Creationism in Crisis - Are Red Kangaroos Evolving in the Absence of Dingoes?

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Red kangaroos, Osphranter rufus
Evolving in the absence of dingoes?

'An exciting possibility': scientists discover markedly different kangaroos on either side of Australia's dingo fence

If you change an organism's environment, the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection (TOE) predicts that the organism will evolve to fit into that changed environment. One such change could be the removal of an apex predator, as happened when humans erected the 'dingo fence', stretching more than 5,600 Km (about 3,500 miles) across Australia in the 1950, but was in a state of disrepair until 1975, which is thus the effective start of environmental isolation southeast of the fence.

The purpose of the fence was to protect domestic sheep from dingoes, Canis dingo, the wild Australian canid and only Australian placental mammal other than bats. Dingoes have been Australia's apex predator for some 10,000 years, maybe longer, so have been an important part of the ecosystem and the main, if not only, predator on red kangaroos, Osphranter rufus since then.

So, when wildlife to the southeast of the 'dingo fence' had their apex predator removed, the TOE predicts that there should be observable evolutionary change, and this is what a team of scientist led by Dr Rex Mitchel of the College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia may have found when they studied the Red Kangaroos either side of the fence. Although, as they point out, evolutionary change in about 45 years, or about 17 red kangaroo generations, would be unusual and, with a limited dataset more work is needed to check that other factors are not the cause of the observed changes, for example, reduced stress in the protected area.

Four of the team: Vera Weisbecker, Associate Professor, Flinders University; Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University; Frédérik Saltré, Research Fellow in Ecology for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University, and Dr D Rex Mitchell, have written about their research in The Conversation.

Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Published: May 31, 2023 9.07pm BST

‘An exciting possibility’: scientists discover markedly different kangaroos on either side of Australia’s dingo fence

Image source: Shutterstock

Vera Weisbecker, Flinders University; Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Flinders University; Frédérik Saltré, Flinders University, and Rex Mitchell, Flinders University

Australia’s dingo fence is an internationally renowned mega-structure. Stretching more than 5,600 kilometres, it was completed in the 1950s to keep sheep safe from dingoes. But it also inadvertently protects some native species.

This makes the fence an unintentional experiment in the relationship between predators and prey. Our new research examined how the fence affects a favourite prey of the dingo: red kangaroos.

We found young kangaroos on the side exposed to dingoes grew more quickly than their protected counterparts. This has potentially big repercussions for the health of these juveniles.

The merits of the dingo fence are hotly debated, and there have been calls to pull it down or move it. That’s why we must seek a better understanding of how the fence affects the animals that live along it.

Australia’s dingo fence runs for more than 5,600 kilometres.

Image source: Shutterstock

‘Stressful’ lives

The dingo fence, formally known as the “wild dog barrier fence”, runs through Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia. It protects sheep and cattle to the southeast.

Extensive fencing can fragment habitats and disrupt ecosystems. Maintaining the fence costs about A$10 million per year. For these and other reasons, some have suggested the fence be pulled down.

But how would removing the fence affect kangaroos that have lived without dingoes for up to 70 years? Our research sought to answer this question.

We assessed 166 red kangaroos from two isolated populations on either side of the fence in far northwest NSW. We did this using data collected as part of a licensed shooting program. We compared population size, age structure, sex ratio, growth rate and skull shape.

We expected kangaroos north of the fence – those hunted by dingoes – to differ from their dingo-free cousins to the south. That’s because their lives are more stressful, especially for young kangaroos and females that are killed by dingoes more often than adult males.

Killing dingoes is the only way to protect livestock, right? Nope

Female and young red kangaroos are targeted by dingoes.

Image source: Shutterstock

What we found

As anticipated, we found more young and female kangaroos in the dingo-protected population south of the fence. But the story is more complex than that.

Young kangaroos south of the fence, up to about the age of four years, grew more slowly than those in the north. They were substantially smaller and lighter than their dingo-exposed counterparts.

This raises an exciting possibility: that the growth of kangaroos south of the fence has slowed in the absence of the dingo threat.

But maybe there was just more plant food available in the north, where there are fewer kangaroos compared to the south. Was this the reason the northern kangaroos grew more quickly?

As it turns out, no. We assessed the vegetation on each side of the fence using a decade of satellite measurements. We found there was probably less, not more, food overall for kangaroos in the north compared to the south.

More detailed investigation is needed into whether the types of plants differed on each side of the fence. But our results suggest the different growth rates were driven by predators, not food availability.

The dingo fence from space: satellite images show how these top predators alter the desert

There was probably less vegetation north of the dingo fence than in the south

Image source: Shutterstock

This raises important questions

The differences between populations are even more striking considering the dingo fence in the area we studied was in disrepair until 1975. Before then, dingoes and kangaroos probably moved freely. So the changes we observed could have come about in as little as 17 kangaroo generations.

This would be unusually fast for an evolutionary adaptation. Instead, we suspect it’s the result of a more immediate response to the absence of dingoes, such as lower concentrations of stress-related hormones. These affect the health of mammals, and might have affected kangaroo growth rates in this case.

After about the age of four, the protected kangaroos had caught up and were the same size as their unprotected counterparts. But the unprotected kangaroos would have invested a lot more bodily resources into growing so quickly.

This would have left less energy for the animals to develop important functions such as their immune or reproductive systems. Or they might have had less fat reserves.

Conversely, protected kangaroos might have been healthier, or more fertile, because of their slower growth rates.

New DNA testing shatters 'wild dog' myth: most dingoes are pure

The research raises questions about how mammals respond to changes such as the absence of dingoes.

Image source: Shutterstock

Understanding the mammal response

Our study involved only a single sample at one point in time. But it’s the first to comprehensively assess differences in a dingo prey species on either side of a fence.

Our results provide an insight into how prey populations might fare if the dingo fence is removed. But the implications are potentially even broader.

We must now investigate whether other native mammal species share similar differences across the fence. If so, this could help us predict how animals elsewhere in Australia are coping with rapid environmental change.
Vera Weisbecker, Associate Professor, Flinders University; Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University; Frédérik Saltré, Research Fellow in Ecology for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University, and Rex Mitchell, Postdoctoral Fellow, Flinders University

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)

The researchers' findings are published, open access in the Journal of Mammology:

Abstract

Decommissioning the dingo barrier fence has been suggested to reduce destructive dingo control and encourage a free transfer of biota between environments in Australia. Yet the potential impacts that over a century of predator exclusion might have had on the population dynamics and developmental biology of prey populations has not been assessed. We here combine demographic data and both linear and geometric morphometrics to assess differences in populations among 166 red kangaroos (Osphranter rufus)—a primary prey species of the dingo—from two isolated populations on either side of the fence. We also quantified the differences in aboveground vegetation biomass for the last 10 years on either side of the fence. We found that the age structure and growth patterns, but not cranial shape, differed between the two kangaroo populations. In the population living with a higher density of dingoes, there were relatively fewer females and juveniles. These individuals were larger for a given age, despite what seems to be lower vegetation biomass. However, how much of this biomass represented kangaroo forage is uncertain and requires further on-site assessments. We also identified unexpected differences in the ontogenetic trajectories in relative pes length between the sexes for the whole sample, possibly associated with male competition or differential weight-bearing mechanics. We discuss potential mechanisms behind our findings and suggest that the impacts of contrasting predation pressures across the fence, for red kangaroos and other species, merit further investigation.

Mitchell, D Rex; Cairns, Stuart C; Körtner, Gerhard; Bradshaw, Corey J A; Saltré, Frédérik; Weisbecker, Vera (2023)
Differential developmental rates and demographics in Red Kangaroo (Osphranter rufus) populations separated by the dingo barrier fence
Journal of Mammology, gyad053. DOI: 10.1093/jmammal/gyad053

Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by Oxford University Press. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Fig 1.

The dingo barrier fence extends from southeast Queensland to the Great Australian Bight in South Australia. The study location (black rectangle): Quinyambie and Mulyungarie stations are adjacent properties located on the western side of the South Australia–New South Wales border (black dotted line) and separated by the fence.

Mitchell, et. al,(2023)

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Fig 4.

Changes in cranial shape throughout ontogeny in Osphranter rufus. Orbs represent cranial shape predicted for younger individuals. Mesh represents shape predicted for older individuals. Relative braincase size and incisor size become smaller during growth.

Mitchell, et. al,(2023)

What is now needed is detailed DNA analysis of the two populations because any differences would be definitive evolutionary change.

That should be a small crumb of comfort for creationists who must continue to hope that no such differences are found in red Kangaroos or other wildlife either side if the dingo fence, but I wonder how many of them would be prepared to bet their house on the probability of none being found.

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Creationism in Crisis - Extinct Australian Species Continue to Haunt Creationists

Creationism in Crisis

Extinct Australian Species Continue to Haunt Creationists

Reconstruction of an Australian pterosaur

Peter Trusler

Study finds 107-million-year-old pterosaur bones are oldest in Australia - News at Curtin | Curtin University, Perth, Australia

The subject of my previous blog post was from 3.5 million years ago (a mere 875 times longer than creationists believe Earth has existed). The next article stretches that to 26,750 times longer, with the discovery of the oldest pterosaur ever found in Australia from 107 million years ago - before even the common ancestor of the marsupials and other mammals had evolved.

The discovery was made by a team of palaeontologists from Curtin University's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, led by PhD student Adele Pentland. Her team's work is described in a Curtain University press release by Lauren Sydoruk:

Creationism in Crisis - Extinct Australian Species Haunt Creationists

Creationism in Crisis

Extinct Australian Species Haunt Creationists

Ambulator keanei (reconstruction)

Credit: Jacob D. van Zoelen, Aaron B. Camens, Trevor H. Worthy and Gavin J. Prideaux.
(CC BY 4.0)

Newly described enormous marsupial wandered great distances across Australia 3.5 million years ago

In some ways, I almost feel sorry for creationists the way science keeps refuting their beliefs, if only they weren't so arrogant as to assume that their ignorance makes them more expert than the experts and so qualified to pronounce the best-supported theory in science, wrong, for the simple, reason that they don't like it.

Well, for that reason, I have the great pleasure in pricking their pomposity and reporting the first of two more scientific papers that refute them, not that they will read them, or understand them if they do.

The second paper will be the subject of my next blog post.

This one concerns the finding that there were giant marsupials in Australia nearly 3.5 million years before creationists believe Earth was created by magic out of nothing.

This comes in the form of an open access paper by four Australian scientists, published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, three of whom, Jacob van Zoelen, PhD Candidate, Aaron Camens, Lecturer in Palaeontology, and Professor Gavin Prideaux, all of Flinders University, have written about their research in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism in Crisis - That's Blown It! Bone Flutes from 8,000 Years Before Earth Was Created!

Creationism in Crisis

That's Blown It! Bone Flutes from 8,000 Years Before Earth Was Created!

The first prehistoric wind instruments discovered in the Levant | CNRS

This is beginning to look like another bad week for creationist frauds.

Close on the news that archaeologists have discovered how agriculturalists and pastoralists migrated into what is now Morocco, thousands of years before Earth was created by magic out of nothing, according to what they tell their dupes, comes news that a Franco-Israeli team have unearthed musical instruments that are some three time older than creationist fools are told Earth is.

The normal creationist tactic for coping with the cognitive dissonance the scientific evidence keeps on producing in their minds, is to:

• Ignore it and hope it'll go away if ignored for long enough.
• Dismiss it as a conspiracy - the scientists are lying because they want to turn you away from God (Oops! gave away the fact that creationism is religion, not science, there, but needs must...!)
• Claim the dating methods are wrong so the flutes must be much younger.
• Claim that 'historical science' is all speculation because no-one was there to see it - aka. the "My great grandparents never had sex. Prove me wrong!", argument.
• Assert that the facts must be wrong because they don't agree with the Bible narrative, which must be true because it says it is in the Bible.
• Shout at it and stamp their foot to make the facts behave and comply with their requirements.

Sadly for creationists though, none of those tactics have worked, and the evidence is still that people in the Middle East were making musical instruments 12,000 years ago. Even more embarrassingly for creationists who believe humans have always believed in their god and are all descended from a couple it created without ancestors and from a handful of related survivors of a genocidal flood a few thousand years ago, there is evidence that these Bronze Age people, like the Egyptian, Indians and Chinese (to name but a few) had a religion that appears to have had nothing to do with the religion of the Bible. The flutes may have had some ceremonial role in that early religion.

To add insult to injury, this discovery was made in the part of the world where creationists like to image the tales in the Bible were set and yet the Bible has no mention of people having a religion involving birds and rituals involving bone flutes. It's exactly like the authors knew nothing of their own history.

The findings are described in a news release from Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS):

Creationism in Crisis - Migrants Took Agriculture to North Africa 3,000 Years Before Creationists Claim Earth was 'Created' out of Nothing.

Creationism in Crisis

Migrants Took Agriculture to North Africa 3,000 Years Before Creationists Claim Earth was Created out of Nothing.

View of the site Kaf Taht el-Ghar (KTG).

Photograph: Juan Carlos Vera

The Maghreb in North-West Africa

Farming lifestyle in northwestern Africa was ignited by oversea-migrant - Uppsala University, Sweden

A research team from Sweden, Spain and Morocco have found genomic evidence that two waves of migrants took agriculture to North Africa in about 5400 BCE where it was adopted by the local population. One wave came along the north Mediterranean coast and through Iberia, and the second a short time later, from the Levant along the south Mediterranean coat.

For the previous 8,000 years and maybe even longer, the people of the western end of the Maghreb had been more or less isolated and lived as hunter-gatherers. Genetic evidence from 15,000 year old fossils shows that the population were intermediate between the people of the Levant and sub-Saharan Africans, and then, about 7,400 years ago, there was an ingression of Eurasia genes and culture from Spain as agriculturalists migrated to the Maghreb to live alongside the indigenous population, followed about a hundred years later, by a second wave of pastoralists from the Eastern end of the Mediterranean migrating along the North African coast, bringing a third population into the mix.

Later, in the Neolithic, these groups had merged into a single population.

It almost goes without saying that the team found no evidence of the population being exterminated in a flood, to be replaced after about 2000 BCE by a population from the Middle East, all descended from a small, incestuous band of eight related individuals, as they would have been if creationist fairy-tales were real history.

The News release from Uppsala University explains the study:

Creationism in Crisis - How Our Neanderthal Genes are Making us What We Are

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

Homo sapiens skull (left) and Neanderthal skull (right)

Lingering effects of Neanderthal DNA found in modern humans | Cornell Chronicle

As modern humans migrated out of Africa, they came into contact with the descendants of an earlier hominin migration - Neanderthals and their cousins the Denisovans. This period of interbreeding probably lasted about 10,000 years until the last Neanderthals disappeared about 40,000 years ago.

Some have recently proposed that interbreeding may have resulted in the relatively small population of Neanderthals being absorbed into the larger and growing population of Homo sapiens. Proponents of this idea have pointed out that there is more Neanderthal DNA around nowadays, in the form of 1-4% of the genome of people of non-African origins, than ever existed when Neanderthals were alive.

According to recent research by a team of scientists from several institutions, including Cornell, some of those genes are still active and influencing human traits including several with a significant influence on the immune system.

The study and its findings are the subject of a press release by Cornell, and an open access paper in eLife:

Creationism in Crisis - Why Masturbation Evolved Naturally

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

Why we’re searching for the evolutionary origins of masturbation – and the results so far

Far from being created separately, without ancestors and then all being descended from 8 survivors of a global genocide, as creationists believe, there is a growing body of scientific evidence that humans are not only part of the large tree of life but evolved from a common ancestor.

And, no doubt to the embarrassment of smugly sanctimonious theists who believe that masturbation is wrong, although they almost certainly indulge in it in private (and of course, many religious clerics also indulge in it with the child victims, while condemning those who do it without a victim as 'sinners') there is now evidence that masturbation is a natural, evolved activity, common to many other animals, and probably has some evolutionary benefits.

Creationists might like to ignore or wave aside the evidence that the scientists who investigated it had no doubts that the Theory of Evolution is the perfect model for explaining the observable evidence, as usual, and also that they regard it as evidence of common origin for the primates, including humans.

These findings come from the work of a team led by Dr. Matilda Brindle, of the Department of Anthropology, University College London (UCL), London, UK and The Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, Regent's Park, London, UK.

We discovered that masturbation is an ancient behaviour within primates, and concluded that the ancestor of all monkeys and apes, including humans, probably masturbated. It’s unlikely masturbation is a habit that different species of monkeys and apes have picked up along the way.

Dr. Matilda Brindle

Dr Brindle has written about her group's work in The Conversation. Her article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism in Crisis - Genetic Research is Showing How Humans Evolved as Part of the Primate Family Tree

Creationism in Crisis

Genetic Research is Showing How Humans Evolved as Part of the Primate Family Tree

Baboon in western Tanzania, here at Mahale Mountains National Park, have received genetic input from three lineages.

Photo: Yvonne de Jong and Tom Butynski

Juvenile golden snubnosed monkey at Shennongjia National Park, Central China.

Photo: Julia Ostner

Deutsches Primatenzentrum: Genomes of 233 primate species sequenced

If their dupes understood them, a number of papers published recently in a special 'Primate Genomes' edition of science would be giving creationist cult leaders panic attacks, because they all show how deeply embedded the Theory of Evolution is in modern biology as the explanation for the observable evidence, and it also shows how human evolution fits completely into the science of primate evolution.

The papers are the result of studies by a large international team of researchers including scientists from the German Primate Center - Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, (Deutsches Primatenzentrum - DPZ). These studies analysed the genomes of 809 individuals from 233 primate species, generating the most complete catalog of genomic information about our closest relatives to date.

It shows, amongst other things that, like the modern humans species, Homo sapiens, which is the result of several periods of diversification then ingression of genes from related species by interbreeding, such as that between H. sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans and others inside and outside Africa, some modern baboons also had an ingression of genes from related species.

As the DPZ news release explains:

Unintelligent Design - How Badly Designed DNA Replication can Cause Cancer - Incompetence or Malevolence?

Tiny circles of DNA (small rings) upend conventional genetic principles that govern inheritance of genes on chromosomes (oblongs). The large blue circles are cell nuclei.

Paul Mischel lab

Extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA), DNA circles carrying cancer-associated genes, play a critical role in cancer development, according to new research led by Stanford Medicine. These DNA circles can be found in precancerous cells, and their presence accelerates the transformation to a cancerous state. This discovery paves the way for potential early diagnosis and intervention methods in cancer treatment.

Tiny DNA circles are key drivers of cancer, Stanford Medicine-led international study finds | News Center | Stanford Medicine

Here's a conundrum for creationists to avoid or blame on 'The Fall' - so showing creationism is Christian fundamentalism, not science.

It's the finding by scientists at Stanford Medical Centre, that errors in DNA replication can cause small circles of extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA) to form and that these can lead to the formation of cancers. ecDNAs have been found before and the suggestion was that they are produced by cancerous cells as the DNA replication becomes increasingly botched, but this new study shows they can arise in pre-cancerous cells and may well be the cause of the cell becoming cancerous.

The ecDNA contains genes that deliver a super-charged growth signal that can override a cell’s natural programming. They also contain genes likely to dampen the immune system’s response to a nascent cancer.

Creationists, of course, insist that the process of DNA replication was designed by their putative intelligent [sic] omniscient designer. An intelligent, omniscient designer will know in advance exactly what it's design will do, so this raises several questions:

1. If this was the work of an intelligent designer, why should it not be regarded as malevolent and responsible for designing a process that deliberately causes cancers and so increases the suffering in the world?
2. If this was not the intended outcome, why should the designer not be regarded an incompetent?
3. If it was incompetent, why didn't it change its design once it realised what the outcome was? Is it either ignorant of what its design does, or doesn't it care?

Anyway, those are problems for advocates of the childish notion of design by a magic, supernatural magician, believed by those who want easy answers and the pretense of superior knowledge to that of scientists, while avoiding the bother of learning.

The problem for science is how to use this knowledge to reduce the pain and suffering in the world, because medical science, unlike creationism's supposed god is actually moral and seeks to reduce the pain and suffering in the world, and so fights a continuous battle with whatever force is tending to increase it - in this case, as any intelligent person can understand, the force is that of evolutionary arms races and the self-interest of mindless genes.

So, how did the Stanford Medical School scientists make this discovery? The Stanford Medical news release by Krista Conger, explains:

Creationism in Crisis - Rapid Evolution of Codfish Caused by Human Predation

Creationism in Crisis

Rapid Evolution of Codfish Caused by Human Predation

Codfish drying in Lofoten, Norway, illustrating the region's classical long-term fishing tradition. Scientists collected historical and contemporary genetic samples at Lofoten for a study on evolutionary changes in codfish.

Giada Ferrari

Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua

Overfishing Linked to Rapid Evolution of Codfish | Rutgers University

Just as the theory of evolution predicts, codfish have evolved under the selection pressure of human predation, and this evolution has occurred over the second half of the 20th century when the policy had been to only take cod over an agreed size to allow stocks to replenish from younger fish.

So, codfish have responded to this selection pressure by becoming sexually mature earlier before reaching the size at which they would previously have become sexually mature. Under this intense selection pressure, evolution that would normally be expected to take hundreds of thousands or millions of years, has occurred in a few decades.

This discovery was made by Brendan N. Reid, and Malin L. Pinsky of the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources, Rutgers University, NJ, USA, and Bastiaan Star of the Center for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Norway, using new techniques that enabled them to extract DNA from codfish caught more than 110 years ago, and analyse it with sufficient sensitivity to detect subtle changes over time when compared with that of recent samples.

It transpired that the evolution involved changed to multiple genes, and these changes were seen in fish from both sides of the Atlantic.

As the Rutgers University news release explains:

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Refute Two More Creationist Lies - New Information Arises Naturally and Mutations are not all Deleterious

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

Geneticists discover hidden “whole genome duplication” that may explain why some species survived mass extinctions - News & Events | Trinity College Dublin

When a mass extinction some 200 million years ago wiped out related species along with very many others, there was some reason why the common ancestor of the sturgeon and the paddle fish survived and went on to diverge into the 28 species of sturgeon (Acipenseridae) and the 2 extant and 6 extinct species of paddlefish (Acipenseridae).

Now reserchers led by Professor Aoife McLysaght and Dr Anthony Redmond from Trinity College Dublin’s School of Genetics and Microbiology, believe they have found the reason.

It was probably all due to whole genome duplication, followed by rediploidation, which gave the common ancestor an advantage in being able to evolve rapidly in the rapidly changing conditions. Genome duplication provides a spare copy of a gene which is then free to mutate without any loss of the function of the original gene. This is a natural way in which new information can arise in a genome. Gene duplication is a common feature of the evolutionary history of most species but whole genome duplication is unusual.

First a bit of background biology:

Creationism in Crisis - Australia's Dingos are Still Distinct and Showing Signs of Speciation

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

New DNA testing shatters 'wild dog' myth: most dingoes are pure

Recent new findings illustrate the way a species will evolve by diverging into related species that may still be able to interbreed even though other indicators show that they should be regarded as a distinct species. It also shows how a single species can diverge into populations as the precursor to evolving into subspecies and then species.

How are dingoes unique?

Dingoes possess several unique characteristics that distinguish them from domestic dogs and wolves. These characteristics include:

1. Size and Body Proportions: Dingoes are typically smaller than wolves and many domestic dog breeds. They exhibit a lean and agile body structure with a head that is broader and flatter than that of domestic dogs.
2. Coat Color and Texture: Dingoes commonly have a sandy or reddish-brown coat color, although variations can occur. Their coat is usually short, dense, and well-adapted to the Australian climate. Some dingoes have a white chest and facial markings.
3. Cranial Features: Dingoes often have a skull shape that is different from both domestic dogs and wolves. Their skull is generally longer and less domed than that of most dogs, with a narrower zygomatic arch (cheekbone) region.
4. Dentition: Dingoes possess a unique set of teeth, including relatively large canine teeth and sharp carnassial teeth adapted for cutting flesh. Compared to domestic dogs, their teeth are generally larger and exhibit less size variation.
5. Behavior and Social Structure: Dingoes are highly adaptable and display behavior suited to their semi-arid and arid habitats. They are generally more independent and less social than domestic dogs. Dingoes often live in small packs or as solitary individuals, whereas wolves form larger, more structured packs.
6. Reproduction and Breeding: Dingoes typically have a different breeding cycle than domestic dogs, with a once-a-year breeding season. They also exhibit different mating behaviors and have fewer puppies per litter compared to many domestic dog breeds.

It's important to note that while these characteristics are typical of dingoes, there can be variations among individuals and populations. Additionally, some of these traits may be influenced by interbreeding between dingoes and domestic dogs, which can introduce genetic diversity into the dingo population.

ChatGPT3 "What are the unique characteristics that distinguish dingoes from domestic dogs and wolves?" [Response to user question]
Retrieved from https://chat.openai.com/

It also shows how, as science refines and improves its techniques, new information brings about a change of consensus in a classic example of scientific opinion changing when the information changes, unlike religion which needs to find reasons not to change its collective mind despite new information, or risk another fragmentation into mutually hostile sects.

The study is a re-examination and re-evaluation of the status of the Australian dingo, Canis dingo, in view of improved DNA testing. Using earlier techniques which involved comparing just 23 DNA markers, geneticists had concluded that there were very few pure-bred dingoes left as most had DNA derived from hybridization with feral domestic dogs, Canis familiaris. On that basis, the dingo was reclassified as a wild dog and an invasive pest, and several eradication programs were implemented.

But a new study, using newer techniques which enable the scientists to compare not just 23 but 195,000 DNA markers has revealed a very different picture. This shows not only that ingression of familiaris DNA has been very limited in some areas, but that the dingo species can be regarded as four distinct populations. In other words, not only is the dingo still a species distinct from feral dogs but the dingo species is showing early signs of speciating.

It is now accepted that dingoes have not evolved directly from wolves so are not a subspecies of Canis lupus but are descended from the Southeast Asian domestic dog, meaning they were taken to Australia by humans and have evolved to adapt to the Australian environment. They have also been there so long that they have become an important part of the Australian ecosystem as apex predators, so can't now be regarded as an alien species, unlike rabbits, rats, European foxes, mice, cane toads and domestic cats.

The new study, by geneticists from the University of New South Wales and Sydney University, NSW, Australia, with colleagues in the National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA, is published, open access, in the journal Molecular Ecology.

Three of the scientists, Kylie M Cairns, Research fellow, UNSW Sydney, Mathew Crowther, Associate professor, University of Sydney and Professor Mike Letnic, Evolution and Ecology Research Centre, UNSW Sydney have explained their research and its significance for dingo conservation in an article in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Malevolent Designer News - How the Biblical Origin Myths Failed the 'Chosen People'

Malevolent Designer News

How the Biblical Origin Myths Failed the 'Chosen People'

The toilet seat from the estate at Armon ha-Natziv. The site, excavated in 2019, probably dates from the days of King Manasseh, a client king for the Assyrians who ruled for fifty years in the mid-7th century.

Credit: Ya’akov Billig

Early toilets reveal dysentery in Old Testament Jerusalem | University of Cambridge

Giardia duodenalis

Any caring, omni-benevolent, omniscient god would have warned his chosen people about the need for good hygiene in the form of sanitation and the importance of hand-washing, because it would have told them about germ theory and how to avoid catching the parasites it had designed to cause, amongst other things, debilitating diarrhoea.

But not so the god of the Old Testament.

The evidence just discovered by scientists working at Cambridge University, in collaboration with colleagues at Tel Aviv University, with the cooperation of the Israel Antiquities Authority, is that a particularly nasty parasite, Giardia duodenalis, which causes an intractable form of dysentery, was rife in Iron Age Judah.

There is, of course, no mention of this in the Bible, not any hint about how to avoid it with good hygiene and sanitation. It's just like the authors of the Bible were as ignorant as the Late Bronze age/Early Iron age people who lived in Judea at the time. There are extra-biblical Babylonian references to diarrhoea affecting the populations of what is now the Near and Middle East. One example reads: “If a person eats bread and drinks beer and subsequently his stomach is colicky, he has cramps and has a flowing of the bowels, setu has gotten him". The cuneiform word often used in these texts to describe diarrhoea was sà si-sá.

Some texts also included recommended incantations to increase the chances of recovery, showing that they believed magic spells would help control the cause.

But if we listen to the childish fantasies of creationists, we should conclude that this was deliberate, because an omniscient creator would know precisely what the microorganisms it designs will do and creates them for that purpose. Leaving humans ignorant was all part of the plan to allow the parasites to make them suffer, apparently.

How did the Cambridge-led scientists make this discovery? A press release gives the details:

Creationism in Crisis - Another Mystery of Abiogenesis May Have Been Solved

Creationism in Crisis

Another Mystery of Abiogenesis May Have Been Solved

Image by Triff/Shutterstock

Chirality in a generic amino acid (-NH 2 : amine,-COOH: caboxyl,-R: rest of the molecule). (a) Left-handed (LH) enantiomer: with thumb along the C→H axis, it takes the left hand for the fingers to point from COOH to NH 2 through R. (b) Righthanded (RH) enantiomer: with thumb along the C→H axis, it takes the right hand for the fingers to point from COOH to NH 2 through R.

Picture: Wikimedia Commons

New Study Provides Novel Insights into the Cosmic Evolution of Amino Acids - University of Tsukuba

One of the enduring problems in biology is explaining why just about all organic molecules in biological organisms have the same chirality. Creationists often latch onto this problem as evidence of something that science "can't explain", as though not (yet) being able to explain something renders the entire body of science wrong, so their "God did it!" superstition wins by default.

Of course, creationism can't explain it either other than by declaring it to be one of their creator god's mysteries.

But, properly understood, chirality is evidence of common descent since the earliest molecules from which self-replicating organisms evolved had one particular chirality - a property which has been inherited by all its descendants. The mystery is why one chirality came to dominate so completely to the exclusion of the other.

Chirality arises because an atom of carbon can form a molecule with four different groups which can be in one of two stereo-spacial arrangements, a levo (L) and a dextro (D) form, known as enantiomers. All amino acids from which proteins are built, and all fatty acids, are L-enantiomers.

Chiral molecules also display 'optical isomerism' in that the different enantiomers rotate the plane of polarisation in polarised light in opposite directions. 'L' enantiomers rotate it to the right 'd' (dextro rotation) and 'D' enantiomers rotate it to the left 'l' ( levorotation).

Creationism in Crisis - The Evolution of Life and the Genetic Code.

Genetic information is stored as long, complex sequences of the four different bases in DNA: adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G) and cytosine (C). Triplets of these bases are interpreted by the genetic machinery as instructions to add a certain amino acid to a protein.

Alfred Pasieka/Science Photo Library/Getty Images Plus

Did life evolve more than once? Researchers are closing in on an answer

By way of an introduction to this article on abiogenesis, I'm going to try to dispel the common, but evidence-free claim from creationists that the genetic code is so complex that it must have been designed by an intelligent designer.

This is, of course, nothing but the usual argument from ignorant incredulity and a false dichotomy fallacy - I don't know enough, I can't be bothered to learn, and I can't imagine how something could have arisen naturally, so God did it - and of course it must be the locally popular god because there are only two possibilities; the current science or the local god. It's an argument that demonstrates better than most the scientific illiteracy, intellectual bankruptcy and cultural chauvinism of creationism.

First, I look at the genetic codes and how it could have evolved naturally, without a supernatural magician making chemistry and physics do things they couldn't do without it, or making the highly improbable happen - as though the notion of an undetectable entity existing outside space and time but able to influence things inside space and time makes any sense.

This comes in two forms: a conversation with an AI chat bot, and the book, Life Ascending by Nick Lane.

Firstly, a conversation with ChatGPT3:

Creationism in Crisis - How the Human Genome Holds a Record of Our Evolutionary History

Creationism in Crisis

How the Human Genome Holds a Record of Our Evolutionary History

Reconstruction of an early Eurasian H. sapiens from remains found in Greece

Ancient humans may have paused in Arabia for 30,000 years on their way out of Africa

The first anatomically modern Homo sapiens to migrate out of Africa were almost certainly hunter-gatherers. This much can be deduced from the fact that agriculturalists tend to be relatively sedentary and tied to the land. Our early ancestors, however, were migrants who spread relatively rapidly and one of the best habitats for hunter-gatherers is the coast where food in the form of shell-fish is abundant.

It is often assumed that these migrants travelled up the Nile or the Red Sea coast to the Middle East, and dispersed from there, but there is an alternative coastal route once they arrived at the Horn of Africa.

It is a short sea journey from there to what is now Yemen in Arabia and from there either up the Hijaz to the Middle East or along the south-east coat to what is now Oman. From Oman it is again a short sea-crossing at the Gulf of Hormuz, or even up the Arabian Gulf coast, into what is now Iran. From there, the whole of south and south-east Asia is accessible by coastal spread, as is Mesopotamia and then Central Asia either by going round the Black Sea coast, or the more difficult rout through the Caucasus mountains between the Black Se and the Caspian Sea.

Even Australia could be reached via land at a time when sea-levels were much lower than today at glacial maxima.

And now, a team of Australian researchers led by Raymond Tobler and Yassine Souilmi, of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia, have found genetic evidence of a 30,000 year period of evolutionary adaptation to a colder environment, probably in Arabia of the immediate area, prior to a rapid dispersal across Eurasia as far as Australia. Functional targets in the genome include multiple interacting loci involved in fat storage, neural development, skin physiology, and cilia function, with associations with multiple modern Western diseases.

The team’s findings were published recently in PNAS, sadly behind a paywall, although the Abstract is published open access.

Three of the team have also written about their research and findings in an article in The Conversation. There article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism in Crisis - Another Gap Closes - The Evolution of Paired Limbs. No God(s) Needed

Creationism in Crisis

Another Gap Closes - The Evolution of Paired Limbs
No God(s) Needed

Zebra fish, Danio rerio, studied in this research.

Where Do Our Limbs Come From?

Fig. 5: Hypothesis of the elaboration of the PAFF to paired fins.

Simplified evolutionary scenario of vertebrates showing the presence of a PAFF and subsequent modifications leading to paired fins. Dashed lines and dagger symbols indicate extinct lineages, and solid lines indicate extant lineages. PM-derived fins and fin folds are in cyan, while LPM-derived fins are in pink. Larval PAFF is hatched. Black arrows indicate the position of the anus.

Tzung, KW., Lalonde, R.L., Prummel, K.D. et al. (2023)

The thing about the Theory of Evolution is that it is confirmed by every discovery in archaeology and palaeontology since it predicts what the 'transitional forms' and structures will look like, being intermediate between two knowns.

Creationism, on the other hand, beyond childish hand-waving denialism, can't even offer an explanation for intermediate forms, since it claims all species were created as they are today, without ancestors, so there should be no evidence of progression through a gradual series of change, and an omniscient, omnipotent creator would not need to constantly revise and refine its creation, nor create species destined to become extinct and replaced by new ones.

That's just one reason, amongst many, why the archaeological and palaeontological record refutes the childish notion of special creation, without ancestry, by an omniscient creator making chemistry and physics do something they couldn't do without it.

So, when an international collaboration of scientists fills a gap in our knowledge, with new clues about the origin of paired appendages – a major evolutionary step that remains unresolved and highly debated, we can be confident it fits neatly into an evolutionary framework and completes a segment of the evolutionary picture of terrestrial tetrapods evolving from lobe-finned fish. It also, quite incidentally and without intent, refutes creationism yet again.

The scientists who have just produced this additional confirmation included scientists from the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Their findings have just been published, open access, in the journal Nature.

Their research and its significance are explained in a University of Colorado press release:

How Creationists Lie to Us - Ken Ham's Top 10 'Evidences' [sic] (For the Moral and Intellectual Bankruptcy of Creationism)

Ken Ham, Creationist
Net worth (2023) $55 million

10 Best Evidences That Confirm a Young Earth | Answers in Genesis

I've just been shown an article from Ken Ham's deception site, answersingenesis.com, which the posted claimed proved the Bible contains accurate science.

Evidently the dupe hadn't got the courage or the ability to check the claimed '10 Best Evidences [sic] from Science That Confirm a Young Earth.

The article starts of in typical Creationist style with circular reasoning arguing that the Bible must be true because it says so in the Bible. He then launches into an attack on dating methods which he claims can't be proven because no-one was there to witness it (apart from his God, obviously.

This has the same intellectual merit as arguing that you can't be sure your great grandparents met and has sex, because no-one recorded seeing them doing it, so their children being born by magic is at least as good an explanation as that they had them the normal way.

Or, more subtly, it you met a friend in one town one day then in a different town a month later, you can't prove he/she travelled from the first town to the second in the intervening month unless you saw them on the journey, so a rational explanation is that he/she magically teleports from one place to another.

Despite this wealth of evidence, it is important to understand that, from the perspective of observational science, no one can prove absolutely how young (or old) the universe is. Only one dating method is absolutely reliable—a witness who doesn’t lie, who has all evidence, and who can reveal to us when the universe began! And we do have such a witness—the God of the Bible! He has given us a specific history, beginning with the six days of Creation and followed by detailed genealogies that allow us to determine when the universe began. Based on this history, the beginning was only about six thousand years ago (about four thousand years from Creation to Christ).

And Ham doesn't even understand the science he's attacking: The evidence is that Earth is 4.54 billion years old, not the 3 billion he's attacking. But this is only a minor aspect of his profound ignorance and/or intellectual bankruptcy, as we will see. There then follow several Bible references which are supposed to prove that the Bible is the word of God - because it says so in the Bible. And believe it or not, this site appears to be aimed at adults, although Ham shows his contempt for his dupes by treating them like toddlers and being incapable of basic logic. But let's move swiftly on to the 10 evidences [sic]:

Creationism in Crisis - How A Fossil Sabre-Toothed Predator Adjusted to Environmental Change, 250 Million Years Ago

Creationism in Crisis

How A Fossil Sabre-Toothed Predator Adjusted to Environmental Change, 250 Million Years Ago

New top predator in town (at least, temporarily): giant gorgonopsian Inostrancevia with its dicynodont prey, scaring off the much smaller African species Cyonosaurus

Art by Matt Celeskey.

Inostrancevia

Dmitry Bogdanov, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Fossils of a saber-toothed top predator reveal a scramble for dominance leading up to “the Great Dying” - Field Museum

Evidence published a few days ago in Current Biology illustrates how major environmental change can cause major evolutionary events as vacated niches due to extinction are occupied by other species adjusting to the new conditions.

This is illustrated by the migration over some 7000 miles of a top predator in Eastern Eurasia, a tiger-sized, saber-toothed creature called Inostrancevia, to South Africa where it replaced an earlier top predator which had recently gone extinct. At the time of the migration, there was only one large super-continent, Pangea.

The discovery was made by Christian F. Kammerer of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh, NC, USA working with Pia A. Viglietti and Jennifer Botha, of the Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, and Elize Butler of the National Museum, Bloemfontein, South Africa, who identified the fossil of a large predator found in South Africa’s Karoo Basin, as that of Inostrancevia, previously only known from fossils found in Russia.

Their discovery is explained in a press release from the Field Museum, Chicago:

Creationism in Crisis - The Beginnings of Empathy May Have Evolved in a Dinosaur!

Creationism in Crisis

The Beginnings of Empathy May Have Evolved in a Dinosaur!

Photo: Michael Rosskothen/MostPhotos

Artists impression of an early feathered theropod dinosaur

Credit: Daniel Eskridge Getty Images

Dinosaurs were the first to take the perspectives of others | Lund University

More evidence today that creationism is a fallacy. Scientists at Lund University, Sweden, have shown that what creationists proclaim to be the unique ability of humans, thus proving special design by their putative designer god - the ability to empathise - may have its origins, not even in ancestral mammals, but in common ancestors of both mammals and birds, i.e., dinosaurs.

Creationists normally get themselves in a terrible muddle over empathy, preferring to ignore it as an evolved source of morality in favour of their supposedly God-given morals, and yet their holy book, in which they claim their designer god wrote down these morals includes an assumption that empathy is a human trait.

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

Matthew 7:12

---

Do to others as you would have them do to you.

Luke 6:31

But creationists, while arguing that humans have this unique ability, argue that they, like a sociopath, can't work out how their actions might affect others, so need a handbook to look it up in.

The evidence that this trait first arose in a common ancestor of birds and mammals comes in the form of a paper in Science Advances by three researchers from Lund University, Sweden.

A Lund University press release explains the research:

Malevolent Designer News - The Divine Malevolence's Next Move with it's SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus.

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

Arcturus: what to know about the new COVID variant, omicron XBB.1.16

Creationism's divine malevolence excelled itself with the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, killing millions, making hundreds of millions more sick either in the short term with the initial infection, or long-term with the long-lasting aftereffects experienced by some victims with 'long-COVID'. It managed to achieve a stunning over three-quarters of a billion cases worldwide with nearly 7 million deaths, as of 18 May 2023, not to mention the bankrupted business and ruined national economies.

But human science having hit back with a vaccine produced in record time, it then had to go into an arms race of new, resistant variants to keep it ahead of science. The most successful of those, Omicron, resulted in unprecedented peaks of cases although deaths were relatively low due to the vaccines.

And now, not to be outdone by humans, it has produced the latest variant, a version of Omicron (Omicron XBB.1.16) that epidemiologists have named Arcturus.

Should we be concerned, that Arcturus can evade the immunity conveyed by vaccines, regular booster vaccines and natural immunity due to previous infections? Here is how Manal Mohammed, a Senior Lecturer and Medical Microbiology at the University of Westminster, UK sees it. Her article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Published: May 3, 2023, 4.07pm BST

Arcturus: what to know about the new COVID variant, omicron XBB.1.16

CROCOTHERY/Shutterstock

Manal Mohammed, University of Westminster

A new COVID variant XBB.1.16, or “Arcturus”, has now been identified in at least 34 countries including the UK.

Arcturus is a subvariant of omicron and was first detected in India in January 2023.

As of April 17, the latest date up to which the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has reported data on this variant in the UK, 105 cases of Arcturus had been sequenced across England. Five Britons who tested positive for Arcturus have died.

It’s important to note that only a small portion of COVID infections undergo genetic sequencing, so it’s likely there are many more cases of Arcturus. The UKHSA recently reported that the variant is making up 2.3% of sequences in the UK.

Meanwhile, Arcturus has been steadily rising in the US in recent weeks, accounting for more than 10% of new confirmed COVID cases as of the end of April.

But the variant has been most dominant in India, which had recorded 61% of global sequences of Arcturus as of mid-April. It has driven a huge increase in cases in India over the past month. The country was recording more than 10,000 COVID cases each day with Arcturus making up about two-thirds of all cases. Fortunately this wave now appears to be on the decline.

Nonetheless, Arcturus has been classified as a variant of interest by the World Health Organization. So what do we know about this variant, and should we be worried?

Another new COVID variant is spreading – here's what we know about omicron BA.4.6

Where did Arcturus come from?

XBB.1.16 is a descendant of XBB, a recombinant omicron strain, meaning it contains genetic material from two different variants. Specifically, XBB is a mixture of two BA.2 sublineages: BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.75.

XBB has shown increased transmissibility relative to earlier variants, probably because it appears to be better at evading existing immunity from vaccination and prior infections.

Arcturus is very closely related to XBB.1.5, also known as Kraken.

Compared with its parent strain XBB, Arcturus has three additional mutations in the spike protein: E180V, F486P and K478R. This is a protein on the surface of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID) which allows it to bind to and infect our cells.

Arcturus is understood to be the most contagious subvariant yet, and these additional mutations might explain why.

COVID is still with us.

Source: Anna Tryhub/Shutterstock

The typical symptoms of COVID include fever, cough, runny nose and loss of sense of taste or smell. However, doctors in India have reported conjunctivitis symptoms in children infected with Arcturus, which has not generally been seen in earlier COVID waves.

What about vaccine protection?

COVID vaccines target the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2. As such, mutations in the spike protein may affect how well the vaccines work.

There is no data yet on vaccine efficacy against Arcturus. However, a recent study found that among people who had been vaccinated or previously infected, the antibody responses generated against closely related strains XBB and XBB.1 were significantly lower than against other variants.

So XBB subvariants could threaten current COVID vaccines and therapeutics. But importantly, it’s likely vaccines still offer good protection against severe disease.

While further studies are needed to confirm how Arcturus responds to vaccines, scientists are continuing work on new vaccines that could offer stronger protection against emerging variants.

The continued evolution of omicron

Although omicron was first detected in late 2021 it continues to evolve resulting in new subvariants. Arcturus is one of some 600 detected to date.

This is to be expected in a highly vaccinated population. New variants naturally evolve to evade existing defences. Those strains with a competitive advantage – namely greater transmissibility and capacity to escape our immune response – will dominate. Arcturus may yet fuel a rise in cases in the UK and elsewhere.

COVID variants: could dangerous new ones evolve in pets and farm animals?

However, there is no great cause for concern. While scientists will continue to monitor Arcturus, there’s no evidence at this stage to suggest it’s more severe than previous variants. In addition, we have good protection now from vaccines and natural infection.

That said, the continued evolution of COVID and the emergence of new strains such as Arcturus is a reminder that the virus is still with us. For those eligible for further boosters, it’s important to keep these up to date.
Manal Mohammed, Senior Lecturer, Medical Microbiology, University of Westminster

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)

I'm still waiting for an intelligent reply explaining why creationists would rather we thought of their putative designer god as a pestilential malevolence forever designer new and better ways to make its creation suffer, than have people accept that the theory of evolution explains the origins of parasites like the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus as a natural process, without the intervention of a supernatural deity - which would let their favourite genocidal monster off the hook.