Rosa Rubicondior

Friday 22 September 2023

Creationism in Crisis - A Parasitic Plant That Evolved by LOSS of Genetic Information!

Balanophora fungosa

coenobita (https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/24169269)
Via Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0)

This parasitic plant convinces hosts to grow into its own flesh—it’s also an extreme example of genome shrinkage | UBC Science - Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia

I wonder if creationists ever puzzle over the fact that science never produces any evidence supporting their dogmas and superstitions; instead, science repeatedly finds evidence the flatly contradicts them. It takes a special form of delusion and self-deception to dismiss all that contrary evidence and stick with an evidence-free notion.

Just such a creation-refuting piece of science has just been published in the journal Nature Plants. It concerns the evolution of the parasitic plants, the Balanophora and in particular, the discovery that during their evolution they lost 38% of their genome.

Despite the fact that many parasites have undergone a genome reduction during their evolution to a parasitic life-style, creationist dogma dictates that mutations and loss of genes are always deleterious, or 'devolutionary' (^©Michael J Behe) a nonsensical term which tries to relate biology to the biblical myth of 'The Fall' because Behe has now abandoned the futile attempt to prove that evolution isn't a natural process in which no gods or supernatural entities are involved.

Parasitism is also a refutation of the childish notion of intelligent [sic] design, especially by a supposedly omni-benevolent designer, because no intelligent designer would design the inevitable arms race that characterises a parasite-host relationship, unless that designer was both malevolent and extremely stupid.

First, a little about the Balanophora:

Creationism in Crisis - Evidence of Common Origins Found in Microscopic Sea Creatures

Trichoplax adhaerens.

Eitel M, Osigus H-J, DeSalle R, Schierwater B (2013)
Global Diversity of the Placozoa.
PLoS ONE 8(4): e57131, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0057131

Tiny sea creatures reveal the ancient origins of neurons | Centre for Genomic Regulation (CGR)

Sad news today for any creationist trying desperately to cling to the childish notion that humans were created by magic without ancestors just a few thousand years ago and so are a special form of life, not related to any other.

It comes in the form of an open access paper in the online journal Cell announcing that researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST), Barcelona, Spain have found evidence of the ancient origins of neurons in microscopic sea creatures, the placozoans, the size of a grain of sand.

These simple, multicellular creatures are in many ways transitional between single-celled and multicellular organisms.

Creationism in Crisis - How The Malevolent Designer Kills Mother & Child During Pregnancy

Western News - In major breakthrough, Western, Brown researchers close in on preeclampsia cure

In a major breakthrough, scientists have identified the cause of preeclampsia, the leading cause of mortality during pregnancy.

And once again a scientific breakthrough exposes the utter nonsense that is intelligent [sic] design creationism.

Preeclampsia affects up to 8% of women during pregnancy. If left untreated it can lead to eclampsia (an epileptiform fit) in the later stages of pregnancy, which can result in the death of both mother and baby.

Creationism in Crisis - The Universe is Much Grander and More Magnificant Than Any Religion's Prophets Ever Told Us.

Maisie’s Galaxy.
Not as old as previously thought

NASA (representative image)

Collaboration with global team confirms, disproves distant galaxies | RIT

Cosmologists are making discoveries about the age and nature of celestial bodies almost daily and, as with all science, as the information improves, theories and knowledge are either being abandoned or confirmed, so our understanding of reality improves - which is the entire point of scientific research.

This is in marked contrast with religions, where 'research' consists of trying to find new ways to stick to ancient belief and all apologetics presuppose the answer.

For instance, compare theology to a 'philosophy' based on the assumption that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden who created everything and who demand adoration and worship as the price for not doing something unspeakably unpleasant to you when you die (assuming you'd know about it and could experience it, even though you're dead and won't have a body with a sensory system and functioning brain to experience it with)!

Sound extremely childish and risible?

Yes, it does, doesn't it! And yet theologians command respect and power in society, far greater than should be given to someone because they have an imaginary friend and spends their time trying to make excuses for not having any definitive evidence for their beliefs.

What is giving cosmology this power is the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) which is sending back hugely improved data of a much higher quality and reliability of anything cosmologists have had to work with before.

For example, in a paper published in Nature a few days ago, by a team of scientists including researchers from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA, cosmologists showed that there are very many more ancient galaxies whose red shift dates them to the very early universe, but that a candidate for the oldest such galaxy is in fact much younger than previously thought. This is because the JWST is able to measure the red shift with far greater accuracy than was previously possible.

Creationism in Crists - How Prey Perception Directs Evolution

Lapwing, green plover or peewit, Vanellus vanellus

Habitat geometry rather than visual acuity limits the visibility of a ground‐nesting bird's clutch to terrestrial predators - Hancock - 2023 - Ecology and Evolution - Wiley Online Library

If you're going to perpetuate your genes through time, you need to arrange things so the next generation doesn't get eaten, because that ends your gene line. To do that, you need to ensure you arrange things so any potential predator has difficulty finding the next generation, at least before they've managed to breed.

I appreciate these concepts are difficult for creationists to grasp, but a paper out today shows the importance of catering for the perception of potential prey on your offspring, if you want then to survive and breed.

It concerns the siting of lapwing nests and eggs.

The northern lapwing, Vanellus vanellus, green plover or peewit (from their call), is a ground-nesting bird, which, until about 40 years ago was common in my part of Oxfordshire, UK. They formed vast flocks in the Autumn that would put on impressive displays as twilight approached, as they twisted and turned in flight (hence their name, lapwing) giving the flock a twinkling appearance as they exposed their white underwings, then twisted to hide them, confusing any potential predator such as peregrine falcons. Since then, they have been in rapid decline, probably due to habitat destruction and change in agricultural land management, and these vast flocks are no more.

Creationism in Crisis - Now It's an 800,000 Year History of the Sahara Desert With Periods of Greening

Changes of vegetation between humid and arid phases in North Africa. Vegetation zones are based on the minimum precipitation requirements of each vegetation type.

Image: Jani Närhi / University of Helsinki

September: Sahara Desert greening | News and features | University of Bristol

Scientists led by Dr Edward Armstrong, a climate scientist with Bristol University, UK, have successfully modelled the climate history of North Africa and shown that the Sahara Desert had periods of greening, with rivers, lakes and savannah-like grasslands.

These periods of greening explain the evidence of water-dependent species such as hippos. Their research is published open access in the journal Nature Communications.
This evidence adds support to the 'Sahara Pump' hypothesis:

Dog rose, Rosa canina.
Descendant of a K-Pg mass extinction survivor.

Nature’s great survivors: Flowering plants survived the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs

Despite creationist claims that their putative creator god created Earth and set the parameters of the universe to make it perfect for human life, Earth is not a very safe place to live. Most of it is actually hostile to human life, being either too cold, too hot, under water or too high for there to be enough partial pressure of oxygen to survive for long.

It is also subject to regular, non-discriminatory natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, droughts, or devastating floods. In the last few days, tens of thousands of people have dies in Morocco and Libya because of natural disasters.

And Earth is occasionally hit by an asteroid that changes the climate so radically that a mass extinction occurs, like the one, 66 million years ago, that exterminated all the dinosaurs except for a few feathered varieties that went on to become birds - the K-T extinction, more correctly known as the K-Pg extinction or boundary. (K is the initial letter of the German word for Cretaceous, and Pg is for Paleogene, which used to be called the Triassic)

Creationism in Crisis - Evidence of the Earliest Deep-Sea Vertebrates Found - Those Gaps in the Record Just Keep on Closing!

Fossilized sea-floor traces resembling those made by modern bottom-feeding fish suggest that fish colonized the deep sea as early as 130 million years ago—80 million years earlier than the earliest known fossilized deep-sea fish.

The earliest deep-sea vertebrates revealed by unusual fossils

The refutation of several key creationist claims continues with news that a team of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and British scientists, led by palaeontologist Andrea Baucon of Genoa University, Italy, have discovered strong evidence of the existence of fish, 130 million years ago, pushing back the earliest known vertebrate presence in the abyssal plain by 20 million years.

Just to remind creationists, 130 million years is 130,000 times longer than they believe Earth has existed. Although all dating methods return a range of dates with a predictable variance, none of them has a lower limit anywhere approaching that magnitude.

The evidence, found in the Apennine mountains that run down the centre of Italy consists of the pits and tail-fin drag marks left in the silt in deep-ocean floor, of which the Apennines are now composed.

Creationism in Crisis - No-One Mourns For The Old Dead Gods of Arabia - Part 2

Mirrored building at the ancient al Ula Maraya archaeological site, Saudi Arabia

7,000-year-old animal bones, human remains found in enigmatic stone structure in Arabia | Live Science

Archaeologists are uncovering evidence of religious rituals in Norther Arabia, 3000 years before creationists believe Earth and humans were created!

Creationists love to point to the fact that all cultures, ancient and modern, tend to have religion as a central element to the culture, as though that fact somehow proves the locally popular god is real.

Of course, it also points to the fact that we have evolved to 'fail safe' and assume agency where there is none, to naively believe what our parents believe, to accept simplistic answers to complex questions and find it impossible to imagine total oblivion at death.

But, ask a creationists to explain why we should accept the locally popular god is the only real one and all the ancient gods are false, and they will probably cite much of that list as reasons why they had false beliefs, stopping short of going just one god (or one pantheon) further and applying that logic to their own god(s), citing all sorts of nebulous reasons why they believe in their particular god(s).

The team found animal horns from a variety of animals, including cattle and caprines, or animals in the goat family, at the site.

Image credit: Wael Abu-Azizeh et al. 2022/RCU

So, it must be embarrassing to realise that those nebulous reasons were very probably cited by believers in those ancient gods as 'proof' that they existed.

Did the sun not rise in the morning because they had performed the right rituals? Did the crops not fail when they had failed to chant the right prayers in exactly the right way at the right time, or had broken the rules in some other way?

Did the gods not reward them by helping them prevail in battle or punish them for an assumed transgression when they lost a battle?

And could they too not 'look at the trees' and marvel at the wonders their gods had created? And did their priests not also have the power of prophesy and claim they heard the god(s) speaking to them?

One thing we can be sure about is that belief in their god(s) was a strong motivation for rituals associated with life, death and probably animal husbandry, as it is for believers today. The evidence for that is in the artifacts they left behind as discovered by archaeology, such as that currently going on at al Ula in the Ashar Valley in Northern Arabia, where researchers have now discovered evidence of ritual sacrifice and burials in the remains of stone structures known as mustatils, which are believed to have been used for religious purposes.

To add to the embarrassment for creationists, these structures have been dated to about 7,000 years ago, i.e., some 3,000 years before Earth and humans were created!

Regular readers may recall how the archaeological site in Northern Arabia, close to the Fertile Crescent was the subject of a blog post here last March. Now the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCA), set up to investigate the site, has produced an update. It concerns the remain, both animal and human, found in some of the graves associated with the buildings.

As the RCA news release reports:

Scanning electron micrograph of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria being engulfed by an immune cell known as a neutrophil.

Credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health

Researchers discover genes behind antibiotic resistance in deadly superbug infections | Doherty Website

Scientists based at the Docherty Institute, Melbourne University, Victoria, Australia have discovered just how devious any designer of the deadly super bug, Staphylococcus aureus, also known as Golden staph, would need to have been to come up with such a clever way to make us sick and die.

Curiously, for people who purport to worship the putative designer of all living things, creationists would have us believe that the designer is just such a mendacious malevolence, rather than have us believe that a natural process such as evolution by natural selection is responsible for parasites and the way they evade our immune systems - also, so creationists claim, designed by the same designer, making it look like a bumbling incompetent amnesiac than a supremely intelligent deity.

First, a brief background on S. aureus and MRSA:

Creationism in Crisis - Signs of Life on an Exoplanet 120 Million Lightyears Away.

Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18 b | NASA

Abiogenesis, like the conditions that produced the Big Bang, is one of creationism's favourite gaps in which they try to fit their ever-shrinking little god and play their false dichotomy fallacy - if science can't explain it, "God did it!".

That ploy depends for its success of a couple of things, not the least of which are scientific illiteracy and cultural chauvinism of their target dupes. Creationists, while telling their targets that science can't explain how abiogenesis occurred, then pretend they know anyway and have calculated the probability of it. Of course, without knowing the precise conditions and chain of events, it is impossible to do that calculation, but nevertheless, creationist frauds will confidently proclaim it to be infinitesimally small.

However, if the precise mechanism were known, and the conditions could be replicated (temperature, pressure, catalysts, chemicals and time) the mechanism would not be impossible, it would be inevitable (i.e., certainty) since it is a basic principle of chemistry that if the conditions are right, a reaction will occur. No ifs or buts, it will occur since chemical reactions are not governed by laws of probability but by laws of physics. No chemist has ever needed to set up ten thousand test tubes to ensure at least one will produce the expected result. He/she would get ten thousand identical results.

But now, as scientists improve their ability to detect and examine the atmosphere of distant exoplanets orbiting other suns in the galaxy, so they are improving their ability to detect the inevitable signs of life on those planets and many people think it is only a matter of time before we have strong evidence of life elsewhere in the universe.

Conspiracy Loon News - Why Some People Fall For Wackadoodle Conspiracy Theories

They fall more easily for conspiracy theories - Linköping University

In the last 20 years of so, two things have featured in western culture, especially so in the United States, and recent research has shown how these are linked.

Democratization of opinion: Conflation of the belief that everyone is entitled to their opinion on every subject under the sun, as guaranteed to Americans by their constitution, and the belief that this means every opinion should carry equal weight in a debate, regardless of the evidence (or lack of it) on which it is based, or the level of expertise in the subject of the person voicing that opinion.

The attractiveness of this belief to the intellectually lazy and to those who feel alienated by the political and economic forces that shape their lives, is that they can tell themselves that they are at least the equal of the experts, and very probably their better.

For example, I was recently castigated in the social media when I disagreed with the claim that "everyone needs Jesus because without Him life is meaningless". I was informed that "This is America (it was actually Facebook!) where we are entitled to our opinions!", as though a constitutional right in one country mandates the rest of the world to respect dogma and regard it as a statement of irrefutable truth, with the implication that no-one has a right to disagree. The constitution guarantees my right to my opinion (but not your right to yours).

Similarly false claims are made by creationists daily in social media, accompanied by indignation when challenged. Creationists who couldn't define the terms 'evolution' or 'kind' and who assiduously maintain their scientific ignorance, will confidently inform the world that the millions of highly qualified working biomedical scientists who have no difficulty with the science, have it all wrong, and should listen to the creationist who knows best, having completed a 15 minute Google University degree in creationism. And they're all part of a gigantic Satanic conspiracy anyway.

Bit by bit microplastics from tyres are polluting our waterways – Griffith News

Back in the late 1960's, when I was a student at Oxford Polytechnic (Now Oxford Brookes University) studying for an HNC in Applied Biology, one of the modules (on which apparently the National Council for Academic Awards (NCAA) insisted) was 'General Studies', i.e., anything which broadened our education away from the narrowness of a specialised subject, such as Applied Biology.

Part of that was an assignment to investigate an aspect of man-made environmental pollution, Rachal Carson's 'Silent Spring' being a recent publication and a nascent green movement beginning to emerge. The subject I decided on was to investigate what happened to the millions of tons of vulcanized rubber from road vehicle tyres that needed to be replaced annually because tyres wore away on the roads. It stood to reason that that rubber either entered the atmospheres as dust, or, more likely, got washed off the roads and into road-side ditches and eventually into the waterways and from there to the sea.

The question was, what effect did this fine rubber dust have on the environment and how much of it ended up in the food chain?

I was shocked to discover, after several days searching the literature available to me in the college library (if only we had had the Internet in those days!) that there was not a scrap of scientific data on the subject. There were no published papers on the question whatsoever. Either no-one had thought it worth investigating, no-one had identified the problem, or no-one was prepared to fund the research. And yet millions of tons of vulcanized rubber were being turned into tyres and from then into rubber dust on our roads, and it was all going somewhere, but no-one knew where!

In desperation, and with a project to complete, I abandoned my research and instead looked at the environmental effects of DDT, then extensively used as an insecticide, and about which some alarming news was emerging - extermination of brown pelicans in American lakes treated with DDT to kill mosquitoes, because DDT is adsorbed onto particulate matter which is ingested by the small organisms eaten by fish and so concentrated up the food chain, at the apex of which were brown pelicans; loss of peregrine falcons because DDT reduced egg shell thickness, leading to a loss of broods, again the result of DDT being concentrated up the food chain and killing the apex predators.

So, news that, some 54 years later, researchers at Griffin University, Australia, have published a paper in Environmental Science & Technology, dealing with a closely related problem - the problem of microplastics and tire [sic] wear products in urban stormwater.

Sadly, the research paper is behind a paywall, but a Griffin University news release explains the research and its significance:

Malevolent Designer News - Is Creationism's Divine Malevolence Planning the Next Pandemic?

News - Bird flu is undergoing changes that could increase the risk of widespread human transmission - University of Nottingham

On top of a couple of recent papers showing creationist dogma to be false and that, if there were such a thing as an intelligent designer of living things, that designer can only be regarded as a malevolent monster, we have another paper which, if we believe creationist dogma, again shows their divine creator to be an obsessive, sadistic psychopath.

It is the news that scientists at Nottingham University, UK., and China have discovered how the variant of the H3N8 avian flu virus which is endemic in Chinese poultry farms, is mutating in a way which could make it more likely to cross the species barrier into humans and become the next pandemic.

What is the H3N8 Avian influenza virus and what threat does it pose to humanity?

H3N8 Avian influenza, also known as avian flu or bird flu, is a subtype of the influenza A virus that primarily affects birds, especially waterfowl and shorebirds. It is one of several subtypes of avian influenza viruses, each identified by specific combinations of surface proteins: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). In the case of H3N8, it refers to the third type of hemagglutinin (H3) and the eighth type of neuraminidase (N8) found on the virus's surface.

While H3N8 avian influenza primarily affects birds, it has the potential to pose a threat to humans under certain circumstances. Here are some key points to consider regarding its potential threat to humanity:

Zoonotic Transmission: Avian influenza viruses, including H3N8, are zoonotic, which means they can infect humans when they come into close contact with infected birds or contaminated environments. Most human cases of avian influenza have resulted from direct or indirect exposure to infected poultry.

Limited Human Infections: H3N8 avian influenza has not been as widely reported in human infections as some other avian influenza subtypes, such as H5N1 and H7N9. However, there have been occasional cases of H3N8 avian influenza infection in humans, often associated with direct contact with infected birds.

Potential for Adaptation: Avian influenza viruses have the ability to mutate and potentially adapt to human hosts. If a strain of H3N8 were to acquire the ability for efficient human-to-human transmission, it could lead to a more widespread outbreak or even a pandemic. This is a significant concern with avian influenza viruses in general.

Influenza Pandemic Preparedness: Due to the risk of avian influenza strains causing pandemics, public health organizations and governments worldwide monitor and study these viruses closely. Preparedness plans and strategies are in place to respond quickly to potential outbreaks, including the development of vaccines and antiviral medications.

Importance of Surveillance: Surveillance of avian influenza in both bird populations and humans is crucial to detect any changes in the virus's behavior or its potential to infect humans more easily. Timely identification and containment of outbreaks are essential to minimize the risk to public health.

In summary, H3N8 avian influenza is primarily a bird virus, but it can infect humans in rare cases. The main threat it poses to humanity lies in its potential to evolve and adapt to human-to-human transmission, potentially leading to a wider outbreak or pandemic. Vigilant surveillance, early detection, and preparedness are key components in mitigating this threat and preventing a significant public health crisis.

As explained in a Nottingham University news release, the evidence comes from an isolate of the H3N8 avian influenza virus (AIV) recovered from a human patient:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Favourite 'Designer' Made Alzheimers More Likely

IU researchers identify new gene mutation that alters Alzheimer’s disease risk

The terrible week for creationism continues unabated: Following yesterday’s news of more evidence of common descent of the great apes, including humans, we have news that creationism's putative designer has apparently given some people a gene variant that increases their risk of developing Alzheimer’s dementia in later life, while some others get a variant the reduces that risk.

A problem of creationists' own making is the insistence that mutations don't happen by chance but need the deliberate intervention of their favourite putative designer, without whom nothing happens.

This means they need to ignore the existence of parasites, which, if they were designed deliberately, can only be regarded as evidence that whatever designed them had malevolent intent, and intended to increase the suffering in the world, since that is what they do.

It also means they need to ignore the evidence that a lot of diseases are caused by mutations, especially the degenerative diseases in older people, which don't manifest until after they have produced their offspring, and so passed on their genetics, including any mutations.

This is where we come to the news that a large team of researchers, led by scientists from Indiana University School of Medicine, USA, have identified a mutation in a critical gene for the brain's immune system, so greatly increasing the risk of developing Alzheimer's.

Creationism in Crisis - How Human Shoulders and Elbows Show Our Common Ancestry With Chimpanzees

Our Shoulders and Elbows Began as Brakes for Climbing Apes | Dartmouth

Every week is a bad week for creationists but this one is shaping up to be especially bad, with a clutch of peer reviewed papers which either show creationist is a counter-factual superstition, or that any putative designer can only be regarded as a malevolent entity, forever plotting new ways to make its creation suffer with more effective parasite.

The first of these is a paper by Dartmouth researchers, published in The Royal Society Open Science, which shows that the human shoulder and elbow joints probably evolved in an arboreal ape ancestor on the evidence that chimpanzees have the same adaptations.

The adaptations evolved to act as brakes as the apes lowered themselves from trees, reducing their chance of falling or injuring these joints because of their relatively large bodies.

The research, and its significance for understanding human evolution, is explained in a Dartmouth news release:

Creationism in Crisis - Another Terrible Day for the Creationism Cult as Scientists Find a Predicted Massive Fossil-Like Record of the Big Bang

Vast bubble of galaxies discovered, given Hawaiian name | University of Hawaiʻi System News

Figure 13. Interactive 3D visualization of the cosmography of Ho'oleilana. All objects in the north galactic hemisphere of the Cosmicflows-4 collection of galaxy groups are seen as points in gray while those lying within the shell of Ho'oleilana, of radius 11,492 km s⁻¹ and width ±2w where w = 837 km s⁻¹, are highlighted in red. Major components in proximity to the shell are highlighted and identified by name. The Boötes supercluster lies near the center of Ho'oleilana. Our home location is at the origin of the red, green, and blue axes. These axes have lengths 10,000 km s⁻¹ and are directed toward positive SGX, SGY, and SGZ, respectively. An interactive version of this figure is available on Sketchfab at https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/hooleilana-a871418f1a3b4afc89f5cda9f3a70c53.

The thing about science is that it is supported by evidence and one of the best pieces of evidence is when something predicted by a theory turns out to be true.

And one of the things predicted by the Big Bang is massive objects produced by 3D ripples found in the material of the early universe, known as Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO).

Creationism in Crisis - Evolution By Whole Genome Duplication in Venomous Gastropods

Red-mouthed Rock Shell, Stramonita haemastoma

H. Zell via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Whole Genome Duplication and Gene Evolution in the Hyperdiverse Venomous Gastropods | Molecular Biology and Evolution | Oxford Academic

Creationist dupes will confidently tell you that genetic information can only be created with the intervention of a magic, supernatural creator because, so they claim, information theory says, no new information can arise because it's somehow analogous to the creation of energy which the First Law of Thermodynamics says can't be created.

Press them to explain why they think information is analogous to energy and they'll break off the conversation and run, usually with departing abuse or smug condescension.

They will also confidently tell you that all mutations are deleterious, so evolution is either impossible, or 'devolutionary' [sic] (© Michael J Behe).

So, show them examples of increase in genetic information being part of the explanation for evolution in some taxons because the real world has no difficulty duplicating all or part of a genome then letting natural selection select for advantageous mutations in the duplicated genes, and they'll go into denial mode or pretend to be too stupid to understand.

These examples abound in nature and most species will have remnants of gene duplication in their genome. An example of the role it played in the evolution of a highly diverse class of mollusks, the marine gastropods, many of which are venomous.

Covidiot News - How ChatGPT is Dispelling Anti-Vaxx Disinformation

ChatGPT is Debunking Myths on Social Media Around Vaccine Safety, Say Experts - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

According to a very recent report in the peer-reviewed journal, Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, the artificial intelligence chat bot, ChatGPT, is helping to dispel some of the myths surrounding vaccines, by providing the factual information that debunks the myths.

Having had all our COVID-19 vaccinations, including any seasonal boosters, and having just recovered from a mild, but unpleasant bout of it which my partner and I probably caught in France or during the flight back, I thought I would put this to the test with a little research of my own:

Creationism in Crisis - An Acute Bottleneck in Early Hominin Ancestral History - Almost a Million Years Ago

Early Ancestral Bottleneck Could’ve Spelled the End for Modern Humans----Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences

African savannah in the Middle Pleistocene (Artist's Impression)

Credit: Peter Schouten

Creationists claim, without any understanding of the biological absurdity of the claim, that the human population on Earth went through a genetic bottleneck of 8 related individuals about 4,000 years ago following a genocidal flood inflicted on Earth by an angry god, annoyed that his design wasn't working as intended.

The one thing right about that claim is the bottleneck, although it wasn't so narrow that it would have almost guaranteed extinction within a few generations because of accumulated deleterious genes and a lack of genetic diversity, it was about 1,280 individuals and it happened about 900,000 years before creationists believe the universe was created, before anatomically-modern humans had evolved.

This is the findings of Chinese researchers led by Haipeng Li, of the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, and Yi-Hsuan Pan of the Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.

First, a little about evolutionary bottlenecks and the consequences for humanity had the mythical genocidal flood actually occurred as creationists believe:

Webb Reveals New Structures Within Iconic Supernova | NASA

The age of the universe is guaranteed to get creationists tying themselves in knots while performing the most contorted mental gymnastics ad foaming at the mouth. Their problem is that they have been conditioned to dismiss scientific dating by chanting mindlessly about all radiometric dating methods being wrong because radioactive decay rates changed over time and dating the same sample by different methods gives different results.

The latter point, to a creationist, is the clincher because, to a simplistic, black vs white, thinker any discrepancy means the entire process is wrong and therefore its rational to argue that they can make 8,000 years look like several billion years.

But their problem is, dating the age of celestial objects such as the Ring Nebula does not rely on radiometric dating. Astronomers use a variety of methods to calculate the distance of the object from Earth, or in this case the JWST:

Unintelligent Design - The Ludicrous Complexity, High Risk and Prolific Waste in Bamboo Reproduction

Sagao Bamboo Forest

Antti T Nissinen

Flowering for naught: 120 years with nothing to show | Hiroshima University

If you want an example of something that no even half competent, intelligent designer would come up with, but exactly the sort of thing a mindless, undirected, utilitarian process such as evolution by natural selection, can produce, you need look no further than bamboo.

Bamboo is monocarpic, i.e., like many annual and biennial plants it flowers once, then dies. However, unlike most monocarpic plants that take just one of two, maybe a few years, to flower, bamboo of the variety hedonis takes 120 years.

To make matters worse, because they all germinated at the same time after the last flowering, all the bamboo plants in the local area flower and die at the same time, devastating an ecosystem that had been forming for 120 years, as food crop, and even providing raw materials for local crafts. And then it's gone, reverting to grassland for the three or more years it takes for the new generation to reestablish itself.

As though that weren't bad enough, researchers at Hiroshima University have now shown that there is a very low success rate in germinating seeds as most of them are sterile and fail to germinate.

The last time this variety of bamboo flowered was in 1908, so, in a few years, there is a very real risk that var. hedonis could become extinct.

The problem is explained in a Hiroshima University News release:

Creationism in Crisis - A 4.5 Billion-Year-Old Meteorite Helping to Understand How The Solar System Formed

Erg Chech 002 (EC 002) Meteorite

Credit: Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Sahara space rock 4.5 billion years old upends assumptions about the early Solar System

According to creationists, a magic supernatural god magicked a flat Earth into existence from nothing and put a dome over it to keep the water about the sky out. It then hung a sun and a moon from the dome and the sun has been orbiting Earth ever since. In its Bronze Age account of this creation, the magic god 'forgot' to say where the sun went at night, and creationists have puzzled over that problem for centuries, never reaching a conclusion.

Nowadays, 25% of Americans still believe Earth is the centre of the universe and the sun orbits it, although most of them now accept that Earth is no longer flat or has a dome over it, whilst believing the Bible, which says otherwise, is the inerrant word of the god who created everything from nothing.

Science, on the other hand, is providing evidence that the universe is some 14 billion years and the solar system, with the sun at the centre and Earth orbiting it, formed some 4.5 billion years ago.

One of the pieces of evidence is a meteorite, recovered from a sand dune in the Saharah Desert which has been dated to 4.5 billion years old, using the aluminium-26 – magnesium-26 (26Al-26Mg) decay system combined with the Uranium/Lead system.

First, a little AI information from ChatGPT3.5 about the dating methods used, their accuracy and limitations. Creationists especially might want to skip this since it refutes many of their claims about radiometric dating in general, and shows their responses to be parrot squawks, regurgitated on cue without the slightest understanding of the subject:

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Use Algae to Work Out How Plants Evolved in 600 Million Years

Mesotaenium endlicherianum
Closest to the first algae to colonize the land

Press release: Algae provide clues about 600 million years of plant evolution

No doubt to the discomfort of creationists, a team of researchers led by Professor Jan de Vries of the University of Göttingen, Germany, have worked out how terrestrial plants have evolved in the 600 million years since the first marine algae colonize the land. This colonization is believed to have occurred just once, so all terrestrial plants are descended from that single colonizing species.

Note the question was not whether, but how this evolutionary process occurred. There was never a shadow of doubt that it was an evolutionary process in which there was no evidence of magic or supernatural interference with chemistry and physics.

Using the results of a series of experiments that have been running in the research lab in Gottingen for over 25 years, the team were able to identify key evolutionary changes that occurred as a prequel to land colonization and which are still to be found in terrestrial plants after 600 million years of evolutionary diversification.

Creationists must now draw on their repertoire of rehearsed dismissals of the science to cope with these finding and maintain the myth that land plants were created as is in one day about 8000 years ago, and have not evolved since:

Redefine evolution ("They're still plants!").
The dates are wrong ("Radiometric dating is flawed; it wasn’t hundreds of millions; it was just hundreds of years!").
The scientists are lying ("It's a Satanic conspiracy to turn people away from Jesus!")

First a little AI background on marine algae and when the transition to terrestrial living occurred:

Creationism in Crisis - 520 Million-Year-Old Common Ancestor of Crustaceans and Insects Found in the Fossil Record

Artists impression of Kylinxia zhangi in life

X. Wang

Three-eyed distant relative of insects and crustaceans reveals amazing detail of early animal evolution | News | University of Leicester

A team from the University of Leicester, Yunnan Key Laboratory for Palaeobiology and the Institute of Palaeontology at Yunnan University, Chengjiang Fossil Museum, and the Natural History Museum in London, have redescribed a unique fossil animal from rocks nearly 520 million years old that fills in a gap in our understanding of the evolution of animals known as arthropods.

The animal, Kylinxia zhangi, simply shouldn’t be there if creationists claims were true. It is from almost 520 million years before Earth and the life on it was created and its one of those 'transitional' species showing characteristics of not just two different species, but two entire classes of the arthropod phylum. As such, of course, they are evidence of the evolutionary common origin of those two classes within the major taxon.

They're the sort of species that would have any creationist scratching their heads and declaring, "But they're still er... insects.... er... crustaceans"! before hurriedly redefining 'kind' as a major taxonomic class that includes hundreds of thousands of disparate species with different appendages and body plans of the sort that the same creationist will assure you can't have evolved because 'macro-evolution', i.e., evolving new appendages, body plans, etc., is impossible, while 'micro-evolution, i.e., evolution within the same 'kind' is now perfectly possible. 25 years ago, it was impossible until they realised no Ark could be big enough to contain 2 (or 7)of each known and extinct species.

So, the standard knee-jerk response will be necessary: the scientists lied; the scientists got the dates wrong; the dating techniques are flawed; the scientists are part of a world-wide satanic conspiracy to turn people away from Jesus - even the Chines scientists for whom Jesus and Satan are as mythical as are the Chinese Taoist gods to an American Christian fundamentalist.

But, leaving aside the arrogant cultural chauvinism in assuming the locally popular god in America is the only real one, I wonder how many creationists can explain why the dating methods used were wrong by many orders of magnitude, returning dates in the hundreds of millions of years when the real date should have been about 4,000 years.

The find and its significance is explained in a University of Leicester news release:

Creationism in Crisis - New Zealand Fossil Hoard From 3 million years Before Creationists Believe Life was Created

Shell fossils from the Māngere Shellbed fossil fauna.

Auckland wastewater pipe dig reveals 'fossil treasure trove' - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

Not only is the age of these marine fossils a problem for creationism, so is the composition. It's a central dogma of creationism that all fossil deposits and rock strata are the result of a single genocidal flood in which 'all living substance' was destroyed - including and especially terrestrial animals, so any deposit of fossils resulting from that alleged flood should contain terrestrial species and plants. Not only that, but they should be from all over the globe, not just the local fauna because in a global flood there would be no barriers and dead animals would be free to float anywhere.

And yet here we have a fossil deposit consisting wholly of marine species from a particular time, found in a narrow range of habitats local to New Zealand at that time. There are no Eurasian, African or American species and not even any Australian species - from just a short float away.

The fossils were found by workers laying a new wastewater pipeline in a major civil engineering project. The find and its significance is described in research paper in the Taylor & Francis journal New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics and an accompanying news release by Taylor & Francis:

Unintelligent Design News - How the Human Y Chromosome Evolved

The 'weird' male Y chromosome has finally been fully sequenced. Can we now understand how it works, and how it evolved?

An international team of scientists led by researchers from the National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA, together with colleagues from the University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA, the University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA, have finally completed the task of sequencing the entire human Y chromosome from end to end or T2T (Telomere-to-Telomere). This completes the entire human genome now sequenced T2T.

Unsurprisingly, they found that most of the DNA was non-functional junk, containing the remnants of ancient retroviruses and duplicated genes that had then mutated.

The X and Y chromosomes, or sex chromosomes, are how gender is determined in humans and other mammals. Females have two copies of the X chromosome while males have one of each. Males inherit their Y chromosome from their father.

The significance of the research, and how it informs our understanding of the evolution of the Y chromosome from one of the two X chromosomes that females carry is the subject of an article in The Conversation by Professor Jenny Graves Jenny Graves, La Trobe University, Australia. Her article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons Licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism in Crisis - Science is Revising Its Thinking About Human Origins - But It's No Comfort For Creationists

Graecopithecus freybergi, possibly a contemporary of Andoluvius turkae, lived 7.2 million years ago in the dust-laden savannah of the Athens Basin. (Artist's impression)

Image credit: Velizar Simeonovski.

New ancient ape from Türkiye challenges the story of human origins | Faculty of Arts & Science

Science might have the human evolutionary story wrong. But before creationists get over-excited, no-one is suggesting it was all done by magic without any ancestors just a few thousand years ago. The new thinking is over the where, not the how of evolution. That humans and the other apes evolved from a common ancestor is not in any doubt. The question is only where that common ancestor lived - Eurasia or Africa?

This discovery in Turkey adds support to the idea that the African apes, including humans, evolved from an ancestor that migrated into Africa from Eurasia via the Eastern Mediterranean, between 9 and 7 million years ago, having evolved in Western Europe and lived there for some 5 million years.

The news release from the University of Toronto, where the leader of an international team, Professor David Begun, is based, explains the find and its significance for the human evolution story:

The non-photosynthetic, parasitic orchid, Gastrodia foetida

Fungi-eating plants and flies team up for reproduction | Research at Kobe

A characteristic of evolved systems is that they tend towards increasing complexity, the antithesis of an intelligently designed system, which should be minimally complex for the simple reason that complexity is expensive in terms of energy and resource, and more likely to go wrong.

Unnecessary complexity and prolific waste, which are normal components of evolved systems, are the strongest arguments against intelligent design and for a mindless, utilitarian, near-enough-is-good-enough, process such as evolution by natural selection.

And just such a case of quite ludicrous complexity has been revealed by Kenji Suetsugu of Kobe University Graduate School of Science, Kobe, Japan.

Sadly, the paper in Ecology is behind a paywall, however the research and its significance is the subject of Kobe University press release:

Creationism in Crisis - Another 'Uniquely Human' Trait is Also Present in Bonobos

Bonobo, Pan Paniscus Shares 'uniquely human' trait

Photo: Leon Harberkorn

Deutsches Primatenzentrum: Bonobos grow similarly to humans

The problem creationists have with trying to maintain the myth that humans are a special creation by citing uniquely human traits, is that science keeps on showing that these are not unique after all, and in fact support the idea of common origins.

One such 'uniquely human' trait was thought to be the adolescent growth spurt where children have a rapid increase in height soon after puberty. Now researchers led by Dr. Verena Behringe of the Endocrinology lab at the German Primate Center (DPZ), Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Göttingen, Germany, have shown that our closest relatives, bonobos, Pan paniscus, have a similar growth spurt at a similar stage in the development and that other primates may also have similar growth spurts.

The research is explained in a DPZ News release:

Gua Sireh, Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia

This cave on Borneo has been used for 20,000 years – and we’ve now dated rock art showing colonial resistance 400 years ago

According to creationists, about 8-10,000 years ago a god made of nothing made everything in the Universe out of nothing using nothing more than magic words. It also created humans and all the other animals a few days later. Then, in a fit of anger because its creation hadn't turned out the way it had designed it, it killed almost all of it in a genocidal flood, reducing the human population of Earth to just 8 related people.

While all that was happening, there were people using a large cave in Sarawak on the island of Borneo, in Malaysia from 35-43,000 years before Earth existed and up until and including European colonisation about 400 years ago. These people left a record of their existence and cultural history in the form of drawings on the cave wall. There is no record of a genocidal flood, and nothing about a god creating other people about 10,000 years ago.
But, according to creationists, just a few thousand years ago the island of Borneo was repopulated by people from the Middle East, who, although all descended from 8 related individuals of Middle Eastern origin, mysteriously adopted the same artistic style as the antediluvian population, forgot all about the genocidal flood and the god who caused it, invented their own gods and continued as though nothing unusual had happened.

That is the sort of mental gymnastics a creationist needs to perform to avoid the dreadful prospect of wondering if they could be wrong.

First, a little about the caves in Sarawak and the art and artifacts found in them:

Creationism in Crisis - How a Deleterious Gene Can Survive in a Population

Coyote tobacco, Nicotiana attenuata

Stan Shebs via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

It all depends on the genetic diversity | Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology

Mutations in genes that are essential for defence against predator attack are usually deleterious and would be expected to be quickly eliminated from a population, however, occasionally, the same mutation can convey an advantage which it is able to assert in conditions where predator populations are low, and this is especially true if wide genetic diversity within the population makes it more likely that the mutation can operate synergistically with other genes.

This can lead to a dynamic situation in which, in periods of low predation, the mutation can increase, or at least remain at a stable level in the population, and, in periods of high predation, it can be reduced. This dynamic can result in deleterious genes being retained in a population for much longer than would be expected if they were wholly deleterious.

An example of this was found recently by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Jena, Germany, in a wild member of the tobacco family, Nicotiana attenuata. Their finding is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS)

The research and its significance are explained in a press release:

10 Stages of the Peer Review Process: A Step-by-Step Guide for Authors | The International journal of Innovative Research & Development

Creationist frauds tell their dupes that the scientific process of peer review, is a device to ensure conformity to scientific dogma and to prevent unorthodox (i.e., creationist) opinions from being published in respected journals.

This helps maintain the delusion that there is real scientific support for creationism and that many more scientists are really creationists than is apparent from the scientific literature.

It also plays to conspiracism, which is a normal component of creationism, caused by the same childish teleological thinking defect in an adult, by helping to maintain the delusion that scientists and publishers of scientific journals, periodicals and books, and their staff, are all part of a gigantic international Satanic conspiracy to turn people away from God and destroy people's trust in the church and the Bible.

The truth is that peer review is simply a device to ensure the research was conducted with sufficient rigor and proper controls, that the authors have provided the required standard of evidence to support their claims and that their conclusions are indeed supported by the evidence. It also helps insure against plagiarism since the expert reviewers will very likely be aware of the work of others in their field of expertise.

Here, for example is the peer-review process as outlined in a blog by the International Journal of Innovative Research and Development (IJIRD):

Creationism in Crisis - Urban Great Tits Have Beome Paler Than Their Rural Relatives

European great tit, Parus major.

Source

Urban great tits have paler plumage than their forest-living relatives | Lund University

In an example of how the environment, and in this case probably the availability of different food items, can cause changes on which natural selection can act, a study by an international team or reserchers led by Pablo Salmón of Lund University, Sweden, has shown that great tits, Parus major living in an urban environment have paler breasts than those living in a forest environment.

Although this is probably not an evolutionary change, i.e., a change in the frequency of alleles in the population gene pools, as the cause is probably dietary difference, it illustrates how an environmental change can produce changes in features on which natural selection can act to bring about true evolutionary changes, and so begin the process of allopatric speciation.

Of course, there will be creationists who will misrepresent the scientific fact of evolution, either deliberately, or mendaciously in order to mislead others, who will dismiss this as "not evolution", not for the reason given above but because "they're still great tits/still birds" and haven't grown a new structure or turned into an unrelated taxon.

The research is explained in a Lund University press release:

Creationism in Crisis - Why Our Ancestors Evolved to Walk Upright - 21 Million Years Before Creationists Believe Earth Existed

Morotopithecus bishopii

Wooded grasslands flourished in Africa 21 million years ago – new research forces a rethink of ape evolution

Scientists are changing their mind about when and why the ancestors of hominins evolved to walk upright - but it's no comfort for creationists, as it all happened 21 million years before they believe Earth existed and only needs the standard Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection to explain it.

There is no doubt about how it evolved. Needless to say, as always, the paleoanthropologists found nothing that needed magic or a supernatural deity to explain it.

The scientists have published their findings in two papers in Science, one by a team led by Daniel Peppe, Associate Professor, Department of Geosciences, Baylor University, and the second led by Laura M. MacLatchy, Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan.

Three of Laura MacLatchy's team 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 - Fijian Folk Tale Has Nothing About a Global Flood or The God Who Allegedly Caused It!

Nabukelevu, Kadav, Fiji.
Eruption remembered in riddles and fantastical oral traditions.

A dramatic volcano eruption changed lives in Fiji 2,500 years ago. 100 generations have kept the story alive

2,500 years ago, just 1,500 years after creationists believe the human population of the world had been reduced to just 8 people in a genocidal flood, there was a volcanic eruption on one end of the island of Kadavu in the south of the group of Pacific islands now known as the Fijian Islands.

The people who were already living there, having presumably migrated there from the Middle East in just 1,500 years, remembered the details of the eruption and passed them on, complete with the local gods to whom they attributed the events, not in writing, but encoded in riddles and a symbolic oral tradition which "included fantastic beings flying through the sky, fighting each another furiously and noisily, drinking the ocean dry, and throwing giant spears with force enough to leave massive holes in rocky headlands", according to research by a group of scientists including Professor Patrick Nunn of the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia.

Curiously, if the Bible tales of a global flood had been true, people to whom a local volcanic eruption was such an important event in their history that they remembered it in such an elaborate way, regarded a genocidal global flood as not worth a mention, and the god who allegedly caused it as unworthy of inclusion in their pantheon.

This is the ludicrously unlikely scenario that creationists have to try to rationalise in order to avoid considering that their favourite Bronze Age fairy tales are anything other than literal truths.

The research which has decoded the Fijian oral traditions is the subject of an article by Professor Nunn in The Conversation. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Friday 22 September 2023

Wednesday 20 September 2023

Monday 18 September 2023

Sunday 17 September 2023

Saturday 16 September 2023

Friday 15 September 2023

Thursday 14 September 2023

Wednesday 13 September 2023

Tuesday 12 September 2023

Monday 11 September 2023

Saturday 9 September 2023

Friday 8 September 2023

Thursday 7 September 2023

Wednesday 6 September 2023

Tuesday 5 September 2023

Sunday 3 September 2023

Friday 1 September 2023

Thursday 31 August 2023

Wednesday 30 August 2023

Tuesday 29 August 2023

Saturday 26 August 2023

Friday 25 August 2023

Thursday 24 August 2023

Wednesday 23 August 2023

Tuesday 22 August 2023

Sunday 20 August 2023

Saturday 19 August 2023