Hypocrisy News - How Piety is Used to Self-Licence Exemptions For Religious Sex Workers and Their Clients

Hypocrisy News

How Piety is Used to Self-Licence Exemptions For Religious Sex Workers and Their Clients

Uncovering the secret religious and spiritual lives of sex workers

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.

Published: March 10, 2023 3.57pm GMT

Uncovering the secret religious and spiritual lives of sex workers

Shutterstock.

Daisy Matthews, Nottingham Trent University and Jane Pilcher, Nottingham Trent University

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.

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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.

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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.

Credit: Shutterstock/Jorisvo

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.

Woman practising yoga in a studio.

Credit: Shutterstock/Luna Vandoorne

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.

Credit: Shutterstock/Viacheslav Lopatin

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.

Protest in London in July 2018.

Credit: Shutterstock/Koca Vehbi

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.

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All names have been changed to protect the identities of those involved.

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For you: more from our Insights series:

• The artist formerly known as Camille – Prince’s lost album ‘comes out’
• ‘It’s like being in a warzone’ – A&E nurses open up about the emotional cost of working on the NHS frontline
• Living with MND: how a form of ‘acceptance therapy’ is helping me make one difficult choice at a time

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.
Daisy Matthews, PhD candidate in Sociology, exploring the lives of religious and spiritual sex workers, Nottingham Trent University and Jane Pilcher, Associate Professor of Sociology, Nottingham Trent University

This article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

Malevolent Designer News - The Astonishing Success of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus. And it Ain't Over Yet!

Malevolent Designer News

The Astonishing Success of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus.
And it Ain't Over Yet!

Three years into the pandemic, it's clear COVID won't fix itself. Here's what we need to focus on next

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.

Creationism in Crisis - Monkeys Make Tools and Make Fools of Creationists

Creationism in Crisis

Monkeys Make Tools and Make Fools of Creationists

Examples of sharp edged flakes produced unintentionally by long‑tailed macaques.

© Proffitt et al, 2023

Macaca fascicularis aurea using a stone tool.

Image credit: Haslam M, Gumert MD, Biro D, Carvalho S, Malaivijitnond S (2013)
(CC BY 2.5), via Wikimedia Commons.

Surprising similarities found between stone tools of early humans and old world monkeys | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

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:

Creationism in Crisis - Jewel Beetles Evolved by Gene Duplication

Creationism in Crisis

Jewel Beetles Evolved by Gene Duplication

Jewel Beetle, Chrysochroa raja

Source: Mounted specimens at Prague Museum. Wikipedia

Jewel beetles evolve to see new colors by duplicating their genes | University of Minnesota

Jewel Beetle, Chrysochroa rajah.

Credit: Nathan Lord, Louisiana State University

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:

Icons of Feminism - Mary Woolstencraft and Rejection of Religious Doctrine

Icons of Feminism

Mary Wollstonecraft and Rejection of Religious Doctrine.

Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie, c. 1797

Source: Wikipedia

Mary Wollstonecraft, by John Keenan, 1787

Mary Wollstonecraft: an introduction to the mother of first-wave feminism

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.

Creationism in Crisis - Not All Science Has to be Done in a Laboratory

Creationism in Crisis

Not All Science Has to be Done in a Laboratory

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How we discovered flamingos form cliques, just like humans

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.

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Have Discovered How Our Sense of Smell Has Evolved

Creationism in Crisis

Scientists Have Discovered How Our Sense of Smell Has Evolved

Neanderthal hunter.
How good was their sense of smell?

Reconstruction of a Neanderthal woman.

Bacon Cph, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Study offers new insight on what ancient noses smelled | UAF news and information.

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.

de March, Claire A.; Matsunami, Hiroaki; Abe, Masashi; Cobb, Matthew; Hoover, Kara C.
Genetic and functional odorant receptor variation in the Homo lineage
iScience 26(i); 2022. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.105908

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by Elsevier Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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.

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Unintelligent Designer News - Correcting the Incompetent Designer's Blunders

Unintelligent Designer News

Correcting the Incompetent Designer's Blunders

Credit: Phospho Biomedical Animation

What are these 'cancer vaccines' I'm hearing about? And what similarities do they share with COVID vaccines?

Creationists would have us believe that cancers are caused by 'Sin' in some magical process that makes chemistry and physics do something they wouldn't do on their own. This also makes Creationists feel smug because they've blamed cancer victims for their own condition, and absolved their putative creator god of any responsibility.

That idea arose in the fearful infancy of our species when we lived in what seemed to be a demon-haunted, magical world in which there was a simple, teleological answer to every mystery - God did it if it was a good thing, or, if it was a bad thing, an evil demon did it. Cancer, like mental illness, was a symptom of moral weakness for allowing the demon to take over, so the sufferer deserved it.

But we are grown up and know better now.

For instance, we know that cancers almost always have one of four causes:

1. Viruses. For example liver cancer can be caused by hepatitis B and cervical cancer can be caused by the human papillomavirus.
2. Inherited genetics. Rare because there is strong selection pressure to eliminate lethal genes from the gene pool.
3. Mutagenic substances such as tars in cigarette smoke, benzene and asbestos fibres.
4. Errors in DNA replication during cell division for growth, repair and replacement. Some of these may include a genetic predisposition.

The fourth of these is by far the most common, especially now cigarette smoking has been reduced to low levels, and tends to occur more frequently as we age.

So why do these errors arise?

This involves something that I have yet to see a Creationist give a satisfactory explanation for in terms of the putative intelligent [sic] designer.

The errors arise primarily because the mechanism for replicating the DNA during cell division is imperfect, resulting in one or both daughter cells having errors in its DNA. This is so common that there is a correction mechanism for repairing DNA - which should not be necessary if the process had been designed to work properly in the first place. Normally, if this error is serious and the DNA can't be repaired, the cell will self-destruct in a process known as apoptosis. This process itself is imperfect and sometime fails, particularly if the person has a genetic mutation that prevents it happening, so predisposing them to these sorts of cancers.

But why is this complex process necessary in the first place

In evolutionary biology terms this is perfectly understandable since evolution is unplanned and necessarily utilitarian - whatever works to give an advantage is retained and built upon, no matter how suboptimal.

The process for cell replication that evolved when multicellular organisms evolved out of single-celled organisms was the same one that had been used for single-celled organisms when the entire genome had to be copied into the daughter cells. But the big advantage of multicellularity is cell specialisation and division of labour. This means that specialised cells only need the genes to carry out their speciality and don't need all the others, which are replicated needlessly in every one of the tens of trillions of cells that make up a human body and most have to be switched off by a complex process of epigenetics.

Meanwhile, all that unnecessary DNA replication not only wastes resources but increasesd the risk of the defect tha causes cancer.

In intelligent [sic] terms, it makes no sense since a perfect, intelligent, omniscient designer would not settle for a utilitarian suboptimal process. It would have designed a cell replication process which replicated only the genes needed by a specialised cell for example. And it would have designed a DNA replication process that didn't require correcting.

In brief then, if you believe in intelligent [sic] design, you must agree that cancers are either caused by viruses that are designed for the purpose, or because of the imcompetence of the designer.

But human medical science is making progress in correcting these problems with vaccines against the viruses and more recently, bespoke vaccines against the specific cancers caused by errors in cell replication, using a similar mRNA vaccine technology to that used to create the CAVID vaccines that have transformed the pandemic.

In the following article, reproduced from The Conversation, Sathana Dushyanthen, an academic specialist & lecturer in cancer sciences & digital health at The University of Melbourne, explains what these vaccines are and what similarities they have with the COVID vaccines. The article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here.

Published: March 6, 2023 7.03pm GMT

What are these ‘cancer vaccines’ I’m hearing about? And what similarities do they share with COVID vaccines?

Shutterstock

Sathana Dushyanthen, The University of Melbourne

Barely a month goes by without headlines announcing yet another advancement in cancer vaccines.

Just last month, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted breakthrough therapy designation to Moderna and Merck’s skin cancer vaccine. This allows expedited development and review of drugs intended to treat serious conditions.

We already have a vaccine to prevent human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes cervical and other cancers. We also have a vaccine to protect against the hepatitis B virus, which can cause liver cancer.

But you may have heard of new types of cancer vaccines being developed using technology similar to that used for COVID vaccines. Decades before COVID vaccines, scientists had been working on messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccines targeting cancer.

Rather than preventing disease, these vaccines are a personalised treatment for cancer, to combat disease.

How do they work?

Science in Motion.

Traditionally, vaccines inject part or all of a weakened virus (or other pathogen) into the body to provoke an immune response.

mRNA works by injecting only the genetic instructions and allowing the body’s cells to make part of the cancer protein (antigen) itself. This trains the immune system to develop antibodies against the protein.

When these same proteins are present on an invading tumour cell, the immune system stimulates an immune response against it.

While COVID mRNA vaccines respond to one antigen – the spike protein on the outside of coronavirus – cancer vaccines act on several antigens present on the tumour surface.

The mRNA cancer vaccines train the patient’s immune system to fight their own cancer. Most trials are manufacturing vaccines for individual patients based on the specific antigens present on their tumours.

It takes around two months to produce a vaccine.

The vaccine stimulates an immune response against cancer cells.

Shutterstock

How are they made?

To make these vaccines, a sample of the patient’s tumour and healthy tissue is taken. These samples are DNA-sequenced to compare differences between the DNA in the cancerous cells and the healthy cells.

Scientists identify problem mutations driving disease. These can then be used as antigen targets in the mRNA vaccine.

Bespoke approaches allow scientists to target a wider range of cancer antigens. Targeting multiple antigens decreases the odds that cancer cells will mutate and become resistant to vaccines, because the immune system attacks on multiple fronts.

Personalised medicines are extremely expensive because they are bespoke products. Manufacturing costs for bespoke treatments remain high. However, with rapidly falling costs of different aspects such as genome sequencing (some companies are now offering genome sequencing for just US$100), sequencing the entire genome is becoming more viable.

As large-scale manufacturing increases in future for off-the-shelf vaccines, there will be resource efficiencies that reduce cost.

What vaccines are in development?

In December 2022, Moderna and Merck (known outside the United States and Canada as MSD) published the results of its early phase (2b) clinical trial. The trial was investigating a combination therapy of an mRNA vaccine and immunotherapy (a drug that stimulates an immune response) in advanced stage melanoma patients.

After one year of treatment in 157 patients, they found the combination reduced the risk of cancer recurrence or death by 44%.

2/x Their cancer vaccine is personalised and called called mRNA-4157/V940. What's that? It means that it targets mutations or abnormalities only seen for that cancer. This actives your immune system 🦀 . Good video here 👇 https://t.co/Q3k88Jyksy

— Dr Lennard Lee (Oxford University) (@drlennardlee) February 27, 2023

Now, Moderna and Merck plan to follow up their initial trial with a phase 3 trial for advanced melanoma in 2023. Phase 3 trials test for safety and efficacy in larger groups of patients.

Moderna's experimental cancer vaccine treats but doesn't prevent melanoma – a biochemist explains how it works

BioNTech has several mRNA cancer candidates in the works, including for advanced melanoma, ovarian cancer and non-small cell lung cancer. It will release results from its own phase 2 melanoma trial (of 131 patients) using immunotherapy and an mRNA vaccine combination later this year. Its primary aim is to measure cancer progression and survival over 24 months in previously untreated patients.

A third company called CureVac is also developing mRNA vaccines targeting a range of cancers including ovarian, colorectal, head and neck, lung and pancreatic.

CureVac has a deal with Tesla, the electric car manufacturer, to develop small, portable mRNA bioprinters to automate the process of producing patient mRNA. These can be shipped to remote locations where they are able to churn out vaccine candidates based on the DNA template (recipe) fed into the machine.

A lot of these vaccines, including those targeting cancer, are in pre-clinical to phase 1 stages of development, to test the effects and side effects in the laboratory, animal models or small groups of patients.

When will they become available?

Overseas, Moderna and Merck’s mRNA cancer vaccine was fast-tracked for review by the US FDA in February 2023.

Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration has not approved the use of mRNAs for use either alone or with other cancer treatments yet.

World's first cancer vaccine one step closer to reality: Given 'breakthrough' status by FDA https://t.co/3zMRzM4pRx

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) February 24, 2023

In January 2023, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service partnered with BioNTech to fast-track the development of mRNA cancer vaccines over the next seven years. Eligible UK cancer patients will get early access to clinical trials from late 2023 onwards. By 2030, these mRNA vaccines will be made clinically available to around 10,000 cancer patients.

Cancer vaccine trials could start in the autumn – UK signs deal with BioNTech

In Australia, BioNTech is establishing its Asia-Pacific mRNA clinical research and development centre in Melbourne, in partnership with the Victorian government. This would develop mRNA vaccines for research and clinical trials, including personalised cancer treatments.

Meanwhile, Moderna will develop Australia’s first large-scale mRNA vaccine facility at Monash University by 2024, in partnership with the state and federal government. This will give Australians priority access to mRNA vaccines made locally.

What else could the technology be used for?

Aside from cancer, there is huge potential to use mRNA technologies across many gene therapies.

There are studies underway testing mRNA vaccines for various diseases such as evolving COVID strains, seasonal influenza, malaria, HIV, cystic fibrosis and even allergies, giving new hope for many previously incurable diseases.

3 mRNA vaccines researchers are working on (that aren't COVID)

Sathana Dushyanthen, Academic Specialist & Lecturer in Cancer Sciences & Digital Health| Superstar of STEM| Science Communicator, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

Human medical science is making good progress at coping with the problems caused by incompetent, unintelligent design because we now understand that there are no magic demons involved in the diseases they result in, and no magic designer who can be appeased in the right way to make the demons go away or improve its shoddy designs.

What I've yet to see is a Creationist give a grown-up answer to this glaring evidence of incompetence in design with its needless complexity, prolific waste and failure to plan, without resorting to religious superstition and demonstrating why Creationism is not science.

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Malevolent Designer News - It Didn't Take Creationism's Divine Malevolence Long to Design Parasites

Malevolent Designer News

It Didn't Take Creationism's Divine Malevolence Long to Design Parasites

Reconstruction shows the dense aggregations of monotypic Neobolus wulongqingensis forming benthic ‘meadows’ on the soft sediment with their associated obligate encrusting kleptoparasitic tube-dwelling organisms.

Artist: Rebecca Gelernter of Near Bird Studios.
Source: Zhang, Z., et al.(2020)

Neobolus wulongqingensis with encrusting kleptoparastic tubes.

Source: Zhang, Z., et al.(2020)

Incredible fossil find is the oldest known parasite | Ars Technica

As we can see from the very many parasites that exist in nature, Creationism's putative designer likes nothing more than to create organisms that harm other organisms - if you subscribe to the intelligent [sic] design hoax, that is.

The existence of parasites refute any notion that the designer god is also the supposedly all-loving god of the Christian Bible because, if anything fits the adjective 'evil' it's parasites that cause sickness, disability and death or otherwise take from their host, giving nothing in return.

Now, according to a 2020 paper in Nature, it seems that parasitism has been around for almost as long as multicellular life, and in all probability, well before that. The evidence is in the form of fossil brachiopods encrusted with kleptoparasitic tube worms. These worms are aligned to match the feeding currents of the brachiopods, making it clear that they took a share of the food in the water currents the sedentary brachiopods generated to bring them food.

The authors, a team of palaeontologists from the Northwest University, Xi’an, China, point out that there are no convincing examples of parasite-host relationships in the Ediacaran biota, so these parasites appear to have arisen early in the Cambrian and so would have played an important role in the Cambrian radiation.

Creationism in Crisis - New Science Poses a Massive Threat to Creationist Superstitions

Creationism in Crisis

New Science Poses a Massive Threat to Creationist Superstitions

A skull of a new hominin species named Homo naledi, which was alive sometime between 335 and 236 thousand years ago.

Photograph: Xinhua/Alamy

Homo naledi.

Source

New analysis of ancient human protein could unlock secrets of evolution | Evolution | The Guardian

If they understood its implications, news that the UK is setting up two centres to study the potential of the new technique of proteomics should give Creationist frauds a sinking feeling on a par with what the captain of the Titanic must have felt. This assumes that they ever allow mere facts to influence them, other than creating a need to explain them away to their credulous cult followers, that is.

Basically, proteomics is the study of residues of ancient proteins sometimes found on ancient fossils in which all useful trace of DNA has disappeared. If these proteins can be recovered and analysed, the hope is that they can be used to deduced some of the DNA of the fossil’s original individual, so pushing the DNA record back much further than currently possible, and with it, constructing the evolutionary trees of, for example, ancient hominins.

The problem this would overcome is that DNA is relatively fragile and is only preserved in useful detail in colder climes, meaning that the African hominin fossils have lost any useful DNA, leaving palaeontologists with having to work out relationships based on anatomical data alone. Proteins, particularly structural proteins, on the other hand, are more stable and are often preserved in, for example, the enamel of teeth.

Australopithecus sediba

Source

If successful, this technique could settle debates about when and where the common ancestor of Home sapiens and Neanderthals lived, for example. It might also be possible to fit the ancient South African hominin, H. naledi, in it correct place in the hominin family tree. This enigmatic hominin combines features of both the chimpanzee with its small brain and human lower limbs and arms - basically, a chimpanzee head on a human body. Despite its relatively small brain there is evidence that H. naledi ritually buried its dead, suggesting a sophisticated culture and sense of mortality. It is also in the 'wrong' place to be a direct ancestor of H. sapiens, which is believed to have evolved in East Africa. H. naledi was also contemporaneous with other African hominins, living about 300,000 years ago.

Creationism in Crisis - Chinese Culture From 30,000 Years Before Creationists Believe Earth Was Created!

Creationism in Crisis

Chinese Culture From 30,000 Years Before Creationists Believe Earth Was Created!

Archaeologists excavating the well-preserved surface at the Xiamabei site, northern China, showing stone tools, fossils, ochre and red pigments.

© Fa-Gang Wang

Location of Xiamabei in the Nihewan Basin

Creationism in Crisis - The Bad News Continues With More on Ancient European Hominins

Creationism in Crisis

The Bad News Continues With More on European Hominin Lineage

Part of the tibia of an early human believed to be Homo heidelbergensis discovered at the Boxgrove archaeological site in West Sussex.

Image © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London

Reconstruction of Homo heidelbergensis

Source

Earliest human fossils in the UK reveal how ancient Europeans were connected | Natural History Museum

Although there is still debate about how exactly they relate to one another and exactly which species some of them are, there is no comfort to be had from that for Creationists, because what is not in any doubt is that there were species of Homo alive and well 430,000 years ago - some 420,000 years before Creationist superstition says Earth was created, and, although there as yet are no fossils, evidence of tools shows that there were humans or proto-humans living in Britain up to 700,000 years ago.

In fact, there is even less comfort to be had for creationists from the doubts about in which exact taxon the different specimens should be placed, because as one species transitions over time into a descendant species, there is never a point in time where the next generation is a different species to its parents - that only happens in the rare cases of a new species arising by hybridization, or in childish Creationist parodies of the process. As I've said before, to determine the exact point of transition is like trying to determine the exact point at which green becomes yellow or blue becomes green in the following colour continuum.

And this gets even more complex because not all features evolve in lockstep, so, for example, modern Homo sapiens teeth could have been present in a hominin with an ancestral tibia - exactly what we would expect from an evolutionary process.

That problem is the essence of a study published last November, which somehow I missed at the time. It concerns the exact position of the 'Boxgrove' fossil in relation to other archaic European hominins, using the large sample of about 29 individuals from the Sima de los Huesos (Pit of Bones) site at Atapuerca, Spain. The fossil found at Boxgrove in Suffolk, UK, is normally placed in the H. heidelbergensis taxon, as indeed are many other fossils, simply because they are not, H. erectus, H. neanderthalensis or H. sapiens.

However, a comparison with the Sima de los Huesos fossils, which were also initially assigned to H. heidelbergensis but have since been reclassified on the basis of DNA analysis as early H. neanderthalensis, shows that 'Boxgrove' has many features in common with them. For example, the Boxgrove incisors fit within the range found at Sima de los Huesos, but the tibia has distinct features which suggests it belongs in a separate taxon.

The study is published, open access, in the Journal of Human Evolution. The research, by an international team of paleoanthropologists which included Professor Chris Stringer an expert in human evolution the Natural History Museum, London, and its significance is explained in the Natural History Museum's new release by Emma Caton:

Creationism in Crisis - 30 Thousand Years of European Hominin History

Creationism in Crisis

30 Thousand Years of Continuous European Human History

Depiction of the people of the Ice Age.

Credit: Esteban De Armas/Shutterstock

Artist's impression of life in a Gravettian camp

Source

We thought the first hunter-gatherers in Europe went missing during the last ice age. Now, ancient DNA analysis says otherwise

It's another bad day for Creationism. Close on the news that scientists have reconstructed the last 100 million years of the history of Earth's surface, comes news that a different group of scientists have revealed the last 30,000 years of the history of Homo sapiens in Europe.

Since Creationists are capable of holding to the belief that Earth is only 10,000 years old because ancient Bronze Age nomads who knew no better thought so, despite the fact that the last 100 million years of its history is known in detail, they should have little difficulty in ignoring the evidence that Europeans have a known history stretching back three times longer than they believe Earth has existed. After all, what is a mere 30,000 years when 100 million years can be ignored?

In fact, we know from fossil evidence that early modern human hunter-gatherers spread out of Africa and across Eurasia beginning about 45,000 years ago. The mystery was what happened to them during period between 25,000 and 19,000 years ago when the last Ice Age was at its maximum and much of Europe was under vast ice sheets like that covering Greenland today.

Some authorities believed that European Homo sapiens disappeared during that time, but this recent research shows that they hung on in France and the Iberian Peninsula, to repopulate Europe as the ice sheets retreated north. The evidence is in the traces of their DNA now found in modern Europeans. The scientists who made this discovery have published their work in two papers, one in Nature and the other in Nature, Ecology & Evolution

One of the authors of these papers, Adam B. Rohrlach of the Department of Archaeogenetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany and the School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia, has written about the team's research in The Conversation. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here.

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Reveal 100 Million Years of Earth's History

Creationism in Crisis

Scientists Reveal 100 Million Years of Earth's History

Credit: ttsz / Getty Images

Scientists just revealed the most detailed geological model of Earth's past 100 million years.

By Map:USGS Description:Scott Nash
This file was derived from: Tectonic plates.png, Public Domain, Link

When your holy book tells you Earth is only about 10 thousand years old, but the evidence tells you there is a continuous history of the last 100 million years, it takes a special form of self-deception and denialism, amounting to a mental disorder, to cling to the tales in your holy book and continue to believe it's a text book of history and science and not really a book of stories made up by people with little science so knew no better.

So, with their tradition of science denial and rejection of any evidence they don't want to be true, it probably won't come as a surprise to Creationists that Australian scientists working with colleagues in the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), Paris, France, the Université Lyon, Villeurbanne, France, and Université Grenoble-Alpes, Grenoble, France, have published a detailed model of the changes to Earth's surface over the past 100 million years. Their model is published in the journal, Science.

The research is explained in an article in The Conversation, by lead author, Tristan Salles, Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney, Australian, reprinted here under a Creative Commons license and reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here: