Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning
The thing about evolutionary biology is that researchers can't help providing evidence for it. It's not intentional; it's not as though there is any doubt, it's just that the reality is that species evolved from common ancestors. So, inevitably, reality shows the evidence.
Take, for example, this piece of research published yesterday on the subject of bonobo (Pan paniscus) and chimpanzee (P. troglodytes) and their use of non-verbal communications or gestures which both use extensively to communicate with others of their species.
Religion, Creationism, evolution, science and politics from a centre-left atheist humanist. The blog religious frauds tell lies about.
Wednesday 28 February 2018
Monday 19 February 2018
All-female Fish Makes Creationism Look Stupid
Amazon molly (Poecilia formosa) Photo credit: Manfred Schartl |
No wonder American creationists all seem to be uncritical fawns of Donald Trump, hoping he'll build a wall to shut Mexico out. Right on the Mexican border with Texas, that centre of Christian fundamentalism and creationism, is a little fish that could cause the whole thing to come down - creationism that is, not the wall which hasn't even been started yet, the truculent Mexicans not agreeing to pay for a Trump foible.
The little fish, the Amazon molly, Poecilia formosa, like the newly emerged new species of crayfish I wrote about earlier, is all-female and reproduces asexually. The daughters are all clones of their mother.
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Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Science
Thursday 8 February 2018
An Intermediate Spider-Scorpion!
Chimerarachne yingi, preserved in amber in exquisite detail. Photo: Bo Wang |
Continuing with what has turned out to be another dreadful week for creationism, we now have two papers about a 100 million year-old species, beautifully preserved in exquisite detail in amber, which has characteristics of both spiders and scorpions.
Spiders, a group of arachnids are characterised by modified body appendages called spinnerets which extrude silk, and, in males, a pair of pedipalps which are used to insert sperm into females. All but the most primitive spiders also have smooth, non-segmented abdomens. Scorpions, on the other hand have segmented abdomens and lack spinneretes and pedipalps. They also have the characteristic tail.
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Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Palaeontology
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Science
Wednesday 7 February 2018
Yet Another Newly Evolved Species
Marbled crayfish, Procambarus virginalis |
Like most weeks, it's been a pretty dreadful one for creationists so far as scientific research is concerned. Another week and still not one iota of support for creationism or its lab-coated mock-science version, intelligent (sic) design. Instead we have the usual plethora of papers which quite incidentally, and with no effort or intent on the part of the authors, refutes creationism and confirms evolution.
I've already written about two - bacteria evolving to digest plastic and the extraordinary evolutionary history of the house dust mite. Now we have this observed evolution of a new species of crayfish which fills all the criteria for what creationists call 'macro-evolution', which they claim is impossible. Later, I'll be writing about a beautiful example of a fossil of an intermediate ancestor of both spiders and scorpions - again, something creationists tell their dupes don't exist. That one 'impossible' thing and one 'nonexistent' thing in the same week!
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Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Science
Tuesday 6 February 2018
Mites Evolving All Around Us
A scanning electron microscope image of an American house dust mite, Dermatophagoides farinae. Image credit: Ellen Foot Perkowski |
Unless you have a microscope or exceptionally good eyesight you are never likely to see one but you are living now with millions of them in your carpets, furniture and beds. They are of course the ubiquitous house dust mites, and they have an interesting and unusual evolutionary history.
This history in turn is probably responsible for a unique solution to a common problem faced by all organisms - how to cope with those pieces of non-coding DNA called transposons, part of the junk DNA, that can randomly relocate themselves within a genome, causing mutations and diseases. Transposons behave a little like independent strands of DNA with evolutionary pressures to survive despite evolutionary pressure on their 'hosts' to control them.
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Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Parasitism
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Science
Bacteria Evolved to Eat Plastic
ILLUSTRATION: P. HUEY/SCIENCE |
One of the more subtle aspects of evolution, and one that creationists are either unable or unwilling to understand, is the difference between genetic information and the meaning of that information. A paper published in March 2016 by a Japanese team, illustrates that principle very well. It is about the discovery of a strain of bacteria that has evolved the ability to digest the man-made plastic, poly(ethylene teraphthalate) (PET).
Currently, the world-wide production of PET is over 50 million tons and none of it was biodegradable - until now!
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Biology
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Creationism
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Environment
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Evolution
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Science
Wednesday 31 January 2018
Evolutionary Transition To Modern Humans
Modern human brain organization emerged only recently | Max Planck Society
The fossil record shows a distinct gradual transition to the modern human brain and cranial capacity from more ape-like origins, even within the species we recognise as Homo sapiens.
This is the finding of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, according to an open access paper published a few days ago in Science Advances. The finding also illustrates nicely how science incorporates new information, even information that at first glance doesn't seem to fit what we thought we knew, and how that new information can lead to a revised understanding and an improved explanation.
The fossil record shows a distinct gradual transition to the modern human brain and cranial capacity from more ape-like origins, even within the species we recognise as Homo sapiens.
This is the finding of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, according to an open access paper published a few days ago in Science Advances. The finding also illustrates nicely how science incorporates new information, even information that at first glance doesn't seem to fit what we thought we knew, and how that new information can lead to a revised understanding and an improved explanation.
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Anthropology
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Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Science
Monday 29 January 2018
New Poll - Creationism Declining in USA
In U.S., Belief in Creationist View of Humans at New Low
Slightly encouraging news a couple of days ago from a Gallop poll in the USA. I say slightly encouraging because the change is small on a small data set (just 1011 adults aged 18 or over) and the same poll is also disappointing in other ways.
The poll shows that belief in creationism as the best explanation for humans fell to 38%, the lowest since polling began in 1981 and below 40% for the first time.
However, a two percentage point fall is within the margin of statistical error on that size data set. None-the-less, it is encouraging - for the USA.
Slightly encouraging news a couple of days ago from a Gallop poll in the USA. I say slightly encouraging because the change is small on a small data set (just 1011 adults aged 18 or over) and the same poll is also disappointing in other ways.
The poll shows that belief in creationism as the best explanation for humans fell to 38%, the lowest since polling began in 1981 and below 40% for the first time.
However, a two percentage point fall is within the margin of statistical error on that size data set. None-the-less, it is encouraging - for the USA.
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Christianity
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Evolution
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Science
Friday 26 January 2018
Modern Humans May Have Left Africa 200,000 Years Ago
Misliya-1 |
The story of when and where modern humans first left Africa is continuing to develop and looks like becoming more complicated than first thought when the evidence seemed to point to a single migration by a small group around 50,000 years ago.
A large international team led by Israel Hershkovitz from Tel Aviv University have concluded that the jaw bone found in a Misliya Cave on the western slope of Mount Carmel in Israel is that of a Homo sapiens, but that it is between 177,000 and 194,000 years old. This is some 40,000 years earlier than modern humans were believed to have left Africa to begin their world-wide dispersal. The previous earliest H. sapiens remains were those found nearby in the Skhul Cave on Mount Carmel and Qafzeh Cave in Israel, dated to between 80,000 to 120,000 years old.
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Anthropology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Science
Wednesday 24 January 2018
How Creationists Lie To Us - Creation Ministries
When you show the world you need to lie for your faith You show the world you know your faith is a lie |
It is of course a lie.
The lie originated in one of the usual creationist disinformation sites, Creation.com, the online front for Creation Ministries, the Australia-based creationist organisation from which Ken Ham split when he realised America was a more lucrative place for scamming fundamentalist Christians, in an article penned by Jonathan O'Brien, a Creation Ministries staffer.
O'Brien is notorious for, amongst other things, his claim that the primitive carving of a rhinoceros in front of some leaves at Angkor in Cambodia is really a carving of a stegosaurus, a creature with which it has very little real resemblance, and the claim that because a volcanic cone in Mexico grew in a year, this is evidence that mountains did not take millions of years to form, so could all have formed in the last few thousand years (ignoring the fact that most mountain ranges are not volcanic in origin but are due to plate tectonics).
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Morality
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Science
Tuesday 23 January 2018
Pope Attacks Sex Abuse Victims.
Bishop Juan Barros |
In an astonishing end to his less than triumphal visit to Chile, Pope Francis shocked his hosts by, not to put too fine a point on it, calling those accusing a Catholic Bishop of assisting a cover-up of child abuse, liars.
His visit had been met with demonstrations and much smaller crowds than previous visits because the Catholic Church in Chile is currently embroiled in the now traditional clerical sex abuse of minors scandal. Police had to use tear gas and water cannons to break up one demonstration outside the Pope's open-air address in the centre of Santiago.
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Catholics
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Christianity
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Pope
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Religious abuse
Thursday 18 January 2018
Neanderthals Had Sex With Anyone
Upper view of the Montmaurin-LN mandible. |
We now know that modern humans interbred with at least two, probably three and possibly more different hominin species when they left Africa. What this new analysis shows is that Neanderthals also interbred with archaic hominins and may not even have formed as single lineage in Eurasia.
Instead, this analysis by a team of scientists from the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (National Research Centre for Human Evolution - CENIEH) in Spain, led by José María Bermúdez de Castro, together with the French researcher Amélie Vialet, from the Musée d'histoire naturelle (Natural History Museum) in Paris, suggests that Neanderthals may have diversified, evolved as isolated populations, then interbred with one another so that later Neanderthals were a mosaic of earlier and divergent populations.
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Anthropology
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Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Science
Tuesday 16 January 2018
Birds of a Feather - New Species Evolve
Large cactus finch (Geospiza conirostris) |
Birds of a feather: U of T researchers discover Amazon bird to be rare hybrid species
This week we have a couple of examples of new species arising - that thing that creationists insist can't happen. The evolutionary process that created them was hybridisation which occurs very much faster than the more usual (at least in vertebrates - speciation by hybridisation is common in plants) divergence by a combination of genetic drift and natural selection. And in these cases, the species are birds.
The first is from those devil figures for creationists - Darwin's finches or Galapagos finches. This was originally reported and commented extensively upon last November and revealed an observed incidence of apparent speciation when a vagrant male appeared on the island of Daphne Major. This was much larger and had a larger, more robust beak than any of the other three species present on the island. It also sang with a different song.
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Birds
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Science
Monday 15 January 2018
Two More Catholic Clerics - Two More Sex Abuse Scandals
Archbishop Anthony Apuron stands in front of the Dulce Nombre de Maria Cathedral Basilica in Hagatna, Guam, Nov. 2014. Photo credit: AP Photo/Grace Garces Bordallo |
The US Pacific territory of Guam, which is almost wholly Catholic, has been rocked by a series of allegations that vehemently homophobic Anthony Apuron, Archbishop of Agana, sexually abuses altar boys in the 1970s. He has vigorously denied all the allegations and has not been criminally charged, but now another accuser has come forward.
The latest accuser, a relative of Archbishop Apuron, has claimed in the local media that he was abused by Apuron in 1990. This latest allegation has been reported to the Vatican. According to Archbishop Michael Byrnes, an earlier Vatican tribunal investigation into the earlier allegations has reportedly concluded and reached a verdict late last year but, for reasons unknown, has not yet made its findings public. Archbishop Byrnes has been given administrative responsibility for the diocese while Apuron is on administrative leave.
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Catholics
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Christianity
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Religious abuse
Tuesday 9 January 2018
Changing Our Mind When the Evidence Changes
European brown bear (Ursus arctos) Photo credit: Ivan PC |
To a creationist, with their simplistic black vs white, right vs wrong mentality, the fact that science can make mistakes or that the understanding is provisional - and all scientific understanding is provisional, even the best-supported - tells them that science, unlike their firmly held and unchangeable dogmas, is unreliable and therefore wrong. Little better than a guess, in fact.
To a scientist, and to anyone interested in truth rather than simple certainty, however, discovering that you have been wrong is actually welcome news and news that was well worth doing the research to discover because it means that what you now think you know is closer to the truth than it was before. Science works because scientists can and do change their minds when the evidence changes, unlike fundamentalist religions, where not changing your mind and not even questioning the dogmas is a prerequisite.
Monday 8 January 2018
Massive Evolutionary Reduction in Genome Size
A Chilean cicada, which hosts particularly unusual symbiotic bacteria. Photo credit: Piotr Lukasik |
Hopefully getting back to blogging again after spending time on another book, it's a pleasure coming back with details of two papers published by the same team a few days ago that shatter so many creationist dogmas, it's hard to keep count.
Creationists will tell you, for example, that evolution involves an increase in complexity and therefore an increase in information in the genome, and that this is impossible because of some mysterious application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which ignore the fact that an organism, Earth, and even the solar system are not closed systems. Never-the-less, they'll confidently assure you that in this way science has proved evolution can't happen, it's just that millions of working biologists never got the memo and have been mistaking the observed instances of not evolution for examples of... well... evolution.
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Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Science
Friday 22 December 2017
Climate Change is Shrinking Moose
The Shrinking Moose of Isle Royale | Michigan Tech News:
Moose on Isle Royale, Michigan, USA are evolving rapidly in response to environmental change, especially climate change.
Unlike nearby populations of moose which have halved in the past 12 years, the Isle Royale moose population has increased by more than twenty percent per year for the last six years - but they are getting smaller. Measurements of skulls collected over a forty year period show they have shrunk by about sixteen percent. Life-span is also reducing.
Moose on Isle Royale, Michigan, USA are evolving rapidly in response to environmental change, especially climate change.
Unlike nearby populations of moose which have halved in the past 12 years, the Isle Royale moose population has increased by more than twenty percent per year for the last six years - but they are getting smaller. Measurements of skulls collected over a forty year period show they have shrunk by about sixteen percent. Life-span is also reducing.
Sunday 10 December 2017
Suffer Little Children - At the Hands of Priests and Nuns
Smyllum Park Catholic Children Abuse Centre, Lanarkshire, Scotlanda |
When a nun caring for children at the Catholic-run Smyllum Park children's home in Lanarkshire, Scotland walked into the chapel and found a priest sexually abusing an eight year-old girl, she sprang immediately into action.
She grabbed the girl by one arm and flung her against the wall, breaking her arm, called her a 'whore' and shouted “get the f*** out of here” at her.
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Catholics
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Christianity
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Human Rights
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Religious abuse
Friday 8 December 2017
Pope Francis Thinks the Bible is Wrong!
Lord's Prayer: Pope Francis calls for change - BBC News
Pope Francis has been thinking.
No, it's not about how the church can avoid taking responsibility for the child abuses carried out by it's priests and nuns and certainly not about how it can compensate and support their victims and avoid creating any more.
It's about how to resolve a curious contradiction in the Bible that has been taxing the brains of theologians and biblical scholars for close on 1700 years, ever since the Bible was compiled. The contradiction is between James 13:1 with:
Pope Francis has been thinking.
No, it's not about how the church can avoid taking responsibility for the child abuses carried out by it's priests and nuns and certainly not about how it can compensate and support their victims and avoid creating any more.
It's about how to resolve a curious contradiction in the Bible that has been taxing the brains of theologians and biblical scholars for close on 1700 years, ever since the Bible was compiled. The contradiction is between James 13:1 with:
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Atheism
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Bible
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Christianity
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Pope
Human Evolution - Dispersal Out of Africa
On the origin of modern humans: Asian perspectives | Science
One of the exciting things about science is how knowledge is never fixed and unchanging. It grows and develops as new findings are incorporated into existing understanding, sometimes even needing quite fundamental revisions of what we thought we knew.
One such branch of science is that of human evolution and dispersal out of Africa which is in an exciting phase at the moment as new archaeological discoveries are made and new techniques of DNA recovery and analysis are revealing genetic evidence of relationships and interbreeding.
One of the exciting things about science is how knowledge is never fixed and unchanging. It grows and develops as new findings are incorporated into existing understanding, sometimes even needing quite fundamental revisions of what we thought we knew.
One such branch of science is that of human evolution and dispersal out of Africa which is in an exciting phase at the moment as new archaeological discoveries are made and new techniques of DNA recovery and analysis are revealing genetic evidence of relationships and interbreeding.
Labels:
Anthropology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Science
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