Creationism and climate – birth of a new pseudoscience
The usual creationist nonsense is just tedious. But creationist “climate science” is toxic, disastrous in its implications for policy, and frighteningly well-connected politically
Major event | Date (using Ussher)1 |
---|---|
Creation | 4004 BC |
Curse | 4004 BC (Day 10 after creation) |
Global Flood | 2348 BC |
Tower Babel | 2242 BC |
Egypt began | After 2242 BC but prior to Abraham going to Egypt (Genesis 12) |
Call of Abraham | 1922 BC |
Ice Age peak | 1848 BC (500 years after the Flood) |
Time of the Judges (Moses was first) | 1491 BC (God appearing to Moses in the burning bush) |
Time of the Kings (Saul was the first) | 1095 BC |
Split kingdom | 975 BC |
Christ was born | ~4 BC |
We are all too familiar with creationist life science (theory of kinds) and creationist Earth science (Flood geology). As I explain in an article at 3 Quarks Daily, recent decades have seen the emergence of a creationist climate science, which is a direct attack on the “secular” climate science of climate change. Creationist climate science rejects, as it must, the palaeoclimatology that helped establish the existence of positive climate feedbacks, and from this draws the inference that our present concern about human effects on climate is unbiblical, unscientific, and exaggerated. This fits in directly with the agendas of the organisations opposing fossil fuel restraint, and even involves some of the same people. We need to pay attention.
Creationists cannot avoid accepting a single Ice Age, which they have to regard as more recent than Noah’s Flood. So with great imagination they have devised theories that make the Ice Age an actual consequence of the Flood, and in the process they come to believe that their own theories are biblical. They can then call into play the entire creationist rhetorical apparatus, invoking arguments about biblical versus secular, God’s word versus man’s word, and a conspiracy of secular scientists deliberately hoodwinking the public by ignoring the biblical evidence.
But it is this secular science that lies behind our models of the climatic effects of human activity. In particular, the ability of the Milankovitch cycles to cause such large changes in Ice Age climate shows the existence of positive feedbacks, as further confirmed by detailed ice core studies. The creationists, whom we must not to dismiss as ignorant or ill informed, are well aware of this, and draw the implication that the appeal to positive feedbacks is an artefact of the secularist viewpoint, and should be rejected. They argue from this that current concerns about where the climate is going are misplaced. As I show in my 3QD article, all this is explicitly spelt out in the creationist literature, which links directly to the Cornwall Alliance’s climate change denial literature. This is no accident. The director of the Cornwall Alliance is an active contributor to Answers in Genesis, and the right wing political philosopher Jay W. Richards, who over at the Discovery Institute pours scorn on evolution science and global warming concerns alike, is a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a former adviser to Cornwall.
For all these reasons, I regard creationist climate science as a much more pressing threat than the usual annoying creationist nonsense. How should we respond?

This post first appeared at PandasThumb. Fuller version at 3 Quarks Daily
Anti-Science Conspiracy Theories, Power, and Morality
By Carl Weinberg, republished with permission. Read the original article here.
[My own comments: It is easy to link creationism to religion, but to me this seems counter-effective, as well as ignoring the many believers who oppose creationism all the more fervently because it is a travesty of their own faith. Debunking the science in “creation science” is an endless activity, but I don’t think anyone ever became a creationist because of things like polonium halos, or alleged gaps in the fossil record. Digging deeper, we can identify creationism as a conspiracy theory. Indeed it could hardly be otherwise, given its claim that the entire scientific establishment and most of the educational system is engaged in a diabolical plot. This is a particularly dangerous conspiracy theory, not only because it is fiercely anti-intellectual, but because it keys into climate science denial and, these days, into even crazier and more toxic beliefs.
Why do people buy into conspiracy theories, and how to thwart those who use such theories to enhance their power?

This raises further urgent questions; why do people buy into conspiracy theories, and how to thwart those who use such theories to enhance their power. Questions for the psychologist, the social scientist, and the historian, as this article exemplifies.]
Almost two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, we are inundated with COVID conspiracy theories: Satan-worshipping globalist elites, including George Soros and Bill Gates, deliberately developed and spread the COVID virus around the globe. The COVID vaccine is the Mark of the Beast from the Book of Revelation. Hollywood celebrities caught COVID by drinking infected adrenochrome harvested from live children in a satanic ritual. Mask and vaccine mandates are a communist plot by the Jewish Illuminati. Polling data suggest that millions of Americans—up to 20 percent of the country—believe at least some of these claims.
Almost two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, we are inundated with COVID conspiracy theories…
For secular and scientifically-minded Americans, it’s tempting to dismiss COVID conspiracy believers as lunatics and fools. But if we want to have a chance at beating the COVID pandemic, we do not have the luxury of ignoring 20 percent of the population. Nor will browbeating them work. Better to begin by attempting to understand the roots of conspiracy theories aimed at modern science, with the aim of confronting those ideas more effectively. My new book, Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism in America, suggests that people embrace conspiracy theories when they are concerned about moral decline and feel powerless to reverse it.
Starting with the Scopes “Monkey” trial of 1925, I trace a century of Christian conservative activism animated by conspiratorial claims remarkably resonant with the COVID culture war. Leading Christian fundamentalists of the 1920s—William Bell Riley, Gerald Winrod, Mordecai Ham, among them—blamed evolutionary science on an all-powerful international, satanic, Jewish communist cabal, foretold in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In 1924 sermons delivered in North Carolina, Ham warned his audience that Satan worked through a shadowy network of Jews with a “tremendous banking connection” who stood behind the new immoral Russian Bolshevik government. “The day is not far distant,” Ham warned, “when you will be in the grip of the Red Terror and your children will be taught free love by that damnable theory of evolution.”
Better to begin by attempting to understand the roots of conspiracy theories aimed at modern science, with the aim of confronting those ideas more effectively.
While creationists claimed that evolution was bad science and appealed to the Bible for authority, their primary tactic was to argue that the real danger of evolution was the way it made people act. If you taught young people they were descended from animals, that is, they would act in an “animalistic” fashion, which had both violent and sexual implications. In this view, communists were the worst. Not only were they atheists, undermining the authority of the Bible and promoting evolutionary science. But from Marx and Engels to Lenin and Trotsky, they fought for social changes that undermined existing power relations and represented an evolving class-based morality. In pinning evolution and communism on Jews, Riley, Winrod, and Ham followed the lead of auto magnate Henry Ford, who published the fabricated Protocols as fact. In The International Jew, published as a series in Ford’s Dearborn Independent, the automaker blamed Jews for all manner of social ills, especially for promoting “sex knowledge” to demoralize the Christian masses. In a similar fashion, current-day creationists like Ken Ham (no relation to Mordecai) of Answers in Genesis link the changing “man-centered” (as opposed to “God-centered”) morality of evolution to abortion and gay marriage.
Which is to say that COVID conspiracy theories do not really derive from opposition to science, but rather express deep anxiety and a sense of powerlessness about the current moral state of American society. What makes conspiracy theorizing distinct is precisely the sense that the conspirators possess a near-supernatural power to affect the course of events. In real life, powerful people do lie and make decisions in secret. But they are never fully in control. Witness, for example, the disastrous twenty-year US war in Afghanistan or the massive movement last year to protest police brutality.
In real life, powerful people do lie and make decisions in secret. But they are never fully in control.
After we peel back the fantastical Jewish space lasers and lizard people, we will find a well-grounded concern with the power wielded over ordinary people by billionaires and their allies in both political parties. We can’t really have a rational debate over the role of Satan in the COVID-19 pandemic. But we can exchange ideas about pharmaceutical drug prices, the opioid epidemic, amnesty for undocumented immigrants, tech companies’ suppression of free speech, abortion rights, police brutality, and even the spate of strikes workers have launched across the US today. It is through debates on these kinds of issues that progress can be made.
Carl R. Weinberg is Adjunct Associate Professor of History and Senior Lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion and Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism in America. Follow him on Twitter @Euclid585.
Black swans and other deviations: like evolution, all scientific theories are a work in progress

Discussions about the nature of science and scientific theories are often confused by the outdated view that such theories are rendered false when anomalies arise. The notion of a scientific theory as a static object should be replaced with the more current view that it is part of a living research programme, which can broaden its scope into new areas.
For example, take the hypothesis that all swans are white, which seemed pretty good to Europeans until Dutch explorers found black swans in Australia in 1636. So what happens to our hypothesis? There are a number of options.
1) Redefine swan-ness to include whiteness. Then black swans aren’t really swans, and the hypothesis remains true by definition.
2) It’s been disproved. Discard it.
3) Compare different species of swan the world over, and see how well black swans fit in.
(1) is the least useful. Definitions can only tell us about how we are using words. They tell us nothing about the world that those words attempt to describe. (2) is based on the common-sense idea that hypotheses should be discarded when falsified by observation. This was the idea put forward by philosopher Karl Popper in the 1930s, to distinguish between science and pseudoscience.
He saw psychoanalysis, for example, as pseudoscience because disagreement with its findings can always be explained away as a result of repression. Popper’s 1930s view has a great deal to commend it, but throws out a lot of babies with the bathwater. (3) is how science actually works, as Popper and his colleagues, who challenged traditional views of how science works, had realised by the 1970s. https://www.youtube.com/embed/mE590aeTdqE?wmode=transparent&start=0 GoJo Media/YouTube.
In our example, the black swan was an anomaly, but any major scientific theory will have anomalies. Newton’s theory of planetary motion could not explain the orbit of Mercury, an anomaly that was known for decades before Albert Einstein explained it with his general theory of relativity. Despite this anomaly, Newton’s theory was retained because there is so much that it does explain. A theory is not meant to be a final statement of how things are, but just the latest stage of a research programme in continual progress.
Evolution as theory and research
In the 18th century, the existence of family relationships between different species was spelt out in the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus’s grouping of living things into species, genera, orders and so on, but there was no suggestion of how things got that way. By the 1820s, the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was talking about inheritance of characteristics acquired as the result of striving (as the giraffe’s ancestors strived to reach higher into the trees).
By 1859, naturalist-biologists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently came up with the idea of natural selection as the primary driver of evolution. Natural selection, that is, operating on variation, but with no understanding of where the variants came from, or how that variation was inherited.
In the early 20th century came the discovery of mutations as a source of variants and the incorporation of the Austrian botanist Gregor Mendel’s genetics into evolution science, but as yet without knowledge of the material basis of mutation and inheritance. This emerged in the 1940s, when DNA was recognised as the genetic material. Then from the 1950s onwards there was the determination of its structure and the cracking of the genetic code that revealed how it directs the formation of proteins.

Since then, we have recognised that evolution is governed by chance as well as by selection, that inheritance is complicated by things like gene duplication (where a chunk of DNA is copied twice and each copy can then evolve independently), horizontal gene transfer (where DNA is transferred between species), and even the incorporation of genetic material from viruses into our own genetic material. And of course there are plenty of other things that we still don’t understand … Yet.
So at every stage, we have an imperfect theory, full of gaps and inconsistencies, but one that emerges all the stronger from scrutiny of its imperfections. Like atomic theory, it has developed in ways that its originators could not even have imagined, with growing understanding at all levels from individual molecules to the genetics of populations. And like atomic theory it is fundamental to our understanding of the science that has grown up around it. Biology without evolution is like chemistry without atoms.
The possibility of correction
Sometimes we tells students that “the scientific method” consists in gathering data, formulating hypotheses to explain them and then collecting more data to see if the hypotheses stand up. At other times, we tell them that it consists in formulating hypotheses, collecting data and rejecting the hypotheses if the data don’t fit. Such views are much too simple and make scientific research sound like following a rather boring recipe.
The first step in any scientific enquiry is deciding that something is worth looking at. So the possible results must be worth having and the research programme must have some prospect of success. The next thing is continual dialogue between hypotheses and data. The hypotheses must be open to modification in the light of the data and must always remain open in principle to correction in the light of further knowledge. This commitment to the possibility of correction is known as fallibilism, and is one thing that all scientific endeavours have in common.
Beyond that, I see no point in pretending that science has a single method (it doesn’t), or in trying to draw a hard and fast line between scientific knowledge and other kinds of knowledge about the world (there isn’t one).
What about the swans?
Meantime, DNA evidence shows that the different white swan species whooper swan, tundra swan and mute swan are closely related, with the Australian black swan as their first cousin. Surprisingly, the black-necked swan of South America is a more distant relation.

Other questions suggest themselves. Is there any link between geographical distribution and closeness of relationship? When and where did the separate species arise? Do the differences in colour have any survival value, and if so, what?
So by now, our original swan hypothesis, based on appearance, has been greatly modified, and given rise to a whole range of new questions involving molecular similarities, adaptive evolution vs neutral drift, biogeography and the fossil record. That’s science.
Paul Braterman, Hon. Research Fellow; Professor Emeritus, University of Glasgow
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
‘God intended it as a disposable planet’: meet the US pastor preaching climate change denial
This piece,written in October 2020, seems more relevant now than ever. The Reverend John Macarthur returned to this theme in November 2021, repeating his description of the world as disposable and comparing it to a styrofoam cup

Paul Braterman, University of Glasgow
Every so often you come across a piece of writing so extraordinary that you cannot help but share it. One such piece is a sermon on global warming by American pastor John MacArthur. Full of beautifully constructed rhetorical flourishes, it is forcefully delivered by an experienced and impassioned preacher to a large and appreciative audience.
For me, as a man of science, it is the most complete compilation of unsound arguments, factual errors and misleading analogies as I have seen in discussions of this subject. But it’s important because climate change is a big election issue this November in the US, where there is a growing movement of evangelical Christians who deny its existence, while Joe Biden promises a “clean air revolution”.
Read more: Faith and politics mix to drive evangelical Christians’ climate change denial
The minister of the COVID-denying, law-defying Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California – which has encouraged worshippers to congregate as normal despite state COVID-19 restrictions – MacArthur is an impressive figure whose Study Bible has sold almost 2 million copies.
He regards the infallibility of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, as essential to his faith, and his sermon about global warming can only be understood in that context. MacArthur’s rejection of the science is shared by other major US ministries and organisations such as Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries International and the Discovery Institute. https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZTlYl8E_B14?wmode=transparent&start=0
In this sermon, MacArthur paraphrases “a scientist at Cal Tech” (except not a scientist at all, but the novelist Michael Crichton, best known for Jurassic Park), as saying in a lecture:
Consensus science is the first refuge of scoundrels … invoked only in situations where there is a political, social, financial agenda but no scientific support.
The reverend has the most serious reasons possible for rejecting the scientific consensus concerning the age of the Earth, the origins of humankind, the history and prehistory of the ancient near East and the peopling of continents: it is totally incompatible with the Genesis account of creation, Adam and Eve, the flood and the dispersion of peoples from the Tower of Babel.
Error, denial and misunderstanding
As for global warming itself, the reverend channels standard climate change denial, but all his arguments are unsound and have been convincingly refuted to the satisfaction of an overwhelming consensus of climate scientists (see in-depth discussion at Skeptical Science). He understates the amount of global warming, incorrectly describes the full record as dating back only 30 years, and cites the Little Ice Age as evidence that the changes currently taking place are natural. There’s more:
Here’s the key, friends, this is the real deal. Legitimate science recognises a close correlation between sunspots and climate change … The sun is the source of temperature changes because of its infrared variations. … There is absolutely no evidence that CO₂ contributes to warming. On the contrary the opposite is true. Warming produces CO₂ … It’s the other way round.
Here we have a collection of half-truths and misunderstandings, typical of denialists claiming to represent “legitimate science”. As the graph below shows, the 11-year sunspot cycle is a minor deviation, and the temperature increase since 1980 has occurred despite the fact that over that period the amount of solar energy falling on Earth has gone down slightly. Incidentally, this solar energy input is concentrated mainly in the visible, not the infrared, region of the spectrum, and it is the roughly balancing heat outflow from the Earth that is in the infrared.

MacArthur offers a false dichotomy between saying that CO₂ warms the oceans, and warmer oceans release more CO₂. Unfortunately, both these statements are true. There is a positive feedback loop: human-released CO₂ is the primary driver, but its effect is amplified by the fact that yet more CO₂ is then released from non-human sources. Regarding CO₂ itself, MacArthur seems to be even more confused:
By the way, plants produce CO₂. What man produces is marginal … Industry doesn’t affect CO₂ in the environment or atmosphere.
Plants do produce CO₂ but they absorb more than they emit. However, when it comes to humans, their activity may cause only a small imbalance each year between CO₂ emission and natural uptake, but this imbalance is cumulative. CO₂ levels are now 50% above pre-industrial, and subtle atomic differences clearly show that fossil fuel is the source. But according to MacArthur, “There is no scientific reason to believe that ice caps are melting”. https://www.youtube.com/embed/O9uunW_DBZE?wmode=transparent&start=0
Despite the Arctic Monitoring and Assement Programme’s video on this subject, the reverend does not think that the evidence for ice-cap melting is scientific, and that other factors are at play:
This is all political [and] financial agendas, class warfare, class envy … By the way, US$100 billion has been spent to make a case for global warming … driven by the socialist mentality … even some of the feminist mentality that resents male success.
All is now clear. Talk of global warming is part of a politically motivated conspiracy. But US$100 billion? That’s 600 years’ worth of all federal climate research spending. Clearly, those pesky socialists and feminists are formidable fundraisers. However, none of this matters because environmentalism is fundamentally misplaced. As MacArthur puts it, citing Revelation and the integrity of scripture:
God intended us to use this planet, to fill this planet for the benefit of man. Never was it intended to be a permanent planet. It is a disposable planet. Christians ought to know that.
And that is a statement that would leave anybody who cares about this world speechless.
This article is republished from The Conversation,where it has received over 340,000 reads, under a Creative Commons license. It has also been republished at PoliticsMeansPolitics , Metro News, Yahoo News California and UK, and Church and State. Read the original article.
Sensory Worlds Beyond Our Imagining
An Immense World; How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Ed Yong, Random House/Bodley Head, June 2022
This book is an enormous achievement. A thrilling read, taking us into the Umwelt, or perceptual world, of numerous mammal, fish, reptile and insect species. A major work of scholarship, with over a thousand references to a 45-page bibliography, as well as accounts of interviews with numerous researchers and visits to their laboratories. An exploration of many ways of sensing the world, some of which we share, while others are beyond our imagining. The evolving interplay of perception and action, communication and deception, environment and response. And an enhanced insight into what it is like to be a bat, a bird, a blue whale, a beetle, or a human.
From the wealth of detail in the book, a consistent grand narrative emerges. Some physical process interacts with living matter. This is the raw material for sensation. Sensory abilities then shape a creature’s Umwelt, being developed according to the demands of its environment. But every perceiver is itself an object of perception to others, and we have colour displays and camouflage, smells as signals and identifiers, sound as communication to others and, by echolocation, back to the creature who generates it, and the same is true of other senses that we do not share, such as the detection of tiny electrical fields. Senses combine and even, we suspect, merge, and what we ourselves perceive is but part of an immense pattern. But the heedlessness with which we amplify our own signals disrupts this pattern, contributing to our destruction of nature, and we ourselves are the poorer for it.
Let me offer a few samples from the book’s wealth of detail.
Yong starts with taste and smell, two ancient senses that operate by direct molecular contact. It is not long before he surprises us. Snakes use their forked tongues to smell in stereo. Humans are poor compared with other mammals at detecting smells at low levels, but are rather good at telling different smells apart. No one knows how smell relates to chemical structure (contrast this with how seeing relates to the wavelength of light, hearing to frequency, or touch to pressure). As every well-trained dog-owner knows, smell is central to the Umwelt of dogs, but I would never have guessed that the same is true of elephants. And the molecules involved in smell include opsins, which are central to vision. As Yong puts it, in a way we see by smelling light.
It is sometimes said that dogs, and most other mammals, are colour blind. This is only half true; they have just two kinds of colour receptors, while we (like other apes, and our cousins the Old World monkeys) have three.[1] The colours that we perceive arise from subtle interactions between these receptors. Thus some neurons are excited by blue cones but inhibited by red or green, while others are stimulated by red but inhibited by green. So the colours are we experience are the result of a kind of neuronal arithmetic, below the level of conscious awareness. I still feel surprise when someone superposes red and green beams of light on a screen, and I see the result as pure yellow. Our colour vision can be represented by a triangle, with red, blue, and green at the corners, and yellow halfway along one edge.
But hummingbirds, like many birds and reptiles, can see four kinds of colour; red, green, blue, and UV. If human colour vision can be represented by a triangle, that of a hummingbird is a pyramid. And while for us the overlap of red, green, and blue are enough to produce white, four kinds of sensor need to be activated to look white to a hummingbird.
Among humans, different individuals have slightly different sensitivities, and some women show a degree of four-colour vision, having inherited different pigments from the sites on their two separate X chromosomes that are responsible for colour vision. Words cannot convey this added perceptual dimension, but the fact that they really do have four-colour vision can be demonstrated by discrimination tests. (This by the way answers a philosophical riddle that intrigues me. How do I know that you are seeing colours the same way that I am? It turns out that there is a real chance that you aren’t.)
Many flowers that appear white to us are coloured in the UV, and appeal to insect pollinators with green, blue, and UV three colour vision. And UV vision evolved in insects long before there were flowers, so the flowers evolved the pigments to attract the pollinators.[2] Thus the ability to see directly influences the evolution of what is there to be seen.
Temperature detection overlaps other senses. There are sensors that can detect hot or cold temperatures, but can also be stimulated in different ways. The sensor for painful heat can be activated, on the skin as well as in the mouth, by habanero peppers, while menthol feels pleasantly cool in the mouth or the smoker’s throat. Menthol also happens to be addictive.
The ability to detect heat at a distance is useful to species that suck blood, from bedbugs and mosquitoes to vampire bats. Ticks can detect body heat from up to 13 feet away, and common insect repellents work with them, not by interfering with smell, but by blocking the heat sensors. These sensors are in spherical pits on their legs, and the pits are covered by a film with a hole in it. So the sensors give directional information as well as detecting the heat source. Rattlesnakes and other pit vipers also have pits with a narrow opening, falling on a sensing membrane that carries around 7000 nerve endings. They can detect the presence and approximate direction of an increase in temperature of 0.001oC, which means that a viper can locate a rodent 1 m away. Information from the temperature sensing pits is combined with information from the eyes, so maybe for them the sense acts as an adjunct to vision, rather than on its own.
Touch organs can be modified for special purposes. The emerald jewel wasp paralyses cockroaches by stinging their brains, and has a touch sensor at the end of her sting to locate the exact location. A wide range of mammals, including the opossum, a marsupial, as well as rats and mice, use touch sensors at the base of whiskers to explore their surroundings several times a second. Since each whisker has its own connection to the somatosensory cortex, this builds up a map of the surroundings. So whisking, as it is called, is perhaps more like seeing than like touch. It would seem to be a very ancient trait indeed, since the last common ancestor of placentals and marsupials was back in the age of dinosaurs. The whiskers of seals are so shaped and angled as to minimise the forces on them as they move through the water, which would otherwise overpower the pressure waves caused by passing fish.
Sound detection is fast, precise, 24 hour, and useful for detecting predators or prey. Sound is also used in communication, as in the finding and assessment of mates. But mating calls come at the cost of giving away one’s location. There is a species of parasitic fly that has developed ears remarkably similar to those of the crickets it preys on, to eavesdrop on their mating calls. On Hawaii, which was once seriously infested by such flies, the crickets have fallen silent. Once again, the overlapping Umwelten of prey and predator drives evolution.
Surprisingly, the first insects were almost certainly deaf, since hearing has evolved separately among them at least 19 different times, on many different parts of the body, having in general been developed from organs that respond to vibration and pressure.
We can only detect parts of how animals use sound to communicate. Birdsong contains more structure than the human ear can resolve, unless it’s played back slowly. In fact, the structure within each note may be more important to the birds than the order that the notes are played in. Whales and elephants both use what we call infrasound, vibrations too low in pitch for our ears to hear, as a way of keeping in touch over long distances. Mice, however, communicate using ultrasound, frequencies too high for us to detect. The terms infra and ultra are arbitrary, relating to our own capacities, but since we are deaf to such sounds they were not even detected, let alone studied, until a few decades ago, and may be much more important in nature than we realise.
Echolocation in particular may be much more extensive than our knowledge of it, when it uses frequencies that our own ears cannot detect. Even bat echolocation, although suspected much earlier, was not clearly demonstrated until 1938. It enables bats to navigate and catch insects in complete darkness. This is an impressive feat; the bats need to generate short pulses of high-frequency sound, and then detect the direction and timing of the faint echo from a small moving target. Some bats can even tune their ears to respond to a frequency slightly different from the one they are emitting, and detect the movement of their prey using the Doppler effect. [3]
But moths are not merely passive prey. They have ears that can detect bat cries, and dodge and loop to evade capture. Tiger moths produce clicks of their own, which confuse the bats. Some moths even have long flexible tails at the end of their wings, which may also add to the confusion.
Infrasound echolocation by dolphins was detected in the 1950s, and since the 1960s the U.S. Navy has been training them to find sunken equipment and mines, and aiming to reverse engineer their abilities. Humans avoid walking into obstacles using echolocation, and some blind people have developed this to a high skill, building up a model of the world in their visual cortex, in much the same way that most of us do so using sight.
Darwin was puzzled by so-called electric eels, which use electric shocks to stun their prey. After all, evolution regards present organs as the result of a series of incremental improvements, but what use would the electric organ have been in its feeble first stages of development? It took a century to find the answer. Many fish possess a lateral line, sensitive to pressure, and in some cases this has been modified to detect electricity. This confers an obvious advantage, since any living thing moving through water generates tiny electric currents. And electrodetection gains in sensitivity and acuity when combined with the ability to generate one’s own more powerful electric field. So we have passive electroreception and active electroreception, just as we have hearing and the use of echoes. The cells that detect the electrical fluctuations are hair cells, basically similar to the same cells that detect pressure waves on the lateral line, or pressure oscillations in our own ears. Active electroreception operates in every direction, will work as well in cloudy as in clear water, and is so sensitive that some fish can be trained to detect the difference between a clay pot full of river water, and one also containing an insulating glass rod.
Passive electroreception is extremely widespread among vertebrates, being used by sharks, catfish, and salamanders, while the platypus has over 50,000 electroreceptors in its bill. Bumblebees can detect the electric fields that surround flowers, and it may well be that electroreception is much more common than we as yet realise among insects, equipped as many are with touch- and current-sensitive hairs.
Yong concludes his list of the senses with the ability to detect magnetic fields. This is a difficult area, if only because magnetic effects are extremely weak, and show subtle variations on a global scale in direction, intensity, and angle of dip relative to the surface. To complicate things further, no one even knows what the magnetoreceptor would look like or how it operates. Some bacteria grow small crystals of magnetite, and can distinguish North from South, but no one has managed to find similar structures in the birds and animals that are known to use magnetic fields as an aid to migration. One current theory invokes what are called radical pairs, molecules raised to high-energy states by the influence of light, but such states are short-lived, and I as a chemist would require a lot of convincing.
Senses interact. Mosquitoes are attracted by body warmth, but only if they can smell carbon dioxide. Electric fish that have learnt to distinguish shapes using their electric sense are then able to do so by sight, and vice versa. I have already mentioned how the mental maps constructed by blind people, who have learnt to navigate using echolocation, reside in the visual cortex. And finally, we need to remember that sensation requires discriminating between the signals that come to an organism from outside, and those that it generates by itself.
So all complex animals, including ourselves, perceive only a small part of the immense world of possible sensations, and construct their own Umwelt from the part accessible to their own senses. But we show brutal insensitivity in how we influence this world. We brighten the night sky and blur the distinction between the seasons, confuse forest insects with the sound from our machines, scatter huge amounts of material that must distract the sense of smell, and make the very oceans reverberate, so that whales navigating by infrasound end up stranding themselves in response to naval sonar.
And when did you last see the Milky Way?
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Ed Yong’s earlier book, I contain multitudes: the microbes within us and a grander view of life, was a New York Times bestseller, and in June 2021 he received a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his writing on the COVID-19 pandemic
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1] Red colour perception evolved by accidental duplication of the gene that codes for the green-sensitive receptor, followed by Darwinian selection for a new use – the ability to detect ripe fruit, or tender young leaves, against a green background. A nice example of how evolutionary change generates new information.
2] Yong does not tell us how we know this, and to do so would have required a chapter in itself. But, in brief, the methods involve cross-species comparisons, and, these days, the use of molecular biology to reconstruct family trees for the relevant genes. The simplest assumption is then that a trait prevalent in one particular clade was present in its last common ancestor.
3] This is the familiar increase in the perceived frequency of a sound wave when the distance between source and observer is decreasing. Here the decrease is in the length of the round trip, from bat to target and back again, but with further fine tuning from the motion of the prey, and even the flapping of a moth’s wing has a detectable effect.
This post first appeared in 3 Quarks Daily
At a popular evangelical tourist site, the image of a ‘wrathful God’ appeals to millions
Susan L Trollinger, University of Dayton and William Trollinger, University of Dayton
The Ark Encounter, an evangelical theme park located near Williamstown, Kentucky, has welcomed between 4 million and 5 million visitors since its opening in July 2016. Hundreds of thousands more are sure to visit this summer.
This theme park boasts a re-creation of the story of Noah’s Ark from the Bible. As described in Genesis 6:14-16, God directed Noah to build this ark to spare eight humans and a male and female pair of every kind of creature from the flood that God was going to unleash on the world as a punishment for sin.
As scholars of fundamentalism and creationism, we have visited the Ark Encounter multiple times. We have also written a book, “Righting America at the Creation Museum,” about the ark’s companion site, the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.
What we find particularly striking about Ark Encounter is that it is a tourist site devoted to emphasizing – with great specificity – the wrathful nature of God and the eternal damnation that awaits unrepentant sinners.
What is Ark Encounter’s argument?
According to Answers in Genesis, the fundamentalist organization that launched Ark Encounter, and its CEO, Ken Ham, Ark Encounter is a centerpiece of AiG’s mission to “expose the bankruptcy of evolutionary ideas and bedfellow: a ‘millions of years old’ earth (and even older universe).”
So, according to AiG, when Genesis 1 says God created the Earth in six days, it literally means six 24-hour days. Similarly, when the Bible says Adam and Eve were created on the sixth day and gives details about their descendants and how long they lived, this is interpreted as recounting real history. And all of this means that, according to AiG, the Earth is “about 6,000 years old.”
While scientists have estimated the Earth to be about 4.5 billion years old, AiG counters by claiming that radiometric dating is not reliable. Instead, they assert that the catastrophic biblical flood created all the geological formations that make the Earth look ancient.
Over the past few decades, this argument has become a doctrinal touchstone for many American evangelicals.
An enormous structure
We most recently visited the Ark Encounter on March 15, 2022. Measuring 510 feet (155 metres) long, 85 feet (25 metres) wide, and 51 feet (15 metres) high, the Ark Encounter is, to quote one visitor we overheard, “so huge!”
After purchasing tickets that cost US$54.95 per adult, we and other visitors boarded buses and made the ascent up a long hill. Getting off the bus, we walked to the Ark, keenly aware of how small we were in relation to this ginormous structure.
Inside the Ark, visitors walk through three enormous decks, encountering rows of clay food storage containers, burlap sacks and animal cages. They observe over 100 bays featuring placards and digital animations that, among other things, go far beyond the Bible to explain Noah’s training in shipbuilding, carpentry and blacksmithing. The same creativity applies to the various displays explaining how eight human beings on the Ark fed, watered and managed the waste of 7,000 or so creatures.

Visitors also walk through a life-size diorama of the plush living quarters of Noah’s family, where they learn about the skills, gifts and interests of Noah’s sons – details not included in Genesis. They also learn about Noah’s wife and his sons’ wives. The Bible never identifies these women by name, much less describes them. Nevertheless, the Ark gives them names, different ethnic complexions, biographies and even hobbies.
Notwithstanding the occasional placard acknowledging that designers have taken “artistic license” with these dioramas, we couldn’t help but notice how much of what is in the Ark is not actually found in the Bible.
But visitors to the Ark seem to embrace these dramatic additions to the biblical text. As religion scholar Paul Thomas observes in his new book, “Storytelling the Bible at the Creation Museum, Ark Encounter, and the Museum of the Bible,” the world created by the designers of the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter satisfies the evangelical longing “for a time and place governed by biblical principles, even if that idealized time and place … never really existed.”
A very angry God
AiG requires all Ark Encounter employees to affirm a 46-point faith statement. They must agree, for example, that “gender and biological sex are equivalent and cannot be separated,” modern understandings of “social justice” are “anti-biblical,” and all humans “are sinners” and “are therefore subject to God’s wrath and condemnation.”
This emphasis on the overwhelming wrath of God is perhaps the most noteworthy feature of Ark Encounter as a tourist site.

Genesis 7:16 states that, as the flood waters rose, God slammed shut the door into the Ark. Once shut, all the humans and animals on the other side of the door were doomed to drown.
According to a placard displayed at Ark Encounter, there may have been upwards of 20 billion people on Earth at the time of the Genesis flood, a number that would have included children and infants, not to mention the unborn.
Another placard asks, “Was it just for God to judge the whole world?” The answer: “Since He is the one who gave life, He has the right to take life. Secondly, God is perfectly just and must judge sin. Third, all have sinned and deserve death and judgment.”

Remarkably, Ark Encounter has placed a “keepsake photo” placard near the door that, in the Ark’s depiction, sealed the fate of all those on the other side. As we have witnessed every time we have toured Ark Encounter, happy visitors line up to have their photos taken in front of this door.
According to AiG, this ancient divine slaughter prefigures a future divine slaughter. As the Ark Encounter website puts it, “God will judge this wicked world once again, but this time it will be by fire … God always keeps His promises – judgment will come.” According to AiG, we can escape this fate by believing in Christ, but for the billions (past and present) who have not or do not, the result is “everlasting, conscious punishment in the lake of fire (hell).”
As historian Doug Frank makes clear in his 2010 book, “A Gentler God,” this understanding of a wrathful God is alive and well in American evangelicalism. Frank’s argument is supported by a 2014 Pew Research report that revealed that 82% of American evangelicals believe in a literal hell.
Millions of evangelicals visit Ark Encounter for all sorts of reasons, including, perhaps, its sheer immensity. That said, the message they get from Ark Encounter is clear and simple.
The wrathful God has determined that those who do not accept Jesus as savior, those who are resolutely on the wrong side of culture war issues like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, will pay for their sin eternally.
Susan L Trollinger, Professor of English, University of Dayton and William Trollinger, Professor of History, University of Dayton
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Damage limitation at Imperial
Disaster has been averted at Imperial. But much damage has been done, the group appointed to implement the decisions taken faces an impossible task, and the process has aggravated the very problem that it was meant to address.
For months, as I described elsewhere earlier, Imperial College has been contemplating the possibility of dis-honouring T. H. Huxley, one of its founders, on the basis of early remarks that we would now condemn as racist, but did no more than express the general assumptions of his time and place. This despite the fact that Huxley was a lifelong opponent of all forms of discrimination, a fierce opponent of slavery at a time when many cultivated Englishmen were sympathetic to the Confederate cause, and clearly changed his views about race over time.

The President and the Provost have both been urging a whitewashing (if I can use this term) of the College’s history by such measures as removing Huxley’s name and bust from one of Imperial’s most prominent buildings. As I explained earlier, they attempted to accomplish this using a deeply flawed process. A History Group lacking in any higher level expertise in Huxley’s own areas of biology and palaeontology was set up, with the College archivist restricted to a consultative role, as was the Imperial faculty member best qualified to comment on historical matters. Two outside historians were consulted, but their areas of expertise did not really include Huxley.1 Adrian Desmond, Huxley’s biographer, was consulted but as I documented in my earlier article, his unambiguous vindication of Huxley was completely ignored. In October (revised version November), the History Group’s report recommended that Huxley’s name be removed from the Huxley Building, and his bust on display there relegated to a museum.
A request for comments on this report drew over 200 submissions. Despite earlier commitments, the Provost refused to publish these, alleging confidentiality, and instead a summary was prepared by two outside facilitators from Goldsmith College’s Department of Social, Therapeutic, and Community Studies, neither of them biologists nor historians. As might be predicted, this summary was obviously bad, suppressing all quantitative information about the general thrust of the submissions and giving equal weight to views that did, or did not, reflect historical reality. This summary was then made available to the President’s Board, a group of senior advisers to the President, with whom the final decision rested. Board members also had access to the full submissions, but as we now know these add up to around 90,000 words, and one wonders how many people at such a level of seniority could possibly have found time to read them all.
Fortunately, loud voices had been raised in protest both inside and outside Imperial, the tenor of a forum held to discuss the History Group report was unmistakable, and I know that at least some Board members were directly lobbied by academic staff opposed to the removal proposals. It may also be relevant that the President, a firm advocate of removal, is now in the last few months of her term of office, and has been further weakened by other controversies.
The board met on February 21, and an official account of its conclusions was published on February 25. According to this account, its main recommendations were as follows:

The Board committed to finding new ways to mark the impact and contributions of brilliant figures from underrepresented groups, having connections to Imperial, such as the Nobel Prize physicist Professor Abdus Salam , Dr Margaret Fishenden, who conducted seminal studies of combustion and heat transfer at Imperial , and Dr Narinder Singh Kapany, known as the father of fibre optics. This recommendation had met with widespread approval.
A working group has been established to implement these recommendations, and “To establish new ways for the Imperial community to continue to expose, engage with and learn from its history.”
The name and bust of TH Huxley will be retained, but put in context. This makes sense, provided the contextualising material comes from someone well informed about its subject matter. The submission to the History Group by Adrian Desmond, Huxley’s most noted biographer, would be a good start. The College will also consider a joint name for the building, linking Huxley to “a pathbreaking scientist from a Black, Asian or other minority ethnic background.”2 Here the working group faces a daunting challenge. There are very few scientists of any background whose names could be linked to Huxley’s without suffering by comparison, let alone if consideration is restricted to the underrepresented.
Similar recommendations made regarding commemoration of the Beit brothers, whose profits from mines in South Africa did much to finance the College, seem to me sensible although I have no expertise in this area. Specifically, the College will seek to direct its Beit scholarships to African scientists. Other de-naming recommendations seem to have been quietly dropped.
The Board also decided to release an anonymised version of the written submissions. This has the effect of showing the degree of distortion in the previously publicised summary. For example, the summary says that “Some participants felt such items [statues, busts, and historical artifacts] should be removed when possible as they are a daily reminder of enslavement and colonial legacy and not a reflection of the College current values.” In the full version, slavery (or slave, enslavement, etc.) is explicitly mentioned in 45 submissions. Two of these deal with a side-issue, the slave owner Sir Henry de la Beche. (Here the first version of the report was criticised for being too kind, but the matter had by then already been dealt with with at the Department level by removing his name from an award, renaming the geology society, and archiving his bust ) . Of the remaining 43, only 5 favour removing existing names or statues, 2 are ambiguous, and 36 are opposed to removal. 26 mention Huxley by name and all but twoof these oppose removal, with frequent mention of his enlightened attitudes and opposition to slavery. (It took me less than half an hour to establish all this, using simple word searching to scan the relevant submissions, which were generally quite unambiguous.)
Again, according to the summary,
Other [respondents] said they felt unwelcomed and rejected by Huxley’s links to eugenics, leading to feelings of marginalisation, disrespect, hurt and offence. Some that marking his legacy without this context had a negative effect on Imperial’s aspirations to equality and inclusion and its global standing.
This is flat out untrue.
By my count, 20 separate submissions mentioned eugenics. Of these, only one was in favour of renaming. 19 were opposed, and of these 18 mentioned Huxley by name, many pointing out that nothing in his writings could be said to support eugenics. As one respondent put it, capturing the general flavour of the responses, “taking down Huxley because his work contributed to eugenics is about as logical as cancelling Jesus because his name has been used to justify crusades.” Others also pointed out that to link Huxley to eugenics is unhistorical, since we can date the very term to Galton’s writing in 1883, some years after the work for which Huxley is chiefly remembered. (I would further add, since such charges are often raised by creationists against evolution science as a whole, that eugenics was deeply rooted in older beliefs2 about hereditary inferiority.
So how did the summary come to say what it did? Its authors, remember, were from Goldsmith College’s Department of Social, Therapeutic, and Community Studies, with no expertise either in history or in the relevant science. I must presume that, as non-experts, they wrongly imagined that the History Group spoke from a position of expertise, and allowed their perspective to be influenced accordingly. I emphasise this point because it helps explain the very real harm that this process has done to the College, and to the reputation of science in general.
Consider the History Group’s overall impact. To quote its own report,
The Group’s project was set up as part of a series of initiatives to address racial injustice. An important rationale for the project was to develop an understanding of how Imperial is perceived by a wide range of stakeholders, how this is influenced by its history (or perception of its history) and the extent to which this perception will hinder our ambition to establish a truly inclusive environment which allows all to flourish and to feel at home.
How well has the History Group succeeded in attaining these objectives? Not very. The recommendation to dis-honour Huxley achieved the rare distinction of being attacked both by the strongly Conservative Telegraph and the left-leaning Observer, sister paper to the Guardian. The Telegraph printed and re-echoed the letter of protest by 40 academics that the journal Nature had refused to publish. In the Observer , Kenan Malik, who himself studied at Imperial and is, for what it is worth, himself a member of a minority ethnic group, criticised the entire notion that real inequalities were being usefully addressed by such symbolic actions, while pouring scorn on a process that treated Huxley, an agent of scientific and social progress, in the same way as the slave trader Colston whose statue had been thrown into Bristol Harbour (or, I would add in the context of Imperial, the slave owner de la Beche discussed above). As Malik puts it,
Damning both equally as racists who do not deserve commemoration is to abandon historical evaluation for a crude mode of moral judgment.
The Times also gave sympathetic treatment to criticism of the history group report from within Imperial.
By the time the College’s decision was announced, Russia had invaded Ukraine, moving public attention away from this, as with so many other matters. The only newspaper accounts of the decision that I could find were in the Daily Mail online and, again, the Times.
The headline in the Daily Mail reads
Ethnic minority scientist’s name will be added to Imperial College building named in honour of Thomas Henry Huxley after claims that biologist who discovered birds were descended from dinosaurs was racist
Its bulleted summary states that the History Group had accused Huxley of ‘scientific racism’, while the full article reports academics’ rebuttal and praise of him as a role model.
The Times article, however, is extraordinary, not only restating the refuted claim that Huxley’s work had somehow led to eugenics, but describing him as a eugenicist himself.

Notice that this article appeared under the byline, not of a reporter, but of the Social Affairs editor. I can only surmise that it is playing a role in some wider agenda.
So, returning to the history group’s objectives, how will all this activity have affected “how Imperial is perceived” and the worthy “ambition to establish a truly inclusive environment which allows all to flourish and to feel at home”? Not, I fear, very well. The College has given us a shameful exhibition of poor scholarship, and besmeared the reputation of its founder. It created a false impression of impartiality and expertise in the setting up and naming of the History Group, thus enhancing the opprobrium it will attract from some for ignoring its recommendations. For those who, like the vast majority of historians, life science scholars, and respondents to the call for submissions, the accusations against Huxley were ill-informed and misguided, the exercise will leave them dismayed by the History Group’s recommendedations. For those, if there are any, who do really feel excluded and less able to flourish because of Huxley’s belief, in 1865, in a hierarchy of races, they will be dismayed that the Group’s central recommendation was not implemented, and will be feeling more excluded than ever. Who can blame them when the report itself and its Press coverage have given them so much cause?
One final irony. Within the UK at least, the biggest single cause of imbalances of power and education between groups is social class. Imperial itself is well aware of this problem, and includes this factor among others in its ambitious plans to widen access. What better role model, then, than a child forced by family poverty to leave school at age 10, who rose to the highest levels of accomplishment, whose scientific achievements continue to earn our admiration 150 years later, and who did more perhaps than any other person of his time to broaden educational opportunity? I give you
Thomas Henry Huxley
This article first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily, as an update of my earlier Intellectual Disgrace at Imperial College. As before, I thank numerous colleagues for discussions and relevant information, including Joe Felsenstein, Steve Hollenhorst, Nick Matzke, Andrew Petto, Betty Smokovitis, and members of Imperial’s academic staff. RCS Building image, Barabbas1312, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. Bust of Huxley, photograph George P. Landau, via https://victorianweb.org/victorian/religion/agnos.html . Huxley sketch by his daughter, Marian, via Wikipedia
***
1] To be fair, there was some overlap with the other main target for reconsideration, the Beit brothers, major donors towards the College, whose wealth derived from South African mines. Imperial College has no history department at such, but the academic staff member best qualified to pronounce on historical matters was also relegated to a consultative role.
2] Pet peeve: I wish people would not say “minority” when they clearly mean “underrepresented”. Albert Einstein came from a minority ethnic background, and as a result had to flee his country of birth, but I do not think that is what the College has in mind.
Evolution 101, with reference to coronavirus
By T. Ryan Gregory. Reproduced with permission
Mutations occur as chance errors in replication. They’re just mistakes in copying. Most have no effect. Some are detrimental to the organism (or virus), a few may happen to be beneficial — this depends on the environment.
Three main evolutionary processes determine what happens to genetic variation once it arises (and these are independent of the process that generates new variation, namely mutation): genetic drift, natural selection, and gene flow.
We call different versions of a gene “alleles” and we can talk about the proportion of those versions in a population as “allele frequencies”. Genetic drift is a random change in allele frequencies that occurs by chance.
Genetic drift is basically sampling error, in which the genetic variation in a new generation does not accurately reflect what was present in the previous generation. The most obvious mechanisms of genetic drift are founder effects and population bottlenecks. (But see below about genetic drift being common in small populations generally). Founder effects occur when a random, non-representative subset of a population moves to a new location and founds a new population. The allele frequencies in that founder population won’t be the same as in the source population, and there will typically be less variation overall.
Population bottlenecks are sudden, severe declines in population size in which survival happens at random. So, for example, a drought or storm causes a major die-off and the individuals who survive were just lucky (rather than having traits that helped them survive).
Gene flow is movement of genetic variation from one population to another. The overall effect is to introduce new variation into an existing population (if the source population has different alleles) and to make two populations that exchange alleles more similar to each other.
When we think about the early stages of new species evolving, we generally are considering ways that gene flow is being blocked. Lots of gene flow means two populations are less likely to diverge genetically.
The final evolutionary mechanism is natural selection. In this case, the reason some individuals survive and reproduce better than others is *non-random*. It doesn’t occur by chance. It is specifically related to heritable traits that make survival and reproduction more likely.
This is where the concept of “fitness” is relevant. In evolutionary terms, fitness refers to the advantage in survival and/or reproduction due to heritable traits. Fitness depends on the environment. What is fit in one environment may be neutral or unfit in another environment.
There are different forms of natural selection, depending on what part of the distribution of traits is fit/unfit in the population: directional selection, diversifying (or disruptive) selection, and stabilizing selection.
Under directional selection, one extreme of the distribution is fit and the other is unfit. This drives the distribution of traits in a particular direction from one generation to the next.
For example, if the largest individuals leave more offspring on average than smaller individuals in each generation, then the average size will increase over time. Not because individuals start being born larger in response, but because more offspring are born of large parents.
In diversifying selection, it is the two extremes that are fit and the average traits that are unfit. This can cause a population to split into two. For example, if the smallest and largest individuals do well but the medium-sized are at a disadvantage.
Finally, in stabilizing selection the average value is fit and the extremes are both unfit. The result is that this prevents the distribution of traits from changing in the population because deviations from the current average are detrimental in that environment.
I have added an image from Wikipedia to show these three types of natural selection. A is the original distribution of traits, B is the new distribution. 1) Directional, 2) Stabilizing, 3) Diversifying selection.

There are many factors that affect these evolutionary mechanisms. Mutation rates can be high if there is weak quality control and repair of errors, or if there is some environmental factor (mutagen) that messes up replication.
It also matters how much replication is happening. Every time a genome is replicated, there can be errors. Lots of replication means lots of opportunities for mistakes to occur. (In multicellular organisms, only mutations in the germline are relevant in evolution, of course).
As to what happens to alleles, this depends on the environment as well as population size. Genetic drift, which is sampling error, is stronger when samples (i.e., populations) are smaller. Natural selection, which is non-random, is stronger when populations are large.
Whether an allele is fit or unfit (will be subject to non-random natural selection) or neutral (will evolve by random genetic drift) depends on the environment.
Natural selection and genetic drift can happen at multiple levels. The main one is, of course, among organisms within populations, but these can also happen within organisms. Cancer is an example of cell-level selection that is usually suppressed in multicellular organisms.
When it comes to viruses, there are two levels as well: within hosts and among hosts. Because viruses mutate so quickly (by chance, because their repair mechanisms are weak), there can be new variation arising within a single host.
Some mutants will do better within the host — that is, they will be better at invading host cells or will be replicated more quickly than other versions of the virus within a host.
So, there is natural selection within the host.Some mutants will do better at getting into new hosts. For example, maybe they form smaller aerosol particles and spread father when sneezed out. Or maybe they are in high concentration in the nose rather than deeper in the lungs, so they get shed more easily.
The mutant viruses that do best within a host are not necessarily the same ones that do better at infecting new hosts. In fact, a highly virulent version might be very effective at invading host cells but do so much damage that the host never spreads it to another host.
There can be a trade-off between virulence (replication within a host that causes damage to the host) and transmissibility (spread to new hosts). Which versions of a virus evolve depends on the mutations that happen to occur by chance replication errors and the outcome of genetic drift and natural selection both within hosts and among hosts.
Whether viral evolution involves increased or decreased virulence and/or higher or lower transmissibility depends on many factors. Number of replication events happening. Rates of replication errors. Selective pressures within and among hosts. Viral and host population sizes.
Virulence and transmissibility are not the same thing, and there may be trade-offs between them, but it’s also a concern that a virulent (damages or kills the host) virus can still be successful at the host population level if it is able to spread to many new hosts.
Viruses that are both highly virulent and transmissible will eventually run out of hosts to infect, but they can do great damage before that happens.
One of the many positive effects of reducing transmission (e.g., with vaccines, masks, etc.) is that this imposes a selection pressure for less virulence. If only versions of the virus that don’t incapacitate or kill the host manage to reach new hosts, then those are fitter. Reduced transmission also means fewer replication events happening and this means fewer new mutations.
A mild but highly transmissible version of a virus can spread quickly through a population and then fizzle out as hosts become immune, and many people seem to be assuming this will happen with Omicron, but that also means a lot of replication and new mutations.
The Omicron variant in particular has many, many mutations specifically in the spike protein, which is one reason it is so much more transmissible and escapes previous immunity. And this may now be the starting point for new variants.
It is possible that Omicron is milder (than Delta, at least) and that it will infect pretty much everyone and that this will be a step toward SARS-CoV-2 becoming endemic (like flu, requiring seasonal vaccinations).
But it is also possible that Omicron may undergo more chance mutations that make it more virulent as well as highly transmissible. Then it spreading rapidly will mean many hospitalizations and deaths before it runs out of hosts. We do know it is still evolving.
Viruses don’t want anything. They just spread to new hosts or they don’t, and replicate effectively in hosts or they don’t. Mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, natural selection. There are many factors we can’t control, but there are some that we can. We really ought to try.

Teaching Indigenous thought as science in New Zealand
As Michael says, this project is patronising, since it values Matauranga not for what it is, but for somethng that it is not. Such muddled thinking does nothing but harm to the admirable project of decolonising the curriculum
Peddling and Scaling God and Darwin
Exactly 40 years ago this December the hot topic in science was the trial over the teaching of Creationism in Arkansas. A bill had been passed a few months earlier to give equal time of the teaching of “Creation” and “Evolution” in schools. (Creation mean a 6 day creation some 6 -10,000 years ago according to a literal view of Genesis and Evolution meant an earth some 4.5 billion years old and humans evolving ultimately from a unicellular creature.) At first Creationists in America were rejoicing at their success, but soon forces were mobilised against them.
Soon the bill was challenged in the courts, with a court case running from 7th to17th December 1981. A vast number of witnesses were called on both sides and on Jan 5th 1982 Judge Overton gave a 38 page ruling concluding that Creation Science was not science but religious doctrine and thus could not…
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