F Rosa Rubicondior

Tuesday 11 October 2016

Irish Catholic Bishop Now 'Irrelevant'.

Fine Gael TD Kate O’Connell
Fine Gael TD: Archbishop’s opinion on abortion ‘is not at all relevant’ | Irish Examiner.

A measure of just how much contempt there is in the Irish Republic for the Catholic Church can be seen in an astonishingly frank attack on Archbishop Eamon Martin, Primate of Ireland, for his comments on the subject of the proposed liberalisation of Ireland's draconian abortion law, which is enshrined the Constitution.

A Fine Gael TD, Kate O’Connell, told the Irish Examiner,

Sunday 9 October 2016

'Kind' Pope Francis Bashing the Gays Again!

Pope Francis: A 'global war' seeks to destroy marriage.

A few days ago in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, the Pope gave an almost perfect illustration of how the Catholic Church is completely incapable of reforming itself without giving up being the Catholic Church.

He reportedly told an audience of priests and seminarians that there is a 'global war to destroy marriage'. He was of course referring to moves to legalise same-sex marriage and so give equal human rights to homosexual couples rather than to stigmatise, persecute and deny basic rights to them as the church would prefer.

Saturday 8 October 2016

It's Time To Dump Trump!

I don't normally comment here on American politics, if for no other reason that I'm not American and believe Americans should decide their own affairs.

However, Donald Trump provokes me to make an exception. Donald Trump is not fit to run a used car lot, let alone the most powerful nation in history with a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying everything on this planet several times over. He has shown himself to be emotionally unstable and quite incapable of controlling his most hateful impulses. He has a sociopathic, even psychopathic disregard for other people. This latest revelation should have done for him as a serious presidential candidate but it

Altruism and Spiders

A female dark fishing spider (left) and its male counterpart, which sacrifices itself as a food source immediately after mating. A new study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Gonzaga University has found that this cannibalism can benefit the male's offspring.
Photo: Karina I. Helm
Source
Ultimate sacrifice: Spider's post-sex cannibalism aids offspring | University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Altruism is one of those evolutionary traits that creationists claim not to be able to comprehend for a couple of reasons:
  1. It seems to require some sort of morality and a knowledge of outcomes, and they normally find it hard to think why anyone would do something for someone else if there is no promise of a reward. At least that is normally behind their claim that you need their god to be moral.
  2. How can a trait which is detrimental to the individual in that it causes loss or harm, be advantageous in the Darwinian sense, and so be passed on differentially in preference to a trait for selfishness?

Wednesday 5 October 2016

Even Educated Bees Do It!

The buff-tailed bumblebee, Bombus terrestris.
Source: Wikipedia
Associative Mechanisms Allow for Social Learning and Cultural Transmission of String Pulling in an Insect | PLOS Biology

It's now well known that humans are not the only species capable of learning new skills and passing these on to others.

Despite the old religious-based view of humans as having a unique intelligence not seen in other animals, and thus standing us apart from the rest of 'creation', like tool construction and use and the ability to solve problems, learning and culture are now being seen in a whole range of other animals. Until now though, this had been confined mostly to vertebrates and almost exclusively to mammals and birds.

Tuesday 4 October 2016

Does God Favour Axolotls?

Early development reveals axolotl mysteries -- ScienceDaily

You can understand a creator being quite fond of axolotls. There is something fascinating about them, especially the way they look and behave a lot like some sort of fish with legs and even breathe underwater using gills.

Basically, the Mexican axolotl, Ambystoma mexicanum, is a big salamander which spends most of its life as a tadpole. They even breed in their juvenile form and only become land-based adults when their water dries up. They also have a massive genome by mammalian standards, all packed into just fourteen chromosomes. Their genome is far larger than any other known amphibians but this appears to be due almost entirely to repetitive gene duplication.

Monday 3 October 2016

We Owe It All To Pollution!

Dr Rosalie Tostevin. Field work in Namibia.
Source: UCL
Credit: Fred Bowyer
Low-oxygen waters limited habitable space for early animals | Nature Communications.

The great thing about science is the way it all meshes neatly together. Although there may currently be gaps in our understanding these gaps are getting smaller and the piece that fills the gap almost always neatly fits in with what we already know.

Of course, there may be occasions when the piece doesn't quite fit and so we need to look again at the surrounding science, but in the long run, these conflicts are always resolved to smooth out the wrinkles and fill in the cracks.

And another one of these little gaps looks as though it might have been filled in. Despite the ever and unrealistically optimistic hope of creationists that the very next gap will be found to be where their god lives, no such god was found by science yet again. The answer was entirely consistent with what we already know - which is inevitable, when you think about it. It is inevitable because science is about reality and reality is consistent.

Talking Neanderthals Give Creationists Earache!

Tympanic membrane (grey), ossicular chain (yellow, green, red), and bony inner ear (blue) of a modern human with a One-Eurocent coin for scale.
© A. Stoessel & P. Gunz
Source
Morphology and function of Neandertal and modern human ear ossicles

Creationists struggle with archaic human like Neanderthals, Homo erectus and H. habilis trying out various ways to dismiss them as diseased and deformed individuals, forgeries, etc.

The slightly less delusional ones have learned that there are limits to the amount of evidence that can be denied without looking more than a little insane, so have learned to accept a form of evolution, albeit a ludicrously rapid one which requires several fully-formed new species to spring into existence every generation. To these, all hominids are merely minor variations and have all developed from the fully human people who supposedly got off the Ark about 4000 years ago.

Saturday 1 October 2016

Has The 'Intelligent Designer' Been Tweaking Zika?

Fatal Zika Virus Infection with Secondary Nonsexual Transmission - NEMJ Correspondence

Parasites in general and viruses like the zika virus in particular continue to be an embarrassment to creationists who insist everything is intelligently designed for a purpose.

The main embarrassment of course is in explaining why it designed them in the first place, although 'The Fall' is regularly trotted out as the excuse. But, this gives away the fact that the 'intelligent (sic) designer' is the Christian god and that intelligent design 'science' is fundamentalist, Bible-literalist Christianity posing as science to try to sneak past the 'Establishment Clause' in the US Constitution.

Tuesday 27 September 2016

Ostrich Eggs Cracking Creationism

3.8-million-year-old ostrich eggshell fragments from Laetoli, Tanzania.
Image credit: Terry Harrison.
Source: Sci News
Protein sequences bound to mineral surfaces persist into deep time | eLife

An open access paper published yesterday shows something which should be frightening the wits out of creationists frauds, even if their willing dupes won't understand or accept the significance of it. An international team of researchers has shown the proteins can persist in the fossil record for at least 3.8 million years - some 50 times longer than DNA.

The protein was found bound to the fossilised fragments of ostrich eggshells. The finding open up the possibility of detailed analysis of human evolution where DNA has not survived.

Monday 26 September 2016

Doing Science With Elephants

Straight-tusked elephants (models)
Source: Wikipedia
Elephant history rewritten by ancient genomes : Nature News & Comment

How can elephant DNA teach us about why science works and creationism doesn't?

Creationists, with their simplistic black vs. white view of the world, often pour scorn and derision on science for changing its collective mind so frequently. This comes of course from a mindset which values 'certainty', no matter how illusory, more highly than truth. Truth is sacrificed in the search for the cosy comfort of 'certainty'.

But science doesn't look for certainty. Science simply tries to get as close to the truth as possible and a truth which can be demonstrated. The analogy is of a car being driven to a destination. Every movement on that journey is a sign of progress, not a sign of failure. Constant change of position is the method of progress. Science has to change its collective mind to make progress. Religions fail to make progress because they can't change their collective minds without abandoning their religion. With religions, the dogma is everything.

So what has this to do with elephant DNA?

Thursday 22 September 2016

Christians 'Cleanse the Streets' After Gay Pride March

The Freethinker - The voice of atheism since 1881 » In Belgrade, priests ‘cleanse’ the streets after Pride event

In an orgy of gratuitous anti-gay hate and abuse, Serbian Orthodox Christians, incensed at a gay pride parade in the Serbian capita, Belgrade, held a rally and march to ritually cleanse the streets of 'homosexual contamination'. The parade had been heavily protected by police preventing Orthodox and far-right nationalist extremists violently breaking it up as earlier years.

Amongst the expressions of Christian 'love' was a banner showing a homosexual being pushed into Hellfire by a Christian with a cross. The love of Jesus

Mexican Priests Still Raping Children

"I personally ask for forgiveness for the damage [some priests] have done for having sexually abused children. We will not take one step backward with regards to how we will deal with this problem, and the sanctions that must be imposed".
Catholic Church ACQUITS Mexican priest who admitted to raping 30 young girls | Daily Mail Online

In an extraordinary move, and one which flies in the face of official Vatican pronouncements on the subject of child-abusing Catholic priests, the Archdiocese of Mexico has formally acquitted an HIV carrying priest of any wrongdoing even though he admitted having sex with about 30 girls aged between 5 and 10 over many years.

The assaults were committed on indigenous girls in the southern province of Oaxaca which has a predominantly indigenous population and where the influence of the Catholic Church is very powerful, especially amongst the indigenous people. No criminal charges have yet been brought against the priest, José Ataulfo Garcia, despite his admission, almost certainly due to the Church's political influence in Mexico.

Wednesday 21 September 2016

Americans Losing Faith

The factors driving the growth of religious ‘nones’ in the U.S. | Pew Research Center

In another attempt to understand the recent rapid growth in the 'nones' - those who don't self-identify with any religion - the Pew Research Centre took another look at the data to identify the factors driving this rejection of organised religion:

The share of Americans who do not identify with a religious group is surely growing: While nationwide surveys in the 1970s and ’80s found that fewer than one-in-ten U.S. adults said they had no religious affiliation, fully 23% now describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular.”

But there are differing ideas about the factors driving this trend – and its implications for society. While it appears the U.S. is becoming less religious, some contend that’s not necessarily the case. Instead, they say, the growth of the “nones” may simply indicate that people who are not religious are becoming more forthright and willing to say they have no religious affiliation, perhaps because being a “none” has become more socially acceptable.


Clearly this topic is exercising the minds of a lot of worried people. Although this study is a relatively superficial treatment of the phenomenon, analysing only a few factors such as age, former religion and strength of former religious commitment rather than any underlying cause of change in opinion, it shows a number of interesting and related trends. An earlier Pew Centre FactTank report had shown some of the reasons people give for rejecting religion, including a better understanding of science, but it would have been good to see some analysis of lifestyle changes such as ready access to information and exposure to the behaviour, ignorance and downright stupidity underpinning religious fundamentalism.

Monday 19 September 2016

Death of a Modern Exorcist

Fr. Gabriele Amorth. 70,000 exorcisms.
World Famous Exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth Dies at 91 |Blogs | NCRegister.com

The thing about the modern Catholic Church is its modernity and the way it has enthusiastically embraced science and abandoned those old, mediaeval, unscientific superstitions like a flat Earth, six-day creation and the inferior status of the black, brown, yellow and red-skinned races.

They've even turned their back on the notion which lead to the persecution of women as witches - a world in which evil spirits could enter and take over human... er... except they haven't.

No, really!

Sunday 18 September 2016

Caving for Creationists

A waterscorpion (Nepa sp.) attacks its crustacean prey.
Photo credit: Patrick Landmann/SPL
BBC - Earth - The bizarre beasts living in Romania's poison cave

News that a cave near the Black Sea in Romania which has been isolated from the outside world for 5.5 million years has multiple examples of unique and strange creatures living it it, comes as no surprise at all to evolutionary biologists.

In fact, provided that there is a source of energy so living things can continue to live, this is exactly what we would expect of an evolutionary process.

Saturday 10 September 2016

Another Big Problem For Creationists

Multi-locus Analyses Reveal Four Giraffe Species Instead of One: Current Biology

If only they were little less disingenuous and arrogantly certain, you could almost feel sorry for creationists. Just when they're settling down to feel smugly self-satisfied that they've invented a workaround for all the evidence that evolution fully explains biodiversity without involving their imaginary friend science comes up with another paper that illustrates the disingenuous fraud of this workaround. Their workaround was to deliberately misrepresent the terms 'macroevolution' and 'microevolution' as they are used by science.

Wednesday 7 September 2016

Shi'a And Sunni - As Different as Chalk And Chalk

'Iranians are not Muslims', says Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti | The Independent

With the two major Middle Eastern Islamic powers, one, Iran being 95% Shi'a and the other, Saudi Arabia being 90% Sunni, indulging in a bitter war of words, it is worth looking at the history of the religious differences between these two branches of Islam.

The origin of this schism goes right back to the events following the death of Muhammad in Medina, Saudi Arabia in 632 CE. Muhammad himself had no male descendants, brothers or nephews so there was no clear line of succession and no rules of succession to be found in the Qur'an or Hadiths.

The early Muslim leadership, still centred on Medina, formed three different groupings; the first being the close associates of Muhammad who had made the hijra (the journey from Mecca into exile in Medina) with him; the later converts from amongst the leading families in Medina and the later still converts from Mecca. Whilst the first group regarded themselves as the natural successors to Muhammad and regarded the other two with suspicion as Johnny-come-latelies who had failed to support Muhammad in the early days.

Tuesday 6 September 2016

Irish Catholics Lying For Jesus

Irish doctors respond to the advice given in controversial abortion clinic video

An undercover pair of reporters for the Irish edition of the Times has exposed the systematic lies being told to vulnerable pregnant women seeking safe, confidential and accurate abortion advice.

The Women's Centre, Berkeley Street, Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland, which poses as an independent advice centre but which is in reality a front for a Catholic anti-abortion group, was visited by the two reporters, Ellen Coyne and Catherine Sanz, pretending to be pregnant. They used concealed cameras to filmed the session. The report regretably sits behind a paywall so this blog post draws on other sites which report on its contents.

They were told:
Taken from the Abortionadvice.ie website.
  • The ovaries and breasts are connected so when a pregnancy is terminated, it can cause breast cancer.
  • An abortion can harm a woman's reproductive system.
  • Women who have had abortions may go on to abuse their other children.
  • The abortion pill can't be used after the 6th week of pregnancy.
  • Abortions often lead to the death of the woman having the abortion.
  • UK abortion clinics can give you infections so only the group's centres should be used.
All of these are wrong or grossly misleading. As doctors from Doctors For Choice, an Irish organisation that campaigns for reform of Irish abortion laws, pointed out:

The videoed "information" given to a young woman who presented herself as pregnant to a Dublin "advice" clinic is entirely untrue and dangerous. International medical guidelines state that the abortion pill can be prescribed up to at least 9 weeks in pregnancy. Furthermore there is no reputable published research and no medical evidence for an increased risk of breast cancer or psychological sequelae from abortion, when compared to women who have completed pregnancies. To suggest that women who have had abortions are more likely to perpetrate child abuse is to heap insult on top of the stigma already imposed on the more than 100,000 women who have been forced to leave Ireland to access safe legal abortion services.

Irish women deserve access to safe, legal abortion, regulated as are other medical services. They deserve evidence-based, unbiased information provided in a setting where basic first principles regarding counselling apply - where there is no agenda regarding the decisions they reach and the advice is non-directive.

Berkeley Street, Dublin, 2014
Abortions are illegal under the Irish Constitution unless as the result of medical intervention to save the life of the mother. Although there is a constitutional right to obtain information about abortion services in other jurisdictions, abortion advice centres such as this are completely unregulated, so luring unsuspecting, vulnerable women into them to be fed lies, misinformation and propaganda is perfectly legal in the Republic of Ireland. They are not regulated by medical or other professional ethical standards.

Prior to disguising itself as an independent advice center, this militant pro-life group set up shop adjacent to a family planning clinic in Berkeley Street and harangued women using the service with unwanted 'advice'. They now seem to have decided to be a little more subtle which means pretending not to be an overtly Catholic front organisation.

Although the Bible does not explicitly forbid the telling of lies and the ninth Commandment only forbids bearing false witness against a neighbour, this is generally held to be a general prohibition on telling lies. This Catholic group however seems to feel exempt from this fundamental piece of Christian 'morality'. Presumably, they would expect Jesus to tell lies too if the truth wasn't what he wanted it to be or what he wanted people to hear.

'via Blog this'

Monday 5 September 2016

Look What Christianity Is Used For!

Pastor Idowu Olupinla, founder of Cherubim and Seraphim Church
Pastor arrested for operating underage prostitution cartel inside church - Premium Times Nigeria.

Satan used children against me – Pastor found with 13 girls in sex harem.

Following on from the canonization yesterday of the sadistic Albanian nun and friend of poverty, Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu (aka Mother Teresa) showing how Catholic Church leaders exploit the gullible credulity of their followers for their own nefarious purposes, come two news items from Nigeria showing how the same tendency to abuse power for personal gain is not restricted to the bigger and more organised churches.
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