Creationism in Crisis - How A Change In The Envionment Can Faciltate Migration and Divergence

Figure 1. Flows of non-native insects between North America (NA), Europe (EU), and Australasia (AU). Numbers indicate the total count of species established from donor to recipient, with flow widths being proportional to these counts. Overlapping flows on the donor side indicate the fraction of species that established in both recipient regions.

European insects spread across the world. Was it because settlers carried plants?

It's an observable, and often regrettable fact of biology that the majority of invasive species tend to be from Europe into North America and Australia and not vice versa. That’s not to say there are no migrations the other way, but the distribution is highly asymmetric, so is unlikely to be due to chance alone.

There have been several attempts to explain this in terms of the North American and Australian environment being inherently more amenable to invasion, and the European environment being less so. However, historically, Europe has been repeatedly invaded by insect species from Asia, so the latter explanation is unlikely.

It is generally assumed that insects are spread inadvertently by trade in goods, when insects 'stow away' in packages, the holds of ships, etc., but research led by Dr. Rylee Isitt of the University of New Brunswick, and published in the journal NeoBiota, shows that after accounting for patterns of international trade, the number of insects that have spread from Europe into North America, Australia, and New Zealand far exceeds expectations.

The question is then, is there something different about European insects that makes them better at invading new territories; are they more numerous? Or is there something else at work here?

The same research found no evidence for these ideas:

Figure 2. Cumulative discoveries (observed and modelled) and establishments (modelled) of non-native insects exchanged between Europe (EU), North America (NA), and Australasia (AU) versus cumulative import value (inflation-corrected to 2020 British pounds sterling, billions), 1827–2014. Alternating background shading indicates decadal increments, with shading omitted prior to the 1940s for clarity.

So, what's going on?

Dr. Isitt and collaborators have proposed that the abundance of European insect invaders may be a result of deliberate introductions of non-native plants into Europe's colonies. Plants introduced into European colonies could have promoted the spread of European insects into North America and Australia by two different means.

This is, of course, consistent with a basic prediction of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. If an environmental change creates an opportunity for a species to expand its territory, then it will expand into that new territory, where if there is any competition, natural selection will determine the outcome. However, if the change in the environment is the introduction of a food resource that was previously absent, there is unlikely to be much competition, so the invasive species gets a free ride.

And of course, as Europeans have colonised new lands such as North America, Australia and New Zealand, so they have taken their traditional staple food plants with them, created a perfect environment for European insects to tag along and become established just as the human colonists and their plants have.

The research team have published their findings in NeoBiota:

Abstract

The geographical exchange of non-native species can be highly asymmetrical, with some world regions donating or receiving more species than others. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain such asymmetries, including differences in propagule pressure, source species (invader) pools, environmental features in recipient regions, or biological traits of invaders. We quantified spatiotemporal patterns in the exchange of non-native insects between Europe, North America, and Australasia, and then tested possible explanations for these patterns based on regional trade (import values) and model estimates of invader pool sizes. Europe was the dominant donor of non-native insect species between the three regions, with most of this asymmetry arising prior to 1950. This could not be explained by differences in import values (1827–2014), nor were there substantial differences in the sizes of modelled invader pools. Based on additional evidence from literature, we propose that patterns of historical plant introductions may explain these asymmetries, but this possibility requires further study.

Introduction

Non-native insects have been implicated in displacing native species, altering the composition of ecological communities, damaging economically important trees and food crops, vectoring diseases, and more (Kenis et al. 2009; Bradshaw et al. 2016). An intriguing aspect of insect invasions is that some regions appear to have donated disproportionately more non-native insects during biotic exchange than others. For example, considerably more phytophagous forest insects have invaded North America from Europe than the reverse (Niemelä and Mattson 1996.1), and Europe has contributed a large fraction of New Zealand’s non-native insect fauna (Edney-Browne et al. 2018). Consequently, the question of why such asymmetries may occur has fascinated ecologists for decades, with several mutually compatible hypotheses offered: (1) differences in the magnitude of invasion vectors, such as international trade, may lead to differences in the arrival and establishment rates of non-native species; (2) differences in the size of potential invader pools may drive differences in the numbers of species being donated to other regions; (3) environmental differences (e.g., climate and availability of host plants) in recipient regions may promote or inhibit invasion; and (4) biological traits of insects native to some regions may make them better at invading or competing than insects native to other regions (Vermeij 1991, 1996; Niemelä and Mattson 1996; Visser et al. 2016.1).

The latter two hypotheses are often tested on a single insect order or guild and at smaller spatial scales (e.g., Rigot et al. 2014; Guyot et al. 2015; Rassati et al. 2016.2), but less commonly on multiple insect orders and multiple geographical regions. Testing them requires regional knowledge of the nature of recipient environments and their ecological communities, and of the biological traits of the invaders, information that is often available only for certain regions or certain insect groups/guilds. The former two hypotheses are more approachable, given the availability of datasets on international trade, regional insect richness, and modelling approaches that can estimate invader pool sizes.

Our research goals were firstly to test for the existence of asymmetries in the cumulative numbers of insect invaders, across all taxa, exchanged between three world regions of interest: North America, Europe, and Australasia (limited to Australia and New Zealand). These regions were chosen due to their histories of anthropogenic interactions and exchange of species, existing literature suggesting asymmetrical exchange of insects between them (see above), and the availability of data. Secondly, if clear asymmetries were found, we aimed to determine if they could be explained by differences in propagule pressure (using the value of international trade as a proxy) or by differences in estimates of invader pool sizes. We did not statistically test hypotheses (3) and (4), above, but considered them as possible explanations for asymmetries that could not be explained by hypotheses (1) and (2).

Isitt R, Liebhold AM, Turner RM, Battisti A, Bertelsmeier C, Blake R, Brockerhoff EG, Heard SB, Krokene P, Økland B, Nahrung HF, Rassati D, Roques A, Yamanaka T, Pureswaran DS (2024)
Asymmetrical insect invasions between three world regions. NeoBiota 90: 35-51. https://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.90.110942

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication.

It's good to see how the basic principles of environment-led evolution (which often starts with migration into new territory) underpins the observable phenomenon of invasive insect species and what governs their movements. Earth is, of course, a dynamic and changing place where these sorts of migrations in response to environmental change have been going on for hundreds of millions of years. Recently however, Man has become a major factor in this process, the consequences of which are still being played out. One thing we can be sure of though is that there is no place for supernatural magic in the explanation for it.

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Creationism in Crisis - People Were Creating Art On Rocks in Australia 5,000 years Before 'Creation Week'!

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

New analysis unlocks the hidden meaning of 15,000-year-old rock art in Arnhem Land

What the authors of Genesis didn't know was that, not only is Earth a spheroid, but there are people living on the land masses on the far side of it; people moreover who had lived there for about 40,000 years and had been leaving a record in the form of drawings and paintings on rocks for about 10,000 years. Had they done so, they would have written about a spheroid earth that was at least 40,000 years old instead of a flat one that was only about 7,000 years old when they wrote about it being magicked out of nothing at the same time as the sun and stars.

One of my favourite quotes that, for some reason, theologians rarely talk about, is by the 'father of modern theology, St Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE), who was canonized for his 'divinely-inspired' wisdom, on the 'controversy' of the shape of Earth:

But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours that is on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the earth is suspended within the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as on the other: hence they say that the part that is beneath must also be inhabited. But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled.

It is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man. [My emphasis]

Source: De Civitate Dei, Book XVI, Chapter 9 — Whether We are to Believe in the Antipodes,
translated by Rev. Marcus Dods, D.D.; from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at Calvin College.

So, from reading the faulty accounts in the Bible, the hapless St Augustine concluded that there couldn't be people living in the 'Antipodes' because there wouldn't have been enough time for the m to get there if they were descended from 'that one first man' (Adam). Perhaps he forgot that we are all allegedly descended from Noah, not Adam, so there would have been even less time for people to get to the 'Antipodes'!

But People got to the 'Antipodes' thousands of years even before Adam was supposedly magicked into existence, let alone when Noah lived. So, by St Augustin's logic either Earth is lot older than even he thought from reading his Bible, or there never was a 'first man'. Either way, it is clear that the 'Father of Modern Theology' was misled by the Bible, which has turned out to be neither history nor science!

It's mistakes like that that tell us not only was Genesis not written by an omniscience creator but that the authors were parochial and ignorant in the extreme. They thought two of each species of all known animals, who all lived a few days walk from Noah's house, could fit on a wooden boat, that a local flood covered the entire flat Earth and the magic man who made it all lived just about the dome over it all, straight up from where everyone lived.

Creationism in Crisis - Now It's Spa Water From At Least 1.5 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'!

Macaques keeping warm in 1.5-million-year-old spa water.

Is Spa Water a Fossil of Water? Uncover the Real Ultra-Deep Water Cycles | Research News - University of Tsukuba

Snow monkeys (Japanese Macaques, Macaca fuscata) keeping warm in 1.5-million-year-old spa water, in a hot spring, or onsen

The water in aquifers holds a special place in creationist mythology because, despite the fact that there isn't nearly enough of it, they will claim it's where the water that flooded Earth to a depth sufficient to cover the highest mountains (29,000 feet) during their favourite mass murderer's genocidal flood came from and went back to. If that were remotely true, of course, it couldn't possibly be more than 10,000 years old, because that was when Earth was magicked out of nothing, so the tale goes.

However, in yet another science paper that casually refutes creationism, two scientists from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, have dated the water in natural spas in central Japan and found it to be 1.5-5 million years old. Not only does it predate creationism's mythical flood, but it predates creationism's mythical 'Creation Week' when they claim their magic god magicked the universe out of nothing, having first self-assembled out of nothing using a design it made before it existed (I'm not making this up, but you can see why its trivially easy to refute creationism and why most people grow out of it eventually!).

Like the vast majority of the history of Earth, this water entered the aquifers in that immense period of pre-'Creation' history.

First, a brief AI background to the dating method. Creationists should note that this is not radiometric dating, so their traditional dismissal modes don't apply, so they need to ask their cult leaders how best to misrepresent the science:

How can the age of lithospheric water be determined using isotopes of hydrogen (^2H) and oxygen (^18O)? The age of lithospheric water can be determined using isotopes of hydrogen (^2H, also known as deuterium) and oxygen (^18O) through a method called stable isotope analysis. Water molecules with different isotopic compositions can provide information about the origin and history of the water. Here's a brief explanation of how the age determination process works:

1. Isotope Fractionation:
   • Isotope fractionation occurs during various processes like evaporation and condensation.
   • Lighter isotopes tend to evaporate more readily than heavier ones. For example, in the water cycle, water with lighter isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen is preferentially evaporated, leaving heavier isotopes behind.
2. Isotope Ratios:
   • The ratio of heavy to light isotopes in a water sample can be measured. For example, the ratio of ^18O to ^16O and ^2H to ^1H (or deuterium to hydrogen).
3. Meteorological Processes:
   • Different meteorological processes can influence the isotopic composition of water. For instance, precipitation tends to have a characteristic isotopic signature based on temperature, altitude, and other factors.
4. Lithospheric Water Age Determination:
   • The isotopic composition of water in the lithosphere can be compared to known meteoric water lines or regional meteoric water lines.
   • Over time, water interacts with rocks, minerals, and other geological materials. This interaction can affect the isotopic composition of water. By analyzing the isotopic ratios in the lithospheric water, scientists can estimate the age of the water based on these interactions.
5. Modeling and Interpretation:
   • Isotope hydrologists and geochemists often use mathematical models and statistical methods to interpret the isotopic data and estimate the age of the water.
   • The age determination is based on the understanding of how isotopic ratios change over time due to geological processes.

It's important to note that this method provides an estimate of the average age of the water in a particular system, and the accuracy can be influenced by various factors, including the local geological conditions and the complexity of water-rock interactions. Additionally, combining multiple isotopic systems and other geochemical tracers can enhance the precision of age determination.

How the scientists made this discovery is the subject of a paper in the Journal of Hydrology, and a press release from Tsukuba University:

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Unintelligent Design - Scientists Reveal More Paradoxes That Creationists Can't Resolve

Caenorhabditis elegans

The nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans, used for the genetic analysis.

New roles for autophagy genes in cellular waste management and aging

From a superstitious creationists point of view there are two ways to interpret the findings of a team of researchers from the Buck Institute, Sanford Burnham Prebys and Rutgers University, who have uncovered possible novel functions for various autophagy genes, which may control different forms of disposal including misfolded proteins—and ultimately affect aging. Unfortunately either choice creates unresolvable paradoxes, unlike the Theory of Evolution which fully explains the facts without resorting to the childish ideas of magic and omniscient, omnipotent designers:

1. Either the 'designer' designed these genes to clean up the mistakes its earlier designs produced, but they eventually stop doing so (so we die).
2. Or it designed them to ensure we died of old age, by not cleaning up the mess its earlier design makes.

But creationists also claim their putative designer is omniscient and omnipotent, so would not have designed systems that make mistakes that need to be cleaned up. In that case what these genes are doing should not be needed (and yet it is, and when they stop, we die!).

They also claim 'death' didn't 'enter the world' (as though 'death' is some sort of physical entity) until 'The Fall' when a mythical couple did something they were designed to do and exercised free will. Somehow this created 'death' (as well as lots of parasitic pathogens, allegedly). But these genes are part of the 'design' so were species like humans created with these genes (in which case the 'designer' was planning for 'The Fall' and 'The Fall' was all part of its plan), or did it redesign us afterwards to incorporate the new 'death' thing to ensure we die of old age, if one of its pathogens doesn't get us first.

The same case can be made for the immune system - were we originally 'designed' with it to protect us from the pathogens that didn't yet exist, in which case the 'designer' was planning to harm us with pathogens, or was there an upgrade, post-Fall, that the designer 'forgot' to mention in its account of how it magicked humans out of dirt?

Sadly for creationism, these are the sorts of irreconcilable paradoxes that their childish superstition contains, which is why they need to perform so much in the way of mental gymnastics to continue to pretend they have a coherent and logical set of beliefs.

So, what are these findings which yet again refute the childish notion of creationism? A news release from the Buck Institute explains:

Bible Blunders - The Ignorant Authors Of Genesis

Panels a and b show early images of the visible appearance of Uranus and Neptune reconstructed from Voyager 2 ISS images in 1986 and 1989, respectively, showing Uranus to be pale blue-green, and Neptune dark blue (PIA18182 and PIA01492, credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech). While these early Uranus images were close to ‘true’ colour, the Neptune images were actually stretched and enhanced. Panels c and d show more recent reconstructions of the true colours of these planets, showing them to be more similarly coloured.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Björn Jónsson,

https://www.planetary.org/articles/uranus-neptune-color-difference

Voyager 2/ISS images of Uranus and Neptune released shortly after the Voyager 2 flybys in 1986 and 1989, respectively, compared with a reprocessing of the individual filter images in this study to determine the best estimate of the true colours of these planets.

Credit: Professor Patrick Irwin, University of Oxford.

New images reveal what Neptune and Uranus really look like | University of Oxford

You will search the Bible in vain for any mention of the planets of the solar system, let alone a description of them, and the only description of Earth is so laughably childish it's incredible that anyone could take it seriously.

The reason for that should be obvious to anyone familiar with the scientific ignorance of Bronze Age people, but it's a measure of how far science has taken us since those times, and especially since the European Enlightenment when religion first began to lose its suffocating grip on European culture.

The astounding thing is that there are people alive today, living in technologically advanced countries with modern medicines, skyscrapers, satellite communications and navigation system, the Internet, air transport, nuclear power and space exploration, who still believe those simple people from the fearful infancy of our species had a better understanding of the universe than the scientists on whose discoveries their technological society is based.

For example, astronomers are now in the position of being able to have informed debates about the details of planets such as Neptune and Uranus because we have put instruments into space that can send back accurate data to inform those debates. We can now see that what the simple authors or Genesis thought were little lights stuck on a dome over a flat Earth are in reality large planets orbiting a sun which, unlike the description of it in Genesis, is not hanging from the same dome the planets are stuck to, but is a massive body at the centre of a planetary system in one of hundreds of billions of similar suns and planetary systems in one of maybe a trillion other galaxies, none of which would be affected by earthquakes on Earth, let alone fall down when they could be trampled on by a giant goat! [sic] (Daniel 8:10). (Seriously! There really are grown adults who believe that!)

An example of this informed debate was published open access recently in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The research is described in an Oxford University News release:

Unintelligent Design - How Creationism's Incompetent Designer Tries To Fix It's Bad Design

New Study Reveals Crucial 'Housekeeping' Genetic Elements and Their Potent Role to Fight Cancer｜THE INSTITUTE OF MEDICAL SCIENCE, THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO

The thing about Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer is that it isn't just your common or garden variety of jobbing designer; it is allegedly omniscient, omnipotent and perfect, so anything it designs should be perfectly designed to do exactly what it does, nothing more and nothing less. Creationists need to ignore that aspect of its designs when it comes to the problem of all the parasites that live on and in the animals and plants it supposedly created or they need to perform some double-think mental gymnastics and blame something else which, even though their putative intelligent designer is the only entity capable of designing anything living, also designs things.

Creationists also need to ignore the fact that good design is minimally complex and pretend it’s a hallmark of good design. But imagine a manufacturing process that is so badly designed that it needs whole layers of sub-processes to correct the mistakes, and then those sub-processes need more sub-processes to correct their mistakes!

Presumably, a creationist would look at that system with its vast array of monitoring and error corrections as evidence of intelligent design, regardless of the waste and inefficiency built into the system. In reality, of course, any competent process designer would get it right first time, or would scrap a bad design and start over, learning the lessons of earlier failures, so designing the perfect system with minimal complexity and minimal waste should not be beyond the wit of a perfect, omnipotent omniscient designer, should it?

Alas, what we see in nature is nothing like perfectly designed processes; instead, we see muddle, waste and inefficiency with layer upon layer of sub-processes simply to cope with the errors in the processes.

An example of just this situation inside the cells of our allegedly intelligently design bodies was discovered recently by a team of researchers from the Laboratory of Functional Analysis in silico (Nakai-lab) at The Institute of Medical Science, The University of Tokyo, Japan, led by Professor Kenta Nakai, head of the laboratory, and Dr. Martin Loza, Assistant Professor, in collaboration with Dr. Alexis Vandenbon, Associate Professor, from the Institute of Life and Medical Sciences, Kyoto University, Japan. Their work was published, open access, in Nucleic Acids Research on December 12, 2023.

The team found as many as 11,000 gene regulators, all needed for basic 'housekeeping' and error corrections within the cell. These are known as housekeeping cis-regulatory elements (HK-CREs). These elements are vital in maintaining cellular stability beyond conventional gene regulation, influencing diverse cellular functions across healthy cell types. Moreover, a subset of these housekeeping elements, particularly those related to zinc finger genes, was found to have reduced activity in diverse cancers, suggesting their role as potential housekeeping tumor suppressors.

These HK-CREs were believed to be simple on/off switches that regulated the activity of housekeeping genes, but that was far too simple for whatever designed this complex process, of course. The Japanese team found that these switches aren't only important for the enhancement of specific genes but are crucial for the basic functions that keep our cells healthy. In other words, they are needed to clean up and correct the mistakes in the basic cell functions.

Given the significant association between cancer and mutations in epigenetic components, every small insight we gain could be key in the ongoing battle against this disease, which has tragically claimed innumerable lives. Through extensive bioinformatics analyses, we aimed to emphasize HK-CREs profound impact on fundamental cellular processes, including their potential as essential housekeeping tumor suppressors.

Assistant professor Dr. Martin Loza, lead author
The Institute of Medical Science
The University of Tokyo, Japan

To summarise at this point then, the housekeeping genes (HKRs) are needed to clean up the errors and mess of a badly designed process, but then they need more genes (HK-CREs) to regulate their activity!

But it gets worse!

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Home In On Evolution Of Photosynthesis 1.75 Billion Years Ago

Image of Navifusa majensis, a microfossil from the McDermott Formation in Australia. This 1.75 billion-year-old microfossil contains thylakoids, which identify it as a cyanobacterium.

Credit: Emmanuelle Javaux

Images of N. majensis microfossils.

Demoulin, C.F., Lara, Y.J., Lambion, A. et al.(2024)

The evolution of photosynthesis better documented thanks to the discovery of the oldest thylakoids in fossil cyanobacteria

Way back in the dim and distant past in that vast expanse of pre-'Creation Week' history of life on Earth, simple bacteria were evolving a way to use the energy in sunlight to turn the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into the basic building block of carbohydrates, glucose.

The process that was evolving was destined to transform life on Earth when the 'cyanobacteria' took up residence in archaea and turned them into simple algae, the progenitors of all plant-life on earth and responsible for so much greenery away from desert and polar regions.

And now scientists working at the Early Life Traces & Evolution laboratory of the Astrobiology Research Unit at Liège University (ULiège), Belgium have pushed back the earliest date for these pioneer bacteria in the fossil record to 1.75 Billion years by identifying thylakoids membranes, essential for early photosynthesis, in microfossils in rock formations in Australia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Canada.

Their discovery is explained in a ULiège press release:

Cult News - Constantine I - The Not-So-Christian Self-Idolatrous Roman Polytheist

Constantine I, or Constantine the Great.
Roman emperor from 306 to 337 AD.

Cult Mentality: SLU Professor Makes Monumental Discovery in Italy : SLU

Tell me all about Constantine I of Rome. Constantine I, also known as Constantine the Great, was a Roman Emperor who ruled from 306 to 337 AD. He is often credited with being the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity and played a crucial role in the history of the Roman Empire, particularly in the transition from paganism to Christianity. Here are some key points about Constantine I:

1. Early Life: Constantine was born on February 27, around 272 AD, in Naissus (present-day Niš, Serbia). He was the son of Constantius Chlorus, who was a Roman army officer, and Helena, who is believed to be of humble origin.
2. Military Career: Constantine began his military career under the rule of Emperor Diocletian. He rose through the ranks and eventually became a military tribune.
3. Tetrarchy: The Roman Empire was divided into four parts (the Tetrarchy) by Emperor Diocletian to make governance more manageable. Constantine's father, Constantius Chlorus, was one of the Tetrarchs.
4. Rise to Power: After the death of his father in 306 AD, Constantine's troops proclaimed him emperor. This led to a series of civil wars as various claimants vied for power.
5. Battle of Milvian Bridge (312 AD): Constantine's most famous victory was at the Battle of Milvian Bridge against Maxentius. According to tradition, Constantine had a vision of a cross in the sky with the words "In hoc signo vinces" ("In this sign, you will conquer"). Constantine adopted the Christian symbol, the Chi-Rho, and won the battle.
6. Edict of Milan (313 AD): Constantine issued the Edict of Milan along with his co-emperor Licinius, granting religious tolerance to all religions in the Roman Empire, effectively ending the persecution of Christians.
7. Foundation of Constantinople: In 330 AD, Constantine inaugurated a new capital for the Roman Empire, which he called Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul). This city played a significant role in the history of the Byzantine Empire.
8. Council of Nicaea (325 AD): Constantine convened the First Council of Nicaea, which aimed to address theological disputes within Christianity. The council produced the Nicene Creed, a statement of Christian faith.
9. Christian Conversion: While Constantine is often considered the first Christian Roman Emperor, the exact nature and timing of his conversion remain debated among historians. Some suggest that he only converted on his deathbed, while others argue for an earlier and more gradual conversion.
10. Death: Constantine I died on May 22, 337 AD. He was baptized shortly before his death.

Constantine's reign marked a turning point in the history of the Roman Empire. His support for Christianity had a profound impact on the development of the religion and its eventual establishment as the dominant faith within the empire.

If he convened the Council of Nicea in 325 AD doesn't this suggest he had already converted to Christianity? Also, what is the connection with York, England?

The relationship between Constantine's conversion to Christianity and the convening of the Council of Nicaea is a matter of historical debate. While some sources suggest that Constantine may have converted to Christianity before the Council, the exact timing and nature of his conversion remain unclear. Some historians argue that his conversion was a gradual process, and he may have fully embraced Christianity closer to the end of his life.

Regarding the connection with York, England, Constantine the Great is associated with the city in the context of his proclaimed father, Constantius Chlorus. Constantius Chlorus, who was a co-emperor and the father of Constantine, died in York (then known as Eboracum) in 306 AD. After his death, Constantine was proclaimed emperor by his troops in York, marking an important point in the series of events that would eventually lead to his rise to power.

The historical records are not entirely clear about whether Constantine was present in York when he was proclaimed emperor. The primary sources that describe his elevation to emperor, such as the "Origo Constantini Imperatoris" and the "Panegyrici Latini," do not explicitly mention Constantine's physical presence in York at the time of his proclamation.

The general narrative is that Constantine was with his father, Constantius Chlorus, in Eboracum (modern-day York) when Constantius died in 306 AD. Following Constantius's death, the troops in York proclaimed Constantine as emperor. However, it's not explicitly stated whether Constantine was physically present in York during this proclamation or if he was elsewhere.

It's worth noting that Constantine's connection to York is more related to his father's activities and death in the region rather than significant events in Constantine's own life. Nevertheless, York acknowledges this historical connection, and there are some sites and monuments in the city that commemorate Constantine and his father.

The Roman emperor Constantine I, or Constantine the Great, is hailed by Christians as the first Christian emperor and the man who single-handedly converted the Roman Empire to Christianity. But the facts were as usual, different to the narrative promulgated by the Christian Churches.

Certainly, he was instrumental in turning what had been a minority cult into the official religion of the empire but it was Diocletian, some 70 years later who made it official and launched a vicious campaign of repression designed to eradicate all religions and all sects of Christianity which didn't conform to the State Dogma.

Constantine was, however, not so much a devout Christian as a man who liked to hedge his bets. He supported any and all religions of the empire, including the worship of himself as God-Emperor, and only accepted Christian baptism on his death bed. Evidently, he thought he had found favour with all the other gods of the Empire, but just wanted to make sure in case the Christians were right. A form of Pascale's Gambit that includes all the gods, just to be on the safe-side, because, as we all know, gods can easily be fooled by pretending to believe in them, even ones that claim to be the only god.

Now a team of archaeologists led by Professor Douglas Boin, Ph.D, of Saint Louis University, Missouri, USA have unearthed evidence that shows Constantine was as keen to promote non-Christian sects as to promote Christianity. The evidence is in the form of a temple to Constantine and his ancestors, the Flavian family in the hill town of Spello, about 20 miles from Assisi and about two and a half hours from Rome. The inhabitants had applied to be allowed to celebrate a pagan religious fezrival in Spello rather than travel all the way to another festival site. Building the temple was Constantine's condition for granting them their wish.

A St Louis University News release explains the find and its significance:

Creationism in Crisis - How A Marine Snail Transitioned From Egg-Laying To Live Births.

Adult snails adapted to different habitats.
The larger snail is adapted for defense against crab attacks, while the small snail is adapted to live in areas with strong wave exposure.

© Sophie Webster

ISTA | The Snail or the Egg?

Live-bearing has allowed Littorina snails to occupy and adapt to a diverse range of habitats. This has led to the evolution of many ‘ecotypes’ that vary in size, shape, and behavior.

© Fredrik Pleijel

When did eggs evolve? Eggs, in the context of reproduction, have been around for a very long time in the evolutionary history of life. The evolution of eggs is a complex process that occurred over millions of years, and different types of eggs have evolved in different lineages of organisms.

The earliest evidence of eggs comes from fossils of small, shelled eggs that date back to the Early Cambrian period, around 540 million years ago. These eggs are believed to belong to a group of extinct marine animals. However, it's important to note that these early eggs were likely quite different from the eggs we are familiar with today.

The evolution of eggs in the context of vertebrates, such as birds, reptiles, and mammals, is a more recent development. Amniotic eggs, which have a protective shell and membranes that allow them to be laid on land rather than in water, evolved in the lineage leading to reptiles. This adaptation was crucial for the colonization of terrestrial environments.

Birds, a group of reptiles, are known for their hard-shelled eggs, and their evolutionary history is marked by the development of various features related to flight and parental care. Mammals, on the other hand, have live births or lay eggs with soft shells (monotremes like the platypus and echidna).

In summary, the evolution of eggs is a complex process that spans millions of years and involves various lineages of organisms, with different types of eggs evolving at different times in the history of life.

An example of the scientific ignorance that underpins creationism is in the boringly repetitive "Gotcha!" question from creationist fools, "Which came first; the chicken of the egg?", as though they believe chickens had ancestors that never laid eggs and the chicken species started with a single individual, which either hatched from an egg or was given birth to.

Of course, creationists believe chickens were created out of dirt by magic without any ancestors, so in their childlike, magical view of things their question makes some sort of sense.

In reality of course, ancestors of chickens laid eggs and egg-laying originated hundreds of millions of years ago at about the time multicellular organisms evolved.

All placental mammals have had live births ever since this evolved in Mammalia about 140 million years ago, but live birth has evolved independently in other classes multiple times. It is frequently found in the Reptilia, for example, and at least one insect, the tsetse fly.

A marine snail, Littorina saxatilis, is known to have transitioned from egg-laying to live young-bearing in the last 10,000 years - a mere blink in the evolutionary time scale. An international team of researchers, led by Dr. Sean Stankowski of the Austrian Institute of Science & Technology (ISTA) have now worked out the 50 genetic changes involved in this , which probably began about 100,000 years ago. Their research is explained in an ISTA news release:

Why Science Works And Religion Fails - Changing Our Minds When the Facts Change

For decades, paleontologists have debated whether Nanotyrannus is a separate species or simply a juvenile T. rex.

Credit Raul Martin

Nanotyrannus lancensi, believed by some to be a juvenile T. rex

Credit: Conty via Wikipedia (CC BY 3.0 DEED)

New research shows “Juvenile T. rex” fossils are a distinct species of small tyrannosaur

One of the key features of science is the so-called 'controversy', where different opinions are discussed within the scientific specialty. They are invariably resolved with new evidence because, in science, the facts are neutral in any debate and so act as referees. This is why science is convergent onto single answers, in contrast to religions.

Creationists, who generally crave certainty at the expense of truth, find this baffling and cite controversies as examples of scientists not being able to make their minds up, not appreciating that this is the scientific method moving toward the truth, unlike religions which have no such built-in method of resolving disagreements and converging on universal truths. If they did, there would only be one religion; instead we have some 40,000 different Christian sects alone, all claiming, without any supporting evidence, to be the one true religion, and continuing to spawn new sects at an average of 20 new sects per year, or roughly one every three weeks.

In the world of religious opinion, controversies frequently lead to schisms and splits because neither side can provide any evidence for its claims and, more often than not, the ancient documents around which disagreements swirl are so ambiguous or impossible to translate accurately that there is no way to determine the intentions of the author, who was probably only expressing an opinion or reporting on evidence-free beliefs and superstitions anyway.

One such controversy that has now probably been resolved was whether the fossil of a relatively small theropod dinosaur was that of a distinct species, Nanotyrannus lancensis, or that of a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex.

Two palaeontologists, Dr. Nicholas Longrich of the Department of Life Sciences, University of Bath, Bath, UK and Dr. Evan Thomas Saitta of the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA have now provided evidence that supports the opinion that the fossil is that a full-grown Nanotyrannus lancensis.

A University of Bath news release explains their research:

Creationism in Crisis - Monogamy Predates Christianity By Millions of Years

Ring-tailed lemures. Recent studies show that many lemurs do not live individually, but in pairs of females and males.

Image: istock.com/Goddard_Photography

Early Primates | | UZH

Religious fundamentalists like to assume they have ownership of the institution of marriage because the 'right' form of marriage was dictated by their imaginary god so we should all subscribe to their approved form of it. In many formerly majority Christian countries, the Christian-based marital laws are one of the few remaining vestiges of a time when Christianity imposed itself on everyone, believers, non-believers and non-Christians alike, arrogantly believing it had a divine right to rule.

But recent research has shown that a form of flexible monogamy, or more or less stable social parings of a female and a male is common if not the norm in the primate family. It was most likely incorporated into religions because some human tribes thought of monogamy as the 'right' form of sexual relationship, so any god whom the priesthood wanted to be taken seriously had to hand down 'morals' that the people thought were right and proper. After all, the only way to tell if a god is a good god or an evil god is to compare its morals and behaviour to that of an external standard of 'good', is it not?

If you think not, you have to believe that if your god had told people to hurt babies, rob banks and hit old ladies, those would now be considered moral acts and people who didn't do them would be regarded as immoral and deserving of punishment or other social sanctions. Christian apologist for faith-based genocide, William Lane Craig, has even declared that a seemingly immoral act such as infanticide, is morally right if you believe his (but only his) god commands it, and it would be immoral not to carry out such a divine command.

But William Lane Craig's repugnant idea of what constitutes morality is straying somewhat off the point, which is the 'right' form of marriage in human society, which William Lane Craig presumably believes is divinely commanded by his god and therefore mandatory for the rest of us.

But, absolute monogamy is not the universal norm in modern human sexual relationships, even in societies which only permit monogamous marriage, and probably never has been. Humans can best be described as mostly monogamous, most of the time, with 'infidelity' by both sexes being fairly common to the extent that some estimates put the number of people who have a different father to the one they think is theirs at about 25%. In some cultures, such as Islamic, bigamy is normal and, as evidenced by baptism records, pre-marital sex was commonplace in 19th Century England.

Unintelligent Design News - If Scientists Can Do It, Why Couldn't Creationism's 'Intelligent' Designer?

© Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology/Geisel

First step towards synthetic CO₂ fixation in living cells | Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology

I've written several articles on one of the best arguments against intelligent design - RuBisCo - and include a section on it in The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax. I have also reported on efforts by biomedical scientists to improve on its efficiency and so increase crop yields.

Now we have another research paper which shows how any intelligent designer of photosynthesis could have done a much better job of it but either chose not to or was too incompetent to realise is could have done better, if it really is intelligently [sic] designed and not the result of a mindless, utilitarian process.

First a little refresher on RuBisCo and why it is so inefficient:

Creationism in Crisis - The Evolution of African Primates

Cercopithecus diana

Complex Evolutionary History With Extensive Ancestral Gene Flow in an African Primate Radiation | Molecular Biology and Evolution | Oxford Academic

Cercopithecus diana

Mustached guenon,
Cercopithecus cephus

De Brazza's guenon,
Cercopithecus neglectus

Stuhlmann's Blue monkey,
Cercopithecus mitis stuhlmanni,

Crowned Guenon
Cercopithecus pogonias

12 years ago, I wrote a blog post to explain why, because speciation is a process, not an event, we often don't even know it's happened until well after the event when we can see we have a new population with distinct characteristics. I illustrated this with a hypothetical example of monkeys in a forest being split into isolated populations by climate change.

In it I said:

But, gradually, due to climate change or continental drift, or maybe a change in ocean currents, the forest begins to get drier and turn into grasslands, with trees surviving only close to rivers. In other words, the monkey population is broken up into isolated groups which can no longer interbreed because they simply don't come into contact any more. Each group will be free to evolve according to the local conditions in its woodland. Eventually, maybe after a few hundred thousand years, maybe a million or two, these groups may evolve to the point where they not only look different to each other but may not be able to interbreed even if they do meet up.

So where and what was the 'speciation event'? At what point in the process could an observer say, "Hey! I've just seen speciation occur! It happened when...". In fact, we only know that speciation has occurred retrospectively because, according to our rules of taxonomy, failure to interbreed means they are now different species. Maybe if we had been able to examine them a hundred thousand years ago we might have found that they could still interbreed. Maybe we would have found an incompletely speciated 'ring species'.

There was no sudden emergence of a new species; no sudden branching of the 'tree of life'; no mutation which brought a new species into being and no 'macro-evolution' event. There was no event which creation pseudo-scientists proclaim to be impossible and which they claim has never been seen. All there was was a slow accumulation of difference, directed by natural selection with each group doing nothing but struggling to survive and reproduce with the ones which left the most descendant contributing the most genes to the gene-pool.

Now, take the same scenario, only this time the climate changed again after a few tens of thousands of years and the isolated scattered groups could once again mix freely. But this time maybe they had not diverged sufficiently to prevent interbreeding, or maybe one group now had a significant advantage over the others. In these cases, the group with the genes which gave them greater success would come to dominate and possibly replace the others.

Is this speciation? Is this the point at which we can say a new species arose and the 'archaic' form went extinct? Or is this merely evolution of the entire species? Were those groups isolated for a few thousand years new twigs on the monkey branch of the tree of life, or were they merely groups of individuals with the potential to become new species, but which never quite made it? Certainly, the day they came back into contact, nothing happened to their genes. It was not a change on their part which caused them to re-establish contact. It was the environment which changed.

Rosa Rubicondior: Evolution - Making a Monkey (4 July 2012)

And now, as though to confirm my hypothetical example was close to the real thing, a team of archaeologists and geneticists, led by Axel Jens and Katerina Guschanski of the Department of Ecology and Genetics, Animal Ecology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, have carried out a whole genome analysis of 22 species of West African guenons (monkey of the Cercopithecini tribe - one of the world's largest primate radiations) and shown how the different species diverged with frequent gene flow across species boundaries and hybridization events playing a part in the process of radiation and diversification.

The team have published their findings, open access, in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. In it they say:

Unintelligent Design - Malevolence or Incompetence? - Why Design A Uterus To Grow Fibroids?

Uterine fibroids

Hic et nunc via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Assistant Professor Stacey Schutte, left, and Research Associate Andreja Moset Zupan study new avenues to treat fibroids in Schutte's biomedical engineering lab in UC's Bioscience Center.

Photo/Andrew Higley/UC Marketing + Brand

Researchers find ways that uterine fibroid cells respond differently from surrounding tissue | University of Cincinnati

Almost 80% of women of child-bearing age will develop uterine fibroids. Although usually not malignant, they can nevertheless be extremely painful, can cause bleeding and can lead to infertility. The economic cost of fibroids has been estimated to be some $9 billion in the USA alone.

Fibroids grow in response to the same hormones, oestragen and progesterone, which cause the endometrium to thicken then breakdown during the menstrual cycle. Now a research team at the University of Cincinnati have shown that cell stretching is also a factor in their growth.

Hormones and uterine stretching as the endometrium thicken and shrinks and during pregnancy and childbirth are, of course part of the normal state of affairs for the uterus that creationists believe must have been designed by their supposedly omniscience, omnipotent designer, so, if we accept that childish notion of magic design by an omniscient supernatural entity, for the sake of argument, we have to assume growing fibroids was all part of the plan, since it is not possible for an omniscient designer to not be aware of the outcome of its design and for it not to design with that outcome in mind.

So, the only alternative, within the creationist paradigm, is that fibroids are the accidental and unforeseen consequences of the design and function of the uterus - which would mean one of three things:

1. The designer was not omniscient.
2. The designer was incompetent.
3. If the designer was both competent and omniscient it must have been malevolent and intended a high percentage of women to suffer the pain and inconvenience of fibroids.

This discovery is the subject of a research paper in the journal F&S Science which, sadly is behind a paywall, but the Abstract in the form of a summary of the paper is available.

Unintelligent Design - Another Ludicrously Complex Arms Race, This Time Between Plants And A Predatory Fungus

Gray Mold, Botrytis cinerea, on green tomatoes

Discovery: plants use “trojan horse” to fight mold invasions | News Running epigenetics a close second for the most obvious evidence on unintelligent design in nature is the ubiquitous arms race; Arms races are a major component of evolutionary biology, easily understandable in terms of evolution by natural selection. One organism (call it Organism A) predates on, or parasitises another (call it Organism B); this creates an advantage for Organism B in avoiding being eaten of serving as the host of Organism A, so any functional defense mechanism is selected for by natural selection. This in turn creates an advantage for Organism A to evolve a mechanism for overcoming Organism B's defences, and so on until a state of equilibrium is achieved in which either one or the other organism is no longer able to evolve further.

This can lead to some extreme adaptations such as the stupidly long neck and legs of the giraffe which is a response to acacia trees evolving longer trunks to place their leaves, flowers and seeds beyond the reach of giraffes. In the process, acacia trees need to produce masses of cellulose to build the trunk and pump water much higher against gravity than if they were low-growing bushes, and giraffes have to maintain a very high blood pressure to keep their brain supplied with oxygen while drinking water places them at risk of predation by lions because they can't stand up and raise their heads quickly or they will lose consciousness. And they need the additional complexity of special valves in their neck veins to maintain a high blood pressure to their brain.

Now, take away acacia trees (imagine a sudden virus that wipes them out) and the giraffe is no longer superbly adapted for its environment; instead, it is severely handicapped, and might even find feeding from an alternative source difficult.

Another arms race can be seen at the moment is where the SARS-CoV-2 virus is evolving new variants every few months in response to growing herd immunity in its hosts, the human population, due to vaccinations and sub-lethal infections. The virus is getting better at evading our antibodies for long enough for us to pass on the infection to someone else and is tending to be less lethal, so we survive to infect others, even being asymptomatic. Gradually the virus will evolve to become a relatively mild infection that most of us will catch as often as we catch the common cold, and only especially vulnerable people will be made seriously ill by it.

These are just two examples of hundreds of similar arms races in nature; there are even arms races between sexes of the same species as females evolve strategies to retain the ability to only mate with a male of her choice, while males evolve strategies to deprive her of that ability.

But how on Earth can this be explained in terms of design by a single designer, or, including the creationists fallback excuse for parasites, two designers - their supposedly omnipotent, omniscient god and 'Sin'? Would not an omnipotent, omniscient god know in advance what Sin's next response would be and create a design that it couldn't overcome, so an arms race never started in the first place? Or are we to believe that creationism’s god and this 'Sin' thing are equal in all things yet able to conceal their next move from something all-knowing, but powerless to stop its rival? In other words, neither omniscient nor omnipotent.

The notion of intelligent design is quite simply incompatible with the evidence of arms races, for which evolution provides a ready answer.

I have devoted the whole of chapter 3 to arms races in nature in my popular, illustrated book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax, but what it doesn't include is this recently discovered arms race between plants and a parasitic fungus, Botrytis cinerea, or gray mold.