Evolution News - The How and Why of Seahorse Evolution

© Ralf Schneider

How sessile seahorses managed to speciate and disperse across the world’s oceans | News and media | University of Konstanz

We have news today showing how the biological world we see now only makes sense in the context of the Theory of Evolution, and showing how well the TOE meshes with other strands of scientific evidence, in this case, genetics, plate techtonics and oceanography.

It was produced by an international research collaboration, involving a research team led by evolutionary biologist Professor Axel Meyer of the University of Konstanz, Germany and researchers from China and Singapore, which was able to identify factors that led to the success of the seahorse from a developmental biology perspective: its quickness to adapt by, for example, repeatedly evolving spines in the skin and its fast genetic rates of evolution.

Their results were published, open access, on 17 February 2021 in Nature Communications.

From the Konstanza Universität press release:

How Science Works - Telling a Consistent Story of Crocodile Evolution

Crocodile (Crocodylus acutus) from a population living on the coast of Panama.

Image: José Avila-Cervantes.

Crocodile evolution rebooted by Ice Age glaciations - McGill University

Once in a while we get a piece of scientific research that shows how science, and the answers science provides, all mesh together to give a much larger picture, showing how several different branches of science all work to support one another and confirm our conclusions about what happened in the past to produce what we see today.

In this case, evidence from genetics, geology and climatology all work to explain what can be observed in the evolution of the American crocodiles either side of the Panamanian isthmus. It was provided by researchers from McGill University, Quebec, Canada who initially set out to see how far the Caribbean and Pacific populations of crocodiles had diverged from one another in the 3 million years since the Isthmus of Panama rose up and joined North and South America but separated the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The news release from McGill University explains:

Evolution News - The Evolution of 'Selfish' Altruism

Red paper wasp, Polistes canadensis
Polistes colonies offer windows into the evolution of co-operation.

Image: P Kennedy

February: tropical-wasps | News and features | University of Bristol

One of the things Creationists pretend to find hard to understand is how 'selfish' genes, or an evolutionary process that means individuals with certain beneficial mutations have an advantage over those who don't, can produce altruism. It probably tells us something about Creationists, that they don't understand how something which isn't purely selfish can improve the chances of survival of the species over all, or why this should be beneficial.

It may also help explain the recent finding that fundamentalist evangelical Christians tend to have a low regard for the health and welfare of others, as we are seeing by their selfish behaviour during the coronavirus pandemic.

Evolution News - A Gift From Our Neanderthal Cousins

Neandertal gene variants both increase and decrease the risk for severe COVID-19 | Karolinska Institutet Nyheter

Readers may remember how, back last October, I reported on a paper from researchers at Karolinska Institutet and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, which showed that a gene carried on chromosome 3, which we inherited from our Neanderthal cousins, is a significant risk factor for severe Covid-19.

Now the same team have shown that Neanderthals also contributed a protective variant, carried on chromosome 12, that helps us fight RNA viruses. Genes known as OAS, from this region of chromosome 12, code for protein enzymes that break down viral RNA. People with this Neanderthal variant have a 20% lower chance of needing intensive care in hospital if they become infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. This allele is present in half the non-African population of the world, showing in conveys a significant benefit and so has been steadily increasing in the human gene pool.

Trumpanzee News - How Trump Split the GOP

QAnon conspiracy theorists in the failed coup d'etat

Rise of conspiracies reveals an evangelical divide in the GOP - The Survey Center on American Life

Everything Donald J Trump does ends in failure. His businesses go bankrupt; his presidency was a monumental failure in which not a single one of his pre-election promises were kept and his handling of the coronavirus pandemic was probably the worst of any state, resulting in 25% of all cases world-wide being in America, peaking at 250,000 a day with 2,000 deaths, the measures scientists were urging to control it becoming political issues with widespread flouting of social distancing and mask-wearing and now deep suspicion about the safety and even the real purpose of the vaccine.

And now we discover that the party he led - the Republican Party of Lincoln - is deeply divided and practically in a state of civil war, as the evangelical Christian faction has become ever more extreme and mainstream, pushing the moderate Republicans out to the side-lines.

Old Dead Gods - Stonehenge Rebuilt

Stonehenge, Wiltshire, UK

Stonehenge may be dismantled Welsh stone circle | UCL News - UCL – University College London

Stonehenge, that ancient monument in the middle of the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, may have been built first, about 5,000 years ago, in the Preseli Hills of South Wales, and then been dismantled, transported to its present site and re-erected. This is the conclusion of archaeologists from University College London (UCL) who have published a paper in the journal Antiquity.

The smaller, inner, stones or 'blue stones' are already known to have come from the Preseli Hills and to have been erected before the larger, outer ring of local 'sarsen' stones was erected. Now archaeologists led by Professor Mike Parker Pearson of the UCL Institute of Archaeology, have identified an ancient quarry and the remains of a stone circle nearby, which may have been dismantled and transported 140 miles away, possibly by migrants.

Evolution News - On the Origin of Our Species

This cranium from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco is often called a modern human ancestor. The meaning of that ancestry is discussed and disentangled in a new study by Bergstrom and colleagues.

© Chris Stringer

On the Origin of Our Species | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

As I have said before, despite Creationist fraudulent assertions that there are no transitional fossils in the human ancestral lineage, the reality is that there are, if anything too many of them. This has led to a confusing picture and a 'tree' more resembling of a bush than a neat tree with nicely spaced-out branches. But then nature has no obligation to provide us with neat, easy to understand data, especially when the reality is fuzzy and complicated.

Now a group of paleoanthropologists from the Natural History Museum, London, UKThe Francis Crick Institute, London, UK and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany have joined forces to try to sort out the confusion and debunk a few misunderstanding that have arisen, even in scientific circles.

The Max Planck Institute news release explains:

Christian Talibangelical Trumpanzees for Violence

Attempted coup d’état by Trumpanzees, 6th January, 2021

After the ballots are counted: Conspiracies, political violence, and American exceptionalism - The Survey Center on American Life

In its American Perspective Survey, The Survey Center on American Life has revealed a post-Trump America deeply divided and with a large number of people, especially evangelical white Christians, ready to resort to violence to achieve their political ambitions.

But even as pride in America has taken a battering because of the antics of Trump and his supporters, the belief in American exceptionalism, that many of us non-Americans find so arrogant and worryingly nationalistic, still remains strong.

Although Trump retains considerable support, especially amongst the Republican rank and file, most Americas expressed relief that he had finally gone. There is also broad support for investigating the possible wrongdoings by his administration.

Creationist Failure News - Yes! It's Another of Those Commonplace 'Non-Existent' Things!

Cantabrigiaster fezouataensis from the Lower Ordovician (Tremadocian) Fezouata Shale,
Zagora Morocco

Credit: Collection of Yale University

New starfish-like fossil reveals evolution in action | University of Cambridge

Researchers from Cambridge University's Earth Sciences and Zoology Departments have identified an Ordovician period fossil, about about 450-million-years-old, from Morocco's Anti-Atlas Mountains as intermediate between the sea lilies or Crinoids and modern starfish. The Ordovician was a period of rapid diversification starting about 485.4 million years ago immediately after the Cambrian and lasting until about 443.8 million years ago.

Regular find like this must be acutely embarrassing for the Creationist frauds who tell their credulous dupes that the absence of these transitional forms in the fossil record means Darwin's TOE is falsified!

Evolution News - How a Single Gene Alteration May Have Separated Modern Humans From Cousin Species

Modern Human skull (L) compared to Neanderthal skull (R)

How a Single Gene Alteration May Have Separated Modern Humans from Predecessors | UC San Diego News Center

Researchers at UC San Diego, led by Alysson R. Muotri, PhD, believe they have shown that a mutation in a single gene could have altered the way our ancestors' brains were wired, enabling them to develop complex social structures, language, adaptability, creativity and use of technology, all of which appear to have arisen over a very short period of time, by evolutionary standards.

The mutation involved a single base-pair substitution - the simplest of all mutations!

They did this by growing brain 'organoids' in Petri dishes from modified stem cells. The UC San Diego news release explains:

Trumpanzee Fruitloop News - "God Didn't Say Trump Lost, So He Won Really!"

Amanda Grace,
"All part of God's plan to make eveyone think Joe Biden won"

'Prophetess' Amanda Grace Says Trump's Impeachment Trial Is Proof He's Still President | Right Wing Watch

Self-declared "prophetess" and Talibangelical grifter, Amanda Grace, normally bases her 'prophesies' on what the voices in her head say. This time, however, she's going with what they don't say.

In this case, despite wrongly telling her Trump would win last November, so far, 'God' hasn't told her Trump lost - so he must have won really and is still president! Or so she told a delighted right-wing author, commentator, and leading Trumpanzee cultist, Eric Metaxas, on The Eric Metaxas Radio Show.

Apparently believing that it's not the final tally of the votes cast, the certification of the count by state officials, the votes of the Electoral College and finally, certification of the result by Congress, that determines the outcome of American elections, but what her personal voices say, that determines them, she said:

There has been a delay for a reason. It’s not over, and it’s far from over with what the Lord is going to do with President Trump, what the Lord is going to do to the wicked of this nation, including the media. You know, I prophesied from the Lord in October about the media suffering the biggest crisis they ever had in 2021 for their crimes, so I’m watching for that to unfold.

She also 'revealed' that it is all part of God's plan to make everyone think Joe Biden won, so there will be no doubt it is God's miracle when Trump is reinstalled in the White House.

But the real clincher is the fact that Trump is being impeached for a second time. Grace has declared, despite legal opinion to the contrary, that it is only possible to impeach a president in office, and not after he has been deposed, therefore, impeachment 'proves' he is still president, really:

There’s been a delay because I believe God is trying to get people’s eyes on him. He wants all eyes on him right now for the demonstration he’s going to put on. Just like when the Jews were at the Red Sea, and they’re there, and Egypt’s at their back, and it’s all eyes on God because either the Lord is going to do this, or it’s not going to happen. And when they thought there was a dead end, God saw a path through that water. So, God’s ways are much higher when he sees how to make a path when people don’t think there is a way.

The Lord has never said to me [Trump is] not going to serve a second term. Sometimes what the Lord doesn’t say is as important as what he says. And he never said to me, ‘President Trump is not going to serve a second term.’ However, I do believe, because I prophesied this last night from the Lord, a surprise is coming with this impeachment because you can’t impeach a citizen. So something is very interesting here going on, because they’re trying to impeach a citizen right now, if he really is a citizen. You can only impeach a sitting president, so this is like we have dueling presidents right now. This is what it is: dueling presidents.

People’s actions speak louder than their words. These wicked peole right now in Congress—who the Lord is going to deal severely with, by the way—you can only impeach a president. If he is really a citizen right now, how are you impeaching him? You can’t impeach a regular citizen. It’s not possible, not according to the law, not according to the Constitution. So their action—sometimes the actions of the wicked will give them away—are pointing that something is not quite kosher going on with who’s the president.

You actually can impeach a former President, FWIW

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) December 4, 2019

One person who disagrees with Grace on that score, is President-reject, Donald J. Trump who once famously called for the impeachment of Barak Obama after he had left office. In early 2020, in a tweet which is no longer available, Trump's Twitter account having been permanently suspended, in response to Obama's comments on health care, Trump said, "We should impeach him for that. Why aren’t we impeaching him?"

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), himself a lawyer, though not a constitutional scholar, also disagrees with 'Prophetess' Grace. Answering criticism of his call to impeach Obama in December 2019, he assured Jake Sherman, "You actually can impeach a former president, FWIW".

Not that anyone need take fruitloop, Amanda Grace's opinion on the niceties of US constitutional law, seriously, but there is actually some unsettled debate on the matter of impeaching former officials, unsettled partly because it's never really been tested at this level before. The argument is over the interpretation and the intent of two Articles:

• Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, says, “The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
• Article I, Section 3, says, “Judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.”

In other words, a person convicted on impeachment can't be imprisoned, executed, fined, have property seized or face any other penalty - not even the loss of his pension.

So, those convicted face two penalties - removal from office, and disbarment from holding future office, the latter being the only relevant penalty for a former official, meaning the purpose of impeachment is not solely to sack a corrupt official, but also to prevent them from ever holding office again.

The other argument is over the intent of the people who framed these articles, and it surely can't have been their intention to build in a massive loophole that would render the entire thing moot and unusable - namely, by offering the escape route of resignation to avoid the penalty of being disbarred in the future, and the ignominy of being convicted.

Be that as it may, the reality is that Congress has the right to bring articles of impeachment against a former office holder, and has decided to do so, as is their constitutional right; and the Senate now has a constitutional duty to hold a formal trial once articles of impeachment have been brought before them, to which they are bound by their oath of office. The argument over whether the Senate can then convict under the Constitution is a separate one altogether.

The moral of this story is, if you want to understand the US Constitution and the powers of the legislature, ask a constitutional lawyer, not a deluded fruitloop who hears voices and even understands what they mean when they don't say anything - especially when what they don't say is what she doesn't want them to say anyway.

What is the probability that she is just plain lying because she is too embarrassed about making false prophesies to admit she made them up too and got it wrong?

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The Fundamentalist Christian Child Pornographer and Trump Aide.

Christmas at the White House with Trump's Ad designer, child pornographer and paedophile rapist, Ruben A. Verastigui.

Former Trump and GOP Aide Ruben Verastigui Charged With Child Pornography Offenses

Of course it would be wrong to suggest that all Trump's supporters and staffers share his lack of moral scruples in sexual matters, but this one certainly did.

In fact, when he was working for the Senate Republican Conference and Christian pro-life groups, and designing social media ads for Donald Trump's Make America Great Again Committee and Donald J Trump for President, Inc., Ruben A. Verastigui was also trading in child pornography and telling his online pal and fellow paedophile:

Well like I said babies are some of my biggest turn-ons and beast. Young rape… Fuck I love all that.

According to this report in The Daily Beast:

D.C. Metropolitan Police arrested Ruben A. Verastigui on Friday after an investigation revealed he allegedly “distributed, received, and possessed images of child pornography” between March 2020 and February 2021. Jared Holt, resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, first reported Verastigui’s arrest on Twitter.

Trump's Legacy - How Trump Made America Hate Again

Police clash with a mob of Trump supporters who breached security and stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021.

Photo: Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

How America Changed During Trump’s Presidency | Pew Research Center

What happens when an advanced nation elects an incompetent oaf with a narcissistic personality disorder and the emotional maturity and self-control of an over-privileged adolescent, gives him a Twitter account and his own room and tells him he runs the world?

We spent the last 4 years finding out when America did just that in 2016. As this article by Michael Dimock and John Gramlich of the Pew Research Center, based largely on Pew Research polling over the period, shows, it left American society and the Republican Party deeply divided and at one point on the brink of violent insurrection, and America massively diminished in the eyes of the world.

Trump became the first world leader to try to govern (with his idea of government) through a Twitter account. Policies were announced and people were sacked not after discussions with colleagues and attempts to reach consensus but on a whim, often in the small hours of the morning by a Twitter tweet in response to an item on one of the right-wing disinformation TV networks, such as Fox News.

Evolution News - Our Common Ancestry in Fish

Polypterus bichir

We’re more like primitive fishes than once believed – University of Copenhagen

Humans, like all terrestrial tetrapods, have a couple of major differences with the bony fish we are all believed to be descended from via an intermediate species such as Tiktaalik roseae, which crawled out onto land about 370 million years ago; the major differences being our jointed limbs and our lungs, all thought to be adaptations to walking on land and breathing air.

However, researchers at the University of Copenhagen believe they have found evidence to show that these structures could have been present in our ancestral fish some 50 million years before that. In fact, lungs may be the forerunner of the swim-bladder found in bony fish, rather than the swim-bladder being the forerunner of lungs.

The conventional view is that bottom-feeding fish, in low-oxygen environments, used their swim-bladder as a fresh-air supply by gulping air from the surface. The swim-bladder is connected to the gut. This, over time, evolved into the lungs and enabled this bottom-feeders to use the limbs they were evolving to crawl around in the silt, to come out onto land.

This research challenges that view by suggesting that some early bony fish may have had lungs that later evolved into swim-bladders in fish that needed to vary their buoyancy while some retained them as functional lungs which server the purpose of a fresh air store for foraging in an anoxic environment.

Evolution News - Evolution of Skin, Fur and Feather Colours

Summary of Current Understanding of the Location of Melanosomes in Different Body Tissues and Organs and Putative Functions in Major Vertebrate Classes.

Functions of Melanin in Ancient Vertebrates

Fossil pigments shed new light on vertebrate evolution, UCC study finds | News and Views | University College Cork

A team of palaeontologists from University College Cork (Coláiste na hOllscoile Corcaigh), Ireland have uncovered how melanin, the pigment that now gives mammals and birds the colours in their skin, fur and feathers, once had a different function in our evolutionary ancestors, but, because of one of those effects of the utilitarian 'design' process of evolution by natural selection, it was also toxic. Unless, as a creationist who believes in intelligent [sic] design, you believe toxicity was a problem deliberately created so it could be solved with a clunky work-around later.

Of course, the work debunks intelligent [sic] design creationism simply by revealing the facts, especially its latest ploy - evolution = devolution!

Melanin initially evolved as part of a mineral storage system which also played a role in immunity, and was stored in several internal organs in the bodies of early amphibians and reptiles. But it has a tendency to produce free radicles and is thus mildly toxic. The benefits of a functional, albeit primitive, immune systems outweighed the damage done, but as later animals evolved improved immune systems - given added impetus by the toxic melanin, the dynamic shifted so that the net result of melanin in the internal organs was detrimental, producing selection pressure to remove it to a place of safety - namely, outside the body in the outer layer of the skin, in hair and feathers of the evolving mammals and birds.

This in turn created selection pressure favouring colouration for camouflage, display, etc, as well as protection from harmful solar radiation, so we now have a rich diversity in hair and feather patterns in the mammals and birds.

Religion Declining Even in Former Devout Islamic and Catholic Countries

Middle East: Are people losing their religion? | Middle East| News and analysis of events in the Arab world | DW | 04.02.2021

The increasing rejection of religion which we have seen in most of the predominantly former Christian Western industrialised world since the mid 20th century, is now also being seen in the predominantly Moslem parts of the Middle East according to a poll conducted by the Arab Barometer, a research group based in Princeton University and the University of Michigan. The poll was the subject of a recent article in The Economist.

Coincident with, or maybe because of, this loss of faith, there is a corresponding fall in the trust of political parties and religious leaders who, in some countries are one and the same.

U.S. Ethics Ratings for Clergy at Second Lowest on Record

Percentage who believe each profession has a high or very high standard of professional ethics.

Source: Gallup Poll Social Series^[PDF]

U.S. Ethics Ratings Rise for Medical Workers and Teachers

The level of trust of the US public in the ethics of the clergy continues to decline, according to a Gallup survey published just before Christmas, 2020, based on sampling over 1-17 December, 2020. The same poll shows an enhanced level of trust in the medical and medical-related professions, doctors, nurses and pharmacists, probably due to the way they are seen to be coping with the coronavirus pandemic.

The stock of the clergy, never as high as that of nurses, doctors and pharmacists has been in steady decline since 2004, falling 17 percentage points in the intervening 16 years to 2020, probably as a result of the child abuse scandals that engulfed the Catholic Church. The evangelical alliance with Donald Trump has done them little good either; all four of their worst years have been since 2016 when they fell below 40% for the first time, never again to rise above it.

The medical professionals all appear to have benefitted from the coronavirus pandemic in terms of perceived professionalism, all three showing sharp rises during 2020.

Anti-Covid-19 Vaccination Diary - The Beginning of the End!

Anti-Covid Vaccination Record Card

To begin at the beginning - we got a phone-call from our doctor's surgery last Wednesday inviting us to have the anti-Coronavirus vaccine. Of course, being fed up with restrictions on our movements for getting on for a year now, and looking forward to a holiday somewhere warm and sunny this year, unlike last year where we made do with a few days in Pembrokeshire, Wales, we jumped at the chance and were duly booked in today at the Village Hall in Clifton Hampden, about 5 mile drive away on the Wallingford road.

In this diary, I'll record our experiences, any side-effect and hopefully, come the day, our second dose and our road to a good level of immunity, how easy it is to do foreign travel, etc.

The purpose to to show that there is nothing to fear and averything to gain from this vaccine!

Malevolent Designer News - God Loves Elephants More Than he Loves Us

Artist's illustration of species within the taxonomic order Proboscidea, which includes elephants.

Credit: Liam Elward
Larger versions are available by contacting Charlotte Hsu at chsu22@buffalo.edu.

How elephants evolved to become big and cancer-resistant - University at Buffalo

Unlike most other mammals, and especially humans, elephants hardly ever get cancers.

The reason for this has been known since 2016 when researchers at the University of Chicago found that elephants have multiple copies of the TP53 gene, probably produced by gene duplication during their evolution to large size! The TP53 gene is involved in DNA repair, but in most mammals, this gene is not very efficient. Multiple copies of it seem to compensate for this inefficiency, however.

Now another team have shown that this is true for other related animals and was probably true for their remote ancestors.

This is how I explained it in by popular illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good as an example of something creationist's putative designer could have give us and other mammals, but chose not to (assuming you believe that magical nonsense):

Malevolent Designer News - Different Responses to the Same Cancer!

Moffitt Researchers Discover Mechanism that Regulates Anti-Tumor Activity of Immune Cells in Ovarian Cancer | Moffitt

Yet another conundrum to ponder for intelligent [sic] design creationists who like to believe their putative designer is one and the same as the allegedly all-loving god of the Christian Bible.

Why has it given some women a better immune system for dealing with ovarian cancers than it gave to others?

This difference was the subject of an investigation by researchers from the Moffitt Cancer Center to discover what it was that meant the outcomes from immunotherapies for this cancer were so variable from one woman to another. What they discovered was: