiple adaptations and changes in anatomy occurring over time. For example, the pelvis and lower limb bones of early hominins gradually became more elongated and robust to support bipedalism.
References:
Lovejoy CO. The origin of man. Science. 1981 Jul 24;213(4506):341-50. doi: 10.1126/science.211.4480.341. PMID: 17748254.
Richmond BG, Jungers WL. Orrorin tugenensis femoral morphology and the evolution of hominin bipedalism. Science. 2008 Mar 21;319(5870):1662-5. doi: 10.1126/science.1154197. PMID: 18356526.
Aiello LC, Wheeler P. The expensive-tissue hypothesis: the brain and the digestive system in human and primate evolution. Curr Anthropol. 1995;36(2):199-221. doi: 10.1086/204350.
Carrier DR. The energetic paradox of human running and hominid evolution. Curr Anthropol. 1984;25(4):483-95. doi: 10.1086/203165.
However, a minority view is that it evolved because it made it easier for our ancestors to collect fruit in forests. It is this minority view that researchers from the University of Michigan are challenging. They believe they have found evidence that it evolved in open woodland in which the diet consisted of leaves.
The University of Michigan news release explains the finding and its significance for anthropologists and the human evolutionary story:
Looking For Evidence That the Current Consensus May be Wrong or Incomplete
The small red dot highlighted inside the white box on this James Webb Space Telescope image is an early galaxy, seen as it looked just 350 million years after the Big Bang.
Science is reasonable uncertainty Religion is unreasonable certainty.
Images of six candidate massive galaxies, seen 500-800 million years after the Big Bang. These are more massive that the theory predicts.
Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/I. Labbe
The great strength of science is scientists' willingness to re-examine what they think they know and to change their mind when the evidence changes. Science values truth over certainty, so all scientific knowledge is provisional and contingent on not being falsified.
Religion, by contrast, sells certainty and theists value certainty over truth, more so at the fundamentalist extreme, where intellectual dishonesty and sleights of hand to gain followers are rewarded and admired (as the many extremely wealthy televangelists in the USA, to whom lying is second nature, attest). Intellectually bankrupt creationists prefer a comforting lie to an uncomfortable truth. Scientists, on the other hand, can make their name and gain kudos and scientific respect by successfully challenging the consensus view with convincing evidence and exposed frauds are cast into academic oblivion.
To see this in action, try to get a creationist to accept that a glaring contradiction in the Bible means that one or other verse must be wrong because both mutually exclusive contradictory statements can't both be right.
For example, the contradictory accounts of what Judas did with the 30 pieces of silver, how he died, who bought the 'field of blood' and why was it so-called?
Oldest Known Bat Fossil Give Clue to Evolution of Flying Mammals
Photo of a newly described bat skeleton representing Icaronycteris gunnelli. This specimen is the holotype, the name-bearing representative of a new species, and is in the American Museum of Natural History’s research collections.
The evolution of bats is far from clear because of the paucity of fossils. It is interesting therefore that the oldest known fossilised bat has been discovered in Wyoming, USA, in the Green River Formation. This adds just another chapter to the account of how the Green River Formation refutes creationism, as I'll go into shortly.
First, a bit about the evolution of bats from ChatGPT:
Bats are a unique group of mammals that have adapted to a life of flight. The evolution of bats is a subject of much debate among scientists, but recent studies suggest that they likely evolved from small, arboreal, insect-eating mammals around 50 million years ago. Fossil evidence from the Eocene period supports this theory, showing that early bats had elongated fingers with membranes stretched between them, much like modern bats.
One of the most significant challenges in studying the evolution of bats is understanding how flight evolved. Recent studies have shed light on this question, suggesting that flight evolved in bats through a process known as "penny-plane" aerodynamics, where the wings generate lift by creating a vortex of air. This mechanism is unique to bats and is not found in any other flying animals.
Another interesting aspect of bat evolution is their remarkable ability to echolocate, or use sound waves to navigate and locate prey. This ability likely evolved early in bat evolution, and recent studies suggest that it may have co-evolved with the development of flight.
Overall, the evolution of bats is a fascinating topic that continues to be the subject of much research and debate. By studying the fossil record and the behavior of modern bats, scientists are gaining new insights into the origins and adaptations of these unique mammals.
Reference:
Simmons, N. B., & Seymour, K. L. (2021). Evolution of bats. In Mammalogy (pp. 294-317). Springer, Cham.
ChatGPT. (2023, April 14). Tell me about the evolution of bats, with references, please. [Response to a question]. Retrieved from https://github.com/openai/gpt-3
Before moving on to the new fossil, I'll deal briefly with the Green River Formation, because it utterly refutes another creationist article of faith - the alleged Global flood a few thousand years ago.
The cartilage of the skate is stained with Alcian blue, the bones with Alizarin red. One of the few places in the world that collects Leucoraja erinacea and breeds it for research, including for the present study, is the Marine Resources Center at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole.
More than 450 million years ago, a primitive fish doubled its genome and so, contrary to creationist fraud claims, doubled the amount of genetic information without the intervention of a magic god. The extra genes were then available to the process of evolution, without loss of function of the original genes, again contrary to creationist claims that all mutations are detrimental, therefore can't be part of evolution.
That doubled genome then drove the evolution of some 60,000 different vertebrates, including mammals such as humans.
Now scientists at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin, the Andalusian Center for Developmental Biology (CABD) in Seville and other labs have discovered that part of the evolutionary story of skate 'wings' is partly due to the way the DNA containing the genes for them is folded together with the non-coding regulatory sequences that turn thee genes on an off at the right time in the developing embryo.
The major genomic changes to give the skates their 'wings' happened some time ago in its evolutionary history but the main changes since then have been due to changes in this 3D folding.
As the Max Delbrück Center's press release explains:
If you've bought into the Creation Cult's intelligent [sic] design notion, it's probably best to ignore articles like this that might cause you to doubt the competence of your putative designer, but you're probably used to ignoring evidence that refutes creationism or you wouldn't have fallen for the intelligent [sic] design hoax in the first place.
Nevertheless, it discoveries such as this by Danish Scientists led by Shiraz A. Shah, of Copenhagen University Hospital, Herlev-Gentofte, Gentofte, Denmark, together with colleagues from France and Canada, that highlight the way arms races can lead to ludicrous levels of complexity of which any even half-competent designer would be rightly ashamed.
It comes about because the human gut, especially that of babies, is an ideal, warm, moist, and nutrient-rich environment for micro-organisms, so is teeming with bacteria, protozoa, and viruses, some of which are harmless but some of which parasitize both the microbes and the human cells of the gut.
One incidental benefit that creationists will point to is that the presence of these organisms probably helps train the developing babies’ immune system so it is more effective in later life, so the presence of these organisms can be beneficial.
But hold on! What are they 'training the immune system' for? They are training it to protect us from the very bacteria that the supposedly intelligent designer designed to harm us. At least, since it is supposedly omniscient, it knew what its bacteria and viruses would do when it designed them, so we must assume it designed them for that purpose.
And, if we accept that it designed bacteria to train our immune system, why did it then design the viruses that kill these beneficial bacteria?
But whatever it was thinking of, if 'thinking' is the appropriate term, the result is a baby’s gut teeming with more than 200 different families of virus, many of which were unknown prior to this study. The team's findings are published, open access, in the journal Nature Microbiology.
The research and its significance is explained in a University of Copenhagen news release:
If you're an intelligent designer and you have a perfectly functional, tried and tested method for determining the sex of the insects you create, you would use that method for a new species, wouldn't you?
Not if you're the creationist cult's putative intelligent designer, you don't. What you do is come up with an even more complex way of doing the same thing, for no apparent benefit!
In many insects, including the hymenopterans (bees, wasps, ants, and sawflies) the normal way the sex of an individual is determined is by the number of copies of each chromosome in the cell nucleus. Females are diploid, i.e., they get two copies - one from their mother and one from their father, via a fertilized egg - while males are haploid, having only one copy, which they inherit from their mother via an unfertilized egg.
It has been that way since the order evolved, or so it would seem as almost all of them use the same method, suggesting it was the method used by their last common ancestor, 200 million years ago.
Distribution of endogenous MCP clusters across 462 genomes from 238 protist species. MCP clusters (25% identity across 30% length, 73 clusters) are shown as inner circles scaled in size according to the number of MCPs in each cluster. Numbers refer to the MCP cluster number assigned, with the larger viral groups labeled. MCP clusters are connected to the eukaryotic species (based on NCBI taxonomy) they are found in. Clusters with a more diverse host range are drawn closer to the center of the plot.
Q. What is the difference between an evolved organism, and one allegedly designed by creationism's putative intelligent designer?
A. Nothing! They both look like no intelligence was involved in their design, because they will both have masses of waste, ludicrous complexity, and no ultimate purpose, other than making more copies of themselves.
Although creationists have been programmed to point to complexity as evidence of design, it is actually evidence of bad (or no) design, because good, intelligent design is minimally complex.
This point was neatly illustrated in a paper published in PNAS a couple of days ago which showed that the genome of single-celled, eukaryote organisms contains ancient 'fossil' endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) that do nothing but need to be replicated every time the organism replicates, wasting resources and risking error. Altogether the team found remnants of over 30,000 such viruses.
The discovery was made by a group of researchers led by Dr. Christopher Bellas and colleagues from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, with colleagues from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands and Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg, Germany.
The team were interested in the new 'Polinton-like viruses' that two of the team had previously found in protista from an Austrian alpine lake. According to my AI software, ChatGPT:
It has been said that, like the Qur'an, if the Bible were discovered for the first time today, we could date it accurately by the scientific ignorance in it.
There is no hint of knowledge about Germ Theory, electricity, atoms, photosynthesis, thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics, gravity, or dark matter and dark energy, anywhere in the Bible, unless you stretch the meanings of words beyond breaking point and add things that are not there.
It's as though the authors knew no more than the little that was already known at the time and didn't realise that much of what they thought they knew was fundamentally wrong. But you would expect a creator god who wanted us to believe it knew everything and most importantly, had a vital message for mankind, would have included something new and even something useful - like electricity or antibiotics, for example, but it couldn't even describe the scientific method, let alone a null hypothesis or the need for controls in an experiment.
So, it took until the early part of the 20th century for a scientist to discover that matter and energy are interchangeable because they are different aspects of the same thing, and so why planets orbit suns and Earth has enough gravity to stop us and the atmosphere floating off into space. Einstein’s discovery of Relativity is now a fundamental of cosmology and theoretical astrophysics.
Figure 3 (a) SEM photo of cord fragment, (b) 3D Hirox photo of cord fragment, (c) schematic drawing illustrating s and Z twist; (d) enlarged Hirox photo with cord structure highlighted, arrows indicate location of photos e and f; (e) SEM photo of bordered pits (circled in red); (f) SEM photo of bordered pits.
Here's some of that scientific evidence stuff that creationists must dismiss somehow to remain a member of their anti-science, counter-factual cult. It's the news that Neanderthals were making string 40,000 years before they believe the Universe was created. The cult exists despite the overwhelming evidence that it is wrong by many orders of magnitude, and that magic was not involved, so one little piece of ancient string is hardly likely to change their minds.
As a piece of archaeology, however, the fact that Neanderthals had the technology to make string - one of the foundational technologies of human technology - is surprising and unexpected. Making string, which involves extracting long fibres from plants (in this case, the bast fibres from the bark of a conifer), twisting them together to make longer strands, then twisting those strands together with the opposite twist to lock the fibres in place, is a complicated and labour-intensive process.
With 99% of all known species having gone extinct, creationists still like to imagine an omniscient god created them. One must assume, therefore, that they believe it created them to go extinct!
It's a strange sort of intelligence that would intelligently design something to fail, but that's the sort of double think creationists need to be capable of to be members of their anti-science cults.
But the good news is that one of these 'creations', the Mediterranean Monk seal, is making something of a comeback, having been reduced to about 800 individuals, mostly around the coast of Greece.
The Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus) is one of the world's most endangered marine mammals and is the only seal species endemic to the Mediterranean Sea. The species is characterized by its monk-like hood, and its gray-brown fur with lighter colored undersides.
Here are some key facts about the Mediterranean monk seal:
Habitat: Mediterranean monk seals are found in the Mediterranean Sea and the eastern Atlantic Ocean, primarily along the coastlines of Greece, Turkey, and North Africa.
Population: According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Mediterranean monk seal population is estimated to be between 500 and 700 individuals, making it one of the rarest mammals in the world.
Threats: The primary threats to Mediterranean monk seals include habitat loss, human disturbance, entanglement in fishing gear, and hunting. The species has been heavily exploited for its fur, oil, and meat, and has suffered from a decline in its prey species due to overfishing.
Conservation Efforts: The Mediterranean monk seal is protected under various national and international laws, including the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals and the Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats. Several conservation organizations are also working to protect the species, including the Mediterranean Monk Seal Conservation Society and the Hellenic Society for the Study and Protection of the Monk Seal.
ChatGPT. (10 Apr 2023). Tel me about the Mediterranean Monk seal, with references, please. [Response to a user question]. OpenAI.
The Monk seal was once abundant around the Greek coast and used to breed on the beaches but evolved a change of habit due to persecution by humans who saw it as competition for fish. It now breeds in sea caves and tends to stay in them when not in the sea.
The Greek poet, Homer, mentioned what is probably the monk seal in his Odyssey:
Homer, the ancient Greek poet, mentioned the Mediterranean monk seal in his epic poem, the Odyssey. In Book 4, lines 345-347, he describes the sea-monsters that inhabit the waters around the island of Pharos:
…and the great seal (phoke) was in attendance upon her from the bottom of the sea, even the seal that was wont to come forth last from his lair to bask upon the shore.
In this passage, the Greek word "phoke" is used to refer to the seal, which is believed to be the Mediterranean monk seal. It is interesting to note that the word "phoke" is also the origin of the English word "phocid," which refers to the family of true seals that includes the Mediterranean monk seal.
It is worth noting that the Odyssey was written in the 8th century BCE, long before the Mediterranean monk seal became endangered. At the time, the species was likely abundant and well-known to the ancient Greeks.
It is a sign of cultural evolution that humans are now more inclined to protect endangered species than to persecute them, consequently, the monk seal population has rebounded, and they are now present in Croatia and Albania from where they had disappeared. When a female monk seal, nicknamed Argyro, who became so familiar with humans on the island of Samos that she would lounge in beach chairs and hang out in a cafe, was shot, it caused an outrage throughout Greece. In earlier times, Greek fishermen would boast that they had killed a monk seal as this was considered a good thing to do.
This cultural evolution in humans, where the primitive notion that a god had given all the animals on Earth to humankind to use or abuse as they wished, to one where we realise we all share this one planet and depend on maximising biodiversity if we are all to survive, has allowed the monk seal to reverse its cultural evolution and once again start to come out of the sea caves and appear in numbers on beaches. This is another example of how Humanism is replacing the old, harmful religious superstitions as human ethical evolution rids itself of the regressive influence of religion.
In his traditional Easter address 'Urbi et Orbi' ([to] the City and the world), Pope Francis announced that it was a solid fact that Jesus has risen, leaving historians bemused and wishing they too had the powers to declare truth by fiat. It would save an awful lot of time and money.
Scientists, of course, have long been envious of the magical power of religious clerics to simply declare facts to be true, even mutually contradictory ones and ones proven to be false. No need for all that experimentation and analysis; simply give it some thought, decide what would be convenient if it were true, and declare it to be so! Voilà! (Or should that be, Shazam?)
The Pope has this magical power, apparently, because an omniscient God speaks directly to him and informs him of the inerrant truth - rather like a mega-rich televangelist in that respect. All Pope Francis must do is announce it, and, at least as far as the Catholic Church and its followers are concerned, it is so.
However, he then went on to throw that whole 'fount of divine wisdom' thing into confusion by calling on the world to pray for peace between Russia and Ukraine. (There is nothing like an empty gesture in times of trouble, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than sending aid.)
As it is Easter, when Christians traditionally celebrate the repugnant notion of vicarious redemption through the blood sacrifice of a supposedly innocent person, I thought it would be good to examine the whole notion of the crucifixion of the legendary founder of the Christian religion, Jesus.
What I'm not going to do is point out the glaring and irreconcilable inconsistences in the accounts of the crucifixion and the alleged resurrection, which betray the fact that any pretense to be eye-witness accounts are just that - pretense.
If you want more information on that you're more than welcome to try the Easter Challenge to see if you can resolve the accounts into a coherent narrative incorporating all the alleged events.
The origins of Easter have nothing to do with the alleged crucifixion of course, being based, at least in part on the Roman festival of Hilaria:
For example, the timing of Easter is determined by the first full moon after the vernal equinox, which was also an important time in the Roman calendar. The Roman festival of Hilaria, which was held in honor of the goddess Cybele, was celebrated around the same time as the vernal equinox and involved parades, feasting, and gift-giving.
Reference:
"The Origins of Easter" by Mark Cartwright, Ancient History Encyclopedia: https://www.ancient.eu/article/1294/the-origins-of-easter/
"Easter" by Christine M. Tomassini, Encyclopædia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Easter-holiday
"The Pagan Roots of Easter" by Jennifer Billock, History: https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/history-of-easter-origins-of-easter-traditions
The name 'Easter' comes from the Old English 'Ēastre', the name of an Anglo-Saxon festival celebrating the spring equinox which was used by the Christian Church as the arbitrary date of the alleged crucifixion of Jesus, which has as much basis in fact as the supposed date of his birth, i.e., none at all.
Perhaps the first thing to point out about the story is its unlikelihood.
The thing about the Theory of Evolution is that, contrary to creationist claims and unlike creationism, it can make accurate predictions. Not only does that fact refute the creationist lie, but it also means that creationism has no place in science and can be dismissed as an alternative to the real science of evolution.
Because evolution is defined as change in allele frequency over time, this means that when we look for evidence of evolution in the phenotype and then map it onto changes in the genome over time, they should march in lockstep through the history of the evolving species.
And, to the great discomfort of creationists, this is exactly what scientists found when they analyzed the genomes of 22 relatively recent woolly mammoths recovered from frozen specimens that lived about 100,000 years ago, with one of the oldest known woolly mammoths, 'Chukochya', that lived about 700,000 years ago, and compared them to the genomes of modern elephants.
What can you tell me about woolly mammoths, species and distribution?
Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) were large, prehistoric relatives of modern elephants that lived during the Pleistocene epoch, from about 300,000 to 10,000 years ago. They were well-adapted to cold environments, primarily inhabiting the mammoth steppe—a vast, treeless region that stretched from Western Europe through northern Asia and North America during the Ice Age.
Key Features:
Thick Fur Coat: Woolly mammoths had a dense undercoat of fur and a layer of longer guard hairs to help insulate them from the extreme cold.
Fat Reserves: They had a layer of subcutaneous fat, up to 10 cm thick, which helped retain heat.
Curved Tusks: Their large, spiraled tusks could grow up to 4 meters long and were used for foraging under snow, fighting, and display.
Humped Back: This was due to large fat deposits stored in a hump for additional energy and insulation.
Species
The woolly mammoth is the most famous and well-studied member of the mammoth genus (Mammuthus), but it is part of a larger group of mammoth species, including:
Mammuthus columbi – The Columbian mammoth, larger and lived in more temperate areas of North America.
Mammuthus meridionalis – Southern mammoth, which preceded the woolly mammoth and inhabited warmer climates.
Mammuthus exilis – A dwarf species found on the Channel Islands off the coast of California.
Distribution
Eurasia: Woolly mammoths were widespread across northern Europe, including the British Isles, Siberia, and parts of Russia.
North America: They crossed into North America via the Bering Land Bridge, populating regions like Alaska and Canada.
Pleistocene Glaciation Period: During colder periods, woolly mammoths migrated further south into lower latitudes of Europe, Asia, and North America.
They survived in some isolated regions, like Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean, until about 4,000 years ago, long after their mainland extinction.
Extinction
Woolly mammoths likely went extinct due to a combination of factors:
Climate Change: As the Ice Age ended, warming temperatures caused the mammoth steppe to shrink, reducing their habitat.
Human Hunting: Early human populations are believed to have hunted mammoths, contributing to their decline.
Habitat Loss: Shrinking tundra regions and the spread of forests and wetlands left fewer areas for mammoths to thrive.
Today, woolly mammoths are an important subject of study in paleontology, with well-preserved specimens found in permafrost, providing valuable insights into their biology and environment. There have also been discussions about "de-extincting" woolly mammoths using genetic technology.
The work was conducted by a team led by Professor Love Dalén, professor of evolutionary genomics at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, Sweden and is published open access in Cell Biology. The research and its significance is explained in information made available by Cell Press and published in Science Daily:
