Creationism in Crisis - What Is a 170-Million-Year-Old Pliosaur Doing on a 10,000-Year-Old Earth?

The oldest megapredatory pliosaur, Lorrainosaurus, in the ancient Middle Jurassic sea that covered what is today northern France 170 million years ago.

Artwork by Joschua Knüppe (Germany).

Model of the head of Lorrainosaurus keileni.

Model By 10 Tons

Ancient sea monster remains reveal oldest mega-predatory pliosaur | Uppsala University

Q. What is a 170-Million-Year-Old Pliosaur Doing on a 10,000-Year-Old Earth?

A. Refuting Creationism and showing it to be a childish counter-factual superstition, of course, like everything else that exited in the 99.97% of Earth's history that occurred before 'creation week'.

These fossils of this predatory marine reptile from the Mesozoic Era were recovered in 1983 from a road cutting near Metz, Loraine, France and have now been examined by an international team of palaeontologists from the Naturkunde-Museum Bielefeld in Germany, the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, the Natural History Museum in Luxembourg and The Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University in Sweden, co-led by Sven Sachs of Naturkunde-Museum Bielefeld, Germany and Daniel Madzia of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

They have shown them to be of a new pliosaur genus: Lorrainosaurus.

Creationism in Crisis - Why Earth is Fine Tuned for Extinction

An arid and uninhabitable planet awaits us - in 250 million years.

September: Nature Geoscience extreme heat | News and features | University of Bristol

Creationists like to imagine that Earth is fine-tuned for life. This belief depends on the parochial ignorance of the creationist of course, because they will be oblivious of the fact that, cozy though their small bit of the planet might be, most of it is uninhabitable by humans without specialist equipment, and even cloths and houses are required in the temperate areas. Human life would be impossible without modern technology in the oceans, deserts, arctic waste, the tops of high mountains or just a few thousand feet above the surface of the planet (this is why modern aircraft that fly at 30-60,000 feet need to be pressurised).

But a planet that is fine-tuned for life would also have an infinite life-span, not a time-limited one where the life-time is limited by entirely natural processes, such as plate tectonics and the solar cycle. In fact, the life span of Earth is a mere blink on a cosmic time-scale that is measured by the life of suns.

Long before the sun becomes a red giant and swallows up the inner planets at the end of its life, shortly before becoming a super nova and blowing away the outer planets, Earth's continents will have coalesced into another single super-continent, reminiscent of Pangea, and the climate will have made life untenable for most species of mammal, according to researcher at Bristol University.

The resulting increase in volcanic rifting and out-gassing, combined with 'continentality' and an increase in solar energy output, will result in a 'wet-bulb' temperature of >35^oC and a 'dry bulb' temperature of >40^oC - temperatures at which mammalian thermoregulation fails, leading to death in about 6 hours.

The team's findings are published open access in Nature Geoscience and explained in a Bristol University press release:

Creationism in Crisis - The Universe Is Far Bigger Than Creationist Superstition Says It Should Be

Artist’s impression of a record-breaking fast radio burst

ESO/M. Kornmesser

Astronomers detect most distant fast radio burst to date | ESO

From observation of the 'red shift' we know the Universe is expanding and, by calculating the rate of expansion, we can calculate how far away an object is from any point in the Universe such as Earth.

If the creationist superstition were correct, assuming the Universe is expanding at the velocity of light (in fact, it is nowhere near that fast), the farthest objects could be no more than 10,000 light years away. This is the time it would take for light leaving the object to reach Earth, travelling at the velocity of light (186,000 miles per second).

However, an international team of astrophysicists has discovered a remote source of 'fast radio bursts' (FBR) of radio waves lasting less than a millisecond, in a galaxy so far away that its light took eight billion years to reach us! Although this is the farthest FBR source so far discovered, being about 50% farther away than the previous farthest, it is by no means the farthest object so far detected. These are about twice that distance, consistent with the Universe being 14 billion years old. In other words, the Universe has been expanding for much longer than 8 billion years, and for many times longer than the 10,000 years creationists belie.

So, any creationist capable of doing the simple maths should be able to work out that the Universe is far too large and has been expanding far too long for it to have been created 10,000 years ago, by several orders of magnitude.

The location of the FRB source was pinpointed by researchers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and its discovery is explained in an ESO press release:

Malevolent Designer News - How Science is Racing to Beat Creationism's Favourite Sadist

Illustration by Michael S. Helfenbein

Black-legged tick, Ixodes scapularis
Illustration from The Malevolent Designer

Catherine Webber-Hounslow

Racing to defuse a ‘ticking’ public health time bomb | YaleNews

Like the parasitic worms that zombify their hosts I wrote about in my previous blog post, I also wrote about the black-legged tick, Ixodes scapularis, now proliferating in North America and infecting more and more victims with Lyme Disease, in my popular, illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good.

As the reputed work of an intelligent [sic] designer, this tick can only be regarded as evidence of the pestilential malevolent of any designer that could design such a creature, as it serves no purpose other than to be the vector of a number of different pathogens and to make more ticks.

Malevolent Designer News - How Parasites Got Their Genes For Turning Their Hosts Into Zombies

Mantis, Hierodula sp. with Cordodes or horsehair worm parasite emerging

© Kuan-Chieh (Chuck) Hunh
(CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Mantis Hierodula sp. with two Chordodes mizoramensis emerging

Stolen genes allow parasitic control of behavior | RIKEN

One of the more gruesome aspects of many parasites is their ability to take control of their hosts so the host participates in its own destruction, for the benefit of the parasite.

I wrote extensively about these relationships in by popular, illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, to illustrate the fact that the creator god creationists purport to worship has to be regarded as a pestilential, sadistic monster forever devising more and more nasty ways to make its creation suffer, for no apparent reason other than the pleasure of watching the suffering.

An example I used was the parasitic nematodes known as horsehair worms that live for part of the life-cycle in an insect such as a cricket or mantis, and, when mature, it induces it to seek out and jump into water where it either drowns or gets consumed by a fish. If the former, it emerges from the dead or dying body of its host and adopts a free-living life in the water; if the latter, it passes through the fish unharmed and emerges into the water via that route.

My AI source describes them thus:

Creationism in Crisis - A 50 Million-Year-Old Bat Skull - And Another Gap Closes

Most bats use echolocation - using sound emitted from their mouths or noses - to sense their surroundings.

Photo: Getty Images

Holy bat skull! Fossil adds vital piece to bat evolution puzzle | UNSW Newsroom

Earlier this week I predicted that there would soon be more science papers which casually refute creationism - an easy prediction to make, since just about every serious science paper does exactly that. This is a prediction I'm beginning to regret as they are coming so thick and fast that it's difficult to keep up with them!

This time, it's a paper describing a near-perfect fossil bat skull from 50 million years ago that closes one of creationism’s beloved gaps in the fossil record. Of course, like almost all archaeology, geology and palaeontology, it deals with the 99.97% of the history of Earth that occurred before creationist dogma says the universe was created out of nothing by magic.

The evolutionary history of bats suffers from a lack of fossil evidence, probably because bat skeletons are generally small and thin and bat lifestyle doesn't predispose them to formation of fossils when they die. They mostly roost in caves where dead bats are rapidly consumed by a whole ecosystem of creatures that live on their droppings on the cave floor.

However, this latest find is of a near perfect skull and shows evidence that echolocation may have evolved earlier than previously thought, soon after or parallel with the evolution of powered flight.

First, some AI background:

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Have Shown How Mosquitoes Evolved in Another Casual Refutation of Creationism With Facts

Researchers scoured academic literature and used new genomic techniques to create the mosquito family tree.

Photo credit: Matt Bertone, NC State University.

Aedes eagypti

Anopheles stephensi

Anopheles albimanus

Ochlerotatus notoscriptus

Study Elucidates Evolution of Mosquitoes and Their Hosts | NC State News

It's proving to be another terrible week for the creation cult with yet another science paper that casually, and without any intention on the part of the authors, utterly refutes some basic creationist cult dogmas.

This paper deal with the evolution of the mosquitoes and the parasite-host relationship that refute intelligent design ideas with their arms races, needless complexity and prolific waste, in addition to their refutation of the notion of an omnibenevolent designer.

And of course, as we've come to expect, almost all that evolutionary history occurred millions of years before creationists think the Universe was magically created out of nothing by a magic man made of nothing who popped up from nowhere, in the days when nothing was something that existed. This magic, invisible man then allegedly created every living thing without ancestors, pretty much as we find it today, but on a flat Earth with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out. Seriously!

The point has already been made by others many times before: creationism is not a problem for science; science is a problem for creationism; and this paper is just one more drop in the tsunami engulfing the cult.

First, a little AI background on mosquitoes:

Creationism in Crisis - Human And Chimpanzee Language Developments Have A Common Origin

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

Young chimps develop language in the same way that human babies do.

New study reveals similarities between chimpanzee and human language development | University of Portsmouth

The traditional creationist argument for the daft notion that humans were specially created without ancestors and are thus a different sort of creation to the other animals, is normally to point at unique characteristics of humans, oblivious of the fact that, by definition, any species will have unique characteristics that define it as a distinct species.

One of these supposedly unique abilities is the ability to communicate with complex languages. This again ignores the fact that orcas or killer whales form social groupings with unique cultures and vocalizations with which they communicate with members of their own pod.

Now research by scientists from the University of Portsmouth in England, the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, and Université Clermont Auvergne in France have shown that there are clear similarities between the development of language in humans and the development of vocal communication in chimpanzees, strongly pointing to its origin in a common ancestor.

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Reconstruct the Skull of a 12 Million-Year-Old Ancestral Primate

Virtual reconstruction of the face and cranium of Pierolapithecus catalaunicus using CT scans of the original fossil

© Kelsey Pugh

Artist's impression of the face of Pierolapithecus catalaunicus

Credit: Meike Köhler

Extinct Ape Gets a Facelift, 12 Million Years Later | AMNH

No sooner do I write a blog-post in which I predict that it won't be long before yet more scientific papers which quite incidentally refute creationism are published, than along come another one, right on cue.

Of course, since almost all papers dealing with archaeology, paleontology and geology deal with the 99.97% of Earth's history that occurred before 'Creation Week' according to creationist dogma, this is a simple prediction to make. It is actually harder to find a serious science paper dealing with those subjects that doesn't casually refute creationism.

This paper would be embarrassing for creationists on a number of different levels, if they weren’t careful to remain proudly ignorant of it or at least had a strategy for ignoring inconvenient truths. It is a paper on the reconstruction of the face and cranium of an extinct primate that lived about 12 million years ago and which is believed to be close to if not directly ancestral to all the great apes, including humans.

So, we have another of those supposedly missing 'links' this time between the Hominidae and the other primates, and a fossil that is multiple times older than the Universe, according to the creationist creation myths. And yet the creation cult manages to stagger on regardless of all the evidence against it.

The skull is that of Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, which was discovered in Catalunya, Spain, early this century:

Creationism in Crisis - Neanderthals Were Hunting Cave Lions in Europe 40,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'.

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

Artists impression of a Eurasian cave lion, Panthera leo spelaea

Neanderthals hunted dangerous cave lions study shows - University of Reading

In the third of this week's scientific papers that casually refute creationism by reporting on 'pre-creation' events of which Earth's history is 99.97% composed, we learn that Neanderthals in Europe were hunting cave lions for food and their pelts, 50,000 years ago, during the Paleolithic Age - which came to an end when, bizarrely, creationists believe the Universe was created.

There may well be more papers yet to appear, in what is turning out to be a week of which most creationists will want to remain ignorant, if they haven't already worked out a strategy for coping with the inevitable cognitive dissonance by dismissing the unwanted evidence. To creationists, it must feel at times that science is against them. It is, of course, but that's a problem for creationists, not science. It’s not compulsory to adopt counter-factual beliefs.

The scientific paper is published open access in Scientific Reports and is accompanied by a news release from Reading University. The discovery was made by lead author, PHD student, Gabriele Russo, of Universität Tübingen in Germany, together with a team of colleagues which included archaeologist Dr Annemieke Milks, of the University of Reading.

The skeleton of the cave lion dates to around 50,000 years ago, during the Upper Paleolithic, at a time when anatomically-modern Homo sapiens were just beginning to appear in Eurasia, and Neanderthals had western Eurasia pretty much to themselves.

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Have Reconstructed the Head And Face From the Skull of a 700,000 Year-Old Homo Heidelbergensis

Lateral view. Portrait of Homo heidelbergensis from Petralona, Greece, with hair and skin pigmentation.

Image credit: Aidonis et al., doi: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2023.104206.

Anthropologists Reconstruct Face of Homo heidelbergensis | Sci.News

Frontal view.

Image credit: Aidonis et al., doi: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2023.104206.

Skull of Homo heidelbergensis (the Petralona Skull)

Source: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)

The incidental refutation of basic creationist superstitions continues unabated this week.

Following the news that animal and human tracks carved in rocks in what is now Namibia in Southwest Africa, are twice as old as the Universe, according to creationists, comes news that scientists have reconstructed the head and face of an archaic hominin, Homo heidelbergensis, who lived between 700,000 and 200,000 years ago in Eurasia, and news that Neanderthals were hunting cave lions in Europe, 48,000 years ago (to be the subject of my next blog post).

But, given that 99.99% of the known history of the Universe occurred before it was created by magic out of nothing by a magic man made of nothing that popped up from nowhere, if we believe creationists, this is not in the least surprising. Almost all geology and palaeontology, and much of archaeology is concerned with this 'pre-creation' history.

The team who forensically reconstructed the face and head was led by Christina Papageorgopoulou of the Laboratory of Physical Anthropology, Department of History and Ethnology, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece, and included researchers from the Institute for Bio-Economy and Agri-Technology, Centre for Research & Technology Hellas, Greece and the Ephorate of Palaeoanthropology-Speleology, Ministry of Culture, Greece. First a little about H. heidelbergensis and how the Petralona Skull, used in the reconstruction, was dated to between 200,000 and 700,000 years old:

Creationism in Crisis - Humans Were Carving Human and Other Animal Tracks in Rocks in Namibia, 10,000 Years Before Creationists Think Earth Was Created

Stone Age depictions of human footprints and animal tracks in Doro !nawas mountains, Namibia.

Image credit: Andreas Pastoors.

Large engraving of an elephant at rock art site RAS 8.

How just one set of animal tracks can provide a wealth of information | FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

Hunter-gatherer people were carving human and other animal tracks in rocks in Namibia during the Later Stone Age (LSA) that began in Southern Africa about 20,000 years ago.

Unlike the Paluxy hoax in America, when crudely forged human tracks were carved by local people on top of dinosaur tracks, to provide souvenirs for gullible tourists during the Great Depression, these carvings are believed to have had cultural significance for the people who carved them.

They depict detailed human footprints interspersed with tracks of hooved animals which are so accurate that experts are able to determine detailed information on the species, age, sex, limbs, side of the body, trackway and relative direction of the tracks.

The carvings are on six rockfaces in the Doro !nawas mountains in Namibia.

Creationism in Crisis - Colliding Planets Falsify Creationism

Image shows a visualisation of the huge, glowing planetary body produced by a planetary collision. As the resulting debris moves between the host star and Earth it causes the star to appear to dim. The host star is seen in the background of the image.

Credit: Mark Garlick

October: Exoplanet collision | News and features | University of Bristol

The reason creationism is so easy to refute is that its claims are simplistic, designed as they are to appeal to those who think like children and who know little or no science.

This means we can construct simple hypotheses and predictions and test them against the real world. When we do that, we invariably find the hypotheses are easily falsifiable and the predictions fail to be fulfilled.

Science readily accepts, for example, that much of the observable universe emerged from chaos under the directional force of gravity, which turns a chaotic system into a progressively ordered system, so galaxies, superclusters, black holes, suns and planetary systems all emerged from the background chaos of the Big Bang and quantum fluctuations. This view of the universe predicts that there is still a degree of chaos and unpredictability about the universe.

M1: The Crab Nebula from Hubble.
The chaotic remnants of an exploding supernova.

Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU)

Creationists however, insist that the universe, and everything in it was created in a few days by a perfect, omniscient, god, casting magic spells and commanding everything to appear from nowhere, made out of nothing, in a perfectly ordered and designed universe. It then either micromanages it or sits back and watches while it runs on a prepared a set of rules that govern it (depending on the flavour of creationism and how much the superstition has tried to accommodate science while still believing in magic and the fairy tales they were told in childhood).

So, our simple hypothesis then is that a universe created according to creationist superstitions would be perfectly ordered and free from chaos, and of course had the ultimate purpose of providing humans with somewhere nice to live, like America. Such a well-ordered universe would never have planets colliding, or comets being knocked out of stable orbit in the outer reaches of the solar system and moving into elliptical orbits around the sun, for example. Nor would it have had a minor planet colliding with a young Earth as is believed to account for the Moon and the axis tilt that causes the seasons.

Creationism in Crisis - This Fossil Marsupial is Thirteen Thousand Times Older Than The Universe, According to Creationists

The three species of the family Thylacosmilidae on the South American continent: Anachlysictis gracilis (left, above), Thylacosmilus atrox (right) and Patagosmilus goini (left, below)

Credit: Jorge Blanco.

Anachlysictis gracilis stalking its prey in the La Venta area of Colombia, 13 million years ago. (artists impression)

Credit: Juan Giraldo

Prehistoric predator | Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

Scientists have unearthed the fossilised remains of a predatory sabre-toothed marsupial that lived in what is now Columbia in northwestern South America, 13 million years ago, during the Cenozoic, the period which followed the extinction of the dinosaurs, which cleared the way for a rapid diversification of mammals.

The fossil is of Anachlysictis gracilis, one of the family of predatory marsupial known as the Thylacosmilidae.

Creationism in Crisis - How We Can Tell The Bible Is Not The Work Of The God Described in It

A creator god would not have got so much wrong when it tried to describe the world it had created and described is as though it knew no more than a parochial Bronze Age pastoralist who knew almost nothing and had to rely on guess-work and folkloric superstitions from the fearful infancy of our species.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

The universe from descriptions of it in the Bible.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1: 6-10.

How the Universe really is, as revealed by science:

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Use Ancient 'Fossils' in Ocean Floor Sediment to Analyse Africa's Weather Patterns Over Millions of Years

Floodwaters in the town of Bushmans River, South Africa.

Shutterstock/David Steele

Floodwaters in the town of Bushmans River, South Africa, following unusually heavy rain associated with the Benguela Niño

Shutterstock/David Steele

Syracuse University Paleoclimatologists Use Ancient Sediment to Explore Future Climate in Africa - College of Arts & Sciences at Syracuse University

Scientists from Syracuse University, George Mason University and the University of Connecticut are using hydrogen isotopes locked up in 'fossilised' plant material embedded in ocean floor sediments to analyse the changes in weather patterns in Southern Africa, in order to try to predict the effects of current changes.

The 'fossils' are in the form of stable flakes of the waxy substance that coats plant leaves. These get washed into the ocean when they flake off the leaves and eventually sink to the ocean floor where they become embedded in the layers of silt in chronological order. The team measured the ratio of the two stable isotopes of hydrogen (¹H and ²H or deuterium) in of thin sections core samples of the ocean floor deposits. This ratio is directly related to the rainfall on the adjacent land.

This is only possible because childish creationist claims that the Universe is only 8-10,000 years old are not only quantitatively wrong, but wrong by many orders of magnitude, and quite laughably so to anyone who has even the slightest understanding of the subject.

Unintelligent Design - How Evolution Keeps on Reinventing the Wheel

Zebra plant Aphelandra squarrosa

Golden dead-nettle Lamium galeobdolon

Both plants produce benzoxazinoids but with entirely different biochemical pathways

© Karin Groten,
Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology

Benzoxazinoids are produced in very different plants, such as the zebra plant Aphelandra squarrosa (left), the golden dead-nettle Lamium galeobdolon (right) and maize. Comparative studies of the plant metabolites and the genes expressed have now demonstrated how flexible plant metabolism is. The formation of benzoxazinoids in the three species is based on different enzyme classes and has thus evolved independently of one another.

© Karin Groten, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology

Nature is inventive - the same substance is produced differently by plants | Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology

Imagine for a moment that you're a supremely intelligent designer and you just designed a metabolic pathway for producing a substance in plants that is intended to deter other creatures you designed earlier to eat the plants, from eating them.

No! I know that's not an intelligent thing to do but work with me on this one!

Then, the same problem you've created which the animals you've designed doing what you've designed them to do, and eating other plants you've designed, so how do you solve that problem?

Being intelligent, you give those plants the same metabolic pathway to produce the same deterrent substances you've just designed, don't you?

Well, yes, if you were truly intelligent you would, but not if you're creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer. If you're creationism’s putative intelligent [sic] designer, you set about creating entirely new metabolic pathways for each plant to produce the same deterrent chemicals! In metaphorical design terms, it’s the equivalent of inventing the wheel anew every time you need to put wheels on a cart.

Would you employ such a designer?

Creationists regard this as supreme intelligence - which probably tells us a great deal about creationists and probably explains why they're creationists in the first place.

You might think this example is made up to make creationists look even more gullible, but it's actually based on real science as revealed recently by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Jena, Germany. These researchers have found that distantly related plants use different enzymes and different biochemical pathways to produce the defence compounds, benzoxazinoids, and with different enzymes come different sets of genes.

The researchers found that these biochemical pathways have evolved in plants at least three time and don't have their origins in a common ancestor.

Creationism in Crisis - Now it's Tree Rings Recording Solar Storms 4,300 Years Before The Universe Existed! Oops!

Artist illustration of events on the sun changing the conditions in Near-Earth space

Credit: NASA

The Miyake Event is the biggest yet discovered.

Alamy/PA

Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in tree rings | University of Leeds

It's probably unkind to laugh at creationists, who probably genuinely don't know any better and are too dim to learn any science. But they leave us little choice when they wave aside all the evidence of a 14 billion-year-old Universe and a 3.8 billion-year-old Earth as 'wrong' or 'scientists lying' or 'planted by Satan to mislead us', or even 'faked by God the liar almighty as a test of faith', in favour of an evidence free-superstition they were taught by their parents and which they are too terrified to let go off in case they get a zap from an invisible, magic mind-reading sky thug, stories about which they were terrorized by as children, or worst of all, they don't feel important enough?

Their infantile superstition is, of course, that Earth is 8-10,000 years old and was created by magic pretty much as we find it today, just because a bunch of Bronze Age pastoralists thought so.

And then along comes an international team of those pesky scientists who only go and produce evidence that a tree was alive on Earth 4,300 years before the Universe supposedly existed and recorded in its annual tree rings a massive solar storm from a sun that supposedly hadn't yet been magicked into existence, and which is allegedly hanging like a lamp from a dome over Earth so we can tell it's not night! (Remember! It's unkind to laugh! LOL!)

Creationism in Crisis - Another Unintelligently Designed Arms Race

Buff-tailed bumblebee,
Bombus terrestris

Asian hornets,
Vespa velutina nigrithorax.

Asian giant hornets, Vespa velutina nigrithorax

Credit: Sandra Rojas-Nossa

Bumblebees drop to shake off Asian hornets - News

Let's quickly run through the sort of thing creationists need to believe is an example of supreme intelligence, in order to retain their delusion that what their mummy and daddy told them can't possibly be wrong and they really were specially designed by the magic creator of the universe who hold them in especially high regard.

An intelligent [sic] designer (there can only be one because Abrahamic dogma insists there is only one creator - apart from something called 'sin' which somehow transformed itself from a verb to a noun and magically became a creative entity, over which their god has no power) designed the buff-tailed bumblebee to travel from flower to flower, collecting pollen and nectar and pollinating the flowers as it does so. So far, so good.

Then the same intelligent [sic] designer decided these bumblebees, along with other related species of bee, would be ideal food for a predatory giant hornet that it was designing so it created these hornets with the ability to hunt down and kill bumblebees.

Now, that solution to the problem of what to provide giant hornets with for food is now a problem for it to solve. In other words, it didn't realise its solution - killing and eating bumblebees - would be a problem for bumblebees.

Once it did realise the problem it had stupidly err... intelligently created, it set about finding a solution. So, it brilliantly gave the buff-tailed bumblebee, but no other bees, a defensive strategy so they could stop giant hornets doing what they were intelligently [sic] designed to do.

I wonder how long it will take this solitary designer to realise that this is now a problem for giant hornets and set about designing a solution for that problem it intelligently [sic] created!

But it turns out that buff-tailed bumblebees’ defensive strategy probably wasn’t designed to protect it from giant hornets after all, but from some, as yet unidentified predator (which could even be extinct now). The stupidity was in designing giant hornets to try to catch them in the first place when they had already been given a defence against them!

of course, what I described there is the classic evolutionary arms race that is the cause of a considerable proportion of biodiversity as species compete with one another, seek to avoid being eaten, or try to find a way not to starve, for long enough to produce the next generation. The obvious lack of planning and foresight is how we know there was no intelligence and no plan in the process which created it.

How the buff-tailed bumblebees’ escape strategy was discovered by researchers from the University of Exter, Cornwall, UK together with colleagues at the Spanish universities of Vigo, Pontevedra, and Santiago de Compostela, A Coruña, who have published their findings in an open access paper in Communications Biology. It is explained in a news release from the University of Exeter:

Creationism in Crisis - Astronomers Discover The Early Stages of Planatary Formation - About Which The Bible is Silent

An image of the radio wave emission strength from the disk around DG Taurus, observed with ALMA. Rings have not yet formed in the disk, suggesting that it is just before planet formation.

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), S. Ohashi et al.

How the Bible's authors saw the Universe.

Press Releases - Astronomers Discover First Step Toward Planet Formation - ALMA

The universe described by the Bronze Age story in the Bible is almost laughable in its naivety, yet there are still ignorant people who think it was accurately described by the creator of it.

It has a flat Earth at the centre, with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, and the sun and moon are lamps hung from the dome to tell us when it’s day or night. All the stars, which we now know are vast galaxies or even superclusters of galaxies, millions of lightyears away, are described as small lights fixed to the inside of the dome, which can shake lose and fall to Earth during earthquakes.

Apart from a magic man speaking some magic words, there is no explanation of how the planet Earth formed, nor any appreciation of planetary systems orbiting a central sun, and of course, no hint that there could be trillions of such planetary systems or the vastness of the Universe.

Of course, you can't really blame the authors who wrote that stuff in the fearful infancy of our species. They were only doing their best with what little knowledge they had. What you can blame though are the ignorant fools who have failed to keep up with scientific discoveries and who still believe those laughably naïve myths are real science and history.

To add to their embarrassment, astronomers have now confirmed what we have suspected for many years now - that planetary systems and planets like Earth form in the accretion discs of second or third generation stars which were formed from condensing clouds of gas and debris produced by exploding earlier stars at the end of their life. These clouds contained not only hydrogen, helium, lithium and lighter elements but also heavier elements produced in the last stages of the earlier sun's demise as it collapsed inwards, forcing the lighter elements in its core to form heavier elements such as iron, calcium, carbon, silicon, oxygen, etc.

As the new sun's gravity pulls these larger elements towards it, angular momentum forces them into a flattened disc orbiting the sun. It was in these discs that the planets condensed around orbitally-stable centres of gravity.

Unintelligent Design News - The Needless Complexity of Acoels-Microalgae Symbiosis

Acoel, a primitive flatworm-like multicellular marine organism

Photo: Christopher Laumer

A simple, multicellular, acoel.

Shining a light on tiny, solar-powered animals | Hokkaido University

Let's step into fantasy land and assume the creationist superstition of an intelligent [sic] designer is true for a moment.

Once upon a time this designer designed photosynthesis and put it in the cyanobacteria, which meant they were able to live on sunlight and carbon dioxide (CO₂whilst giving off oxygen as a waste product. It didn't do a particularly decent job of it and included probably the least efficient known enzyme, ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCo), but that’s another story.

Later on, it decided simple plants called algae also needed to live on sunlight and CO₂, so what did it do? Instead of doing what any normal intelligent designer would do and give them the same process it gave to the cyanobacteria, it put lots of cyanobacteria inside the algae, where they became the chloroplasts! Apparently, the simple solution wasn't complex enough.

Later on, this same designer decided a group of primitive multicellular marine flatworm-like organisms called acoels also needed to live on sunlight and CO₂, so what did it do? Did it give them the same process it had designed for the cyanobacteria? Of course not! Did if put cyanobacteria into the cells of the acoels like it had the algae? Of course not! Those would be simple solutions to the problem.

This time it didn’t even needlessly increased the complexity of acoels by putting whole algae, containing the cyanobacteria, inside the acoel cells. It went for an even more complex solution. Bizarrely, it actually designed the acoels to find and capture photosynthetic algae and insert them into their own cells!

So much for creationists superstitions and their idiotic insistence that maximal complexity is evidence of intelligent design, not minimal complexity, as any normal intelligent designer would design for. Needless complexity is actually evidence for unintelligent design.

Climate Change News - As Earth's Temperature Rises, Humanity is Slowly Grasping the Fact That There is No Planet B

Increasingly dangerous wildfires are just one consequence of climate change. Here, a man watches in 2013 as the Springs fire in California approaches.

Credit: David McNew Getty Images

6 reasons why global temperatures are spiking right now

A Pharmacy shop sign displays the outside temperature of 46 Celsius degrees (114.8 F) in downtown Rome, July 18, 2023.

AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis

As I have commented before, probably the most dangerous delusion fostered by the Abrahamic religions, is that Earth was given to humankind for our exclusive use and that we are being watched over by a benevolent magic guardian in the sky who will ensure that no long-term harm will come to us and our planet. This delusion could well result in us making this planet, our life-support system in the cosmos, uninhabitable by all but a small number of species such as bacteria and cockroaches.

Fundamentalist 'loving' Christians jibber excitedly about the 'end times', looking forward to the day when their imaginary friend comes to Earth and kills everyone who disagrees with them so they can have everything for themselves, but the only end times we face are the end times for all of us, just assuredly as a space man systematically destroying his own spaceship.

So, what is causing the record temperatures we are experiencing this year, where records are not only being broken almost every day, but being broken by record margins? In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation, Andrew King, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, The University of Melbourne gives six reasons for these record temperatures. His article is reprinted under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic purposes:

Creationism in Crisis - Humans Were Walking About in North America 10-13,000 Years Before Creationists Think Humans Were Created

Human footprints beside an ancient lake in New Mexico more than 20,000 years ago.

National Park Service

Study confirms age of oldest fossil human footprints in the Americas | Bournemouth University

10,000 years ago, according to the Bronze Age Canaanite creation myths in the Bible, a magic man in the sky created humans without ancestors, and either before or afterwards, according to the two different versions, he created all the animals too. And animals and humans went forth and multiplied to populate Earth.

White Sands footprints

Bennett, et al (2021)

A few thousand years later, in a fit of pique, because his 'perfect' design hadn't turned out the way he intended, he murdered almost everything in a genocidal flood and Earth had to be repopulated from just eight humans and either two or six of the other animal species (again depending on the version) after the humans had sacrificed one of every species as a thank you for the genocide, Earth was again repopulated from these impossibly narrow genetic bottlenecks.

Creationists also insist that all sedimentary rocks were deposited in their mythical genocidal flood.

Some people still believe that myth to be accurate history, despite all the evidence against it and the fact that there is no evidence for it, save only for the origin myths in a book which, as science discovers more, is becoming increasingly 'allegorical/metaphorical' in order to avoid admitting it's just plain wrong.

One piece of evidence was revealed in 2021, by researchers from Bournemouth University, UK, the US National Park Service, U.S. Geological Survey, Cornell University, USA and the University of Arizona, USA., which showed that humans were leaving footprints in mud at the edge of a lake in what is now White Sands National Park in New Mexico, North America, 10-13,000 years before Earth was created according to the ancient origin myths.

Creationism in Crisis - How Grasses Acquired New Genetic Information - By Horizontal Gene Transfer

Natural GM crops: grasses take evolutionary shortcut by borrowing genes from their neighbours | News | The University of Sheffield

Alloteropsis semialata, acquired genes by lateral transfer from other species.

Despite Creationist dogma that no new genetic information can arise in a genome without the active intervention of a magic man in the sky, who can magically create information at will, there are several known mechanisms by which this can occur - for example, gene or even whole genome duplication, which leaves spare DNA which can mutate without harming the carrier and which, when filtered through the sieve of natural selection, can give rise to novel genes and new genetic information.

And there is horizontal gene transfer, normally thought of in terms of bacteria sharing genes in the form of plasmids with other bacteria, even from a different species. And scientists are constantly discovering new examples of horizontal gene transfer, sometimes with startling results such as the fruit fly, Drosophila ananassae which has the entire genome of the bacterium Wolbachia incorporated into its genome.

Now a team of researchers at the University of Sheffield, UK, have discovered that the evolution of grasses included frequent horizontal (or lateral) gene transfer, the effects of which were to enable them to grow taller and faster. This is a natural version of genetic modification. The research is reported in the journal New Phytologist and explained in the University of Sheffield press release:

Creationism in Crisis - More Evidence of The Positive Psychological Benefits of Awe-Inspiring Science - No Religion Required

Awe-inspiring science can have a positive effect on mental wellbeing, new research finds - Press Releases

Creationists and other religious fundamentalists claim a monopoly on 'spirituality', for example this article on a Jehovah's Witness (aka, liars for Jesus) website which claims you can't be spiritual without believing in their god.

Unbelievably, they cite the Bible in support of that claim, not any real-world observations, experiments or surveys.

However, many scientists, not the least of which are Richard Dawkins, Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan, cite an understanding of science as a source of deep spirituality, a sense of awe and wonder, of oneness with the world and a genuine perspective and appreciation of being alive.

Indeed, my book, What Makes You So Special: From the Big Bang to You is intended to give the reader this sense of awe and wonder from a basic understanding of the scientific processes that led from the Big Bang to the reader's existence here and now, and concludes with the following:

Your journey through space and time has been an adventure of disasters, adaptation, survival and recovery, many, many times you will have been on the brink of extinction - the fate of 99% of all known ancient species - yet your ancestors survived and because they were good at surviving you are here and now. You will live for a mere flash in the time-scale of the Universe but in the vast darkness of the cosmos there can surely be few flashes as bright as your bright spark of consciousness.

Be proud. Be very proud. But at the same time be humbled by the enormity of the events which produced you and the fragility of it all.

Stars died and because they died, you live. You are made by stars out of stardust and in a very real sense; because you are made of the same stuff the Universe is made of and are a part of it, there is something even more wonderful about you. Through you, though not just through you, and maybe not just here on this small planet, the Universe has gained self–awareness and can begin to understand itself.

Through you it can stand on the surface of this beautiful little jewel in the cosmos, can look up in awe at itself and think "Wow!"

You are special. You are unique and you were nearly 14 billion years in the making.

That is your story. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Rosa Rubicondior, What Makes You So Special, page 152

And perhaps Carl Sagan said it better and more succinctly with:

When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.

Carl Sagan, (2011). The demon-haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark. Ballantine Books. (Original work published 1996)

And of course, as Albert Einstein famously said in a letter to J. Dispentier, when refuting false claims that he was a theist or even a Christian:

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

Albert Einstein. Letter to J. Dispentiere, March 24, 1954 Source: Wikipedia - Albert Einstein's Religious Views.

And now we have experimental evidence from psychologists that science can be a source of spiritual experience, with all the psychological benefits, as some people claim religion to be. The paper, reporting on three linked studies, by researchers at the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick, UK, is published open access in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and is explained in a Warwick University press release:

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Have Identified a Likely Human Migration Route Out of Africa - 70,000 Years Before Creationists Think Humans Existed

Wadi Gharandal riverine wetland along the Jordan Rift Valley.

Credit: Mahmoud Abbas

Early Human Migrants Followed Lush Corridor-Route Out Of Africa | University of Southampton

Fig. 1. Map showing archaeological, paleoclimatological, and paleoenvironmental records from the Levant and Arabia mentioned in the text.

(A) The arrows indicate the suggested routes of human dispersals out of Africa [see (9, 17)]. The blue squares show sites with human fossils and footprints in northern Arabia, including those at Al Wusta paleolake (4) and Alathar paleolake (16), respectively. The green circles refer to paleolake/wetland sediments in the western desert of Egypt and Arabia, namely: Bir Tirfawi and Bir Sahara (52), Khall Amayshan (21), Mundafan (22), Khujaymah (22), and Saiwan (60). The green triangles show speleothem deposition in caves in the eastern desert of Egypt, including Saqia cave (43), Wadi Sannur (45), and in southern Arabia including Hoti cave in Oman and Mukkala cave in Yemen (23, 59). The main dated archaeological site in southeastern Arabia is Jebel Faya in the UAE (blue rhombus) (24, 58).

(B) Digital elevation model map of the Levant showing the location of the study areas (yellow stars) along the Jordan Rift Valley (Wadi Gharandal and Gregra) and in the Jordanian Plateau (Wadi Hasa), and the paleolakes and speleothem records in the region. Paleolakes are represented by green circles, namely: Qa'a Azraq (53), Jurf Ed Darawish (26, 32), Lake Elji (54), Qa'a Jafr (27, 55), and Qa'a Mudawwara (28). Speleothem records in the Levant include Soreq cave (green triangle) (44, 46), and the blue squares show sites with human fossils including Skhul and Qafzeh caves (5). The source of digital elevation model data is derived from www.gscloud.cn.

Abbas, M; Lai, Z; Jansen, J.D., et al (2023) (CC BY-NC 4.0)

According to creationist cult dogma, humans were created by magic 8-10,000 years ago. 70,000 years before that, modern humans were migrating out of Africa, having evolved there during the previous tens of millions of years, according to palaeontological, archaeological and genetic evidence.

There are several possible routes by which they could have migrated into Eurasia and from there into the rest of the world, and archaeologists have just reported finding just one such route up the East African coast, across the Sinai Peninsula, down the Red Sea coast of Arabia, through what is now Yemen and Oman and from there to Coastal South Asia.

An alternative route could have been to cross the narrow sea crossing at the southern end of the Red Sea, to southern Arabia and then go north to the Jordan Valley or along the southern coast of Arabia to Oman.

This conclusion comes from the fact that at that time, the Jordan Valley was a “well-watered corridor” which funneled hunter-gatherers through The Levant towards western Asia and northern Arabia via Jordan. Wandering tribes of hunter-gatherer have no particular destination in mind and would have migrated through where the environment provided food and water, so a watered corridor would naturally provide such a route.

This discovery was made by researchers from the University of Southampton (UK) and Shantou University (China), together with colleagues in Jordan, Australia and the Czech Republic. It is published open access in Science Advances and is explained in a press release from Southampton University:

Creationism in Crisis - How Science is Fighting Creationism's Divine Malevolence With Nobel Prize-Winning Science

Katalin Karikó (right) and Drew Weissman, the winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their discoveries enabling the development of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines

Peggy Peterson Photography
Penn Medicine / Via Reuters

Nobel prize in medicine awarded to mRNA pioneers – here's how their discovery was integral to COVID vaccine development

Of course, no serious biologist things they are fighting and invisible magic creator in the sky who is actively designing parasites to harm us, or designing anything else, for that matter, but creationists believe that's just what they are doing.

Some even go so far as claiming scientists, together with their technical staff and publishers, are all part of a secret Satanic conspiracy to mislead people about what their god has created, including the parasites and the suffering and misery they cause, apparently.

So, this piece of research must come across to genuine creationists who really do believe what their cult mandates them to believe, as scientists waging a war on their god's creation.

The war, of course, is a war that medical science has always waged against suffering and the causes of suffering, because increasing the sum total of happiness, but reducing the unhappiness in the world, is basic humanist morality - something that would appear to be lacking in creationists' putative intelligent [sic] designer.

A particularly successful recent war was the war against the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic still raging throughout the world, but thanks to the success of medical science, in a much less virulent form, most people having been protected by the mRNA vaccine developed by Nobel Prize-winning scientists, Dr Katalin Karikó and Dr Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania and a massive world-wide effort to find a vaccine.

First a little about mRNA vaccines:

Creationism in Crisis - Killer Whales Exibit 'Uniquely Human' Behaviour

A killer whale in the Salish Sea is observed harassing a porpoise, a behavior that has long perplexed scientists. A study from Wild Orca and UC Davis’ SeaDoc Society investigates what may be behind it.

Photo credit: Wild Orca

Why Are Killer Whales Harassing and Killing Porpoises Without Eating Them? | UC Davis

A pod of Southern Resident orcas

Photo: NOAA Fisheries.

The problem creationists have with trying to cling to a counter-factual superstition like theirs is that so many facts run counter to it. To normal people, that might be considered a good reason to reassess their opinions and drop those shown to be at odds with the facts and form some based on reality instead.

Not so creationists. To a creationist, the thought of being wrong is an existential threat which, if allowed to develop, would destroy their entire world view which has them at the centre of a specially created universe, the creator of which holds them in high regard. Dropping this childish belief would mean they don't feel as important as they think they are and would maybe have to think the unthinkable - a universe which doesn't have them at the centre of it and eventual oblivion in which the world continues to exist and function without them in it or able to observe it from a privileged position.

The Salish Sea. Location for the study.

All my recent blog posts, especially the 'Creationism in Crisis' series, have shown instances where scientific research has revealed facts which refute basic creationist articles of faith and cult dogmas, and this one is no exception. It deals with a core dogma - that humans were a special creation, created in some material way differently to all other life forms, to which they bear no relationship.

Traditionally, creationists cite examples of how humans are unique, having characteristics shared by no other species - ignoring the fact that that pretty much defines a species and the same case can be made for every other species. One of these is of course another creationist sacred cow - humans have social ethics and a conscience, which creationist dogma asserts could only have come from their particular creator god - the same god whom they believe inflicted a mass genocide on Earth and creates parasites, apparently.

Explaining social ethics, or pr-social behaviour, and a conscience which motivates pro-social behaviour, rewarded by endorphins, is not difficult for science to explain as the result of gene-meme co-evolution in a cooperative species that could not survive as individuals without the support of a social group.

And, to reinforce that, we now have evidence of pro-social behaviour and human-like activities in another species - the orca or killer whale.

At least, that's the explanation for an observed change in behaviour of a pod of orca in the Salish Sea, described in a paper published, open access, in Marine Mammal Science. The investigating team was co-led by Deborah Giles of Wild Orca and Sarah Teman of the SeaDoc Society, a program of University of California Davis (UCDavis) School of Veterinary Medicine.

First a little background on the Southern Resident killer whales, the subject of the study: