How Science Works - (And Why Religion Doesn't) - Checking and Reassessing the Evidence

Scratch marks on the Rising Star Cave wall. Did Homo naledi really make them?

Homo naledi. A South African hominin with the cranial capacity of a chimpanzee.

No scientific evidence Homo naledi was advanced, News, La Trobe University

The great strength of science is the inbuilt fact-checking mechanism that is an integral part of the scientific method - a method derived from the fact that scientific opinion is always evidence-based and only ever provisional. If new evidence is found or previous evidence is shown to be not what was thought, then scientific opinion changes accordingly.

Religion's great weakness is that it is never evidence-based, so there is nothing to check and reassess. If it was, there would only be one religion and it would be a division of science.

For these reasons, science, for which the facts are a neutral referee, tends to converge on a single explanation, whilst religions tend to diverge and schism into different competing ideologies with no facts to referee the competition and no ultimate winners or truth to converge on, so we end up with about 40,000 Christian sects alone, all claiming to be the one true faith, and condemning the followers of all the others to an eternity of torment.

A case in point, so far as science is concerned, is the recent publication of a reassessment of the evidence behind the claim that the fossil hominin, Homo naledi was a culturally advanced species that made artistic patterns on the cave walls, made fire and buried their dead in prepared graves. The evidence for those claims was that the remains of three individuals were found deep in the cave system, to where it was thought they must have been carried deliberately, and were apparently buried in prepared graves, one with a stone tool close to its hand. There was also what looked like evidence of fire and fire would have been needed to light the way to carry the bodies deep into the cave system.

The finds were something of an enigma because, while having the body of a human, H. naledi had a cranial capacity nearer to that of a chimpanzee, so to have developed a relatively advanced culture with a brain that size would have been surprising. The other surprising thing is that the fossils were dated to around 300,000 years ago, which would have made it contemporaneous with much more advanced hominins such as H. erectus and even early H. sapiens. That was a problem for theories of human evolution that had the savannahs of East and South Africa as the environment in which evolving humans had evolved a large brain, and yet here was H. naledi in the same environment with a brain the size not much larger than that of the hominin-chimpanzee common ancestor.

Creationism in Crisis - What Early Humans Were Doing 1-2 Million Years Before The Mythical 'Creation Week'

Sunrise over the Serengeti - where humans evolved, but did we need grasslands to spread into Eurasia?

Image: Mostphotos

A reconstruction of the face of an adult female Homo erectus, as seen on display in the Hall of Human Origins in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. It was based on fossils KNM-ER 3733 and 992. The first hominins out of Africa may have inhabited forests.

Reconstruction by John Gurche.

New research exposes humans’ early ecological versatility | University of Helsinki

Most of the abilities that enabled humans to spread across the world and occupy so many different habitats, from grasslands, forests, Arctic tundra and the icy wastes of Greenland, Northern Canada and Alaska are the result of our evolution on the savannah of East Africa in that long period of history before the mythical 'Creation Week' when creationists think the universe was created. In this case, 1-2 million years before humans and Earth were created according to the creation myths of the Abrahamic religions.

And, because we evolved as a savannah species, it has been assumed that the earliest humans to migrate out of Africa would have migrated along grassland corridors and eventually up into the steppes of Central Asia. But new research by anthropologists at Helsinki University, Finland, led by Tegan I. F. Foister, is casting doubt on that assumption. They argue that human cultural plasticity enabled us to exploit and expand different ecological niches. In effect, we were 'generalist-specialists', which means we could adapt to a new environment, and then quickly become specialist at living in it.

The team have published their findings in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology and explain their work on a news release from Helsinki University:

The origins of human genus have long been associated with savannah and grassland environments of Africa. Due to this association, it was thought that the first human dispersal into Eurasia followed grassy corridors leading from Africa to Asia and to Europe. This link between humans and savannah-grasslands has been considered so strong that it delayed the appearance of early humans in Europe compared to Asia, as open grassy environments appeared in Europe later than in Asia. According to this view, early humans were ecologically clearly less versatile than our own species, Homo sapiens, as we have colonized almost all terrestrial environments on the planet.

“But that’s clearly not the whole story” says the lead author Tegan Foister, a doctoral researcher in the Hominin Ecology group at the University of Helsinki. “Because we knew of some studies suggesting that early humans were living in environments other than savannah-grassland, we thought that it would be interesting to do a more systematic investigation on the environments humans are known to have occupied during this crucial time period”.

The research published in Evolutionary Anthropology is a systematic review of 121 previously published reconstructions of early human habitats and it revealed that humans, when dispersing out of Africa for the first time, started to occupy a diverse set of environments from grasslands to forests.

“We have long associated early humans with savannah-like environments outside of the African continent. However, when the research published over the past two decades is considered together, it shows humans inhabiting diverse environments early in the evolution of the genus Homo. Already one million years ago humans in Europe were occupying fully forested environments”. Foister continues.

Although the analysis shows that grasslands and savannahs were important components of early human habitats, it places humans into a wide spectrum of environments, and in many cases environments with varied vegetation composition. This suggests that commonly held beliefs about early humans are not entirely correct: Humans did not have that strict requirements for their habitats and they seem to have been ecologically more versatile than previously assumed.

The study also indicated regional differences in human habitat characteristics. The grasslands and savannahs show the highest prevalence among African habitats, whereas forested habitats were more prominent in Eurasia making the range of different habitats wider in Eurasia. This suggests a possibility that the first human range expansion into Eurasia was accompanied and potentially even enabled by the expansion of human ecological niche.

The research is part of University of Helsinki and Kone Foundation funded project that investigates the evolution of the human niche over the past 2 million years. Although the present study focuses on the early humans, its findings are important also to the understanding of the origins of uniquely wide niche of our own species Homo sapiens.

Co-author Miikka Tallavaara, leader of the project and the Hominin Ecology group, says: “The ability of Homo sapiens to occupy most of the terrestrial ecosystems has enabled our ecological dominance and triggered the current biodiversity crisis. Our finding that human species in the Early Pleistocene were also able to thrive in multiple environment types provides an exciting target for future research into the evolutionary origins of the human plasticity and ecological success.”

More technical detail is provided in the Abstract and Introduction to the team's open access paper in Evolutionary Anthropology:

Abstract

To understand the ecological dominance of Homo sapiens, we need to investigate the origins of the plasticity that has enabled our colonization of the planet. We can approach this by exploring the variability of habitats to which different hominin populations have adapted over time. In this article, we draw upon and synthesize the current research on habitats of genus Homo during the early Pleistocene. We examined 121 published environmental reconstructions from 74 early Pleistocene sites or site phases to assess the balance of arguments in the research community. We found that, while grasslands and savannahs were prominent features of Homo habitats in the early Pleistocene, current research does not place early Pleistocene Homo, in any single environmental type, but in a wide variety of environments, ranging from open grasslands to forests. Our analysis also suggests that the first known dispersal of Homo out of Africa was accompanied by niche expansion.

1 INTRODUCTION

Our own species, Homo sapiens, has expanded globally to dominate an exceptionally diverse range of ecological settings. This has often happened at the cost of other species, leading to the present biodiversity crisis.^{1, 2} To understand the long-term causes of this, it is necessary to investigate the trait thought to have enabled this rapid expansion—plasticity.³ The degree to which the ecological plasticity displayed by H. sapiens is unique compared to other species of the genus Homo is increasingly studied.^{4, 5, 6} An emerging concept in this research is the generalist-specialist niche.^{4, 7} This term refers to the specific plasticity of H. sapiens and how it allowed the development of highly specialized adaptations to exploit resources across a wide range of different ecosystems.⁶ Evidence on the range of suitable habitats earlier H. species occupied^{8, 9, 10} may provide important insights into the origins of the plasticity which has enabled H. sapiens to adopt its generalist-specialist strategy and colonize almost all environments on the planet.

Here we apply a novel approach to review and synthesize published reconstructions of the environmental context of early Pleistocene humans to explore the current state of the research regarding the variability in suitable environmental conditions. We focus on sites dated to between ∼2.0 and 0.8 Ma. When using the term human, we are referring to any member of the genus Homo. In many cases, human presence is indicated just by archaeological remains, making species identification impossible. However, in this period the human species occupying this site can often be treated as Homo erectus sensu lato. We nevertheless remain agnostic about the taxonomy of Homo in the early Pleistocene and operate at the genus level.

Figure 1.

A map with points indicating the geographic distribution of sites for which environmental reconstructions were extracted from the corpus. Many of the points represent several individual locations, for example in Nihewan, Northern China, what appears as one point is six sites within our data (Supporting Information Appendix and Table 1). The coloring of points corresponds with regions used in the analysis: Africa (Red), Asia (Purple), Europe (Blue), Levant, and Caucasus (Green).

Foister, T. I. F., Žliobaitė, I., Wilson, O. E., Fortelius, M., Tallavaara, M.
Homo heterogenus: variability in early Pleistocene Homo environments.
Evolutionary Anthropology. 2023; 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.22005

Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Creationists will tie themselves into knots to explain these finding, invoking 'flawed' dating, 'changing radioactive decay rates', Satanic conspiracy theories and forged fossil evidence, but the fact will remain that 99.97% of Earth's history, and several million years of hominin history such as this paper reveals, occurred in that vast expanse of time before they think the Universe was created.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Favourite Pestilential Sadist is Fighting Back Against Medical Science

Anopheles stephensi, spreading fast in Africa

Jim Gathany, Public domain
via Wikimedia Commons

Anopheles stephensi, already reached Ghana

First evidence of how the Asian malaria mosquito is spreading drug-resistant malaria in Africa - Lancaster University

You can never write Creationism's favourite sadist off in its battle to keep on killing children with its special tool, malaria. Just when you think medical science has it on the run and it looks possible that we could eradicate malaria like we did its other plaything, smallpox, it performs another twist of the arms race and redesigns the plasmodium parasite or a mosquito vector so they can evade our best efforts to protect children. And, pulling out all the stops, in this case, it's done both.

That's if you subscribe to the childish myth of a magic invisible designer creating all living things of course.

For normal people with a thinking ability above that of a slow 10-year-old, however, what we are seeing is an example of evolution by natural selection in response to an environment in which there are anti-malarial drugs and insecticides that kill mosquitoes.

Fact:
According to the WHO, there were an estimated 247 million cases of malaria worldwide in 2021 with over 600,000 deaths, mostly in Africa. Children under 5 accounted for about 80% of all malaria deaths in the region.

Before creationists start trying to cover their embarrassment, and absolve their god of blame by citing something called 'Sin', which apparently changed from a verb to a noun, materialised as an entity capable of operating outside the control of their supposedly omnipotent god and began creating living things too, may I remind them of their intelligent [sic] design guru, Michael J Behe's contribution to this debate.

Behe wrote one of their sacred books, The Edge of Evolution in which he used faulty logic and bad maths to try to prove that malarial resistance in plasmodium falciparum was intelligently designed, in order to appeal to his largely scientifically illiterate and gullible target readership. His 'argument' was destroyed by biologist Kenneth Miller however, when he pointed out that Behe had assumed in his maths that several mutations had to occur in sequence in a single cell as a single event - something that no evolutionary biologist would ever suggest - an argument that appears to have gone way over the heads of Behe's adoring readership.

Behe's faulty logic was in presenting evolution as something so highly unlikely that no evolutionary biologist would offer it as the mechanism by which evolution happens, then base his maths on that faulty logic and, voila! dutifully show that it is so highly unlikely that it probably didn't happen - so God did it!

Apparently, if you start off with a mechanism for evolution that no biologist in their right mind would ever suggest, you can easily show that it couldn't happen. Creationists regard this as 'creation science'!

But, true to form, Behe has now saddled creationists with the problem of blaming 'Sin' for something that he says was created by their putative intelligent [sic] designer, but then believing two mutually exclusive things simultaneously has never been a problem for creationists.

And that makes it all the more difficult for creationists to wave aside the evidence of malevolent intent, if we stick to the creationist superstition for a moment, in the news published recently in Nature Medicine that an insecticide-resistant species of mosquito Anopheles stephensi, capable of spreading drug and diagnostic-resistant strains of Plasmodium falciparum, has spread from Asia to Africa via the Horn of Africa and has already caused a surge in cases of malaria in Ethiopia, and this species is spreading at a fast rate never before recorded for a mosquito, having already reached Ghana in Northwest Africa. The finding, by an international team which includes Dr Luigi Sedda, from the Lancaster Ecology and Epidemiology Group at Lancaster University Medical School, Lancaster, UK, is outlined in a news release from Lancaster University:

Research by Lancaster University has led to the discovery of the role played by the Asian malaria mosquito (Anopheles stephensi) in the spread of drug and diagnosis-resistant malaria in Africa. Malaria is caused by a parasite which is spread by the bite of blood-sucking mosquitoes. According to the WHO, there were an estimated 247 million cases of malaria worldwide in 2021 with over 600,000 deaths, mostly in Africa. Children under 5 accounted for about 80% of all malaria deaths in the region.

Following its first detection in Djibouti in 2012, the Asian malaria mosquito Anopheles stephensi spread to the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea) and beyond (Yemen, Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana) at a speed unknown before for similar species.

People in households/dormitories with An. stephensi positivity had a 270% higher risk of malaria infection than those in households/dormitories where An. stephensi was not detected.

In addition, two other biological threats for the control of malaria were identified: drug resistance and diagnostic resistance of the parasite.

Dr Luigi Sedda, from the Lancaster Ecology and Epidemiology Group at Lancaster Medical School, is a joint first author on the paper which is published in Nature Medicine.

This is a very important finding. The mosquito that has spread in the Horn of Africa from Asia drove a major urban malaria outbreak in Ethiopia. An. stephensi is posing important public health concerns due to the increase in geographical presence, the capacity to persist throughout the year and to resist current insecticides, and to transmit drug and diagnostic resistant parasites.

The epidemiological characteristics of An. stephensi driven malaria can challenge the expectations for the new malaria vaccines to reduce the burden of malaria disease and deaths in Africa, the continent that was already highly hit by malaria and where successes in malaria reduction are currently stalled.

Dr Luigi Sedda, co-first author
Lancaster Ecology and Epidemiology Group,
Lancaster Medical School, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK.

A water storage facility in a village in Ethiopia, a structure targeted by Anopheles stephensi

The capacity of Anopheles stephensi to use manmade water storage containers which are abundant in rapidly expanding African urban settings, coupled with its unique ecology, behavioural plasticity and resistance to major insecticides, makes it unamenable to conventional mosquito control tools. This latest evidence can change the prospects of malaria control and elimination in the face of any future intervention that ignores the presence of this invasive species.

The study was led by the Armauer Hansen Research Institute in Ethiopia with the collaboration of Lancaster University (UK), the Adama Science and Technology University (Ethiopia); University of California, San Francisco (USA); The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (UK); Radboudumc University Medical Center (The Netherlands); U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative (USA) and the Federal Ministry of Health (Ethiopia).

Well, you have to hand it to creationism's divine malevolence! Faced with the prospect of losing one of its best tools for killing innocent children and greatly increasing the suffering in the world, it has hit back hard and fast with a newly redesigned super mosquito to spread its newly-redesigned malaria parasites.

Of course, that's if you don't accept that evolution by natural selection is quite capable of producing this sort of response to anti-mosquito insecticides and anti-malaria drugs by the well-known evolutionary process biologists know as an evolutionary arms race - the antithesis of intelligent design.

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Create Evolutionary Arms Races In a Laboratory

In laboratory flasks containing just two teaspoons of media, scientists document how rapid adaptation between bacteria and viruses produce complex ecological networks.

Credit: Josh Borin,
UC San Diego

A typical E. coli phage virus.

Bacteria-Virus Arms Race Provides Rare Window into Rapid and Complex Evolution

Creationists hate evolutionary arms races because they can't be sensibly explained in terms of intelligent design by a single omnipotent, omniscient designer and for a creationist, any other sort of designer(s) would be a serious blasphemy that would see them swiftly ejected from their cult and cast into outer darkness, socially speaking.

And yet evolutionary arms races are an integral part of evolution, probably accounting for more biodiversity than sex selection and environmental change. Evolutionary arms races are the inevitable result of the fact that living things eat other living things, either as parasite or as predators, so there are two ways an organism in a parasite-host or predator-prey relationship can gain an advantage over others of its species: it can either be a more successful parasite/predator or it can be better at avoiding being parasitised or eaten. Either scenario will lead to more offspring carrying the genes for greater success so they will increase in the species gene pool and the whole population will evolve in that direction, creating selection pressure on the other member of the relationship to respond appropriately.

This is all the result of natural selection at works, with no plan and no sentience needed.

It should not be beyond the wit of an average 10-year-old to comprehend that unless childhood brainwashing and theophobic psychosis has prevented rational thinking.

of course, in a natural setting, this all happens relatively slowly in small increments over time, so the evolutionary changes might not be observable for several generations.

So, a group of researchers from UC San Diego, Georgia Institute of Technology and Maryland University, have found a way to speed up the process in laboratory flasks by using small quantities of bacteria and the bacterial parasites, bacteriophage viruses, usually simply called phage viruses.

The news release from UC San Diego explains the research and its significance:

Creationism in Crisis - Guess What Creationist's Favourite Fruitloop Designer Has Designed Now! - Shrimps That Live in Trees!

A new species of terrestrial shrimp, found in the soil and in the trees of the Cyclops Mountains.

Credit: Expedition Cyclops.

Newly-discovered tree-dwelling shrimp

Credit: Expedition Cyclops.

Found at last: bizarre, egg-laying mammal finally rediscovered after 60 years | University of Oxford

In my last blog post, I wrote about a successful expedition to the Cyclops Mountains on the north coast of Indonesian New Guinea to look for the rare Attenborough's long-beaked echidna, Zaglossus attenboroughi and mentioned almost in passing that the team of scientists discovered, amongst lots of insects and other arthropods previously unknown to science, a shrimp that lives in the trees in the tropical rain forest that covers the remote mountains.

I'll repeat that! They discovered a species of shrimp that lives in the trees!

If anything, this is even more ludicrous than the fish and plants that creationists must believe were designed to live in deserts that are notoriously short of water.

Shrimps are not noted for their arboreal agility, nor for their ability to live for more than a few minutes out of water for that matter, but, if you're a creationist who believes all living things are created by an invisible magic creator, you have to believe that this creator either looked at trees in the Cyclops Mountains and concluded that they could be improved by having shrimps living in them, or, feeling a need to create another shrimp, decided the best place to put it was in the trees in a tropical rain forest in New Guinea.

Creationism in Crisis - An Ancient 'Transitional' Species Rediscovered - An Egg-Laying Mammal

Attenborough's long-beaked echidna
photographed in the Cyclops Mountains of Indonesia's Papua Province.

Attenborough's long-beaked echidna, Zaglossus attenboroughi

Found at last: bizarre, egg-laying mammal finally rediscovered after 60 years | University of Oxford

Creationists are always clamouring for evidence of 'transitional' species or fossils, only to dismiss them as 'fully-formed species' so 'not transitional'. What they're demanding is that we show them something that no biologist ever claimed existed - a fossil of something that was half one species and half another - a croccoduck or a half human-half chimpanzee fossil, in other words evidence of their childish parody of evolution.

Instead, what we have is countless examples of species with archaic features and stem species showing characteristics of more primitive taxons and later species that would evolve from it. In fact, every fossil ever found is 'transitional' between its parent generation and its descendant population - a fact only understandable by those with a grasp of what evolution is and how it works over time.

And one such group of animals showing archaic features that show the transition from egg-laying reptiles and the mammals that evolved from them are the monotremes, egg-laying mammals such as the platypus and echidnas - vertebrates that are warm-blooded, have fur and feed their young on milk secreted by special glands on the female's body.

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

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

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

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

Male human head louse, Pediculus humanus capitis

Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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

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

Which begs the questions, why would an omnibenevolent designer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

T-cells surrounding a cancer cell

JUAN GARTNER / Getty Images

Preventing the Exhaustion of T Cells - Universität Würzburg News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: Provided by Erica Barlow.
All Rights Reserved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

North Atlantic Ringed Seal

The Kangia Ringed Seal of Greenland's Ilulissat Icefjord

The ringed seals in Ilulissat Icefjord, Greenland, are special

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

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

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

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

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)

Pinpointing HIV immune response

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nymph

Adult

Asian longhorned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis

Asian longhorned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis, (ventral view)

Photo: Risa Pesapane

An exotic tick that can kill cattle is spreading across Ohio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heming Zhang

Yanliaomyzon ingensdentes (artist's impression)

Heming Zhang

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minjinia turgenensis, evolved before sharks.

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

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

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

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

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