Rosa Rubicondior

Tuesday, 23 July 2024

Malevolent Design - The Brilliance of Dengue - Designed To Make Us Suffer More

Top left: The nuclei of human cells appear in blue. The green signal indicates the presence of a dengue virus protein. Top right: The nuclei of human cells appear in teal. The magenta signal indicates the presence of a dengue virus protein. Bottom left: The nuclei of human cells appear in grey. The red signal indicates the presence of a dengue virus protein. Bottom right: The nuclei of mosquito cells appear in blue. The red and green signal indicates the presence of two dengue virus proteins.

Exposing dengue’s invasion… | Stowers Institute for Medical Research

Today it's the turn of researchers at Oklahoma's Stowers Institute for Medical Research to expose the brilliance of creationism's divine malevolence in the way it's designed the Dengue virus to enable it to spread out of the tropics and infect more people. Currently, according to the World Health Oragnisation, the mosquito-borne virus, infects around 400 million people a year and there is no cure.

The Stowers Institute team led by Predoctoral Researcher Luciana Castellano in the lab of Associate Investigator Ariel Bazzini, Ph.D., has discovered how it, and hundreds of other viruses, replicate in their hosts.

Creationism't intelligent designer, for those who believe in magic, uses it's tried and tested mosquito delivery system, especially the Aedes eagypti mosquito which it used so successfully to spread the Zika virus to cause microcephaly in children.

The sneaky trick it used to get past the immune system it allegedly designed to protect us from things like its viruses, is breathtaking in its simplicity. In order to replicate inside a host cell, the virus needs some specific protein enzymes. It has the RNA code for these enzymes, but the problem is, the host's immune system would recognise those as foreign and launch an attack, so the virus uses the hosts enzymes. Proteins are coded for with a three-nucleotide code, one for each amino acid in the chain. However, the same amino acid can be coded for by several different triplet codes, some of which are more efficient than others. To ensure the cell makes its own enzymes for the virus, the virus uses less efficient codons in its own RNA!
This way, the virus tricks the cell into cooperating in its own destruction.

Neat, eh?

It's a classic example of how an apparently deleterious mutation works in favour of a parasite, and something creationists will find impossible to explain away with the biologically nonsensical 'genetic entropy' causing 'devolution' because the mutation was undoubtedly evolutionary, enabling the dengue virus (DENV) to produce very many more copies of itself than before, and something better can't be less perfect than the original.

Creationism in Crisis - Decline in Creationism in USA is Accelerating While Acceptance of Evolution Increases

Majority Still Credits God for Humankind, but Not Creationism Evidence of the continuing decline in creationism, which coincides with increased access to the Internet and exposure to creationist fundamentalists, was published by Gallop today.

The percentage of American adults who believe in creationism has fallen to a new low of just 37% (a figure which would be astonishingly high for most of the developed world where creationists languish in the lower few percentiles) while those who believe God played no part in the evolution of humans from less advanced life forms has risen to a new high of 24%.

The equivalent figures for 1999 were 47% and 9% respectively, and the signs are that these changes are accelerating.

Although correlation is not proof of causation, it is evidence of correlation and there is a strong correlation between access to the Internet (and so exposure of creationism to critical analysis, and exposure of the hypocrisy and inherent intellectual dishonesty of most creationists). This exposure has revealed that many creationists are using it as an excuse to pose as the superior of other people.

The arrogant assumption that the Universe was created with them in mind and that they have a special relationship with the creator of everything, so this provides an excuse to pose as more expert than the experts, without the bother of learning.

The first published results from Juukan Gorge show 47,000 years of Aboriginal heritage was destroyed in mining blast

On of the first pieces of good news for the creation cult emerged from Australia a couple of days ago. It was that one of the best pieces of evidence of continuous human occupation with no signs of ever being submerged in a flood, has been destroyed by mining activities.

It was an ancient rock shelter at Juukan Gorge in Puutu Kunti Kurrama Country in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, which had evidence of human occupation going back 47,000 years, i.e. 37,000 years before Bible literalist creationists believe the Universe was magicked up out of nothing, and 43,000 before it was supposedly submerged in deep flood water that would have obliterated any trace of human habitation.

It was the kind of solid, incontrovertible evidence of biblical errancy that keeps creationist cult leaders awake at night trying to make up lies to tell about it or discredit it in some way that a creationist will believe (not hard; just say the scientists hate God and make up lies, that'll make a creationist feel special).

How the site came to be destroyed and the attempts to recover the artifacts it contained is the subject of an article in The Conversation by Michael Slack, Director, Scarp Archaeology and Adjunct Associate Professor of Archaeology, James Cook University; Jordan Ralph, Adjunct Lecturer, Archaeology, Flinders University and Wallace Boone Law, Postdoctoral Researcher, Geospatial Science and Archaeology, University of Adelaide. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Evolution Observed As Killifish On Trinidad Respond To Predation

Killifish are highly adaptable to their surroundings

Fish adjust reproduction in response to predators - News Center - The University of Texas at Arlington

The killifish on the Caribbean island of Trinidad are ideal subjects for studying evolution because they can quickly adapt to environmental change. Some have even become amphibious, spending time out of water, probably to avoid predation, while others lay their eggs out of water on damp moss as an evolved adaptation to predation. However, eggs out of water bear the additional risk of desiccation which needs to be balanced against the risk of predation in water.

This paper by Professor Matthew R. Walsh, a biology professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, USA and his laboratory technician, Christopher Roden shows that the eggs of fish that lay them out of water hatch earlier than those in water, reducing the risk of desiccation, showing how predation has driven a change in the rate of embryo development to reduce the risk of desiccation, while avoiding predation.

Their findings are published open access in Proceedings of the Royal Society B and explained in the University of Texas press release:

Rare parasitic wasp.

Maria Blake

Australian amber has revealed ‘living fossils’ traced back to Gondwana 42 million years ago

Amber is especially good for preserving in exquisite details, small arthropods which don't fossilise well in rocks, like larger vertebrates with hard body parts, and we can be confident that the age of the fossil is the age of the amber in which it is preserved.

Some years ago, on holiday in Kassandria, Greece, I came across a small group of Mediterranean pines that were being use to collect the resin used to flavour the local wine, Retsina. This wine is something of an acquired taste but is best drunk chilled, with Greek food, on a warm summer evening at sunset, overlooking the Aegean - and probably after a bottle or two of Demestica.

The fascinating thing was how many ants had managed to get themselves trapped in the resin in the plastic containers it was draining into from the cuts in the tree bark.

There were so many that I can only assume that when ancient amber was being produced there were either fewer ants or less resin.

So, what can we tell from the fossils preserved in amber?

Partly from their occurrence in amber, we know that some 85% of all living species were arthropods, rather than the 0.3% of species that were the much more noticeable vertebrates. We can also tell where and when major orders evolved and how long some of them have existed for. Since amber is formed from tree resin, it follows that it only occurred after trees evolved and from the resin produced by specific species of tree in areas where these trees grew.

Refuting Creationism - Hibernating Social Snakes - 38 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Newly discovered snake species provides insight into reptile social behaviour and development | Folio

The discovery of the new snake species has yielded insights into the evolution of modern snakes like the Amazon tree boa (left) and scrub python (right).

Photos: Michael Lee, Flinders University/South Australian Museum.

Red-sided garter snakes hibernate together in a hibernaculum.

Photo: Greg Schechter via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

A new paper published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society should give creationists cause to wonder if the people who wrote their favourite creation myth knew what they were talking about. That's assuming they have enough courage and intellectual integrity to consider that evidence trumps superstition and not the other way round, which is a big ask for most creationists as it would also mean their mummy and daddy could have been wrong too.

The evidence the new paper reveals is that of a collection of fossilised snakes found in Oligocene rocks in western Wyoming are those of a new species from 38 million years before creationists believe the Universe was created out of nothing by magic, when snakes had legs and could talk, and didn't have to eat nothing but dust [sic].

Refuting Creationism - Evolution By Hybridization May Be Commonplace in Plants

The team found the black cottonwood-balsam poplar stable hybrid lineage after analyzing the genetic makeup of 546 poplar tree cuttings collected along seven transects ranging from Alaska to Wyoming, with collections in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, in between.

Credit: Penn State. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Discovery of a hybrid lineage offers clues to how trees adapt to climate change | Penn State University

Despite creationist dogma that say otherwise, evolution in a population can occur by hybridization, especially in plants, where it may be commonplace. Two related plants hybridize and the resulting offspring acquires additional combinations of genes which extend its capabilities, enabling it to survive environmental change or move into new niches, and forming a stable population with new allele frequencies.

And as though to rub salt into creationist wounds, some of these happened hundreds of thousands of years before creationism's legendary 'Creation Week', before which, on the say-so of some ignorant Bronze Age pastoralists who were unaware of anything more than a day or two's walk from the Canaanite Hills, creationists think there was once nothing out of which everything was created by some magic words, just a few thousand years ago.

They also hold the diametrically opposite views simultaneously, that evolution is impossible because the Second Law of Thermodynamics [sic] forbids it, and that evolution occurred as a massively accelerated rate in the last few thousand years, unnoticed by anyone, in which several whole new species arose in a single generation by magic.

Now a team led by Penn State University paleobotanists led by Associate Professor Jill Hamilton, from Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, have shown that a hybrid between black cottonwood, or Populus trichocarpa, and balsam poplar, Populus balsamifera, was able to move out of the wet coastal region to which most black cottonwood trees are restricted, into the arid lands to the east. This movement started about 800,000 years ago.

The risk of long COVID has declined over the course of the pandemic, although it remains a persistent threat. Researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis identified vaccination as a primary factor in reducing the risk of long COVID.

Risk of long COVID declined over course of pandemic – Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

According to a report published today by scientists from Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, the risk of contracting long COVID after an infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus fell significantly when people were vaccinated. This was true for both the Delta and Omicron strains as well as for original.

The researchers attribute almost 72% of this reduction to the vaccines and the rest to changes in the SARS-CoV-2 virus and improved detection and management of infected patients. Their results are published in the New England Journal of Medicine and in a Washington University School of Medicine new release:

Small Animals Acquire Genes from Bacteria that Can Produce Antibiotics | Marine Biological Laboratory

Bdelloid rotifers, about a hair's width in size, are the only animals known to acquire a large number of genes from their environment (from bacteria, even plants). This study indicates they use some of those genes to resist disease.

Credit: C.G. Wilson

Q. Why are creationists obsessed with attacking science, but scientists are supremely indifferent to creationism?

A. Because creationism isn't a problem for science, but science is a problem for creationism.

Like just about every serious biologist publishing their research findings, refuting creationism was probably not even in the thinking of the biologists from University of Oxford, the University of Stirling and the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, Mass, USA, when they published their paper on how a type of rotifer resists fungal infections, but that's what they've just done.

It's a basic article of faith for creationists, promulgated by frauds who misrepresent information theory and conflate it with the laws of thermodynamics that an organism cannot acquire new genetic information without the intervention of a supernatural deity (who just happens to be the locally popular god as revealed in the locally popular books deemed to be holy by the locally popular church, mosque, synagogue, temple or gurdwara} because that would violate some assumed law akin to the law of conservation of energy - which has nothing to do with information or genetics

It is of course nonsense, as the evidence of gene and whole genome doubling, and horizontal gene transfer shows. Organisms can acquire new genetic information by simple chemistry and physics; and that new information is often available to be exapted for novel purposes.

Refuting Creationism - Humans Were Butchering A Giant Armadillo in Argentina - 11,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

21,000-year-old Neoesclerocalyptus fossils with man-made cut marks

UNLP scientists discover the oldest record of human presence in South America » UNLP

It's one of those moments that creationists like to pretend is a weakness of science - time to reconsider what we thought we knew and to update our understanding in the light of new evidence.

In short, time to do what a dogmatic, intellectually bankrupt creationist can never do - consider being wrong and changing our mind because the evidence has changed.

The reason for this reassessment is that the fossilised remains of a species of glyptodont or giant armadillo, a Neoesclerocalyptus, has been discovered on the bank of the Reconquista River, in Argentina that have been dated to 21,000 years ago, that bears the unmistakable cut marks of butchery by humans. Previously, the earliest incontrovertible evidence of humans in South America put it at about 16,000 years ago. The fossils were discovered and analysed by a team of palaeontologists led by scientists from the National University of La Plata, Argentina.

This is a clear 11,000 years before creationists believe the Universe was magicked into existence, and so puts this event in the 99.9975% of Earth's history that occurred before creationists believe it existed, based on the best guesses of parochial Middle-eastern pastoralists who believe the entire universe consisted of a small flat planet with a dome over it that contained nothing that wasn't known to the people who filled the gap in their knowledge with childish guesses.

Refuting Creationisn - Understanding Consciousness - No God(s) Required

Study reveals how an anesthesia drug induces unconsciousness | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

One of creationism beloved gaps in which they try to shoehorn their ever-shrinking little god, is a scientific explanation for consciousness.

It is true that we don't yet have an explanation for consciousness but no gap in the scientific understanding of anything has ever been filled by a god, or to be more scientific, by an unproven, undetectable supernatural entity, so it's a strangely unrealistic view of science that any (or all) of creationism's gaps, real or imaginary are going to be the exception to the rule and somehow, one day, science is going to reveal the locally popular god in all its glory, having managed to hide itself for millennia.

Being inherently unfalsifiable, of course, there is no possible scientific methodology that could reveal any specified god as the indisputable cause of any phenomenon, so creationist belief that this is about to happen is delusional.

But back to the problem of consciousness.

Fona herzogae.

Credit: Jorge Gonzales

Life Underground Suited New Dinosaur Fine | NC State News

If you want to leave a fossil as evidence of your existence, live, or at least die, in a burrow.

If you want to refute creationism, arrange to die 99 million years before they believe the Universe existed.

That's what an otherwise unremarkable dinosaur that was about the size of a large dog, contrived to do in what is now Utah, USA. It, and its relatives, because so many of them died in their borrows, are preserved in exception detail compared to species that lived above ground where their bodies would have been scavenged and destroyed before they could be fossilised.

Creationism Refuted - Stardust Creation 1,300 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Cassiopeia A

JWST Unveils Stunning Ejecta and CO Structures in Cassiopeia A's Young Supernova

Todays' refutation of creationism comes to us from the field of astronomy and in particular the details of what happened and is still happening in the expanding supernova remnant known as Cassiopeia A which has a super-dense body at its centre, probably a neutron star, the collapsed remains of the parent star.

A neutron star is the remains of an old star that was too large to collapse to a white dwarf but not large enough to become a black hole. In a neutron star, the pressure due to gravity is so intense that even atoms compress, and electrons are forced into protons to become neutrons, so the star becomes nothing but neutrons. Due to conservation of angular momentum a neutron star has a rotation rate in seconds or less.

Cassiopeia A (Cas A) was observed in the night sky 350 years ago. It is 11,000 light years away, so the light the explosion generated reached Earth 11,000 years after the explosion, which simple maths tells us happened 1,350 years before creationists think the Universe was created. It was of course an event in that long, 13.8 billion years pre-'Creation' history of the Universe when 99.99999% of its history, and 99.9975% of the history of Earth occurred.

A supernova like Cas A is the birthplace of star dust out of which Earth and everything on it is made. It is the stuff that connects us to the rest of the universe and to which we, or rather the atoms and molecules that we are made of, will return to be recycled into future planets around future suns, when our own sun swallows up the inner planets then goes supernova itself, and flings our atoms out into the cosmos to be recycled as new suns and planetary systems, maybe to be studied by cosmologists on some other planet wondering about that sudden flash of light in the Milky Way, that was the death of our sun.

As I said in What Makes You So Special? From the Big Bang to You:

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

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

What Makes You So Special? From the Big Bang to You, page 152

Secular Humanism - Winning In Britain - Highest Number of MPs Ever Make A Secular Affirmation

Kier Starmer Labour Prime Minister and the latest in a long line of non-religious UK PMs

Highest number of MPs ever take secular affirmation – Humanists UK

An under-reported fact following the landslide victory for the Labour Party at the last election was the massively increased number of MPs in the Commons who have no religion. Roughly 40% of MPs chose to make a secular affirmation rather than swear a religious oath on taking their seats. This included Sir Kier Starmer and 50% of his cabinet ministers.

The list of openly non-religious Prime Ministers ever since the 1888 when the law requiring all MPs to take a religious oath was abolished, includes Ramsay McDonald, first Labour PM and former president of Humanists UK, David Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Clement Atlee and James Callaghan. It is almost exactly 100 years since Ramsay McDonald became the first PM to make a secular affirmation in 1924.

According to Humanists UK:

COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects and Long-Term Neutralizing Antibody Response: A Prospective Cohort Study: Annals of Internal Medicine: Vol 0, No 0

According to data published in Annals of Internal Medicine, people who experience flu-like symptoms - chills, tiredness, headaches, and feeling unwell, after a COVID mRNA vaccination tend to have a higher antibody count. This was based on a prospective cohort study of 363 participants from the San Fransico Bay area of California, US, who were vaccinated in 2021 and self-reported their symptoms.

Those who reported these symptoms had antibody levels about 1.5 time those of people who had no such symptoms after 1 month and at least 6 months after vaccination. In addition to those with self-reported symptoms, comparable results were found in 147 people who were objectively assessed for elevated skin temperature and increased heart rate.

The conclusion is that rather than acting as a deterrent, these symptoms should not be a deterrent but should be welcomed as evidence that the vaccine has worked.

More details are given in the report in Annals of Internal Medicine:

A hibernating little brown bat,Myotis lucifugus, infected with white-nose syndrome.

Photo credit: Jonathan Mays

A stealth fungus has decimated North American bats but scientists may be a step closer to treating white-nose syndrome

Creationism's malevolent designer seems to be in two minds about bats.

On the one hand it gives them a super-duper immune system that means they can harbour viruses like the corona viruses, one of which became SARS-CoV-2 that caused COVID-19; on the other hand, it designs a nasty fungus that is currently decimating populations of bat in North America, against which even their super-duper, intelligently [sic] designed immune system is ineffective.

The fungus, known to science as Pseudogymnoascus destructans, which causes the disease known as white-nose syndrome, is an invasive organism that uses various strategies to invade the skin of hibernating bats with deadly consequences. It was first detected in a New York cave in 2006.

Entrapment of an elephant in the quicksand of layer 5 of the upper archaeological level of the late Early Pleistocene site of Fuente Nueva-3.

Credit: Palmqvist et al., Journal of Iberian Geology (2024)

Prehistoric quicksand trap in Spain reveals doomed elephants and early scavenging behavior | Archaeology News Online Magazine

A team of archaeologists from Malaga University have uncovered the earliest evidence of ancient hominin activity in Europe - at 1.4 million years ago.

The evidence from the Fuente Nueva-3 archaeological site in Orce, southeastern Spain shows that hominins scavenged alongside giant hyenas for animals which became stuck in a quicksand trap in what is now the Guadix-Baza Depression.

The team included Professor of Paleontology Paul Palmqvist and Professor of Stratigraphy and Paleontology María Patrocinio Espigares. They showed that the site consisted of two distinct archaeological levels, an upper (UAL) and a lower (LAL) level, the latter of which contains a high density of manuports, while the UAL contains remains of megafauna such as mammoths, Mammuthus meridionalis, and many hyena coprolites, showing significant scavenging activity

Refuting Creationism - No Ancestral Couple, Not Even An Ancestral Species - All Modern Humans Are Hybrids

Reconstruction of a Neanderthal woman.

‘A history of contact’: Princeton geneticists are rewriting the narrative of Neanderthals and other ancient humans

Our understanding of our relationship with contemporaneous archaic hominins such as Neanderthals has changed over the past 25 years or so. It was once believed that, as separate species, there would have been no successful interbreeding, despite a few fossils suggesting a mixture of both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens feature, then Nobel Prize-winning Svante Pääbo's group at the Max Plank Institute analysed a Neanderthal genome and showed that modern Eurasia Homo sapiens have 2-3% Neanderthal DNA, so interbreeding must have taken place.

Since then, the same team has discovered a second extinct hominin, the Denisovans, and shown that they too interbred with Neanderthals in Eurasia and Homo sapiens in East and Southeast Asia, especially.

And now we know that Africans' too carry evidence of Neanderthal genetic ingression.

In other words, ever since Homo sapiens left Africa and moved into the territory of at least two archaic hominins, the descendants of an earlier migration out of Africa, probably Homo erectus, have behaved much like a ring species of incompletely speciated geographical subspecies where barriers to hybridization had not fully evolved.

Malevolent Designer - How A Respiratory Pathogen Manipulates Our Immune System.

A microscopic view of Haemophilus influenzae bacteria.

Image: Adobe

Respiratory bacteria ‘turns off’ immune system to survive - UQ News - The University of Queensland, Australia

Regular readers may recall my recent article explaining how bowel cancer has been cleverly 'designed' to switch off our immune system to prevent the cancer cells from being detected and attacked.

Well, it seems this same technique has been employed by the malevolent designer to make a bacterial pathogen better at making us sick when it infects the lining of the respiratory system of vulnerable people.

Or at least that is what an intellectually honest intelligent [sic] design creationist has to believe (if there is such a thing) because, in rejecting the science that shows how organism's evolve by a mindless, unintelligent natural process without the involvement of supernatural magic, and attributing it all to their putative designer, they are tacitly accepting that it also designs parasites such as these bacterial pathogens.

And we can exclude Michael J. Behe's scientifically nonsensical notions of 'genetic entropy' and 'devolution' [sic] from some assumed created initial perfection - made possible by the religious dogma of 'The Fall', because an ability that conveys an advantage to a pathogen and makes it able to produce more offspring than what went before, can't logically be described as less perfect than something worse, and of course, there is no known mechanism which would cause a detrimental mutation to increase in the species gene pool, other than riding piggyback on a mutation that conveys a greater advantage.

The location of Coro Trasito is indicated by the orange dot.

Map created using USGS ArcGIS Online Map Viewer.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0306448.g001

Early Pyrenean Neolithic groups applied species selection strategies to produce bone artefacts - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - UAB Barcelona

Because the Bronze Age mythmakers made up a tale about it, creationists believe their all-loving god committed a global genocide against all living species by flooding the world to a depth sufficient to cover the highest mountain (i.e. at least 29,000 feet, the height of Everest) about 4,000 years ago or less. Such a flood would have obliterated all signs of human civilisation on the planet and covered it with a thick layer of sediment containing the fossils of all the animals and plants jumbled together, from disconnected land-masses.

The problem with that belief is that there is evidence of human activity from long before that time, even in places like the Pyrenees between Spain and France, where archaeologists are uncovering evidence of human habitation and domestication of animals 7,000 years ago, in caves such as the Coro Trasito, located 1,548 metres above sea level, in Huesca, Spain.

Refuting Creationism - LUCA Had Evolved 4.2 Billion Years Ago And Already Suffered From Viral Parasites

A digital representation illustrating how LUCA was already under attack from viruses even at 4.2 billion years ago.

Science Graphic Design

July: LUCA | News and features | University of Bristol

Contrary to the Bible's laughable model of a 10,000-year-old universe consisting of a small flat planet with a dome over it, containing nothing that was unknown to the Bronze Age hill farmers whose best guess became part of the Hebrew creation myth, scientists at the University of Bristol have shown that the last universal common ancestor of all living organisms (LUCA) had evolved within 400 million years of Earth forming some 4.6 billion years ago.

They have calculated that LUCA was about as complex as a prokaryote, had already evolved an immune system and was engaged in an arms race with viruses.

52,000-year-old wooly mammoth skin recovered from permafrost and found that it contained fossils of ancient chromosomes.

Love Dalén/Stockholm University

First ever 3D reconstruction of 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth chromosomes thanks to serendipitously freeze-dried skin | ScienceDaily

52,000 years ago, a full 42,000 years before creationism’s putative creator god created a universe comprised of a small flat planet with a dome over it, under which there was nothing that wasn't known to Bronze Age Canaanite hill farmers, a wooly mammoth somehow contrived to die and be quickly preserved in permafrost near what is now Belaya Gora, Sakha Republic, Siberia, where it was recovered in 2018, preserved in such a condition that skin cells could be identified under a microscope.

Mammoths, of course, along with their close relatives, elephants, were unknown to the authors of the tales in the Bible which creationists think are real history and science.

A microscope image of subdermal muscle from the ancient skin shows remnants of mammoth nuclei. The new study revealed that fossils of ancient chromosomes survive in this skin sample.

Elena Kizilova/Institute of Cytology and Genetics SB RAS

Carbon dating has shown the preserved mammoth to be more than 42,000 years old and an analysis of its mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) gives a date close to 52,000 years old.

The research team co-led by Marcela Sandoval-Velasco and Juan Antonio Rodríguez of the Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark, and Olga Dudchenko and Cynthia Pérez Estrada of The Center for Genome Architecture and Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA, used STAR Methods combined with Hi-C to analyse and reconstruct the genome from the ancient DNA (aDNA) recovered from the mammoth skin.

Creationism in Crisis - UK's Most Intact Dinosaur Fossil Was Living 125 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

An artist’s impression of Comptonatus chasei.

Image credit: John Sibbick

Research reveals the most complete dinosaur discovered in the UK in a Century | University of Portsmouth

The fossil remains of a dinosaur, discovered in the cliffs of Compton Bay, Isle of Wight, England, have been shown to be a species new to science. The fossils were discovered in 2013 by the late fossil collector Nick Chase, who sadly died of cancer before his finds could be fully analysed. Nick Chase had a record of fossil discovery, including the most complete Iguanodon skull ever found, yet never had a new species named after him

That has now been rectified by retired GP and PhD student at the School of the Environment, Geography and Geosciences, University of Portsmouth, UK, Jeremy Lockwood, who helped with the dinosaur's excavation and has spent years analysing it to determine that it is a new species which he has named Comptonatus chasei. It has proven to be the most intact dinosaur ever discovered in Britain.

Together with David Martell, also of the School of the Environment, Geography and Geosciences, University of Portsmouth and Susannah Maidment of the Fossil Reptiles, Amphibians and Birds Section, Natural History Museum, London, UK, Dr Lockwood has published his findings, open access, in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. Their work is also explained in a University of Portsmouth press release:

Refuting Creationism - Extinct Giant Kangaroo Walked on All Fours - 2.5 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Imaginative AI reconstruction of a Protemnodon.

Illustration by Superinnovators x AI

July: Ancient large kangaroo moved mainly on four legs | News and features | University of Bristol

Science works because scientists, unlike religious fundamentalists, don't have fixed dogmas and doctrines they must adhere to and so are free to re-examine the evidence, reassess their conclusions and change their minds.

Unlike creationists, scientists are free to question, reassess and rethink without fear of a terrible fate awaiting them for having the temerity to question the cult dogma, or the social stigma, ostracism and in some cases threats of physical violence, that would be heaped upon a fundamentalist who questioned the basic tenets of the cult.

So, scientists are free from the sophophobia that charcterises creationism and which the cult leaders go to great lengths to inflict on their followers, and, unlike with creationism, the standing of a scientists who changes his or her mind with good reason goes up, while the social standing in creationist circles of a creationists who shows intellectual integrity and changes his or her mind will actually go down, in the prevailing anti-intellectual culture of the creationist cult!

Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Dingoes in 4,000 years

Dingo, Canis dingo

ABC Eyre Peninsula: Gary-Jon Lysaght

What were dingoes like before the European invasion? Centuries-old DNA reveals a surprising history

Just about the time creationists believe their omnibenevolent god committed global genocide in a fit of pique, humans were introducing a domestic dog to Australia, where it was to become feral and begin the slow process of allopatric speciation.

Dingoes are an interesting study of evolution in progress, demonstrating how an isolated population diverges away from the parent population over time due to different environmental selectors and genetic drift as the isolated population adapts to local environmental change.

There is also the 'founder effect' where the founder population is not a representative sample of the parent population but contains a different range of allele frequencies. Some of these may be the reason it was able to invade the new territory in the first place, so it already starts off with some advantages, which may be selected for in the new environment. This has been described as surfing on a wave of selection as the new population advances into its new territory, so changing its allele frequency further away from its parent population.

All these processes that give rise to allopatric speciation can be seen in the Australian dingoes.

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The "Rosa Rubicondior" Blog by Bill Hounslow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Tuesday, 23 July 2024

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Tuesday, 9 July 2024