Creationism in Crisis - Head Lice Bring More Lousy News For Creationists

Contact between Europeans and Native Americans is recorded in the DNA of head lice.

Credit: Vincent Smith,
Natural History Museum, London, CC-BY 4.0

Head lice hitched a ride on humans to the Americas at least twice

Male human head louse, Pediculus humanus capitis

Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)

According to the creationist favourite arguments - the argument from ignorant incredulity and the false dichotomy - anything which is complex, such as cells, multicellular organisms, cultural ethics, etc., must have been intelligently designed by their particular god by magic, because that is the only answer allowed. Evolution is ruled out by dogmas, as too hard to understand, by someone too lazy to learn biology and too afraid to consider being wrong.

So, following what passes for creationist logic, creationists should believe that the species-specific, obligate parasite, the head louse, Pediculus humanus capitis, must have been intelligently designed by the creationists' god.

Which begs the questions, why would an omnibenevolent designer:

1. design an irritating parasite?
2. design its DNA to look like head lice had co-evolved with humans over millions of years from a common ancestor with the louse, Pediculus schaeffi, that parasitises chimpanzees?

And, as with all host-specific, obligate parasites, like pubic lice, chlamydia, and other STDs, there is the little matter of who on the Ark, was host to them and how did they acquire them?

Of the three lice that can infest humans, the head louse, Pediculus humanus capitis, the closely-related body louse, P. h. humanus and the more distantly-related pubic louse, Phthiriasis pubis, all have their counterparts in our nearest great ape relatives, in the latter case, the gorilla, and all have genomes that map closely onto the evolutionary history of different human populations.

Humans inherited the ancestor of P. humanus when we diverged from the chimpanzees and, as we lost body hair, it became isolated to our head and facial hair. Later, when we started wearing clothes, our lice diverged into two sub-species, P. h. capitis and P. h. humanus (also called P. h. corporis) respectively. How we managed to acquire the sexually-transmitted pubic or crab louse, Phthiriasis pubis, from an ancestor of gorillas about 3.3 million years ago, is a matter for speculation.

What are the three species of lice that infest humans and what can they tell us about our evolutionary history and the history of different human populations? There are three species of lice that infest humans:

1. Pediculus humanus capitis:This is the head louse, which infests the human scalp and hair.
2. Pediculus humanus corporis:This is the body louse, which lives and lays its eggs on clothing and only feeds on the human body.
3. Pthirus pubis:This is the pubic louse, which infests coarse body hair, especially in the genital area but can also be found in other coarse body hair.

These lice can provide insights into our evolutionary history and the history of different human populations through a field known as "phylogeography." Phylogeography involves studying the genetic variation within a species to understand its historical migration patterns and population dynamics. Lice are highly host-specific, meaning that they have evolved to live on and feed exclusively from humans. The divergence of head and body lice is thought to have occurred when humans began wearing clothing. The body louse adapted to live in clothing and only feeds on the human body when needed, while the head louse remained adapted to living in human hair. Research on the genetic diversity of human lice has contributed to our understanding of human evolution and migration. For example, studies have used genetic data from lice to estimate when humans started wearing clothing, which is linked to the migration out of Africa. The idea is that as humans migrated to different climates, the need for clothing increased, leading to the divergence of body lice from head lice. Additionally, the study of lice genetics has been used to investigate the timing and patterns of human migration and to trace the movement of human populations over time. This research helps scientists map out the historical interactions and separations of human populations, providing valuable information about the peopling of different regions of the world. In summary, the genetic diversity of human lice provides clues about our evolutionary history, including migration patterns, the development of cultural practices like clothing use, and the historical interactions among human populations.

Now, a group of scientists led by Marina Ascunce, of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS), together with colleagues, have used this knowledge to show that head lice came to America twice; once with the first wave of human migration from Siberia via the land bridge, Beringia, which was located between Siberia and Alaska, what is now the Bering Strait, when sea-levels were lower, and again with European colonists. They report these findings in a new study published on November 8 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

The new study analysed the DNA of 274 human lice from 25 geographic sites around the world. This analysis revealed the existence of two genetically isolated clusters of lice that only rarely interbred. Cluster I had a worldwide distribution, while cluster II was found in Europe and the Americas. There is also a population found in the Americas which appears to be the result of a mixture between lice descended from populations that arrived with the First People carrying cluster I lice and those descended from European (cluster II) lice, which were brought over during the colonization of the Americas.

The researchers also identified a population of lice in Central America which shows a close genetic with lice in Asia. This is consistent with the idea that people from East Asia migrated to North America and became the first Native Americans. These people then spread south into Central America, where modern louse populations today still retain a genetic signature from their distant Asian ancestors.

Abstract The human louse, Pediculus humanus, is an obligate blood-sucking ectoparasite that has coevolved with humans for millennia. Given the intimate relationship between this parasite and the human host, the study of human lice has the potential to shed light on aspects of human evolution that are difficult to interpret using other biological evidence. In this study, we analyzed the genetic variation in 274 human lice from 25 geographic sites around the world by using nuclear microsatellite loci and female-inherited mitochondrial DNA sequences. Nuclear genetic diversity analysis revealed the presence of two distinct genetic clusters I and II, which are subdivided into subclusters: Ia-Ib and IIa-IIb, respectively. Among these samples, we observed the presence of the two most common louse mitochondrial haplogroups: A and B that were found in both nuclear Clusters I and II. Evidence of nuclear admixture was uncommon (12%) and was predominate in the New World potentially mirroring the history of colonization in the Americas. These findings were supported by novel DIYABC simulations that were built using both host and parasite data to define parameters and models suggesting that admixture between cI and cII was very recent. This pattern could also be the result of a reproductive barrier between these two nuclear genetic clusters. In addition to providing new evolutionary knowledge about this human parasite, our study could guide the development of new analyses in other host-parasite systems.

Fig 1. Humans and lice.
The map shows the geographic distribution of the modern human head lice included in this study using green dots. Archeological findings of human lice are shown with the figure of a human louse on the map with the corresponding estimated dates from: [3, 5, 6, 21, 22]. In addition, the map reflects the approximate locations of hominin fossil remains and their proposed distribution based on: [23–38]. Each hominin is color coded as follows: Neanderthal (Blue), Denisovan (Black), and Anatomical Modern Humans (Orange).

The outline map was downloaded from Wikimedia: Map author: Maulucioni (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_with_the_Americas_on_the_right.png).
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode.

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Fig 5. Proposed global co-migration of human lice and humans.
Top: Map depicting the collection sites of the human lice included in this study. The color of each circle corresponds to the majority nuclear genetic cluster to which sampled individuals were assigned. Sites with admixed lice are indicated with patterned circles including colors of the two major genetic clusters at that site. The proposed migrations of anatomically modern humans out of Africa into Europe, Asia and the Americas, as well as the more recent European colonization of the New World are indicated with thick grey arrows. Hypothetical human louse co-migrations are indicated with orange and blue arrows. At the bottom, the STRUCTURE plot from Fig 3A corresponding to the assignment of 274 lice from 25 geographical sites at K = 4 (Table 1) is shown.

The outline map was downloaded from Wikimedia: Map author: Maulucioni (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_with_the_Americas_on_the_right.png).
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode.

Ascunce MS, Toloza AC, González-Oliver A, Reed DL (2023)
Nuclear genetic diversity of head lice sheds light on human dispersal around the world.
PLoS ONE 18(11): e0293409. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0293409.

Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by [publisher] Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 DEED (CC0 1.0 Universal)

As the author point out, analysis of the DNA of host-specific obligate parasites such as lice can help fill in gaps in the fossil record because their evolution is closely linked to their host's evolution, patterns of migration and , in our case, to cultural changes such as wearing cloths. Again, in the case of humans, a clear pattern emerges which maps exactly onto other evidence of migration, isolation and remixing, confirming the value of DNA analysis in this respect. There is a clear line of migration out of Africa into Asia and from Asia into the Americas with the earliest human migrants. The lice Europeans inherited, had been partially isolated in the European Peninsula with their hosts, or possible had evolved with Neanderthals who then passed them on the modern humans, were the able to remix with the Asian/American variety from the 15th century onwards.

So what creationists need to explain, as well as why their putative designer went to the trouble of designing an obligate parasite to live on us, is why it then gave them DNA that looked like they had evolved over millions of years, share a ecommon ancestor with those of chimpanzees and reflected our pattern of migration out of Africa and across the world over a period of several tens of thousands of years.

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Unintelligent Designer News - Scientists May Have Discovered The Design Flaw That Makes Our Immune System Fail When We Need It Most

Healthy (red) and exhausted (green) T cells in the spleen of chronically infected mouse.

Image: Ana Maria Mansilla / Institut für Systemimmunologie, Universität Würzburg

T-cells surrounding a cancer cell

JUAN GARTNER / Getty Images

Preventing the Exhaustion of T Cells - Universität Würzburg News

Our immune system is notoriously unreliable and often fails when it is needed most, with cancers and serious infections. As a piece of supposedly intelligent [sic] design, (according to creationist superstition) it is more an example of blithering incompetence, if not downright malevolence.

Remember, creationists believe the designer of it is supremely intelligent, omniscient with the power to foresee the future, omnipotent and perfect. Remember too that creationists claim, as the only supernatural entity capable of designing live things, that it also designed the pathogenic organisms that the immune system was designed to protect us from.

Apparently, in creationist circles, designing pathogens to make us sick, then designing an immune system to protect us from those pathogens, then redesigning the pathogens to bypass our immune system that should be protecting us from them, is considered evidence of supreme intelligence.

Similarly, designing a method of cell replication to replace out old cells when they wear out, but using a method that sometime makes mistakes and turns the cells into cancer cells is also a sign of infinite wisdom.

For reasons that can only be guessed at, and probably for political motives that depend on fools being misled about science and which have nothing to do with worshipping their particular god, creationist frauds would rather we thought of their putative designer god as an incompetent fool and pestilential malevolence, than accept that pathogens, cancers and our immune system are the result of a mindless, utilitarian natural process that operates without a plan and produces suboptimal results, providing the result is better than that which preceded it in terms of producing more offspring which go on to breed successfully.

For creationist frauds, religion merely provides them with an excuse for their avarice and demands for political power over others.

Creationism in Crisis - Complex Life Evolved 2.4 Billion Years Before The Mythical 'Creation Week' - And Another Gap Closes...

Nodules of microfossilierous black chert are scattered throughout a rock outcrop.

Credit: Provided by Erica Barlow.
All Rights Reserved.

Microfossils are contained within black chert like the ones seen here.

Credit: Professor Erica V. Barlow. All Rights Reserved.

Window to the past: New microfossils suggest earlier rise in complex life | Penn State University

In that vast passage of time before the mythical "Creation Week" when 99.97% of Earth History occurred, some events that were highly significant for the evolution of life on Earth were happening. One of these was the Great Oxidation Event or GOE, which was to change the course of evolutionary history and put it on a trajectory that led to the evolution of multicellularity and to all the biodiversity of multicellular plants, fungi and animals that we see today.

The GOE happened when proliferating cyanobacteria, which had been evolving for a billion years or more, started using photosynthesis to create sugar from carbon dioxide, water and solar energy, and pollute the atmosphere with their toxic waste, oxygen. It was a major environmental change, causing Earth's first mass extinction. To anyone who understands the link between environmental change and evolution, it won't come as a surprise to learn that it was accompanied by a major evolutionary change in living organisms - the change from prokaryote to eukaryote cells.

What and when was the Great Oxidation Event in Earth's history, and what were its consequences for life on Earth? The Great Oxidation Event, often abbreviated as GOE, was a significant period in Earth's history during which there was a substantial increase in atmospheric oxygen levels. It is estimated to have occurred approximately 2.4 billion to 2.3 billion years ago, in the Proterozoic Eon, specifically during the Paleoproterozoic era. The consequences of the Great Oxidation Event for life on Earth were profound and multifaceted:

Creationism in Crisis - A Population of Greenland's Ringed Seals Has Been Isolated Since 90,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

North Atlantic Ringed Seal

The Kangia Ringed Seal of Greenland's Ilulissat Icefjord

The ringed seals in Ilulissat Icefjord, Greenland, are special

How an isolated population of a species diverges from the 'parent', both genetically and phenotypically, is illustrated by a population of Arctic ringed seals, Pusa hispida hispida which is normally a wide-ranging circumpolar species but a population of which is more or less sedentary in the Ilulissat Icefjord in Western Greenland, and so is isolated from the main population.

This population, known locally as the Kangia, differs markedly in coat pattern and size from the usual ringed seal and genetic studies have shown that it has been isolated from the main population for about 100,000 years, which, to the embarrassment of creationists, means since about 90,000 years before they believe Earth existed.
The ringed seal of the Ilulissat Icefjord have been identified as a distinct subspecies by a research team led by Greenlandic and Danish researchers. Their results are published open access in the journal Molecular Ecology.

Tell me all about the Arctic ringed seal, especially the Kangia from western Greenland. The Arctic ringed seal (Pusa hispida), often referred to as simply the ringed seal, is a species of seal found primarily in the Arctic and subarctic regions of the Northern Hemisphere. These seals are well adapted to cold environments and are considered the smallest and most abundant of the Arctic seals. Here are some key facts about the Arctic ringed seal:

Malevolent Designer News - How HIV Research is Trying to Overcome the "Designer's" Devilish Malevolence

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)

Pinpointing HIV immune response

The traditional creationist double-think response, when presented with evidence of malevolent design in the form of parasites such as pathological viruses, bacteria, protozoa or worms, etc., is to blame something called 'Sin' for their creation, absolving their proclaimed intelligent [sic] designer of any culpability, while maintaining that everything living must be attributed to their god because it is the only entity capable of designing living organisms.

However, in the case of HIV, the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in humans, they greeted it with barely concealed jubilation in their caring Christian way, declaring it to be a 'Gay Plague' sent by their god to punish homosexuals, so they now can't blame Satan or 'Sin' for its creation. A case of being hoist by their own petard.

And to add to creationists' embarrassment, they also believe the human immune system that HIV evades then suppresses, was designed by their, allegedly perfect, omniscient designer to protect us from the parasites it created to harm or kill us, in which case, HIV, like so many other pathogens, is a testament to its incompetence.

HIV is one of a group of RNA retroviruses that can hide from our immune system by inserting a DNA version of their RNA into our DNA using the enzyme reverse transcriptase that they bring with them. Once inserted, the virus looks for all the world like just another chunk of junk DNA. Indeed, like most species, our DNA contains lots of mutated and harmless relics of these retrovirus from our evolutionary history.

Now though, medical science, in trying to do what seems beyond the capability of creationism's putative omnipotent intelligent [sic] designer is closing in on just how HIV manages to evade and suppress our immune system, and how our immune system responds to it.

In a paper just published open access in the journal Science Communications a team of scientists led by Ruy M. Ribeiro, a theoretical biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA has shown, using experiments on Macaque monkeys and mathematical modelling, that, although the body's immune system does succeed in suppressing virus production and in killing infected cells, the response only last for a very short time at the start of infection.

Malevolent Design - Another Dangerous Tick That Can Kill Cattle Is Spreading Fast

Nymph

Adult

Asian longhorned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis

Asian longhorned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis, (ventral view)

Photo: Risa Pesapane

An exotic tick that can kill cattle is spreading across Ohio

In what creationists should see as a triumph for their favourite sadist if they were true to their professed belief and weren't selective in its application, the Asian longhorned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis which they believe it designed, which feeds by sucking the blood of its victims and which was first detected in the USA in 2017 and in Ohio in 2021, is now present in such vast numbers that it is believed to have killed three cattle in southeastern Ohio, simply through blood loss.

One of the cattle was a healthy, 5-year-old bull. It would have taken about 10,000 ticks to kill it by exsanguination. that number of ticks were recovered in 90 minutes on one Ohio farm alone.

Ticks, like other parasites, if we accept the intelligent [sic] design argument for a moment, can only be ascribed to the work of a pestilential malevolence because creationists also insist that the putative designer is omnipotent and omniscience, therefore it knows exactly what its designs will do, and designs them to do exactly that.

And ticks appear to be designed to do only two things:

1. Produce more ticks.
2. Act as vectors for disease-causing organisms, in this case Anaplasma phagocytophilium and Theileria orientalis.

And, in a brilliant piece of malevolence, what gives these nasties their great power to spread and colonise new territories in vast numbers, all the adults are females that breed parthenogenically. In favourable conditions a newly-hatched tick can reach sexual maturity in a few weeks to a few months. Each female can lay up to 2,000 eggs which, if they all hatch and breed, will produce 4 million breeding ticks in two generations and 8 billion ticks in three, in favourable conditions.

As an introduced species in the USA, the Asian longhorned tick has few natural predators that can keep their numbers in check. In parts of their native range in Asia, guinea fowl are used to keep them in check, but the breeding rate of the tick is so high that natural predation has negligible impact on their numbers. This fantastic rate of reproduction means that a single female colonising a fresh territory can, if the conditions are right, produce tens of trillions of offspring within a year or two.

Creationism in Crisis - 160-Million-Year-Old Predatory Lampreys Makes Suckers of Creationists

Artist’s impression of Yanliaomyzon ingensdentes, one of two newly discovered species of flesh-eating lamprey found in 160-million-year-old rocks.

Heming Zhang

Yanliaomyzon ingensdentes (artist's impression)

Heming Zhang

Jawless ‘Bite’ from the Past: Jurassic Fossils Shed Light on Lamprey Evolution--Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology

Way back in that long spell before 'Creation Week', the creation cult's date when the Universe was created, when 99.97% of Earth's history happened, there were two large, flesh-eating lampreys looking for victims to bore into. Unlike their blood-sucking modern relatives, which latch onto fish and suck their blood and body fluids, these ancient species probably ate the flesh of their victims.

These rare fossils were discovered in 160-million-year-old rocks in North China and are part of the Yanliao Biota, which is found in rock formations that are proving to be a valuable Lagerstätte.

Rosa Rubicondior, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, Chapter 4: Parasitic Vertebrates. pp. 106-107

Creationism in Crisis - Why Science Works (And Creationism Fails) - Rethinking Shark Evolution

Sharks’ non-bony skeletons were thought to be the template before bony internal skeletons evolved, but a new fossil discovery suggests otherwise.

Minjinia turgenensis, evolved before sharks.

Ancient bony fish forces rethink of how sharks evolved | Imperial News | Imperial College London

On of the great strengths of science, apart from its rigorous fact-checking and peer-review process, is the way scientists constantly reassesses what they thought they knew and change their mind when the facts demand it.

Unlike creationism, there are no sacred truths or dogmas that must never be questioned in science, and the best way to make a name for yourself in science is to overthrow an established consensus, just as Einstein overthrew Newtonian physics and Darwin overthrew the teleological thinking that had dominated biological science.

Creationism, by contrast, have a form of 'Morton's Demon' that filters all information and only allows information that supports and reinforces creationism to enter their world view.

An example of science reassessing the evidence is this paper by an international group of scientists led by Dr. Martin D. Brazeau of the Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Ascot, UK, and the Department of Earth Sciences, Natural History Museum, London, UK. It reassesses the evidence for the origin of sharks, which were assumed to have evolved from the cartilaginous fish that preceded the boney fish, and suggests that they may in fact originate in the bony fish and have since reverted to a cartilaginous skeleton.

Creationism in Crisis - The Fishy Origin of The Mammalian Shoulder - And Another Gap Closes

A CT scan of a fish fossil in the study.

Credit: M. Brazeau & M. Castiello

How the fish got its shoulder | Imperial News | Imperial College London

The problems for the creation cult continue to pile up, no-doubt behind the backs of creationists who habitually look the other way when science produces more evidence refuting their dogmas.

This time, it's yet more evidence of the origins of terrestrial tetrapods, including mammals, as air-breathing fish. The evidence is that the basic structures of the mammalian shoulder joint were already present in a fossil fish, and it closes another of creationism beloved gaps in which they force-fit their ever-shrinking little god.

The shoulder girdle – the configuration of bones and muscles that in humans support the movement of the arms – was a classic example of an evolutionary ‘novelty’. This is where a new anatomical feature appears without any obvious precursors; where there is no smoking gun of which feature clearly led to another.

The new study uses fossils, developmental biology, and comparative anatomy, to investigate the 'mystery' and in so doing suggests a new approach to investigating the evolution of major anatomical structures, like the shoulder girdle.

The fossil studied was of the late Devonian placoderm fish, Kolymaspis sibirica:

Unintelligent Design - Now it's Plants Designed to Live in Deserts

Tamarix aphylla

Appearance of the shrub, branches, and surfaces of T. aphylla. (A) A photograph of T. aphylla located across the coastal sabkha of the United Arab Emirates. (B) A close-up view of the branches. (C) A branch recorded in the late morning (11 a.m.) was encrusted with salt crystals. (D) A branch recorded in the early morning (8 a.m.) showed condensed water droplets. (E and F) Scanning electron microscopic images of the surfaces of leaves with salt crystals (E) and a zoomed image of a single salt gland (F). The length of the scale bars in panels B, C, D, E, and F are 5 mm, 3 mm, 3 mm, 1 mm, and 50 µm, respectively.

Al-Handawi, M. B.; Commins, P.; Dinnebier, R. E.; (2023)

NYU Abu Dhabi Researchers Reveal How Common Desert Shrub Efficiently Harvests Water from the Air - NYU Abu Dhabi

Yesterday it was fish 'designed' to live in a desert that demonstrated how biological 'design' is a bottom-up process where, in this case, a fish, is faced with increasing desertification of its environment and only those fit for living in the environment survive to breed, so, over time, and with whatever increased complexity evolves, we have fish 'designed for living in a desert.

An intelligent designer, on the other hand, starting with a desert, would be insane to imagine that what was needed was a fish to live in it, and then set about designing all the complexity and elaborate workarounds for the problems it has needlessly created for itself.

And today, we have another example, in the form of a plant that also lives in a desert, so needs an alternative source of water.

What intelligent designer not in need of responsible adult supervision, would look at a desert and think, "I know what that needs - plants!", then try to solve the problem of, being a plant, it needs water which is singularly lacking in a desert, so it designs a ludicrously complicated way to get water, instead of simply designing the plant to live where there is enough water for it, using the method it has already used successfully in just about every other plant.

Creationism in Crisis - The Universe is Much Bigger Than Our Prophets Said, Grander, More Subtle, More Elegant..

The Crab Nebula seen by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument)

Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, T. Temim (Princeton University).

The Crab Nebula Seen in New Light by NASA’s Webb - NASA

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has gazed at the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. Since the recording of this energetic event in 1054 CE by 11th-century astronomers, the Crab Nebula has continued to draw attention and additional study as scientists seek to understand the conditions, behavior, and after-effects of supernovae through thorough study of the Crab, a relatively nearby example.

The Crab Nebula seen by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope

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

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

The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 6-10

The Crab Nebula - a tiny fragment of the universe as seen by science:

Unintelligent Design - Hundred-Year-Old Fish That Live in A Desert

A century-old buffalofish from Apache Lake, Arizona, USA

Bigmouth buffalofish, Ictiobus cyprinellus

Study uncovers hundred-year lifespans for three freshwater fish species in the Arizona desert | University of Minnesota

The last place you'd expect to find fish would be in a desert.

That's because, being intelligent, no-one would expect an intelligent designer to design fish to live in that environment, and yet there are fish living in a lake in the Arizona desert. These are three species of the Catostomidae, all from the Ictiobus genus, Ictiobus cyprinellus, I. bubalus, I. niger, known colloquially as buffalofish.

Good design is a top-down process, but no intelligent designer would take a desert as its starting point and decide that what the desert needed was fish. Evolution being a bottom-up process starts with fish and, as its environment becomes a desert, those that are better adapted to a desert environment are selected by that environment to survive ad breed, so, over time, we have a fish 'designed' to live in a desert.

And this is how we can tell they weren’t intelligently designed but evolved by a natural, unintelligent process without a plan.

First, a little AI background:

Unintelligent Design - How Viruses Are Needed To Promote Mammalian Cell Growth

Illustration of bacteriophages infecting a bacterium.

Fig 1. Uptake of T4 phage by mammalian cells does not trigger a pro-inflammatory immune response [modified].

(A) A549 cells and (B) MDCK-I cells incubated with T4 phages for 2 hours. Images were taken with a confocal microscope; the plasma membrane is shown in magenta, T4 phage DNA in green, and the cell nucleus in blue.

Bichet MC, Adderley J, Avellaneda-Franco L, Magnin-Bougma I, Torriero-Smith N, Gearing LJ, et al. (2023)

Mammalian cells internalize bacteriophages and use them as a resource to enhance cellular growth and survival | PLOS Biology

Imagine you're a designer charged with designing a mammalian cell so it grows and multiplies efficiently. You've already designed DNA and genes to make the right proteins to stimulate cell growth, but it isn't working as well as it should.

What do you do?

An intelligent designer, especially an omnipotent, omniscient designer, wouldn't have designed it sub-optimally in the first place, but if it had, it would simply redesign it and make sure all the right genes were provided because, being omnipotent, nothing would be impossible.

But whatever designed the mammalian cell didn't do the intelligent thing.

Instead it opted for an unnecessarily complex solution - it used the bacteriophage viruses that it had designed to infect and kill the bacteria it had designed earlier, to infect mammalian cells and give them the missing genes to correct its mistake. It then modified the process it had designed to protect the cells from infection, so these viruses don't trigger an immune response and get destroyed.

No going for the simple solution like a normal intelligent designer would, when a much more complex solution is available, eh?

This is what you need to believe to be an intelligent [sic] design creationist, to explain the findings of a group of researchers led by Jeremy J. Barr of the School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, Australia. They have discovered that phage viruses, which proliferate in our gut where they normally parasitise and kill bacteria, are taken in by mammalian cells where they accumulate and activate metabolic pathways that promote cell metabolism and growth and prolong the cell cycle.

The findings of the team are published open access in PLOS Biology:

Creationism in Crisis - Some of Our Mental Heath Problems Could Be the Result of Denisovan Genes

Super-resolution STED microscopy image of HEZ293 cells transfected with the zinc transporter ZnT9 (in green). In magenta the mitochondrial protein TOM 20 and in white the localization in mitochondria.

Credit: Rubén Vicente.

Geographic distribution of the substitution identified in the SLC30A9 gene in current human populations and possible scenarios of Denisovan introgression. Ancestral SLC30A9 corresponds to the version of the gene prior to interbreeding between Denisovans and sapiens. SLC30A9 variant, refers to the version shared with Denisovans.

Credit: Jorge Garcia and Elena Bosch.
Licensed under Creative Commons 4.0. Created with mapchart

Denisovan genetic inheritance may have left a mark on our mental health - Focus UPF (UPF)

A team of researchers led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), a joint center of the Superior Council of Scientific Research (CSIC) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) , and by the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences (MELIS) of the UPF, has identified one of the most widespread traces of the genetic inheritance of the extinct Denisovans in modern humans.

These genes probably played an important role in helping early Homo sapiens adapt quickly to a cold climate, but, because they are involved in the regulation of zinc and play a part in cellular metabolism could also be a contributory factor in predisposition to mental health disorders such as depression and schizophrenia.

It's tempting to assume that they may also have contributed to a growth in religion since many 'prophets' seem to have had schizophrenic disorders in which they heard voices. However, that's not the main worry for creationists in this research. What they need to cope with is the fact that all this happened in that vast expanse of time before 'Creation week' when creationists believe the universe was magicked up from nothing, just 10,000 years ago.

There is also the matter of Homo sapiens not having a single founding couple who were created without ancestors, and don't even come from a single species, but are a hybrid between several related species.

So, just who were these Denisovans?

Creationism in Crisis - New Thinking on How a Hunting Strategy Evolved in Barbastelle Bats - But no Comfort For Creationists.

Barbastelle, Barbastella barbastellus

Western barbastelle bat, Barbastella barbastellus

Evolutionary chance made this bat a specialist hunter - SDU

In a classic example of how scientists never take what they think they know as proven beyond question, a group of scientists led by associate professor Lasse Jakobsen of the Department of Biology, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark have reassessed how the Western barbastelle bat, Barbastella barbastellus, evolved its hunting strategy, and have concluded that the way we thought it evolved is probably wrong.

But it's no comfort to creationists because there is no suggestion that it may have been acquired by anything other than a god-free natural process or that the scientists are having any doubts about the Theory of Evolution. Indeed, the general principle of arms races is not in doubt, only whether it applies in the case of the barbastelle's hunting strategy. To add to creationist discomfort, evolutionary arms races were the subject of an early research paper by a certain Richard Dawkins together with John Richard Krebs and are now accepted as a fundamental driver of evolution. They are, of course, utterly incompatible with the notion of intelligent [sic] design.

Briefly, it was previously thought that the 'quiet' echolocation used by barbastelles to locate their insect prey was the result of an evolutionary arms race between bats and insects in which insects had evolved the ability to detect bats by their echolocation sounds and take evasive action. Bats then adjusted their sounds by either changing their frequencies or, in the case of barbastelles, turning down the volume.

Creationism in Crisis - How Panic Is Causing Creationist Frauds To Expose Their Dishonesty On Amazon

Why would someone lie to you about the contents of a book?

Like those who lie to you about science, their problem is not that they think it is wrong; their problem is that they think it is right, but they don't want you to think otherwise because they don't want you to be informed. They have an agenda that requires you to remain ignorant and believing falsehoods.

These are frauds who understand how knowledge empowers and sets you free, so they need you to remain captive and weak probably because their income and power depends on it.

This was never better illustrated than by the barrage of lies and disinformation with which the creation industry is trying to stop you reading my books. It is so important to them that you don't read these books that expose them as frauds and conmen that they are willing to sacrifice their personal integrity to try to fool you into not reading them. The fact that they are willing to bear false witness to you for their own self-interest, should tell you that their pretense of piety is part of their agenda, since a devout Christian would believe that bearing false witness is a sin. These are frauds using religion as an excuse for their behaviour.

I suppose I should be flattered in a way, that they are so afraid you'll read these books because of the irrefutable arguments they present and the examples I used that they need to go to these lengths to retain their control of their cult members and recruit more ignorant dupes into it.

Two of my books that are causing consternation in creationist cult circles are, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax, and The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good.

An indication of this consternation is the number of misleading and downright dishonest 'reviews' that Amazon are allowing to remain on these books.

The following is an all-too-typical examples, written by someone who calls him or herself 'The Professor' and who purports to be a University professor who has written numerous books, although he/she neglects to say what chair he/she holds at what university or give the tile of any of these 'numerous books'. We just have to take their word for it.

However, the veracity of their word can best be judged by the content of the 'review' of The Malevolent Designer. For some reason, the title of the book in their 'review' is followed by Unintelligent Design in parenthesis, so it's not even clear which book is being 'reviewed' here.

The 'review' read:

Superstition News - The USA is Not The Only Country Where a Large Number of People Believe in Magic and Would Welcome a Theocracy

Religion in South and Southeast Asia: Key facts | Pew Research Center

Although post-war Europe has seen major changes in religious affiliation and beliefs with Atheism and acceptance of the scientific view of human origins now the largest demographic by far in many countries, including the UK, the USA continues to be an outlier amongst Western industrial democracies in this regard, with a large number of people believing in magic and the special creation of humans as is, on an Earth that is just a few thousand years old.

Another feature of Western European post-war culture is the presumption that religious freedom comes not from a close association between church and state but by strict secularism, so that many countries that were formerly solidly Catholic or Protestant are increasingly secular. This contrast markedly with American evangelicals, who, whilst not being in the majority in what is also becoming an increasingly secular society, would like nothing more than a theocracy with Christianity even being required to qualify as a 'proper American' and the church being involved in education, the judiciary, the legislature and even the executive, in a Taliban-style theocracy.

As this Pew Research survey shows, American Evangelicals closely resemble South and Southeast Asian Buddhists and Muslims in this respect. The survey is the subject of a report by Jonathan Evans, Kelsey Jo Starr, Manolo Corichi and William Miner and a summary by Jonathan Evans.

It shows that in "three Buddhist-majority countries (Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Thailand) and two Muslim-majority countries (Malaysia and Indonesia), as well as the religiously diverse country of Singapore", religion is an important part of everyday life with both Buddhism and Islam having some similarities in terms of belief, personal and national identity and to what degree it should be involved in politics, laws and customs. In all these measures, religion, regardless of the sect, had a remarkable similarity to Evangelical Christianity in the USA, especially amongst the far-right Christian Nationalists.

Creationism in Crisis - 7,000-Year-Old Shark-Tooth Knives From Indonesia Cuts Creationism Down

Distribution of anthropogenic manufacturing traces, use-wear and residues on the Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 (a) and Leang Panninge (b) tiger shark-tooth artefacts.

Langley, M., Duli, A., Stephenson, B., et al (2023)

Bringing a shark to a knife fight: 7,000-year-old shark-tooth knives discovered in Indonesia

Figure 5. Use-related features of the Leang Panninge shark tooth: a) ground facet (indicated by red arrowhead) and striations on the lingual surface; b) grooves between the perforation and tooth shoulder from ligatures; c) plant fibre associated with hafting; d) cut notches along the base and grooves from ligatures (both indicated by red arrowheads) on the labial surface. White scale bars = 1mm (image c by B. Stephenson; all other images by M. Langley).

Langley, M., Duli, A., Stephenson, B., et al (2023)

It's a fundamental requirement of the creation cult to believe that about 4000 years ago, their putative perfect creator god had a human-like fit of temper because its intelligently [sic] designed creation wasn't working as intended and inflicted a genocidal flood on the planet, killing everything apart from a few survivors who lived in a floating box for a year. They then disembarked onto a sterile planet somewhere in the Middle-east and somehow survived to create the biodiversity we see today.

From there, apparently, the surviving humans repopulated Earth, invented new cultures and languages as they did so, forgetting all about the flood and the god who inflicted it on their recent ancestors, and invented new gods and religions, with only one small tribe remembering it all in word-perfect detail.

Apart from the ludicrously narrow genetic bottleneck this would have cause, meaning almost all the surviving species would be extinct within a few generations, there is the little problem of so much archaeology being around that would not have survived such a flood, and evidence of cultures that existed before, during and after it apparently without noticing it at all. An example is the 7,000-year-old fighting knife made from shark teeth discovered on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, which should not have been there if the Bronze Age tales made up by people who thought Earth was small and flat with a dome over it and ran on magic, that creationists think were true history and real science, actually were true history and real science.

This discovery by a team of archaeologists from Australian and Indonesian universities led by Associate Professor of Archaeology, Michelle Langley of Griffith University, is the subject of an open access paper published recently in Antiquity. Five of the authors have also written about this discovery in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Published: October 26, 2023 11.55pm BST

Bringing a shark to a knife fight: 7,000-year-old shark-tooth knives discovered in Indonesia

Credit: Matthew R McClure/Shutterstock

Michelle Langley, Griffith University; Adam Brumm, Griffith University; Adhi Oktaviana, Griffith University; Akin Duli, Universitas Hasanuddin, and Basran Burhan, Griffith University

Excavations on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi have uncovered two unique and deadly artefacts dating back some 7,000 years – tiger shark teeth that were used as blades.

These finds, reported in the journal Antiquity, are some of the earliest archaeological evidence globally for the use of shark teeth in composite weapons – weapons made with multiple parts. Until now, the oldest such shark-tooth blades found were less than 5,000 years old.

Modified tiger shark teeth found in 7,000-year-old layers of Leang Panninge (top) and Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 (bottom) on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

Credit: M.C. Langley

Our international team used a combination of scientific analysis, experimental reproduction and observations of recent human communities to determine that the two modified shark teeth had once been attached to handles as blades. They were most likely used in ritual or warfare.

7,000-year-old teeth

The two shark teeth were recovered during excavations as part of a joint Indonesian-Australian archaeological research program. Both specimens were found in archaeological contexts attributed to the Toalean culture – an enigmatic foraging society that lived in southwestern Sulawesi from around 8,000 years ago until an unknown period in the recent past.

The shark teeth are of a similar size and came from tiger sharks (Galeocerda cuvier) that were approximately two metres long. Both teeth are perforated.

A complete tooth, found at the cave site of Leang Panninge, has two holes drilled through the root. The other – found at a cave called Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 – has one hole, though is broken and likely originally also had two holes.

Microscopic examination of the teeth found they had once been tightly fixed to a handle using plant-based threads and a glue-like substance. The adhesive used was a combination of mineral, plant and animal materials.

The same method of attachment is seen on modern shark-tooth blades used by cultures throughout the Pacific.

Scratches and a ground section on the tip of the Leang Panninge shark tooth indicate its use by people 7,000 years ago.

Credit: M.C. Langley

Examination of the edges of each tooth found they had been used to pierce, cut and scrape flesh and bone. However, far more damage was present than a shark would naturally accrue during feeding.

While these residues superficially suggest Toalean people were using shark-tooth knives as everyday cutting implements, ethnographic (observations of recent communities), archaeological and experimental data suggest otherwise.

Grooves and traces of red resin along the base of the Leang Panninge tooth show how the teeth were attached using threads.

Credit: M.C. Langley

Why use shark teeth?

Not surprisingly, our experiments found tiger shark-tooth knives were equally effective in creating long, deep gashes in the skin when used to strike (as in fighting) as when butchering a leg of fresh pork.

Indeed, the only negative aspect is that the teeth blunt relatively quickly – too quickly to make their use as an everyday knife practical.

This fact, as well as the fact shark teeth can inflict deep lacerations, probably explains why shark-tooth blades were restricted to weapons for conflict and ritual activities in the present and recent past.

Evolution of a smile: 400 million year old spiny fish overturns shark theory of tooth origins

Shark-tooth blades in recent times

Numerous societies across the globe have integrated shark teeth into their material culture. In particular, peoples living on coastlines (and actively fishing for sharks) are more likely to incorporate greater numbers of teeth into a wider range of tools.

Shark teeth are widely used to edge deadly combat weapons or powerful ritual blades in the Pacific. Left: a knife from Kiribati; centre and right: weapons from Hawai'i.

Credit: The Trustees of The British Museum,
CC BY-NC-SA

Observations of present-day communities indicate that, when not used to adorn the human body, shark teeth were almost universally used to create blades for conflict or ritual – including ritualised combat.

For example, a fighting knife found throughout north Queensland has a single long blade made from approximately 15 shark teeth placed one after the other down a hardwood shaft shaped like an oval, and is used to strike the flank or buttocks of an adversary.

Weapons, including lances, knives and clubs armed with shark teeth are known from mainland New Guinea and Micronesia, while lances form part of the mourning costume in Tahiti.

Farther east, the peoples of Kiribati are renowned for their shark-tooth daggers, swords, spears and lances, which are recorded as having been used in highly ritualised and often fatal conflicts.

Shark teeth found in Maya and Mexican archaeological contexts are widely thought to have been used for ritualised bloodletting, and shark teeth are known to have been used as tattooing blades in Tonga, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Kiribati.

In Hawai‘i, so-called “shark-tooth cutters” were used as concealed weapons and for “cutting up dead chiefs and cleaning their bones preparatory to the customary burials”.

A shark-tooth knife from Aua Island, Papua New Guinea. Red arrows highlight wear and damage caused by fighting.

Credit: M. Langley and The University of Queensland Anthropology Museum

Other shark tooth archaeological finds

Almost all shark-tooth artefacts recovered globally have been identified as adornments, or interpreted as such.

Indeed, modified shark teeth have been recovered from older contexts. A solitary tiger shark tooth with a single perforation from Buang Merabak (New Ireland, Papua New Guinea) is dated to around 39,500–28,000 years ago. Eleven teeth with single perforations from Kilu (Buka Island, Papua New Guinea) are dated to around 9,000–5,000 years ago. And an unspecified number of teeth from Garivaldino (Brazil) is dated to around 9,400–7,200 years ago.

However, in each of these cases the teeth were likely personal ornaments, not weapons.

Our newly described Indonesian shark tooth artefacts, with their combination of modifications and microscopic traces, instead indicate they were not only attached to knives, but very likely linked to ritual or conflict.

Whether they cut human or animal flesh, these shark teeth from Sulawesi could provide the first evidence that a distinctive class of weaponry in the Asia-Pacific region has been around much longer than we thought.
Michelle Langley, Associate Professor of Archaeology, Griffith University; Adam Brumm, Professor, Griffith University; Adhi Oktaviana, PhD Candidate, Griffith University; Akin Duli, Professor, Universitas Hasanuddin, and Basran Burhan, PhD candidate, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

The authors give more technical details in their paper in Antiquity:

Abstract

Although first identified 120 years ago, knowledge of the Toalean technoculture of Middle Holocene Sulawesi, Indonesia, remains limited. Previous research has emphasised the exploitation of largely terrestrial resources by hunter-gatherers on the island. The recent recovery of two modified tiger shark teeth from the Maros-Pangkep karsts of South Sulawesi, however, offers new insights. The authors combine use-wear and residue analyses with ethnographic and experimental data to indicate the use of these artefacts as hafted blades within conflict and ritual contexts, revealing hitherto undocumented technological and social practices among Toalean hunter-gatherers. The results suggest these artefacts constitute some of the earliest archaeological evidence for the use of shark teeth in composite weapons.

Figure 1. Map with (inset) the location of Leang Panninge and Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1

image by K. Newman.

Figure 2. Archaeological contexts of the perforated shark teeth: a) Leang Panninge cave; b) cave entrance at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1, at the foot of the isolated limestone karst tower; c) stratigraphic profile, Leang Panninge (2019); d–e) stratigraphic profiles, Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 (2018); f) Maros point excavated from Leang Bulu’ Sipong 1 (Square T9S1) above the Toalean-associated layer that yielded the shark tooth (scale bar is 10mm)

Photographs and image compilation by Y. Perston.

Figure 8. Comparison of the Toalean shark-tooth artefacts with examples of Maros points found at Leang Panninge (bottom left) and Leang Pajae (top and bottom right)

Photographs of Maros points by Y. Perston;
figure by M. Langley.

Langley MC, Duli A, Stephenson B, et al.
Shark-tooth artefacts from middle Holocene Sulawesi.
Antiquity. 2023:1-16. doi:10.15184/aqy.2023.144.

Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Antiquity Publications Ltd. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Other than lying about science or blatantly misrepresenting it, I've yet to see a coherent explanation for why so much of Earth's history pre-dates the creation cult's 'Creation Week'.

We know, for instance that the scientists are using the correct decay rates when they use radiometric dating to determine the age of objects like these shark teeth because creationists assure us that if the basic parameters of the Universe were even slightly different, life would be impossible, yet decay rates depend on two of the four fundamental forces - the weak and strong nuclear forces, so, if they were very different 10,000 years ago by an amount that would make 10,000 years look like 3.8 billion, or 14 billion, or whatever is needed to explain the discrepancy between belief and observable reality, then life would have been impossible when it was supposedly created because quite simply, atoms larger than hydrogen would not have existed because their nuclei would have been unstable.

Creationism must be about the only cult that requires its followers to believe that the vast majority of history occurred when there was no place and no time for it to occur in.

But then these are people who can be made to believe that all life on Earth is descended from a tiny number of ancestors that lived in an unventilated box and got out of it onto a sterile planet on which every living substance had been destroyed (Genesis 7:23), including, presumably, the plants the herbivores needed, the insects the insectivores needed and where most of them would have promptly been exterminated by the carnivores.

Creationism in Crisis - How Bat Faces Evolved Under Selective Pressure of Food Resources - In Just 25 Million Years

Top left: Wrinkle-faced bat, Centurio senex (Fruit)
Bottom left: Jamaican fruit bat, Artibeus jamaicensis (Fruit)

Top right: Hairy-legged vampire bat, Diphylla ecaudata (Blood of birds)
Bottom right: Orange nectar bat, Lonchophylla robusta (Nectar)

Photographs: Sharlene Santana/University of Washington

Fruit, nectar, bugs and blood: How bat teeth and jaws evolved for a diverse dinnertime | UW News

The pale-faced bat, Phylloderma stenops, is a noctilionoid bat with an omnivorous diet.

Credit: Sharlene Santana/University of Washington

A side-view image of the skull of a greater spear-nosed bat, Phyllostomus hastatus, a noctilionoid species with an omnivorous diet.

Credit: Sharlene Santana/University of Washington

Just as Darwin's finches evolved different beaks to fit them for the differing food on the different Galapagos Islands, so the shape of bats' faces have evolved to fit them for the predominant food in their diet, in just 25 million years, which is a mere tick of the clock in geological time.

What this can tell us about the evolution of bats and especially their dentition is the subject of a study of the noctilionoid bats published in Nature Communications last August.

Catholic Sex Abuse News - Spanish Catholic Priests Sexually Abused Over 200,000 Children

Cardinal Enrique Pla y Deniel, Successor to Cardinal Gomá
Seen here giving the Nazi salute alongside Geralissimo Franco

Cardinal Isidro Gomá y Tomás, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain.

Cardinal Isidro Gomá y Tomás, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, when the Catholic Church was at the height of its power in Spain.

Spanish clergy sexually abused more than 200,000 children, inquiry estimates | Spain | The Guardian

The routine sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests is back in the news after an independent commission, led by Spain's national Ombudsman, former education minister, Ángel Gabilondo, has discovered that more than 200,000 minors have been sexually abused by Catholic priests since 1940.

This figure is an estimate based on extrapolating the figure of 0.8% of 8,000 Spanish adults in a survey who reported being sexually abused by Catholic priests before the age of 18 - a figure which rose to 1.13% (360,000 of Spain's 32 million adult population) if lay members of the church were included. Lay members of the church perform some of the duties of priests but are not ordained or under holy orders. As such, they come under the authority and control of senior church figured, usually the bishops, archbishops and cardinals in charge of diocese.

For most of the period, the Spanish Catholic Church was a privileged and protected institution that considered itself largely above the law - a position that derived from its active support and cooperation with General Frano's Fascist regime. During this period, the Catholic Church was given control of most of the influential and welfare aspects of Spanish life, including education, health and institutions such as orphanages, mother and baby homes and homes for single mothers, many of whom were themselves victims of sexual abuse.

Creationism in Crisis - Pigeons Can Solve Complex Problems More Quickly Than Humans

Feral pigeons can solve complex categorization problems that would trouble humans.

‘Dim-witted’ pigeons use the same principles as AI to solve tasks

The feral pigeon, Columba livia domestica. Dimwit or genius?

In yet another casual and unintentional refutation of creationist dogma, two psychology professors, one from Ohio State University and the other from the University of Iowa, have shown that humans were not created as the species with the highest intelligence, which creationists argue shows we were specially created, different to the other animals.

The researchers have shown that pigeons can solve complex problems that would be difficult for humans because pigeons use the same principles as artificial intelligence to crunch through the available options. The difference being that unlike humans who can extrapolate from solving one problem to general problem-solving similar problem, pigeons don't extrapolate from the particular to the general.

It appears then that the natural process of evolution produced a form of AI, long before humans developed machine learning and AI.

As explained in an Ohio State University news release by Jeff Grabmeier:

Creationism in Crisis - How Microscopic Organisms Were Evolving Half a Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fossil plankton from half a billion years ago. These tiny algae measure much less than a millimetre in size. They evolved their colonial structure to avoid being eaten by early animals.

Credit: THP Harvey

Algae-like fossils show colonial arrangement"

Bizarre new fossils shed light on ancient plankton | News | University of Leicester

A scientist at the University of Leicester, UK, has discovered a new type of fossil, that lived half a billion years ago in the Cambrian Era. It resembles an algae but shows evidence of the beginnings of colonial existence as groups of cells joined together to form larger masses.

It was part of the Cambrian biota which evolved at a time of increasing competition between predatory and prey species, after multicellular life had evolved motility and the ability to hunt and consume other life forms, so exterminating the Ediacaran biota that preceded it.

Evolving the ability to group together into larger masses could have happened because doing so made it harder for a predator to consume the algae-like organisms.

In their obsessive search for something to discredit the Theory of Evolution, creationists often abandon one or more of their basic dogmas, confident that their target dupes won't realise they don’t have a coherent set of ideas with which to counter the vast body of science that established the TOE beyond a shadow of doubt.

This cavalier approach to truth also demonstrates the truism that there is no truth agenda in creationism; it’s all about recruiting more people into the cult in the childish belief that a fantasy becomes more and more true, as more and more people are fooled into believing it - a childish way of seeking safety in numbers.

A classic example of this is the absurd claim that the so-called 'Cambrian Explosion', which actually lasted several million years, was a literal explosion of life forms that arose overnight without ancestors. They believe this shows the work or a creator and simultaneously refutes the idea of common origins and the evolution of multicellular life from single-celled organisms.

And of course, it abandons the notion of a 10,000-year-old Earth and the mythical account in Genesis of how and when life on Earth was created, in which there is no mention of the Cambrian biota or anything resembling it.

First, a little background to the era in which these newly-discovered organisms lived: