The belief that certain individuals, often as the result of possession by demons, have the power to suspend the laws of nature at will and make unnatural events occur, sometimes with the casting of magic spells but often with a look, still persists even in some technologically advanced economies.
This is revealed in a database, newly-compiled by Boris Gershman, associate professor of economics, American University in Washington DC, USA, and published today in the journal PLOS ONE.
Belief in witchcraft, demons and the power of magic words and/or thoughts to control natural objects and forces is just another manifestation of the teleological thinking of childhood which causes Creationism, and to some extent, religion when retained in an adult. It is based on the assumption that everything, including atoms, molecules and forces such as gravity have a personality and are sentient, so can be controlled by words and telepathically by thoughts ,and that there is a magical entity 'somewhere out there' who is controlling everything telepathically, or making laws which force them to comply.
There is, of course, no evidence to support that notion which has been part of human culture since the fearful infancy of our species, when a belief in evil magic seems a rational explanation for diseases that are now known to be caused by poisons, parasitic organisms, genetics, physiological disorders, dietary deficiencies or surfeits, etc - explanations which don't require magic and supernatural forces.
In the third of this series of articles reprinted from The Conversation, dealing with the recent evolutionary history of modern humans, Professor Penny Spikins, Professor of the Archaeology of Human Origins, University of York, UK, poses the question of how different the world would look today had the Neanderthals prevailed and not gone extinct, or, as more recent research suggests, been absorbed into the increasing and expanding population of Homo sapiens as they moved into the territory formerly occupied by Neanderthals.
An intriguing thought from this article is that humans, by forming large, urbanised groups, effectively domesticated themselves and so acquired some of the attributes of domestication that we see in, for example, domestic cattle, who now live in far larger, and more tolerant groups than their wild ancestors who lived in small groups where each individual could have a wide 'personal space'. Tolerance for others, the key to successful human groups, thus may have been a consequence as well as a cause of the formation of large human groups.
Because of the nature of their societies, where small, isolated extended family groups, separated from other bands by considerable distances, Neanderthals never self-domesticated, so never developed the mutual tolerance needed to form large, cooperative groups of unrelated individuals. In addition to their lack of genetic diversity within the group, this may have played a part in their eventual demise/absorption.
Professor Spikins' article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here:
A new study published today on the open access journal, PLOS Medication, shows that even those people who had previously been infected with COVID-19 still benefit from vaccination, although the benefit varies a little with the batch used. The study, led by Katrine Finderup Nielsen at Statens Serum Institut, Denmark, shows that these individuals gain between 60% and 94% protection against reinfection.
According to information released by PLoS ahead of publication:
During the recent pandemic, vaccination has been one of the best tools available for curbing the spread of COVID-19. People infected with the virus are known to develop long-lasting natural immunity, but Finderup Nielsen and her team wanted to know whether these individuals would still benefit from receiving the vaccine. The team analyzed infection and vaccination data from nationwide Danish registers that included all people living in Denmark who tested positive for the virus or were vaccinated between January 2020 and January 2022. The data set included more than 200,000 people who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 during each of the Alpha, Delta and Omicron waves. Their analysis showed that for people with previous infections, vaccination offered up to 71% protection against reinfection during the Alpha period, 94% during the Delta period and 60% during the Omicron period, with protection lasting up to nine months.
A point I've made before is that human evolution is far more complex than was once thought and the more fossilised remains we find, the more confusing the picture becomes. We now know, for example, that there was not a single species from which all modern humans have descended, but we are the result of multiple instances of hybridization and ingression of genes from sister and cousin species, both early on in Africa and later when Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa into Eurasi and came into contect with the descndants of earlier migrations.
The problem is that the earlier, simplistic view, of a lineal progression, superficially implies an anthropocentric, goal-oriented process, with humans at the pinacle, as the supreme achielvemtn of evolution. Essentially, replacing a religious view with a speudo-scientific one.
Although this view has been rejected by thinking people for years now, it still conditions our view of our place in the world, as owners or guardians' of it, with it all being here for our convenience. This arrogant anthropcentism has led us to where we are today, on the point of creating an uninhabitable earth with nowhere else to live. In 2015, the view that God intervened to ensure Humans evolved was still held by 24% of American adults, according to a Pew Research survey. Although Creationism is now declining in the USA, this 'God-driven' view is still held by a signifcant proportion of American adults.
The following article by Professor Penny Spikins, Professor of the Archaeology of Human Origins, University of York, UK, the second in this series of articles reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence, discussed the six recent discoveries that have caused us to change out views about our origins, not, as Creationists might home, because the Theory of evolution is wrong, but because the result of it is not the simple, linear progression we had expected it to be.
The article has been reformatted for stylistic consistence. The original can be read here:
This is the first of three blog posts dealing with human evolution, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency.
A few days ago, sometime during November 15th 2022, the human population of Earth exceeded 8 billion. In the following article by Professor Matthew Wills, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at the Milner Centre for Evolution, University of Bath, UK, explains how our large brains and complex social structures allowed this to happen.
Cultural or memetic evolution is of course closely analogous to genetic evolution, so human evolution can be seen as the result of gene-meme co-evolution, with cooperation and the evolution of social ethics being an important part of our success, enabling us to create organised urban societies and nation states having evolved sets of ethics in common.
Professor Wills' original article can be read here:
November 15 2022 marks a milestone for our species, as the global population hits 8 billion. Just 70 years ago, within a human lifetime, there were only 2.5 billion of us. In AD1, fewer than one-third of a billion. So how have we been so successful?
Humans are not especially fast, strong or agile. Our senses are rather poor, even in comparison to domestic livestock and pets. Instead, large brains and the complex social structures they underpin are the secrets of our success. They have allowed us to change the rules of the evolutionary game that governs the fate of most species, enabling us to shape the environment in our favour.
The golden toad (Incilius periglenes) is an extinct amphibian that was once abundant in a small area north of Monteverde, Costa Rica. Amphibians have extremely high rates of extinction in response to climate change and habitat fragmentation.
Understanding population growth
Legend has it the king of Chemakasherri, which is in modern day India, loved to play chess and challenged a travelling priest to a game. The king asked him what prize he would like if he won. The priest only wanted some rice. But this rice had to be counted in a precise way, with a single grain on the first square of the board, two on the second, four on the third, and so on. This seemed reasonable, and the wager was set.
A chessboard with each square containing twice the number of rice grains as the one before. K = a thousand, M = a million, G = a billion.
When the king lost, he told his servants to reward his guest as agreed. The first row of eight squares held 255 grains, but by the end of the third row, there were over 16.7 million grains. The king offered any other prize instead: even half his kingdom. To reach the last square he would need 18 quintillion grains of rice. That’s about 210 billion tonnes.
The king learned about exponential growth the hard way.
When Homo heidelbergensis started travelling more widely, populations started to change from one another. The African lineage led to Homo sapiens, while migration into Europe around 500,000 years ago created the Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Scientists debate the extent to which later migrations of Homo sapiens out of Africa (between 200,000 and 60,000 years ago) displaced the Neanderthals or interbred with them. Modern humans who live outside Africa typically have around 2% Neanderthal DNA. It is close to zero in people from African backgrounds.
If unchecked, all populations with more births than deaths grow exponentially. Our population does not double in each generation because the average number of children per couple is fewer than four. However, the pace of growth has been accelerating at an unprecedented rate. Those of us alive today are 7% of all the humans who ever existed since the origin of our species.
Why aren’t all species booming?
Biological intervention normally puts the brakes on population growth. Predator populations increase as their prey becomes more abundant, keeping numbers in check. Viruses and other disease agents sweep through populations and decimate them. Habitats become overcrowded. Or rapidly changing environments can turn the tables on once successful species and groups.
Thomas Malthus was famous for his 1798 essay ‘On the Principle of Population’.
Charles Darwin, like the 18th-century scholar Thomas Malthus before him, thought there might be a hard limit on human numbers. Malthus believed our growing population would eventually outpace our ability to produce food, leading to mass starvation. But he did not foresee 19th and 20th-century revolutions in agriculture and transport, or 21st-century advances in genetic technology that allowed us to keep making more food, however patchily, across the globe.
Our intelligence and ability to make tools and develop technologies helped us survive most of the threats our ancestors faced. Within about 8,500 years humans went from the first metal tools to AI and space exploration.
The catch
We are now kicking an increasingly heavy can down the road. The UN estimates that by 2050 there will be nearly 10 billion of us. One consequence of these vast numbers is that small changes in our behaviour can have huge effects on climate and habitats across the globe. The rising energy demands of each person today are on average twice what they were in 1900.
But what of our cousins, the Neanderthals? It turns out, in one sense, their fate was less dire than we might suppose. One measure of evolutionary success is the number of copies of your DNA that are dispersed. By this measure Neanderthals are more successful today than ever. When Neanderthal populations were last distinct from Homo sapiens (around 40,000 years ago) there were fewer than 150,000 of them. Even assuming a conservative average of 1% Neanderthal DNA in modern humans, there is at least 500 times as much in circulation today than at the time of their “extinction”.
Professor Nevin Kozik, PhD, of Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science – National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Florida State University, during fieldwork to investigate how rapid changes in marine oxygen levels may have played a significant role in driving Earth’s first mass extinction.
Fundamental to the Theory of Evolution (TOE) is the idea that environmental change causes evolutionary change, a consequence of which can be extinction, especially when change is too rapid for species to evolve adaptations to it. Environmental change can be very rapid (instantaneous in the case of a meteor strike, for example) but evolutionary change is characteristically very slow, needing many generations to produce a significant adaptation.
So, it's hardly surprising that a period of rapidly fluctuating marine oxygen levels about 443 million years ago, caused Earth's first mass extinction at the same time. Confirmation of that, and so of a prediction of the TOE, has now been produced by a team led by Florida State University (FSU) researchers.
The research depends on a fairly recent dating method for marine sediment that measures the proportion of thallium isotopes in the sediment, as explained by Owens, J.D; Neilson S.D; Horner, T.J., et al (2016)[PDF]:
If Creationism ranked as a serious scientific hypothesis, it would have been abandoned years ago because of the mass of evidence for an alternative theory - the Theory of Evolution. In fact, of course, in scientific circles, Creationism was never regarded as serious science because it entailed magical entities and was unfalsifiable, and was abandoned in 1859 when Darwin & Wallace first published their explanation for biodiversity and the existence of species.
Yet the childish superstition persists in the more backward and scientifically illiterate parts of the world, despite evidence of so many transitional species showing a clear evolutionary change from an earlier taxon to a later one. One such transition that has evidence in the fossil record is the evolutionary transition from lobe-finned fish to terrestrial vertebrates.
A key stage in the development of the terrestrial vertebrates was the transition onto land of air-breathing fish, so a key piece of conditioned denialism for Creationists is to claim there are no fossils showing this transition because their dogma dictates that there are no transitional fossils, for no better reason than Darwin said there should be some.
In fact, of course, there are very many of these fossils showing intermediate species, capable of crawling out onto land and of living in water.
I described this transition, and the ecological changes that facilitated it, in my book, What Makes You So Special: From the Big Bang to You, which deals with the science behind the formation of the Universe, of Earth and of life on Earth, and eventually to humans and the development of human cultures and civilisations, culminating ultimately in you, as a unique individual and beneficiary of that immense chain of causality. So, it's good to know this subject has now been made into a YouTube video, which entirely vindicates what I said:
Now, here is my description:
Here is an example of how science is self-correcting in that methods are critically scrutinised, especially if the reported results look far out of place with other known data. It's the sort of thing that Creationist frauds often find irresistible as something to misrepresent, as either science changing its mind, showing science to be unreliable, or scientists looking for an excuse to change the conclusion because it didn't conform to scientific 'dogma'.
It's neither of those things, of course. It just one team of researchers offering a suggestion as to why another team might have been wrong.
It concerns a 2021 paper published in Science by a team from Institute for Studies in Landscapes and Human Evolution, Bournemouth University, Poole, Dorset, UK, led by Matthew R. Bennett which reported the discovery of human footprints preserved in sand deposits in White Sands National Park, New Mexico, USA, in the what had been the sediment in Lake Otero at the bottom of Tularosa Valley, which had been dated to between ~23 and 21 thousand years ago. The problem was, this placed them at the height of the last glacial maximum, long before other evidence suggested modern humans migrated into the Americas from Siberia.
That conclusion has now been challenged by a second team of scientists from The Desert Research Institute (DRI), Kansas State University, the University of Nevada, Reno, and Oregon State University, led by Professor Charles Oviatt, with some fairly hefty evidence. They have published their findings in the journal Quaternary Research.
Global distribution of plant species richness across the globe as predicted using the distribution 300,000 plant species across 830 regional floras worldwide.
Bagley Wood, near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK is a lightly managed ancient mixed broadleaf
and conifer wood belonging to St Johns College, Oxford, who acquired it in 1557.
Prior to that it had been owned by Abingdon Abbey between 955 and 1538. It is
now used for field research by members of the University Zoology Department and
is probably one of the most closely studied areas of woodland in Europe.
These photographs were taken on a sunny sunday afternoon in November on one of
the warmest November days on record. Of particular note are the profusion of
holly berries and the variety of fungi to be seen.
Walkers are welcome to use the wood but are politely requested to stay on the
footpaths, to keep dogs on a lead and not to disturb the wildlife, so the
woodland remains almost completely undisturbed.
A feature in Late Spring are the carpets of bluebells as well as the many
nesting birds, especially finches, warblers, blackcaps, chiff chaffs and tits.
In recent years, red kites and buzzards have both increased in numbers, and
muntjac deer have become common.
If you've fallen for the Intelligent Design hoax and so believe viruses like the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused COVID-19 were intelligently designed, you probably should be deeply in awe at the lengths to which your putative designer is going to find a super new version that can evade our antibodies acquired from vaccines and earlier infections - antibodies produced by an immune system you believe it created to protect us from the pathogens it creates to make us sick, obviously - and so make even more people sick, ruin even more economies and scupper economic recovery.
We've had in sequence since the initial wave, several waves as new variants emerged, including Delta and most successful to date, Omicron, which is now in the latest of several new subvarieties.
Of course, to anyone who understands evolution, this is nothing more than what is expected as the virus mutates within a selective environment and the most successful becomes the dominant variant. Mutations arise because of copying errors and hybrids arise when two different variants infect the same cell and their genomes get mixed up in their descendants.
To an ID cultist, however, this explanation must be rejected in favour of one in which their imaginary creator actively redesigns the virus to overcome new challenges.
In this article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistence, Victoria Easton, Virology Research and Teaching Fellow in the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Leeds, UK, looks at the emerging variants and discusses whether we should be concerned or not. The original article can be read here:
