Creationism in Crisis - How Multicellularity Evolved - With New Genetic Information

Brown Algae

Evolved within past 200,000 years

Green Alaga, Stigeoclonium sp.

Via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Macroalgal deep genomics illuminate multiple paths to aquatic, photosynthetic multicellularity: Molecular Plant

What are the main types of algae and how do they differ? Algae are classified into several main groups based on their characteristics, including pigmentation, cellular structure, and mode of reproduction. The main types of algae include:

1. Diatoms (Bacillariophyta):
   • Diatoms are single-celled algae characterized by their unique glass-like silica cell walls called frustules.
   • They are typically found in freshwater and marine environments.
   • Diatoms are important primary producers and play a significant role in the global carbon cycle.
2. Green Algae (Chlorophyta):
   • Green algae encompass a diverse group of algae that are mostly freshwater but also found in marine and terrestrial environments.
   • They contain chlorophyll a and b, giving them a green color, similar to land plants.
   • Green algae can be unicellular, colonial, filamentous, or multicellular, with a wide range of morphologies.
3. Red Algae (Rhodophyta):
   • Red algae are predominantly marine algae, although some species can also be found in freshwater.
   • They contain pigments like chlorophyll a and various accessory pigments, including phycobiliproteins, giving them shades of red, pink, or purple.
   • Red algae often have complex multicellular structures and are important contributors to coral reef ecosystems.
4. Brown Algae (Phaeophyta):
   • Brown algae are primarily marine algae, commonly found in cold-water habitats.
   • They contain chlorophyll a and c, along with fucoxanthin, which gives them their characteristic brown color.
   • Brown algae can range from small filamentous forms to large, complex seaweeds like kelps.
5. Blue-Green Algae (Cyanobacteria or Cyanophyta):
   • Despite being called algae, cyanobacteria are actually prokaryotic organisms, classified within the domain Bacteria.
   • They are photosynthetic and often form colonies or filaments.
   • Cyanobacteria can be found in diverse habitats, including freshwater, marine environments, soil, and even extreme environments like hot springs.
   • Some cyanobacteria can produce toxins under certain conditions, leading to harmful algal blooms (HABs) and posing risks to aquatic life and human health.

These main types of algae differ in their pigmentation, cellular structure, habitat preferences, and ecological roles. While some are beneficial and essential for ecosystem health, others can become problematic under certain conditions, such as nutrient pollution or climate change. Understanding the characteristics and ecological functions of different types of algae is crucial for managing and conserving aquatic ecosystems.

Today’s refutation of creationists dogma comes in the form of an open access paper just published in the Cell Press journal, Molecular Plant. Research biologists have revealed how multicellularity evolved several times independently in algae, and how many of the new genes were acquired initially by viruses.

This gives the lie to creationist claims that new information can't arise in the genome because of some half-baked confusion of information with energy and a nonsensical assumption that new genetic information would need to come from nothing.

And of course, like about 99.99% of the history of life on Earth, it all happened in that very long period of pre-'Creation Week' history between Earth forming in an accretion disc around the sun and creationism's little god creating a small flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle East out of nothing, according to creationist mythology

In information provided by Cell Press ahead of publication, the scientists at New York Abu Dhabi University and Technology Innovation Institute, United Arab Emirates, said:

A deep dive into macroalgae genetics has uncovered the genetic underpinnings that enabled macroalgae, or "seaweed," to evolve multicellularity. Three lineages of macroalgae developed multicellularity independently and during very different time periods by acquiring genes that enable cell adhesion, extracellular matrix formation, and cell differentiation, researchers report April 12 in the journal Molecular Plant. Surprisingly, many of these multicellular-enabling genes had viral origins. The study, which increased the total number of sequenced macroalgal genomes from 14 to 124, is the first to investigate macroalgal evolution through the lens of genomics.

This is a big genomic resource that will open the door for many more studies. Macroalgae play an important role in global climate regulation and ecosystems, and they have numerous commercial and ecoengineering applications, but until now, there wasn't a lot of information about their genomes.

Alexandra Mystikou, co-first author
Division of Science and Math
New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Macroalgae live in both fresh and seawater and are complex multicellular organisms with distinct organs and tissues, in contrast to microalgae, which are microscopic and unicellular.

There are three main groups of macroalgae -- red (Rhodophyta), green (Chlorophyta), and brown (Ochrophyta) -- that independently evolved multicellularity at very different times and in very different environmental conditions.

Rhodophytes and Chlorophytes both evolved multicellularity over a billion years ago, while Ochrophytes only became multicellular in the past 200,000 years.

To investigate the evolution of macroalgal multicellularity, the researchers sequenced 110 new macroalgal genomes from 105 different species originating from fresh and saltwater habitats in diverse geographies and climates.

The researchers identified several metabolic pathways that distinguish macroalgae from microalgae, some of which may be responsible for the success of invasive macroalgal species.

Many of these metabolic genes appear to have been donated by algae-infecting viruses, and genes with a viral origin were especially prevalent in the more recently evolved brown algae.

They found that macroalgae acquired many new genes that are not present in microalgae on their road to multicellularity.

For all three lineages, key acquisitions included genes involved in cell adhesion (which enables cells to stick together), cell differentiation (which allows different cells to develop specialized functions), cell communication, and inter-cellular transport.

Many brown algal genes associated with multicellular functions had signature motifs that were only otherwise present in the viruses that infect them. It's kind of a wild theory that's only been hinted at in the past, but from our data it looks like these horizontally transferred genes were critical factors for evolving multicellularity in the brown algae.

David Nelson, co-first author
Division of Science and Math
New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Creates Genetic Defects

UC Irvine-led research team builds first tandem repeat expansions genetic reference maps – UCI News

Creationists assure us that creating new genetic information is impossible without magic performed by the magic creator because they have been sold some half-baked notion that genetic information follows the same laws of physics as energy, so can't be created according to the Third Law of Thermodynamics.

The fact that this is demonstrably wrong since gene duplication is readily observable doesn't stop them trotting out the same refuted claims time after time, but then to a creationist, having a claim refuted is not seen as a reason not to try to get away with it again later. You'll see this repeatedly as an apologist fraud such as William Lane Craig, Ken Ham or Michael J Behe will be comprehensively refuted in a public debate one day, only to try the self-same argument a day or two later on a different opponent in front of a different audience.

Sadly for creationists, however, this tactic leads them down a cul-de-sac where they are left arguing that DNA duplication must have been intelligently designed and, so they will also claim, evidence of intelligent design is evidence that their favourite god (and no other!) exists.

Creationism in Crisis - How Rusty Patched Bumblebee Genes Show Evidence of Evolution Under Intense Selection Pressure

The rusty-patched bumblebee, Bombus affinis

Photo by Jay Watson

The rusty-patched bumblebee, once common in the United States, has declined from about 90% of its former range.

Photo by Jay Watson

Rusty-patched bumblebee’s struggle for survival found in its genes - Warner College of Natural Resources

Evolution, or more precisely change in allele frequency over time, inevitably records selection pressures on a species resulting in a genome which, when correctly read and compared to predecessors, should tell the story of changes in the species environment.

This principle is illustrated by the threatened species of bumblebee, the rusty patch bumblebee, Bombus affinis, which has recently declined by about 90% in the USA and is now considered an endangered species. If this rate of decline continues the species will probably be extinct within 20 years. This level of intense selection pressure has inevitably left its mark on the genome of the species.

On of the problems facing the species is the result of the way bees breed. The queen can normally produce two sorts of egg - a fertilised, diploid egg which will develop into a female and a haploid, unfertilised egg which will develop into a male or drone. The problem arises when there is a high level of inbreeding, due, for example, to a small population - which the bee is now facing. In that situation, the female can produce diploid males because both sets of chromosomes can be identical. Diploid males are normally sterile so reducing the breeding success of the local species.

Creationism in Crisis - A New Look at Bird Evolution - Not Whether, But How!

Wompoo fruit-dove from Queensland, Australia.

Credit: Daniel J. Field

A greater flamingo, Mallorca, Spain.

Credit: Daniel J. Field

We’ve had bird evolution all wrong - News - University of Florida

To a child-like black vs white creationist, science changing its mind is science admitting it was wrong - which means it's probably wrong this time too, so all of science can be dismissed as wrong. Unless of course, it's some pseudo-science purporting to support creationism, then it's absolutely incontrovertible proof of creationism, because there is nothing a creationist craves more than proof of creationism provided by the same science they despise so much when it refutes creationism yet again.

So, news that a team of researchers at Florida University have re-examined the genetic evidence for the evolution of birds and revised the family tree will be music to the ears of any creationist fraud looking for some science to misrepresent. However, this research does nothing of the sort, and merely confirms what we already know - that birds diversified from a common ancestor by an evolutionary process. The debate is never about whether that happened, but how and exactly when.

What misled taxonomists was a chunk of DNA that has remained more or less unchanged for some 60 million years. By a process which is poorly understood, this large chunk of DNA avoids recombination during the process of egg and sperm production. Using this section alone gave one family tree, which put doves and flamingoes as close cousins, but using the whole genome gave a different family tree which makes doves and flamingoes much more distantly related (though of course, still related by common ancestry).

The research team have published their findings, open access, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) and explain them in a University of Florida news release:

Creationism in Crisis - An Evolutionary 'Family Tree' For All Living Birds

Male wood duck, Aix sponsa

After 10 years of work, landmark study reveals new ‘tree of life’ for all birds living today

The results of a ten-year study, published today in Nature will come as a huge disappointment for any creationists who find the courage to read it (and who have the ability to understand what they're reading - which for creationists is probably asking too much.

Those still under the delusion that mainstream biologists are abandoning the TOE in favour of creationism with its magic and a suppositional supernatural entity, will be especially disappointed. Not only does it show birds have been around for very much longer than creationists believe the universe has been it also shows that the team of scientists are firmly committed to the Theory of Evolution as the only scientific explanation for biodiversity.

Two of the biologists who co-authored the paper along with a large international team of biologists, Jacqueline Nguyen, Scientific Officer in Ornithology, Australian Museum, and ARC DECRA Fellow, Flinders University and Simon Ho, Professor of Molecular Evolution, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney, have described their findings in an article in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism in Crisis - How Batesian Mimicry In The Female Diadem Butterfly Evolved - Convergently

Female Diadem Butterfly, Hypolimnas misippus

Photograph: A Coetzer

The female Diadem (bottom left) mimics the African Queen (top left). The male Diadem (right) keeps a distinct pattern to attract mates

Scientists discover how Diadem butterfly mimics African Queen - News

This is the second in a sudden spate of research papers that casually and unintentionally refute creationism without even trying, simply by revealing the facts. It deals with the evolution of Batesian mimicry in a species of butterfly.

Scientists working at the universities of Exeter, Edinburgh and Cambridge, and Mpala Research Centre in Kenya have discovered the genetic basis for the clear example of Batesian mimicry to be found in the female of the pantropical species of butterfly, the Diadem butterfly, Hypolimnas misippus, which closely resembles the toxic African queen butterfly, Danaus chrysippus.

Batesian mimicry is the natural phenomenon where an otherwise harmless species evolves to resemble a harmful or distasteful species as a defence mechanism. The prerequisite for Batesian mimicry to evolve is that a prey species is predated upon by the predator of a harmful species which coexists in the same locality. The predator learns to avoid the dangerous or distasteful species so any other species that comes to resemble the harmful or distasteful species might be mistaken for it and avoided. The more closely it comes to resemble the avoided species, the more likely it is to survive and reproduce.

Creationism in Crisis - How Hair Evolved From A Keratin Gene In A Frog-Human Common Ancestor

Western clawed toad, Xenopus tropicalis

Genetic basis for the evolution of hair discovered in the clawed frog

Western Clawed Frog, Xenopus tropicalis
Carries the precursor gene for mammalian hair.

"When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions" - Claudius in Hamlet.

That was never more true of creationism than it is today with the publication of not just the usual casual refutation of creationism we've come to expect most days, but of four disparate papers each of which casually and unintentionally refutes creationism to anyone who understands biology and is familiar with the basic dogmas of the creation cult, simply by revealing real-world facts.

The papers range from this one, which shows how mammalian hair has its genetic origins in a common human-amphibian ancestor, through how a female butterfly evolved Batesian mimicry, through the discovery of a giant Amazonian dolphin from 16 million years before creationists think Earth existed, to how early modern humans survived a super-volcano eruption in South-West Ethiopia a mere 64,000 years before 'Creation Week'.

With so many papers I'll do my best to cover all of them in the next few days, so keep checking back!

Firstly, the evolutionary origin of mammalian hair.

The gene for this originated in a common ancestor of humans (and the other mammals) and a modern clawed frog. The gene controls the growth of keratin, of which the claws of a clawed frog are composed, as is mammalian hair. The evidence for this common origin was found by researchers from the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, led by led by Leopold Eckhart. The team have published their findings open access in Nature Communications and described their work in a Medical University of Vienna new release:

Unintelligent Design - How Epigenetic Settings Are Passed To Daughter Cells - Even William Heath Robinson Would Be Impressed

Cracking Epigenetic Inheritance: HKU Biologists Discovered the Secrets of How Gene Traits are Passed on - Press Releases - Media - HKU

It all started when single-celled organisms started to form colonies of like-minded individuals. The easiest way to do it was for the two daughter cells of a dividing cell to stick together instead of going their own way. They in turn would have had more daughter cells until they formed large clump of cells, but, unless the cells began to perform distinct functions, there was no advantage to forming clumps like that instead of each cell going its own way and fending for itself. Fortunately, there were no large predators around, otherwise a clump of cells would have made a tasty snack and the whole idea would have been abandoned as too risky by half, and we would be stuck now with a world of single-celled organisms and nothing else.

However, with the trial and error which characterises biological development, some of the cells in the clump began to perform specialist functions. For example, as the clump got larger, specialist cells would have been needed to exchange gasses with the environment or the cells at the centre would have been deprived of oxygen and their waste in the form of carbon dioxide would have accumulated because diffusing across a large mass of cells would be too slow to keep up with production and the supply of oxygen would be too slow to keep up with the demand. The same thing applied to getting nutrients into the center of the clump.

So, the clumps which had specialist cells fared better in the competition for resources than those which were just undifferentiated clumps. In fact, the clumps with specialised cells would probably have eaten the undifferentiated clumps and become predators. And with predators there was pressure for increased specialisation for movement, ingestion and excretion, for more efficient respiration and for reproduction. And predation also produced pressure for more motility, for senses like sight and smell and maybe hearing and as the organisms became more complex so they needed nervous systems to coordinate their activities and process and respond to the stimuli their senses were receiving from their environment and some would have evolved defensive armour such as scales and spikes and hard shells and internal structures like cartilage and bone to give their bodies shape and form and to make their swimming apparatus stiffer and more powerful.

But what they never managed to do was find a different way to produce all the different specialist cells by a different method to that used by their single-celled ancestors, so every cell in their body had the full genome whether they needed it or not, and more often than not, they didn't need most of it. A bone cell doesn't need to do what a nerve cell does, and a nerve cell doesn't need to do what a muscle cell does, and neither muscle nor nerve cells need to make bone, and what else needs to make elbow skin other than an elbow skin cell, except perhaps a scrotum skin cell? Yet they all have the genes for doing everything any one cell needs to do.

So, cue creationism's intelligent [sic] designer who has been designing and modifying all these different clumps of specialised cells but who, for some reason, seems incapable of recognising that its designs are heading for disaster unless it can think up a way to make sure each specialised cell has only the genes it needs. For reasons which no creationist apologist has ever managed to explain, their putative designer always behaves as though it can't undo a bad design and start again but is compelled to try to make the best of what it has muddled through with so far. In every way, creationism’s 'intelligent [sic] designer' behaves just like a mindless process operating without a plan, handicapped by acute amnesia, and constantly surprising itself with a new problem it designed just yesterday.

Just like the eccentric British designer and cartoonist, William Heath Robinson, no solution to a problem can be too complex even if it creates a new problem for which another overly complex solution has to be found. Unlikely objects, designed for a completely different purpose, will be pressed into service; a stepladder will be balanced precariously on top of a piano and an umbrella will be used to push a button when prodded by a sink plunger swinging on a length of knotted string. A labour-saving device for peeling potatoes will take half a dozen, intense and serious-looking men to operate it and peeling the potatoes will take considerably longer than had each man been given a potato peeler and left to get on with it. Eggs will be fried in a frying pan held over a candle lit by a match rubbed against a matchbox which swings into action when released by a lever when the scuttle-full of coal, or the boulder suspended on knotted string, lands on it.

Creationism in Crisis - How Genomic Imprinting Evolved - Unintelligently

Microscopic fluorescence image of a C.tropicalis mother worm. The worm carries eggs loaded with a toxin (red) which is expressed from a Toxin-Antidote selfish genetic element only when it was maternally inherited.

© Pinelopi Pliota/IMBA

Revealing the evolutionary origin of genomic imprinting 

Caenorhabditis elegans

Genomic imprinting is the process by which genes are suppressed by epigenetic settings that differ depending on whether the genes come from the father or the mother in a sexually-reproducing species.

This is an example of the sort of Heath Robinson machine which a natural, mindless evolutionary process can and does produce and which distinguishes evolved systems from intelligently designed processes. It comes from the fact that multicellular organism uses the same method to replicate their cells as their single-celled ancestors used, yet only need a small selection of the genes depending on how specialised the particular cells are.

But the reason for genomic imprinting involves something even more embarrassing to any creationists who understand it - it probably evolved out of an arms race not between the organism and a foreign parasite but between the organism and one of its genes that had gone rogue and turned into a 'jumping' gene or 'selfish genetic element':

What exactly are 'selfish genetic elements' and what do they do? Selfish genetic elements are DNA sequences that have evolved to enhance their own transmission to the next generation, often at the expense of the organism's overall fitness. These elements can manipulate various cellular and reproductive processes to increase their own propagation within a population, sometimes even if it is detrimental to the host organism.

One well-known example of selfish genetic elements is transposable elements, also known as jumping genes. These DNA sequences have the ability to move or copy themselves within the genome, potentially disrupting genes or regulatory sequences in the process. While transposable elements can sometimes contribute to genetic variation and evolution, they can also cause harmful mutations or genomic instability.

Another example of selfish genetic elements is meiotic drive elements. These elements bias their own transmission during meiosis, the process by which gametes (sperm and eggs) are formed. Meiotic drive can result in the preferential transmission of one allele (variant of a gene) over another, leading to distortions in genetic inheritance patterns within a population.

Selfish genetic elements can have significant implications for evolutionary processes, population genetics, and genome stability. They can influence patterns of genetic diversity, contribute to speciation, and even drive the evolution of complex biological systems. However, they can also pose challenges for organisms by causing genetic disorders or reducing overall reproductive success.

In the case of the nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans, this arms race has produced a truly bizarre result, and something only an unintelligent, mindless designer, or a malevolent designer, could come up with, known as toxic ascaris, or TAs:

Creationism in Crisis - Evolution By Loss Of Complexity - How A Mutation Cost Our Ancestors Their Tails

A mutation cost our simian ancestors their tails

Photo: Getty / Steve Adams

Change in Genetic Code May Explain How Human Ancestors Lost Tails | NYU Langone News

In that distant, pre-'Creation Week' history of Life On Earth, 25 million years before creationists think Earth was created out of nothing, and all living things on it were magicked into existence without ancestors, a 'jumping gene' inserted a short length of DNA termed AluY, into the gene which controls tail length in monkeys, and the resulting tailless monkeys went on to diversify into the apes - gibbons, siamangs, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and the hominins which were to evolve into the Australopithecines and the Homo genus, including Homo sapiens, all of which still possess that short insertion in the TBXT gene, which otherwise is identical to one of the gene which grow the tail of the simians.

As an example of design, it is one of the least intelligent, since, instead of removing all the genes required to grow a tail, the 'designer' simply broke an essential gene and left all the others to do nothing apart from having to be replicated in every cell in every ape that ever lived, as an example of the massive waste and unnecessary complexity that characterises an evolved process and gives the lie to any notion of any intelligence being involved.

By inserting the AluY snippet into a mouse BBXT gene the researchers found a variety of tail effects, including mice born without tails. They also showed that there was a small increase in the incidence on neural tube defects (spina bifida) in mice.

Quite why tailless would have been selected for during the evolution of these ancestors of the modern apes is a matter for speculation; maybe a tail was becoming an encumbrance for a brachiating mode of locomotion as opposed to running along the top of branches and jumping from branch to branch, which the smaller monkeys used, where a tail was an important balance organ. For a heavier ape hanging beneath the branches by its arms, there would have been less need for a balance organ and a tail would have been liable to damage and infection.

How this was discovered by a team led by researchers at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, is the subject of an open access paper in Nature and a NYU Langone Health news release:

Creationism in Crisis - What Made Snakes Able To Evolve So Quickly 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'?

Lialis burtonis. Not a snake, but a legless gecko.

Image credit: Pascal Title, University of Michigan/Stony Brook University.

A false boa, Pseudoboa nigra, eating a lava lizard, Tropidurus hispidus.

Image credit: Ivan Prates, University of Michigan.

Snakes do it faster, better: How a group of scaly, legless lizards hit the evolutionary jackpot | University of Michigan News

100 million years ago the ancestral snake was just another lizard but then suddenly (on the evolutionary timescale) something happened that enables snakes to diversify into thousands of different species while the other lizards plodded along slowly, diversifying at a much slower rate than the snakes.

But what was it that allowed this sudden radiation into so many species and why did it give the snakes the edge over their cousins the lizards? It was an event that an international team led by University of Michigan biologists have called an evolutionary singularity, in an analogy with whatever was at the start of the Big Bang.

The team has estimated that snakes have evolved up to three times faster than lizard, an ability that was facilitated by three things - an elongated body and loss of legs; enhanced sensory detection enabling them to find and track prey, and a flexible skull that enabled them to swallow large prey.

In an attempt to understand this, the team assembled a large database of lizard and snake diets from examining the stomach contents of tens of thousands of museum specimens. They also sequenced the partial genomes of almost 1,000 species from which they were able to construct the evolutionary trees of lizards and snakes.

Their findings are the subject of a paper in Science and of a news release from the University of Michigan:

Creationism in Crisis - 250 Million Years of Butterfly And Moth Evolution

Butterfly and moth genomes mostly unchanged despite 250 million years of evolution

It'll no doubt come as a surprise to those creationists who believe Earth was created from nothing by magic just about 10,000 years ago to learn that the butterflies and moths have been evolving for 250 million years.

It'll maybe come as a bigger surprise to those creationists who have been fooled into believing that the Theory of Evolution is being discarded by mainstream biologists in favour of their childish fairy tale of magic and supernatural spirits, that yet another group of mainstream biologists regard it as the foundation of modern biology, and are participating in the Darwin Tree of Life Project, which aims to sequence the genome of 70,000 eukaryote species from Britain and Ireland, to learn their evolutionary relationships.

This project also contributes to the much larger, Earth BioGenome Project.

One of the teams taking part in this project, based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, has just completed the sequencing of 200 high-quality genome of the Lepidoptera order of insects (moths and butterflies) and discovered some interesting facts about the evolution of the order, including that there are some elements in the genomes, which they term 'Merian elements' after the 17th century entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian, which have remained relatively stable over the 250 million years the order has been evolving.

The research is published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution and is described in a Welcome Sanger Institute news release:

Creationism in Crisis - 275 Million New Human Genetic Variants in USA Alone - Why So Many?

275 Million New Genetic Variants Identified in NIH Precision Medicine Data | All of Us Research Program | NIH

Researchers at the American NIH have identified 275 million previously unknown genetic variants in samples from 250,000 representative American adults who participated in their All of Us research program. Half the participants were of non-European ancestry. Nearly 4 million of these newly discovered variants are from areas of the genome tied to known disease risks.

Let's consider that from the point of view of someone who believes in intelligent [sic] design:

Why on Earth would an intelligent designer design so many variations on the same theme? An intelligent designer, especially one endowed with the foresight of omniscience and unlimited powers and who is omnibenevolent and perfect, would design the perfect solution to every problem, and stick with it, not design lots of different solutions to the same problem. And every iteration through the cycle of replication would produce an exact copy of that perfect design, so there is no logical way all those variations could be the result of random mutations which all happened to be equally good at whatever they did, so there was no element of selection involved.

Quite simply, lots of variations on the same theme are evidence not of intelligent design, but of utilitarian, mindless 'design' working without a plan and with no conception of the ideal or perfection. Variation is kept because it works; maybe not exactly as well as other alleles, but well enough for the carrier to survive and reproduce. Even if the differences are too small to play a significant part in evolution by natural selection, unless they are serious deleterious, genetic drift can account for them being a significant part of the species genome.

Unintelligent Design - How Ovulation Goes Wrong Because It Wasn't Intelligently Designed

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

Gene expression atlas captures where ovulation can go awry | Cornell Chronicle

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970, in what seems like a different lifetime now, I was a senior research assistant in the Oxford University/MRC Neuroendocrinology Research Unit, researching the hormonal control of ovulation in guinea pigs. Two of our tools were radioimmunoassays I had adapted for measuring extremely low levels of a hormone in guinea pig anterior pituitary glands known as luteinizing hormone (LH), and another similar assay for measuring the level of the steroid progesterone in guinea pig blood.

Sadly, having worked for close on two years towards producing a research paper with hundreds of assay results, thousands of microscope slides, hundreds of electron micrographs and a freezer full of samples waiting to be assayed, the government pulled the rug from under our feet by withdrawing our research funding, and I was made redundant, so my work was never published. Disillusioned and with a young family to support, I left research and perused a career in the NHS Ambulance Service instead - but that's a different story, and not relevant to the subject of this blogpost, which illustrates how much science has progressed in the last 50-60 years.

Researchers are no longer researching the hormonal control of ovulation but the fine details of the genetic control of the process of ovulation at the cell level, and what they've found is that the process is far from intelligently designed by anything resembling a perfect, omniscient, omnipotent designer. It is a process that is so complex that it can, and does, go wrong. An intelligent designer who didn't want random women to be unable to shed viable eggs, could have designed a less complicated process, but you can depend on creationism's putative intelligent[sic] designer to never do something simple when there is a far more complicated and wasteful way to achieve the same result.

The research, published a few days ago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was led by Iwijn De Vlaminck, associate professor of biomedical engineering in Cornell Engineering, and Yi Athena Ren, assistant professor of animal science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The paper’s lead author is Madhav Mantri, Ph.D., now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.

The team used a form of RNA tagging to map the gene expressions that occur during ovarian follicle maturation and ovulation in mice.

This spatial transcriptomics map depicts the cell types of a mouse ovary undergoing hormone-induced ovulation

The research is explained in a Cornell University Press release:

Creationism in Crisis - Hagfish Genome Shows How Genetic Information Arises Without Magic

Sixgill Hagfish,
Eptatretus hexatrema

Credit: Peter Southwood via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Hagfish, until now the only vertebrate that hadn't had its genome sequenced.

Image credit: Juan Pascual Anaya

January: Hagfish | News and features | University of Bristol

One of the mysteries of vertebrate evolution is from where did all the genetic information come, but a recently completed sequencing of the hagfish genome has solved that mystery.

Creationists traditionally parrot the claim that information can't increase without magic because of some half-baked notion that it is like energy, so is subject to the third law of thermodynamics, which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

But it only takes a moment's thought to realise that every time a cell replicates, the amount of genetic information normally doubles, without the help of magic, because it is simply a controlled organisation of existing matter. Similarly, if the genome gets doubled, or lengths of DNA get accidentally duplicated, this is simply the incorporation of existing matter into the resulting genome. No new matter is created yet the amount of information in the genome increases.

The other source of creationist confusion stems from them not understanding the difference between information and meaning. Meaning is information in the context of the environment. I'll illustrate this with a simple analogy:

Creationism in Crisis - No Doubt That Lycophytes Evolved, The Question is How?

Spikemoss, Selaginella arbuscula, Hawaiʻi.

Credit: DutraElliott (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Marsh Clubmoss, Lycopodiella inundata, with sundew, Drosera rotundifolia.

Credit: Christian Fischer via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

A Window into Plant Evolution: The Unusual Genetic Journey of Lycophytes - Boyce Thompson Institute

Creationists who are desperate to believe they are winning the argument against evolution in the science community and converting biologists to believing in magic and a supernatural magician or two, will not want to read about the discovery by an international team of researchers concerning the evolution of a small group of plants known as lycophytes.

First, a brief introduction to lycophytes, courtesy of ChatGPT 3.5:

Creationism in Crisis - How Mammoths Evolved During The 700,000 Years They Lived in Siberia Prior To 'Creation Week'

Siberian woolly mammoth,
Mammuthus primigenius
(Reconstruction)

Woolly mammoths evolved smaller ears and woolier coats over the 700,000 years that they roamed the Siberian steppes | ScienceDaily

What could the authors of Gensis know about the fauna of Alaska when they thought Earth was a small, flat planet centered on the Canaanite hill country? They didn't even know much about the history of their close neighbours in Egypt and Mesopotamia, let alone the remote areas of Asia.

So, they were oblivious of the fact that there were woolly mammoths there and had been for some 700,000 years. This is why there are no mammoths in the Bible, nor their relatives, Asian and African elephants, for that matter. To Bronze Age Canaanite hill farmers these animals, and where they lived and the people who lived alongside them, simply didn't exist. So, they concocted tales which to us are ludicrously unrealistic, such as tales about a magic man magically making stuff from nothing with magic words, about 5,000 years before they were making the tales up, followed by an equally ludicrous tale of a genocidal flood about two thousand years later with two of all known species surviving for a year, sealed in a wooden box with no ventilation. They thought breath was something to do with 'life' and didn't know about oxygen or why the animals would have needed it, so didn't see anything wrong with a tale about hundreds of animals and 8 humans being sealed in a floating wooden box for a year.

But now, thanks to science, we know better and can see what they got wrong, and why they could not have privy to real scientific knowledge, or knowledge about real geography and history.

One of the things they got spectacularly wrong was the childish belief that all the animals around them and the planet they lived on, were all created in a few days and none of the animals had ancestors, because they didn't even know their domestic animals like goats, sheep, cattle, doves and pigs had all been selectively bred from wild ancestors.

And of course, they couldn't even have guessed that there were mammoths in Siberia which had been evolving there for 700,000 years until going extinct about 9,000 years earlier.

But a team of Swedish and Russian scientists, led by David Díez-del-Molino of the Centre for Palaeogenetics and Department of Zoology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden, has now examined the genomes of 23 woolly mammoths, including that of the oldest known remains from 700,000 years ago, and compared them to 28 genomes of modern Asian and African elephants, to gain an understanding of the evolution of this species of mammoth. Their findings are published in an open access paper in Current Biology and explained in a Cell press release (taken here from the copy in Science Daily):

Creationism in Crisis - How Human Skin Colour Evolved in Africa Long Before 'Creation Week'

PIK Professor Sarah Tishkoff led a collaborative team of researchers who have discovered key insights into the molecular basis of skin color differences among Africans

Image: Courtesy of Sarah Tishkoff
and Alessia Ranciaro

1996 map of the major ethnolinguistic groups of Africa, by the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division (substantially based on G.P. Murdock, Africa, its peoples and their cultural history, 1959).

Source: Wikipedia

A molecular look at the mechanisms behind pigmentation variation | Penn Today

While creationism's god was creating a small flat Earth with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, the people of Africa were evolving and diversifying according to local conditions and gene flow between populations that has resulted in a whole range of skin tones and a genetic variance that is greater in a small population of Africans than in the whole of the extra-African population of the world, reflecting the genetic bottleneck of a small band of migrants moving out of Africa into Eurasia.

Africans had of course had several hundred thousand years to diversify prior to the mythical 'Creation Week' when creationists believe a magic man made of nothing came from nowhere and magicked a universe out of nothing with some magic words, spoken in a language that no-one understood because there was no-one to understand it.

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Have Worked Out How The Vertebrate Head Evolved - It wasn't Created By Magic

Laser scanning images of stage 24

Figure 3
Dynamics of head mesoderm cell clusters during individualization of the head muscles See also Figures S4 and S5.

(A–L) 3D reconstructions and laser scanning images of stage 24 (A–D), 25 (E–H), and 26 (I–L) lamprey embryos. The area enclosed by the white dotted line in (K) indicates velum mesoderm. Pink, mesoderm; light blue, dorsal inner mandibular mesoderm; green, ventral mandibular arch mesoderm; yellow, cavity in the mandibular mesoderm. Images show sagittal views.

(M) Comparison of rosettes and head mesoderm cell clusters in lamprey and amphioxus embryos. Right blue, somite rosette; blue, distinct head mesodermal cell clusters. DIMM, dorsal inner mandibular mesoderm; EOM, extraocular muscle; GS, gill slit; GV, ganglion trigeminal; HyAM, hyoid arch mesoderm; HyM, hyoid mesoderm; LLM, lower lip mesoderm; LPM, lateral plate mesoderm; MM, mandibular mesoderm; NHP, nasohypophyseal plate; Op, optic vesicle; OPM, oropharyngeal membrane; OV, otic vesicle; PHM, pharyngeal mesoderm; PMM, premandibular mesoderm; PP, pharyngeal pouch; S, somite; ULM, upper lip mesoderm; Vel, velum; VMAM, ventral mandibular arch mesoderm.

Onai, Takayuki et al. (2023)

Study on Lamprey Embryos Sheds Light on the Evolutionary Origin of Vertebrate Head ｜ UNIVERSITY OF FUKUI

Despite the almost daily claims in the social media by creationist dupes that mainstream biologists are abandoning the Theory of Evolution (TOE) in favour of creationism because it doesn't explain the facts, there is no sign whatsoever in the scientific literature of that happening. No serious biologist has ever published a peer-reviewed paper proposing that magic by a supernatural designer better explains the facts than the TOE.

Instead, just about every paper dealing with origins and development of species and their relationship to other species, has evolution firmly and inextricably embedded within it and the conclusions only ever make sense as the result of an evolutionary process. The belief that the TOE has been or is in the process of being, overthrown by creationism is a lie promulgated by the Deception Institute to claim success for the 'Wedge Strategy', which has been a monumental failure as fewer Americans now believe in creationism than did at the start of the campaign.

The paper recently published with open access in iScience illustrates just have firmly embedded the TOE is in biology. It concerns the early development of the vertebrate head, which has been a matter of conjecture in biology:

Some believe that the vertebrate head has developed as a result of modification of the segmental elements of the trunk, such as the vertebrae and somites. On the other hand, others believe that the vertebrate head has evolved as a new, unsegment body part, unrelated to other widely observed embryonic segments somites. Interestingly, previous studies on embryos have revealed the presence of some vestiges of somites in the head mesoderm (e.g., head cavities and somitomeres). However, homology between trunk somites and such head segments has been controversial.

Note the complete absence of any notion of magic creation in the controversy. The issue is over which tissues evolved into the beginnings of the vertebrate head.

The paper, by Japanese scientists led by Assistant Professor Takayuki Onai, of the Department of Anatomy, University of Fukui, School of Medical Sciences, Fukui, Japan, resolves that controversy by showing how the head of a lamprey embryo develops.

As the University of Fukui news release explains:

Unintelligent Design - Neurodegenerative Diseases Such As MS & Alzheimer's Traced Back To Early North European Farmers - 24,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Bronze Age Genes.

Credit: SayoStudio

Life in Bronze Age Britain (artist's impression)

Ancient DNA reveals reason for high MS and Alzheimer's rates in Europe

Researchers have just completed a massive gene bank for ancient humans who lived in Eurasia up to 34,000 years ago (i.e., up to 24,000 years before creationist dogma says the universe and everything in it was magicked out of nothing by a god made of nothing who self-assembled out of nothing before there was time and space to self-assemble in.

The gene bank has enabled researchers to trace the historical and geographical spread of genes and diseases, producing four papers published in Nature. This article deals with just one of them; others will follow.

The results should disturb any creationists who has the courage to read about them because, not only did it all occur long before the mythical 'Creation Week' that is central to their superstition, but is shows that any designer either could not have been omniscient, or must have been malevolent, because it shows how the genes for Multiple Sclerosis (MS) arose in North Europe, probably as a side-effect of evolving genes to increase resistance to the diseases carried by domestic animals. An omniscient designer who deigned them should have been aware of what they would also cause, so either isn't omniscience and didn't know what its design would do, or created MS deliberately.

As the University of Cambridge News release explains: