Refuting Creationism - How 70% of the Mediterranean Sea Was Lost 5.5 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Artistic representation of the Gibraltar sill rupture at the end of the Messinian Salinity Crisis. In the final moments of this crisis, the level of the Mediterranean Sea was around 1 km lower than that of the Atlantic Ocean.

© Pibernat & Garcia-Castellanos

How 70% of the Mediterranean Sea was lost 5.5 million years ago | CNRS

The two accumulation phases of the Mediterranean salt layer during the Messinian Salinity Crisis.
In the first phase, salt accumulated in a Mediterranean Basin filled with brine; in the second phase, salt accumulated in a Mediterranean completely isolated from the Atlantic Ocean, as a result of the significant drop in sea level in the western and eastern Mediterranean sub-basins.

© Giovanni Aloisi

Despite living not a stone's throw from it, the authors of Genesis appear to have known next to nothing about the Mediterranean, and, having guessed that Earth was created about 4,000 earlier they blundered on with their preposterous, counterfactual mythology. Had they been away of real history they might have made a better fist of it, but there was no way they could have known that about 5.5 million years earlier there was no sea to speak of; instead there was a salt-filled depression due to what is now called, The Messinian Salinity Crisis.

This event was caused by land rising up under the straights of Gibraltar restricting inflow from the Atlantic and eventually closing it altogether, and, as water levels fell, the ridge between Sicily and the North African coast formed another barrier, effectively dividing the Mediterranean into two seas.

New Book - The Failure Of Creationism: The Theory That New Was

The Failure of the Wedge Strategy

AI generated image (ChatGPT4o)

While writing my previous book, Refuting Creationism: Why Creationism Fails In Both Its Science and Its Theology I realised what a monumental failure the creationist movement, in particular the Discovery Institute's 'Wedge Strategy', had been.

Just about every paper published in the fields of biology, palaeontology, cosmology and archaeology refuted just about every claim on which creationism rests, whether the claims of a young earth with the YEC obsession with a global flood, the supposed absence of 'transitional fossils', the proclaimed 'impossibility of 'life' or genetic information arising without a magic creator', or Michael J Behe's 'irreducible complexity'.

None of them have garnered the slightest degree of support on the scientific community and it holds as true today as it did When Behe was forced to admit under oath in the Kitzmiller case, "...there are no peer reviewed articles 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."

Despite the regular repeated claims by creationists that the Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis, about to be overthrown in scientific circles by Intelligent design theory, there is not the slightest indication of that happening. False witnessing remains the single most important tactic of the creationist movement as it seeks to fool ignorant people of the scientific validity of the childish superstition. Scientific support for Darwinian evolution remains as strong today as it was in 1991 when the Discovery Institute launched its campaign to confuse and misinform public and scientific opinion about the strength of the evidence for the TOE and the claimed 'gaps' and 'defects' in the theory.

The so-called 'controversy' was never anything of the sort and attempt to 'teach the controversy' and introduce Christian fundamentalism into public school science classes disguised as a legitimate science have been met with barrage of condemnations and detailed rebuttals from major science professional bodies and teaching estabishments.

The only success the Discovery Institute can claim, is in its campaign to confuse American public opinion about the level of support for creationism in biomedical science circles. While some 98-99% of biomedical scientists fully accept the TOE as the only explanation for humans in their modern form, American public opinion believes only some 66% do and that there is a debate to be had.

This new book, The Failure of Creationism: The Theory That Never Was, is an exposé of that failure with examples of recent scientific papers that implicitly refute creationism and appendices containing the absurd claims by creationists of the TOE imminent demise, the published opposition to teaching creationism in science classes by major scientific and educational bodies and the Discovery Institute's politically subversive 'Wedge Strategy'.

Refuting Creationism - Scientists Discover What Caused Earth's Climate Cycle To Change A million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Rig used for obtaining core samples of seabed sediment

The pattern of glaciation and warmer spells changed about 1,000,000 years ago.

Deep ocean clues to a million-year-old Ice Age puzzle revealed in new study – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Like almost all of Earth's history, a sudden change in the cyclic pattern of climate change occurred in that long, pre-Creation period. To be precise, 700,000 to 1 million years ago the pattern of glaciation and interglacial warm spells changed from a 41,000 year cycle, due to changes in the degree of tilt in Earth's rotation (axial precession), to one of about 100,000 years with no obvious change in axial precession or external causes such as solar radiation. This is known to climatologists and geologists as the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT)

Given the conviction of creationists that their putative designer god created Earth perfectly tuned for them to live on, it will probably be disturbing to learn that Earth's pattern of climate can change radically over the long term, and not caused by anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases but by perfectly natural processes that don't need the interference of a magic deity to explain them. On top of this all happening before they believe Earth was created out of nothing as a small flat planet with a dome over it, there is much here for creationists to ignore and for their cult to lie about.

Refuting Creationism - How The Grand Canyon Reveals Life On Earth 540 Million Years Before 'Creation Week',

Professor Carol Dehler samples the 500-million-year-old Bright Angel Formation in the Grand Canyon.

Photo: UNM/Laura Crossey

The Grand Canyon's Horseshoe Bend, where creationisst believe a raging torrent of flood water did a 180 degree turn and headed back the way it came.

USU Geologist, Colleagues Rewrite Textbooks With New Insights From Bottom of the Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon often features in creationist disinformation websites because it needs to be explained away in terms of a history of Earth lasting only some 6-10,000 years and because it is easy to fool people who want to be fooled that it is somehow evidence if a global flood, and in particular how the water in the alleged flood ran away. Cult frauds also pretend the different rock layers in the canyon wall can all be explained in terms of sediment deposited during their god's supposed genocidal flood.

The truth, as usual with creationist claims, is nothing like the childish myth they like to pretend is real history. In fact, the walls of the Grand Canyon are a record of plate tectonics and climate change over hundreds of millions of years and mesh completely with what is known of Earth's history from other sources.

An indication of how creationists cult leaders are terrified of the information in the walls of the Grand Canyon, can be gauged from the notorious creationist purveyor of disinformation, Andrew Snelling's article on the creationists disinformation site, Answers in Genesis and the lengths he went to to obtain sample without disclosing exactly where he got them from, as related in this article in science. Snelling argued that it discriminated against his religion to require him to provide GPS coordinates of his samples! Clearly, Snelling believes his religion requires his 'science' to lack precision and reproducibility in case someone else tried to replicate his measurements and finds his to be bogus.

Snelling was subsequently given permission to collect samples under supervision and then wrote up his findings to try to explain away the fact that his findings didn't conform to his YEC preconceptions. His excuses include the creationists go-to excuse - the unsubstantiated claim that the uniformly old age of the rock he obtained must be because radioactive decay rates used to be different by several orders of magnitude!
One of Snellings stated objectives was to prove that the deformed Tapeats sandstone deposits, which he assures his readers are not fractured, despite the fact that photographs show fractures, were soft when deformed. He mentions this early in his article but then quietly drops the subject, presumably because his findings contradict his claim.

His findings are soundly refuted here.

Clearly, it is important to creationist cult leaders that their dupes are badly misinformed about the date of the rocks in the walls of the Grand Canyon, and it is obvious why, as this paper by geologists from Utah State University, together with colleagues from the University of New Mexico, Boise State University, Idaho, the University of Las Vegas, Nevada and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Denver, Colorado, shows. The rocks at the bottom of the canyon are from the Cambrian, 540 million years before creationists dogma says Earth was made from nothing by magic.

Other rocks map exactly onto what is known of changes in sea level and climate due to plate tectonics and how the canyon itself was carved into those strata is fully explainable in terms of erosion by a river flowing over a river bed that was rising slowly due to forces beneath Earth's crust over a period of millions of years.

Perhaps the most embarrassing thing for creationists is the thing they normally avoid like the plague - the famous Horseshoe bend, which requires their credulous dupes to believe a raging torrent of water, for no apparent reason, changed direction by over 180 degrees and headed back the way it came, when raging torrents of water are notoriously uni-directional.

And why on Earth anyone would imagine the water from a global flood would flow through a canyon in the middle of North America into the Pacific Ocean is anyone's guess and not something Andrew Snelling or any other creationist apologist has ever attempted to explain, simply leaving it to their parochial and culturally chauvinistic dupes to assume that anything important that happened in world history must have happened in the USA.

Malevolent Designer News - How The SARS-CoV-2 Virus Steals Proteins From Our Immune System To Protect Itself

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ChatGPT4o

AI-Generated depiction of SARS-CoV-2 virus coated in stolen proteins.

ChatGPT4o

SARS-CoV-2 “steals” our proteins to protect itself from the immune system

Although COVD-19 has been mostly brought under control by medical science and the vaccination campaign, it still kills thousands of people a year, but nowhere near the volume of deaths during the initial wave when world-wide health services came close to collapse and economies were on the point of ruin.

But there is still much to learn about why it was so virulent and successful.

To an admirer of creationism’s divine malevolence it must have seemed like a triumph of design, as it filled hospitals, killed millions and wrecked economies, helped by its supporters in the evangelical Christian churches who opposed measures to mitigate the worse effect of the virus, and then opposed the vaccination campaign with lies, scare tactics and the most infantile conspiracy theories imaginable, to help ensure the virus got to as many people as possible.

Now, a team of researcher from the Medical University of Vienna together with colleagues from the Medical University of Innsbruck have discovered how the virus protects itself from the immune system creationists believe their putative intelligent designer designed to protect us from the virus’s and other pathogens it designs to make us sick, would grace the pages of another 'intelligent design' polemic by Michael J. Behe and his Deception Institute. It depends on several components of a system being present in a classic 'irreducibly complex' system that creationists wave around as 'proof' that the locally-popular creator god is real because they can't understand how it could have evolved.

Refuting Creationism - What Did The Denisovans Ever Do For Us?

Denisova Cave

By Демин Алексей Барнаул - Own work,
CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Denisovan Girl Reconstruction (Smithsonian)

Artwork by Mayaan Harel, Mayaan Visuals.

New insights into the Denisovans – the new hominin group that interbred with modern day humans - News & Events | Trinity College Dublin

In marked contrast to the childish creationist notion of a single founder couple being magically created without ancestors 6-10,000 years ago, evidence is growing that one ancestral species that contributes some of its DNA to modern non-African humans, the Denisovans, were once widespread especially in Southeast Asia and may have reached South America, or at least people carrying some Denisovan DNA may have done, but not via the traditional route - Siberia, Beringia and Alaska - followed by later Homo sapiens.

My understanding is that they and Neanderthals were most likely direct descendants of H. erectus that migrated out of Africa some 2 million years ago and gave rise to the Denisovans in Eastern Eurasia and Neanderthals in Western Eurasia. These two then interbreed with the H. sapiens migrants as they came up out of Africa and spread throughout Eurasia and down to Melanesia, Austronesia and Oceania.

So, rather than a single ancestral couple magically created out of dirt, without ancestors, as creationists believe, modern non-African humans don't have an ancestral couple, they don't even have a single ancestral species but are the result of hybridization between at least three ancestral species.

There is also evidence, according to two researchers from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, that there may have been several regional populations of Denisovans, each of which contributed to the Homo sapiens genome at different times. As with other hominin species, they were diversifying as they spread in what may have been the beginnings of classical allopatric speciation.

The Denisovan DNA that was retained by H. sapiens as they migrated into the different environments in Asia was that which gave them an advantage, such as the ability to survive in the low oxygen partial pressure of the Tibetan Plateau - something that the Tibetans have inherited - immunity to certain endemic pathogens and an improved ability to keep their body temperature up during cold weather by burning stored body fats - something that Innuits have inherited.

Refuting Creationism - How Bird's and Bat's Wings Evolved

Wing of a blue roller, Albrecht Dürer, 1512

Wikipedia (Public Domain) Link

Unlike birds, the evolution of bats’ wings and legs is tightly coupled, which may have prevented them from filling as many ecological niches as birds.

Jason Koski/Cornell University

Bats’ and birds’ evolutionary paths are vastly different | Cornell Chronicle

Unlike an intelligent designer, the process of evolution can't go back to basic and start again. It is normally an additive process that has no control over what it has to work with and simply refines and improves on what is there. That's not to say new structures can't evolve but they do so by enlarging or remodelling something that was already there - the membrane of a bat's wing, for example is the webbing that exists in the tetrapod embryo between the fingers and toes, while the feathers of a bird's wing are highly modified scales. Both those structures evolved out of tissues that were already there. It would have been impossible for a bat to grow wing feathers instead of a membrane, for example, because the earliest mammals had lost their scales and evolved fur.

But of course, that would not have been a problem for an omnipotent intelligent designer who, having designed one wing would not need to set about designing another way to do the same thing.

So, constrained as evolution was by what it could use, it's not really surprising that birds and bats evolved on two different trajectories, with the only thing in common being flight (and of course the basic vertebrate skeletal body plan).

Unintelligent Design - How Evolution Rescued an Unintelligent Heath-Robinson Design Blunder

A WashU researcher hand pollinates Arabidopsis.

Photo: Joe Angeles/WashU

How plants evolved multiple ways to override genetic instructions - The Source - Washington University in St. Louis

The thing about evolution that distinguishes it from intelligent design is that evolution is utilitarian. It settles for something that works better than what preceded it, which is different from designing a perfect solution to a problem. Near enough is good enough because anything which is an improvement gets pushed up the frequency listing in the gene pool. So, organisms over time have accumulated sub-optimal systems that sometimes fail and cause other problems.

One of those systems is the way DNA is replicated - which is so error prone that error correction mechanisms have evolved over time, but they don't always work either, so we have the phenomenon of the 'jumping genes' that get inserted in the wrong place in the genome, sometime in the middle of a functional gene or in a control section adjacent to a functional gene, causing genetic defects.

So, in the best Heath-Robinson approach to design, rather than abandoning that design and starting again, the way any intelligent designer would do, another layer of complexity is needed to try to mitigate the occasion when the system fails.

So, what organisms have evolved over the years is a process for neutralising these 'jumping genes' by attaching methyl groups to one of the bases which prevents it being transcribed. This is a part of the epigenetic system by which the specialised cells of multicellular organisms turn of unwanted genes and only allow the genes for their speciality to be active - a layer of complexity needed because the way cells replicate was inherited from their single-celled ancestors where the whole genome needs to be included in every daughter cell.

Animals, such as mammals have two enzymes which attach this methyl group depending on the DNA 'context', but plants have multiple enzymes for doing the same thing. The question is why do plants need these multiple enzymes?

Refuting Creationism - How Eggs Evolved Hundred of Millions of Years Before Chickens

A cell of the ichthyosporean C. perkinsii showing distinct signs of polarity, with clear cortical localization of the nucleus before the first cleavage. Microtubules are shown in magenta, DNA in blue, and the nuclear envelope in yellow.

© DudinLab

Chromosphaera perkinsii resembles the early stages of animal embryo development during its multicellular life stage

DudinLab

The egg or the chicken? An ancient unicellular says egg! - Medias - UNIGE

Scientists believe they may have cracked the chicken and egg 'problem' that creationists have been fooled into thinking is a killer problem for the Theory of Evolution. With their child-like understanding of evolution, creationists can't imagine how species emerge over time from earlier species by a process of evolution and think that their mythical magic creation without ancestors is actually what happens, or at least what evolutionary biologists think happens. So, they imagine explaining how the first chicken hatched from the first egg before there was a chicken to lay it, is an insurmountable problem.

In fact, of course there never was a first chicken just as there never was a first human, and eggs are simply a phase in the life cycle of, in this case, chickens, so hens' eggs are chickens just as much so as adult hens are. The ancestral species that the Southeast Asian jungle fowl evolved from had been laying eggs ever since they diverged from the egg-laying avian dinosaurs that had evolved from the egg-laying theropod dinosaurs, etc, etc, back to the egg-laying tunicates and chordates in the Cambrian and their egg-laying ancestors...

Common Origins - Marmoset and Human Brain Development

Common marmoset, Callithrix jacchus

Peterwchen, CC BY-SA 4.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

As in humans, infants of common marmosets interact with several caregivers from birth and are thus exposed to intensive social interaction.

Image: Judith Burkart/UZH

Brain Development Marmosets | | UZH

Creationists like to pretend there is nothing in common between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom because humans were magically created as the special creation of a god who made all the 'lower' animals for our use, then gave us dominion over everything. This makes creationists feel really important.

The truth however is that we have very much in common with other animals and particularly with the species to which we are most closely relates and with whom we share the most recent common ancestor as we and they evolved and diversified over the same period of time to arrive at our present state.

This is reflected in the nested hierarchies into which the different branches of the evolutionary tree can be arranged in, anatomy, physiology and DNA and in the way our bodies develop through embryology and continued into childhood.


And yet creationists insist we are not only a different species, but a different 'kind' of animal, even a different category of life altogether, even though none of the difference they insist apply to different taxons as evidence of evolution apply to humans in respect of the other great apes.

The common marmoset, Callithrix jacchus, and their evolutionary relationship to humans. The common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) is a small primate species native to the forests and scrublands of northeastern Brazil. Known for its expressive face, tufted ears, and squirrel-sized body, it’s a popular species for scientific research, primarily because it shares some interesting genetic and behavioural traits with humans. Here’s an overview of its characteristics, behaviour, and evolutionary relationship with humans.

Physical Characteristics

• Size: Common marmosets are small, weighing only about 300-400 grams, with a body length of 7-10 inches (18-25 cm) and a long, bushy tail.
• Appearance: They have a distinctive look with white ear tufts, a small face, and wide eyes. Their fur is mostly brownish-grey with a mix of white and black, allowing them to blend into their arboreal habitat.
• Hands and Feet: Like other New World monkeys, they have claws on most fingers (rather than flat nails like humans), which helps them cling to trees.

Habitat and Diet

• Environment: Marmosets thrive in forests, especially in areas with dense foliage where they can find food and avoid predators. They’re highly adaptable and can be found in both natural and urbanized settings in Brazil.
• Diet: They’re omnivores, feeding on tree sap, insects, fruits, and small animals. They use their specialized incisor teeth to gouge tree bark and access sap, which is a key component of their diet.

Social Structure and Behaviour

• Social Groups: Marmosets live in family groups typically led by a dominant pair. Groups consist of 5-15 individuals, often including multiple generations, with cooperative care of young by both parents and other group members.
• Communication: Marmosets are highly social and communicate through vocalizations, scents, and body language. They produce different calls depending on the context, and some sounds are ultrasonic, beyond human hearing range.
• Reproduction: These primates have a unique reproductive system, where dominant females can suppress the reproduction of other females in the group. They often give birth to twins, and group members assist in raising the young, a rare behaviour in mammals that echoes human familial cooperation.

Relationship to Humans

Marmosets belong to the infraorder Simiiformes, which includes all monkeys and apes, meaning they’re more distantly related to humans than other primates like chimpanzees and gorillas, who are part of the hominoid lineage. However, they still share significant genetic similarities with humans—about 92% of their DNA. They’re one of the smallest primates often studied for insights into human aging, neurological diseases, and genetics because of several interesting parallels:

• Brain and Behaviour: While their brains are much smaller than humans', they share many structural and functional aspects, including similar regions that govern emotions, memory, and sensory processing.
• Lifespan and Aging: Marmosets age quickly for a primate, with a lifespan of around 12-16 years. They exhibit aging patterns similar to humans, including changes in the immune system, body mass, and cognitive abilities, which is valuable in studying aging processes.
• Social and Parenting Behaviours: Cooperative parenting and close social bonds within groups mirror certain aspects of human social structures.

Conservation Status

The common marmoset is currently listed as "Least Concern" by the IUCN, though habitat loss and pet trade are concerns. They adapt well to different environments, which has helped their survival, but their populations are still vulnerable to ecological changes.

In summary, while common marmosets diverged from humans over 40 million years ago, their unique traits and social behaviours make them a valuable species for understanding certain aspects of human biology and psychology, providing insight into genetic, neurological, and social characteristics that bridge the gap between humans and other primates.

Now, as though to drive another nail into the coffin of that primitive superstition, scientists have just shown how the brains of humans and the common marmoset monkey follow parallel development, demonstrating their common origins.

Common marmosets and humans have similar prolonged periods of childhood where child care is shared amongst several adults, so the children experience intense socialisation as they develop juts as human children do, and because their brains are fundamentally the same as human brains, the same areas develop in the same way and at the same stage in their development:

Similarities in Brain Development Between Marmosets and Humans

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In common marmosets, the brain regions that process social interactions develop very slowly, extending until early adulthood, like in humans. During this time, all group members are involved in raising the infants, which contributes to the species’ strong socio-cognitive skills.

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The development of primate brains is shaped by various inputs. However, these inputs differ between independent breeders, such as great apes, and cooperative breeders, such as the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) and humans. In these species, group members other than the parents contribute substantially to raising the infants from birth onwards.

A group of international researchers led by Paola Cerrito from the University of Zurich’s Department of Evolutionary Anthropology studied how such social interactions map onto brain development in common marmosets. The study provides new insights into the relationship between the timing of brain development and the socio-cognitive skills of marmosets, in particular their prosocial and cooperative behaviours.

Prolonged learning from social interactions

The research team analysed brain development using magnetic resonance data and showed that in marmosets, the brain regions involved in the processing of social interactions exhibit protracted development – in a similar way to humans. These brain regions only reach maturity in early adulthood, allowing the animals to learn from social interactions for longer.

Like humans, immature marmosets are surrounded and cared for by multiple caregivers from birth and are therefore exposed to intense social interaction. Feeding is also a cooperative business: the immature animals are fed by group members and as they get older they have to beg for food because their mothers are already busy with the next offspring. According to the study, the need to elicit care from several group members significantly shapes brain development and contributes to the sophisticated socio-cognitive motivation (and observed skills) of these primates.

A model for human evolution

Given their similarities with humans, marmosets are an important model for studying the evolution of social cognition.

Our findings underscore the importance of social experiences to the formation of neural and cognitive networks, not only in primates, but also in humans. This insight could have an impact on various fields, ranging from evolutionary biology to neuroscience and psychology.

Paola Cerrito, first author
Department of Evolutionary Anthropology
University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland.

The early-life social inputs that characterize infants’ life in cooperatively breeding species may be a driving force in the development of humans marked social motivation.

Publication:

Paola Cerrito, Eduardo Gascon, Angela C. Roberts, Stephen J. Sawiak, Judith M. Burkart.
Neurodevelopmental timing and socio-cognitive development in a prosocial cooperatively breeding primate (Callithrix jacchus). Science Advances, 30 October 2024. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ado3486

Abstract
Primate brain development is shaped by inputs received during critical periods. These inputs differ between independent and cooperative breeders: In cooperative breeders, infants interact with multiple caregivers. We study how the neurodevelopmental timing of the cooperatively breeding common marmoset maps onto behavioral milestones. To obtain structure-function co-constructions, we combine behavioral, neuroimaging (anatomical and functional), and neural tracing experiments. We find that brain areas critically involved in observing conspecifics interacting (i) develop in clusters, (ii) have prolonged developmental trajectories, (iii) differentiate during the period of negotiations between immatures and multiple caregivers, and (iv) do not share stronger connectivity than with other regions. Overall, developmental timing of social brain areas correlates with social and behavioral milestones in marmosets and, as in humans, extends into adulthood. This rich social input is likely critical for the emergence of their strong socio-cognitive skills. Because humans are cooperative breeders too, these findings have strong implications for the evolution of human social cognition.

INTRODUCTION
Strong social cognition and prosociality are, from a very young age, hallmarks of the human mind compared to the closest living relatives, the nonhuman great apes (1). Because of our peculiar life history, characterized by early weaning and extensive allomaternal care starting from very early in infancy, human development is embedded in a world filled with other individuals, including parents, siblings, and other family members. Thus, this is the context in which human toddlers’ strong social cognition and prosociality develops (2). It is this same period that is also the most important for the formation of the neural bases of higher-order social, emotional, and communicative functions (3). Not unexpectedly then, several independent lines of evidence, spanning neuroscience, pediatrics, primatology, and psychiatry, point to the fundamental role that the relative timing of brain development and social interactions have for the acquisition of social cognition and prosocial behaviors (4).

During ontogeny, total brain volume increases until reaching its adult levels. This volumetric increase is the product of gray matter (GM) volume (GMV) increase until a peak value is reached in childhood, after which it decreases concurrently with synaptic pruning and white matter volumetric increase (5). In addition, the ontogenetic trajectories of cerebral GM are heterochronous, such that both maximum GMV and GM reduction rate vary across brain regions. The importance of the temporal patterns of brain development in shaping the adult phenotype becomes apparent, for example, in the case of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Deviations from the normal range of developmental timing of the cortex can profoundly affect socio-cognitive skills and are one of the main factors linked to the occurrence of ASD (3). Specifically, several studies have found that early brain overgrowth during the first years of life strongly correlates with ASD [e.g. (6)] and a meta-analysis of all published magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data by 2005 revealed that the period of greatest brain enlargement in autism is during early childhood (7), with about a 10% volume increase compared to controls during the first year of life. Hence, individuals affected by ASD present an accelerated early-life brain growth and achieve a final brain volume that is not different from that of controls, but they achieve it earlier than controls. Recent works with human brain organoids has confirmed the accelerated maturation of the cortex in the ASD phenotype, especially interneurons (8, 9). Consequently, given this accelerated early-life brain development, fewer social inputs are available during the period when the GMV reduces to adult size and differentiates via experience-dependent pruning. Accelerated development of functional connectivity between certain brain areas [e.g., amygdala–prefrontal cortex (PFC)] can also be a consequence of early-life stress, which, in turn, can cause adverse physiological conditions such as increased anxiety and cortisol levels (10). Unfortunately, so far, nothing is known regarding the impact of changes in brain developmental timing within nonhuman species. That is, we do not know if, within a given nonhuman species, alterations in ontogenetic trajectories of the brain have an impact on the adult behavioral phenotype. However, comparative studies across species with different ontogenetic trajectories and social behaviors can help us shed light on the relationship between the two.

The importance of social inputs occurring during prolonged brain maturation and slow developmental pace has also been highlighted in the context of human evolutionary studies. The remarkable brain growth and development occurring postnatally in humans arguably allows the brain to be influenced by the social environment outside of the uterus to a greater extent than that seen in other great apes (11), who are not cooperative breeders (12). Hawkes and Finlay (13) show that, in addition to weaning our infants earlier than expected (based on allometric scaling with other life-history variables), human neonates have an especially delayed neural development, which is likely correlated with the energetic trade-offs stemming from the large size and high caloric demand of our brain (14). In addition, we observe that, in humans, compared to other great apes, myelination is much prolonged and continues well into adulthood (15).

Common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) are cooperatively breeding platyrrhine monkeys. Like humans, but unlike other great apes (12), they rely on extensive allomaternal care and share many life-history traits (e.g., short interbirth intervals and a hiatus between menarche and first reproduction) with humans (16). They also show remarkable prosociality (4, 15) [much more than great apes (16)] and strong socio-cognitive abilities, which have been argued to correlate with cooperative breeding (17–20). However, the neurobiological features underlying the socio-cognitive abilities promoting the prosocial behavior are poorly understood. Moreover, experimental research has shown that, in common marmosets (hereafter marmosets), there is a critical period for the development of social behaviors (21), although the relationship between developmental timing of the brain and these early-life social interactions is poorly understood.

Given these similarities with humans, marmosets are becoming an ever-more important model in neuroscience (22–25) and particularly in research investigating the neurobiological and neurodevelopmental bases of social cognition. As in humans, immature marmosets are surrounded and cared for by multiple caregivers from the first day on. The entire family is typically present during birth, and oxytocin levels increase not only in mothers but also in all group members (26). Group members contribute appreciably to carrying the infants and, once infants start eating solid food, frequently share food with them. After a peak provisioning period, adults are increasingly less willing to share food with them (27–29). During this period, intense and noisy negotiations over food are frequent, with immatures babbling and begging and adults eventually giving in—or not. Intriguingly, when doing so, immatures appear to take into account how willing individual adults are to share and will insist in more and longer attempts with adults who are generally less likely to refuse them. Soon after, immatures have to compete for attention and food not only with their twin sibling but also with the next offspring that are born far before they themselves are independent because, like in humans, marmosets are weaned early and mothers have their next offspring soon after (30). By now, the immatures still have not reached puberty; this only happens shortly before yet another set of younger siblings is born. Typically, with these new arrivals, the immatures start to act as helpers themselves and thus face the developmental task of switching from being a recipient of help to becoming a provider of help and prosocial acts (31). This is thus the developmental context in which marmosets’ socio-cognitive skills develop.

The goal of this study is to map these behavioral milestones specific to a cooperatively breeding primate to its region-specific brain development to better understand the social interactions in which infants engage during the differentiation period of brain regions selectively implicated in processing social stimuli. Our working hypothesis is that, like in humans, social interactions with several caregivers during this critical period profoundly contribute to the co-construction of the marmoset brain, the maturation of socially related associative areas, and therefore the emergence of prosocial behaviors. For that purpose, we sought to determine if there is a relationship between the temporal profile of the developing marmoset brain and the early-life social interactions that may help explain their sophisticated socio-cognitive skills at adulthood.

To compare the timing of brain development to that of these behavioral milestones and developmental tasks of attaining nutritional independence, we focused on brain regions that, in adult marmosets, are selectively activated by the observation of social interactions between conspecifics but not by multiple but independently behaving marmosets, as identified by Cléry et al. (32). We tested if these brain regions share similar developmental trajectories based on the developmental patterns of regional GMV. To potentially reveal a coordinated ontogenetic profile underlying the “tuning” of the social brain in marmosets, we then compared these neurodevelopmental patterns to longitudinal data of infant negotiations with caregivers in relation to food (as measured by the frequency of food begging). Last, because it is known that brain regions whose activations correlate with performance on a given task strengthen and get fine-tuned with age (33, 34), we assessed if there is stronger connectedness between areas that develop according to similar developmental trajectories and share similar response to social interaction stimuli.

We thus combined several types of previously published data from marmosets to provide a unified picture of structural brain development alongside the development of social interactions between infants and multiple caregivers necessary to ensure survival (infant provisioning). These included structural MRI (sMRI) data of GM of 53 cortical areas and 16 subcortical nuclei acquired from a developmental cohort (aged 13 to 104 weeks) of 41 male and female marmosets (35), functional MRI (fMRI) data mapping the brain areas activated by the observation of social interactions in marmosets (32), food sharing interactions in five family groups of marmosets including a total of 26 adults and 14 immatures [from 1 to 60 weeks of age (27)], and cellular-resolution data of corticocortical connectivity in marmosets obtained via 143 retrograde tracer injections in 52 young adult marmosets of both sexes (36).

Overall, we make the following predictions:

1. P1: Cortical regions that show significantly stronger activation during the observation of social interactions (32) share similar structural neurodevelopmental profiles, which are distinct from those regions showing significantly stronger activation during the observation of nonsocial activities.
2. P2: That those same brain regions showing a significantly stronger activation during the observation of social interactions exhibit a protracted development, reaching their adult volume later than the other regions.
3. P3: The developmental trajectory of infant negotiations with caregivers in relation to food (as measured by the frequency of food begging) is more similar to that of brain regions responding more strongly to the observation of social interactions than to the other regions.
4. P4: Functional connectivity is stronger between regions with similar developmental timing and response strength to the observation of either social or nonsocial behaviors and weaker between regions with different developmental timing and response strength.

If the brains of humans an marmosets are fundamentally similar and develop the same way, perhaps a creationist could explain in what way, apart from their tail and their claws in place of human flat finger nails, marmosets are a different 'kind' to humans, and then explain why the same reasoning doesn't place the great apes in the same 'kind' as humans.

Refuting Creationism - Domestication of Sheep Long Before 'Creation Week'

Cypriot mouflon. Ovis gmelini ophion,
male near Agios Epiphanios, Cyprus

By Charles J. Sharp - Own work,
CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Eastern Anatolian sheep (Konya sheep), Ovis orientalis anatolica

Population History of Domestic Sheep Revealed by Paleogenomes | Molecular Biology and Evolution | Oxford Academic

I've previously noted how almost all our domestic animals have been selectively bred to improve upon their wild ancestors, sometimes to the extent that the wild ancestor is hardly recognisable as the same species. Indeed, in some instances, the genetic isolation of the wild and domestic varieties is so wide that they are regarded as different species.

And Bible-literalist creationists believe all animals were magically create out of dirt without ancestors, specifically for the use of man - which begs the question, why have we had to improve on them to make them fit for purpose? Did an omnipotent creator god not know what we would use them for?

In a recent post I describes the domestication of modern cattle from their wild auroch ancestors, which, because of their size and aggressive nature, were too dangerous for herding and milking, and the domestic breeds have evolved from a very small founder population, probably because of that difficulty so animals placid enough were only rarely found.

All that took place thousands of years before creationists believe there was an Earth with life on it, as is usual with almost all of Earth's and human history.

Now, as an added embarrassment to creationists, palaeogeneticists have managed to trace the ancestors (wild mouflons) of modern domestic sheep to discover where they were domesticated and how long ago. It goes without saying that it happened long before creationists believe the god magicked sheep out of dirt, in common with almost all of Earth's history.

Common Origins - Stem Species of Horseshoe Crab's Scorpions & Spiders From 450 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

This life reconstruction image shows Lomankus edgecombei in what would have been its natural marine environment.

Illustration by Xiaodong Wang

The Megacheiran candidate: Fossil hunters strike gold with new species | YaleNews

It's another of those 'non-existent' transitional fossils days that come round several times a month, as scientists find yet another fossil which is clearly of an intermediate species between two different taxons.

Today's example is of an intermediate or stem species from which horseshoe crabs, spiders and scorpions evolved. It lived about 450 million years before there was an Earth for it to live on, according to creationists superstition, which believe Earth was created by magic as a small flat planet with a dome over it between 6 and 10,000 years ago.

New Book - Refuting Creationism: Why Creationism Fails In Both Its Science and Its Theology

My latest book is now available in Kindle, paperback and hardcover versions.

It is a comprehensive rebuttal of the main planks in the creationist anti-science campaign, showign why creationism is not only based on bad science and deliberate misinformation and misrepresentation of science and scientists, from the Big Bang, through abiogenesis to evolution of species.

I present evidence not only for speciation, including creationists' favourite fallacies - 'no transitional fossils' and 'no evidence of "macro-evolution"'. I also expose the lies and disinformation with which the creationist website misinform their cult mebers.

And lastly I show how fundemental Bible-literalism is based on bad theology by regarding stories that can't possibly be true as literal science and real history, rather than the simple tales parochial Bronze Age pastoralists invented to brige the yawning chasms in their knowledge and understanding, setin the small part of the Middle East that was all they knew anythign about.

Refuting Creationism - Ancient Aurochs From Long Before 'Creation Week'

A cave painting from Chauvet's cave, showing horses and aurochs.

Wikipedia (CC2.0)

An aurochs skull, St Petersburg.

Image: Prof. Dan Bradley.

Ancient DNA brings to life history of the iconic aurochs - News & Events | Trinity College Dublin

On problem with believing a myth that Earth was made out of nothing by magic 6-10,000 years ago is that there are paintings in caves in France that are older than that, showing animals that were around before then.

And a problem with believing that the same magician created all living things just as they are today without any ancestors, is that those same cave paintings show species that were ancestral to some of the animals that are around today, such as domestic cattle.

And a problem with believing that the same magician created all the animals for the benefit of humans is the evidence that all our domestic animals, with almost no exceptions, have been improved by selective breeding from wild ancestors. Did their putative creator not know what humans would need or how they would use the animals it created for them?

Aurochs, their evolution and relationship to domestic cattle. Aurochs (Bos primigenius) were large wild cattle that roamed parts of Europe, Asia, and North Africa. They are considered the ancestors of modern domestic cattle, playing a significant role in human history and agriculture. Here's an overview of the aurochs, their characteristics, history, and their relationship to modern cattle.

Physical Characteristics

• Size: Aurochs were significantly larger than modern cattle, with bulls standing up to 6 feet (1.8 meters) at the shoulder and weighing up to 1,500 pounds (700 kg) or more. Cows were generally smaller than bulls.
• Appearance: They had a muscular build with long legs and a slender body, which allowed them to move quickly. They possessed a distinctive hump over their shoulders.
• Color: Bulls were typically dark with a lighter "eel stripe" down the back, while cows were generally reddish-brown.
• Horns: Aurochs had large, forward-curving horns, which could reach up to 31 inches (80 cm) long. These horns were crucial for defense against predators and in fights between males.

Evolution and Extinction

• Evolution: The aurochs evolved around 2 million years ago in India and spread across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Over time, isolated populations adapted to their environments.
• Extinction: The last recorded aurochs died in 1627 in Poland due to hunting, habitat loss, and diseases spread by domesticated cattle. Their extinction marked the end of the species, but they live on genetically through domestic cattle, which were bred from aurochs around 8,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Relationship to Domestic Cattle

• Domestication: Modern domestic cattle (Bos taurus and Bos indicus) were domesticated from different auroch populations. Early humans domesticated aurochs in two main areas:
  • Bos taurus was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent (modern-day Middle East).
  • Bos indicus (zebu cattle) was domesticated in the Indian subcontinent.
• Genetic Influence: Domestic cattle have inherited many traits from their auroch ancestors. Selective breeding by humans introduced variations in size, color, horn shape, and other physical traits to better suit agricultural needs.
• Behavior: Domestic cattle have been bred for docility and other traits that make them manageable for farming. Aurochs, on the other hand, were more aggressive and less tolerant of human presence.

Breeding Back Efforts
In recent years, there have been efforts to "breed back" cattle that resemble the aurochs. Breeding back does not resurrect the aurochs genetically but seeks to produce cattle that resemble aurochs in appearance and behavior.

• Heck Cattle: In the early 20th century, German zoologists Heinz and Lutz Heck attempted to recreate aurochs by selectively breeding European cattle breeds with certain aurochs-like features.
• TaurOs Project: Launched in 2008, this project uses selective breeding of various cattle breeds to produce animals that physically and behaviorally resemble aurochs, focusing on rewilding European landscapes.

Role in Ecosystems and Rewilding
Aurochs once played a critical role in their ecosystems by grazing on grasses, which helped maintain the balance of plant species and created habitats for other animals. In rewilding efforts, cattle resembling aurochs are introduced to landscapes where their grazing patterns help to maintain open grasslands and support biodiversity.

Cultural Significance
Aurochs appear in ancient art, mythology, and folklore across many cultures. They were revered as symbols of strength and vitality and often featured in prehistoric cave paintings, such as those in Lascaux, France, which date back over 17,000 years.

Summary

• Ancestors of Domestic Cattle: Aurochs are the wild progenitors of domestic cattle, with genetic links to both Bos taurus and Bos indicus.
• Distinctive Features: Large, muscular, and possessing large horns, aurochs were much larger than modern cattle.
• Rewilding and Conservation: Through efforts like the Heck Cattle and TaurOs Project, conservationists attempt to restore the ecological impact that aurochs once had on European landscapes.
• Legacy: Although extinct, the aurochs' genetic legacy continues in domestic cattle, and they remain an iconic symbol in history and conservation.

The story of the aurochs highlights the powerful connection between humans and wild animals, showcasing how our ancestors' choices shaped the landscapes and species we see today.

And all these questions come from a paper published recently in Nature which reports on the analysis of the genome of 38 Aurochs from bones stretching back over some 50,000 years from sites across Eurasia from the UK to Siberia. The team of geneticists from Trinity College and other universities have explained their findings in a Trinity College press release:

Ancient DNA brings to life history of the iconic aurochs

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Geneticists from Trinity, together with an international team of researchers, have deciphered the prehistory of aurochs – the animals that were the focus of some of the most iconic early human art, and whose tale is intertwined with climate change and human culture.

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The team analysed 38 genomes harvested from bones dating across 50 millennia and stretching from Siberia to Britain in this work.

The aurochs roamed in Europe, Asia and Africa for hundreds of thousands of years. Adorned as paintings on many a cave wall, their domestication to create cattle gave us a harnessed source of muscle, meat and milk. Such was the influence of this domestication that today their descendants make up a third of the world’s mammalian biomass.

We normally think of the European aurochs as one common form or type, but our analyses suggest there were three distinct auroch populations alone in Europe – a Western European, an Italian, and a Balkan. There was thus a greater diversity in the wild forms than we had ever imagined.

Dr Mikkel-Holger S. Sinding, co-author
Department of Biology
University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Intriguingly, climate change also wrote its signature in aurochs genomes in two ways:

First, European and north Asian genomes separated and diverged at the beginning of the last ice age, around 100,000 years ago, and did not seem to mix until the world warmed up again at its end.

And second, genome-estimated population sizes dropped in the glacial period, with a more pronounced hard time endured by European herds. These lost the most diversity when they retreated to separated refugia in southern parts of the continent before repopulating it again afterwards.

The most pronounced drop in genetic diversity occurs between the period when the aurochs of southwest Asia were domesticated in the north of the Fertile Crescent, just over 10,000 years ago, to give the first cattle.

Remarkably only a handful of maternal lineages (as seen via mitochondrial DNA which is handed down via mothers to their offspring) come through this process into the cattle gene pool.

A Pleistocene aurochs from the Upper Rhine Valley, around 50,000 years old.

Image credit Staatliche Schlosser and Garten Hessen.

Although Caesar exaggerated when he said it was like an elephant, the wild ox must have been a highly dangerous beast and this hints that its first capture and taming must have happened with only a very few animals. However, the narrow genetic base of the first cattle was augmented as they first travelled with their herders west, east and south. It is clear that there was early and pervasive mating with wild aurochs bulls, leaving a legacy of the four separate preglacial aurochs ancestries that persists among the domestic cattle of today.

Professor Dan Bradley, senior author
Smurfit Institute of Genetics
Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.

Publication:

Rossi, C., Sinding, MH.S., Mullin, V.E. et al.
The genomic natural history of the aurochs.
Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08112-6

Abstract
Now extinct, the aurochs (Bos primigenius) was a keystone species in prehistoric Eurasian and North African ecosystems, and the progenitor of cattle (Bos taurus), domesticates that have provided people with food and labour for millennia¹. Here we analysed 38 ancient genomes and found 4 distinct population ancestries in the aurochs—European, Southwest Asian, North Asian and South Asian—each of which has dynamic trajectories that have responded to changes in climate and human influence. Similarly to Homo heidelbergensis, aurochsen first entered Europe around 650 thousand years ago², but early populations left only trace ancestry, with both North Asian and European B. primigenius genomes coalescing during the most recent glaciation. North Asian and European populations then appear separated until mixing after the climate amelioration of the early Holocene. European aurochsen endured the more severe bottleneck during the Last Glacial Maximum, retreating to southern refugia before recolonizing from Iberia. Domestication involved the capture of a small number of individuals from the Southwest Asian aurochs population, followed by early and pervasive male-mediated admixture involving each ancestral strain of aurochs after domestic stocks dispersed beyond their cradle of origin.

Rossi, C., Sinding, MH.S., Mullin, V.E. et al.
The genomic natural history of the aurochs. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08112-6

© 2024 Springer Nature Ltd.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

One interesting finding is that the aurochs split and diversified during a glacial period when different populations were in different refugia, where they diversified genetically. This is reflected in the DNA inherited by domestic cattle and shows allopatric speciation in progress.

Another interesting finding is how the domesticated cattle and the wild aurochs continued to interbreed with domestic cattle, with auroch bulls mating with domestic cows, showing how diverging species can interbreed for a period until barriers to hybridization evolve.

All this paints a much more interesting picture of the origins of domestic cattle from wild ancestors than the childish one involving magic that creationists find easier to understand. It also poses the question for creationists - why didn't their putative designer design domestic cattle fit for purpose - docile and a high milk yield - that had to be bred into them through an extended period of selective breeding because their wild ancestors were too big and dangerous?

Malevolent Design - How Sleeping Sickness Parasites Are 'Designed' to Evade Our Immune System

Trypanosoma brucei

Sleeping sickness

Discovery Illuminates How Sleeping Sickness Parasite Outsmarts Immune Response | Johns Hopkins | Bloomberg School of Public Health

Trypanosoma brucei is a blood-borne eukaryote parasite that should leave believers in an intelligent designer, open-mouthed in admiration for its inventive genius. Christian fundamentalist creationists of the white supremacist persuasion should also admire the racist that, through T. brucei, has managed to keep large parts of Africa technologically under-developed due to the difficult in maintaining herds of domestic animals where the vector of these parasites - the tsetse fly - is common.

As a vector, the tsetse fly is a triumph of malevolent design which I mentioned in my popular book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax, but it would have been all for nothing without the nasty little T. brucei to cause sleeping sickness in humans and the debilitating disease "nagana" in cattle.

What creationist admires of the divine malevolence they believe designs these things should now be marveling at is the sheer brilliance of the design by which it manages to evade the immune system, which they believe was created by the same designer god which now regards his design as a problem to be overcome oh parasites like T. brucei can continue making Africans and their cattle sick.

Refuting Creationism - First Steps to Abiogenesis

Diagram of the atmospheric evolution of Earth's ancient atmosphere estimated by this study

© Yoshida et al.

Research News - How Life Began on Earth: Modeling Earth's Ancient Atmosphere | Tohoku University Global Site

The fact that living organisms arose on Earth from inorganic sources rather than being made of nothing by magic, is an indisputable fact because there are living organisms on Earth and the chemicals they are composed of all exist on the planet in inorganic minerals and gases. 'Life' contains nothing that 'non-life' doesn't contain.

This much we know, but what we don't yet know and can probably never know with certainty, is precisely how and where that happen. In fact, we don't even know whether it did all start in the same place at the same time because the reason there are two different prokaryote cells - bacteria and archaea - could be because life arose on Earth not once but twice, by two different processes in two different places at two different times.

What we have though is lots of working hypotheses in the process of being validated.

What role would Earth's atmosphere have played in abiogenesis? Earth's early atmosphere was crucial in creating the right conditions for abiogenesis—the process by which life originated from non-living matter. While the exact composition of Earth’s primordial atmosphere is still debated, its unique conditions likely contributed in several essential ways:

1. Provision of Basic Building Blocks
   
   • Earth’s early atmosphere likely contained simple molecules like methane (CH₄), ammonia (NH₃), hydrogen (H₂), carbon dioxide (CO₂), nitrogen (N₂), and water vapor (H₂O). These molecules are rich in carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen—elements that are vital for organic compounds and, ultimately, for life.
   • When exposed to energy sources like ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the Sun or electrical discharges from lightning, these molecules could recombine into more complex organic molecules, such as amino acids and nucleotides, which are the building blocks of proteins and nucleic acids, respectively.
   
   
2. Facilitation of Prebiotic Chemistry
   
   • Experiments like the famous Miller-Urey experiment in 1953 showed that simple gases (methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor) in an atmosphere subjected to electrical sparks could produce amino acids. This suggests that Earth’s early atmosphere could have been instrumental in initiating chemical reactions that synthesized complex organic molecules.
   • Without a protective ozone layer, the early atmosphere allowed substantial UV radiation to penetrate the Earth’s surface, providing the energy necessary to drive these prebiotic reactions.
   
   
3. Supporting a Reducing Environment
   
   • The presence of reducing gases (such as methane and ammonia) would favor the formation of organic molecules because such conditions prevent the oxidation (and hence destruction) of organic compounds. Oxygen is highly reactive and can break down organic molecules, so the absence of free oxygen in the early atmosphere was likely a key factor that allowed these molecules to accumulate and react.
   • This reducing environment might have helped organic compounds to survive long enough to form stable, self-replicating systems.
   
   
4. Encouraging Geochemical Interactions
   
   • The interaction between the early atmosphere and the oceans, along with geothermal activity like volcanic eruptions and hydrothermal vents, provided a diverse range of chemical environments. In particular, hydrothermal vents may have supplied essential minerals and additional energy sources, further driving complex chemical reactions that are believed to be important in the formation of life.
   • The cycling of materials between the atmosphere and oceans would have contributed to creating localized "hotspots" for prebiotic reactions.
   
   
5. Protection and Concentration Mechanisms
   
   • The atmosphere also played a protective role by preventing the immediate dissipation of important compounds into space. It allowed the concentration of molecules and gases at Earth’s surface, increasing the chances of interactions among the essential precursors to life.
   • Early atmospheres may have helped regulate surface temperatures, preventing extreme fluctuations that would have been hostile to complex chemistry.
   
   
6. Encouraging Self-Organization and Membrane Formation
   
   • Interactions in the early atmosphere could have contributed to the formation of lipid molecules that could aggregate to form primitive cell-like structures or vesicles. These structures would eventually help in containing and protecting reactions necessary for early metabolic pathways.
   • These early "proto-cells" or vesicles would have been necessary to create a boundary for molecular interactions, which is a critical step toward the organization needed for cellular life.

In summary, Earth’s early atmosphere provided a chemically conducive, energetically rich environment that fostered the synthesis and concentration of organic molecules necessary for abiogenesis. This atmosphere also shielded these nascent molecules, allowing them to organize and evolve toward increasingly complex systems, eventually leading to the first living organisms.

One of which is the precise details of the atmosphere on the Early Earth, which is important because it would have had a major impact on the rest of the environment in which life arose. To gain a better understanding of that, a team from Tohoku University, Tokyo University and Hokkaido University, Japan, led by Tatsuya Yoshida have succeeded in modelling that atmosphere, as explained in a Tohoku University press release and published in the journal Astrobiology:

How Life Began on Earth: Modeling Earth's Ancient Atmosphere

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The key to unlocking the secrets of distant planets starts right here on Earth. Researchers at Tohoku University, the University of Tokyo, and Hokkaido University have developed a model considering various atmospheric chemical reactions to estimate how the atmosphere - and the first signs of life - evolved on Earth.

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Ancient Earth was nothing like our current home. It was a much more hostile place; rich in metallic iron with an atmosphere containing hydrogen and methane.

Shungo Koyama, co-author
Graduate School of Science
Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan.

These molecules contain an important clue to how life was initially formed. When exposed to solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation, they undergo a chemical reaction that produces organics (also known as the "building blocks of life"). Part of these organics were precursors to essential biomolecules, such as amino acids and nucleic acids. However, understanding the role of UV radiation is difficult. Firstly, this type of atmosphere is unstable and likely underwent rapid changes due to atmospheric chemical reactions. Secondly, when UV radiation efficiently breaks down water vapour in the atmosphere and forms oxidative molecules, the precise branching ratio and timescale has not been determined. In order to address these issues, a 1D photochemical model was created to make accurate predictions about what the atmosphere was like on Earth long ago.

The calculation reveals that most hydrogen was lost to space and that hydrocarbons like acetylene (produced from methane) shielded UV radiation. This inhibition of UV radiation significantly reduced the breakdown of water vapour and subsequent oxidation of methane, thus enhancing the production of organics. If the initial amount of methane was equivalent to that of the amount of carbon found on the present-day Earth's surface, organic layers several hundred metres thick could have formed.

There may have been an accumulation of organics that created what was like an enriched soup of important building blocks. That could have been the source from which living things first emerged on Earth.

Tatsuya Yoshida, lead author
Graduate School of Science
Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan.

The model suggests that the atmosphere on ancient Earth was strikingly similar to what we see on current day neighbouring planets: Venus and Mars. However, despite their proximity, Earth evolved into a completely different environment. Researchers are trying to understand what makes Earth so special. As such, this model allows us to deepen our understanding of whether atmospheric evolution and the origin of life on Earth are unique or share common patterns with other planetary systems.

These findings were published in the journal Astrobiology on October 22, 2024.

Publication Details:

Tatsuya Yoshida, Shungo Koyama, Yuki Nakamura, Naoki Terada and Kiyoshi Kuramoto
Self-Shielding Enhanced Organics Synthesis in an Early Reduced Earth's Atmosphere Astrobiology DOI: 10.1089/ast.2024.0048

Abstract
Earth is expected to have acquired a reduced proto-atmosphere enriched in H₂ and CH₄ through the accretion of building blocks that contain metallic Fe and/or the gravitational trapping of surrounding nebula gas. Such an early, wet, reduced atmosphere that covers a proto-ocean would then ultimately evolve toward oxidized chemical compositions through photochemical processes that involve reactions with H₂O-derived oxidant radicals and the selective escape of hydrogen to space. During this time, atmospheric CH₄ could be photochemically reprocessed to generate not only C-bearing oxides but also organics. However, the branching ratio between organic matter formation and oxidation remains unknown despite its significance on the abiotic chemical evolution of early Earth. Here, we show via numerical analyses that UV absorptions by gaseous hydrocarbons such as C₂H₂ and C₃H₄ significantly suppress H₂O photolysis and subsequent CH₄ oxidation during the photochemical evolution of a wet proto-atmosphere enriched in H₂ and CH₄. As a result, nearly half of the initial CH₄ converted to heavier organics along with the deposition of prebiotically essential molecules such as HCN and H₂CO on the surface of a primordial ocean for a geological timescale order of 10–100 Myr. Our results suggest that the accumulation of organics and prebiotically important molecules in the proto-ocean could produce a soup enriched in various organics, which might have eventually led to the emergence of living organisms.

Yoshida, Tatsuya; Koyama, Shungo; Nakamura, Yuki; Terada, Naoki; Kuramoto, Kiyoshi
Self-Shielding Enhanced Organics Synthesis in an Early Reduced Earth’s Atmosphere Journal of Astrobiology (2024) DOI: 10.1089/ast.2024.0048

© 2024 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

So, by the action if UV radiation from the sun on the inorganic molecules in Earth's early atmosphere for a period of some 10-100 million years, the oceans could have accumulated the basic building blocks for organic organisms to get started, and all th result of chemistry and physics with no magic gods involved at any point.

And, as usual with scientific discoveries, the truth is shown to have little resemblance to the origin myths the parochial Bronze Age pastoralists made up to fill the yawning chasm in their knowledge and understanding of the world around them, with their belief that Earth had only existed for a few thousand years, so were blissfully ignorant of the 99.9975% of its history that occurred before then.