Researchers analyzed genetic material from cells in the prefrontal cortex (the area shaded in each brain) from four closely-related primates to characterize subtle differences in cell type and genetics.
Ask any Creationist to list the physical differences between humans and chimpanzees, and they will usually focus on the different brain size, but how different are our brains at a fundamental level?
New research by scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison together with colleagues from Yale, has shown that the difference between the human brain and that of the other apes and monkeys are actually small, but those small differences are responsible for the qualitative difference. As explained in the University of Wisconsin-Madison News release:
When comparing a chimpanzee to a human the differences seem huge — from their physical appearances down to the capabilities of their brains. But at the cellular and genetic level, at least in the prefrontal cortex, the similarities are many and the dissimilarities sparing.
The team collected genetic information from more than 600,000 prefrontal cortex cells from tissue samples from humans, chimpanzees, macaques and marmosets. They then categorized the cells into different types and determined the differences between cells of similar type. They found the vast majority of cells were fairly comparable.
After spending several days writing about unintelligent and malevolent design, and preparing a video summarising the arguments against the intelligent design hoax (and not missing a chance to promote my book on the subject), it makes a change to be able to write about some of my favourite creatures, frogs. The frogs of Melanesia in fact, and especially why there are so many species, sometimes in a very small area.
Although 'writing' is a slight exaggeration since most of this blog is unashamedly reprinted from The Conversation. The Conversation is a free online magazine written by experts in their field and dealing with a wide range of topics. It is well worth subscribing to and supporting with a donation, if you value the truth and appreciate good writing.
This article was written by Paul Oliver, a postdoctoral Researcher in Biodiversity and Evolution, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, and Deborah Bower, a lecturer in Ecosystem Rehabilitation, University of New England, Sydney, Australia. It is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here:
Creationists insist that all organisms are the work of their beloved creator god, without whom nothing exists and without whom nothing can evolve because changes in the genome require its intervention. Being omniscient, of course, Creationism's creator knows exactly what its modifications to organisms such as viruses will do, and creates them for that purpose.
So, what creationists would have us believe is that their beloved creator, or divine malevolence, as it should be called, based on its long history of creating pathogens and other parasites designed to make its creation suffer – if you believe Creationists - is that, fresh from its stunning success with the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic still raging across the world, it modified another nasty little virus to increase the suffering still further.
The virus in question is the Orthopox virus that caused the outbreak of Monkeypox, currently giving cause for concern to medical authorities throughout the world.
Orthopox viruses are a family of double-stranded DNA viruses which include variola (smallpox), cowpox and vaccinia. However, it is not ancestral to nor a descendant of variola. Until recently, following its identification as a disease of West African monkeys in 1965, it had been a low-level disease in humans, endemic to West Africa and the Congo Basin, with symptoms similar to, but not as severe as, smallpox. Then is suddenly mutated, broke out of its enclave in West Africa and has now infected more than 77,000 people in more than 100 countries worldwide.
A team of researchers at the University of Missouri have identified the specific mutations in the monkeypox virus that contribute to its continued infectiousness. Or as a Creationist must believe, the specific modifications their divine malevolence made to it to make it more infectious and better able to evade antiviral drugs and vaccinations, so more people would suffer from it.
The University of Missouri news release explains the discovery and how the team made them:
A research team from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, led by Cliona O’Farrelly, Professor of Comparative Immunology in Trinity’s School of Biochemistry and Immunology, together with colleagues in the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden and the Institut Pasteur, Paris, France, has shown that some women have an immune system that enables them to resist viral infections such as the Hep C virus.
The genetic basis for this ability remains to be explained, but the statistical evidence for it is strong.
Creationists would have us believe their putative intelligent [sic] designer not only designed viruses like the Hep C virus and the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus which caused COVID-19, but also designed our immune system to protect us from its parasitic viruses. If that were remotely true, not only would it mean their favourite deity is an incompetent fool but also a malevolent sadist, since not only did it design these viruses for the purpose of harming us, but then gave most of us an immune system which doesn't work very well through choice, having designed a better one for some people.
The Trinity College News release explains the background to the research and how the conclusion was arrived at:
As I have said many times before, here and elsewhere, the problem for the story of human evolution is not, as Creationists have been conditioned to believe, that there are no transitional fossils, but rather that there are too many of them.
The plethora of fossils from different times and places make it hard to determine a linear progression from archaic African hominins through to Homo sapiens, and each new discovery, such as Homo floriensis, Homo luzonensis or the 900,000 year-old hominin footprints found on a beach in Norfolk, England, seems to confuse rather than clarrify the picture.
This of course merely reflects the reality of what happened, with divergence into side-branches, hybridizations between incompletely speciated, diverging populations and, as a recent study suggest, absorbtion of one cousin species, Nanderthals, by another, Homo sapiens, when they can into contact. The picture is confusing because the actual course of events was confused and complex, and not the simple linear narrative we had come to expect.
But of course, there is no reason why it would be, given the history of divergence and re-mergence that appears to have been the pattern in the early African hominins before the expansions of H. eretectus, then H. sapiens out of Africa and into Eurasia.
However, there is a great deal we do now know about our origins, although the details are still being discovered. In this 2018 article by Bernard Wood, Professor of Human Origins, George Washington University and Michael Westaway, Senior Research Fellow, Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia, reprinted from The Conversation under a creative commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency, the authors outline what we know so far. The original article can be read here. Creationists might like to contrast what we know of human origins and what their evidence-free Bronze Age superstion claims:
The origin of ‘us’: what we know so far about where we humans come from
The story of where we come from evolves almost every year.
The question of where we humans come from is one many people ask, and the answer is getting more complicated as new evidence is emerging all the time.
For most of recorded history humankind has been placed on a metaphorical, and sometimes literal, pedestal. Sure, modern humans were flesh and blood like other animals.
But they were regarded as being so special that in the Linnaean taxonomy that prevailed well into the second half of the 20th century they were given their own family, the Hominidae.
This distinguished them from the Pongidae, the separate family used for the three African great apes – the common chimpanzee, bonobo and gorilla – plus the orangutan from Southeast Asia.
We now realise that modern humans are just one of the African great apes.
So when and how did this radically changed perception come about?
Early observations
In the 19th century the only evidence available for determining the closeness of the relationship between any two living animals was how similar they were in terms of what the naked eye could tell from their bones, teeth, muscles and organs.
The first person to undertake a systematic comparative review of these differences between modern humans and the apes was English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley.
In the central section of a small book he published in 1863, called Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, Huxley concluded that the differences between modern humans and African apes were less than those between African apes and orangutans.
He speculated that because African apes were morphologically closer to modern humans than the apes from Asia, then the ancestors of modern humans were more likely to be found in Africa than elsewhere.
A closer inspection
Developments in biochemistry and immunology during the first half of the 20th century enabled the search for evidence of the relationships between modern humans and the apes to shift from macroscopic morphology to the morphology of molecules.
The results of applying a new generation of analytical methods to proteins were reported by the Austrian-born French biologist Emile Zuckerkandl and American biologist Morris Goodman in the early 1960s.
Zuckerkandl used enzymes to break up the protein component of haemoglobin into its peptide components. He showed that the patterns of the peptides from modern humans, gorilla and chimpanzee were indistinguishable.
Goodman used a different method, immunodiffusion, to study albumin, a serum protein. He showed that the patterns produced by the albumins of modern humans and the chimpanzee were identical. He concluded that this was because the albumin molecules were, to all intents and purposes, identical.
Apes and humans: related
Proteins are made up of a string of amino acids and in many instances one amino acid can be substituted for another without changing the function of the protein.
In the late 1960s, the American anthropologist Vince Sarich and New Zealand biologist Allan Wilson exploited these minor differences in protein structure and concluded that modern humans and the African apes were very closely related.
They also provided the first molecular clock estimate of modern human-African ape divergence, dating the split to only around five million years ago. This date was less than half of contemporary estimates based on fossil evidence.
In 1975 the American human geneticist Mary-Claire King and Allan Wilson showed that 99% of the amino-acid sequences of chimpanzee and modern human blood proteins were identical.
Enter DNA
The discovery by James Watson and Francis Crick, with unwitting help from Rosalind Franklin, of the basic structure of DNA, and the subsequent discovery by Crick and others of the nature of the genetic code, meant that the relationships among organisms could be pursued at the level of the genome.
Nowadays technological advances mean that whole genomes can be sequenced. Over the past decade researchers have published good draft sequences of the nuclear genomes of the chimpanzee, orangutan, gorilla and the bonobo.
How close? A chimpanzee (top left), an orangutan (top right), a gorilla (bottom left) and a bonobo (bottom right).
More and better data are steadily being accumulated, and in 2013 a review of ape DNA based on the genomes of 79 great apes was published.
These new ape genome sequences support the results of earlier analyses of both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA that suggested modern humans and chimpanzees are more closely related to each other than either is to the gorilla.
When DNA differences among modern humans and the great apes are calibrated using the best palaeontological evidence for the split between the apes and the old world monkeys, those differences predict that the hypothetical common ancestor of modern humans, chimpanzees and bonobos lived about 8 million years ago.
The rise of the hominins
Most researchers now recognise the modern human as hominins.
Still, the question “where do we come from” can from a scientific perspective be difficult for someone outside of the discipline to come to grips with. In part this is because the fossil record for human evolution seems to grow exponentially, with the author of each new discovery often claiming that the textbooks need to be rewritten.
The interdisciplinary nature of palaeoanthropology also means that new evidence that helps us make sense of our ancestry does not always come in the form of new fossils.
It comes from advances in a range of disciplines that include archaeology, comparative anatomy, earth sciences, evolutionary biology, genomics and primatology.
A further complicating factor is that the human fossil record does not just consist of the fossil evidence of our direct ancestors.
Many of the fossils belong to lineages that do not make it to the surface of the Tree of Life. They belong to extinct close relatives, and the task of sorting close relatives from ancestors is one with which we are only just now beginning to grapple.
There is a lineage that leads to today’s Homo sapiens, but there are also a host of side experiments that are equally important to understand. They represent some of the most interesting chapters in human evolution.
Origins of the genus Homo
Understanding the origins of our own genus Homo means establishing what fossils we recognise as being the first early humans.
Sometime before 4 million years ago we see the first evidence of the genus Australopithecus. These fossils sample the kind of creature that was most likely the ancestor to the genus Homo.
Around 2.5 million years ago we see the first fossil evidence of species in Africa that many argue belong to our own lineage. One of these, Homo habilis, almost certainly made stone tools, had a slightly larger brain than Australopithecus, stood upright and regularly walked on two legs.
Some recognise a second species, Homo rudolfensis, about which we know even less.
These possible human ancestors lived alongside close relatives that were almost certainly not our ancestors. These species are called Paranthropus or robust australopiths – they had small brains, big jaw bones, large flat faces, and huge chewing teeth.
They lasted for at least a million years, so whatever they were eating (which is still a mystery) they were successful in the sense that they lasted as long in the fossil record as the average mammal.
But some researchers think that Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis are not different enough from the australopiths that preceded them to justify being included in the genus Homo.
They claim that the size and shape of their body and the size of their teeth and jaws was little different from that of the australopiths. This means that their locomotion and diet had not shifted far enough in the direction of pre-modern Homo species such as Homo erectus to justify inclusion in Homo.
Tool making is not enough
Also, because it is becoming evident that australopiths may have been making tools earlier than Homo habilis it means that tool-making can no longer be seen as the sole prerogative of Homo.
There is a developing consensus that the relaxation of the criteria more than 50 years ago that saw the inclusion of Homo habilis into the genus Homoneeds to be reconsidered.
Species that emerge slightly later from Africa, such as Homo ergaster, fit much more clearly within what we understand by the genus Homo. That species probably left Africa around 2 million years ago and migrated ultimately as far east as China and Indonesia where it evolved, eventually, into Homo erectus.
A number of further migrations out of Africa probably occurred after the initial Homo ergaster migration, one of which, Homo heidelbergensis, is considered by many palaeoanthropologists to be the ancestor of both Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and modern humans (Homo sapiens).
As far as we know, Neanderthals evolved outside of Africa, perhaps in response to the ice ages of Europe. Our ancestors remained in Africa where perhaps as early as 300,000 years ago, as revealed from recent redating of the Moroccan site of Jebel Irhoud, were well along in the process of evolving into modern humans.
So the origins of ‘us’
Once we get to the origins of our own species Homo sapiens we have the added advantage that we are able to now use next generation sequencing methods to recover ancient DNA (aDNA).
As geneticists recover ancient genomes from different extinct hominin species, they are generating insights that are not possible from comparing the anatomy of the fossils alone.
There is now fossil evidence from teeth to suggest that Homo sapiens may have been in China by 120,000 years ago and in South East Asia by 67,000 years.
The discovery of some distinctive modern human DNA within the DNA recovered from a Neanderthal fossil suggests that modest interbreeding was occurring between Neanderthals and modern humans in Central Asia by 100,000 years ago.
Modern humans have not shared the planet with another hominin species for several tens of thousands of years. But before that, in the past 300,000 years or so, there is fossil and DNA evidence of several hominin species, including the recently reported archaic hominin Homo naledi
First and foremost there was Homo neanderthalensis, whose range overlapped with modern humans in the Near East. Neanderthals most likely became extinct as a result of direct competition with the more technologically sophisticated Homo sapiens.
The evidence from DNA shows that there was interbreeding between our species and pre-modern humans, including the Neanderthals and the other enigmatic hominin referred to as the Denisovans.
We do not yet know how and when Homo erectus became extinct. It would appear that another unexpected side experiment in hominin evolution, known from the island of Flores and called Homo floresiensis most likely became extinct sometime after 60,000 years ago.
Indeed this hominin may represent something far more significant than simply an interesting side experiment, with many leading palaeoanthropologists arguing that the Hobbit may represent a pre-ergaster migration out of Africa.
Even though thousands of hominin fossils have now been recovered and described there is still much work to be done.
Was there a hominin that successfully migrated out of Africa prior to Homo ergaster? Did most of human evolution occur in Africa? Did some important transitions occur outside of Africa?
When did Homo erectus become extinct, and was there genetic exchange between erectus, sapiens and perhaps other hominin species?
As is often the case in science, with the recovery of additional data, in this case fossils and DNA extracted from fossils, we generate more questions than answers.
But ultimately all of this new evidence will result in a far more sophisticated appreciation of not only our evolution, but also the evolution of our extinct fossil cousins.
Fig. 1: Geographic and temporal distribution of 1,162 ancient Eurasian samples used in this study
Each human symbol represents a sample, and the colours indicate different populations classified into broad groupings according to archaeological records of material culture and lifestyle (colours indicated at the bottom left-hand side; Supplementary Text 1). Sample ages are represented in the bottom panel in thousand years before present (BP). The green lines depict the generalized migration route of Anatolian EF into Europe ~8.5 ka, where they mixed with WHG (EHG refers to the contemporaneous Eastern Hunter-Gatherers) to create the European Early Farmers (EF). Similarly, the pink arrows represent the generalized movement of Steppe Pastoralists (Steppe; samples east of the Ural Mountains not shown), which resulted in admixture with LF ~5 ka, giving rise to LNBA societies.
Modern genomics and improved extraction techniques meaning more ancient DNA becomes available for analysis is revealing more detail of our evolution as a species as we spread out of Africa and across Eurasia dnd eventually into the Americas.
As an intelligent and technologically advanced species we might have been expected to be able to isolate ourselves from the environmental selection pressures that normally drive evolution, so it's perhaps surprising and maybe a little humbling to discover that there were about 50 period in our history when selection pressures were so intense that a new mutation spread rapidly through the gene pool and quickly reach fixation, with a 'hard sweep' where a formerly rare genetic variation replaces other alleles of the same gene.
The following article by Yassine Souilmi, Genomics and Bioinformatics, Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, University of Adelaide, Christian Huber, Assistant Professor of Biology, Penn State, USA and Ray Tobler, Postdoctoral fellow, Australian National University, explains the research that discovered these intense burst of evolutionary response to environmental factors. It is reprinted under the terms of a Creative Commons lcesne, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original acn be read here:
Despite the claims of Creationist frauds, scientific papers are not, like Creationist articles on Creationist websites, vetted to ensure they simply regurgitates the approved orthodoxy. Indeed, science would stagnate just like Creationism if that were the case. Instead, science progresses by discovering the unorthodox and revealing the unknown.
Sometimes, as in the case of this paper by scientists from Florida Atlantic University in collaboration with researchers from Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA it turns what we think we know on its head and causes us to rethink things. Like deconstructing part of jigsaw puzzle and throwing the pieces into the air.
The research concerns the origins of the native people of South America. The consensus view was that modern humans crossed from Siberia when sea levels were lower, and what is now the Bering Strait, between Siberia and Alaska, known as Beringia was habitable. From there, they spread south into North America and continued down the Pacific coast, over the Central American isthmus and into South America. Previous genetic studies had seems to support this showing a connection with ancient people from the Altai region of Siberian Central Asia.
However, the genome of two ancient individuals from two different sites in Northern Brazil, at Pedra do Tubarão and Alcobaça, using powerful algorithms and genomic analyses, shows a different story. They show that, not only had there been interbreeding between the ancestors of these people and Neanderthals, but that they also discovered more Denisovan than Neanderthal ancestry in ancient Uruguay and Panama individuals. This is not inconsistent with the Beringia migration theory, of course, but it is the discovery of what happened next, and where this other hominin species DNA came from where the surprise it.
They also found a mysterious and as yet unexplained strong genetic signal linking Australasian (Australia and Papua New Guinea) to an ancient genome from Panama.
Lastly, unexpectedly, they found evidence that there was a northward migration from South America up the Atlantic coast after people had become established east of the Andes.
As the Florida Atlantic University News release explains:
Using DNA from two ancient human individuals unearthed in two different archaeological sites in northeast Brazil – Pedra do Tubarão and Alcobaça – and powerful algorithms and genomic analyses, Florida Atlantic University researchers in collaboration with Emory University have unraveled the deep demographic history of South America at the regional level with some unexpected and surprising results.
Not only do researchers provide new genetic evidence supporting existing archaeological data of the north-to-south migration toward South America, they also have discovered migrations in the opposite direction along the Atlantic coast – for the first time. The work provides the most complete genetic evidence to date for complex ancient Central and South American migration routes.
Among the key findings, researchers also have discovered evidence of Neanderthal ancestry within the genomes of ancient individuals from South America. Neanderthals are an extinct population of archaic humans that ranged across Eurasia during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic.
Results of the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. (Biological Sciences), suggest that human movements closer to the Atlantic coast eventually linked ancient Uruguay and Panama in a south-to-north migration route – 5,277 kilometers (3,270 miles) apart. This novel migration pattern is estimated to have occurred approximately 1,000 years ago based on the ages of the ancient individuals.
Findings show a distinct relationship among ancient genomes from northeast Brazil, Lagoa Santa (southeast Brazil), Uruguay and Panama. This new model reveals that the settlement of the Atlantic coast occurred only after the peopling of most of the Pacific coast and Andes.
Our study provides key genomic evidence for ancient migration events at the regional scale along South America’s Atlantic coast. These regional events likely derived from migratory waves involving the initial Indigenous peoples of South America near the Pacific coast.
Michael DeGiorgio, Ph.D., co-corresponding author
Associate professor
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
College of Engineering and Computer Science
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA
Researchers also found strong Australasian (Australia and Papua New Guinea) genetic signals in an ancient genome from Panama.
There is an entire Pacific Ocean between Australasia and the Americas, and we still don’t know how these ancestral genomic signals appeared in Central and South America without leaving traces in North America.
Andre Luiz Campelo dos Santos, Ph.D., first author
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
College of Engineering and Computer Science
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA
To further add to the existing complexity, researchers also detected greater Denisovan than Neanderthal ancestry in ancient Uruguay and Panama individuals. Denisovans are a group of extinct humans first identified from DNA sequences from the tip of finger bone discovered around 2008.
It’s phenomenal that Denisovan ancestry made it all the way to South America. The admixture must have occurred a long time before, perhaps 40,000 years ago. The fact that the Denisovan lineage persisted and its genetic signal made it into an ancient individual from Uruguay that is only 1,500 years old suggests that it was a large admixture event between a population of humans and Denisovans.
John Lindo, Ph.D., co-corresponding author
Assistant professor
Department of Anthropology
Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
Previously at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil, dos Santos and colleagues uncovered the remains of the two ancient humans from northeast Brazil, which date back to at least 1,000 years before present, and sent them to Lindo for DNA extraction and subsequent genomic sequencing and analyses. Raw data were then sent to FAU for computational analysis of the whole genome sequences from northeast Brazil.
This groundbreaking research involved many different fields from archaeology to biological sciences to genomics and data science. Our scientists at Florida Atlantic University in collaboration with Emory University have helped to shed light on an important piece of the Americas puzzle, which could not have been solved without powerful genomic and computational tools and analysis.
Stella Batalama, Ph.D.
Dean,
College of Engineering and Computer Science.
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA
Researchers compared the two newly sequenced ancient whole genomes from northeast Brazil with present-day worldwide genomes and other ancient whole genomes from the Americas. As of the publication date of the article, Lindo says that only a dozen or so ancient whole genomes from South America have been sequenced and published, in contrast to hundreds from Europe.
Apart from the occurrence of mass burials in the sites that yielded the samples from northeast Brazil, Uruguay, southeast Brazil and Panama, there is no other evidence in the archaeological record that indicate shared cultural features among them. Importantly, the analyzed ancient individuals from southeast Brazil are about 9,000 years older than those from northeast Brazil, Uruguay and Panama, enough time for expected and noticeable cultural divergence. Moreover, northeast Brazil, Uruguay and Panama, though more similar in age, are located thousands of kilometers apart from each other.
Genetic profile at key sites (left). Migration routes (right)
This research suggests that the people who eventually made it to South America, came from a people who had interbred extensively with Neanderthals and even more so with Denisovans, but how the Australasian DNA got to Panama remains to be discovered. The intriguing thing here is that the Australasians themselves have a high proportion of Denisovan DNA and Denisovans are assumed to have been present over much of east and south-east Asia, including the Altai area of Siberia where the first Denisovan remains were found.
As for the creationist claim that only scientific orthodoxy is permitted in peer-reviewed journals, papers like this that cast considerable doubt on the consensus view and raise so many unanswered questions, give the lie to that claim, but it is typical of Creationists that they accuse others of doing what they themselves do, as though accusing others of their own dishonesty somehow absolves them of responsibility for it.
Creationists who publish through sites like Answers in Genesis, or anyone who receives funding from the ICR or the Deception Discovery Institute, must sign an oath that they will never publish anything which isn't in full accord with a literal interpretation of the Bible in general and Genesis in particular. What ‘peer-review’ there is in Creationist circles is merely checking that the oath has been kept.
As I said at the beginning, if Creationist accusations were true, science would be as stagnant as Creationism, never moving away from the handed-down orthodoxy of cult leaders. But as anyone who knows anything about science will know, science is a dynamic, evolving and expanding body of evidence-based knowledge that is responsible for modern technologies like electricity, radio and telephone communications, computers and modern transport systems as well as medicines, modern buildings, clean water and food production.
Without religion, all we would have is some people with nothing to do on holy days and having to take responsibility for their own beliefs and attitudes with nothing to blame and no excuses to justify their antisocial behaviour; imagine life without science.
Atavistic genes and remnant pseudogenes are another major embarrassment for the Creation cult leaders, who must feel very fortunate that their dupes won't know much about them or understand their significance from the point of view of divine creation by an intelligent, omniscient designer, or from the point of view of an evolutionary biologist for that matter.
These pseudogenes are, to anyone who understands them, some of the best evidence, not only for evolution but also against any notion of intelligent design, as I explain in my book, Unintelligent Design: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax.
To add to this embarrassment, three scientists led by Christopher A. Emerling of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA and the
Institut des Sciences de l’Évolution de Montpellier (ISEM), Université de Montpellier, Montpellier, France published an open access paper in Science Advances in May 2018, in which they reported finding that mammals have remnants of one or more of five gene for digesting the chitin exoskeleton of insects, even those mammals which never eat insects, such as rhinoceroses, tigers, elephants and donkeys.
These pseudogenes are thought to be remnants of the time when the stem mammals were small, insectivores living at the time when dinosaurs were the dominant carnivores and herbivores and the early mammals were small, probably nocturnal to avoid the diurnal dinosaurs, shrew like insectivores with sharp pointed teeth, much like those of shrews and hedgehogs today.
The closest things we have to the fundamentalist Christian dream of a fundamentalist theocracy, can be found in the Islamic world in states like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, where Sharia Law is little different to the Levitican Laws a Christian theocracy would impose on the rest of us. In fact, they have the same cultural roots in the tribal cultures of the Middle East, where religious superstition and the support of the priesthood was used to control and subjugate the population and, for the ruling men, the women.
Misogyny and a desire to control the females of the tribe probably originated in pre-human ancestors where biologically, there was an advantage in the males ensuring the children they supported were their own and not those of other males. Males would have been insecure in their ability to ensure fidelity, reinforced by their own tendency to 'spread their seed' as widely as possible, which required the women in the tribe to be unfaithful to their partners. The biological dynamics resulted in males being physically stronger than females and able to impose their control by force, if necessary.
Androcentric religions, such as the Abrahamic religions, evolved partly to codify this gender relationship and give it divine authority, to provide males with the excuses they needed to control and coerce females.
The insecure little men who control the Islamic Republic of Iran are continuing to use religion as their excuse for denying the women of Iran the right to choose what clothes to wear in public!
Imagine if this was reversed and women were telling men what to wear! The regime wouldn't last 5 minutes, and nor would any religion that supported it.
And yet, because their holy book, like the Bible before it, was written in a time when inadequate, insecure little men held the political and economic power, women were regarded as goods to be bought and sold, little different to slaves, the same holy book can be used as an excuse to treat women the same way today.
Just like the Catholic and most fundamentalist Protestant Christian churches, Islam is obsessed with sex. It assumes that if women are not rigidly controlled, they will go and seek out other men to have sex with, and if a women reveals more than just her eyes to any man other than her husband, it will provoke sinful sexual urges in the man which will condemn his 'soul' to an eternity of pain because the religion's god hates nothing more than a man lusting after a women to whom he isn't married.
But of course, that will be the woman's fault for tempting the man. The man can't be expected to see a woman's face, hair or legs and not want to have sex with her, and since it's her doing the tempting, anything that follows will be her fault too, consensual or not.
A couple of recent articles in The Conversation explain the importance of the women's demonstration against the compulsory wearing of the hijab in public and how fundamentalist Islam is merely the excuse for repression. They are reprinted under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
Despite the forlorn claims of Creationists that the Theory of Evolution (TOE) is
a 'theory in crisis' which will soon be overthrown by their childish notion of
magic and the interventions of an unproven, unexplained magical entity which
makes chemistry and physics do things they couldn't do without it, in the real
grownup world of science, the TOE continues to be the basis for understanding
biodiversity, and continues to mesh exactly with what is known of climate
change, geographical history and the development of ecosystems and ecological
niches. This paper from the University of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain,
illustrates exactly that, and in effect is yet another casual and unintentional
refutation of Creationism.
If Creationism qualified as a scientific theory, and was taken seriously by
scientists working in the field, it would be the real 'theory in crisis', and
would have been so ever since Darwin and Wallace explained biodiversity as a
process not requiring intelligent agency, back in 1859 - hence the hysteria,
disinformation and anti-science rhetoric of its proponents who make a living off
the fears and superstitions of ignorant people and need them to stay that
way.
In this paper, the scientists set out to reconstruct the evolutionary history of
a group of lizards familiar to anyone who has holidayed in the Mediterranean
area of Southern Europe and North Africa - the green and wall lizards.
The lizards are from two genera, the Lacerta and Timon. Being
biologists the scientists looked at the factors that cause evolutionary
diversification - environmental and ecological change and how these dynamic
changes related to the genetic and phenotypic changes in the lizards.
It's hard to find a scientific paper these days that doesn't utterly refute the basic dogmas of Creationism. Take for example this paper which deal with the origins of the population of the British Isles at the end of the last Ice Age. There is no intention on the part of the authors to refute the Bible narrative Creationists adhere to, yet they do, simply by revealing the facts.
At the end of the last ice age, what is now the Island of Great Britain was still joined to continental Europe by an area of land, 'Dogger Land', now submerged beneath the North Sea, which stretched across from East Anglia to Holland.
During the glacial maximum, the northern two-thirds of the island and most of Northern Europe was glaciated and so it was repopulated when the ice retreated.
Traditionally, the first anatomically modern humans in Britain were assumed to be hunter-gatherer migrants from Northern Europe who became isolated when sea-level changes inundated Dogger Land and broke through the chalk downs at Dover creating the island of Great Britain, from which Ireland had been separated for hundreds of years. Humans along with the flora and fauna of the island reflects this repopulation over a land bridge from newly-repopulated North-Western Europe, in the immediate post-glacial period when sea-levels were still low enough to allow Dogger Land to be populated.
Fig. 1: Location, genetic ancestry and AMS date of individuals discussed within the text.
Surprisingly though, new research by researchers from University College London (UCL) Institute of Archaeology, the Natural History Museum and the Francis Crick Institute has shown that at least two distinct human populations, with different origins and cultures existed in Britain in the immediate post-glacial period. This conclusion came from an analysis of thee DNA from some of the oldest human remains so far discovered - the remains of an individual found in Gough's Cave, Somerset, England and an individual from Kendrick’s Cave, North Wales, both of whom lived more than 13,500 years ago.
New evidence points to the role of plate tectonics in early Earth’s release of internal heat and the swapping of geomagnetic poles.
Illustration by Alec Brenner
The surprising thing is not so much that Creationists ever existed. Given the power of the Medieval Christian and Islamic religions to coerce the population and force on them simplistic dogma from the ignorant and fearful infancy of our species, and to supress contradicting science, it would have been surprising it they hadn't existed in those days. The really surprising thing is that, despite the massive amount of information which flatly contradicts the childish superstitions and the advanced technological societies in which most of them live, there are actual adults, leading otherwise normal lives, who still believe that childish nonsense.
There really are grown adults who believe Earth was magicked into existence, as is. less than 10,000 years ago!
And these ignorant people exist despite evidence such as this paper, that there were continental movements, known to geologists as plate tectonics, billions of years before they believe Earth was magicked up by a spell from an invisible magician, the existence of which has never been explained, let alone demonstrated with evidence, and the modus operandum which has never been observed.
And, if that wasn't bad enough for the Creation cult, the paper even alludes to the geological clock that has been recording the magnetic reversals of Earth that have occurred 183 times in the last 83 million years and perhaps several hundred times in the past 160 million years, according to NASA.
The scientists led by Harvard geologists, Alec Brenner and Roger Fu, point out that the stability of the early Earth, where basically the same tectonic forces were working as are working still, means the conditions were conducive to the appearance and evolution of self-replicating systems we call life.
As the Harvard Gazette article by Juan Siliezar explains:
New research analyzing pieces of the most ancient rocks on the planet adds some of the sharpest evidence yet that Earth’s crust was pushing and pulling in a manner similar to modern plate tectonics at least 3.25 billion years ago. The study also provides the earliest proof of when the planet’s magnetic north and south poles swapped places. The two results offer clues into how such geological changes may have resulted in an environment more conducive to the development of life on the planet.
The work, described in PNAS and led by Harvard geologists Alec Brenner and Roger Fu, focused on a portion of the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia, one of the oldest and most stable pieces of the Earth’s crust. Using novel techniques and equipment, the researchers show that some of the Earth’s earliest surface was moving at a rate of 6.1 centimeters per year and 0.55 degrees every million years.
That speed more than doubles the rate the ancient crust was shown to be moving in a previous study by the same researchers. Both the speed and direction of this latitudinal drift leaves plate tectonics as the most logical and strongest explanation for it.
“There’s a lot of work that seems to suggest that early in Earth’s history plate tectonics wasn’t actually the dominant way in which the planet’s internal heat gets released, as it is today, through the shifting of plates,” said Brenner, a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a member of Harvard’s Paleomagnetics Lab. “This evidence lets us much more confidently rule out explanations that don’t involve plate tectonics.”
Geologists Alec Brenner and Roger Fu, focused on a portion of the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia, one of the oldest and most stable pieces of the Earth’s crust.
Photo by Roger Fu
For example, the researchers can now argue against phenomena called “true polar wander” and “stagnant lid tectonics,” which both can cause the Earth’s surface to shift but aren’t part of modern-style plate tectonics. The results lean more toward plate tectonic motion because the newly discovered higher rate of speed is inconsistent with aspects of the other two processes.
In the paper, the scientists also describe what’s believed to be the oldest evidence of when Earth reversed its geomagnetic fields, meaning the magnetic North and South Pole flipped locations. This type of flip-flop is a common occurrence in Earth’s geologic history, with the poles reversing 183 times in the last 83 million years and perhaps several hundred times in the past 160 million years, according to NASA.
The reversal tells a great deal about the planet’s magnetic field 3.2 billion years ago. Key among the implications is that the magnetic field was likely stable and strong enough to keep solar winds from eroding the atmosphere. This insight, combined with the results on plate tectonics, offers clues to the conditions under which the earliest forms of life developed.
It paints this picture of an early Earth that was already really geodynamically mature. It had a lot of the same sorts of dynamic processes that result in an Earth that has essentially more stable environmental and surface conditions, making it more feasible for life to evolve and develop.
Alec R. Brenner lead author
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Today, the Earth’s outer shell consists of about 15 shifting blocks of crust, or plates, which hold the planet’s continents and oceans. Over eons the plates drifted into each other and apart, forming new continents and mountains and exposing new rocks to the atmosphere, which led to chemical reactions that stabilized Earth’s surface temperature over billions of years.
Evidence of when plate tectonics started is hard to come by because the oldest pieces of crust are thrust into the interior mantle, never to resurface. Only 5 percent of all rocks on Earth are older than 2.5 billion years old, and no rock is older than about 4 billion years.
Finally being able to reliably read these very ancient rocks opens up so many possibilities for observing a time period that often is known more through theory than solid data. Ultimately, we have a good shot at reconstructing not just when tectonic plates started moving, but also how their motions — and therefore the deep-seated Earth interior processes that drive them — have changed through time.
Professor Roger R. Fu,
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences,
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. USA
Overall, the study adds to growing research that shows that tectonic movement occurred relatively early in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history and that early forms of life came about in a more moderate environment. In 2018, members of the project revisited the Pilbara Craton, which stretches about 300 miles across. They drilled into the primordial and thick slab of crust there to collect samples that, back in Cambridge, were analyzed for their magnetic history.
Using magnetometers, demagnetizing equipment, and the Quantum Diamond Microscope — which images the magnetic fields of a sample and precisely identifies the nature of the magnetized particles — the researchers created a suite of new techniques for determining the age and way the samples became magnetized. This allows the researchers to determine how, when, and in which direction the crust shifted as well as the magnetic influence coming from Earth’s geomagnetic poles.
The Quantum Diamond Microscope was developed in a collaboration between Harvard researchers in the Departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) and of Physics.
For future studies, Fu and Brenner plan to keep their focus on the Pilbara Craton while also looking beyond it to other ancient crusts around the world. They hope to find older evidence of modern-like plate motion and when the Earth’s magnetic poles flipped.
In the abstract to their published open access paper in PNAS, the scientists say:
Significance
The modern Earth is geologically dynamic. Convection in its rocky mantle drives plate tectonics that reshapes its surface, and currents inside its metallic core generate a strong planetary magnetic field. However, it is uncertain whether these processes had begun to shape Earth in its deep past. Our measurements of magnetic signals preserved in 3.25-billion-year-old rocks provide the earliest quantitative evidence of both rapidly moving crust—a hallmark of plate tectonics—and a stable ancient magnetic field that episodically alternated polarity. These observations suggest that the early Earth was remarkably geologically mature from its surface to its deep interior, potentially contributing to stable surface conditions for the evolution of early life.
Abstract
The paleomagnetic record is an archive of Earth’s geophysical history, informing reconstructions of ancient plate motions and probing the core via the geodynamo. We report a robust 3.25-billion-year-old (Ga) paleomagnetic pole from the East Pilbara Craton, Western Australia. Together with previous results from the East Pilbara between 3.34 and 3.18 Ga, this pole enables the oldest reconstruction of time-resolved lithospheric motions, documenting 160 My of both latitudinal drift and rotation at rates of at least 0.55°/My. Motions of this style, rate, and duration are difficult to reconcile with true polar wander or stagnant-lid geodynamics, arguing strongly for mobile-lid geodynamics by 3.25 Ga. Additionally, this pole includes the oldest documented geomagnetic reversal, reflecting a stably dipolar, core-generated Archean dynamo.
Just another example there of how Creationism is refuted quite incidentally, simply by revealing the real world evidence with which it is of course entirely inconsistent simply because the people who made up the origin myths in the Bronze Age were entirely ignorant of the science. Incidentally, it's also an example of the way different strands of evidence mesh so neatly to support the idea that life originated on Earth several billion years ago, just as you would expect if the current theories were correct.
Even more amazing than the fact the otherwise normal people believe the childish Bronze Age Creation myths despite this sort of refutation, is that these same people are prepared to perform the most idiotic mental gymnastics to dismiss them, as though being ignorant of scientific evidence is something to take great pride in, because their mummies and daddies were also ignorant of them.
Recent research has revealed just how sneaky the designer of the SARS-Cov-2 virus that caused COVID-19 would have had to have been, had there been any truth in the childish Creationists superstition that there is a magic intelligent [sic] designer who designs these things.
Like several other pathological viruses and bacteria, SARS-CoV-2 can manipulate out epigenetic system for its own advantage. Briefly, the epigenetic system is a complex process for turning off those genes that are not needed in the specialised cells of a multicellular organism.
In fact, the existence of this complex process is one of the strongest arguments against any intelligence being involved in evolution because it is only needed because the cells in a multicellular organism replicate in exactly the same way as a single-celled organism, even though only a fraction of the DNA will be needed in any specialised cell, whereas a single-celled organism needs its entire genome to function. No intelligent designer who understood the basic principles of good design would come up with such a complex system when it should not be beyond its wit to design a system where only those genes needed by the specialist cells were inherited by them. Utilitarian evolution, on the other hand, is quite capable of coming up with something so unintelligent.
Back to the discovery of what the SARS-CoV-2 virus is capable of:
The following article from The Conversation by Lara Herrero, Research Leader in Virology and Infectious Disease, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia, explains the research and its significance. It is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article cam be read here:
Ray Comfort is an American multi-millionaire Televangelist, Creationist grifter who makes his money out of scientifically illiterate dupes in the Creationist cults, by posing as an expert scientist.
His latest piece of disinformation is his claim that the Venus flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, is an example of irreducible complexity because the trap mechanism could not have evolved. In the Creationist lexicon, ‘irreducible complexity’ is code for ‘the Christian god did it’, so the Bible is literal truth’.
Comfort has no qualifications in biology, or any science subject yet feels qualified to tell his marks that millions of working biomedical scientists have got things all wrong and he knows best. Posturing as an expert is a familiar Creationist tactic intended to deceive, or, as a Christian would put it, an example of bearing false witness. Nevertheless, he should be capable of even the most cursory of fact checking in the age of the Internet, but doesn't feel he needs to, as he knows his target marks never check what he says, so he'll probably get away with it. It’s the tactic of the snake oil salesman.
Had he bothered with fact-checking, however, he would have discovered the freely available scientific evidence that flatly contradicts and gives the lie to his claim. Not only is the evolutionary pathway of the Venus flytrap known, but it is a very nice example of Darwinian evolution.
But then Creationists cult leaders, like their members, have no interest in the truth. Their mission is to mislead those who eagerly send them money for disinformation that makes them feel important, with a special relationisp with the Creator of the Universe who made it all with them in mind.
And Comfort laughs all the way to the bank.
An earlier ploy by Comfort was to tell his followers that there is no gravity in space [sic], so this proves God wrote the Bible [sic]. A more famous one was to claim the banana is specially designed to fit in the hand as you eat it, knowing his cult won't understand the role of selective breeding in plant cultivation. As others have pointed out, it is equally well designed to fit in other orifices too.
Mind you, Comfort's own ignorance sometimes comes back to bite him, like the time he complained about the pain of an impacted wisdom tooth for which he needed surgery, not realising wisdom teeth and the problems we have with them is both evidence for evolution and against intelligent design, but then Comfort was blissfully ignorant of those things.
Anyway, back to the Venus flytrap; the following is the result of a few minutes search on Google - something Comfort can rely on his dupes not doing. It reveals a fascinating story of gradual evolution of the 'snap-trap' mechanism, including repurposing pre-existing structure which originally had an unrelated function.
The evolution of carnivory in plants is a specialised form of foliar feeding where the plant derives nutrients through its leaves in addition to any it obtains through its roots. It generally occurs in conditions where the soil is deficient in nutrients, such as in acidic bogs where water soluble nutrients, especially nitrates, leach out of the soil. It is believed to have occurred independently six times in the angiosperms, based on extant species, and possibly more in carnivorous lineages now extinct.
But it's not the evolution of carnivory itself that Comfort is trying to fool his marks with, but the 'snap-trap' mechanism which captures the prey.
As Comfort could have discovered in just a few minutes had he bothered to, the evolution of this mechanism probably occurred in a common ancestor of Dionaea and the closely related, Aldrovanda. Two studies in 2002 and 2003 and a further study in 2009, have shed light on how this occurred:
