Democrat Voters are Healthier and Live Longer.

Trends in age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) per 100 000 population of residents of counties voting for Democratic or Republican presidential candidates by urban-rural location. Widening gaps in AAMR between Republican and Democratic counties are noted across urban-rural spectrum, from large metropolitan areas, medium metropolitan areas, and rural areas

Growing 'Mortality Gap' Detected Between Democratic and Republican Counties | BWH Press Release - Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH)

According to research just published, open access, in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Americans living in Republican-voting counties have a higher mortality rate than Americans living in Democrat-voting counties and this difference is widening. These are the findings of investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA, led by assistant professor, Haider Warraich, MD, of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, who, according to the BWH press release:

…found what they call a “mortality gap” — a widening difference between age-adjusted death rates in counties that had voted for a Democrat or a Republican in previous presidential and governor elections. The team found that mortality rates decreased by 22 percent in Democratic counties but by only 11 percent in Republican counties. The mortality gap rose across top disease areas, including heart disease and cancer, and the mortality gap between white residents in Democratic versus Republican counties increased nearly fourfold during the study period.

The press release goes on to say:

In an ideal world, politics and health would be independent of each other and it wouldn’t matter whether one lives in an area that voted for one party or another, but that is no longer the case. From our data, we can see that the risk of premature death is higher for people living in a county that voted Republican.

Our study suggests that the mortality gap is a modern phenomenon, not an inevitability. At the start of our study, we saw little difference in mortality rates in Democratic and Republican counties. We hope that our findings will open people’s eyes and show the real effect that politics and health policy can have on people’s lives.

Assistant professor Haider Warraich, MD, lead author
Division of Cardiovascular Medicine
Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA

Warraich and colleagues used data from the Wide-ranging OnLine Data for Epidemiologic Research (CDC WONDER) database and the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Election Data and Science Laboratory. They classified counties as Democratic or Republican based on the way the county had voted in the previous presidential election and adjusted for age when calculating mortality rates.

Overall, the team found that mortality rates in Democratic counties dropped from 850 deaths per 100,000 people to 664 (22 percent), but in Republican counties, mortality rates declined from 867 to 771 (11 percent). When the team analyzed by race, they found that there was little gap between the improvements in mortality rates that Black and Hispanic Americans experienced in Democratic and Republican counties. But among white Americans, the gap between people living in Democratic versus Republican counties was substantial.

The mortality gap remained consistent when the researchers looked only at counties that had voted Republican or Democratic in every presidential election year studied and when they looked at gubernatorial elections. Democratic counties experienced greater reductions in mortality rates across most common causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory tract diseases, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, and kidney disease.

The authors note that the widening gap in death rates may reflect the influence of politics on health policies. One of the inflection points detected in the study corresponds to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which was passed in 2010. More Democratic states than Republican states adopted Medicaid expansion under the ACA, which expanded health insurance coverage to people on a low income.

The study detects an association between political environment and mortality but does not definitively determine the direction of the association or the specific factors that may explain the link between the two. The authors did not study the effect of flipping political environments — that is, counties that switched from voting Democratic or Republican to voting for the other party — on health outcomes, which could be an area of future study. The study period ended in 2019, before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which may have had an even more profound impact on the mortality gap.

Trends in age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) per 100 000 residents of counties voting for Democratic or Republican presidential candidates. Widening gap in AAMR is noted between Democratic and Republican counties. Statistically significant inflection points in annual percentage change (APC) of AAMR occurred for Democratic counties between periods 2001-09 (APC −2.1) and 2009-19 (APC −0.8) and Republican counties between periods 2001-08 (APC −1.4) and 2008-19 (APC −0.2)

Trends in age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) per 100 000 residents of counties voting for Democratic or Republican presidential candidates by sex. Widening gap in AAMR is noted between male and female residents of Democratic and Republican counties. (Top lines) Statistically significant inflection points in annual percentage change (APC) of AAMR occurred for male residents of Democratic counties between periods 2001-10 (APC −2.2) and 2010-19 (APC −0.7) and male residents of Republican counties between periods 2001-07 (APC −1.7) and 2007-14 (APC −0.6) with no significant change noted after additional inflection point (straight line) between 2014 and 2019. (Bottom lines) Statistically significant inflection points in annual percentage change of AAMR occurred for female residents of Democratic counties between periods 2001-09 (APC −2.0) and 2009-19 (APC −0.9) and female residents of Republican counties between periods 2001-07 (APC −1.4) and 2007-19 (APC −0.3).

Trends in age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) per 100 000 residents of counties voting for Democratic or Republican presidential candidates by race and ethnicity. Widening gap in AAMR is noted most prominently among white residents of Democratic and Republican counties, while the gap appears to narrow for Hispanic residents. AAMR gap for black residents of Democratic and Republican counties oscillates across the study period.

Trends in age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) per 100 000 population for counties voting for Democratic or Republican governors by state Group from 2001 to 2019. Group A=New Hampshire and Vermont; Group B=Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Washington DC; Group C=Delaware, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Utah, Washington, and West Virginia; Group D=Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi; Group E=New Jersey and Virginia.

Trends in age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) per 100 000 population of residents of counties voting for Democratic or Republican presidential candidates by urban-rural location. Widening gaps in AAMR between Republican and Democratic counties are noted across urban-rural spectrum, from large metropolitan areas, medium metropolitan areas, and rural areas.

Age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) per 100 000 population for the 10 most common causes of death in Democratic and Republican counties in 2001 and 2019. Except for cerebrovascular disease, the gap in AAMR between Republican and Democratic counties increased for every cause of death over the study period driven by heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory tract disease, unintentional injuries (which include drug overdoses), and suicide.

As these charts show, this gap holds true for all demographic grouping, whether by sex, race, geography or age and even for the 10 most common causes of death. However the biggest gap is seen in the white population. This is significant because the Republican Party is increasingly becoming identified as the party of the white right.

On every measure, Americans living in red counties fare worse that those living in blue counties and the authors point out the study period ended in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic. They also point out that one of the inflections on the charts during which the health of those in Democrat counties improved more than the health of those in Republican counties coincided with President Obama's, Affordable Care Act, which was implemented disproportionately in Democrat counties and improved the health of poor people.

As these figures show, the Republicans who campaigned against 'Obama Care' were in effect campaigning against improving the health of their own supporters!

It will be interesting to see what happened during the later stages of the COVID-19 pandemic after vaccinations against the virus had become widely available, and especially during the omicron variant wave, when most Democrat voters had been vaccinated and were observing sensible precautions, and, following the disastrously incompetent lead of Donald Trump and his allies on the extreme political right, and in the white supremacist evangelical Christian churches, many covidiot Republicans failed to get vaccinated and refused to wear face-coverings or observe social distancing because they had all become seen as anti-Trump statements!

This deliberate division of American into partisan camps, for what Trump and his allies thought would be to their political advantage, resulted in hospital admissions and deaths from COVID-19 being disproportionately of Republican antivaxxer covidiots in what some commentators likened to a self-inflicted genocide of fundamentalist, covidiot Trumpanzees. Probably the first time in the history of democracy that a political party has actively pursued policies that seem designed to kill their own supporters and their supporters trotted dutifully along like lambs to the slaughter led by Judas sheep, and yet only a tiny handful of Republican politicians had the decency to back out of the rabbit hole they had dived into and take the poitical risk of admitting they were wrong.

The teams finding are published, open access, in the BMJ:

Abstract

Objective To assess recent trends in age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) in the United States based on county level presidential voting patterns.

Design Cross sectional study.

Setting USA, 2001-19.

Participants 99.8% of the US population.

Main outcome measures AAMR per 100 000 population and average annual percentage change (APC).

Methods The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention WONDER database was linked to county level data on US presidential elections. County political environment was classified as either Democratic or Republican for the four years that followed a November presidential election. Additional sensitivity analyses analyzed AAMR trends for counties that voted only for one party throughout the study, and county level gubernatorial election results and state level AAMR trends. Joinpoint analysis was used to assess for an inflection point in APC trends.

Results The study period covered five presidential elections from 2000 to 2019. From 2001 to 2019, the AAMR per 100 000 population decreased by 22% in Democratic counties, from 850.3 to 664.0 (average APC −1.4%, 95% confidence interval −1.5% to −1.2%), but by only 11% in Republican counties, from 867.0 to 771.1 (average APC −0.7%, −0.9% to −0.5%). The gap in AAMR between Democratic and Republican counties therefore widened from 16.7 (95% confidence interval 16.6 to 16.8) to 107.1 (106.5 to 107.7). Statistically significant inflection points in APC occurred for Democratic counties between periods 2001-09 (APC −2.1%, −2.3% to −1.9%) and 2009-19 (APC −0.8%, −1.0% to −0.6%). For Republican counties between 2001 and 2008 the APC was −1.4% (−1.8% to −1.0%), slowing to near zero between 2008 and 2019 (APC −0.2%, −0.4% to 0.0%). Male and female residents of Democratic counties experienced both lower AAMR and twice the relative decrease in AAMR than did those in Republican counties. Black Americans experienced largely similar improvement in AAMR in both Democratic and Republican counties. However, the AAMR gap between white residents in Democratic versus Republican counties increased fourfold, from 24.7 (95% confidence interval 24.6 to 24.8) to 101.3 (101.0 to 101.6). Rural Republican counties experienced the highest AAMR and the least improvement. All trends were similar when comparing counties that did not switch political environment throughout the period and when gubernatorial election results were used. The greatest contributors to the widening AAMR gap between Republican and Democratic counties were heart disease (difference in AAMRs 27.6), cancer (17.3), and chronic lower respiratory tract diseases (8.3), followed by unintentional injuries (3.3) and suicide (3.0).

Conclusion The mortality gap in Republican voting counties compared with Democratic voting counties has grown over time, especially for white populations, and that gap began to widen after 2008.

Warraich H J, Kumar P, Nasir K, Joynt Maddox K E, Wadhera R K.
Political environment and mortality rates in the United States, 2001-19: population based cross sectional analysis
BMJ 2022; 377 :e069308 doi:10.1136/bmj-2021-069308

Copyright: © 2022 The authors. Published by BMJ Publishing Group Ltd.
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

I would suggest to my American readers in particular, that a party which is actively and knowingly pursuing policies designed to make their people sicker with a lower life expectancy, is a party which should never be trusted with the power to implement those policies at any level of government.

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Common Origins - How Modern Chromatin Shows the Common Ancestry of All Eukaryotes

Ancyromonas sigmoides, an understudied microbe that holds enormous promise for investigations into the origin of eukaryotes

Credit: Naoji Yubuki

Chromatin originated in ancient microbes one to two billion years ago | Centre for Genomic Regulation

For some bizarre reason, creationists often claim that the science of epigenetics somehow falsifies Darwinian evolution because, so they claim, it shows how genetic changes acquired after birth can be passed on to the next generation, although how that falsifies the observable fact that allele frequency in a population changes over time is never explained when the rehearsed talking points are regurgitated on cue.

It is ironic then, that, according to research by scientists at the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) at the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST), Barcelona, Spain, a vital component of the epigenetic system, the chromatin, or histones, around which DNA is wrapped and which exerts a control over which genes are expressed in the specialised cells of multicellular organisms, had its origins in remote ancestral prokaryote organism some 1-2 billion years ago and so is evidence of common ancestry.

To make matters worse for creationists, the evidence suggests that histones probably evolved as defensive structures in response to selective environmental pressures by genetic parasites such as viruses, in classical Darwinian evolution by natural selection and the inevitable arms races.

As the CRG news release explains:

Covidiot News - Why Covidiot Antivaxx Parents Are putting their Children at Risk

Unvaccinated children mount COVID-19 immune response, but vaccination may be key to strengthening immunity | Doherty Website

New research shows that, although unvaccinated children produce antibodies and killer T-cells in response to COVID-19 infection, this response may not be strong enough to protect them against future variants, especially if the antibodies fail to recognise the variant.

The normal response to viral infections is two-fold. First there are the antibodies that are produced in response to the foreign proteins. These bind to the viruses, deactivate them and cause them to clump together so they can be moped up by phagocytic white cells. However, they can only act against circulating viruses and not against viruses that have already gained access to the cells, where they will be replicating.

The second response is the more long-term one. This produces pre-programmed killer T-lymphocytes or 'memory' T-cells - white blood cells - that recognise infected cells and destroy them, together with the viruses inside them, to prevent them infecting other cells or being shed to infect other people, so limiting the infection and minimising the damage to the infected tissues. T-cells can provide protection even when the antibodies fail to recognise the virus because they are produced in response to stable fragments of viral proteins that are less likely to differ in different variants, hence they safeguard against future mutant forms.

Neither of these is 100% effective of course and people can still become infected again and can still be infectious by shedding more viruses into the environment, but they do greatly reduce the seriousness of the infection and the risk of passing it on to other people.

However, what the researchers at the Doherty Institute, Melbourne, Australia, have shown is that unvaccinated children produce far fewer killer T-cells than adults. The researchers say this limited ability of unvaccinated children to generate strong memory killer T cell responses following natural infection may leave them vulnerable to future infections. The anti-COVID vaccines, on the other hand, are specifically designed to produce a strong T-cell response in addition to antibodies, placing vaccinated children as a significant advantage.

From the Doherty Institute press release:

The Evolution of Chickens and Why God Wasn't Aware of Them

A map depicting the distribution of both the gray and Ceylon junglefowl species and three subspecies of red junglefowl: G. gallus murghi, G. gallus spadiceus, and G. gallus jabouillei. The distribution of G. gallus gallus is depicted as the remainder of mainland southeast Asia and Sumatra following the general distribution in ref. 16. The G. gallus murghi distribution follows that of SI Appendix, Fig. S1, which draws on published maps in ornithological sources and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) records (119, 120 & 121). For G. gallus spadiceus and G. gallus jabouillei, the GBIF records were augmented by specimens with genetic data reported by refs. 16 and 122.

Major new international research reveals new evidence about when, where, and how chickens were domesticated | University of Exeter

A quick search of the Bible on my Kindle reveals that there is no mention of chickens as such anywhere in the Old Testament and they don't get a mention in the Bible until Matthew 23:7, which was probably written in the second half of the first century CE.

There is a very good reason for this: despite being one of the major sources of protein in the world as the most widely consumed meat, the domestic chicken was unknown to the authors of the Old Testament, according to new research by international teams pf archaeologists led by scientists from the University of Exeter, UK and including academics from the universities of Exeter, Munich, Cardiff, Oxford, Bournemouth, Toulouse, and universities and institutes in Germany, France and Argentina.

These teams results are published in two open access papers - the Cambridge Core journal Antiquity and the Proceeding of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).

The first paper deals with the arrival of domestic chickens in Western Eurasia, the Middle East and Northwest Africa.

Briefly, the teams have shown that the domestication of the wild junglefowl of Southeast Asia did not happen until the dry cultivation of rice and millet tempted them out of the jungle and into human habitation where they could feed on these grains, but prior to being used for food, chickens were regarded as exotica and even revered for several hundred years.

Evolution News - How Brown Bears and Polar Bears Diverged into Different Species

The subfossil jawbone of a polar bear that lived 115,000 to 130,000 years ago in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. A genomic study includes an analysis of DNA extracted from a tooth attached to this jawbone, which is now housed at the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo.

Credit: Photo by Karsten Sund, Natural History Museum (NHM), University of Oslo

How species form: What the tangled history of polar bear and brown bear relations tells us - Graduate School of Education - University at Buffalo

A new study by scientists led by Charlotte Lindqvist at University at Buffalo (UB) in the U.S.; Luis Herrera-Estrella at the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity (LANGEBIO) in Mexico and Texas Tech University in the U.S.; and Kalle Leppälä at the University of Oulu in Finland has shown that the evolutionary divergence of brown bears, Ursus arctos, and polar bears, Ursus maritimus, into different species, was every bit as complex as that of hominins into the single extant species, Homo sapiens.

This illustrates how evolutionary divergence is often a far from straightforward process, with several periods of partial speciation, remixing and convergence and separation again until, as today, we can end up with two species that can still interbreed, indicating that barrier to hybridization have not yet fully evolved.

This, of course, is exactly what we would expect of a slow process over time, but not speciation events such as creationists wrongly believe scientists think is how evolution works. This is perhaps best illustrated with the simple analogy of one colour changes into another in a rainbow spectrum where it is impossible to say exactly where one colour ends and the next begins:

Where does the colour change?

The team used an expanded DNA dataset — including DNA from an ancient polar bear tooth — to tease out the details As the University at Buffalo news release explains:

Malevolent Designer - Another Little Bit of Nastiness from Creationism's Favourite Sadist.

The toadfly, Lucilia bufonivora

By James Lindsey at Ecology of Commanster, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

https://www.gardenwildlifehealth.org/portfolio/toad-fly-lucilia-bufonivora/

This example of what creationists believe must have been designed by their allegedly omnibenevolent god takes some beating for its sheer ghoulish nastiness. It is the toadfly, Lucilia bufonivora, or to be precise, the parasitic larvae of the toadfly.

This little piece of divine malevolence (if you believe the intelligent [sic] design hoax) would have made it into my popular, illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, had I been aware of it at the time. Maybe it will make it into a sequel one day.

This rather beautiful, metallic green fly, is a 'blow fly' of the Calliphoridae family, that are more familiar to most people as the blow flies such at the blue bottles and green bottles that lay eggs on dead animals and raw meat. It's the sort of thing in nature that creationists often point to and claim such an exquisite thing is evidence of design.

So what are the facts?

Southern Baptist Sexual Abuses Scandal - SBC Official Says It's More Important to Protect the SBC than to Protect Potential Abuse Victims

North Carolina attorney, Joe Knott. SBC Committee Member
"I guarantee you women and children are going to be victimized"

SBC leader warns that trying to prevent abuse will destroy the mission.

In a frankly astonishingly laissez faire response to the report into historical sexual abuses in member churches of the Southern Baptist Convention, North Carolina attorney and long-time committee member Joe Knott, warned against implementing the measures recommended to protect vulnerable children and women from sexually predatory pastors, youth workers and missionaries because it could lead to ruin.

I am terrified that we are breaching our long-standing position of being a voluntary association of independent churches, when we start telling churches that they should do this or do that to protect children or women.

Joe Knott, SBC Committee member

Evolution News - How Fish like the Electric Eel Evolved Electric Organs

UT Austin researchers confirmed that the genetic control region they discovered only controls the expression of a sodium channel gene in muscle and no other tissues. In this image, a green fluorescent protein lights up only in trunk muscle in a developing zebrafish embryo.

Image credit: Mary Swartz/Johann Eberhart/University of Texas at Austin.

How Electric Fish Were Able to Evolve Electric Organs - UT News

Creationists might want to avoid reading this because it contains information, not only about evolution and how it forms the basis of scientific understanding of the facts, but also because it is about how new genetic information arose by gene duplication and subsequent repurposing of a duplicate gene to create a new organ - something that creationist frauds say can't happen because this is 'macroevolution' which requires a magic designer. The information comes from a research team from the University of Texas Austin and Michigan State University, led by Professor Harold Zakon of UT Austin, who have worked out how electric fish evolved their electric organs.

This is exciting because we can see how a small change in the gene can completely change where it’s expressed.

Professor Harold Zakon, corresponding author
Department of Neuroscience
And Department of Integrative Biology

The University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA.

Having duplicated a gene for producing the sodium pump in their cell membranes early on in their evolution, all fish carry this duplicate gene. The sodium pump is necessary for muscle cells to recover after contracting and so being available to contract again. The team has now shown that the African and South American electric fish have independently repurposed a 'spare' gene to create a new organ with unique abilities.

If they turned on the gene in both muscle and the electric organ, then all the new stuff that was happening to the sodium channels in the electric organ would also be occurring in the muscle, so, it was important to isolate the expression of the gene to the electric organ, where it could evolve without harming muscle.

Professor Harold Zakon

The researchers have discovered that just a short section of about 20 nucleotides in this repurposed gene controls whether it is expressed in any given cell. They found that this section is either altered or missing entirely in electric fish resulting in one of the two sodium pump genes being non-functional in these fish. This allowed the gene to be repurposed in the muscles of electric fish without harming the muscles, which still had the functional copy.

This research could have an application in human health by helping to understand how the variants of this gene work in conditions in which reduced sodium pump efficiency plays a part.

If you rewound the tape of life and hit play, would it play back the same way or would it find new ways forward? Would evolution work the same way over and over again? Electric fish let us try to answer that question because they have repeatedly evolved these incredible traits. We swung for the fences in this paper, trying to understand how these sodium channel genes have been repeatedly lost in electric fish. It really was a collaborative effort.

Jason R. Gallant, co-author
Department of Integrative Biology
And Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior Program
Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA.

The UT Texas News release explains:

There are two groups of electric fish in the world—one in Africa and the other in South America. The researchers discovered that the electric fish in Africa had mutations in the control region, while electric fish in South America lost it entirely. Both groups arrived at the same solution for developing an electric organ—losing expression of a sodium channel gene in muscle—though from two different paths.

One of the next questions the researchers hope to answer is how the control region evolved to turn on sodium channels in the electric organ.

The team have published their results, open access, in the journal Science Advances:

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Open access. (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Abstract

South American and African weakly electric fish independently evolved electric organs from muscle. In both groups, a voltage-gated sodium channel gene independently lost expression from muscle and gained it in the electric organ, allowing the channel to become specialized for generating electric signals. It is unknown how this voltage-gated sodium channel gene is targeted to muscle in any vertebrate. We describe an enhancer that selectively targets sodium channel expression to muscle. Next, we demonstrate how the loss of this enhancer, but not trans-activating factors, drove the loss of sodium channel gene expression from muscle in South American electric fish. While this enhancer is also altered in African electric fish, key transcription factor binding sites and enhancer activity are retained, suggesting that the convergent loss of sodium channel expression from muscle in these two electric fish lineages occurred via different processes.

LaPotin, Sarah; Swartz, Mary E.; Luecke, David M.; Constantinou, Savvas J.; Gallant, Jason R.; Eberhart, Johann K.; Zakon, Harold H.(2022)
Divergent cis-regulatory evolution underlies the convergent loss of sodium channel expression in electric fish
Science Advances 8(22); DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm2970

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Just to recap for any creationists who managed to stay the course and get through to the end: what this paper shows is not only that the authors regard the TOE as the foundation of their science, but also that new information can arise by gene doubling followed by mutation and environment-driven repurposing of redundant copies, but also that information can give rise to new structures with new functions, and all driven by natural selection from what is available to it, and with relatively few changes to the DNA. The advantages of this new organ can be seen from the fact that it evolved twice from the same starting point and converged on the same solution. And all without the assistance of magic.

Evolution News - How Humans Evolved Social Behaviour and Cooperation

Neanderthals may have had less prosocial behaviour than modern humans. They had smaller social groups and may have had a polygynous social structure with more male-male competition.

What oxytocin can tell us about the evolution of human prosociality - Universitat de Barcelona

One of the more nonsensical creationist talking points you still hear occasionally, is that evolution can't account for altruism because survival of the fittest means the selfish survive at the expense of others less selfish. This is demonstrably untrue because the result of evolution show that cooperation at all levels of organisation, from intracellular organelles to social groups of multicellular organisms, is better than conflict, and human society especially demonstrates the truth of this where any tendency towards freeloading is moderated by social ethics and the affiliative needs of individuals.

Now this reasoning has been supported by research which shows that human evolution included improving the ability to empathize. Empathy, of course, is the basis for all human prosocial behaviour and is even acknowledged in the Judaeo-Christian holy books with the invocation to do unto others that which you would they do unto you - the 'golden rule', common to all human societies.

Modern human societies are characterised by comparatively high levels of prosocial behaviours such as intraspecies empathy, social tolerance, cooperation and altruism. Now, Constantina Theofanopoulou, as part of her doctoral thesis carried out under the co-supervision of Cedric Boeckx, ICREA researcher at the Institute of Complex Systems at the Universitat de Barcelona (UBICS) and Erich D. Jarvis, professor at Rockefeller University, has shown that this has an evolved genetic basis involving the genes that control oxytocin and vasotocin receptor in the brain. Oxytocin, also known as the 'love' hormone, is responsible for social bonding as well as sexual attraction and parent-child bonding.

By analysing the genomes of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans as well as non-human primates, the common chimpanzees, bonobos and macaques, Theofanopoulou and her colleagues have shown that there are five sites in the oxytocin and vasotocin receptors where modern humans are unique in one of their two (or more) variants compared to archaic humans and non-human primates, and which are at the same time found in more than 70% of the modern human population.

The scientists have published their finding's, open access, in the journal, Comprehensive Psychoneuroendocrinology.

The Universitat de Barcelona news release gives more details:

Variants unique to modern humans in more than 70% of the population

Past studies that compared the entire modern human genome with the Neanderthal or the chimpanzee genomes have focused on changes that are fixed or nearly fixed in modern humans. This has led to them identifying sites where, for example, all Neanderthals had Adenine (one of the four nucleotides that with guanine, cytosine and thymine form the DNA) and nearly all modern humans (say, 98%) have Guanine. In this study, we searched for differences on locations where, by definition, not all modern humans share the same nucleotide, namely on polymorphic sites, where for example, 70% of the modern human population has Adenine and 30% Cytosine.

[the differences] might be relevant to the smaller social groups attributed to Neanderthals and Denisovans or to the decreased modern human androgenization. They might also be relevant to a different social structure, i.e., Neanderthals have been linked to a polygynous social structure and a higher level of male–male competition than most contemporary modern human populations.

The sites that are unique in both us and archaic humans versus non-human primates can elucidate the genetic underpinnings of the progressive social tolerance needed for the intensive cultural transmission of technological innovations (e.g., fire use) in the evolution of humankind, as well as for the reduced aggression indicated by several markers in early hominid evolution, such as the reduction of male canine size and the accelerated demographic success.

The convergent sites in modern humans and bonobos could be insightful for understanding the posited similarities in prosociality, social tolerance and cooperation between us and bonobos, and the differences of both compared to chimpanzees. For example, bonobos outperform chimpanzees on tasks relevant to social causality or theory of mind and are more attentive to the face and eyes, suggestive of higher empathic sensitivity.

Understanding developmental disorders through evolutionary lenses can aid into us achieving what we call an evo-devo (evolutionary and developmental biology) understanding of these disorders. If indeed “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, then deciphering our evolutionary trajectory may shed light to new genetic spots for clinical research that might, in turn, lead to earlier disorder diagnosis.

Constantina Theofanopoulou, first author
PhD Candidate
Laboratory of Neurogenetics of Language
Rockefeller University, New York, USA
And Institute of Complex Systems
University of Barcelona
Catalonia, Spain

Considering the evidence on modern human prosociality and on the involvement of the oxytocin and vasotocin genes in social behaviours, the researchers hypothesized that the evolution of these genes might elucidate the genetic basis of the evolution of hominin prosociality. With this aim in mind, the study explored the differences between modern humans, archaic humans and non-human primates in polymorphic heterozygous sites in the human genome – locations where at least two alternative sequences are found in a population.

The study compared the available genomic sequences of these genes between modern humans, non-human primate species (e.g., chimpanzees, bonobos, and macaques) and, for the first time, archaic humans.

The researchers identified five sites in the oxytocin and vasotocin receptors where modern humans are unique in one of their two (or more) variants compared to archaic humans and non-human primates, and which are at the same time found in more than 70% of the modern human population. Next, they conducted functional and frequency analyses to establish whether the variants are relevant. They performed a range of analyses on the five sites and found that some of the variants are highly functional, indicating that they have an effect on the molecular function of the proteins activated by these genes.

The researchers also found that these sites are encountered in genome regions that are active in the brain, particularly in the cingulate gyrus, a brain region involved in social cognition-relevant pathways. Moreover, all these sites have been associated in other studies with a plethora of social behaviours or social deficits, such as autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), aggression, and so on.

These findings may help to explain some of the social differences between modern humans and what we presume to know about the social behaviours of Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Variants present only in modern and archaic humans

The study also found two sites on the oxytocin receptor under a positive selection in modern and archaic humans: that is to say, modern and archaic humans showed a variant that was not present in any other non-human primate. This means that these sites are found in very high percentages in the modern human population (in this case, more than 85%). These same sites have also been associated with a great many social behaviours or deficits, and one of them was predicted to be a highly functional site in their regulation analyses.

Convergent sites with bonobos

Lastly, the researchers found three sites where modern humans and bonobos, a primate species that shows convergence of prosocial behaviours with humans, have the same nucleotide.

All the sites identified in this study have also been independently associated with disorders that include social deficits, such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

Because the same sites were not found in the common chimpanzees, with whom we share common ancestry with bonobos, the team reasoned that the three sites which humans and bonobos have in common is most likely a case of convergent evolution. This emphasises the selective advantage in this mutation in bonobos, in which prosocial, empathetic behaviour is highly developed.

More detail is given in the abstract and highlight section to their paper:

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by Elsevier B.V. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

Highlights

• We compared the oxytocin/vasotocin receptors in modern humans, archaic humans, and non-human primates.
• We found 5 sites with modern human specific variation.
• In these sites, the modern human allele is the major allele in the global population.
• Several sites were predicted to be functional and with selection signatures in modern humans.
• We also identified 3 sites of convergent evolution in modern humans and bonobos.

Abstract

Modern human lifestyle strongly depends on complex social traits like empathy, tolerance and cooperation. These diverse facets of social cognition have been associated with variation in the oxytocin receptor (OTR) and its sister genes, the vasotocin/vasopressin receptors (VTR1A/AVPR1A and AVPR1B/VTR1B). Here, we compared the available genomic sequences of these receptors between modern humans, archaic humans, and 12 non-human primate species, and identified sites that show heterozygous variation in modern humans and archaic humans distinct from variation in other primates, and for which we could find association studies with clinical implications. On these sites, we performed a range of analyses (variant clustering, pathogenicity prediction, regulation, linkage disequilibrium frequency), and reviewed the literature on selection data in different modern-human populations. We found five sites with modern human specific variation, where the modern human allele is the major allele in the global population (OTR: rs1042778, rs237885, rs6770632; VTR1A: rs10877969; VTR1B: rs33985287). Among them, variation in the OTR-rs6770632 site was predicted to be the most functional. Two alleles (OTR: rs59190448 and rs237888) present only in modern humans and archaic humans were putatively under positive selection in modern humans, with rs237888 predicted to be a highly functional site. Three sites showed convergent evolution between modern humans and bonobos (OTR: rs2228485 and rs237897; VTR1A: rs1042615), with OTR-rs2228485 ranking highly in terms of functionality and reported to be under balancing selection in modern humans (Schaschl, 2015) [1]. Our findings have implications for understanding hominid prosociality, as well as the similarities between modern human and bonobo social behavior.

Theofanopoulou, Constantina; Andirkó, Alejandro; Boeckx, Cedric; Jarvis, Erich D. (2022)
Oxytocin and vasotocin receptor variation and the evolution of human prosociality
Comprehensive Psychoneuroendocrinology 11 100139; DOI: 10.1016/j.cpnec.2022.100139

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by Elsevier B.V. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

It is entirely possible therefore that modern human groups were able to out-compete the archaic hominins because we were able to sustain larger cooperative groups, with reduced internal conflict stemming from male-male rivalry, than the archaic hominins could manage. This improved social cohesion gave us an evolutionary advantage, hence it came to predominate in the human gene pool, in a classic example of evolution by natural selection.

No doubt, despite evidence such as this to the contrary, we will still get creationists denying the common ancestry of humans and other apes and asserting that natural selection can't account for altruism and love because it would favour selfishness. Creationism requires its dupes to stay stoically ignorant of 'toxic' science. No doubt too that creationists will still make the increasingly forlorn claim that the TOE is a theory in crisis, despite the evidence such as that in this paper that it is fundamental to our understanding of biology and the only scientific theory that makes sense of the evidence without resorting to magical mysteries and childish fairy tales.

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Evolution News - How Salmonella is Evolving to Resist Antibiotics

Researchers find that the Salmonella vaccine for poultry contributed to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the UK.

Image Credit: Mary Parker, Quadram Institute (CC-BY 4.0)

Salmonella vaccine for poultry contributed to rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria | PLOS

A new investigation into the evolution of Salmonella bacteria infecting Brazilian poultry shows that the introduction of a Salmonella vaccine, combined with increasing antibiotic usage by Brazilian farmers, has led to the rise of strains that are more antibiotic-resistant, but less likely to cause disease in humans. This is the conclusion by Andrea Micke Moreno of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, Alison Mather of Quadram Institute Bioscience, UK, and their colleagues, who conducted the investigation.

Their findings are published today the open access journal PLOS Genetics.

Information provided by PLOS ahead of publication explains:

Americans Increasingly Ignore Their Church and Support Same Sex Marriage

Same-Sex Marriage Support Inches Up to New High of 71%

A sure sign that a religion is losing its grip on the people is when public opinion differs markedly from its teachings. This is a manifestation of an increasing tension as social ethics progresses and leaves behind the fossilised ethics of religion from an earlier age. The local religions then have to change to keep up but in doing so, they alienate the traditionalists who tend to become an ever-diminishing minority, pushing it further out to the fringes, or leave the church in protest at its increasing abandonment of sacred principles.

The problem is a direct consequence of the control of public morals religions presume they have entitlement to and their claim of the divine authority of an omniscient god for so doing. This means they can adopt change only by abandoning their justification for their control and in effect, giving up the pretence that morals come from an omniscient deity who, by definition, is never wrong. The reality, of course, is that morals are a social construct that change and develop according to the developmental needs of society, and have no divine, objective basis save what goes to create a cooperative society that is pleasant to live in.

So the progressive forces in society produces a tension between them and the regressive, traditionalist forces of religion and the needs of religions to keep control of their people and so the livelihoods and power of the priesthood. A useful analogy is that of a rope by which religions try to hold back social progress until either the rope snaps and the people give up on that religion, or the religion is dragged, kicking and screaming into the modern age.

Christianity Faces Extinction in the UK Within 40 Years

Church of England ‘R number’ suggests bleak future, says mathematician

The Church of England (CofE) faces extinction within 40 years, according to the calculations of Dr John Hayward, a mathematician at the University of South Wales.

He arrived at this date by applying a technique normally used for assessing the increase or decrease in the spread of a pandemic such as COVID-19, which calculates at 'R' number. The 'R' number calculates how many people someone with the virus passes it on to on average. An 'R' number of one means the number of cases in the population remains constant; above 1 means it is increasing and below 1 means it is decreasing.

Interestingly, this view of religion and how it is spread is almost identical to the view expresed by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene that religions behave like a parasitic virus in the human memepool.

The 'problem' the CofE and other Christian denominations face is that they are not infectious enough. Dr Hayward has calculated the CofE's 'R' number at 0.9, the same as that for the Catholic Church and an 'R' number that a COVID-19 epidemiologist would have welcomed at the height of the Pandemic. This means their congregations could disappear by 2062. The Methodists, with an 'R' number of about 0.85 could be extinct by 2040, lingering on little longer than the United Reformed Church with an 'R' number of about 0.8.

Other Christian denominations in the UK fare even worse and only a handful have 'R' numbers about 1 - the Elim Pentecostal Church and the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches.

Source: Heyward, J. Growth, Decline and Extinction of UK Churches

Source: Heyward, J. Growth, Decline and Extinction of UK Churches

Several churches in Wales and Scotland face extinction before 2050 (i.e., within the next generation). They are the Welsh Presbyterians, the Church in Wales, the Welsh Independents, the Church of Scotland and the Scottish Episcopal Church.

Source: Heyward, J. Church of England 2001–2019

The scale of the catastrophe facing the CofE can be seen from the change in membership since 1800, when 17% of the population were registered as members on the electoral role. That figure is now just 1.7%, i.e., a 99% decline in membership which fell below 1 million for the first time in 2019, at a time of population growth.

Given that rate of decline and the fact that the CofE now represents only a tiny minority of the population, the time is now well overdue for a review of its role in public life and especially its right to insert bishops into the UK's legislative upper chamber, the House of Lords.

The role of the monarch as titular head of this unrepresentative minority cult now needs to be abolished on the succession.

It's time to disestablish the Church of England

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Common Ancestor News - Like Humans, Chimpanzees Have Complex Language

Chimpanzees Asanti and Akuna vocalising.

© Liran Samuni, Taï Chimpanzee Project

Chimpanzees combine calls to form numerous vocal sequences | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

How human languages evolved is something of a mystery. I'm not talking about the neurological and anatomical development that made us able to vocalise and comprehend spoken communications because this is an obvious case of gene-meme co-evolution. What I'm talking about is the evolution of the various sounds into words and so into coded information that conveys a meaning.

This is an even bigger problem for creationists because, apart from the childishly implausible and contradictory accounts in their favourite textbook, the Bible, it offers nothing by way of a rational explanation. Firstly there is the tale that all the descendants of Noah spoke different languages, to account for the handful of Middle Eastern languages the authors were aware of (Genesis 10:1-5). Then we have the contradictory claim that the whole world spoke one language (Genesis 11:1) but God confounded their tongues so they all spoke languages incomprehensible to one another [sic] because he was afraid they would work together to build a tower up to Heaven - which in those days was just above the sky over the Middle East and accessible via a tall enough tower.

But nowhere does the Bible say anything about how we learned to combine different phonics into words. The assumption of the Bible's authors was that, right from start, language was fully formed as some sort of universal given. Even the talking animals (Genesis 3:1-5, Numbers 22:28-30) and plants (Judges 9:13) spoke with human language, using the recombination of human phonics to make the words they spoke, like humans do, even though they lack the neurological and physical means of doing so. Even when God spoke his first words (Genesis 1:3) he used a human combination of human phonics to make meaningful (to humans) words and sentences - in that case, in a language then spoken by no-one else, since there was no-one else to speak it - Ancient Hebrew.

It is of course, nonsensical. Our ability to cooperate in social groups and develop cultures in which agreed combinations of phonetics has agreed meanings, so we can construct new information by an agreed set of rules, is an evolved ability and one which we probably inherited from an ancestor we have in common with chimpanzees, as the work of scientists from the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, Lyon, France, the Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive Sciences, Leipzig, Germany and the Taï Chimpanzee Project, Centre Suisse de Recherche Scientifique, Abidjan, Ivory Coast, shows.

They have discovered that chimpanzees :

Catholic Child Abuse News - Will Italy's New Senior Cardinal Launch a Historical Child Abuse Enquiry?

Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi, Archbishop of Bologna, Italy
President of the Italian Bishops' Conference

Cardinal Matteo Zuppi is the new president of Italy’s Catholic bishops’ conference | Catholic News Agency

The appointment by Pope Francis of Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi, Archbishop of Bologna, to the powerful post of President of the Italian Bishops' Conference, raises the delicious possibility of another major investigation into historical sex abuses by Catholic Priest in a devoutly Catholic Country, and of course the likely haemorrhage of membership from the church and loosening of the Church’s grip on national politics when the truth is revealed, as was seen in France, Spain, Ireland and elsewhere.

Zuppi is regarded as a liberal and was appointed by the Pope when Italian Bishops declined the Pope's invitation to be given the power to elect their president from amongst themselves. This gives him power in Italy second only to the Pope, who as Bishop of Rome is also Primate of Italy. He is believed to have strong links with the Sant’Egidio Community - a liberal-leaning, humanitarian community which describes itself as:

Sant’Egidio is a Christian community born in 1968, right after the second Vatican Council. An initiative of Andrea Riccardi, it was born in a secondary school in the centre of Rome. With the years, it has become a network of communities in more than 70 countries of the world. The Community pays attention to the periphery and peripheral people, gathering men and women of all ages and conditions, united by a fraternal tie through the listening of the Gospel and the voluntary and free commitment for the poor and peace.

Although it doesn't mention LGBTQ issues on its website, the Sant’Egidio Community is believed to support an inclusive approach to members of the LGBTQ community.

Italian bishops have long resisted calls for an enquiry into the sexual abuses of children by Catholic clerics but recently, they agreed to launch an enquiry into abuses over the past 10 years, having rejected one going back 50 years. Obviously, they know they have much to fear from such a long historical period going back to a time before the historical abuse scandals swamped the church and prompted actions to prevent them; a time when deference and a code of silence allowed abuses to go unreported and the abusers to continue their predation without let or hindrance. Similar enquiries in other countries have usually revealed thousands of victims of hundreds of priests, nuns and monks in most Catholic diocese and institutions, and a culture of tolerance, cover-up, facilitation and bullying of victims who dared to complain.

Zuppi's rise has been relatively rapid, having been ordained in 1981 and serving as an auxiliary bishop in Rome. He was appointed bishop of Villanova by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012 and Archbishop of Bologna by Pope Francis in 2015. He was made a cardinal by Pope Francis just 3 years ago, but he needs to tread carefully, as a too liberal approach with too much revelation of the murky world of Italian Catholicism, could alienate him from the powerful conservative wing of the Church which is especially strong in Italy, and that could scupper his chances of becoming the next Pope - a position for which he is currently regarded as a leading candidate.

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Christian Child Abuse News - 700 Sexual Predators Found on a Secret SBC List

An annual meeting for the Southern Baptist Convention, which has almost 14 million members.

Photo: Vernon Bryant/The Dallas Morning News, via Associated Press

Southern Baptist Sex Abuse Report Stuns, From Pulpit to Pews - The New York Times

Leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention in the USA have decided to release a formerly secret list of child abusers known to senior figures in the Convention. The list was originally started as a research project for an SBC committee in 2007 but was officially discontinued shortly after. However, a staffer continued to maintain it until 2022. It's existence was unknown until discovered by Guidepost Solutions, a firm employed as part of a multi-million dollar investigation into how the SBC handled abuse cases.

According to this report, the 205-page list contains details of cases involving "pastors, Sunday school teachers, camp counselors, music ministers, bus drivers and missionaries, with about 400 tied to SBC churches from Alaska to Alabama. In almost all of the cases, the abuse had led to arrests and jail time.". The compiler, whose name has been redacted from the released file, and who remains anonymous in the Guidepost Solutions report, has added the following disclaimer:

Evolution News - Evolution is Occurring Faster Than Previously Thought

Rhesus Macaque, Macaca mulatta

Photo: Timothy Gonsalves, CC BY-SA 4.0,via Wikimedia Commons

Wild animals evolving much faster than previously thought - ANU

The precondition for Darwinian evolution is genetic difference between individuals in a population. This is the 'fuel' which drives evolution in an environment in which certain genetic variations are more advantageous than others, so the amount of this variation in any given population, is the main determinant of the rate of evolution.

In order to quantify the amount of this 'fuel of evolution', an international team led by Dr Timothée Bonnet from the Australian National University (ANU) spent three years trawling through reams of data, after which they were able to quantify how much species change occurred due to genetic changes caused by natural selection.   It turned out to be about two to four times what was previously thought and evolution can go much faster than Darwin originally thought.

The Australian Nation University news release explains:

Evolution News - Observing Evolution by Horizontal Gene Transfer in Action

There are two types of plasmid integration into a host bacteria: Non-integrating plasmids replicate as with the top instance, whereas episomes, the lower example, can integrate into the host chromosome.

Source: Wikipedia
By User:Spaully - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5

Drug resistance molecule can spread though bacterial 'communities'| Research and Innovation | University of Exeter

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) plays an important role in the evolution of microorganisms like bacteria, but a lesser, though not unknown, role in multicellular organism. In bacteria, which freely share small bundles of DNA known as plasmids, even amongst unrelated species, HGT can be the means by which, in the right environment, a beneficial trait such as antibiotic resistance can spread rapidly through an entire microbiome. Plasmids are shed by bacteria into their environment where they can be picked up by other bacteria.

This was demonstrated recently by a study led by the researcher, Arthur Newbury, of the Environment and Sustainability Institute on Exeter University's Penryn Campus in Cornwall, UK. The significance of this finding is that it shows how antibiotic resistance can be spread by plasmids in waste water, for instance.

The Exeter University news release explains:

Malevolent Designer News - What Is Monkeypox?

Monkeypox causes lesions that resemble pus-filled blisters, which eventually scab over.

CDC/Getty Images

What is monkeypox? A microbiologist explains what's known about this smallpox cousin

The third in a series looking at monkeypox and asking whether this is creationism's putative divine malevolence's latest attempt to increase the misery and suffering in the world with another of its nasty little creations.

If not, then creationists need to explain why it either didn't design this virus, or, if it did, why it didn't realise what it would do - and what else it was designed to do. Unlike the SARS-CoV-2 virus that is causing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which is an RNA virus, the virus that causes monkeypox is a more complex, DNA virus that, again unlike the SARS-CoV-2, has the ability to repair mistakes in its DNA when it replicates, so mutations are much rarer.

Monkeypox viruses are from a subset of the Poxviridae family, known as Orthopoxvirus, which includes smallpox and cowpox (but not chickenpox).

An expert in the field explains what the monkeypox virus is, probably why why we are experiencing the current outbreak and what we can learn from the history of the closely-related smallpox virus.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The Conversation is a charity set up to allow experts in the field to give expert insight into items of current public interest and to counter the deluge of lies and disinformation with which politically-motivated extremists are flooding the social media in the Trumpian/Putinesque so-called ‘post truth age’.

What is monkeypox? A microbiologist explains what’s known about this smallpox cousin

Rodney E. Rohde, Texas State University

On May 18, 2022, Massachusetts health officials and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed a single case of monkeypox in a patient who had recently traveled to Canada. Cases have also been reported in the United Kingdom and Europe.

Monkeypox isn’t a new disease. The first confirmed human case was in 1970, when the virus was isolated from a child suspected of having smallpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Monkeypox is unlikely to cause another pandemic, but with COVID-19 top of mind, fear of another major outbreak is understandable. Though rare and usually mild, monkeypox can still potentially cause severe illness. Health officials are concerned that more cases will arise with increased travel.

I’m a researcher who has worked in public health and medical laboratories for over three decades, especially in the realm of diseases with animal origins. What exactly is happening in the current outbreak, and what does history tell us about monkeypox?

A cousin of smallpox

Monkeypox is caused by the monkeypox virus, which belongs to a subset of the Poxviridae family of viruses called Orthopoxvirus. This subset includes the smallpox, vaccinia and cowpox viruses. While an animal reservoir for monkeypox virus is unknown, African rodents are suspected to play a part in transmission. The monkeypox virus has only been isolated twice from an animal in nature. Diagnostic testing for monkeypox is currently only available at Laboratory Response Network labs in the U.S. and globally.

The name “monkeypox” comes from the first documented cases of the illness in animals in 1958, when two outbreaks occurred in monkeys kept for research. However, the virus did not jump from monkeys to humans, nor are monkeys major carriers of the disease.

Monkeypox belongs to the Poxviridae family of viruses, which includes smallpox.

CDC/ Cynthia S. Goldsmith

Epidemiology

Since the first reported human case, monkeypox has been found in several other central and western African countries, with the majority of infections in the DRC. Cases outside of Africa have been linked to international travel or imported animals, including in the U.S. and elsewhere.

The first reported cases of monkeypox in the U.S. was in 2003, from an outbreak in Texas linked to a shipment of animals from Ghana. There were also travel-associated cases in November and July 2021 in Maryland.

Because monkeypox is closely related to smallpox, the smallpox vaccine can provide protection against infection from both viruses. Since smallpox was officially eradicated, however, routine smallpox vaccinations for the U.S. general population were stopped in 1972. Because of this, monkeypox has been appearing increasingly in unvaccinated people.

Indonesia began screening travelers after a monkeypox case was reported in Singapore in May 2019.

Source: Jepayona Delita/Future Publishing via Getty Images

Transmission

The virus can be transmitted through contact with an infected person or animal or contaminated surfaces. Typically, the virus enters the body through broken skin, inhalation or the mucous membranes in the eyes, nose or mouth. Researchers believe that human-to-human transmission is mostly through inhalation of large respiratory droplets rather than direct contact with bodily fluids or indirect contact through clothes. Human-to-human transmission rates for monkeypox have been limited.

Health officials are worried the virus may currently be spreading undetected through community transmission, possibly through a new mechanism or route. Where and how infections are occurring are still under investigation.

Signs and symptoms

After the virus enters the body, it starts to replicate and spread through the body via the bloodstream. Symptoms usually don’t appear until one to two weeks after infection.

Monkeypox produces smallpox-like skin lesions, but symptoms are usually milder than those of smallpox. Flu-like symptoms are common initially, ranging from fever and headache to shortness of breath. One to 10 days later, a rash can appear on the extremities, head or torso that eventually turns into blisters filled with pus. Overall, symptoms usually last for two to four weeks, while skin lesions usually scab over in 14 to 21 days.

While monkeypox is rare and usually non-fatal, one version of the disease kills around 10% of infected people. The form of the virus currently circulating is thought to be milder, with a fatality rate of less than 1%.

Vaccines and treatments

Treatment for monkeypox is primarily focused on relieving symptoms. According to the CDC, no treatments are available to cure monkeypox infection.

Because smallpox is closely related to monkeypox, the smallpox vaccine can protect against both diseases.

Evidence suggests that the smallpox vaccine can help prevent monkeypox infections and decrease the severity of the symptoms. One vaccine known as Imvamune or Imvanex is licensed in the U.S. to prevent monkeypox and smallpox.

Vaccination after exposure to the virus may also help decrease chances of severe illness. The CDC currently recommends smallpox vaccination only in people who have been or are likely to be exposed to monkeypox. Immunocompromised people are at high risk.

Rodney E. Rohde, Regents' Professor of Clinical Laboratory Science, Texas State University

It seems that creationism’s putative designer saw an opportunity created by medical science when smallpox was eradicated altogether, so routine vaccinations against it were stopped as unnecessary, and repurposed a related virus to try to make up for what it had lost in terms of making people suffer with smallpox. At least, that's the conclusion if we assume for one moment that the childish notion of a magic designer of these things. For a creationist, the idea that this could be an evolutionary change which exploits the niche once occupied by a related species of virus with a common ancestry has to be ruled out by dogma. Inexplicably, it is thought more important that people regard their beloved creator god as a pestilential sadist rather than that they accept that evolution works and explains these things without the need for gods and magic.

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