Apart from having to design the virus to overcome the defences it designed to protect us from the viruses it creates to harm up, if you follow me, it then has to continually modify its design to overcome the defences human medical science devises, such as vaccines (which only work because we have those defences in the first place, no matter how inadequate). It is as though Creationism's supposedly omniscient, omnipotent designer doesn't have a clue about the future and can only respond when it happens.
And, like a true amnesiac, it seems to forget entirely what it designed yesterday, and why it designed it, so it ends up in a pointless and wasteful arms race with itself; continually designing solutions today to the solutions it designed yesterday which it now thinks are new problems to be solved.
And now we learn from a study by researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet that infection by one of its earlier designs, the OC43 corona virus which causes the common cold, produces antibodies that give some protection against its SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus!
Figure 2
Intra- and inter-ring interactions. A The primary intra-ring interface between two subunits (green and cyan) within a ring. B Schematic quantifying interactions from a single subunit (α) to illustrate the extensive, cooperative network. Numbers and line widths (not lengths) correspond to quantification of the interactions between α and neighboring subunits as calculated by the PDBePISA server (Supplementary Tables 3 and 4). C Surface representation of two subunits reveals a ball and socket geometry between rings. A single subunit (orange) has two loops (Loop1 and Loop2) that fit into sockets (Socket1 - gray, and Socket2 - white) of a subunit in the ring below it (green). D Surface electrostatics of ring interfaces demonstrate an important role for electrostatics in inter-ring interactions.
Agnello, et. al., (2023), Journal of Biological Chemistry
Creationists would have us believe that there are two forms of life on Earth - that designed by their putative, omnibelevolent, omniscient, omnipotent god and that designed by some magical thing (or is it a process?) called 'sin'. For some mysterious reason, their supposedly omnipotent, omniscient god doesn't have enough power to overcome this 'sin' and is reduced to playing inevitable games with it such as indulging in arms races to defend its creation while 'sin' tries to harm it.
In addition, Creationists believe one of two things:
Their god didn't know when he created the mythical founder couple, Adam & Eve, that this would result in this 'sin' thing being created.
It did know, but created them anyway, presumably not understanding the consequences.
And of course they believe in the literal truth of the Bible where their god is reported as telling Isaiah that in fact he created evil.:
I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.
Isiah 47:7
And they also believe that their god created everything on Earth for his special creation, them of course, or more generally, all humans
Not for the first time, Creationism requires its dupes to believe two or more mutually exclusive things simultaneously. g a
So, with that in mind, imagine being a Creationist and trying to understand what on Earth your magic god was trying to achieve when it created bacteria, then created the phage viruses to parasitise them, described in the research by a team from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biotechnology, University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, Worcester MA, USA.
Their research is published open access in the Journal of Biological Chemistry and described in the magazine for the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB). It describes a phage virus, P74-26, nicknamed the “Rapunzel bacteriophage”, with an extraordinarily long 'tail' which is capable of parasitising even extremophile bacteria that live in hot springs where temperatures can reach 170oC. Neither these bacteria nor the phage virus appear to have any benefit to mankind.
The study was to determine the construction and function of the very long 'tail'.
The discovery was of something that the Creationist idol, Michael J Behe would undoubtedly proclaim as 'irreducibly complex', therefore proof that the locally popular god did it.
To make matters worse for Creationists, the study casually and unintentionally refutes one of the lies that their cult leaders fool them with - that the Theory of Evolution (TOE) is being increasingly rejected by mainstream biologists in favour of their childish, magical and supernatural explanation. The scientists who did the study are in no doubt that the 'tail' is a product of an evolutionary process and that the TOE is a perfect model for explaining and understanding the observed facts.
From the ASBMB magazine:
A recent study in the Journal of Biological Chemistry has revealed the secret behind an evolutionary marvel: a bacteriophage with an extremely long tail. This extraordinary tail is part of a bacteriophage that lives in inhospitable hot springs and preys on some of the toughest bacteria on the planet.
Bacteriophages are a group of viruses that infect and replicate in bacteria and are the most common and diverse things on Earth.
The bacteriophage P74-26 has a tail 10 times longer than most other phage tails and is nearly 1 micrometer long, about the width of some spider’s silk.
Angnello, et al.(2023) Journal of Biological Chemistry
Bacteriophages, or phages for short, are everywhere that bacteria are, including the dirt and water around you and in your own body’s microbial ecosystem as well.
Each phage tail is made up of many small building blocks that come together to form a long tube. Our research finds that these building blocks can change shape, or conformation, as they come together. This shape-changing behavior is important in allowing the building blocks to fit together and form the correct structure of the tail tube.
We used a technique called cryo-electron microscopy, which is a huge microscope that allows us to take thousands of images and short movies at a very high magnification. By taking lots of pictures of the phage’s tail tubes and stacking them together, we were able to figure out exactly how the building blocks fit together.
Bacteriophages are gaining ever-growing interest as an alternative to antibiotics for treating bacterial infections. By studying phage assembly, we can better understand how these viruses interact with bacteria, which could lead to the development of more effective phage-based therapies. … I believe that studying unique, interesting things can lead to findings and applications that we can’t even yet imagine.
Emily Agnello, first author
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biotechnology
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School
Worcester, MA, USA.
Unlike many of the viruses that infect humans and animals that contain only one compartment, phages consist of a tail attached to a spiky, prismlike protein shell that contains their DNA.
Phage tails, like hairstyles, vary in length and style; some are long and bouncy while others are short and stiff. While most phages have short, microscopic tails, the “Rapunzel bacteriophage” P74-26 has a tail 10 times longer than most and is nearly 1 micrometer long, about the width of some spider’s silk. The “Rapunzel” moniker is derived from the fairy tale in which a girl with extremely long hair was locked in a tower by an evil witch.
Brian Kelch, an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biotechnology at UMass Chan who supervised the work, described P74-26 as having a “monster of a tail.”
transmission electron micrograph of multiple bacteriophages attached to a bacterial cell wall; the magnification is approximately 200,000.
Professor Graham Beards, (Wikimedia Commons)
Compared with most phages, P74-26 uses half the number of building blocks to form stacking rings that make up the tail.
Phage tails are important for puncturing bacteria, which are coated in a dense, viscous substance. P74-26’s long tail allows it to invade and infect the toughest bacteria. Not only does P74-26 have an extremely long tail, but it is also the most stable phage, allowing it to exist in and infect bacteria that live in hot springs that can reach over 170° F. Researchers have been studying P74-26 to find out why and how it can exist in such extreme environments.
To work with a phage that thrives in such high temperatures, Agnello had to adjust the conditions of her experiments to coax the phage tail to assemble itself in a test tube. Kelch said Agnello created a system with which she could induce rapid tail self-assembly.
I like to think about these phage building blocks as kind of like Legos. The Lego has studs on one side and the holes or sockets on the other. Imagine a Lego where the sockets start off closed. But as you start to build with the Legos, the sockets begin to open up to allow the studs on other Legos to build a larger assembly. This movement is an important way that these phage building blocks self-regulate their assembly.
We think what has happened is that some ancient virus fused its building blocks into one protein. Imagine two small Lego bricks are fused into one large brick with no seams. This long tail is built with larger, sturdier building blocks. We think that could be stabilizing the tail at high temperatures.
Brian A. Kelch, corresponding author
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biotechnology
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School
Worcester, MA, USA
The researchers used high-power imaging techniques as well as computer simulations and found that the building blocks of the tail lean on each other to stabilize themselves.
They found P74-26 uses a “ball and socket” mechanism to sturdy itself. In addition, the tail is formed from vertically stacking rings of molecules that make a hollow canal.
Kelch pointed out that, compared with most phages, P74-26 uses half the number of building blocks to form stacking rings that make up the tail.
The researchers now plan to use genetic manipulation to alter the length of the phage tail and see how that changes its behavior.
Phages occupy almost every corner of the globe and are important to a variety of industries like healthcare, environmental conservation and food safety. In fact, long-tailed phages like P74-26 have been used in preliminary clinical trials to treat certain bacterial infections.
More technical detail is given in the teams open access paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry:
Abstract
Tail tube assembly is an essential step in the lifecycle of long-tailed bacteriophages. Limited structural and biophysical information has impeded an understanding of assembly and stability of their long, flexible tail tubes. The hyperthermophilic phage P74-26 is particularly intriguing as it has the longest tail of any known virus (nearly 1 μm) and is the most thermostable known phage. Here, we use structures of the P74-26 tail tube along with an in vitro system for studying tube assembly kinetics to propose the first molecular model for the tail tube assembly of long-tailed phages. Our high resolution cryo-EM structure provides insight into how the P74-26 phage assembles through flexible loops that fit into neighboring rings through tight “ball-and-socket”-like interactions. Guided by this structure, and in combination with mutational, light scattering, and molecular dynamics simulations data, we propose a model for the assembly of conserved tube-like structures across phage and other entities possessing Tail Tube-like proteins. We propose that formation of a full ring promotes the adoption of a tube elongation-competent conformation among the flexible loops and their corresponding sockets, which is further stabilized by an adjacent ring. Tail assembly is controlled by the cooperative interaction of dynamic intra- and inter-ring contacts. Given the structural conservation among tail tube proteins and tail-like structures, our model can explain the mechanism of high-fidelity assembly of long, stable tubes.
Agnello, Emily; Pajak, Joshua; Liu, Xingchen; Kelch, Brian A.
Conformational dynamics control assembly of an extremely long bacteriophage tail tube
Journal of Biological Chemistry; (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.jbc.2023.103021
So, from a Creationist point of view, a massively complex solution to the problem of how to get through the defences of a bacterium that was designed to protect it from viruses in order to kill bacteria that, because they inhabit such extreme conditions, are or complete indifference to humans, being neither harmful nor harmless.
Creationists also argue that bacteria and viruses were created by 'sin' in some unexplained magical process, so this 'sin' thing is designing parasites to attack the parasites it creates!
It takes some special mental gymnastics to believe these organisms and the relationships between them are the result of an intelligent design process and not the result of a mindless, utilitarian natural process in which neither magic nor magicians was involved.
South Polar skua, Stercorarius maccormicki, with nest
According to a survey published, open access, yesterday in the Cell Press journal, Current Biology almost the entire breeding population of three seabirds failed to breed on important breeding grounds in Antarctica, due to unseasonably high snowfall in the Antarctic 'Summer' (December 2020-January 2022) when breeding normally takes place. The unusual weather is almost certainly due to man-made climate change.
The researchers found not a single nest of the South Polar skua, and only a handful of the nests of the Antarctic petrel, Thalassoica antarctica, and Snow petrel, Pagodroma nivea, on the main breeding ground of Dronning Maud Land (Queen Maud Land) in the Norwegian-administered sector of Antarctica.
The Ludicrous Complexity of Arms Races Between Parasites and Hosts
Researchers from Penn Vet observed, for the first time, an intestinal pyogranuloma, formed in response to Yersinia infection. The organized grouping of cells includes monocytes (in green), neutrophils (in magenta), and Yersinia
bacteria (in white), and depends on monocytes to form and to control infection, the team found.
Image: The Brodsky Laboratory
Peyer's Patches - organized lymphoid nodules commonly found in the small intestines.
Hard though it is to imagine any intelligent adult holding to such beliefs, Creationists believe that parasites were intelligently designed to make us sick and the same designer gave us an immune system to help stop parasites doing what it designed them to do. It then indulged in a pointless arms race with itself to try to make sure both parasites and our immune system did what they were designed to do.
It's as though the creator is some hate-filled but incompetent, schizophrenic amnesiac, intent on harming us one day and protecting us the next, but not remembering what it was trying to do yesterday and treating its solutions to problems yesterday as problems to be solved today, and no real idea about the basic principles of design.
Now researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine (Penn Vet) have discovered how this arms race has resulted in a continuous battle in or intestines between our immune system and bacteria if the Yersina genus which includes the plague organism, Y. pestis.
The setting for creationism's putative designer's ludicrous battle with itself is the host's intestines where the Yersinia organisms, which are designed to overcome the body's first line of defences, set up colonies in the lymph system. The lymph system's purpose is to protect us from these sorts of infections but the pathogens have been designed to use the system against us!
The body's response is to then try to seal in these colonies with a collection of immune cells to form a granuloma, sustained by monocytes.
The problem is this solution doesn't always work as designed and the granulomas break down when the monocytes fail to sustain them. The infection can ten enter the blood stream and cause serious illness.
The research and its significance is described in a news release from Penn Vet:
Yersinia bacteria cause a variety of human and animal diseases, the most notorious being the plague, caused by Yersinia pestis. A relative, Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, causes gastrointestinal illness and is less deadly, but naturally infects both mice and humans, making it a useful model for studying its interactions with the immune system.
These two pathogens, as well as a third close cousin, Y. enterocolitica, which affects swine and can cause food-borne illness if people consume infected meat, have many traits in common, particularly their knack for interfering with the immune system’s ability to respond to infection.
The plague pathogen is blood-borne and transmitted by infected fleas. Infection with the other two depends on ingestion. Yet the focus of much of the work in the field had been on interactions of Yersinia with lymphoid tissues, rather than the intestine. A new study of Y. pseudotuberculosis led by a team from Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine and published in Nature Microbiology demonstrates that, in response to infection, the host immune system forms small, walled-off lesions in the intestines called granulomas. It’s the first time these organized collections of immune cells have been found in the intestines in response to Yersinia infections.
The team went on to show that monocytes, a type of immune cell, sustain these granulomas. Without them, the granulomas deteriorated, allowing the mice to be overtaken by Yersinia.
Our data reveal a previously unappreciated site where Yersinia can colonize and the immune system is engaged. These granulomas form in order to control the bacterial infection in the intestines. And we show that if they don’t form or fail to be maintained, the bacteria are able to overcome the control of the immune system and cause greater systemic infection.
In all three Yersinia infections, a hallmark is that they colonize lymphoid tissues and are able to escape immune control and replicate, cause disease, and spread.
Because it’s an orally acquired pathogen, we were interested in how the bacteria behaved in the intestines. Daniel [Sorobetea, first-author] made this initial observation that, following Yersinia pseudotuberculosis infection, there were macroscopically visible lesions all along the length of the gut that had never been described before.
We hypothesize that it’s a general role for the monocytes in other tissues as well.
Previous to this study we knew of Peyer’s patches to be the primary site where the body interacts with the outside environment through the mucosal tissue of the intestines.
These therapies have caused an explosion of excitement in the cancer field, the idea of reinvigorating the immune system. Conceptually we can also think about how to coax the immune system to be reinvigorated to attack pathogens in these settings of chronic infection as well.
Professor Igor E. Brodsky, senior author
Robert R. Marshak Professor and chair of the Department of Pathobiology
University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.
Pennsylvania, USA.
The findings have implications for developing new therapies that leverage the host immune system, Brodsky says. A drug that harnessed the power of immune cells to not only keep Yersinia in check but to overcome its defenses, they say, could potentially eliminate the pathogen altogether.
A novel battlefield
Y. pestis, Y. pseudotuberculosis, and Y. enterocolitica share a keen ability to evade immune detection.
Earlier studies had shown that Yersinia prompted the formation of granulomas in the lymph nodes and spleen but had never observed them in the intestines until Daniel Sorobetea, a research fellow in Brodsky’s group, took a closer look at the intestines of mice infected with Y. pseudotuberculosis.
The research team, including Sorobetea and later Rina Matsuda, a doctoral student in the lab, saw that these same lesions were present when mice were infected with Y. enterocolitica, forming within five days after an infection.
A biopsy of the intestinal tissues confirmed that the lesions were a type of granuloma, known as a pyogranuloma, composed of a variety of immune cells, including monocytes and neutrophils, another type of white blood cell that is part of the body's front line in fighting bacteria and viruses.
Granulomas form in other diseases that involve chronic infection, including tuberculosis, for which Y. pseudotuberculosis is named. Somewhat paradoxically, these granulomas—while key in controlling infection by walling off the infectious agent—also sustain a population of the pathogen within those walls.
The team wanted to understand how these granulomas were both formed and maintained, working with mice lacking monocytes as well as animals treated with an antibody that depletes monocytes. In the animals lacking monocytes “these granulomas, with their distinct architecture, wouldn’t form,” Brodsky says.
Instead, a more disorganized and necrotic abscess developed, neutrophils failed to be activated, and the mice were less able to control the invading bacteria. These animals experienced higher levels of bacteria in their intestines and succumbed to their infections.
Groundwork for the future
The researchers believe the monocytes are responsible for recruiting neutrophils to the site of infection and thus launching the formation of the granuloma, helping to control the bacteria. This leading role for monocytes may exist beyond the intestines, the researchers believe.
But the discoveries also point to the intestines as a key site of engagement between the immune system and Yersinia.
Peyer’s patches are small areas of lymphoid tissue present in the intestines that serve to regulate the microbiome and fend off infection.
In future work, Brodsky and colleagues hope to continue to piece together the mechanism by which monocytes and neutrophils contain the bacteria, an effort they’re pursing in collaboration with Sunny Shin’s lab in the Perelman School of Medicine’s microbiology department.
A deeper understanding of the molecular pathways that regulate this immune response could one day offer inroads into host-directed immune therapies, by which a drug could tip the scales in favor of the host immune system, unleashing its might to fully eradicate the bacteria rather than simply corralling them in granulomas.
Abstract
Granulomas are organized immune cell aggregates formed in response to chronic infection or antigen persistence. The bacterial pathogen Yersinia pseudotuberculosis (Yp) blocks innate inflammatory signalling and immune defence, inducing neutrophil-rich pyogranulomas (PGs) within lymphoid tissues. Here we uncover that Yp also triggers PG formation within the murine intestinal mucosa. Mice lacking circulating monocytes fail to form defined PGs, have defects in neutrophil activation and succumb to Yp infection. Yersinia lacking virulence factors that target actin polymerization to block phagocytosis and reactive oxygen burst do not induce PGs, indicating that intestinal PGs form in response to Yp disruption of cytoskeletal dynamics. Notably, mutation of the virulence factor YopH restores PG formation and control of Yp in mice lacking circulating monocytes, demonstrating that monocytes override YopH-dependent blockade of innate immune defence. This work reveals an unappreciated site of Yersinia intestinal invasion and defines host and pathogen drivers of intestinal granuloma formation.
Sorobetea, Daniel; Matsuda, Rina; Peterson, Stefan T.; Grayczyk, James P.; Rao, Indira; Krespan, Elise; Lanza, Matthew; Assenmacher, Charles-Antoine; Mack, Matthias; Beiting, Daniel P.; Radaelli, Enrico; Brodsky, Igor E.
Inflammatory monocytes promote granuloma control of Yersinia infection Nature Microbiology (2023); DOI: 10.1038/s41564-023-01338-6
I doubt that any Creationist would have the courage to read this far, but this offer is open to any who do: Please explain how this system can be regarded as the work of an omnibenevolent, omniscience, intelligent designer and not the work of either an incompetent malevolence or the result of amoral, utilitarian natural processes operating without a plan.
The psychological phenomenon of self-licencing or awarding themselves exemptions from the standards they demand others live by, is a characteristic of the pious, and often the reason for the public display of it.
It's as though the pious see their piety as building up credit they can draw on later to provide themselves with a little relaxation of the rules without running the risk of adverse judgement later. Then, of course, there is the useful Christian notion of forgiveness through confession, in effect having your sin counter zeroed by confession and penance.
In this article from The Conversation, Daisy Matthews, a PhD candidate in Sociology, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK and Jane Pilcher, Associate Professor of Sociology, Nottingham Trent University, explore the extent to which piety is used by sex workers and their clients to free themselves from any feelings of guilt or responsibility for acts which are condemned as sinful by their respective religions. There is a noticeable flexibility of belief where arbitrary lines are drawn and, so long as they are not crossed, anything else is permitted within the religion.
The practices are not restricted to Christians of one denomination or another but extends to Muslims, Jews, and others.
The article, part of the Insight series, is reprinted under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here.
Uncovering the secret religious and spiritual lives of sex workers
Tanya* is telling me just how important her Methodist Christianity is to her. We’re chatting over a video call, and I can see Tanya’s living room in the background. This also happens to be her workspace because Tanya, who is 50, is a full-time phone and cam sex worker. For Tanya, earning her living through sex work does not conflict with her religious beliefs at all. Tanya tells me that she had a client who talked to her about his enjoyment of wearing women’s clothing. He confided in her because they both shared the same religious identity.
He [the client] started talking more and more … he said I listen … he told me he goes to church every Sunday and was a church elder and he opened up. I also said to him … that I used to go to Sunday school every week and so we connected … because I am not going OMG when he told me. And he asked me if I still go to chapel now, and I said no but I still pray and believe in God, and he said that’s nice.
Tanya reassured her client that there was “no need to feel guilty”, that what they were doing wasn’t “wrong”. She even told him: “I bet there are other people in the church who do it”.
Tanya was one of 11 sex workers I spoke to who all had spiritual and religious beliefs. I wanted to discover how these two seemingly opposite life choices could interconnect and coexist. I discovered people like Tanya, who spoke to their clients about God and religion, but I also spoke to women who used religion as a kink to arouse their clients or as a tactic to earn more money or, in some cases, protect themselves when they felt threatened.
I found out that rather than being incompatible, religion and spirituality can create unique connections and meaningful experiences for both sex worker and client. Tanya’s story shows how sex work experiences are not one dimensional, and are not only about selling sex for money. They can hold multiple meanings. As the journalist Melissa Gira Grant suggests in her book, sex work is a role where social skills and empathy are regularly performed.
This article is part of Conversation Insights The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.
My PhD research attempts to shine a light on the realities of the everyday lives of religious sex workers, which include positive experiences as well as distressing ones. I spoke with sex workers who were Christian, Catholic, Muslim, Norse Pagan and spiritual. All the women were over the age of 18 and were consensual sex workers.
Religion, sin and ‘morality’
So, what do different religions say about sex work? Research by independent scholar Benedikta Fones, suggests that in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament representations of sex workers are typically negative. That perhaps doesn’t come as too much of a surprise. The stereotypical “religious” view of sex before marriage is that it is immoral, so why should sex work be any different? Fones argues that these religious ideas, about sex work being “unacceptable”, then spread into wider culture.
Research shows that sex work is generally considered an immoral act within Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
That said, there are some religious organisations or charities that do provide essential support for some sex workers. But there are also “saviour charities”, whose existence gives further insight into the complex relationship between sex work and religion.
Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden on a stained glass window in the cathedral of Brussels, Belgium.
As the sociologist Gemma Ahearne has written, some religiously motivated groups aim to stop people working in the sex industry and aim to eradicate sex work entirely.
And it’s not just religious doctrines which find sex work to be immoral – some religious sex workers do too, as a research project in Thailand discovered in 2015. But the women I spoke with rejected that narrative of religious condemnation. For them, religion and sex work can co-exist and both were a meaningful part of their lives.
Using religion to earn more
One of my first discoveries was how some sex workers use religion to earn more money. One example of this was how one sex worker had decided to capitalise on her Muslim heritage to boost her “brand”.
Zahra and Islam
Zahra is a 26-year-old British Muslim. Zahra was inspired by other women who use the hijab when sex working. From this, she created her alter ego, where she wore the hijab when she made online sexual content and when working as an escort. She said:
On Twitter … I networked with this one girl, she wears a hijab, not in her real life but using it to make more money and mix it up and she is like earning 150k, she’s up there with celebrities and stuff and so, yeah I decided I would have an alter ego, my “hoejabi”, that’s what I called it and I made content wearing a head scarf and like that and I had jobs coming through from that.
So Zahra utilised the hijab and, in her own words, “made a lot of money from it”.
However, this coexistence of identities – as sex worker and religious person – is not simple, and must be managed by a process of constant internal negotiation. Zahra spoke to me at length about the requests she has had from clients which she turned down, because to agree with them would have challenged her religious values and morals.
She added: “I have had clients go, ‘can you sit on the Qur’an and cum or can I bring a Qur’an and ride it whilst saying this and that’, and I say no. That is too extreme for me.”
So although Zahra uses her religion to earn more money by sexualising Islamic symbols like the hijab, she is still a Muslim woman. She believes in Allah in her private life. She set boundaries within her work to ensure that she doesn’t go against her own religious beliefs.
But sexualising religion in this way can come with risks. In 2015, the former porn actor Mia Khalifa starred in a porn film while she was wearing the hijab. She received death threats as a result and was strongly criticised by some people in Muslim communities. Some claimed she was letting down the Islamic faith (although Khalifa herself was raised Catholic).
But despite – or perhaps because of – the controversy around her film, Khalifa became one of the most searched-for stars on the adult movie site Porn Hub.
Being a Muslim and sex worker may be risky - but for Zahra, it was empowering and positive. And she is not alone. There is a Muslim group called Muslims for Full Decrim whose members are also current and former sex workers who support the decriminalisation of the sex industry. Clearly, religious communities like Islam are diverse and this is reflected in how people feel about their religion and sex work.
Maya, yoga and spirituality
Another sex worker I met used elements of her spiritual life to increase interest from clients. Maya, a 25-year-old British woman showed me her bedroom over a video-call. Maya, like Tanya, is a cam sex worker, so her bedroom is also her workspace. But Maya’s bedroom is also the space where she practises yoga. She told me that she performed yoga on camera for her clients:
Good spiritual link, customers have said they find it relaxing to watch. Yeah, I don’t know why I didn’t mention that! I think it’s even like, called a subculture … I sent a video of myself into the site proving I can do it [yoga], you add it to your list of specialities so people can find you for specifically doing that.
For Maya, yoga can be relaxing and a way to connect with her spiritual identity. But it is also a way to make money and it shows how religion and spirituality are becoming more diverse and less bound by traditional religious rules and doctrines. Maya was managing her beliefs flexibly. This was also true for Zahra.
Maya’s and Zahra’s stories show the evident demand from some clients for religion when they are paying for sex. Zahra and Maya sexualise their religion and spirituality when sex working – meeting the desires of clients who get off on that.
Khan, a trans Norse Pagan
But there were other women I met who needed religion to help them belong.
Khan, a 41-year-old transgender woman, was raised Christian but now has a Norse Pagan religious identity. She told me how she changed her religious path because she felt conflicted between her gender identity, sex work identity and, specifically, her Christian identity.
She said that being a transgender woman created challenges to being a Christian and that Christianity would not accept her occupation as an escort.
I don’t think there is a way to reconcile the sex work with Christianity.
It is these kinds of religious ideas about the immorality of sex work that meant Khan looked for and found a religion – Norse Paganism – which better suited her feelings and identities. Norse Pagan practices are diverse and people engage with the religion differently. An introduction to Norse Paganism on spiritualityheath.com states that it “is an inclusive spiritual practice, open to all who are moved toward it”.
The inclusivity offered by this religion seems to enable people with diverse and marginalised identities to feel accepted within it – in other words, it is a religious community free from judgement. For Khan, it was a welcoming religion. It helped her to overcome the challenges she had experienced as a transgender woman sex worker within the Christian faith.
Khan’s story supports the idea that religious beliefs are becoming more fluid and that people are able to tailor religion to better align with their “self”.
But, as Tanya’s story showed, there are Christian sex workers who do not feel conflicted in the way that Khan did. Religious beliefs – even those within mainstream religions like Islam and Christianity – are diverse and one size does not fit all.
Enhancing sexual pleasure
Another topic I was keen to examine was whether sex workers themselves experience sexual pleasure while working. This point is seldom addressed. But according to a number of the women I interviewed, they not only enjoyed sex with some of their clients, but religion and spirituality sometimes increased that pleasure and led to more of a connection.
Amy and spiritual vibes
Take Amy, for example. Amy is a 23-year-old American porn actor who has a spiritual identity. Our interview lasted nearly three hours. She explained to me how being a sex worker and being spiritual were not at “odds with each other”. She described how they are two separate things within her life. However, she also told me that sometimes her sexual encounters (for example, when she is creating pornography) can be a spiritual experience.
Sex can still be spiritual for me … And even if you don’t have, like, a connection with the person and you’re not gonna see them again or don’t care about them, or whatever, you can still enjoy … the moment.
Amy told me that sex could “turn her brain off” and “that’s kind of like a spiritual experience”. Amy’s spirituality concerns “high vibes”, which are positive qualities such as love, and “low vibes” associated with negative qualities such as hatred. So for Amy, although sex work and spirituality are separate, there was also a blurring of lines between them, and some sexual experiences when making porn gave her “high vibes”.
LRE, astrology
Another sex worker I spoke to said that the sex part of her work could become especially enjoyable when she and her client connected over a shared love of astrology and star signs.
Zodiac signs on ancient Torre dell'Orologio clock in St Mark’s Square, Venice, Italy.
LRE is a 22-year-old British woman who works part-time as an escort and sexual content creator. Like Amy, LRE’s spiritual identity could sometimes enhance her sexual pleasure with clients.
Oh, he was a Sagittarius [client]… we did bits and then halfway through he was like, what star sign are you? I was like, ‘you are my new favourite person ever’ … he was like laughing and smiling and I was like ‘no seriously, I love that you asked me that’ … and I thought … this is why there is such sexual chemistry.
Although the stories of Amy and LRE have some things in common, their spiritual identities were present in their sex work in different ways. In Amy’s case, her spiritual identity was not necessarily known to the fellow porn actor she had sex with. But for LRE, her spiritual identity was known and openly discussed with her client.
Belief as a coping strategy
Despite the many empowering and sex-positive stories I heard, there was sometimes a reminder that not all sex worker experiences are positive.
Lilly, Christian Orthodox
Lilly is one such example. Lilly was a 25-year-old escort, originally from Romania. She is Christian Orthodox and lives in the UK. She told me how she prays in her head when she is with a client who makes her feel uncomfortable:
If I have a problem or think something is wrong with this guy, I start to pray in my head, and it helps me not to think because if they feel I am scared, they will take advantage. So, when I start to pray, I forget I am scared and go away from those feelings and so, he will be quiet as he doesn’t feel like this.
Safety challenges are an occupational hazard for sex workers. It is important to say, though, that for Lilly at least, feeling unsafe with a client was not a regular occurrence.
Lilly told me that sex work provides her with greater opportunities to earn more compared to other jobs available to her. I did feel concerned that Lilly, at times, was made to feel scared by her clients. But it was also clear to me that, for Lilly, these negative experiences do not outweigh the positive benefits she says she gains from being an escort.
Decriminalisation
One way to keep sex workers like Lilly safer is to decriminalise the sex industry. Those who oppose decriminalisation seem to be under the misconception that all sex workers are coerced, trafficked or exploited. Although this is true for some, it is not true for most and the misconception that all sex workers are victims is itself, as research shows, a result of stigma and lack of knowledge about the industry.
It is also important to differentiate between criminalised, legalised and decriminalised sex industries. Criminalisation of the sex industry makes all sex work-related practices illegal. Legalisation of the sex industry is where sex work is legal under specific state defined conditions.
For example, under legalisation laws within the UK (except for Northern Ireland, who have adopted the Nordic Model) sex work practices are predominantly legal. However, some engagements with sex work such as soliciting on the street and working with another sex worker within the same house (as this is considered a brothel) are criminalised.
Decriminalisation is where sex work is stripped of regulations and sex workers can operate freely. I support the decriminalisation of the sex industry globally because it is under these conditions that sex workers can best protect themselves and it is the first step in abolishing stigma. Research has also shown it is the best strategy for harm reduction.
Stigma heightens risks
Although it is not the belief of all sex workers, the women I spoke to argued strongly for the decriminalisation of the sex industry. Stories told to me by Khan and LRE, who are both escorts, are cases in point.
Khan lives and works in a US state where escorting is illegal. So, if she has a violent client, she will tell staff and security at the hotel where she is working that she is on a date that has gone wrong.
… God forbid, something does happen, like there’s staffed or security and I will say I was on a date and this guy went crazy …
Khan is forced to hide her sex work from staff when she is in potential danger due to fear of prosecution. LRE faces similar issues in the UK. She told me how she has to hide her income around her hotel room when she is escorting to reduce the likelihood of theft and violence.
… If you get money, put like £100 in the safe and then anything else, just stash it around the room …
All the women I spoke to informed me they do not report violence from clients or thefts to the police. This is not surprising, given evidence that women, men and transgender sex workers are all at heightened risk of police sexual misconduct in comparison to non-sex workers.
Not ‘just’ sex workers
I think my interviews show that sex workers are not just sex workers – they have complex and multifaceted identities. You absolutely can be a sex worker and be religious or spiritual. But it is not necessarily easy to always get a balance. It is the result of constant and skilful identity management. The stories of women like Tanya, Maya, Zahra, LRE, Amy, Lilly and Khan underline how important it is to recognise the sheer diversity of people who work in this industry.
Although there are negative experiences in the sex industry, the women I spoke to, on the whole, felt empowered by their profession. They saw it as providing great opportunities for earning money and offering them positive experiences.
And, importantly, it didn’t get in the way of their religious and spiritual beliefs. As Zahra told me at the end of our discussion:
…I do believe in God and believe in Allah and in my private life. I believe in it.
So whether it was Tanya consoling a church elder, or Zahra finding a way to utilise her Muslim faith, these women were opening up new discussions about what it means to be a sex worker.
All names have been changed to protect the identities of those involved.
With Creationism in headlong retreat under the onslaught from science and improved access to information with the Internet, Creationists at least have something to be proud of.
From their point of view, few designs have been so spectacularly successful as the SARS-CoV-2 virus that is causing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It is a success unparalleled since the 1918 'Spanish' flu outbreak, caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus, and only bettered, in the Middle Ages, with Yersinia pestis and the Black Death, which wiped out 30-60 percent of the European population and 70-200 million people worldwide.
Although not nearly as successful as the H1N1 influenza A virus, which killed an estimated 17-50 million people and maybe as many as 100 million, and paling into insignificance compared to Yersinia pestis, SARS-CoV-2 has so far turned in a very respectable performance with 6.8 million deaths out of about 681 million people infected, and we need to bear in mind that the majority of those infections will have been vaccinated people who benefit from human medical science.
Without the vaccines, it's anyone's guess how many orders of magnitude the death toll would have been, but low though that 1% death-rate is, compared to the divine malevolence's other pathogens, we need to add in other factors when estimating the malevolent designer's successes with SARS-CoV-2.
Life expectancy fell sharply between 2020 and 2021, reversing 70 years of almost continuous improvement thanks to medical science.
There has been severe disruption of health services, especially in poor countries, leading to:
a significant increase in stillbirths, perinatal mortality for both mother and child.
an increase in postnatal depression.
Immunizations programs have been reduced, leading to an increase in malaria, tuberculosis and HIV.
There has been severe deterioration in mental health services.
An estimated 65 million people now suffer the debilitating consequences of 'long covid' caused by long-term damage as opposed to the relatively short duration of the primary infection.
Children's education has been adversely affected due to school closures and staff shortages due to COVID-19.
The economic disruption and the drastic measures to mitigate the pandemic and support businesses during lock-down, in its early stages, have crippled economies with increased government debt and cuts in spending on essential social services, and reduced government revenues for taxation due to an estimated 0.75% fall in GDP
And it's far from over yet!
In fact there is little sign that the virus is attenuating or that "herd immunity" is sufficient to prevent new waves with new variants. As this article points out, there have been more cases of COVID-19 in Australia in the first three months of 2023, than there were in the whole of 2021 and 2022 combined!. The article is by Michael Toole, Associate Principal Research Fellow, Burnet Institute, and Brendan Crabb, Director and CEO, Burnet Institute in The Conversation points out. It deals mostly with Australia but can be extrapolated to the rest of the world.
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have discovered that anthropologists could be wrong about when Early hominins began making stone tools because they have discovered that certain Old World monkeys make stone artifacts which bear what were thought to be characteristics of hominin stone tools.
However, rather than being a problem for evolutionary anthropologists, the discovery is a major problem for Creationists.
The problem is a reverse form of the Palley's Watch argument, which, despite being debunked by Darwin in 1859, is never-the-less regularly trotted out by Creationists who argue that man-made objects must have been intelligently designed (so living organisms must have been too [sic]) and man-made stone tools are 'obviously' designed.
However, the 'stone tools' made by Old World monkeys are not designed; they are created accidentally when the monkeys use stone 'hammers' to crack nuts, using an anvil. This often results in the stone 'hammer' chipping to form a cutting edge that was previously thought to be a sure sign of human design!
Incidentally, this finding give a clue to how early hominins could have discovered how to make stone tools, when they realised the sharp edges produced could be used to cut, and careful chipping could be used to make shapes such as hand-axes, spear points, scrapers, etc.
The research and its consequences for evolutionary anthropology is explained in a news release from Max Planck Gesellschaft:
The beautiful Jewel beetle is about as devastating to Creationism as it would be if Michael J Behe announced that he was a secret evolutionary biologist all along, taking part in an elaborate experiment to test how gullible the average American fundamentalist is.
Recent research has shown that these beetles get their color from gene duplication. This is the process where a mistake in the duplication of DNA leads to genes being duplicated, creating a second, spare, copy. This copy is then free to mutate without any loss of function because the original is still functioning, creating new genetic information by mutation.
This is a problem for Creationists for two reasons:
Reading this account of the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the first 'radical' feminists, by Bridget Cotter, Lecturer in Social Sciences, University of Westminster, UK, one of the things that stands out most vividly is the religious inspiration for the repression and subjugation of women in Victorian England, and how much of that religion is now seen as wrong and antisocial by the vast majority of decent people.
Far from providing society with a fixed moral framework, religion has served to hold back moral development as society evolves, only to have to reluctantly acceded to the new standards when the tension becomes irresistible.
One of the great crimes of religion, or rather the clerics who control it, is the theft of control of social ethics by a clique who knew they would lose control if they allowed the people too much freedom to think for themselves.
If we give all men the vote, where will it all end? Women demanding the same?!"
"If we give way on feminism, where will it all end? Women priests?!"
"If we give way on contraception, where will it all end? Sexually liberated women?!"
“If we give way on same-sex marriage, or allow gays to become priests, Where will it all end?
… Etc, etc, etc.
Because she challenged these imposed social norms and questioned the authority of those who sought to impose them on us, Mary Wollstonecraft was considered a dangerous revolutionary. Ironically she was opposed most vigorously by the same church that proudly, but wrongly, proclaims its founder as a dangerous revolutionary who challenged authority and the prevailing social norms and cultural ethics.
And today, much of what Mary Wollstonecraft campaigned for is taken for granted as right and proper in most civilised countries.
Bridget Cotter's article in The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license. The original can be read here.
A few days ago I wrote about a paper which incidentally refutes the notion that humans are a special creation with unique characteristics that distinguish us from other animals in a way over and above those handful of characteristics that distinguish any distinct species from others.
One of these, so Creationists would have us believe, is having higher emotions and cognition which enable us to form close friendships and empathise with other people, for instance. The paper showed how Caribbean flamingos forms 'cliques' or friendship groups with other flamingos with similar personalities, just like humans do.
Another piece of disinformation that the cult leaders feed their dupes, in order to attack and undermine the science behind the Theory of Evolution (TOE), is the nonsensical claim that a scientific theory must be verified with experiments in a laboratory or else it isn't real science but an unproven hypothesis which is no more valid than a belief in magic. This trick enables Creationists to present their evidence-free superstition as a theory which should carry equal weight to the TOE and so should be taken seriously as an alternative to the science.
Curiously, Creationists who despise science and try to undermine and misrepresent it at every opportunity, would like nothing more than Creationism being regarded as serious science.
Inadvertently exposing laughable Creationists claims that the Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis about to be overthrown in the scientific consensus by Creationist superstition, including magic done by unproven supernatural entities, a study led by University of Alaska Fairbanks biological anthropologist Kara C. Hoover and Universite Paris-Saclay biochemist Claire de March, shows how our sense of smell evolved as an adaption to new environments, in classic example of evolution by natural selection.
The research involved a comparative genetic analysis of the genomes of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans.
The research is explained in a University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) news release:
It sounds a little like Stone Age standup: A Denisovan and a human walk past a bees’ nest heavy with honeycomb. What happens next?
According to a study led by University of Alaska Fairbanks biological anthropologist Kara C. Hoover and Universite Paris-Saclay biochemist Claire de March, the Denisovan, with the species’ greater sensitivity to sweet smells, may have immediately homed in on the scent and beat the human to a high-energy meal.
This research has allowed us to draw some larger conclusions about the sense of smell in our closest genetic relatives and understand the role that smell played in adapting to new environments and foods during our migrations out of Africa.
[Smell is integral to the human story.] Such a strongly overlapping olfactory repertoire suggests that our generalist approach to smelling has enabled us to find new foods when migrating to new places — not just us but our cousins who left Africa much earlier than us!
Profesor Kara C. Hoover
Department of Anthropology
University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska, USA
A paper on the research, recently published in iScience, was written by collaborators from UAF, Duke University, Universite Paris-Saclay, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, and the University of Manchester. The study investigated whether humans share a sense of smell with their now-extinct Denisovan and Neanderthal cousins, who left Africa about 750,000 years ago. Contemporary humans left Africa about 65,000 years ago.
To recreate the noses of our extinct genetic relatives and compare them to those of present-day people, the research team used publicly available genome sequences from multiple Neanderthals, one Denisovan and one ancient human. They used data from the 1000 Genomes project to represent modern humans.
They then compared 30 olfactory receptor genes from each group. The team found that 11 of the receptors had some novel mutations present only in extinct lineages. In the largest study of its kind to date, the team created laboratory versions of those 11 olfactory receptors and then exposed them to hundreds of odors at different concentrations.
When the receptors detected an odor, they literally lit up. The speed and brightness of the luminescence told the scientists whether, how soon and to what degree each “nose” could smell the odors. While the receptors could detect the same things as modern humans, they differed in sensitivity to many of the odors.
We literally reproduced an event that hadn’t happened since the extinction of Denisova and Neanderthal 30,000 years ago: an extinct odorant receptor responding to an odor in cells on a lab bench. This took us closer to understanding how Neanderthal and Denisova perceived and interacted with their olfactory environment.
Claire A. de March, lead author
Institut de Chimie des Substances Naturelles
Université Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
And Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA
This is the most exciting research I have ever been involved in. It shows how we can use genetics to peer back into the sensory world of our long-lost relatives, giving us insight into how they will have perceived their environment and, perhaps, how they were able to survive.
Matthew Cobb, co-author
Faculty of Life Sciences
The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Neanderthals, who lived in Eurasia between 430,000 and 40,000 years ago, had the poorest sense of smell. For example, the Neanderthal from the Chagyrskaya Cave couldn’t detect the sex steroid androstadienone, which smells something like sweat and urine. That may have been useful, Hoover said, given that they were trapped in close quarters in caves during glacial maximums, when the ice sheets from the poles expanded southward and made many areas uninhabitable.
Each species must evolve olfactory receptors to maximize their fitness for finding foodX. In humans, it's more complicated because we eat a lot of things. We're not really specialized.
Professor Hiroaki Matsunami, co-author
Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, USA
Denisovans have left behind less physical evidence than Neanderthals. They are known mostly from modern-day Siberia, where remains in the Denisova Cave were dated to between 76,200 and 51,600 years ago. Denisovans were generally more sensitive to odors than humans and much more sensitive than Neanderthals. They were most responsive to sweet and spicy smells like honey, vanilla, cloves and herbs. That trait could have helped them find high-calorie food.
Present-day humans fell somewhere in the middle.
In many species, olfactory receptors have been linked to their ecological and dietary needs.
The same research is also the subject of a press release from Duke University, the university to which several of the team, are affiliated and where the lead author, Claire A. de March, completed her PhD:
If you had the grooming habits of a Neanderthal, perhaps it’s a good thing your nose wasn’t as sensitive to urine and sweat as a modern human’s.
And if you lived the hunting and gathering lifestyle of a Denisovan on the Asian steppes, your strong nose for energy-rich honey was almost certainly an advantage.
Though we can’t really know what these two extinct human species perceived or preferred to eat, a new study from Duke University scientists has figured out a bit more about what they might have been able to smell.
Using a technique they developed that allows researchers to test smell sensitivity on odor receptors grown in a lab dish, researchers Claire de March of CNRS Paris Saclay University and Hiroaki Matsunami of Duke University were able to compare the scents-abilities of three kinds of humans. Their work appeared Dec. 28 in the open access journal iScience.
Drawing from published databases of genomes, including ancient DNA collections amassed by 2022 Nobel Prize winner Svante Pääbo, the researchers were able to characterize the receptors of each of the three human species by looking at the relevant genes.
It is very difficult to predict a behavior just from the genomic sequence. We had the odorant receptor genomes from Neanderthal and Denisovan individuals and we could compare them with today’s humans and determine if they resulted in a different protein.
The Neanderthal odorant receptors are mostly the same as contemporary humans, and the few that were different were no more responsive/
Claire A. de March
So then they tested the responses of 30 lab-grown olfactory receptors from each hominin against a battery of smells to measure how sensitive each kind of receptor was to a particular fragrance.
The laboratory tests showed the modern and ancient human receptors were essentially detecting the same odors, but their sensitivities differed.
We don’t know what Denisovans ate, but there some reasons why this receptor has to be sensitive
[Neanderthals] may exhibit different sensitivity, but the selectivity remains the same.
Each species must evolve olfactory receptors to maximize their fitness for finding food. In humans, it’s more complicated because we eat a lot of things. We’re not really specialized.
Some people can smell certain chemicals, but others can’t. That can be explained by functional changes.
Professor Hiroaki Matsunami
The Denisovans, who lived 30,000 to 50,000 years ago, were shown to be less sensitive to the odors that present-day humans perceive as floral, but four times better at sensing sulfur and three times better at balsamic. And they were very attuned to honey.
Contemporary hunter-gatherers such as the Hadza of Tanzania are famous for their love of honey, an essential high-calorie fuel.
Neanderthals, who were still around up to 40,000 years ago and who apparently swapped a few genes with modern humans, were three times less responsive to green, floral and spicy scents, using pretty much the same receptors we have today.
Odor receptors have been linked to ecological and dietary needs in many species and presumably evolve as a species changes ranges and diets.
The team's findings were published open access last December in the journal iScience:
Graphical abstract
Highlights
Neanderthal and Denisovan ORs vary less than human ORs but our repertoires are similar
OR variation may have helped humans adapt to new environments
There are limited functional differences in odor specificity across lineages
Neanderthals are less sensitive to odors than humans, and Denisovans more sensitive
Summary
Humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans independently adapted to a wide range of geographic environments and their associated food odors. Using ancient DNA sequences, we explored the in vitro function of thirty odorant receptor genes in the genus Homo. Our extinct relatives had highly conserved olfactory receptor sequence, but humans did not. Variations in odorant receptor protein sequence and structure may have produced variation in odor detection and perception. Variants led to minimal changes in specificity but had more influence on functional sensitivity. The few Neanderthal variants disturbed function, whereas Denisovan variants increased sensitivity to sweet and sulfur odors. Geographic adaptations may have produced greater functional variation in our lineage, increasing our olfactory repertoire and expanding our adaptive capacity. Our survey of olfactory genes and odorant receptors suggests that our genus has a shared repertoire with possible local ecological adaptations.
The researchers are in no doubt whatsoever, that natural selection drove these differences in the olfactory sensitivity of these three closely rated hominins, as each adapted to their particular environment, cultural preferences for particular food and social habits. Nowhere have they had to invoke magic or supernatural deities in their explanation for the observable evidence.
