Covidiot News - How the mRNA Vaccines Give Long-Term Protection Against COVID-19

Long-Term Data Reveals SARS-CoV-2 Infection and Vaccine-Induced Antibody Responses Are Long-Lasting | Mount Sinai - New York

If you listen to antivaxxer covidiots you would believe:

• COVID-19 is no worse than the common cold.
• The SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes COVID-19, is a deadly organism developed by the Chinese for biological warfare.
• COVID-19 was a hoax (which even normally hostile nations had signed up to, apparently).
• God sent the virus to punish America for legalising same-sex marriage (and the rest of the world was collateral damage)
• The vaccines developed against it don't work (regardless of what the clinic trials showed).
• The vaccines contain microchips and special genes to make you become gay and/or subject to satellite control.
• The vaccines contain deadly viruses that can be activated via the 5G phone network.
• Millions of people have died or will die soon because they've been vaccinated.
• [Fill in your own crackpot theory because someone will already have claimed it to be true].

The truth is, however, that millions of people died of COVID-19 in the first year of the pandemic, before a vaccine was generally available and this death rate fell to low levels following the roll out of the first vaccines and subsequent boosters to allow for new variants. Although the virus is still very much with us, people have been able to resume normal activities and the economic and health impact of the virus is now no more than that of seasonal flu, but there were concerns that antibody levels produced in response to the mRNA vaccines were short-lived, giving only temporary protection.

Now a large-scale analysis conducted by leading microbiologists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has shown that antibody responses induced by COVId-19 vaccines are long-lasting. The results of this analysis are published, open access, in the Cell Press journal, Immunity, and are discussed in a Mount Sinai press release:

The emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in late 2019 sparked the global pandemic that is now in its fifth year. Vaccines that were developed at record speed have saved millions of lives. However, the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants and waning immunity have decreased the effectiveness of the vaccines against symptomatic disease. The common perception now is that mRNA-based vaccine-induced immunity wanes quickly. However, this assumption is largely based on data from short-term studies that include a very limited number of data points following peak responses.

The Mount Sinai research team’s analysis of more than 8,000 samples collected over a three-year period in New York City examined how antibody responses to the virus’s spike protein changed after infections, during the primary immunization series, during monovalent and bivalent booster vaccination, and during breakthrough infections.

They found that upon primary immunization, participants with pre-existing immunity (those who had previously been infected with the virus) mounted higher antibody responses faster and achieved higher steady-state antibody titers than individuals who had not been previously infected. The waning of antibody response was characterized by two phases: an initial rapid decay from the strong peak after vaccination, followed by a stabilization phase with very slow decay, suggesting that antibody levels were very long-lasting. Booster vaccination equalized the differences in antibody concentration between participants with and without pre-existing immunity. Breakthrough infections increased antibodies to similar levels as an additional vaccine dose in individuals who had not previously been infected.

This investigation represents one of the most extensive and in-depth assessments of the longevity of SARS-CoV-2 immune responses to date. Its major conclusion is that changes in the virus that allow it to evade immunity, rather than waning immunity, are the major reason for breakthrough infections.

Ours is one of the longest-running COVID-19 studies out there. Following the same group of people monthly over time is rare and powerful because you can compare immune responses on an individual level. SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve, so this research is important to provide an understanding about the impact of new variants and new vaccine doses on a healthy immune system, and to guide all of us to make the best choices to maintain protection against the virus that continues to circulate in our communities.

Professor Viviana Simon, MD, PhD, lead author
Professor of Microbiology, Medicine and Pathology, Molecular and Cell-Based Medicine
Department of Microbiology
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.

This in-depth analysis was made possible through the Protection Associated with Rapid Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 (PARIS) study, an observational, longitudinal cohort of health care workers of the Mount Sinai Health System that was initiated in April 2020. At that time, the densely populated New York metropolitan area was hit with an exponential increase in severe SARS-CoV-2 infections, and essential workers in the health care system were at high risk for infection. In response to the crisis, a team of leading virologists, physician-scientists, and pathologists at Mount Sinai established a specific and sensitive SARS-CoV-2 binding enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay to accurately measure the SARS-CoV-2 antibody titers. This test was used to measure immune responses in the PARIS cohort in order to determine how quickly the antibody defenses were mounted and much these changed over the months and years of follow up.

In addition to showing the impact on a person’s individual antibody response to vaccines based on the type of vaccine received and whether or not they were infected before receiving the first dose, the PARIS study made possible the development of a mathematical model that can be used to predict and characterize antibody responses of both individual people and populations.

People have pandemic fatigue and vaccine uptake has slowed, especially after the vaccines started to be charged to insurance*. We were pleasantly surprised to see that the booster doses promoted a large antibody response regardless of a person’s personal infection history, so we are hopeful that our study findings will encourage people to get their vaccine boosters when eligible and to stay engaged in research. Our work also showcases the impact of viral evolution over time and why it’s critical to keep studies like this going, despite the pandemic fatigue.

Komal Srivastava, MS, Co-first author
Director of Strategy and Operation
Mount Sinai Center for Vaccine Research and Pandemic Preparedness.

According to the research team, the PARIS model has broad applications for studying the kinetics of antibodies produced to different COVID-19 vaccines in diverse populations. They stress much more work remains to analyze side effects, applications of the antibody model and continued research about new vaccines and viral variants.

This study adds an essential piece of data to understand the intricate immune response elicited by SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 vaccination. In light of the emerging viral variants, which predominantly induce a cross-reactive antibody response against the spike protein, it will be exciting to characterize in depth the role of these antibodies - in particular the non-neutralizing ones - in protection against the most recent circulating viral variants. Likewise, monitoring the induction of variant-specific antibodies after multiple exposures by breakthrough infections and by administration of updated COVID-19 vaccines, such as the XBB.1.5 monovalent booster, will be key to understand the evolution of the antibody response over time.

Assistant Professor Dr Juan Manuel Carreno Quiroz, PhD, Co-first author.
Department of Microbiology
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.

*Note: in the UK, vaccines are provided free by the NHS. Other non-US countries will have their own health-care systems which may or may not include charges for the vaccines.

More technical detail and the background to the research is given in the team's paper in Immunology:

Graphical abstract

Highlights

• COVID-19-vaccine-induced immunity wanes but stabilizes at an individual setpoint
• Pre-existing immunity results in rapid antibody responses upon vaccination
• Boosters equalize antibody titers between individuals with and without hybrid immunity
• Antibody kinetics show two phases: an initial rapid decay followed by a steady state

Summary

It is thought that mRNA-based vaccine-induced immunity to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) wanes quickly, based mostly on short-term studies. Here, we analyzed the kinetics and durability of the humoral responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination using >8,000 longitudinal samples collected over a 3-year period in New York City. Upon primary immunization, participants with pre-existing immunity mounted higher antibody responses faster and achieved higher steady-state antibody titers than naive individuals. Antibody kinetics were characterized by two phases: an initial rapid decay, followed by a stabilization phase with very slow decay. Booster vaccination equalized the differences in antibody concentration between participants with and without hybrid immunity, but the peak antibody titers decreased with each successive antigen exposure. Breakthrough infections increased antibodies to similar titers as an additional vaccine dose in naive individuals. Our study provides strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 antibody responses are long lasting, with initial waning followed by stabilization.

Introduction

The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in late 2019 sparked the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that is now in its 4th year. Vaccines to mitigate the impact of the pandemic were developed at record speed and have saved millions of lives. However, the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants¹ and waning immunity² have decreased the effectiveness of the vaccines against symptomatic disease.³ These two issues, the emergence of antigenically distinct SARS-CoV-2 variants and waning immunity, are often conflated and used interchangeably but represent two different phenomena.⁴ Most vaccines used in North America and Europe are based on lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) containing messenger RNA (mRNA) produced by Pfizer/BioNTech (BNT162b2) or Moderna (mRNA-1273), and the common perception now is that mRNA-based vaccine-induced immunity wanes quickly.⁵ However, this assumption is mostly based on data from short-term studies that include a very limited number of data points following peak responses.^2,5

In March of 2020, the densely populated New York metropolitan area was hit with an exponential increase of severe SARS-CoV-2 infections, resulting in a staggering number of fatalities and a severely overburdened healthcare system.^6,7,8 Due to shortages of personal protective equipment, essential workers in the health care system were at high risk for infection. In response to this crisis, we established (1) a specific and sensitive SARS-CoV-2 binding enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to measure humoral immune responses,⁹ and (2) an observational longitudinal cohort of health care workers of the Mount Sinai Health System to determine the kinetics of these humoral responses. This study, named Protection Associated with Rapid Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 (PARIS),¹⁰ aims to capture the dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 antibody responses to infection as well as vaccinations, to determine re-infection rates, and to assess correlates of protection in the context of individual immune histories.

With over 8,000 longitudinal study visits across a single cohort during the first 3 years of the pandemic, our investigation represents one of the most extensive and in-depth assessments of the longevity of SARS-CoV-2 immune responses to date. Using this longitudinal cohort, we determined the kinetics of antibody responses to spike protein after infections, during the primary immunization series, during monovalent and bivalent booster vaccination, as well as during breakthrough infections. Our findings indicate that, in contrast to common perception, COVID-19 mRNA vaccination induces long-lasting antibody responses in humans. The PARIS Study also provides insights into the effect of booster vaccination and breakthrough infections on the stability of antibody responses.

What is clear from this study is that antibody levels remain at protective levels for very much longer that was previously thought and that they continue to give protection against the severe form of the disease. However, as the virus evolves in an environment in which the vast majority of possible victims have already been vaccinated or have had previous infections so have high antibody levels, the variants that can 'escape' this protection will continue to evolve and become the predominant variant.

This diagram from UK data shows how the different variants have evolved and either replaced earlier variants or have reached an equilibrium with them:

Changes in proportions of SARS-CoV-2 variants in UK over time. This diagram is a good illustration of how the proportions of different alleles of a gene change in a species gene pool over time as the species evolves.

Source: National flu and COVID-19 surveillance report: 22 February 2024 (week 8) Ref: GOV-16232

It is essential then that regular boosters, which provide protection against the latest variants, should continue to be given. We are in a long-term struggle with this virus and vaccines keep us ahead of the game.

Creationism in Crisis - What Life Was Like 3.5 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Rocks of the Pilbara Craton exposed on the surface: grey barite rock at the bottom, reddish stromatolites due to oxidation at the top

Photo: Jan-Peter Duda

Barite quarry in the “Dresser Formation” of the Pilbara Craton. These rocks are around 3.5 billion years old and contain evidence of microbial life.

Photo: Jan-Peter Duda

Information for the Media - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Long, long ago, in that dim distant past when Earth was young, and fully 3.5 billion years before creationism's god decided to create a small flat planet with a dome over it centred on the Middle East, thermophile organisms, probably bacteria or archaea were living in a lake in a volcanic caldera in what is now the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia.

This is the conclusion of a research team led by the University of Göttingen wo have just published their work, open access, in the journal, Precambrian Research. Their work is also the subject of a brief news release by the University of Göttingen.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Favourite Sadist May Use Climate Change To Increase The Suffering In The World

Nematode movement

Parasitic worms cause huge economic loss to farmers and can infest humans too.

Temperature, humidity may drive future transmission of parasitic worm infections | Penn State University

Creationists who believe nothing happens unless their invisible magic god wants it to have to have all manner of intellectual gymnastics to avoid giving it credit for all the nasty things to be found in nature, such as parasitic worms.

Their favourite strategy is the old trick of believing two mutually exclusive ideas simultaneously - that only their god is capable of designing living systems, so anything too complex for them to understand must have been created by it, whilst simultaneously believing that all pathogens are created by another entity, called 'Sin', no matter how complex or difficult to understand they may be.

And of course, they are forbidden by dogma to believe in more than one creator and must believe, also by dogma, that that creator is omni-everything - omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent - so they have to believe that whatever its designs do, they were designed to do it, and whatever the future may bring, they were aware of that whilst designing their creations.

What percentage of the surface of Earth is habitable to humans without special equipment? Approximately 29% of the Earth's surface is comprised of land, which is habitable to humans without special equipment. The remaining 71% is covered by water, primarily in the form of oceans, which generally require specialized equipment for prolonged habitation. Therefore, without considering other factors such as climate, terrain, and resources, roughly 29% of Earth's surface is habitable to humans without special equipment.

That means, creationists have no choice but to accept that the results of climate change were part of their designer creator's plan, as was the response of their creations to it. And one of those responses to climate change may be an increase in parasitic worms in parts of the world they have not been prevalent in before.

Many of these worms are, or have been, confined to the tropics and sub-tropical zones, and the northern and southern part of the world, where most advanced economies are based, have been relatively free from them. But, as Earth gets warmer, the 'habitable zone' for parasitic worms expands to incorporate more of the advanced economies, but the habitable zone for humans shrinks even further.

This is the prediction of a team of researchers from the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics and Department of Biology, The Pennsylvania State University (PennState), Pennsylvania, USA, and Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy, led by Professor Isabella Cattadori and Dr. Chiara Vanalli of PennState, who have just published their findings, open access, in the journal Ecology Letters. Their work is explained in a PennState news release:

Unintelligent Design - How The Same Function Evolved Twice - Once in Vertebrates And Again in Insects

Sunset over University of California - Irvine

Diagram of an insect compound eye.

Credit: Bugboy52.40 via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed)

UC Irvine study shows similarities and differences in human and insect vision formation – UCI News

Regardless of the different structures in the compound eyes of insects and the eyes of vertebrates, at the heart of them both is a light-sensitive molecule, 11-cis-retinal, also known as 'visual Chromophore', but these are produced in two different ways from the same starting compound - β-carotene - which in humans is obtained from eating plants like carrots which are rich in Vitamin A from which β-carotene is derived.

This is one of those examples which are so common in biology, of where, had it been intelligent, the same designer could have used a process it had designed earlier but did not, instead it designed an even more complex way of doing the same thing, giving the lie to claims that the same 'intelligent' designer designed living things, insects and vertebrates have two different ways to achieve the same product - 11-cis-retinal; the second being the more complicated of the two.


Although the earliest vertebrates appeared about 518 million years ago, so predating the first insects by about 130 million years, the creationists dogma of omniscience which they traditionally ascribe to their putative designer god, would mean this alleged designer was already aware of the less complex way to make 11-cis-retinal, when if supposedly designed the vertebrate method.

Besides, creationist dogma also says they were all created on the same day - 10,000 years ago.

Trumpanzee News - How QAnon Lured Gullible People Into The Trumpanzee Cult

How people get sucked into misinformation rabbit holes – and how to get them out

From our perspective in Europe, it seems almost incomprehensible how the political situation in the USA has degenerated to such an extent that Donald Trump may be elected as POTUS again, despite the incompetence, buffoonery and criminality that characterised his earlier term.

What was once the 'shining beacon on the hill', which set the rest of the world an example (albeit more than a little idealised) of how democracy operated to produce a prosperous, egalitarian society where aspiration and enterprise were rewarded and the economy worked for all, has degenerated to warring factions, full of mutual hate and fueled by the most ludicrous and lurid conspiracy theories.

A significant number of adult Americans now believe there is a 'deep state' run by senior Democrats, that operates as a Satanic paedophile cult and that the serial adulterer, insurrectionist and crook, Donald Trump, was personally appointed by God as their saviour, because God obviously takes a keen interest in US politics and would pick someone with a narcissistic personality disorder to do his work for him. This god also promised to ensure Trump was reelected 2020, so the fact that he was kicked out of office must have been due to the same deep state/Democrat conspiracy to steal the election - and then hide the evidence where even God can't guide Trump's supporters to it.

And of course, the serious criminal charges Trump is now facing in a number of different US courts, are all part of that conspiracy, as are the judges, prosecutors and prosecution witnesses, so the more damming the evidence and the more charges he faces are evidence of the conspiracy, not evidence of Trump's guilt and unsuitability to hold elected office, let alone be in charge of a nuclear arsenal and the US public finances, and able to appoint senior members of the judiciary.

The only real conspiracy in the USA is that run by the shadowy and rabidly far-right, pro-Trump QAnon, so how did the QAnon cult lure so many people down their particular paranoid rabbit hole to the extent that they are prepared to take up arms against their fellow countrymen and stage an attempted coup d'etat in the name of patriotism?

Creationism in Crisis - What Made Snakes Able To Evolve So Quickly 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'?

Lialis burtonis. Not a snake, but a legless gecko.

Image credit: Pascal Title, University of Michigan/Stony Brook University.

A false boa, Pseudoboa nigra, eating a lava lizard, Tropidurus hispidus.

Image credit: Ivan Prates, University of Michigan.

Snakes do it faster, better: How a group of scaly, legless lizards hit the evolutionary jackpot | University of Michigan News

100 million years ago the ancestral snake was just another lizard but then suddenly (on the evolutionary timescale) something happened that enables snakes to diversify into thousands of different species while the other lizards plodded along slowly, diversifying at a much slower rate than the snakes.

But what was it that allowed this sudden radiation into so many species and why did it give the snakes the edge over their cousins the lizards? It was an event that an international team led by University of Michigan biologists have called an evolutionary singularity, in an analogy with whatever was at the start of the Big Bang.

The team has estimated that snakes have evolved up to three times faster than lizard, an ability that was facilitated by three things - an elongated body and loss of legs; enhanced sensory detection enabling them to find and track prey, and a flexible skull that enabled them to swallow large prey.

In an attempt to understand this, the team assembled a large database of lizard and snake diets from examining the stomach contents of tens of thousands of museum specimens. They also sequenced the partial genomes of almost 1,000 species from which they were able to construct the evolutionary trees of lizards and snakes.

Their findings are the subject of a paper in Science and of a news release from the University of Michigan:

Abiogenesis News - Closing Creationism's Favourite Gap On Their Ever-Shrinking Little God

Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park

Credit: iStock / tomolson54

Hot Spring in Yellowstone National Park.

Credit: iStock / tomolson54

Compound vital for all life likely played a role in life’s origin | UCL News - UCL – University College London

Abiogenesis is the gap creationists prefer to shoehorn their ever-shrinking little god into because they feel safer placing it there, believing that they have an unarguable claim that 'you can't get life from non-life'. Hilariously, you can sow confusion in their smug certainty in two simple ways:

1. Ask them to define 'life' and state whether it is a substance, a process or something else, because it only takes a moment's thought to realise 'life' is what we call the metabolic processes that organic molecules perform, so is simply the laws of chemistry and physics in operation. There is no magic ingredient needed.
2. Ask them what happens when the non-living food they eat becomes living tissues during the processes of digestion and assimilation if it is 'impossible'?

Their claim is nonsense of course; it's simply slogan delivered in response to trigger words which creationists no more understand than a parrot understands the meaning of the words it squawks.

There is nothing in the laws of chemistry or physics that makes abiogenesis impossible; given the right conditions there is no reason the inorganic chemicals present on the early Earth couldn't build more complex molecules or why those molecules couldn't perform the necessary processes to grow, repair and replicate. And once replication is possible, then selection would have been inevitable, and with selection, the processes which performed best would inevitably produce more copies.

Of course this can't be replicated easily in a laboratory because what no laboratory process can replicate is the long period of time, possibly millions of years, the process had on the early Earth, but what scientists can do is show that essential molecules to kick-start the processes could have arisen on the early Earth in the conditions that pertained then.

This is exactly what a team from University College London have shown in respect of a molecule which is the functional unit of one of the basic enzymes involved - Coenzyme A. The molecule is pantetheine. In earlier studies, pantetheine failed to be produced leading some to think that it would not have formed on early Earth and would therefore be absent and unable to play its essential role in metabolism.

Molecular structure of pantetheine

Creationism in Crisis - Evolution Of The Carnivores 315-251 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Inostrancevia, a more advanced predatory synapsid and one of the first sabertoothed carnivores, from the late Permian (~259-252 Million years ago). (Display at the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada)

Credit: Suresh A. Singh

Dimetrodon, an early predatory synapsid from the early Permian (~298-272 Million years ago). (Display at the Royal Tyrell Museum, Canada).

Credit: Suresh A. Singh

February : Killer instinct drove evolution of mammals’ predatory ancestors | News and features | University of Bristol

The ancestors of all modern mammals, the synapsids, first appeared in the fossil record long before the dinosaurs. Some were vegetarian while others were the top land predators for 60 million years before being replaced by the dinosaurs. Their evolution followed the same pattern of an arms race with their prey species in which the carnivores had to get better at killing to survive.

This gives the lie to the claim of any involvement of a single intelligent designer in their evolution since no intelligent designer worthy of the name would compete with itself in an arms race in which there are no winners or losers while all the time additional complexity is needed to keep up.

Tell me all about the synapsids, please. Synapsids are a group of vertebrates that includes mammals and their extinct relatives. They are characterized by several key features, including a single temporal opening behind the eye socket, teeth set in sockets, and a more erect posture compared to earlier reptiles. Synapsids first appeared during the late Carboniferous period, about 315 million years ago, and they were a dominant group throughout much of the Permian and Triassic periods. Here are some key points about synapsids:

1. Evolutionary History: Synapsids evolved from reptilian ancestors, specifically from a group called the pelycosaurs. One of the most famous pelycosaurs is Dimetrodon, which lived during the early Permian period and is often mistakenly identified as a dinosaur. Synapsids evolved further into two main groups: the therapsids and the cynodonts.
2. Therapsids: This group includes the most mammal-like synapsids. They had more advanced jaw structures, with larger temporal fenestrae (openings behind the eye socket) and specialized teeth. Therapsids diversified during the Permian period, with some species evolving into large herbivores like the iconic sail-backed Dimetrodon, while others were carnivorous predators. Towards the end of the Permian, some therapsids gave rise to the first true mammals.
3. Cynodonts: Cynodonts were a subgroup of therapsids that emerged during the late Permian and diversified extensively during the Triassic period. They exhibited several mammalian characteristics, including a more upright posture, specialized teeth, and possibly hair-like structures. Some cynodonts were quite small and likely had a lifestyle similar to modern mammals, while others were larger predators.
4. Mammalian Evolution: The transition from cynodonts to true mammals occurred during the Triassic period. Early mammals retained many reptilian features but also displayed characteristics that are distinctly mammalian, such as lactation and specialized jaw joints. By the end of the Triassic period, mammals had become more diverse and widespread.
5. Impact on Evolutionary History: Synapsids, particularly therapsids and cynodonts, played a crucial role in evolutionary history. They were among the dominant land vertebrates during the Permian and Triassic periods, occupying various ecological niches as herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores. The extinction of many synapsid groups at the end of the Permian, possibly due to environmental changes and the effects of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event, paved the way for the rise of dinosaurs as the dominant land vertebrates during the Mesozoic Era.
6. Modern Descendants: The only surviving descendants of synapsids are mammals, which have diversified into a vast array of species occupying nearly every terrestrial and aquatic habitat on Earth. From tiny shrews to massive whales, modern mammals exhibit remarkable diversity in terms of size, shape, behavior, and ecological adaptations.

Overall, synapsids are a fascinating group of vertebrates that played a significant role in the evolutionary history of life on Earth, ultimately giving rise to the diverse and successful lineage of mammals that we see today.

Now a team of researchers from Bristol University, together with a colleague from the Open University, Milton Keynes, have traced the evolution of the carnivorous synapsid jaw and body size and discovered a major change in the jaw about 270 million years ago which would have been associated with a shift in the behaviour of these carnivores as they became better at killing their prey more quickly, so reducing the risk of injury.
Their findings are the subject of an open access paper in Communications Biology and is the subject of a Bristol University news release:

Creationism in Crisis - 250 Million Years of Butterfly And Moth Evolution

Butterfly and moth genomes mostly unchanged despite 250 million years of evolution

It'll no doubt come as a surprise to those creationists who believe Earth was created from nothing by magic just about 10,000 years ago to learn that the butterflies and moths have been evolving for 250 million years.

It'll maybe come as a bigger surprise to those creationists who have been fooled into believing that the Theory of Evolution is being discarded by mainstream biologists in favour of their childish fairy tale of magic and supernatural spirits, that yet another group of mainstream biologists regard it as the foundation of modern biology, and are participating in the Darwin Tree of Life Project, which aims to sequence the genome of 70,000 eukaryote species from Britain and Ireland, to learn their evolutionary relationships.

This project also contributes to the much larger, Earth BioGenome Project.

One of the teams taking part in this project, based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, has just completed the sequencing of 200 high-quality genome of the Lepidoptera order of insects (moths and butterflies) and discovered some interesting facts about the evolution of the order, including that there are some elements in the genomes, which they term 'Merian elements' after the 17th century entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian, which have remained relatively stable over the 250 million years the order has been evolving.

The research is published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution and is described in a Welcome Sanger Institute news release:

Creationism in Crisis - Fossil Plants from Australia, from 30 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Permineralised dicotyledonous leaves (QMF 61184) in a leaf litter layer from QML 1775, Glencoe sub-basaltic silcrete, Capella District (Clermont Volcanic Province). The leaf shows raised primary and secondary venation indicating that this is abaxial leaf surface and a partially skeletonised leaf of the same species lies across the distal end of the leaf.

From: Rozefelds, Andrew C.; Webb, John; et al.(2024) (Fig 2.)

Impression of lobed Proteaceae leaf (SAM P59649) from the Stuart Creek fluvial silcrete, South Australia.

From: Rozefelds, Andrew C.; Webb, John; et al.(2024)

A botanical Pompeii: we found spectacular Australian plant fossils from 30 million years ago

With so much of Earth's long history recorded in the geology, it’s quite astonishing that there are grown adults who still believe Earth is about 10,000 years old and was created out of noting, along with everything on it, in 6 days, with a few magic words, and that the science which shows otherwise is false or even forged.

It's even more astonishing that many of those people will live in technologically advanced societies that take products of science such as modern medicines, air transport, electricity, computers, radio and telephone communications and satellite navigation systems for granted and will never have any doubt about the truth of the science that created them.

Yet here we have yet more evidence that there were plants growing and leaving fossilised remains, 30 million years before creationists believe 'Creation Week' happened. And all they will have by the way of rationalising the facts with their evidence free-superstition is to lie about the science and claim the scientists used a flawed dating method that somehow managed to make 10,000 years look like 30 million years, or they lied about their results for some nefarious reason as part of a multi-million person conspiracy about which no-one ever breaks ranks and blows the whistle, even though they would gain instant fame and fortune if ever they did so.

And the same creationists who will tell that lie are the same people who hang on every word of a small handful of pseudo scientists who have taken an oath to always reach a required conclusion in their work, regardless of what the facts really reveal, as a condition of their employment.

How and where these fossils were found and dated, and the geological processes of silicification that preserved them, is the subject of a recent paper in the journal Gondwana Research. Andrew Rozefelds, Adjunct Assoc Professor in Central Queensland University and Principal Curator Geosciences Queensland Museum, CQ University Australia, lead author of the paper in Gondwana Research has also written about the research in an article in The Conversation, reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism in Crisis - 275 Million New Human Genetic Variants in USA Alone - Why So Many?

275 Million New Genetic Variants Identified in NIH Precision Medicine Data | All of Us Research Program | NIH

Researchers at the American NIH have identified 275 million previously unknown genetic variants in samples from 250,000 representative American adults who participated in their All of Us research program. Half the participants were of non-European ancestry. Nearly 4 million of these newly discovered variants are from areas of the genome tied to known disease risks.

Let's consider that from the point of view of someone who believes in intelligent [sic] design:

Why on Earth would an intelligent designer design so many variations on the same theme? An intelligent designer, especially one endowed with the foresight of omniscience and unlimited powers and who is omnibenevolent and perfect, would design the perfect solution to every problem, and stick with it, not design lots of different solutions to the same problem. And every iteration through the cycle of replication would produce an exact copy of that perfect design, so there is no logical way all those variations could be the result of random mutations which all happened to be equally good at whatever they did, so there was no element of selection involved.

Quite simply, lots of variations on the same theme are evidence not of intelligent design, but of utilitarian, mindless 'design' working without a plan and with no conception of the ideal or perfection. Variation is kept because it works; maybe not exactly as well as other alleles, but well enough for the carrier to survive and reproduce. Even if the differences are too small to play a significant part in evolution by natural selection, unless they are serious deleterious, genetic drift can account for them being a significant part of the species genome.

Creationism in Crisis - How An Ancient Retrovirus Evolved To Create The Vertebrate Brain

A myelinating oligodendrocyte (green)

Credit: Peggy Assinck,
ALTOS Labs-Cambridge Institute Of Science

Ancient retroviruses played a key role in the evolution of vertebrate brains | ScienceDaily

Schematic diagram of a neuron show the myelin sheath as the electrical insulator of the axon.

Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Extinct Late Devonian placoderm Bothriolepis canadensis. Myelin first appeared in these primitive early fish

Credit: Nobumichi Tamura / Stocktrek Images / Getty.

Creationists generally hate endogenous retrovirus (ERV's) because:

1. They are one of the strongest pieces of evidence of common descent appearing in the same locations in the genome of all organisms in a clade, forming nested hierarchies exactly as the Theory of Evolution predicts. The probability of the same viral DNA appearing in the same locus in all species in a clade by chance is, of course, so small it can be dismissed as an explanation.
2. They form a large part of the 'junk' DNA carried by all organisms, which, although a small proportion of it is transcribed into RNA, the RNA doesn't get translated into proteins and most of it doesn't serve any purpose. Some, but by no means all of it may have some regulatory functions.
3. Occasionally, an ancient ERV may have become exapted for some useful purpose unrelated to the original virus, so showing how new genetic information can enter a genome, flatly contradicting creationist's claims that no new information can arise within a genome because the second law of thermodynamics [sic] and Shannon Information Theory somehow forbids it.
4. An ERV serving a useful purpose also contradicts creationist claims that, while their favourite creator god is responsible for all the good stuff, another creator, called 'Sin', is responsible for the harmful stuff like parasites and viruses. Yet in those exapted ERVs we have viruses providing something that is beneficial and therefore, according to creationist dogma, must have been provided by their god!
5. Lastly, the examples of where ancient ERVs have mutated and provided some additional ability or function, such as enabling the formation of the myeline sheath in vertebrates, can't be regarded as detrimental mutations, yet creationist dogma, courtesy of the hapless Micheal J. Behe, is that all mutations are 'devolutionary'[sic].

How Science Works - Correcting Earlier Mistakes With Modern Technology

280-million-year-old Tridentinosaurus antiquus.
Black outline, not skin, but paint!

Latest News and Views from University College Cork (Coláiste na hOllscoile Corcaigh)

There are few things that creationist like more than reports of 'soft' tissues being found in ancient fossils, because they imagine this 'proves' the fossils are much younger than palaeontologists claim, and places them well within the 10,000 years they believe Earth has existed for. It's nonsense, of course, because fossilised 'soft' tissues are not the same as actual soft tissues since, under the right circumstances, there is nothing to prevent soft tissue being mineralised by the same processes that hard tissues are mineralised. The results are not soft; they are hard, mineralised fossils. The term 'soft tissue' simply relates to what they started out as, not what they ended up as.

That point is probably too subtle for most creationists to appreciate.

Given the propensity of creationist frauds to misrepresent the science to their dupes, it's perhaps surprising that they don't wave the fossil of Tridentinosaurus antiquus. as 'proof' of a young Earth because it was believed to have its skin preserved and was thought by some to be an example of the rare preservation of soft tissue in a fossil.

However, a paper in Palaeontology a few days ago, not only destroys that notion, but shows how the scientific method eventually corrects mistakes and even deliberate hoaxes, in much the same way that the scientific method eventually exposed the Piltdown hoax as a forgery.

This paper shows that what was interpreted as fossilised skin was actually black paint. Whether this was a deliberate attempt to mislead or simply an attempt to make the fossil stand out from the surrounding rock matrix in which it is embedded may never be known, but one thing of which we can be sure, is that it isn't fossilised skin, so there is no mystery for science too explain.

The fossil is embedded in volcanic rock, so the 'mystery' was how the skin survived the high temperatures involved in the production of the rock, and various theories were proposed for this, including the lizard-like reptile sheltering in a crack in the rock.

How the 'forgery' was exposed is the subject of the paper in Paleontology and a news release from the University of Cork, Ireland:

Old Dead Gods - With Long Forgotten Religions - And No Way To Recover Them

The burial of an adult woman associated with a prone and articulated horse

Photo: S.R.Thompson,
courtesy of SABAP-VR Soprintendenza archeologia,
belle arti e paesaggio per le province di Verona,
Rovigo e Vicenza

Laffranchi Z, Zingale S, Tecchiati U, Amato A, Coia V, Paladin A, et al. (2024)

Joint interment of a dog and a human perinate.

Photo by S.R.Thompson, courtesy of SABAP-VR Soprintendenza archeologia, belle arti e paesaggio per le province di Verona, Rovigo e Vicenza.

Laffranchi Z, Zingale S, Tecchiati U, Amato A, Coia V, Paladin A, et al. (2024)

Some Pre-Roman humans were buried with dogs, horses and other animals | ScienceDaily

I've made the point several time before, but another paper published recently, reinforces it again, that when old gods are forgotten and old religions die, there is nothing on which they can be reconstructed because religions are never founded in verifiable evidence.

Unlike religion, science, which is a description of reality, could be rediscovered if it, or a major branch of it, was somehow wiped from our collective memories and all text books on the subject were wiped clean. And the rediscovered science would be the same as it is today. Atoms would have the same structure and properties, chemistry would do what we know it does today; physics would have the same explanations for the different colours of light, for the way energy is conserved; entropy and the laws of thermodynamics would be the same; and the description of the universe, together with the Big Bang, how suns form and how planets form around them, would be the same.

In fact, we can be as sure as eggs is eggs, that if ever we contact intelligent life from another planet, their science will be the same as ours, although they'll use different words to describe it and their numbering system may well have a different base.

But, expunge every trace of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hindi, Shintoism, etc., and erase everyone’s memory of them, and we would never again know what the followers believed or what they believe their god(s) did or didn't do. We would know no more about the major religions of today than we know about the ancient religions before writing was invented. We have not the slightest idea what inspired the builders of Stonehenge and Silbury Hill in Wiltshire; we don't have a clue what the people who built the oldest existing roofed building in Europe, in Menorca in the Balearic Islands believed or what the Minoans of Crete believed, or even the names of their gods, and, unless someone decodes the language the Minoans wrote, we never will. We only know anything about the Egyptian and Sumerian pantheons because someone learned to read their writing.

And we know nothing about the gods and religion of the people who buried horses and dogs with their dead in Late Iron Age, Northern Italy - the subject of a recent paper in PLOS ONE.

In information from PLoS, cited in Science Daily, the authors explain their findings:

Creationism in Crisis - Now It's Evidence In Spain From 6,200 Years Ago That Survived Creationism's Favourite Genocide

Stratigraphic units (SU) from which P. lineatus shells analysed in this investigation were recovered: SU 1406 (C), SU 1704 (D), SU 705 (E) and SU 1516 (F)

García-Escárzaga, A., Cantillo-Duarte, J.J., Milano, S. et al. (2024).

Neolithic groups from the south of the Iberian Peninsula first settled in San Fernando (Cadiz) 6,200 years ago - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - UAB Barcelona

Another terrible week for creationism is coming to an end with news that archaeologist from the Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona (UAB) and the University of Càdiz, together with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA), Leipzig, Germany, have uncovered evidence that Neolithic groups from the south of the Iberian Peninsula first settled in San Fernando (Càdiz) 6,200 years ago and supplemented their diet with shellfish.

This news comes on top of the news that the remnants of a stone plaza in Peru and the body of the victim of a sacrificial bog burial in Denmark, that could not have survived creationism's mythical global genocidal flood if it had really happened as described in the Bible, had also been revealed by archaeologists.

The discovery, and details of how the date was calculated is the subject of an open access paper in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences and the subject of a UAB new release:

Creationism in Crisis - A 4750-Year-Old Stone Plaza in Peru That Survived Creationists' Favourite Genocide

Overhead photo of the circular plaza.
The circular plaza is at center with the modern city of Cajamarca in the background.

Jason L. Toohey et al.(2024)

Callacpuma archaeological site, Peru

UW Anthropologists’ Research Unveils Early Stone Plaza in the Andes

Imagine for a moment that you're dating someone who told you they were 30 years old, then you discover a photograph of them as a teenager, in a newspaper dated 1984. Would you conclude that someone had been lying to you and your date was really about 55 years old, or would you assume the photograph had been faked or the newspaper had the wrong date?

Imagine now being a creationist who believed Earth was devastated by a global flood that covered the highest mountains, about 4000 years ago, which would have scoured the Earth and destroyed everything on it, then someone shows you the remains of a building in Peru that had been there for 4750 years, and showed no signs of ever being submerged in even a few feet of water, let along several thousand feet of it!

If you're a creationist, you dismiss the evidence or assume the dates are wrong or that somehow the inevitable layer of silt had been cleaned up, even if the building had managed to escape the destruction going on around it, because, if you're a creationist, the last thing you can admit to is that your beliefs could be wrong because that would make you feel less important that you think you should be, so you're prepared to perform any mental contortions necessary to avoid that thought.

And this is why belief in a literal interpretation of the Bible has been in headlong decline ever since science began providing evidence of an old Earth and evidence that there never was a global genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago, because people with intellectual integrity who value truth and have the humility to let the evidence lead their opinions, even if it leaves them feeling less important than they think they should be, have realised that the evidence tells them that the Bible is wrong, despite their mummy and daddy believing otherwise.

And of course, just such remains of a building have been found in Peru by two University of Wyoming anthropology professors, and dated to about 4750 BP. It is the remains of a stone plaza and is the oldest stone structure so far found in the Americas, being older even than the Egyptian pyramids and about the same age as Stone Henge (both of which, incidentally, also survived the alleged genocidal flood).
How they did it is explained in a University of Wyoming news release:

Creationism in Crisis - How The Fossil Record Provides Evidence For Evolution - No Magic Needed

Desert sand dune landscape of the Upper Cretaceous Djadokhta/Baruungoyot Formations
Foreground: the large-bodied monstersaurian lizard Estesia mongoliensis

Illustration by Nathan Dehaut

Desert sand dune landscape of the Upper Cretaceous Djadokhta/Baruungoyot Formations. Foreground: the large-bodied monstersaurian lizard Estesia mongoliensis predating on the enantiornithine bird Gobipteryx minuta.

Illustration by Nathan Dehaut

A Lighthouse in the Gobi Desert | Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County

We are regularly told by creationists who have either been fooled by a lie, or are trying to fool us with one, that biomedical scientists are increasingly rejecting the Theory of Evolution and replacing it with the notion of intelligent design.

This was, of course, the aim of the Discovery Institute's 26-year-old, 5-year[sic] strategy detailed in The Wedge to insert Bible literalism into mainstream science, apparently believing that for the first time in the history of science, a well-established scientific theory is going to be replaced by a an evidence-free superstition based on misrepresentation of the data and including unproven supernatural entities doing magic.

Intelligent design creationism, of course, doesn't meet the basic criteria to be called a science, which is why any scrutiny of the relevant scientific literature will find no hint that the TOE is inadequate for explaining the data or that magic explains it in a more scientifically satisfying way. Indeed, as I repeatedly show in these blog-posts, virtually every piece of scientific research casually refutes creationism by revealing the evidence and not a single peer-reviewed biomedical science paper ever concludes that intelligent design is the only way to explain the observations.

As Michael J Behe was forced to admit in the Kitzmiller case, "There are no peer-reviewed article by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred". And that situation has not changed since Behe effectively sank the Wedge Strategy with that grudging admission under oath in an American court. Instead, we find papers like this technical one in which a team of researchers led by Dr. Hank Woolley, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Dinosaur Institute, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, discuss and evaluate the degree to which exceptional collections of fossils, such as those found in the Gobi Desert of Central Asia can influence our understanding of evolutionary relationships between fossil groups - what they term the lagerstätten effect .

The team have explained their research in a news release from the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County:

Creationism in Crisis - What Creationist Frauds Will Never Tell You - Vittrup Man's Body Could Not Have Survived a Global Genocidal Flood

In northern Europe, people have been found in marshes and wetlands.
Vittrup Man was found in 1915 and his remains are now in Vendsyssel Historical Museum.

Photo: Stephen Freiheit

The life of a Stone Age man has been mapped | University of Gothenburg

There are two things about a global flood deep enough to cover the highest mountains, just about 4,000 years ago, that would have been inevitable.

The first is that the whole surface of Earth would have been scoured and all trace of prior human and animal existence would have been destroyed along with any soil or alluvial deposits which would have been suspended in the water to fall out later or be left behind as silt. For example, no bog burial would have survived because no bogs would have survived.

The second is that the bare rocks would then have been left with a layer of silt which settled out, complete with the remains of all the animals and plants destroyed in the flood. Those remains, moreover would not just be from the local area, but would have had a world-wide distribution prior to the flood, so bodies of animal and plants from the Americas would have been jumbled up with those from Africa, Asia and Australia, etc. and they would all have been mixed with the remains of sea creature that would have inevitably been killed to. In fact, on that point, the Bible is quite specific that all living matter outside the Ark was destroyed.

But that's simply not what we see, ever!

Nowhere on the surface of the planet is there such a layer and yet its existence is a certain prediction of the legendary global genocidal flood.

Creationism in Crisis - The Inner Ear Of A 6 Million-Year-Old Hominoid Fossil Gives A Clue To The Evolution Of Bipedalism In Humans

Reconstruction of the locomotor behavior and paleoenvironment of Lufengpithecus

Illustration by Xiaocong Guo;
image courtesy of Xijun Ni,
Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology,
Chinese Academy of Sciences.

InformedHealth.org How does our sense of balance work?

How Did Humans Learn to Walk? New Evolutionary Study Offers an Earful

To walk upright successfully needs a fully functioning balance organ in the inner ear, as anyone suffering from Ménière's disease will testify, so the study of the origins of bipedalism in the remote ancestors of humans needs to take into account changes in the inner ear that would facilitate it.

Humans and our closest relatives, the great apes and the simians, display a range of locomotion but only humans are normally fully bipedal, although chimpanzees can use bipedal locomotion when carrying a load for example.

The monkeys normally run along branches on all fours, balanced on top of them and jumping from branch to branch; the apes hang beneath the branches in locomotion known as brachiation, but humans are ungainly in trees and prefer bipedal locomotion on the ground. The question is, when did this ability evolve in our ancestry?

We can be sure our hominin ancestors the Australopithecines, were fully bipedal because we have a record of their footprints in volcanic ash at Laetoli, and their lower limbs and feet were almost indistinguishable from those of Homo sapiens. 'Lucy' (Au afarensis) was probably mostly bipedal but may have taken to trees for safety and possibly to sleep on constructed platforms like chimpanzees do. The evidence of injuries to her fossilised skeletal remains suggests she may have died by falling out of a tree.

To investigate this stage in our evolution a group of researchers, led by Professor Xijun Ni, which included Yinan Zhang, a doctoral student, both of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IVPP), and Terry Harrison, a New York University anthropologist, used 3-dimensional CT scanning to examine the inner ear of a 6-million-year-old fossil ape, Lufengpithecus, unearthed in China’s Yunnan Province in the early 1980s, and compared it to the inner ear of other living and fossil apes and humans from Asia, Europe, and Africa.

The formation the fossil was found in has been previously dated magnetobiostratigraphically to about 6 million years. This technique depends on the record of periodic changes in Earth's polarity trapped in magnetic particles in sedimentary rocks and by recording the microfossils such as pollen associated with these changes:

Malevolent Design - Another Arms Race Between A Parasitic Worm And Its Host - Or is It Just Unintelligent Design?

Cane Toad, Rhinella marina

Cane Toad, Rhinella marina

A secret war between cane toads and parasitic lungworms is raging across Australia

The subject of parasitic arms races throws creationists into a bout of cognitive dissonance from which they can only emerge with a hefty dose of double-think and self-deception, telling themselves that it's perfectly logical to hold two diametrically opposite and mutually contradictory views simultaneously, like believing that the term 'circle' describes a spere but the term 'square doesn't describe a cube.

They need to believe that, whilst it is central to their dogma and the belief on which all their god of the gaps and false dichotomy fallacies relies - that there is only one creator god capable of whatever it is they are waving as 'proof' or its existence, and at the same time believing that parasites were created by a different creator, over whom their omnipotent god has no powers and who goes toe to toe with it in parasite-host arms races.

Sadly for creationists, they were denied the argument concerning a second creator by their guru and Deception Institute flunky, Michael J Behe, who used the evolution of parasites like Escherichia coli and Plasmodium falciparum (the malaria parasite) as 'proof that their god is the intelligent designer behind the 'design' of all living things.

So, let's do what Behe unwittingly did and remove the second, evil designer from the equation, and see where it leads.

A case in point is the recently discovered arms race between the Australian cane toads and the lung worm parasite that infests their lungs:

Creationism in Crisis - Hundreds of Fossils From France From 470 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Biomineralized taxa of the Cabrières Biota

Saleh, F., Lustri, L., Gueriau, P. et al. (2024)

New fossil site of worldwide importance uncovered in southern France - UNIL L'ACTU

Artistic reconstruction of the Cabrières Biota.

Credit: Christian McCall (Prehistorica Art).

The news just keeps getting worse for creationism as the relentless scientific refutation of all their sacred dogmas continues unabated.

Today, it's the turn of palaeontologists from the Faculty of Geosciences and Environment at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), Switzerland, who, together with international colleagues, have just announced the discovery of a large collection of exceptionally well preserved fossils in the Lower Ordovician formation at Montagne Noire, in the Hérault department of France. The Lower Ordovician deposits were formed between about 485.4 and 470 million years before creationists believe Earth was magicked out of nothing.

Tell me all about the Lower Ordovician period particularly in the Montagne Noire, in the Hérault department of France, including how its age was determined. The Lower Ordovician period is a significant geological epoch characterized by a diversification of marine life, particularly marine invertebrates such as trilobites, brachiopods, and mollusks. It spans from approximately 485.4 to 470 million years ago. The Lower Ordovician is part of the larger Ordovician period, which is divided into three stages: Tremadocian, Floian, and Dapingian.

Montagne Noire, located in the Hérault department of France, is a region renowned for its Lower Ordovician sedimentary rocks, which provide valuable insights into the Earth's geological history during this period. The geological formations in Montagne Noire contain a wealth of fossils and sedimentary structures that have been studied extensively by geologists and paleontologists.

Creationism in Crisis - Humans Were Making Beads In North America 2,900 Years Before 'Creation Week' - And The Evidence Survived The Legendary Genocidal Flood!

12,940-year-old bead made of hare bone, discovered at Wyoming’s La Prele Mammoth site.

Photo: Todd Surovell.

UW Archaeology Professor Discovers Oldest Known Bead in the Americas

The problem with having counter-factual beliefs that are only believed because you want to feel more important than you're afraid you really are, is that you need a vast array of strategies for ignoring the vast amount of evidence that your beliefs are wrong. This is especially important if you live in a technological society where there is free access to that vast amount of evidence and news such as this discovery of what could be the oldest known bead from the western hemisphere, dated to 12,940 years ago.

It was recovered from a site in Wyoming, USA at an archaeological site known as the La Prele Mammoth site:

What information do you have on the La Prele Mammoth site in Wyoming, USA?

Atheism - Eight Things You Probably Didn't Know

8 facts about atheists | Pew Research Center

Atheism is the lack of belief in the existence of any god or gods, nothing more and nothing less. This position is based on the self-evidence fac that the only intellectually honest basis for belief is evidence and the equally self-evidence fact that there is not (and cannot be) any definitive evidence for the existence of anything supernatural because, by definition, nothing supernatural can be detected. All there is, is the material universe and anything beyond that has nowhere and no time to exist in and could not interact with or influence events in the material universe, so is indistinguishable from nothing. Belief in anything supernatural is thus a superstition for which there is no supporting evidence.

Atheism is a belief position, not a knowledge claim. Since again the only intellectually honest position is that all knowledge has a degree of uncertainty, atheism is not Agnosticism since Agnosticism allows for the possibility of Atheism being wrong, but any assessment of the probability of the existence of any god must be subjective since there can be no observations to base it on. So, an Agnostic cannot express that probability without it becoming a belief position. As it is, Agnosticism is a pedantic knowledge claim which has no measurable probability of being different to Atheism, in the accuracy of its claim.

Recently, the Pew Research Center published 8 facts about Atheism based on its opinion polling in the USA and elsewhere. Most of them refer to Atheism in the USA, where Atheists make up 4% of U.S. adults, according to their 2023 National Public Opinion Reference Survey. That compares with 3% who described themselves as atheists in 2014 and 2% who did so in 2007.

That figure of 4% for the USA lags someway behind the UK (12%), Netherlands (17%), Sweden (18%), France (23%) and even once staunchly Catholic countries of Spain (10%) and the Republic of Ireland where 14.2% gave Atheist/No religion, as their religion, (if any) in the 1922 census (an increase of 187% since 2011). However, with a great deal of stigma still attached to Atheism in the USA and pressure to conform with regular church attendance, the true figure for Atheism is probably very underestimated and hidden within the large and growing 'Nones, which currently stands at 28% in the USA.

Pew Research Center's eight fact about Atheism are:

Creationism in Crisis - Now It's Fossils of Air-Breathing Fish From Australia - From 380 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Life reconstruction of Harajicadectes zhumini, a 40 cm long lobe-finned fish that is not too distantly related to the fishes that gave rise to the earliest limbed tetrapods.

Brian Choo/Flinders University

A 380-million-year-old predatory fish from Central Australia is finally named after decades of digging

It seems every day brings a new scientific refutation of creationism that the frauds who lead the cult and feed it disinformation need to keep hidden, or at least give the half-baked strategies for ignoring. The scientists are lying; the scientists get their dates wrong; no matter what the evidence shows, God's holy word trumps it; if you weren't there to see it, it probably didn't happen.

Maybe creationists can be satisfied with such obvious logical fallacies and evidence free assertions, but normal people will allow the evidence to lead their opinions, not the misrepresentations and lies of frauds who know nothing of the subject.

And what better evidence that the world wasn't created out of nothing by magic in a few days about 10,000 years ago, than yet more evidence that there were creatures like fish living on Earth 380 million years before creationist mythology says the magic creation happened; creatures like this fossil air-breathing, lobe-finned fish found in Devonian rocks in Central Australia.

And to make matters worse for creationists, this fish was a close relative of one of the lobe-finned fish that evolved into the terrestrial tetrapods from which all terrestrial vertebrates are descended. Taxonomists have now named this fish, Harajicadectes zhumini.