Historical Christian Abuse - New Museum to Scotland's Witch Hysteria

Burning witches alive was common in Germany and other parts of Europe, but in Scotland the convicted were usually strangled before their bodies were burned.

PHOTOGRAPH BY FAKG, ALBUM

"Witch Hill" or "The Salem Martyr"
Thomas Satterwhite Noble

Luce Center of the New-York Historical Society Museum and Library
Via Wikipedia (CC BY 3.0)

New museum remembers Scotland's dark era of witch hysteria

News that there is now a museum to the Scottish witch hysteria, prompted me to do a little bit of research into witchcraft and societies changed attitude toward the idea of witches casting evil spells and suspending the laws of nature with their thoughts.

Our modern-day attitude toward the whole idea of witches and witchcraft, compared to what it was when the atrocities of witch-finding and witch burning were being committed, mostly but not exclusively, by the Catholic Church at the behest of the Pope, shows how our morals are evolving and consigning religious 'morals' to the dustbin of history where they belong.

On of the main driving forces behind witch hysteria in Europe was a book, "Malleus Maleficarum" (Hammer of Witches) written by a sex-obsessed and misogynistic German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer (under his Latinized name Henricus Institor). This classified witchcraft as heresy and thus punishable by burning alive, and recommended torture as the best way to discover the truth. Kramer's hatred for women whom he blamed for tempting him to 'sin', could scarcely be disguised, and on that faith-based misogyny, the witch burnings were based.

Although it was rejected by the Catholic Church at the time, "Malleus Maleficarum" was later revived by insecure royal courts during the renaissance for the same reason witch hysteria has been promoted since - to unite a frightened population behind a 'war' against an internal threat. The same way America's Republicans are waging a 'culture war' against the 'evil of liberalism' today.

Protestant Christianity also did its share of the persecution and murder of (mostly) unmarried or widowed women, of course, as the Pendle witch trials in England, the Salam witch trial in the Puritanical Massachusetts Bay Colony in Colonial America and the witch trials in Presbyterian Scotland attest.

The change in attitude towards the idea of witchcraft between then and now illustrates how societies do not get their morals from religion but religions get their morals, such as they are, from society. No organized church ever spoke out against the witch trials and demanded they cease or preached that they were immoral. But the churches, inspired by the Bible (Exodus 22:18) were very much the instigators of the atrocities, as they still are in some parts of Africa, where children are regularly targeted by preachers and accused of witchcraft in order to spread fear and distrust amongst their followers to keep them dependent on the church for 'protection against evil'.

What brought about the changes was an injection of a large dose of enlightened Humanism into western culture, with its sense of fairness, justice and evidence-based decision-making in place of faith-based superstition and reactionary dogma.

Creationism in Crisis - The 36 Million-Year Geological Cycle That Drives Burst of Biodiversity.

Oceans Through Time

Smithsonian Institution

Scientists discover 36-million-year geological cycle that drives biodiversity - The University of Sydney

The thing about believing Earth is only 8,000 years old is that the cognitive dissonance that arises when evidence such as these 36 million-year geological cycles can cause all manner of bizarre, childish behaviour, like pretending the facts aren't there and if you don't look at them, they'll go away, or going on line and lying in the social media in the hope that, if you can fool a few more simpletons into believing your counter-factual superstition, it'll become true because whether facts are true or not doesn't depend on evidence but on how many people believe they are true.

This bizarre behaviour in an adult comes directly from the fact that, as research has shown, creationism, like conspiracism, is caused by a thinking defect where an adult has retained a childhood mode of thinking known as teleological thinking where nothing happens unless there is agency and where everything, even elementary particles are sentient and aware of whatever a directing entity is telling them to do. To a toddler, questions like, "How does DNA know how to mutate?" or "How does natural selection know what to select?" seem like intelligent questions.

And underlying the whole thing is the unshakeable belief that what their mummy and daddy believed must be true, because mummy and daddy are always right.

So, imaging the cognitive dissonance this latest piece of research will cause the truubuleeving creationist. Not only does it concern an Earth that is many orders of magnitude older than they believe Earth and the Universe have existed for, but it explains the periodic bursts of biodiversity caused by change in the fundamental environment - just as the Theory of Evolution predicts, and which, incidentally, could explain the appearance of 'punctuated equilibrium' in the fossil record.

The research, which has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was led by Associate Professor Slah Boulila from Sorbonne Université, CNRS, Institut des Sciences de la Terre Paris, Paris, France, and included Professor Dietmar Müller, from the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney, Australia. The team also included Shanan E Peters of the Department of Geoscience, University of Madison, Madison, WI, USA, Bilal U. Haq of the Département d’astronomie, Université de Genève, Genève, Switzerland.

It is explained in a news release from Sydney University:

Unintelligent Design - Why Did Creationism's Designer Give Honey Bees a Better Brain for Decison Making Than it Gave Us?

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

Bees make decisions better and faster than we do ... for the things that matter to them | The Lighthouse

This is one of those pieces of research which leaves you wondering, if we had been intelligently designed, especially by a designer for whom we were a special creation with everything else created just for us, why it didn’t give us the best available from all the systems it had designed for other species.

For example, why don't we have the immune system of bats, the respiratory system of birds, the eyesight of the peregrine falcon or the cancer resistance of sharks and elephants? And now we learn that the little honeybee, Apis mellifera, with its brain the side of a sesame seed, can make decisions much more quickly that we can. Surly, with our large brains, there was room to incorporate a honeybee's decision-making process.

But these are problem for creationists and those who like to imagine they were the special design of an omniscient god who only wanted the best for them. For evolutionary biologists of course, the answer is that there is no design and no plan and humans are the result of their own evolution with its environmental selectors and compromises that enabled our ancestors to survive over time, and honeybees, bats, birds and sharks are the result of theirs.

Evolution isn't a process that can remember what it did in a different branch of the tree of life and copy that into another branch, as an intelligent designer could, which is why species can be arranged in nested hierarchies.

The research in question, which was focused on machine learning and robot autonomy, rather than exposing the infantile stupidity of creationism, was conducted by a team led by Professor Andrew Barron from Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia and Dr HaDi MaBouDi, Neville Dearden and Professor James Marshall from the University of Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, UK.

It is explained in The Lighthouse, the online news magazine of Macquarie University:

Malevolent Designer News - How Ticks are Designed to Infect Deer With a Prion Disease

A wildlife camera captures deer practicing allogrooming — grooming one another to get places that they can’t reach on their own. During allogrooming, deer may eat ticks that contain CWD-infested blood.

Ticks may be able to spread chronic wasting disease between deer

White-tailed deer, Odocoileus virginianus
May catch fatal Chronic Wasting Disease from tics

Source: USDA Via Wikipedia
Public Domain

Black-legged or Deer tick,
Ixodes scapularis

Source: USDA via Wikipedia
Public Domain

The thing about being a troobuleeving creationist is that you have to find a way to avoid crediting your putative intelligent [sic] designer deity with all the nasties that exist in nature, while insisting that only your beloved intelligent [sic] designer designed everything.

You also need to buleeve your putative designer is omniscient because it's one and the same as the allegedly omniscient and omnipotent god of the Bible and Qur'an, so knows exactly what its designs will do when it designs them, which amounts to designing them for that purpose.

The same deity is also allegedly omni-benevolent, which makes parasites and prey-predator arms races difficult to explain, especially since it supposedly boasted to Isaiah about creating evil, so the Bible claims (Isaiah 45:7).

So, imagine the mental gymnastics that a troobuleeving creationist will need to perform to accommodate the knowledge that one of their intelligent [sic] designer's designs, the black-legged or deer tick, Ixodes scapularis, might be responsible for transmitting the prion that causes Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in deer, as this piece of research, led by Heather Inzalaco of the Wisconsin Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA, suggests.

The black-legged tick and how it transmits the rickettsia parasite, Anaplasma phagocytophilum to humans - The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature’s God is Not Good pp. 15-17.

First, a little about prions and the diseases they cause:

Creationism in Crisis - Even 'Artificial' Cells With a Minimal Genome Evolve Naturally

Electron micrographs of a cluster of minimal cells magnified 15,000 times.

Credit: Tom Deerinck and Mark Ellisman
University of California at San Diego.

Artificial cells demonstrate that "life finds a way": 2023 news: News: News & Events: Department of Biology: Indiana University Bloomington

It's turning out to be another terrible week for those few creationists capable, and willing, to read the science.

Here for example is a report on the work of a team led by evolutionary biologist, Professor Jay T. Lennon, of the Department of Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University. It shows a number of things that refute basic creationist dogmas:

• The team use a genetically engineered, stripped down version of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides, a parasitic organism that, in common with many parasites had lost genes in the course of its evolution as a dependent parasite in the gut of goats and similar animals, reducing its genome to just 901 genes. So here we have evolution by loss of information (something creationists claim can't happen because their dogma says loss of information is invariably detrimental) as the starting point of this research.
• The team then removed all but the essential genes needed to maintain a functional, reproducing cell, removing a further 45 percent of the genes, reducing the genome to just 493 genes, showing the massive amount of redundancy in a cell's genome - something that no intelligent designer would have designed, showing there was no intelligence in the design of M. mycoides. By comparison, a typical cell can contain 20,000 genes!
• The team then allowed the minimal cell to evolve for 300 days, or 2000 generations (equivalent to 40,000 years of human evolution). They found that even with a minimal genome and so fewer targets for mutation and selection to act on, the minimum cells evolved towards greater fitness, just as the TOE predicts.
• And of course, as with all biological research, there is the complete dependence on the TOE to understand and explain the results, with no hint of doubt in it's explanatory powers or any suggestion that the creationists superstition with its magic and unproven supernatural entity might offer a better explanation of the facts.

Here then is how the Indiana University news release describes the research:

Creationism in Crisis - The Universe is Larger and More Majestic Than the Ignorant Authors of Genesis Ever Imagined - Don't Blame Them, They Were Only Doing Their Best With What Little Knowledge They Had

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

Seven Amazing Accomplishments the James Webb Telescope Achieved in Its First Year | Science | Smithsonian Magazine

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Creationism in Crisis - 500 Million Year-Old Fossil Reveals How Tunicates Evolved

Artistic reconstruction of Megasiphon thylakos.

Artwork by Franz Anthony.

Discovery of 500-million-year-old fossil reveals astonishing secrets of tunicate origins | Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology

Newly-discovered tunicate from the Middle Cambrian Marjum Formation in Utah, USA

Left:
Holotype (UMNH.IP.6079) and only known specimen of Megasiphon thylakos, showing overall morphology including paired siphons and barrel-shaped body

Right:
Counterpart fossil of the same specimen

Nanglu, K., Lerosey-Aubril, R., Weaver, J.C. et al. (2023)

Tunicates are interesting for a number of reasons, not least of which is that they are believed to be ancestral to all the chordates, which includes us and all other vertebrates. However, it's not obvious to look at them how they evolved into the chordates in the first place, until you examine the juvenile form, which is motile, unlike the adult which is sedentary, anchored to a rock by what had been its head.

The juvenile form had the beginning of a notochord, or collections of neurons along its back that evolved into the central nervous system, encased, in the case of the vertebrates in the bony spinal column with a cranium at the head end.

Another interesting thing is that it was not clear what ancestry they had and how they evolved from it. Modern tunicate form two groups: the sedentary (when adult) appendicularias and the free-swimming ascidiaceans or "sea squirts", but it was not clear which form, if either, was the stem tunicate. That mystery came some way to being solved recently with the discovery of a rare fossil from 500 million years ago, in the Middle Cambrian Marjum Formation in Utah, USA, and the study carried out on it by four Harvard biologists led by Dr Karma Nanglu, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.

Just how, is explained in a Harvard news release:

Creationism in Crisis - Now It's Stone Tools Being Used in Kent, Almost 300,000 Years Before Creationists Think Earth Was Created.

Giant handaxe recovered from fluvial deposits in the Medway Valley, Kent, UK

The Maritime Academy handaxe

Giant stone artefacts found on rare Ice Age site in Kent | UCL News - UCL – University College London

The problem with being a devotee of a counter-factual superstition like creationism in order to feel important enough, is that reality keeps trying to intrude and make you wonder if you could be wrong and less important than you feel you should be. So, it's a characteristic of a creationist that they have to have a whole repertoire of mental gymnastics to continue to fool themselves into thinking practically every discovery by science isn't a problem, because, somehow, it isn't real.

One of these tactics is to tell yourself that you must be right because lots of others agree with you, regardless of the fact that even more people disagree with you, so you have to keep recruiting new members of your cult. In the childish belief that facts become truer the more people believe them, you have to plumb ever greater depths of dishonesty to fool gullible people into joining your cult by seeking out scientifically illiterate fools with a child-like thinking ability to misrepresents science to.

A fundamental counter-factual creationist belief is that a magic supernatural deity created everything out of nothing with you in mind, in just 6 days about 6,000 years ago, and all living species were created in one day without ancestors. And of course, it holds you in such high regard as the pinnacle of its creative ability that it did it all for you!

So, one of the problems you need strategies for dismissing is the evidence that Earth is several billion years old, there were tool-making hominins living on it several hundred thousand years ago every species, including modern humans, had ancestors. If you ever concede those facts, your entire counter-factual world disintegrates and leaves you not feeling important enough and feeling stupid for having been fooled into believing it in the first place.

So, to prick the pomposity of creationists again, here is solid evidence that hominins were creating stone tools in what is now Kent, in the UK, 300,000 years ago - some 294,000 years before Earth was supposedly created.

Since anatomically modern humans had not migrated out of Africa at that time and Neanderthals and Denisovans had not yet evolved in Eurasia, the descendants of an earlier migration, such as Homo heidelbergensis, H. antecessor or even H. erectus, must have made these tools.

These tools, some of the largest ever found in Europe, were discovered during a survey by archaeologists from University College London (UCL) of a site at Frindsbury, Kent on which it is planned to develop the Maritime Academy School.

A UCL press release explains the finding:

Creationism in Crisis - How Evolution Helped the Avian Dinosaurs Survive the K-Pg Extinction to Become Birds

Feathers from a baby bird that lived 99 million years ago, preserved in amber.

Photo by Shundong Bi.

Illustration of what a newly hatched Enantiornithine bird may have looked like.

Fossil of an extinct Enantiornithine, Zhouornis hani

Yuguang Zhang, Jingmai O’Connor, Liu Di, et al. (2014)
Via Wikipedia (CC BY 4.0)

Fossils reveal how ancient birds molted their feathers— - Field Museum

All modern birds have evolved from the few early birds and avian dinosaurs that survived the mass extinction that killed off the Cretaceous megafauna such as dinosaurs at the so-called Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, also erroneously called the K-T (Cretaceous-Triassic) boundary. Incidentally, K is the initial letter for the German for Cretaceous (Kreide).

It is believed that one thing that helped some of the early birds survive was that they were clothed in feathers, which, like the fur of the early mammals, enabled them to survived several years of ice-age weather that were caused by the dust in the stratosphere the exploding meteorite threw up, dimming the sun and causing an expansion of the polar ice sheets.

But not all birds survived. One group that didn't was the Enantiornithines which went extinct along with the non-avian dinosaurs.

Now two researchers, Yosef Kiat and Jingmai Kathleen O’Connor, from the Negaunee Integrative Research Center in the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL, USA believe they have discovered why. The key to the discovery was feathers from this group of birds preserved in amber.

Their research is explained in a press release from the Field Museum of Chicago:

Creationism in Crisis - More Evidence for Evolution in Soft-Bodied Fossils from Wales

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

A reconstruction of the ancient inhabitants of the Castle Bank Quarry in Wales.

Credit: Yang Dinghua

Newly discovered soft-bodied fossil site found in Wales | Department of Zoology

Creationists frauds like to make much of the so-called 'Cambrian Explosion' some 542–485 million years ago, when, so they claim the fossil record shows that a whole range of multicellular species with different body plans, suddenly appeared without ancestry, as if by magic.

Of course it was nothing of the sort and lasted some 6-10 million years during which multicellular organisms evolved out of the Ediacaran biota and arms races between predators and prey, made possible by the evolution of mobility (the Ediacarans had probably been sedentary filter-feeders, fixed to rocks and the sea bed) led to the evolution of different forms of mobility, senses such as sight and touch which require a nervous system, defensive armour like shells, spines and scales, burrowing and of course advanced digestive and excretory systems to process the new food supplies.

With little competition for natural niches, it is hardly surprising that diversification was rapid, but the impression of sudden appearance in the fossil record is due to the fact that most of the biota were soft-bodied (bones, teeth and shells not yet having evolved) and so the conditions in which they were preserved was rare. Previously, almost all out knowledge of the Cambrian biota came from the Burgess Shales from Canada, so all we have is a snapshot of the state of play at a moment in time with nothing on which to base a claim of sudden appearance or unnaturally rapid diversification.

But now though, thanks to a chance discovery made during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, we have another collection of soft-bodied fossils from Wales from the Ordovician Period, some 462 million years ago, the geological period immediately following the Cambrian. This collection of fossils shows the state of play some 20 million years after the Cambrian. Not surprisingly, these reveal a clear ancestry in the Cambrian with some of the species bearing a striking resemblance to Cambrian species such as the iconic Opabinia, Yohoia and Wiwaxia.

The discovery is the subject of a paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution by scientists from Cambridge University, UK, which is sadly behind an expensive paywall, together with several astonishing pictures of the fossils and artist's reconstructions, however, the abstract is available here. The work is also described in a brief news release from Cambridge University:

Unintelligent Designer News - How Trees Evolved Sub-optimal and Complex Seed Dispersal Mechanisms

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

A seed survival story: How trees keep ‘friends’ close and ‘enemies’ guessing | Penn State University

Hawes, the fruit of the common hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna, in an English hedgerow in Autumn

Hips (Rosa Canina) and blackberries (Rubus Fruticosus)

© 2023 Rosa Rubicondior

Back in November 2013 (was it really nearly ten years ago?!) I wrote a blog post which anticipated this latest piece of research. It was all about how a symbiotic relationship between birds and flowering plants had evolved in which the plants provide birds with food in exchange for them dispersing their seeds, and how this incidentally led to us evolving colour vision.

Lessons From Nature - How Birds and Berries Gave Us Colour Vision

Now this research by a large international team led by Assistant Professor Tong Qiu, of the College of Agricultural Sciences, Penn State University, has looked at the dynamics of this relationship in which trees need to balance the loss of seeds by consumption and their dispersal by those same consumers, and how this balance can change in years of plenty (mast years) and lean years.

The relationship is complex and sub-optimal, exactly as might be expected of an evolved system, but not of an intelligently designed system, which would be optimized and minimally complex to avoid the unnecessary waste of the naturally evolved system. Climate too plays a part in the complex, especially the occurrence of summer drought.

The research is explained in a Penn State News release:

Creationism in Crisis - Our Placental Ancestors Briefly Lived With Dinosaurs and Survived the Mass Extinction

Public domain

June: Humans’ ancestors survived asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs | News and features | University of Bristol

The beginning of the end for larger dinosaurs. The beginning of the age of placental mammals for us.

According to a new study by palaeontologists from the University of Bristol and the University of Fribourg, placental mammals had evolved in the Cretaceous and were living alongside dinosaurs when the asteroid struck and precipitated the mass extinction that wiped out the larger fauna, leaving smaller feathered dinosaurs to evolve into birds and the early placental mammals to diversify quickly into all today's placental mammals and occupy niches vacated by the larger dinosaurs.

This event is known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, marked in the geological column by a thin layer of iridium, believed to be of asteroid origin, the asteroid having vapourized on impact.
The question the team set out to answer was when exactly the placental mammals evolved relative to the mass extinction. The fossil evidence, which has only been found in rocks younger than 66 million years, suggested they evolved after the K-Pg boundary, but molecular data suggested an earlier origin.

The research, which is published, open access, in the journal Current Biology, is described in Bristol University press release:

Abiogenesis News - Urea May Have Been The Precursor to Life.

Potential witness to the origins of life: a urea dimer.

Visualisations: Adobe Stock / Montage

Why urea may have been the gateway to life | ETH Zurich

Artist's impression of the pre-biotic Earth.

A new technique for observing chemical reactions with an extremely high temporal resolution has enabled Swiss scientists working at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich (ETH Zürich) and Geneva University to see what happens when urea in water is subject to ionizing radiation - the conditions that would have existed on pre-biotic Earth, billions of years ago.

The dominant theory explaining abiogenesis is that it took place around deep ocean hydrothermal vents, or black smokers, but a rival theory, which harks back to Darwin's 'warm little pond', is that it could have occurred in shallow pools subjected to ionizing radiation from the sun. The team's observation of how urea reacts lends support to the latter theory.

Urea is a highly reactive molecule that exists in concentrated solutions as a dimer (two molecules chemically bonded). The researchers observed that ionizing radiation causes a hydrogen ion (i.e., a proton, which carries a positive charge) to move from one molecule in the dimer to the other, creating a negatively charged urea^- radical from one molecule and a protonated urea⁺ molecule from the other. The former is highly reactive and can then form malonic acid - believed to be the first step in creating larger molecules such as RNA. This happens so fast (in about 1 femtosecond, or 150 billionths of a second) that it effectively monopolizes the dimer and prevents other chemical reactions from occurring, so favouring the formation of malonic acid.

The details are given in the ETH Zürich press release:

Creationism in Crisis - A Gap in the Fossil Record in Texas Has Just Been Filled With A Jurassic Plesiosaur

An artist’s interpretation of a Jurassic plesiosaur. Fossils from a plesiosaur discovered in West Texas are the only fossils from a Jurassic vertebrate found and described in the state. The University of Texas at Austin led the research.

Credit: Wikimedia commons

Plesiosaur, artist's impression.

Newly Discovered Jurassic Fossils Are a Texas First | Jackson School of Geosciences | The University of Texas at Austin

Those pesky gaps in the fossil record into which creationists try to shoehorn their ever-shrinking little god, keep on getting filled by science. To the average child-like creationists it must seem at times as though every serious scientist is trying to prove them wrong. No wonder so many of them are also fruitloop conspiracy theorists.

But the fact remains that the 'fossil record' is simply the record of the fossils found so far. This was neatly illustrated recently when a team of palaeontologists filled another big gap - the lack of Jurassic vertebrate fossils in Texas. Since parts of Texas and Mexico were covered by a shallow sea during the Jurassic, there should have been a fossil record of Jurassic marine vertebrate species and yet none, apart from a few marine invertebrates such as ammonites and snails, had been found - until now.

The discovery of bone fragments of the limbs and backbone of a plesiosaur, was made in the Malone Mountains of West Texas by teams led by Steve May, of UT Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences Museum of Earth History.

The Jurassic deposits which are found in the Malone Mountains were laid down in the shallow sea just below sea level a few miles from the shore. The deposits have since been lifted up into mountains by tectonic activity. Hilariously, creationists try to explain the ordering of fossils in the geological column by claiming the more advanced animals could run faster so got further up the mountains as the biblical genocidal flood waters rose. This apparently explains why shellfish and marine vertebrates with flippers are found in mountains!

A paper describing the bones was published recently in the journal Rocky Mountain Geology.

A UT Jackson School of Geoscience news release tells the story of the research:

Creationism in Crisis - Our Ancestors Were Eating One Another About 1.45 Million Years Before Creationists Think Earth was Created

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

Homo erectus
Cannibalized by unknown tool-using hominid.

Humans’ Evolutionary Relatives Butchered One Another 1.45 Million Years Ago | Smithsonian Institution

More evidence that the Bible narrative is wrong by several orders of magnitude about the age of Earth, comes in yet another scientific paper showing that there were human ancestors living in Africa 1.45 million years ago.

And these hominids were also cannibals, judging by the cut marks found on their fossil remains, highly suggestive of the flesh being removed for consumption in much the same way that flesh was cut from the bones of other species.

The evidence comes from the work of three paleoanthropologists led by Briana Pobiner of the Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program, Washington, DC, USA. Her colleagues were Michael Pante of the Department of Anthropology and Geography, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA and Trevor Keevil of the Department of Anthropology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.

Briana Robiner discovered the cut marks when she was examining the specimen KNM-ER 741 for evidence of animal predation by, for example, lions and sabre-toothed cats that were living in the area at the time. KNM-ER 741 was found by Mary Leakey in the Turkana region of Kenya and was originally assigned to the Australopithecine species, Australopithecus boisei but has since been reclassified as the hominin, Homo erectus, making it a direct ancestor of modern humans as well as Neanderthals and Denisovans.

With several archaic hominids co-existing in East and South Africa at that time, the butcher(s) could be from a cousin species which would technically not be cannibalism, which requires the cannibal to consume members of its own species.
Their trio's research is described in a Smithsonian news release:

Unintelligent Design News - Fossil Teeth From 3.4 Million Years Ago Show Megalodons Were Warm-Blooded (And This May Have Caused Their Extinction)

Megalodons, which went extinct 3.6 million years ago, are believed to have grown to lengths of 50 feet.

Credit: Alex Boersma/PNAS

Megalodon sharks could reach up to three times the size of the largest great white ever recorded.

Herschel Hoffmeyer/Shutterstock

Megalodon was no cold-blooded killer | UCLA

Unplanned, mindless evolution can, and often does, push a species up to and over the edge of a cliff, resulting in extinction, because it has no way to tell the future.

This makes no sense as the product of an intelligent process, of course, especially a process controlled and directed by an omniscient god, for whom the future is knowable and predictable, and it is simply not the work of such an intelligent, omniscient designer to deliberately design species such as the megalodon to go extinct.

Now scientists from the University of California - Los Angeles, USA (UCLA) together with colleagues from the William Paterson University of New Jersey, USA, the University of California–Merced, USA, Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, USA, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Princeton University, Princeton, USA and DePaul University, Chicago, USA believe they have worked out why the megalodon went extinct.

Determining the body temperature in life from isotopes in fossil teeth.

Scientists can estimate the body temperature of live animals by analyzing the isotopes of oxygen and carbon found in their fossil teeth using a method known as stable isotope analysis. Here's an overview of how this process works:

1. Oxygen Isotopes: The ratio of oxygen isotopes (oxygen-18 to oxygen-16) in the body is influenced by various factors, including the temperature and the isotopic composition of the water an animal consumes. As animals drink water or consume food, the oxygen isotopes from those sources become incorporated into their tissues, including teeth.
   
   Animals that maintain a relatively constant body temperature, such as mammals, have a consistent relationship between their body temperature and the oxygen isotope composition of their tissues. This relationship is often referred to as the "oxygen isotope thermometer."
   
   By analyzing the oxygen isotopes preserved in fossil teeth, scientists can compare them to the isotopic composition of modern animals with known body temperatures. This comparison allows them to estimate the body temperature of the ancient animals.
2. Carbon Isotopes: The carbon isotopes (carbon-13 to carbon-12) found in fossil teeth can provide additional information about an animal's diet and metabolism, which can be indirectly related to body temperature.
   
   Different types of food sources have distinct carbon isotope signatures. For instance, plants using the C3 photosynthetic pathway have a different carbon isotope composition compared to plants that use the C4 pathway. Animals feeding on different types of plants will exhibit different carbon isotope ratios in their tissues, including teeth.
   
   By analyzing the carbon isotopes in fossil teeth, scientists can infer the type of plants consumed by an animal and gain insights into its dietary habits. This information, in combination with oxygen isotope analysis, helps refine temperature estimates.

It is important to note that these methods provide approximations and are subject to various uncertainties and limitations. However, they offer valuable insights into the paleobiology and ecology of ancient organisms, including their body temperature ranges.

A paper in 2019 suggested that the main cause was competition from the newer and smaller, great white sharks, but this team's findings point to the difficulty in maintaining a body temperature several degrees warmer than the sea water it lived in. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive and a dynamic which demanded a high-energy food intake could be pushed out of balance by competition for food.

The team arrived at the conclusion that the megalodon was warm-blooded by examining the fossilized remains of megalodon teeth which contain isotopes of oxygen and carbon deposited when the shark was alive, so making a permanent record of the relative abundance of these isotopes, which vary according to the temperature of the water they lived in.

The research and its significance are explained in a press release from the UCLA Newsroom:

Creationism in Crisis - Another 'Missing' Link - From 94 Million Years Ago

A rendering of a mosasaur, a prehistoric marine reptile that went extinct millions of years ago. A set of mosasaur fossils found in southern Utah a decade ago are the oldest ever found in North America, according to a new study.

Artwork: Andrey Atuchin

Life reconstruction of the mosasaur Plioplatecarpus, a distant relative of Sarabosaurus dahli.

Image credit: Sci.News / Dmitry Bogdanov.

UNF: UNF professor & team discover ancient marine reptile fossil, publish ground-breaking evolutionary insight

The chronic problem for creationists, and one the frauds who lead their cult need to work ever harder to give their dupes strategies for ignoring, is that being a counter-factual superstition, the facts keep trying to assert themselves and create doubt in the minds of the faith-fooled.

Another such fact is the discovery that the fossil remains of an early marine reptile, a mosasaur, found 11 years ago, have, on re-examination, proved to be close to the stem mosasaur of this group of extinct marine reptiles and gives clues about the origins of a novel cranial blood supply seen in a particular group of mosasaurs. The species has been named Sarabosaurus dahli after the US Bureau of Land Management volunteer, Steve Dahl, who helped recover the fossil fragments.

The team of Dutch, French and American palaeontologists who identified the fossil as a new species included Dr. L. Barry Albright III, of the Department of Physics, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, Florida, U.S.A., and, embarrassingly for Creationists, Dr. Michael J. Polcyn, of the Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, who obviously has no difficulty accepting that the TOE best explains the observable evidence.

The finding and its significance are explained in a University of North Florida news release:

Creationism in Crisis - A Continuous Culture in Central America for 11,000 Years. No Evidence of a Genocidal Flood

The El Gigante rock shelter in western Honduras.

Photo Credit: Alejandro Figueroa

Macrobotanical remains from El Gigante.

Photo Credit: Thomas Harper

Lessons in sustainability, evolution and human adaptation — courtesy of the Holocene | The Current

The thing about creationists claims of a global genocidal flood with just eight survivors, is that there is no evidence that such a flood ever occurred and what evidence there is all points to it never having happened.

If creationism were based on evidence, those two demonstrable facts should at least cause them to do the unthinkable and consider being wrong. However, considering being wrong is such an existential threat to creationists that it is something that must never even be contemplated.

So, what are these demonstrable facts?

• The evidence that should be there is of course the global layer of silt containing a jumble of fossils from disconnected land masses than would be the inevitable result of such a flood with no land barriers to how far debris could float. Creationists also claim that extinct orders such as dinosaurs were living at the time of the flood, so the predicted jumble of fossils should contain extinct and extant species in haphazard order.
  
  But that's not what we see.
• The evidence that should not be there is of course archaeological evidence of continuous cultures which pre-dated the supposed flood 4,000 years ago and continues in an unbroken sequence through the time of the alleged flood and up to modern times. The culture should have been destroyed along with the evidence for it in a catastrophic global flood, of course.
  
  But that's what we see.

Normally, having inevitable predictions from a hypothesis refuted is a reason to abandon the hypothesis, but creationists are not normal people, at least in their use of logical deduction. To a creationist, the conclusion is sacred, so facts must be ignored.
Evidence of the latter fact, which shouldn't be there but is, was the subject of a recent paper on PLOS ONE a couple of days ago. It concerns the stratified layers of the remains of food plants in a the 'El Gigante' rock shelter in Honduras, Central America, going back to 11,000 years. The site was recently nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Not only does this show a pattern of continuous occupation but it also records the dynamic nature of hunter-gatherer societies and the adaptations to climate and environmental change.

Of course, the scientists were interested in what this tells us about how the local culture evolved from hunter-gatherers to farmers and what lessons can be learned of relevance to today's society. The refutation of the creationist flood myth was purely incidental, like the other frequent scientific refutations of creationism, where the revealed facts speak for themselves.

The international research team included scientists from the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB).

A UCSB news release explains the discovery and its significance:

Malevolent Designer News - A Tapeworm that Extends the Age of its Victim to Improve the Chance of it Being Eaten

Two ants of the species Temnothorax nylanderi: The lighter colored ant is infected with larvae of the tapeworm Anomotaenia brevis (bottom right) and thus has a different cuticle color as well as, more importantly, a considerably longer lifespan.

Photo: © Susanne Foitzik

Temnothorax nylanderi

Wikipedia (www.AntWeb.org) (CC BY 4.0)

Parasites as fountains of youth: Study finds infected ants live much longer | Press and Public Relations

A beautiful example of how the mindless, undirected process of evolution can produce parasites that turn their hosts into zombies, because that suits the survival interests of their offspring, was published a couple of years ago in Royal Society Open Science.

And more bad news for creationists because it makes their beloved designer god look even more malevolent.

The study was conducted by a team of researchers led by Professor Susanne Foitzik of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU).

Why an intelligent designer would design something like this is something for creationists to explain because the designer of such a system can only be described as malevolent and planning to increase the suffering in the world, or full of hate for the ants it supposedly also designed.

The study showed that worker ants of the species Temnothorax nylanderi can live several times longer than normal workers of the same species when infected by a parasitic tapeworm, Anomotaenia brevis.

The ants are the intermediate hosts of the tapeworm, the primary host of which is a woodpecker. The longer an infected ant lives, the greater its chances of being eaten by a woodpecker, so it is in the interests of the tapeworm genes to keep the ant alive as long as possible.

The research is explained in a press release from JGU:

Creationism in Crisis - No Doubt About it. Sponges Evolved!

Glass sponge genome furnishes insights into evolution of biomineralization - LMU Munich

Figure 1.Aphrocallistes vastus: habitus, genomic overview and phylogenetic grouping in the Hexactinellida.

(a) Photograph of Aphrocallistes vastus at 170 m depth on the Hecate Strait and Queen Charlotte Sound glass sponge reefs. Lasers top to bottom right are 10 cm apart (photo by James Pegg, the ROV pilot). The single red laser dot marks the oscular region (‘tip’) and the two laser dots the main ‘body’, the two regions from which differentially expressed genes were assessed.

(b) Photograph taken by ROV of the sponge reefs at Fraser Ridge in the Salish Sea, BC, Canada. Oscula (round openings) are about 5 cm in diameter.

Francis, Warren R.; Eitel, Michael; Vargas, Sergio; et al (2023)

Contrary to creationist fraud claims, research biologists are not turning their backs on the Theory of Evolution and instead adopting the childish creationist superstition complete with its belief in magic and the assumption of an unproven supernatural magician, can make chemistry and physics do things they can't do on their own.

Prime examples are the research biologists working at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany, who believe they have discovered genetic evidence for the evolution of the so-called 'glass sponges' - sponges with silicate skeletons.

Creationism in Crisis - Mystery of Horse Hoof Evolution - Not Whether but How?

Dawn Horse (artists impression)

Daniel Eskridge (Shutterstock)

Hipparion forcei (a relative of the Laetoli species)

Nobu Tamura - Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

June: Horses lost their toes | News and features | University of Bristol

While increasingly desperate creationist frauds continue to try to fool their followers into believing that biologists are about to abandon the Theory of Evolution in favour of their childish superstition based on unproven magical supernatural entities, real biologists are debating the minute details of how taxons like the equids (horses, donkeys, zebras, etc.) evolved.

One of the mysteries in the evolution of this order is what exactly happened to the lateral toes as the modern equid foot evolved from the common pattern found in ungulates (five at the front, four at the back) through three in extinct equids into a single hooved toe. A recent paper in Royal Society Open Science had suggested that, contrary to the earlier consensus, the toes had become fused into the single central toe with their hooves contributing to the structure of the single hoof with its underlying 'frog'. This had been based in part on an examination of 3.7-million-year-old hoof prints of extinct members of the three-toed Hipparion genus found at Laetoli in the same volcanic ash deposits as those of the extinct bipedal hominid, Australopithecus.

Now a new study disputes those findings and confirms the original hypothesis that, while the lateral upper bones of the digits did indeed fuse as 'splints' to the central digits, the lower bones (the 'fingers and toes') were simply lost. The research team was led by Professor Alan R. Vincelette of Department of Pathology, St. John's Seminary, Camarillo, CA, USA and included Professor Christine Janis of the School of Earth Science, Bristol University, Bristol, UK.

The research is explained in a Bristol University news release:

The distant ancestors of modern horses had hooved toes instead of a single hoof, which vanished over time, according to researchers.

---

Plantar (underneath) view of feet of a four-toed tapir (left) and a one-toed horse (right) by Nuria Melisa Morales-García. In the middle, a reconstruction of the extinct three-toed horse Hipparion, by Karolina Suchan-Okulska.

Overall design: Morales-García.

The animals, such as the Eocene Hyracotherium, had feet like those of a modern tapir: four toes in front and three behind, each individually hooved with an underlying foot pad.

In contrast, modern equids such as horses, asses, and zebras, have only a single toe, the left over original third toe on each foot, encased in a thick-walled keratinous hoof, with an underlying triangular frog on the sole that acts as a shock absorber.

An international team of scientists, from the UK, the US, and the Netherlands, analysed hoof prints and foot bones from modern horses and fossil records to discover what happened to the lost digits.

The upper portions – the remains of the additional hand and foot bones - remain as ‘splint bones’ fused with the remaining central one, but where are the fingers and toes?

In later fossil horses there were only three toes front and back. The extra toes, known as side toes, in these horses were smaller and shorter than in a tapir, and likely did not touch the ground under normal circumstances, but they may have provided support in exceptional situations, such as sliding or forceful impact.

While the notion that modern horses have retained all of their original toes as within-hoof remnants is a novel one, and so rather appealing, it can be shown to be incorrect.

Professor Christine Janis, co-author
School of Earth Sciences
University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.

In findings, published today in Royal Society Open Science, they confirm the older notion that these toes really have been completely lost in evolution, not somehow retained within the hoof, as proposed in another recent paper published in the same journal in 2018.

Although it does seem that remainders of the proximal (upper portions) of the sider digits have been retained in modern horses, as the earlier 2018 paper claimed, the distal (lower portions, or toes) have simply been lost.

The frog of the horse's hoof evolved independently of the side toes as a unique structure providing shock absorption and traction during locomotion.

Professor Alan Vincelette, lead author
St. John’s Seminary, Camarillo, CA, USA

The 2018 paper proposed that in modern horses these side toes are retained within the hoof of the central toe, in part contributing to the frog - although there are no actual bones within the frog.

This was partially based on an interpretation of the hoof prints of an extinct three-toed horse, Hipparion (not on the direct line to modern horses) from Laetoli in Tanzania 3.7 million years ago, the same site that yielded the famous footprints of the hominid Australopithecus. These hoof prints apparently lacked a frog, and this added weight to the notion that the side toes of horses like Hipparion now contribute to the frog of modern horses.

While not all hoof prints of modern horses with frogs record its presence, an undoubted frog can be seen in many hoof prints that are known to have been made by three-toed horses. These observations cast doubt on the notion that the frog of modern horse hooves formed out of the side toes of tridactyl equids.

The team also show that the feet of one-toed horses have a different shape from the main toe of the foot of three-toed horses, being round rather than oval, a difference that may be related to differences in weight distribution and/or ecological habitat.

Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by The Royal Society. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

The abstract to the open access paper in Royal Society Open Science, has more technical details:

Abstract

The traditional story of the evolution of the horse (family Equidae) has been in large part about the evolution of their feet. How did modern horses come to have a single toe (digit III), with the hoof bearing a characteristic V-shaped keratinous frog on the sole, and what happened to the other digits? While it has long been known that the proximal portions of digits II and IV are retained as the splint bones, a recent hypothesis suggested that the distal portion of these digits have also been retained as part of the frog, drawing upon the famous Laetoli footprints of the tridactyl (three-toed) equid Hipparion as part of the evidence. We show here that, while there is good anatomical and embryological evidence for the proximal portions of all the accessory digits (i.e. I and V, as well as II and IV) being retained in the feet of modern horses, evidence is lacking for the retention of any distal portions of these digits. There is also good ichnological evidence that many tridactyl equids possessed a frog, and that the frog has been part of the equid foot for much of equid evolutionary history.

Vincelette, Alan R.; Renders, Elise; Scott, Kathleen M.; Falkingham, Peter L.; and Janis, Christine M. (2023)
Hipparion tracks and horses' toes: the evolution of the equid single hoof
R. Soc. open sci.; 10230358230358. DOI:10.1098/rsos.230358.


Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by The Royal Society. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Yet another piece of biology refuting several basic creationists claims, and to make matters worse, one of the scientists, the leader of the team and lead author of the paper, Professor Alan R. Vincelette, PhD, is a Catholic seminarian and a leading expert on the evolution of horses. He expresses no doubt at all that the TOE provides a complete explanation for the fossil record which shows the evolution of the equids over time.

But then, in mainstream Christianity, there is no problem at all with accepting the TOE. It's only the wackadoodle extremist fringe cults that requires their members to be fooled by falsehoods.

So, which creationist is going to explain to Professor Vincelette, PhD, why he is wrong, both in his theology and in his science?

Malevolent Designer News - How Food Poisoning Must Look Intelligently Designed to a Creationist

Scanning electron micrograph of Providencia alcalifaciens

Source: Wikipedia (Public domain)

Providencia alcalifaciens growing on culture medium

New insights on bacteria that causes food poisoning | Osaka Metropolitan University

The thing about believing in intelligent design, if that's what Christian and Islamic creationists genuinely do, is that you have to believe the bad stuff is designed by the designer of the good stuff because your religion only allows you to believe in one supreme designer, or you have to believe there is some other entity or force capable of intelligently designing things against which your putative supreme designer is powerless.

The other entity or force is capable of altering your supreme designer's plans at will and there is not a thing the supreme designer can do about it. Even the bizarre and morally repugnant blood sacrifice of its own son didn't give it sufficient power to overcome this rival designer, apparently.

The logic then of insisting there is only one intelligent designer is that the same designer that designs parasites that make us sick, designed our immune system to protect us from its malevolent designs. It needs a private definition of the word 'intelligent' to define that as intelligent design.

As this latest piece of research shows, some bacteria, in this case those that cause food poisoning not only have genes that produce the toxins that make us sick have also been designed to share these genes even with other species, and creationists dogma dictates that creationists believe this can't have evolved by a mindless process, so must be the design by ab intelligence that can only be described as malevolent.

The research was conducted by scientists at the Graduate School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Osaka Prefecture University, Osaka, Japan, with colleagues from the School of Environment and Life Sciences, Independent University Bangladesh (IUB), Bashundhara, Dhaka, Bangladesh and the Department of Pediatrics, Mizushima Central Hospital, Okayama, Japan.

The work is explained in a brief press release from Osaka Metropolitan University:

Unintelligent Design - How the Appearance of Design in a Fibonacci Spiral Evolved

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

Fibonacci fractal

Fossil study sheds light on famous spirals found in nature | The University of Edinburgh

One of the things that creationists unwittingly present as evidence of design (and therefore of a designer) is the spiral pattern known as a Fibonacci spiral that occurs throughout nature, from the pattern of florets in a sunflower, the arrangement of leaves in plants, the spiral of a hurricane to the shape of a spiral galaxy.

The irony is that a Fibonacci spiral is the result of a mathematical progression known as a Fibonacci sequence where the next is the sum of the preceding two numbers, 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34... etc., so the appearance of design is in reality the result of a simple mathematical progression. In other words, it's not evidence of design at all but evidence of how the appearance of design can arise without a designer, intelligent or otherwise.

Who was Fibonacci?

It's also an example of how creationists employ post hoc reasoning and deduce their desired answer from ignorant incredulity and the false dichotomy fallacy - "I can't work out how this happened naturally, therefore it must have been done by [fill in the name of the god their mummy and daddy believed in]".

Of course there will be those who extend their post hoc rationalization and claim the existence of mathematical laws like the Fibonacci sequence shows there must be a law maker, i.e., [fill in the name of the god their mummy and daddy believed in], failing to understand the deference between the descriptive laws use in science, which simply describe what happens, and the proscriptive and prescriptive laws that humans make to control our behaviour in a society.

But then where would creationism be without this ignorance, failures of logic and post hoc rationalization, in the complete absence of any supporting evidence?

And now, as though to add to creationists' discomfort, scientists have found evidence that the Fibonacci spiral seen in the arrangements of leaves in many plants is an evolved feature which was not present in the earliest plants.

First, a description of how Fibonacci sequences arise naturally in nature:

Creationism in Crisis - What Our Ancestors Were Doing 80,000 Years Before Creationists Think Earth Was Created.

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

A day in the life of an excavation at Tam Pà Ling cave.

Credit: Kira Westaway (Macquarie University)

A rare glimpse of our first ancestors in mainland Southeast Asia – News

Something that creationists find puzzling, in their desperate search for certainty at the expense of truth, is how science continually reassesses and revisits what we think we know, and of course, how we change our collective mind when that produces new evidence.

An example of this was published recently in the journal Nature Communications, where a combined team of Laotian, French, Danish, American and Australian researchers showed the results of a reevaluation of the age of fossil early Homo sapiens, found in a cave in Northern Laos, and showed that early modern humans spread through the area, on their way into Southeast Asia and Australasia, much earlier than had originally been thought. This pushes the earliest Homo sapiens presence in the area back from 40,000 to 86,000 years ago.

The newer dating uses luminescence dating because Laotian law forbids damage to the specimens from what is a world heritage site.

Creationism in Crisis - Rogue Mitochondrial DNA - Malevolent Intelligence, Incompetence or Mindless Evolution?

Creationism in Crisis

Rogue Mitochondrial DNA - Malevolent Intelligence, Incompetence or Mindless Evolution?

Mitochondria surrounded by cytoplasm

Credit: Dr David Furness

Transmission em image of mitochondria

© H. Jastrow.

New route to evolution: how DNA from our mitochondria gets into our genomes | University of Cambridge

So often, if only they hadn't learned to ignore it like an elephant in the room, or stay carefully ignorant of it, creationists should be confronting evidence that, if they believe it was designed, could only have been designed by a malevolent or incompetent designer.

Take for example this discovery that sections of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) frequently (in about 1 in 4,000 births) cross into the nuclear DNA, where it can cause cancer.

Creationists insist that this must have been intelligently designed by an omniscient designer who would therefore have known the outcome of its designed processes. The presence of mitochondria in cells is of course, good evidence of how simple, prokaryote cells, evolved into more complex, eukaryote cells by endosymbiosis - something creationists insist didn’t happen, so they are already an acute embarrassment for creationists. Now we have this finding that a supposed intelligent design process would look like a design to cause cancer.
This was discovered recently by a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London. The team were investigating a 2018 claim by researchers at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in the USA, that there were occasional instances of inheritance of paternal mtDNA, in contradiction to the normally accepted view that mtDNA in inherited exclusively from the maternal line because the sperm head, which fertilizes the egg does not contain any mitochondria.

The Cambridge/London team found that these were in fact examples of the migration of sections of mtDNA into the cell nucleus where they had become incorporated into the nuclear DNA. The process is in theory a two-way process except for two things:

1. There is only one nucleus with two copies of the DNA, but a cell can contain thousands of mitochondria, each with a copy of its DNA so the odds are greatly in favour of sections of mtDNA becoming free-roaming.
2. The nuclear membrane has pores which allow RNA to pass out into the cell, whereas the mitochondrial membrane is an intact barrier through which DNA or RNA can't normally pass.

The scientists’ findings are explained in a Cambridge University press release:

Creationism in Crisis - Key Ingredient for Abiogenesis Found on Jupiter's Moon, Enceladus

Creationism in Crisis

Key Ingredient for Abiogenesis Found on Jupiter's Moon, Enceladus

Enceladus has the whitest and most reflective surface that astronomers have yet observed, and it’s known for spraying out tiny icy silica particles.

Source: UCLA

Key building block for life found at Saturn’s Moon Enceladus | Southwest Research Institute

Artist's impression of the south polar region of Enceladus shows massive jets of water ice being blasted into space.

Image credit: Karl Kofoed / NASA.

Creationist frauds playing the 'Big Scary Numbers' tactic and the false dichotomy fallacy, which argues that the probability of self-replicating molecules arising on Earth is so small as to be indistinguishable from zero, and therefore it must have been done by the locally-popular god their mummy and daddy believed in, usually include the notional idea of the 'Goldilocks zone' which is assumed to be a zone round the sun where the conditions are 'just right' for life to exist.

They then argue that the Universe must be fine-tuned for human life on Earth, therefore God did it!

This is, of course, a statistical sleight of hand because the probability of something happening that has already happened is 1 (certainty), not some infinitesimally small fraction of 1. It has happened, therefore it happened. For some reason, the logic in that escapes the hard of thinking on whom the creationist frauds prey.

So, anything which shows that self-replicating molecules, i.e., life arising elsewhere in the Universe, and especially in the solar system far away from the 'Goldilocks zone', is anathema for creationists who must find a way to deal with another inconvenient fact.

Nevertheless, this is exactly what happened recently when an international team of scientists led by Frank Postberg, of the Institut für Geologische Wissenschaften, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany, and including Christopher R. Glein of the Space Science Division, Space Sector, Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX, USA have shown that the ocean beneath the ice covering on Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, has a key building block for 'life', phosphate. Phosphates are essential for life as we know it, not only as the main mineral in the bones of vertebrates but also as a component of metabolic pathways in the form of adenosine diphosphate (ADP) and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and the nucleotides in DNA and RNA.
The discovery was made in data from NASA’s Cassini mission.

A Southwest Research Institute press release explain how this was done:

Creationism in Crisis - 'Viking Disease' was Inherited From Neanderthals As Eurasian Humans Evolved by Hybridization

Creationism in Crisis

'Viking Disease' was Inherited From Neanderthals As Eurasian Humans Evolved by Hybridization

Dupuytren's contracture

The Viking disease can be due to gene variants inherited from Neanderthals | Karolinska Institutet Nyheter

As scientists continue to use the Theory of Evolution to explain the observable facts, oblivious to creationist claims that they are about to abandon it in favour of the childish creationist superstition involving an unevidenced magic supernatural magician, a research team led by Hugo Zeberg from Karolinska Institutet and Nobel laureate, Svante Pääbo from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, have shown that Dupuytren's contracture is probably caused by genes inherited from Neanderthals.

Dupuytren's contracture, also called 'Viking disease' because it is relatively common in North European men with over 30% of males over the age of 60 developing the condition, is a painless but debilitating condition in which one or more fingers is bent across the palm and locked in position.

The researchers were investigating genetic risk factors for the condition and analysed the DNA of a large cohort from UK, Finland and USA so could compare the DNA of 7,871 sufferers and 645,880 healthy controls. Three of the 61 risk factors were in genes inherited from Neanderthals and two of these were the second and third most important risk factors.

The team have published their findings in an open access paper in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

A news release from Karolinska Institutet explains the research: