Unintelligent Design - The Heath-Robinson Contraption In A Western Honey Bee's Gut

Western honey bee,
Apis mellifera

Study shows western honey bee synthesizes food for its intestinal bacteria

A feature of creationism’s putative intelligent [sic] designer's designs is that they are almost always ingenious but overly complex for the task and often cobbled together from components designed for other purposes.

Just like a William Heath-Robinson contraption, where everyday objects such as a coal-scuttle full of coal, is a counterweight, every piece of string is made from short pieces of string knotted together and a simple task is made far more complicated than it need be.

And yet it works, just about, no matter how inefficiently, and removing just one component would make the whole thing fail - what creationists call 'irreducible complexity' but what a proper intelligent designer would probably call, 'bloody stupid'. Creationism's 'intelligent' [sic] designer wouldn't have lasted a term in design school.

Just such a Heath-Robinson machine has recently been discovered in the gut of the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera. Its purpose is to solve the problem of digesting the food the bee eats, for which it needs the help of 8 species of bacteria and other microorganisms that live in the bee's gut. Some of these bacteria are needed just to clean up the waste produced by other bacteria. 8 species is low compared to other species; humans, for example, need about 20 different species.

Apparently, giving bee's the same enzymes the bacteria use was far too simple and not nearly complex enough for the divine Heath-Robinson designer.

But even that wasn't complicated enough because one of the bacteria can't live on sugar alone, even though honey bees can, so the honey bee manufactures nutrients to feed to this bacteria.

How this was discovered was the subject of a recent paper in Nature Microbiology by a team of researchers led by Professor Philipp Engel in the University of Lausanne's Department of Fundamental Microbiology (DMF) in Dorigny. Their research is explained in a news release from the University of Lausanne (translated from French):

Creationism in Crisis - Sturgeons in Alberta 72 million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Credit: University of Alberta

72-million-year-old sturgeon discovered in Edmonton is a fossil first | Folio

Once upon a time, just a few thousand years ago, a magic man made of nothing appeared from nowhere and said some magic words that magicked a whole universe out of nothing. Right in the middle of that universe he made a small flat planet and put a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, then he magicked some people, some plants and some animals and this took him nearly a whole week. Even though he did it all with a few magic words, this made him so tired he needed a day off.

After a while he decided he didn't like what he had made because he had given the people free will and they were using it, so he drowned them all apart from a few, then started again without changing his original design, hoping things would turn out differently this time.

What he hadn't realised was that he had only gone and created this imaginary world in a small part of a really big Universe that had been there for billions of years and already had a planet with lots of animals on it, so, although he had started off 'going down' to chat to the humans he had magicked, he promptly disappeared, never to be seen again, almost as though he had gone back to being nothing. Meanwhile, the real planet in the real universe carried on the way it had always done, as though no magician had ever done anything magical.

One of those animals on the real planet was a fish called a sturgeon which lived in what is now Alberta, Canada, 75 million years before 'Creation Week', which is why scientist were able to find a fossil of it in rocks known to be between 84 and 72 million years old. It's little clues like this, and the complete lack of any evidence of magic, that tells us the story of that fantasy creation was wrong and made up by ignorant people who didn't know any better.

The discovery of the fossil sturgeon was announced in a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology last August and announced to the press in a news release just a couple of days ago:

Unintelligent Design - How Creationism's Heath-Robinson Designer's 'Design' Causes Cancer

Pit Head (c. 1930) William Heath Robinson

Deregulation of Alternative RNA Splicing Promotes Pancreatic Cancer Pr | Moffitt

William Heath-Robinson was an English eccentric illustrator of ridiculously over-complicated solutions for (mostly) imaginary problems. His 'labour-saving' devices often took more people to operate them than the labour they saved.

His designs usually incorporated the most unlikely of objects, such as pianos or stacks of books to stand on, bent sticks to hold things up, pulleys and levers, held together with pieces of string, which never failed to have a knot in them because they had been made from shorter lengths tied together. And the amazing thing was, when you looked at them, it looked though they really would work, and if you took any component away, the whole thing would fail.

What he probably didn't appreciate at the time, was how closely his 'intelligent' designs resembled the designs of creationism's putative designer, but they are almost perfect metaphors for the detail beneath the superficial appearance of design in living organisms, especially the processes and mechanisms that look irreducibly complex.

Take, for example, a consequence of the failure of a 'Heath-Robinson' mechanism for correcting a problem with how RNA is built using templates in DNA which are scattered over several sections of DNA instead of being in a single, contiguous lengths. The different fragments of RNA that this initially produces must then be spliced together (just like William Heath-Robinson's pieces of string).

And of course, being a 'Heath-Robinson' machine, even this little section of the process of protein production is not simple. Splicing is a complex process involving the protein, RBFOX2, and when this fails in pancreatic cells, the resulting faulty RNA molecules can lead to cancer and metastasis of those cancer cells is itself facilitated by reduced RBFOX2.

How the failure of this correction mechanism causes pancreatic cancer was discovered by an international team of researchers led by Assistant Professor, Karen Mann, Ph.D., of the Department of Molecular Oncology, Moffitt Cancer Center, Tampa, FL, 33612, USA, with colleagues from The Tisch Cancer Institute; St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital; the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore; and the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Of course, the real problem here isn't with the designer but the mindless design process that produces these over-complicated, utilitarian 'Heath-Robinson' solutions to problems. DNA is RNA's data store and, so long as it works better than what went before it, there is no pressure to sort out and 'defrag' the DNA, so the irreducibly complex 'Heath-Robinson' machine might fail and cause pancreatic cancer occasionally, but the proteins the pancreas produces are worth the occasional failures, and mindless evolution has no concern for the suffering caused.

Here is how the team described their findings in Nature:

Malevolent Designer News - The Brilliance of Creationism's Divine Sadist

Scanning electron micrograph of Salmonella typhimurium invading a human epithelial cell.

New insights into what helps Salmonella cause infections | Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology

Salmonella

The brilliance of creationism's favourite sadist was on display again recently, when researchers from the Department of Microbiology, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA, showed how the pathogen, Salmonella, is designed to not only survive being engulfed by the macrophages in our blood that are supposedly designed to protect us, but positively thrives and multiplies inside them. Although rarely fatal, Salmonella infection can be distressing and unpleasant with vomiting and diarrhoea, as I can attest from my childhood in rural Oxfordshire at a time when food and water hygiene left much to be desired.

So, it looks like creationism’s intelligent [sic] designer won that particular arms race with itself, in favour of the nasty pathogen designed to increase the suffering in the world. At least, that's the sort of nonsense creationists needs to believe to retain the childish belief that living things are made by a magic man in the sky.

The fact that salmonella can live happily inside a macrophage supposedly designed to kill pathogens has been known for some time, but what the University of Illinois researchers have discovered is just how it manages the trick. It's all down to the structure and function of the bacterium's surface membrane which detects and adjusts to the conditions in which the organism finds itself.
First, a little AI background on the pathogen:

Creationism in Crisis - Americans Are Now Abandoning Religion As Fast As Europeans Did A Generation Ago

Belief in Five Spiritual Entities Edges Down to New Lows

As the chart on the right shows, the decline in belief in God and Heaven has been the most dramatic, falling 16 percentage points in 22 years and the decline in belief in other magical entities like Angels and Satan has run in parallel, the differences being within the statistical error of the data.

What this reflects is the trend that has been apparent in American religious belief since about the mid 1960's where the younger generation have tended to be significantly less religious than their parents with belief in God and the importance of religion tending to increase in older generations. However, as people age, they tend to keep the religious beliefs they formed by the age of about 25-30. What these charts show then is the effect of the older generations dying and the younger generations moving up through the age groups, as the following chart shows:

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Have Worked Out How The Vertebrate Head Evolved - It wasn't Created By Magic

Laser scanning images of stage 24

Figure 3
Dynamics of head mesoderm cell clusters during individualization of the head muscles See also Figures S4 and S5.

(A–L) 3D reconstructions and laser scanning images of stage 24 (A–D), 25 (E–H), and 26 (I–L) lamprey embryos. The area enclosed by the white dotted line in (K) indicates velum mesoderm. Pink, mesoderm; light blue, dorsal inner mandibular mesoderm; green, ventral mandibular arch mesoderm; yellow, cavity in the mandibular mesoderm. Images show sagittal views.

(M) Comparison of rosettes and head mesoderm cell clusters in lamprey and amphioxus embryos. Right blue, somite rosette; blue, distinct head mesodermal cell clusters. DIMM, dorsal inner mandibular mesoderm; EOM, extraocular muscle; GS, gill slit; GV, ganglion trigeminal; HyAM, hyoid arch mesoderm; HyM, hyoid mesoderm; LLM, lower lip mesoderm; LPM, lateral plate mesoderm; MM, mandibular mesoderm; NHP, nasohypophyseal plate; Op, optic vesicle; OPM, oropharyngeal membrane; OV, otic vesicle; PHM, pharyngeal mesoderm; PMM, premandibular mesoderm; PP, pharyngeal pouch; S, somite; ULM, upper lip mesoderm; Vel, velum; VMAM, ventral mandibular arch mesoderm.

Onai, Takayuki et al. (2023)

Study on Lamprey Embryos Sheds Light on the Evolutionary Origin of Vertebrate Head ｜ UNIVERSITY OF FUKUI

Despite the almost daily claims in the social media by creationist dupes that mainstream biologists are abandoning the Theory of Evolution (TOE) in favour of creationism because it doesn't explain the facts, there is no sign whatsoever in the scientific literature of that happening. No serious biologist has ever published a peer-reviewed paper proposing that magic by a supernatural designer better explains the facts than the TOE.

Instead, just about every paper dealing with origins and development of species and their relationship to other species, has evolution firmly and inextricably embedded within it and the conclusions only ever make sense as the result of an evolutionary process. The belief that the TOE has been or is in the process of being, overthrown by creationism is a lie promulgated by the Deception Institute to claim success for the 'Wedge Strategy', which has been a monumental failure as fewer Americans now believe in creationism than did at the start of the campaign.

The paper recently published with open access in iScience illustrates just have firmly embedded the TOE is in biology. It concerns the early development of the vertebrate head, which has been a matter of conjecture in biology:

Some believe that the vertebrate head has developed as a result of modification of the segmental elements of the trunk, such as the vertebrae and somites. On the other hand, others believe that the vertebrate head has evolved as a new, unsegment body part, unrelated to other widely observed embryonic segments somites. Interestingly, previous studies on embryos have revealed the presence of some vestiges of somites in the head mesoderm (e.g., head cavities and somitomeres). However, homology between trunk somites and such head segments has been controversial.

Note the complete absence of any notion of magic creation in the controversy. The issue is over which tissues evolved into the beginnings of the vertebrate head.

The paper, by Japanese scientists led by Assistant Professor Takayuki Onai, of the Department of Anatomy, University of Fukui, School of Medical Sciences, Fukui, Japan, resolves that controversy by showing how the head of a lamprey embryo develops.

As the University of Fukui news release explains:

How Science Works - Correcting A Mistake With Modern Technology - But It's No Comfort For Creationists

Three-dimensional model of the only known picrodontid skull in top (left) and bottom (right) views. CT scan technology revealed previously unknown bones of the skull (colored on the right) that helped demonstrate that picrodontids are not primates as previously believed.

Figure 1. Three-dimensional models derived from µCT scan data of Zanycteris paleocenus (AMNH 17180) with descriptions and orientations of skeletal elements organized from left to right. (a) Cranium in dorsal and ventral views with basicranial region transparent showing original position of digitally extracted bones. Box illustrates left upper molars rotated into occlusal view with distolingual basin (asterisk) and postprotocingulum (arrow). (b) Three-dimensional model of right petrosal in ventral view, composite line drawing incorporating preserved morphology from right and left petrosal, and composite line drawing with major neurovascular structures; (c) R partial ectotympanic in oblique posterior and ventral view; (d) R partial alisphenoid/basisphenoid in lateral and ventral view. Scale bars, 1 mm. Abbreviations: C = upper canine; C a = upper canine alveolus; M = upper molar; P a = upper premolar alveolus.

New Research Sheds Light on an Old Fossil, Solving an Evolutionary Mystery | CUNY Graduate Center

The only certainty in science is that there are no certainties in science.

Unlike religions which provide unreasonable certainty in the absence of evidence and call it 'faith', science provides reasonable uncertainty and provisional opinion pending further evidence.

This was illustrated a couple of days ago by a paper published in Royal Society Biology Letters, which describes the reclassification of a middle Palaeocene placental mammal, known to science as a picrodontid, and known only from a partial cranium, some teeth and pieces of jawbone. This was discovered about 100 years ago and 50 years ago was classified as an early primate, in other words, close to the remote placental common ancestor of all the apes, monkeys, lemurs, tree shrews, etc.

Just to remind creationists: the middle Palaeocene lasted from about 66 million years before the mythical 'Creation Week' to 56 million years before the mythical creation of the Universe. It began a few million years after the non-avian dinosaurs all went extinct.

Creationism in Crisis - Eukaryote Fossils Were Highly Evolved 1.6 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

A soft summer evening in the Paleoproterozoic, as envisioned by DALL-E.

Photo Credit: DALL-E, prompt by Harrison Tasoff.

Limbunyasphaera operculata is a new species that shows a small door opening into the cell.

Photo Credit Riedman et al.

Even the oldest eukaryote fossils show dazzling diversity and complexity | The Current

By 1.64 billion years ago, eukaryote organisms had already evolved out of prokaryote cells and had diversified into a range of complex organisms. For creationists, this was more than 1.6 billion years before the Universe existed and way back in the dim and distant past before humans were supposedly magicked out of dirt in 'Creation Week.

The prevailing scientific consensus was that eukaryotes only diversified significantly about 800 million years ago, but a paper published in the Paleaontological Society's journal Papers in Palaeontology throws this back to double that age almost to the beginnings of eukaryote evolution. The paper is the work of palaeontologists from the Department of Earth Science, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, USA and the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences/Geotop, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

The team arrived at this conclusion by examining microfossils recovered from 430 samples from eight cores drilled by a prospecting company in Australia's Northern Territory. The cores used for this study spanned roughly 500 meters of stratigraphy, or 133 million years, with around 15 million years of significant deposition. They consisted of shale and mudstone: remnants of an ancient coastal ecosystem that alternated between shallow, subtidal mudflats and coastal lagoons.

The microfossils were extracted from the rock by disolving it in hydrofluoric acid, then examined under microscopes. The team recorded 26 taxa, including 10 previously undescribed species.

From the UC Santa Barbara news release:

Unintelligent Design - Neurodegenerative Diseases Such As MS & Alzheimer's Traced Back To Early North European Farmers - 24,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Bronze Age Genes.

Credit: SayoStudio

Life in Bronze Age Britain (artist's impression)

Ancient DNA reveals reason for high MS and Alzheimer's rates in Europe

Researchers have just completed a massive gene bank for ancient humans who lived in Eurasia up to 34,000 years ago (i.e., up to 24,000 years before creationist dogma says the universe and everything in it was magicked out of nothing by a god made of nothing who self-assembled out of nothing before there was time and space to self-assemble in.

The gene bank has enabled researchers to trace the historical and geographical spread of genes and diseases, producing four papers published in Nature. This article deals with just one of them; others will follow.

The results should disturb any creationists who has the courage to read about them because, not only did it all occur long before the mythical 'Creation Week' that is central to their superstition, but is shows that any designer either could not have been omniscient, or must have been malevolent, because it shows how the genes for Multiple Sclerosis (MS) arose in North Europe, probably as a side-effect of evolving genes to increase resistance to the diseases carried by domestic animals. An omniscient designer who deigned them should have been aware of what they would also cause, so either isn't omniscience and didn't know what its design would do, or created MS deliberately.

As the University of Cambridge News release explains:

Creationism in Crisis - How Mindless Evolution Took A Giant Ape To Extinction

A reconstruction of Gigantopithecus blacki.

Image: Garcia / Joannes-Boyau

The Extinction of the Giant Ape--A Long-standing Mystery Solved--Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology

Gigantopithecus blacki, the largest hominoid that ever lived.

Limestone karst landscape in Chongzuo, southern China. The Gigantopithecus sites are located in caves in the steep-sided walls of the mountains. The mountain in the center of the picture is Mulan Mountain. The entrance of Hejiang Cave (#16 in Figure 2) is about three-quarters down from the main peak.

Zhang Y and Harrison T.(2017)

Gigantopithecus blacki was the largest known member of the Hominidae. It lived in what is now southern China but went extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago, leaving only around 2000 fossilised teeth and four jawbones as evidence of its existence. Creationists will need to ignore that fact that this means the entire species lived and went extinct some 250,000 years before 'Creation Week' when they believe the Universe, Earth and all living things were magicked out of nothing.

The reason for its extinction remained a mystery until now, when a team of researchers from Chinese, Australian and American universities have shown that extinction was almost certainly caused by climate change which deprived it of its highly specialised food - tree bark.

The story of its evolution and eventual extinction illustrates the unplanned and mindless nature of evolution by Natural Selection which has no mechanism for anticipating, let alone planning for a major event like climate change causing forest to become grasslands. There is no Plan B because there is not even a Plan A. The large size of Gigantopithecus was probably related to its diet of tree bark, which can be deduced from its teeth and jaw. A large gut being needed to digest, with the aid of bacteria and other microorganisms, a high-cellulose diet. And a large body needs a lot of food to sustain it. Compare the size of the wholly vegetarian gorilla with that of the more omnivorous chimpanzees.

The researchers have published their findings, open access, in the journal Nature and explain it in a news release from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), Chinese Academy of Sciences:

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.

---

Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It

This book explains why faith is a fallacy and serves no useful purpose other than providing an excuse for pretending to know things that are unknown. It also explains how losing faith liberates former sufferers from fear, delusion and the control of others, freeing them to see the world in a different light, to recognise the injustices that religions cause and to accept people for who they are, not which group they happened to be born in. A society based on atheist, Humanist principles would be a less divided, more inclusive, more peaceful society and one more appreciative of the one opportunity that life gives us to enjoy and wonder at the world we live in.

Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle

What Makes You So Special? From The Big Bang To You

How did you come to be here, now? This books takes you from the Big Bang to the evolution of modern humans and the history of human cultures, showing that science is an adventure of discovery and a source of limitless wonder, giving us richer and more rewarding appreciation of the phenomenal privilege of merely being alive and able to begin to understand it all.

Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle

Thank you for sharing!

Tweet Link

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:

My Books on Amazon - And Other Good Book Sellers

Religion, Atheism & Science

The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax

ID is not a problem for science; rather science is a problem for ID. This book shows why. It exposes the fallacy of Intelligent Design by showing that, when examined in detail, biological systems are anything but intelligently designed. They show no signs of a plan and are quite ludicrously complex for whatever can be described as a purpose.The Intelligent Design movement relies on almost total ignorance of biological science and seemingly limitless credulity in its target marks. Its only real appeal appears to be to those who find science too difficult or too much trouble to learn yet want their opinions to be regarded as at least as important as those of scientists and experts in their fields.

Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle

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: