Unintelligent Design - What on Earth are Tardigrades For and Why Design so Many of Them?

Tardigrades are also found in Denmark, in more everyday places, such as in soil, moss and rain gutters.

Photo: Getty

Tardigrade, or water bear.

Photograph: dottedhippo/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Denmark is crawling with the world's most resilient creature – University of Copenhagen

We don’t know how many species of tardigrade there are in Denmark in all, but we did find 96 unique tardigrade DNA sequences during our study – of which only 13 are known species. And there are probably more, so their diversity is apparently huge.

Associate Professor Nadja Møbjerg
Department of Biology University of Copenhagen.

Researchers from the Department of Biology, the Globe Institute and the University of Copenhagen’s Natural History Museum of Denmark have discovered that there are at least 96 species of tardigrade, of which only 13 were previously known to science. There are currently some 1,300 known species worldwide, although the Copenhagen research suggests that may be a vast under-estimate. This figure of 96 species in Denmark alone, was arrived at by analysing environmental DNA, known as eDNA, in soil samples from around Denmark. The technique can trace DNA from all living organisms in soil, water and air.

First a little background supplied by ChatGPT3:

Tardigrades: The Resilient Microscopic Marvels

Tardigrades, often referred to as "water bears" or "moss piglets," are microscopic, water-dwelling animals that belong to the phylum Tardigrada. They have captured the interest of scientists and the public alike due to their remarkable ability to survive extreme conditions that would be lethal to most other forms of life. Tardigrades were first discovered in the late 18th century and have since become subjects of intensive research.

Discovery:
Tardigrades were first described by German zoologist Johann August Ephraim Goeze in 1773. However, it wasn't until the 20th century that they gained significant attention due to advances in microscopy and scientific techniques.

Biology:
Tardigrades are incredibly small animals, usually ranging from 0.1 to 1.5 millimeters in length. They are found in various environments, including marine, freshwater, and terrestrial habitats, where they often inhabit mosses, lichens, leaf litter, and soil.

One of the most fascinating aspects of tardigrades is their remarkable tolerance to extreme conditions:

1. Desiccation (Drying Out):
   Tardigrades can survive complete desiccation by entering a state known as cryptobiosis. In this state, they lose most of their water content and essentially shut down their metabolic processes. They curl up into a "tun" shape, forming a protective barrier against the environment. When conditions become favorable again, they rehydrate and return to their active state.
2. Extreme Temperatures:
   Tardigrades can withstand both high and low temperatures. Some species can survive temperatures close to absolute zero (-273°C) and others can withstand temperatures as high as 150°C.
3. Radiation:
   Tardigrades can endure high levels of ionizing radiation, including X-rays and gamma rays, which would be lethal to most organisms.
4. Pressure:
   Certain tardigrades can survive extreme pressure, such as the pressure found in the deep sea.
5. Toxic Environments:
   Tardigrades can tolerate high concentrations of toxic substances, including heavy metals and strong acids.

Despite their resilience, tardigrades are not invincible. Extreme conditions can still cause damage, and their survival rates vary depending on the specific conditions and species.

ChatGPT3 "Tell me all about tardigrades, their discovery and biology" [Response to user request]
Retrieved from https://chat.openai.com/

The research is explained in a University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Science news release:

Creationism in Crisis - A Mass Extinction in Europe A Million Years Before Earth Existed - According to Creationists.

New research reveals that an extreme glacial cooling around 1.1 million years ago in southern Europe likely led to the extinction of early humans on the continent. This discovery challenges the previously held belief of continuous human occupation in Europe during that period.

Artist’s concept

Extreme cooling ended the first human occupation of Europe | UCL News - UCL – University College London

A sudden cold snap, 1.1 million years ago, caused by changes in the Atlantic currents, could have made life impossible for archaic humans who had populated Western Europe, including what is now the British Isles. Their extinction cleared the way for later colonisation, first by Neanderthals about 250,000 years ago, followed by anatomically modern Homo sapiens, about 40,000 years ago.

Evidence of this extreme climate change and subsequent mass extinction was found by paleoclimate scientists from UCL, University of Cambridge and CSIC Barcelona who analysed the chemical composition of marine micro-organisms and examined the pollen content in a deep-sea sediment core recovered from off the coast of Portugal. This showed evidence of a sudden cooling with ocean surface temperatures falling to 6^oC off Lisbon and semi-desertification of the surrounding area. Parts of the Mediterranean coast would have resembled the Asian steppe.

During the cold snap 1.1 million years ago, the Mediterranean might have looked similar to the Asian steppe.

Image © Panikhin Sergey/Shutterstock.

The research is published in the journal Nature. The press release from UCL explains its significance:

Creationism in Crisis - How Watermelons Evolved, With Gene Loss AND Gene Duplication

Cultivated watermelon, Citrullus lanatus

Photo: James E. Scarborough
via Wikipedia Public Domain

Behind the Rind: New Genomic Insights into Watermelon Evolution, Quality, and Resilience - Boyce Thompson Institute

Fig. 6 Fruits types in C. lanatus, C. mucosospermus, C. amarus, and C. colocynthis: a, b C. colocynthis, c C. lanatus subsp. lanatus, d-f C. lanatus subsp. vulgaris, g, h C. mucosospermus, i: Citrullus sp.

Fig. 8 Fruit flesh colour in C. lanatus, C. mucosospermus, C. amarus, and C. colocynthis: a, b C. lanatus subsp. vulgaris, c, d C. mucosospermus, e C. amarus, f C. lanatus

Achigan-Dako, E.G., et al., (2015)

The embarrassment for creationism continues unabated with news that scientists from the Boyce Tompson Institute, Itheca, New York, USA, have worked out how the cultivated watermelon evolved.

This might seem trivial to normal people, but to creationists, it shatters several cherished pieces of dogma and exposes them as bogus.

1. Firstly, the scientists have shown that the process of domestication from wild ancestors included an incident of gene doubling, so creating new genetic information (and increasing the sweetness of the watermelon). Creationists claim there is no mechanism for increasing the information in the genome without the intervention of a magic man doing magic.
2. Secondly, the scientists have also discovered that the process of domestication involved the loss of several genes from the cultivated watermelon genome, yet creationist dogma says all genetic loss is fatal and all mutations are deleterious, and yet here we have an improved cultivar, resulting in millions more watermelons than had the mutations not happened.
3. Thirdly, the Bible claims all life on earth was created by God for its special creation, mankind, and yet here we have evidence that the cultivated watermelon is the result of selective breeding, meaning that, even if we allow for the sake of argument that watermelons were created for mankind, whoever created them didn't do a very good job, or failed to anticipate what humans would require from a watermelon, so we needed to improve on what was provided. Imagine buying an intelligently designed motor car, then finding it needs considerable modification and improvement to make it fit for purpose! Would you buy from that designer again?

That latter point can be made for all domesticated animals, by the way, since very few of them have remained unchanged compared to their wild ancestors.

So, what is the evolutionary history of watermelons?

According to the press release by Aaron Callahan, from the Boyce Thompson Institute :

Malevolent Design News - Parasites From Over 200 Million Years Ago! So, when was 'The Fall', Exactly?

Parasites of morphotype I, found in the vertebrate coprolite.

Nonsrirach T, Morand S, et al., (2023)

The vertebrate coprolite with parasites found in the Huai Nam Aun locality (Upper Triassic).

Nonsrirach T, Morand S, et. al., (2023)

First discovery of parasite eggs in a vertebrate coprolite of the Late Triassic in Thailand | PLOS ONE

Creationists apologists, in a desperate effort to explain why a supposedly omnibenevolent designer would design so many nasty little parasites, whose sole purpose appears to be to increase the suffering in the world, find solace in the Bible myth of 'The Fall' which apparently allowed 'sin', over which their reputedly omnipotent deity is powerless, to enter the world and begin creating parasites.

Forgetting for a moment that several of these parasites have been cited by creationism's favourite 'creation scientist', Michael J Behe, as examples of irreducibly complex (therefore made by God [sic]) organisms. This means that the entire history of parasites must be shoe-horned into the last 8-10 thousand years or so, or however many thousands of years ago the convenience of the argument needs to place this 'Fall'.

And, of course, since 'The Fall' involved a parentless couple, there could not have been parasites before there were humans on Earth - so the logic of the argument dictates.

It must set up some awful cognitive dissonance in creation cult victims to discover, not only that Triassic animals suffer from parasites, but parasitic nematodes and probably other intestinal parasites existed some 200 million years before they think Earth and humans were created.

Of course, this is just another example of the yawning gap between what the creation cult teaches its scientifically illiterate dupes, and the real history of the Universe and life on Earth.

The discovery of the eggs of parasitic nematodes in the fossil remains of ancient faeces or coprolite, was made by Thanit Nonsrirach of Mahasarakham University, Thailand, and colleagues. The coprolite is from the Upper Triassic Huai Hin Lat Formation in Northern Thailand, which formed in shallow, low-energy brackish or fresh water about 200 million years ago.

The team's findings are published, open access, in PLOS ONE.

Unintelligent Design - When Black Ants Fly To Get The Best Mate

Winged female unmated black ant, Lasius niger, or female 'alates' attended by workers.

Black garden ant alates, Lasius niger
Female (left) and male (right).

Ant Ark
©Brian Valentine

Still suffering from COVID-19, we ventured out yesterday, suitable face-covered and social distanced. It was a warm, humid August day with a high-pressure system dominating the UK weather. There had been over-night rain. Almost everywhere we looked we could see winged black ants climbing to the tops of grass and taking flight - some large, some small, or fat, wingless females crawling about on the footpaths, in the open-air carpark.

It was a local 'flying ant day'. The conditions of temperature, humidity and barometric pressure were exactly right, and this triggered a nuptial or dispersal flight in the local area.

But why is this nuptial flight performed?

Abiogenesis News - Self Organising Organic Molecules Add Another Possibility to The Theory of Abiogenesis

A new model describes the self-organization of catalysts involved in metabolic cycles. Different species of catalysts (represented by different colors) form clusters and can chase each other.

© MPI-DS / LMP

Fig. 4: Oscillatory dynamics for an odd number of species with chasing cross-interactions.

A schematic representation of the oscillatory dynamics (left), snapshots of molecular dynamics simulations (middle, see also Supplementary Movie 8), and a diagram of the corresponding species interactions and pairing (right) are shown side by side. Here, dashed and dotted lines represent respectively the pairs on the left and right of the schematic representation. The eigenvalues of the system are as in Fig. 3b, but now Re(λ)<Im(λ) for the most unstable conjugate pair, so that the dynamics of the system are oscillatory.

Ouazan-Reboul, V., Agudo-Canalejo, J. & Golestanian, R. (2023).

Exploring the origins of life | Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization

Creationists would have us believe that science can't explain how 'life' arose from 'non-life', as though 'life' is some magical, mysterious substance, which, when added to inorganic chemicals, turns them into organic, living, substances. whereas of course, 'life' is simply a term for the active metabolic processes that resist entropy by using the energy stored in organic molecules, involving nothing more than the operation of the laws of chemistry and physics. That energy ultimately comes from the sun via photosynthesis, or, more rarely, geothermal energy via chemosynthesis.

What is life?

The question for science then, is how did inorganic molecules become organised in such a way that they can carry out these metabolic processes, and for that there is almost an embarrassment of explanations, most of which require conditions and time that would be impossible to replicate in a laboratory.

For a plausible ten-step process towards abiogenesis, see: Perfectly Plausible Abiogenesis.

And now to add more to the embarrassment of riches that is the growing science of abiogenesis, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS), Göttingen, Germany have shown in two studies that catalytic molecules can form metabolically active clusters by creating and following concentration gradients.

As explained in an MPI-DS news release:

Malevolent Designer News - Creationism's Favourite Malevolence's Top 5 Deadliest Pandemics

While I'm sitting here slowly recovering from COVID-19 which my partner and I probably either picked up in France or during the flight home, I thought I would look at some of Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer's other successes with lethal pandemics, so I asked my AI app for the 5 deadliest pandemics from known history.

It should be noted that the current COVID-19 pandemic, which is far from over, has to date produced 768,983,095 cases with 6,953,743 deaths and is still producing 352,943 new cases every week (WHO figures as at 2 August, 2023) This despite the fact that 13,492,099,754 (13.5 billion) vaccine doses have been administered.

Given the high mortality rate of in the early months of the pandemic, imagine what the death toll would have been without the assistance of science! Earlier pandemics had no such benefits so direct comparisons are meaningless.

A survey published in The Lancet in June 2022 estimated that about 20 million deaths from COVID-19 had been prevented in the first year following COVID-19 vaccination, so human medical science has deprived the malevolent designer of an even more stunning success with its SARS-CoV-2 virus. If it had occurred a century earlier, it would have ranked about 2 or 3 in the pandemic deaths league table - up there with the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic.

Now for the top 5 pandemics:

Way out in the lead we have the Black Death or Bubonic plague, with 72-200 million deaths.

Please note that my knowledge is based on information available up to September 2021. These references provide more detailed information about each pandemic and their impacts. Additionally, there have been other significant pandemics throughout history, but these five are among the deadliest. [ChatGPT3]

Malevolent Designer News - Is Creationism's Favourite Sadist Obsessed With Making us Sick?

Like a multifunctional gardening tool, the T4A pili of different Acinetobacter strains have evolutionarily modified the ComC protein at their tip (oval, in different colors) to settle in different niches within humans.

Gray bars: cell envelope.

© MPI-DS / LMP

How the hospital pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii quickly adapts to new environmental conditions | Aktuelles aus der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt

Model of the type IVa pilus (T4aP) in A. baylyi. OM–Outer membrane; IM–Inner membrane; PG–peptidoglycan. The individual components are listed in Table 1.

From: Iruegas R, Pfefferle K, Göttig S, Averhoff B, Ebersberger I (2023)

Remember how Michael J Behe got an entire book out of the fact that his target readership thought ignorant incredulity was scientific data, so the fact that neither he nor they knew how the bacterial flagellums evolved was presented as evidence that a god must have designed it? His book is still one of the central gospels of the creationist cult, even though few members would be capable of reading and understanding it, let alone be prepared to read the detailed rebuttals by Miller and others.

In fact, the evolution of the bacterial flagellum by exaptation of pre-existing structures, namely the Type III secretory system that bacteria use to anchor themselves to target cells before parasitizing them, was known about before he wrote his book, as Kenneth Miller has pointed out - a fact that Behe has failed to acknowledge in subsequent editions.

Creatinism in Crisis - When Were Humans Given an Immune System?

Viruses in circulation

What happens in our body when we encounter and fight off a virus like the flu, SARS-CoV-2 or RSV?

Having tested positive for COVID-19, I thought I would spend a little time finding out more about what's going on inside my body right now.

But the research has collided with the work I normally do in exposing the absurdity of creationism in all its guises and the futility of trying to force-fit real world evidence into origin myths made up by people from the fearful infancy of our species who thought Earth was just a small flat disc with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, centered on the Canaanite Hills where they hearded their goats, told their camp-fire tales of magic sky-gods and imagined it was all made just for them.

What occurred to me is the problem creationists would have if they knew enough about the subject and weren't too afraid to question their cult dogmas. For example: The standard creationist excuse for all the nasty little parasites such as viruses, bacteria, etc., is that they are the result of 'sin' which entered the world because of 'The Fall' (so betraying the fact that creationism isn't the science their cult leaders pretend, but religious superstition after all).

It always amuses me how cult leaders like Michael J. Behe make a big issue of the 'irreducible complexity' of bacteria such as E coli as evidence that creationism putative designer must have designed them, only to have them dismissed on another day in a different argument, as the creation of another 'evil' entity - 'sin'.

But with creationism, the tactic is to use whichever argument will work on the current audience, regardless of if consistence of intellectual integrity.

Incidentally, blaming 'sin' flatly contradicts the claim in the Bible that God told Isaiah that He created evil because he created everything.

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.

Isaiah 45:7 (KJV)

So, either God lied to Isaiah or Isaiah lied in the Bible - or creationist cult leaders are lying to their cult.

But let's forget that bit of Bible awkwardness and think things through a little more:

Humans were allegedly created before 'The Fall' so would have had no need for an immune system, which is our defense, imperfect though it is, against the parasites 'sin' created after 'The Fall'.

So, were we given an immune system after 'The Fall'? There is no mention of a major redesign in the Bible, but wouldn't it have been simpler for the creator to have forgiven Adam and Eve and stopped 'sin' creating these things in the first place? And of course, most multicellular species also have an immune system which wasn't needed before 'The Fall'.

Or, if he was really going to need to have himself sacrificed later in a blood offering first why did he wait several thousand years? Why couldn't he impregnate Eve, have Adam do the dirty deed and solve the problem there and then?

Or did he omnisciently anticipate what would happen and design immune systems for the (future) parasites right from the start? If so, he must have anticipated 'The Fall' and the creative powers of 'sin', including details of what it would create, and being omnipotent, could have stopped it.

Anyway, those are just a few of the many problems that creationism causes for itself by trying to fit reality into such an absurd myth, like trying to ram a large square peg into a small round hole, without changing its shape in any way.

Here then is the account of how our immune system tries, often unsuccessfully because it isn't very efficient, to cope when an infection enters our body. It is an article from The Conversation by Lara Herrero, Research Leader in Virology and Infectious Disease, and Wesley Freppel, Research Fellow, Institute for Glycomics, both of Griffith University, Australia. It is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Malevolent Designer News - Dandruff - Another Anoying Little Gift From Creationism's Beloved Malevolence

Up to Half of all adults will have it

Shutterstock

Scanning Electron Microscope picture of freshly prepared human dandruff sample.

Credit: Horoporo via Wikipedia
CC BY-SA 3.0

What is dandruff? How do I get rid of it? Why does it keep coming back?

Dandruff is caused by a yeast of the Malassezia family, Malassezia globosa to be precise. As a complex, eukaryote cell, creationists superstition insists that it must have been designed by an intelligent [sic] designer. It is also axiomatic in creationism that the only entity capable of designing living organisms is the omnipotent, omniscience god of the Bible, Torah and Quran.

It follows from that then, if we accept the dogma for the sake of argument, that this designer god knew precisely what Malassezia globosa would do and so designed it for that purpose.

And that purpose, apart from making more copies of Malassezia globosa, is to cause the embarrassing condition in humans, dandruff. Dandruff doesn't cause a general illness or handicap (apart maybe from a social handicap), and it isn't even painful, apart from an irritation or itch that needs constant scratching. In fact, inducing the person with dandruff to scratch their scalp a lot is Malassezia globosa's dispersal strategy.

Here is what AI's ChatGPT has to say about it:

Creationism in Crisis - How Multicellular Life Evolved - Science is Revising its Thinking

Prehistoric sea creature of the Cambrian period.

Photo: Getty

The Cambrian seas teemed with new types of animal, such as the predator Anomalocaris (centre).

Credit: John Sibbick
Natural History Museum

Life on Earth didn’t arise as described in textbooks – University of Copenhagen

Biologists are changing their collective minds about how multicellular life arose on Earth, but it's nothing for creationists to get over-excited about. They aren't beginning to think it was all magicked by a magic man in the sky. The change of mind is about the exact mechanism and the trigger that started the evolutionary process. No objective biologist thinks the explanation is anything other than a natural, evolutionary process.

It used to be thought that the trigger for the evolution of multicellular organisms, which only evolved between 685 and 800 million years ago, was increasing levels of oxygen caused by the waste product of the photosynthesising cyanobacteria. They had been, like their descendant today in the chloroplasts of green plants, converting carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen, and so polluting their own environment with their waste product - oxygen.

However, the idea that it was rising oxygen levels that triggered the change, has been disputed by the findings of a team from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Massachusetts, USA, the University of Southern Denmark, and Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman.

The team arrived at their conclusion after analysing the chemical composition of ancient rock samples from an Omani mountain range deposited during what geologists call the 'Shuram Formation produced during what is referred to as the 'Shuram carbon isotope excursion':

Creationism in Crisis - The Evolution of Batesian Mimicry in a New Zealand Stonefly

Similar ‘warning’ colouration of the non-toxic mimic Zelandoperla fenestrata stonefly (left), and cyanide-producing Austroperla cyrene (right).

A cyanide-producing Austroperla cyrene sits at the top of this picture, with a mimicking Zelandoperla fenestrata in the center and non-mimicking Zelandoperla fenestrata at the bottom.

Credit: University of Otago

When cheating pays – survival strategy of insect uncovered, News, University of Otago, New Zealand

I've written before about Batesian mimicry as an example of environment-driven evolution and how it depends on an evolutionary arms race - which makes no sense as the work of a single creator god, as creationists believe is responsible for the 'design' of all living organisms.

Batesian mimicry

Batesian mimicry is a fascinating concept in evolutionary biology named after the English naturalist Henry Walter Bates. It refers to a form of mimicry in which a harmless species closely resembles the appearance of a toxic or dangerous species to deceive predators. This phenomenon is commonly observed in the animal kingdom, particularly among insects, although it can also occur in other groups of organisms.

The key components of Batesian mimicry are:

1. Model Species: The toxic or harmful species that possesses some form of defense mechanism, such as toxicity, stinging, or bad taste. Predators learn to associate the distinct appearance of this model species with the negative consequences of attacking or consuming it.

Creationism in Crisis - Now its 300,000-Year-Old Human Footprints from Germany

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

Forensic reconstruction of Homo heidelbergensis

Cicero Moraes via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

300,000-Year-Old Snapshot: Oldest Human Footprints from Germany Found | Senckenberg Society for Nature Research

290,000 years before the Universe was magicked into existence out of nothing, according to creationists, hominins with a fully modern human foot were walking about in mud in what is now Germany.

The footprints of these 'pre-creation' hominins were discovered in the roughly 300,000-year-old Schöningen Paleolithic site complex in Lower Saxony, Germany and have been studied by an international team led by scientists from the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment. Their findings are published in the journal, Quaternary Science Reviews, sadly behind a paywall.

The hominin tracks are presumed to be those of Homo heidelbergensis, a species believed to be the ancestor of Neanderthals, itself a descendant of H. erectus which migrated out of Africa and diversified across Eurasia.

The find and its significance is the subject of a press release from the Senckenberg Centre:

Creationism in Crisis - How Evolution Produced Full Cooperation Between Mitochondrial Endosymbionts and Host Cells

Mitochondria communicate intensively with their host, the higher (eukaryotic) cell.

Two mitochondria from mammalian lung tissue displaying their matrix and membranes as shown by electron microscopy

Louisa Howard via Wikipedia
Public Domain

Cell biology: How cellular powerhouses call for help when under stress | Aktuelles aus der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt

Four Scientists from Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany have shown just how fully mitochondria have integrated into their endosymbiotic host cells over the course of their evolutionary history.

First a little background from ChatGPT3:

Mitochondria and how they evolved>

Mitochondria are double-membraned organelles found in the cells of most eukaryotic organisms, including plants, animals, fungi, and protists. They play a crucial role in cellular respiration, where they generate adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the primary energy currency of cells. Mitochondria are believed to have evolved from endosymbiosis, a process where one organism lives within another and both organisms benefit from the relationship.

The endosymbiotic theory suggests that mitochondria originated from a free-living bacterium that was engulfed by an ancient eukaryotic cell. Over time, the bacterium and the host cell developed a symbiotic relationship, where the bacterium provided energy through respiration, and the host cell provided protection and nutrients. Eventually, the bacterium lost some of its independence and became a specialized organelle within the host cell – the mitochondrion.

Creationism in Crisis - A Newly-Discovered Non-Genetic Mode for Inheritance, But It's No Comfort For Creationists

Because babies acquire their first gut microbes passing through their mother’s birth canal, mothers’ microbiomes form the basis of their offspring’s.

Photo: Sarah Chai/Pexels

Hardship affects the gut microbiome across generations | UCLA

Human gut microbiome

Source

The old scientific debate from the early 19th century between Darwinian evolution and Lamarckian evolution all hinged on whether characteristics acquired after birth could be inherited by offspring, as Lamarck thought, or whether what we inherit from our parents is a variation (within limits) of what they inherited from their parents:

Darwinian and Lamarckian evolution are two contrasting theories of evolution that were proposed in the past. Though both sought to explain the process of biological change over time, they differ in their fundamental mechanisms and assumptions.

1. Darwinian Evolution (Theory of Natural Selection):
   • Proposed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in the mid-19th century.
   • Central concept: Natural selection is the main driving force behind evolution.
   • Mechanism: Variation exists within populations, and individuals with traits better suited to the environment are more likely to survive and reproduce. Over time, these advantageous traits become more common in the population, while less favorable traits are selected against.
   • Inheritance of acquired characteristics: Darwinian evolution does not rely on the inheritance of traits acquired during an organism's lifetime. Instead, it is based on the passing down of genetic information from parents to offspring.
   • Example: Consider a population of giraffes with varying neck lengths. If the environment favors individuals with longer necks (e.g., taller trees for feeding), those with longer necks have a survival advantage and are more likely to pass on their long-necked genes to the next generation.
2. Lamarckian Evolution (Theory of Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics):
   • Proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the early 19th century.
   • Central concept: Evolution is driven by an organism's effort to adapt to its environment and the inheritance of acquired traits.
   • Mechanism: Lamarck proposed that if an organism acquires new characteristics or traits during its lifetime due to its environment's demands, these acquired traits can be passed on to its offspring.
   • Example: Lamarck suggested that if a giraffe stretches its neck throughout its lifetime to reach higher leaves, the elongated neck acquired during its life will be passed on to its offspring, leading to the gradual evolution of longer-necked giraffes over generations.

The key difference between the two theories lies in their view on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Darwinian evolution relies on natural selection acting on existing genetic variation, while Lamarckian evolution suggests that acquired traits during an individual's lifetime can be inherited by their offspring, driving evolutionary change. Lamarckian evolution, however, has been largely discredited by modern genetics and molecular biology, as it does not align with the principles of inheritance through genes and DNA. Instead, the modern understanding of evolution is based on the principles proposed by Darwin, which include the processes of mutation, genetic variation, and natural selection acting on heritable traits.

ChatGPT3 "What is the difference between Darwinian and Lamarckian evolution?" [Response to user request]
Retrieved from https://chat.openai.com/

That debate has now been opened up again in an unexpected way with the news that an international team of scientists led by UCLA psychologists has shown that information produced during hardship suffered by a woman during pregnancy can be passed on to her baby via its microbiome.

Creationism in Crisis - Now its A Living Nematode From 46,000 years Ago in Siberian Permafrost

Permafrost melts into the Kolyma River outside of Zyryanka, Russia, in 2019. The worms in the new study seem to have survived buried deep in the permafrost for tens of thousands of years.

Michael Robinson Chavez / The Washington Post via Getty Images

Duvannyi Yar thaw site on the banks of the Kolyma River, Siberia, Russia.

Credit: Robert G. M. Spencer

Genome analysis of 46,000-year-old roundworm from Siberian permafrost reveals novel species: MPI-CBG

The problem with clinging to counter-factual beliefs like Bible-literalist creationism, for fear of having to contemplate being wrong, is that you have to keep deciding whether to believe the Bible or the evidence.

Here, for example, is a (to a creationist) key passage from the Bible:

Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.

And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:

All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.

And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

Genesis 7:21-23

Leaving aside the absurdity of believing there was a time just 4000 years ago when the highest mountain would have been covered by a fifteen-cubit (i.e., about 22.5 feet) flood, it is necessary to believe that everything outside the Ark was destroyed. The Bible is quite specific on that point - every living substance was destroyed, including the 'creeping things'!

And that claim has to be set against the evidence provided a couple of days ago by an international team of scientists led by Anastasia Shatilovich, of the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science Russian Academy of Science, Pushchino, Russia, and Vamshidhar R. Gade of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany, that they have revived, analysed the genome of and C14-dated a nematode worm recovered from Siberian permafrost, shown to be 46,000 years old.

So, not only was this not destroyed as the Bible claims, it was around some 36,000 years before the Earth was created, according to creationist fundamental dogma.

And of course, a corollary to that is that the permafrost containing the nematode in suspended animation, also survived a catastrophic flood a few thousand years ago.

But then, to be fair on the Bronze-Age Canaanite hill farmers who plagiarized that Mesopotamian local flood myth, what did they know of real mountains, as opposed to low hills, permafrost, or nematodes? They thought Earth was small, flat and ran on magic, and the sky was a dome to keep the water above it out.

The account of the discovery, and its significance, is explained in a news release by the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics:

Creationism in Crisis - Evolution and Arms Races - How Resistance to Snake Venom Evolved in Caecilians

A caecilians. A legless amphibian

Yellow-striped caecilian, Ichthyophis kohtaoensis

How an unlikely amphibian survived its “Judgement Day” - Faculty of Science - University of Queensland


When one thinks of amphibians, it's usual to think in terms of frogs and toads, and newts and salamanders. However, there is a third group, the legless Caecilians, (pronounced Sicilians), which look superficially like earthworms.

Now a research team led by Associate Professor Bryan Fry of Queensland University, Australia, has shown how their evolution was strongly influence by group of venomous snakes, the elapids. These snakes evolved in what is now Australia when it was still part of the single landmass, Gondwana, around 50 to 60 million years ago (Late Paleocene to Early Eocene).

The distinct characteristic of the elapids is hollow fangs with which they inject powerful toxins into their victims.

The evidence of the resulting intense selection pressure and resulting evolutionary arms race as the snakes used their new ability to kill otherwise defenceless caecilians is a devastating refutation of several creationist articles of faith.

First, a brief background of the caecilian amphibians and the elapid snakes

Lesson from France - 2 Million Year Old Orgues d’Ille-sur-Têt

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

Les Orgues d'Ille-sur-Têt, Occitane, France

Note the different layers of soft sandstone formed in ancient beaches as local sea levels changed

In southern France near the pretty Catalan town of Ille-sur-Têt are strange rock formations, or hoodoos, known as the Orgues or organs, so called because they resemble organ pipes (and also the slightly more salacious reason - because they resemble phalluses). The rock pillars with their caps, which give them their alternative name, demoiselles coiffées (ladies with their hair styled) and cheminées de fée (fairy chimneys).

The embarrassing thing for Bible-literalist creationists who believe that all rock strata were laid down in about a year during a mythical genocidal flood, is that there is no way the strata that make up the Orgues could have been deposited in a single inundation because, as can be seen in the accompanying photos, the layers are composed of different sized particles of sand, sometimes mixed with pebbles, sometime not, showing they were once part of different sea levels and river flood plains and the whole was then covered in a shallow sea which produced the limestone cap.

And that means they are very old, pre-dating even the Pyrenees because the erosion into their present formation did not start until plate tectonics caused the Pyrenees to rise up at the boundary between the Iberian plate and the Eurasian plate, the Iberian plate itself being pushed north by the African plate.

The resulting uplift exposed the layers of sandstone which now form the Orgues to be lifted up and exposed to the action of, mostly, water, to give them their present shape - which is still being actively eroded. The evidence for this can be seen along the narrow road that runs between the river Têt and the Orgues, where heavy rain has washed sand across the road in places.

Creationism in Crisis - It's More of Those Transitional Fossils And the Japanese Scientists Call It Evolution

Exposed riverbed from where the fossils were found.

Photo: Toshihiro Yamada

Miocene period fossil forest of Wataria found in Japan | Hokkaido University

Wataria parvipora showing annual rings. It is one of the characteristics that helped the scientists in identifying the wood-fossil.

Nishino et al., Scientific Reports, June 22, 2023

A central dogma of creationism, a fossil of the days when they insisted there was no such thing as evolution at all, and before they decided there were two sorts (micro-evolution, which happens all the time now and happened at warp speed after the mythical flood, and 'macro-evolution' which is still impossible) is that there are no transitional fossils. This lie is also an attempt to recruit Darwin for their superstition as he predicted there would be found series of transitional fossils showing the progress of evolution over time.

This creates a problem for the cult leaders who have to keep devising strategies for ignoring all the many examples of transitional fossils that palaeontologists keep unearthing; one of which is to claim that the transitional fossil is that of a fully formed species, which works on people who think evolution means one taxon turns into a different taxon such as cats turning into dogs or crocodiles into ducks, or, in the case of humans (the (non)evolution of whom is a special obsession with creationists), a chimpanzee turning into a fully modern human.

For a laugh, try asking a creationist to describe exactly what they would expect a transitional fossil to look like!

Anyway, this article is about examples of transitional fossil plants that have been found in an especially well-preserved fossilised Miocene Forest in an exposed bed of the Kiso River. The river level was subject to an unprecedented drought in 1994 which exposed 400 fossilized tree stumps. The stumps are now inundated again but not before a research group led by Professor Toshihiro Yamada of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Hokkaido University, had analysed 137 stumps, of which 130 were identified as Wataria parvipora. The stumps were covered in leaves identified as Byttneriophyllum.

Lesson from France - The Bloody Extermination of the Cathars at Béziers - "Kill them all for the Lord knoweth them that are His!"

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

Kill them all for the Lord knoweth them that are His!

Abbot Arnaud Amalric of Citeaux
Papal legate in charge of the Cathar genocide.
Citing 2 Timothy 2:19

Burning the Cathars at Béziers

Another reminder of the brutal, blood-soaked history of Christianity is to be found in the history of the French town of Béziers on the banks of the River Orb, in the Languedoc region, southeast of Montpellier, on the edge of the Camargue.

It has been, in turn, along with much of the area south of Toulouse, under the control of Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, Moorish Moslems from Andalucia, Catholic Spain and latterly, Catholic France. Until recent times, the local language was a dialect of French, Occitan, which has close links with Catalan. This gave it a sense of a separate identity from that of France - something that concerned King Philip II, keen to exert the same control over the southern provinces as he had over the North.

Béziers is now a peaceful, quite little market town and cultural centre but it was not always so. It was, until 1209, a stronghold of the Cathars, a religious sect which rejected Roman Catholicism and the authority of the Pope, which was brutally suppressed in the 'Albigensian Crusade' on the orders of Pope Innocent III in alliance with King Philip II of France.

For more information on the Albigensian Crusade and Pope Innocent III's and King Philip II of France's reasons for launching it, see:

1. Lesson from France - Massacre of the Cathars of Carcassonne, or How Christians Settled Theological Differences
2. Feel That Christian Love!
3. Brotherly Love - How Christians Settle Disputes

Fresh from their success in laying siege to and then massacring the inhabitants of the Carcassonne, the crusaders moved on to other towns in the area, including Béziers.

Lesson from France - Massacre of the Cathars of Carcassonne, or How Christians Settled Theological Differences

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

Street below the Cité De Carcassonne with the Citadel on the Hill

We've just spent a day in Carcassonne, in southern France, just north of the Spanish border. It's a place every Christian should visit as a reminder of the blood-soaked history of their religion because Carcassonne was the site of one of the most brutal periods of Catholic history until the conquest of the Americas, the Albigensian Crusade.

The Albigensian crusade was conducted on the orders of Pope Innocent III, surely one of the most misnamed Popes in history; a crusade with the objective of nothing less than a total genocide of the Cathars and their religion.

The technique put into practice many of the methods used to terrorize populations and force them into submission that had been developed in the Crusades against the Moslems of the Eastern Mediterranean, where the method was to promise land to the barons and noblemen who led the armies, and the spoils of looting and pillage to the mobs of mercenaries that comprised to soldiery. There were no provisions for feeding and supplying the rag-taggle mobs as they raged through the countryside, so they had to take wheat they needed from the local populations. Towns and villages were ransacked, and the inhabitants slaughtered as a matter of routine.


And bloodletting was encouraged and glorified, to the extent that one observer recorded enthusiastically how the streets of Jerusalem were ankle-deep in blood when the Christian mob over-ran it.
The origins of Catharism are somewhat obscure, as it contained several different ideas fused into a loose system of beliefs with no central authority, so it tended to vary in different communities. A central idea was the essentially Gnostic belief in two gods - a good god of the spiritual domain and an evil god (Satan) who created the physical world and trapped angels inside human bodies. The creator (evil) god was the god of the Old Testament and the good god was the god of the New Testament, who Jesus was sent to tell us about. Escape from the physical world was through death and a special form of baptism to enable reunion with the god of the spiritual realm.

Like Catholicism does today, Catharism was obsessed with sex and saw sexual intercourse as sinful unless performed in the prescribed manner and pre-blessed by a priest in a special ceremony.

A consequence of their belief that the physical world was the domain of Satan and created by him to keep people away from God, was that everything to do with sexual intercourse was to be avoided because it produces more physical reality and more angels trapped in human bodies, so they were Pescatarians, believing that meat, cheese, milk and eggs were the result of sexual intercourse, but fish spontaneously generated and thus were safe to eat. The general disapproval of sexual intercourse caused some obvious problems for some Cathar communities, but others had found a way round it in a legend that the origins of the battle between good and evil in Heaven was because Satan had seduced one of God's wives (he has two, apparently), or maybe it was God who seduced one of Satan's two wives. This was sufficient evidence that God has sexual intercourse, so doesn't prohibit it.

Malevolent Designer News - Why Creationism's Favourite Sadist Gave Some People Protection From COVID-19 - If You Believe That Superstitious Nonsense

Gene Mutation May Explain Why Some Don’t Get Sick from COVID-19 | UC San Francisco

The thing about being a follower of the intelligent [sic] design cult is that you have to believe whatever the 'design' is, that was precisely what your putative intelligent [sic] designer intended to design because, although you should never say so, your designer god is one and the same god that fundamentalist Christians and Moslems believe in, i.e., it is omniscient, omnipotent and inerrant so is incapable of making a mistake.

So, what the cult now has to explain is why their favorite sadist gave some people a gene which protects then against symptomatic COVID-19, but not everyone, if, as the normal excuse for these parasites is valid - i.e., it wasn't God, it was something called 'sin' which creates viruses (and apparently the supreme, omniscient ruler of the universe is powerless to stop it or uncaring enough to not bother, or maybe even unaware of it).

In which case, why create the protective gene?

Of course, a ready explanation which fits in with the intelligent [sic] design superstition is that it wanted a few people to catch COVID-19 but not know they has=d it, so they could spread it around - the infectious but asymptomatic cases that are believed to have been responsible for a great deal of the pandemic's success.

So, creationists need to explain whether their intelligent [sic] designer deliberately created these super-spreaders to infect as many people as possible and if not, what did it create them for and how come it didn't know what the outcome would be? The discovery of this gene was made by a group led by researchers from the University of California San Francisco, who have just published their findings, open access, in Nature. As the UC San Francisco news release explains:

Creationism in Crisis - Genes for Learning, Memory and Complex Behaviour Evolved 650 Million years Ago!

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

Examples of bilaterians each with genes first evolved in the pre-Cambrian.

Source: Wikipedia
(CC BY-SA 3.0)

Genes for learning and memory are 650 million years old, study shows | News | University of Leicester

Bilaterians are a group of animals characterized by bilateral symmetry, which means they have a left and right side that are mirror images of each other. This symmetry allows for a clear front and back end, as well as distinct top and bottom surfaces. Bilaterians are among the most diverse and successful animal groups on Earth.

The emergence of bilaterians marked a significant milestone in the evolution of life. They evolved during the Cambrian explosion, a period around 541 million years ago when there was a rapid diversification of complex animal life in the fossil record.

Bilaterians gave rise to a wide array of animal lineages, many of which are still present today. Some of the major groups that evolved from bilaterians include:

1. Deuterostomes: One of the major branches of bilaterians, deuterostomes include several important animal groups, such as vertebrates (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) and echinoderms (starfish, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers).
2. Protostomes: Another major branch of bilaterians, protostomes include diverse groups such as arthropods (insects, spiders, crustaceans), mollusks (snails, clams, squids), annelids (earthworms, leeches), and many others.

Bilaterians were crucial in shaping the animal kingdom and played a pivotal role in the complex ecological relationships that emerged throughout Earth's history. They eventually diversified into the incredible variety of animal species that we see today.

ChatGPT3 "What were bilaterians and what did they evolve into?" [Response to user question]
Retrieved from https://chat.openai.com

Imagine, you're a creationist fool whose cult leaders have made to feel smugly self-important because a supernatural magic man created your ancestors specially with uniquely humans abilities that set you apart from the other animals, just a few thousand years ago, like the ability to learn, remember and have complex social interactions.

Then along comes a bunch of those spoil-sport scientists who shows that the genes for those things evolved in some very primitive ancestors, the bilaterians, 650 million years ago and so are shared with all the multitude of descendants of those primitive organisms.

How do you handle this new information while still feeling the smugly self-important special creation of the creator of the universe?

You can't allow yourself to think you could be wrong, because that would spoil the whole delusion, so you ignore the science, abuse the scientists, or simply declare it all wrong, and carry on believing the myth of your special importance.

But the problem is the research findings are still there and won't go away just because you've ignored them or declared them wrong, so, whatever you do, avoid reading what follows because it is from a press release from the university of Leicester, UK, where the leaders of the research team were from, and the open access paper in Nature Communications where they published their findings:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationisms Putative Designer is Hiding its New Improved Version of SARS-CoV-2 for Later.

The U.S. Department of Agricultures (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has found that SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19, has widely spread within the U.S. white-tailed deer population, possibly transmitted from humans to deer, where it mutated and potentially transmitted back to humans. The findings are part of a study involving the surveillance of over 11,000 white-tailed deer.

“Reservoir Species” – USDA Releases Shocking Research on COVID-19 Transmission Between White-Tailed Deer and Humans

White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus)
in 2022, 12.2% were carrying the virus and 31% showed signs of previous exposure.

If you're a malevolent designer and you just had a major triumph with a nasty little virus that killed millions, made many more times that sick, and wrecked economies worldwide, but the human victims hit back with a vaccine that protects them, what do you do?

We'll, if you're creationism's favourite sadist, you don't just give up and allow your victims to win; you have a long-term plan to teach the upstarts a lesson.

Using the fact that immunity to your virus is short-lived because you designed their immune systems that way, you store your nasty little virus away somewhere where there is no vaccine-induced immunity and you can experiment with better, more deadly and more infectious versions of it and wait until your human victims no longer have enough immunity to resist the new, improved, version, then you transfer it back into the human population and sit back to enjoy the suffering again!

And what better than a wild species that humans regularly hunt for food, but which don't need to meet the food-hygiene regulations with which humans normally protect themselves from infections in domesticated species.

In China, this could be practically any species, but in North America, what better species is there than the white-tailed deer, which is regularly hunted for meat?

This, of course, is the sort of thinking an honest, troobuleeving creationist (if there is such a thing) would have to believe, because the evidence is that white tailed deer are a reservoir species harbouring the SARS-CoV-2 and providing an environment in which to mutate and evolve.

This evidence comes from the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) which has just released the results of its first year of sampling white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) for active infection of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. These studies show that SARS-CoV-2 is likely to have spread widely within the U.S. white-tailed deer population.
According to a USDA APHIS news item:

Creationism in Crisis - Cosmologists May Have the Age of the Universe Wrong - But not in the Way Creationisst Might Like To Imagine

Spiral Galaxy NGC 1672 from Hubble

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA);

Reinventing cosmology: uOttawa research puts age of universe at 26.7 — not 13.7 — billion years | About us

Scientists may be wrong about the age of the Universe!

But there is no reason for creationists to get excited thinking their childish superstition might have some scientific merit after all.

A researcher from the University of Ottawa, believes he has shown the Universe is not the 8,000 years old that creationists dogma dictates they believe; it's not even the 13.7 Billion years old that mainstream cosmologists believe. In fact, it might be 27.7 billion years old!

The new thinking is the work of Rajendra Gupta, adjunct professor of physics in the Faculty of Science at the University of Ottawa. He has attempted to resolve some problems with the existing model, the Lambda-CDM concordance model, which estimates the Universe to be 13.797 billion years old. This model fails to explain why some stars like the Methuselah appear to be older than the estimated age of our universe and early galaxies in an advanced state of evolution, as discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope. These galaxies, existing a mere 300 million years or so after the Big Bang is calculated to have occurred, appear to have a level of maturity and mass typically associated with billions of years of cosmic evolution. Furthermore, they’re surprisingly small in size, adding another layer of mystery to the equation.

Professor Gupta's new theory in part resurrects a 1922 theory proposed to explain Hubble's red shift within the idea of a steady state Universe, known as "Zwicky's tired light theory":

Zwicky's tired light theory

Zwicky's tired light theory, proposed by the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in the 1920s, suggests an alternative explanation for the redshift observed in the light coming from distant astronomical objects.

According to the tired light theory, the redshift observed in the light from distant objects is not due to the Doppler effect caused by the expansion of the universe, as described by the prevailing Big Bang theory. Instead, Zwicky proposed that light loses energy as it travels through space over vast distances, resulting in a gradual decrease in its frequency (and hence, an increase in its wavelength) and a corresponding shift towards the red end of the spectrum.

In the tired light theory, the loss of energy by photons is caused by interactions with other particles or fields in space. As photons travel through space, they continually collide with these hypothetical particles or fields, which gradually sap their energy and cause the redshift. This energy loss mechanism is often referred to as "tiredness" of the light.

However, it's important to note that Zwicky's tired light theory has not gained wide acceptance among scientists. The prevailing consensus among astrophysicists and cosmologists is that the observed redshift is primarily a result of the expansion of the universe, as explained by the Big Bang theory, rather than the tired light hypothesis. The tired light theory faces several challenges in providing a comprehensive explanation for the observed redshift and other cosmological phenomena.

ChatGPT3 "What is Zwicky’s tired light theory?" [Response to user question] Retrieved from https://chat.openai.com/

Zwicky's tired light theory has been ruled out by the modern consensus for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the difference in observation of light intensity from distant objects as predicted by the steady state and the expanding Universe models:

>For example, in a static universe with tired light mechanisms, the surface brightness of stars and galaxies should be constant, that is, the farther an object is, the less light we receive, but its apparent area diminishes as well, so the light received divided by the apparent area should be constant. In an expanding universe, the surface brightness diminishes with distance. As the observed object recedes, photons are emitted at a reduced rate because each photon has to travel a distance that is a little longer than the previous one, while its energy is reduced a little because of increasing redshift at a larger distance. On the other hand, in an expanding universe, the object appears to be larger than it really is, because it was closer to us when the photons started their travel. This causes a difference in surface brilliance of objects between a static and an expanding Universe. This is known as the Tolman surface brightness test that in those studies favors the expanding universe hypothesis and rules out static tired light model.

Wikipedia

Professor Gupta has proposed a form of Zwicky’s tired light theory and an idea proposed by Paul Dirac - "coupling Constants". The idea is that these constants govern the interaction between particles but they could have 'evolved' over time. By allowing these coupled constants to evolve over time, Gupta has moved the age of the Universe back several billion years to a time which accounts for the apparently mature small galaxies seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. It also allows the 'cosmological constant', introduced to explain the expansion of the universe due to dark energy to be replaces by Dirac's 'Coupled Constants'.

His work is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS):

Abstract

Deep space observations of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed that the structure and masses of very early Universe galaxies at high redshifts (z∼15 ⁠), existing at ∼ 0.3 Gyr after the BigBang, may be as evolved as the galaxies in existence for ∼10 Gyr. The JWST findings are thus in strong tension with the ΛCDM cosmological model. While tired light (TL) models have been shown to comply with the JWST angular galaxy size data, they cannot satisfactorily explain isotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations or fit the supernovae distance modulus vs. redshift data well. We have developed hybrid models that include the tired light concept in the expanding universe. The hybrid ΛCDM model fits the supernovae type 1a data well but not the JWST observations. We present a model with covarying coupling constants (CCC), starting from the modified FLRW metric and resulting Einstein and Friedmann equations, and a CCC + TL hybrid model. They fit the Pantheon + data admirably, and the CCC + TL model is compliant with the JWST observations. It stretches the age of the universe to 26.7 Gyr with 5.8 Gyr at z=10 and 3.5 Gyr at z=20⁠, giving enough time to form massive galaxies. It thus resolves the ‘impossible early galaxy’ problem without requiring the existence of primordial black hole seeds or modified power spectrum, rapid formation of massive population III stars, and super Eddington accretion rates. One could infer the CCC model as an extension of the ΛCDM model with a dynamic cosmological constant

R Gupta
JWST early Universe observations and ΛCDM cosmology,
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2023;, stad2032, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad2032

© 2023 Oxford University Press / The Royal Astronomical Society.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

So, whether you go with Zwicky's tired light theory, Paul Dirac’s 'Coupled Constants', Hubble and Lemaître's Big Bang, or Professor Gupta's combination of these ideas, it's still impossible to come up with an age anywhere near what the creationists superstition says is the age of the Universe, and the current debate amongst cosmologists is moving the age even further away from the Biblical account.

But then when did having demonstrably counter-factual belief ever trouble a troobuleeving creationist?

How Science Works - Peer Reviewers Slate a Submitted Research Paper Suggesting Homo Naledi Buried their Dead

A reconstruction of Homo naledi's head by paleoartist John Gurche, who spent some 700 hours recreating the head from bone scans. Photo by Mark Thiessen/National Geographic

Photo by Mark Thiessen/National Geographic

Evidence for deliberate burial of the dead by Homo naledi

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Christopher Hitchens.

The Homo naledi hand and foot were uniquely adapted for both tree climbing and walking upright.

Credit: Peter Schmid and William Harcourt-Smith | Wits University

The things that make the hominin species, Homo naledi, at the same time, something of an enigma and exciting for paleoanthropologists, is that it:

• Has a mosaic of features of both anatomically-modern humans and chimpanzees, making it a candidate species for our early ancestor. One of the chimpanzee-like features is the small brain, little larger than a chimpanzee.
• Was apparently contemporaneous with early modern humans in East Africa and yet had failed to evolve a larger brain, believed to have been driven in hominins by the African savannah environment.
• Is from South Africa, but the Homo genus is believed to have emerged in East Africa in the Rift Valley and Ethiopian Highlands, from the Australopithecines such as Au. afarensis ('Lucy')

These sorts of enigma are the stuff of science and suggest new avenues for research. Nothing spurs science more than discovering something which doesn't fit in with the existing consensus or for which there is no obvious explanation at present, so there is a great deal of interest in the findings from the Rising Star Cave System in South Africa, so far the only source of fossil H. naledia. The remains are found deep within the cave system in locations that would have been difficult to reach, so the large number of individuals found there suggest they were placed deliberately in these deep chambers.

And now the team investigating the cave have produced evidence that they believe indicates that the remains in the cave were not only placed there but were ritually interred in specially prepared graves. If confirmed, this would be the earliest known deliberate internment of a hominin species, indeed the only example other than of modern humans and Neanderthals. This practice also strongly suggests respect for the dead and maybe even a spiritual belief in an after-life - which would be astonishing for a species with a brain little larger than that of a chimpanzee.