Old Blue Eyes and the Mutant Gene

Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor – University of Copenhagen

Some 6-10,000 years ago, probably in the agricultural lands to the north east of the Black Sea, a person was born with strange, blue eyes. He or she was the common ancestor of all blue-eyed people alive today.

This is the conclusion of Professor Hans Eiberg and his colleagues from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of Copenhagen. They arrived at this conclusion after analysing the genes of a large Danish family to pinpoint the area of DNA responsible for regulating the OCA2 gene known to be the major contributor to human eye colour. This gene, HERC2 exists in a number of alleles, one of which is the mutation that causes blue eyes.

Catholic Abuse News - Indian Bishop Charged With Raping a Nun

Bishop Franco Mulakkal

Kerala Nun Rape Case: Franco Mulakkal Charge-Sheeted, First Bishop To Go On Trial In India For Rape

Bishop Franco Mulakkal, bishop of the Roman Catholic diocese of Jalandhar since 2013, has been charged with raping a nun nine times. This is the first time a Catholic bishop has been charged with such a crime in Indian history.

The attacks are alleged to have taken place in the southern Indian state of Karela over a two year period between 2014 and 2016. Mulakkal faces life in prison if convicted. The charge sheet includes statements from more than 80 witnesses including a cardinal, three bishops, 11 priests and 25 nuns.

He also faces charges of intimidation, illegal confinement and unnatural intercourse, charges which carry a ten year sentence.

Human Evolution News - Another New Species?

Callao Cave, Luzon, Philippines. Home of Homo luzonensis.

New species of ancient human discovered in the Philippines: Homo luzonensis

The wonderful human evolutionary story that only a few days ago became a little more complicated with the discovery of two more 'Denisovans' in Papua-New Guinea, just got even more complicated with the announcement of yet another possible species of archaic hominins on the island of Luzon in the Philippines.

A combined French, Filipino and Australian team of archaeologists led by Florent Détroit of Département Homme & Environnement, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France have discovered twelve more fragments of hominin bones and teeth to add to the metatarsal bone found in 2007 and dated to 67,000 years ago. These recent finds of two more toe bones along with seven teeth, two finger bones, and part of a femur, are from the same stratigraphic layer as the earlier find and come from at least three individuals.

Unintelligent Design News - WWI Muddle

Vibrio cholerae bacteria. If swallowed, these highly contagious organisms release toxins in the gut that cause severe diarrhoeal disease.

Credit: David Golding,
Wellcome Sanger Institute

Genetic code of WWI soldier's cholera mapped | Wellcome Sanger Institute

Creationism's putative intelligent (sic) designer seems to have gotten itself into a right old muddle during World War I, according to the findings of a team of researchers published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Science today.

The team from the Wellcome Sanger Institute analysed the genome of a strain of the bacteria normally responsible for causing cholera, Vibrio cholerae, isolated from a sample of the stools of a WWI soldier of the British Expeditionary Force which had been taken in 1916 while the soldier was convalescing in Egypt.

As the Wellcome Sanger Institute press release explains:

Why Christians Need to Hate Atheists

A theist comforts himself after losing another argument on the Internet.

Fox & Friends Says Protecting Atheists From Discrimination Is Anti-Christian! | Crooks and Liars

This little item by Heather from Crooks and Liars shows Christians arguing that protecting Atheists from discrimination is anti-Christian.

In other words, so they imply, to be a Christian, you should actively discriminate against people who disagree with you, or at least you should have the right to, so treating them as lesser people deserving of lower standards than you are entitled to by virtue of your religion.

None of that essential equality of man or all people being created equal stuff. That's all very well in theory and certainly applies when Christians are being discriminated against, but Atheism threatens Christianity so Christianity needs to abandon ... er... Christianity to defend itself.

So what is it about Atheism that threatens Christian fundamentalists that way? There are a couple of reasons, none of which reflect well on Christians:

Neanderthals and Mammoths Refute Creationism Again

News Page (Archaeology) - American Friends of Tel Aviv University

The news from science is never good news for creationism, but that's the problem with having opinions which are not based on reality. Tweet

This little item from Tel Aviv University, for example, shatters several creationist myths. It shows the fallacy behind the claim that all mutations are harmful and result in degradation (or 'increased entropy') in the genome. It shows common ancestry between two distantly related mammals; it shows how environmental change drives evolution and it shows how mutation does not inevitably lead to a loss of function.

Catholic Abuse News - How the Church Corrupted Ireland

Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland, Diarmuid Martin

Image credit: Gareth Chaney Collins

Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin reveals paedophile priests cannot identify new victims because they abused so many - Irish Mirror Online.

The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, the senior Catholic cleric in the whole of Ireland, has revealed in an astonishingly frank interview on Irish TV, that some paedophiles priests were so prolific in their abuse that when presented with names of possible victims, they could not remember, there had been so many. In some instances, their victims numbered more than a hundred.

He made the statement in an RTE program detailing the scale of the Catholic Church's interference in Irish public life, becoming involved in just about every aspect of life since the foundation of the Republic. The programme by former government minister, Michael McDowell, looks at how this situation was allowed to develop. How could an organisation with no democratic mandate, accountable only to itself and owing allegiance to a foreign state in the form of the Vatican City, wield so much power in a supposedly democratic state?

Human Evolution - More Evidence of Interbreeding

Some of the last Denisovans may have intermingled with modern humans on mountainous New Guinea or nearby islands.

Photo credit: Dozier Marc/Hemis.fr/Getty Images

Moderns said to mate with late-surviving Denisovans | Science.

The human evolutionary story just got a lot more complicated and a lot more interesting than we thought.

Before we discovered that non-African modern humans hybridised with Neanderthals we thought it was quite straightforward. Modern humans evolved in Africa then a small group migrated out and spread all over the world.

Then we discovered the Denisovans - a different species of human that lived in Asia and with which we also interbred, making the non-African humans the result of hybridisation between three related but different species.

Catholic Abuse News - One Law for One, One Law for Another

Archbishop Anthony Apuron of Guam

Catholic Archbishop of Guam removed from office | RTE.

The Vatican is nothing if not inconsistent.

The Catholic Archbishop of the US island territory of Guam, Anthony Apuron, has been convicted by a Vatican tribunal, upholding an earlier guilty verdict by an earlier tribunal, of sexually abusing three underaged boys but is to be allowed to retain his archbishop title.

By contrast, (former) Cardinal McCarrick, Archbishop of Washington, was stripped of his title and defrocked for similar offences, and Cardinal Pell, sentenced to 6 years in prison by an Australian court for sexually abusing minors, has been presumed innocent by the Vatican, pending his appeal.

A Catastrophic Flood Piled Up The Evidence Against Creationism

Fossilized fish piled one atop another, suggesting that they were flung ashore and died stranded together on a sand bar after the wave from the seiche withdrew.

Photo credit: Robert DePalma

Does fossil site record dino-killing impact? | Science.

66 million years ago, the world changed suddenly and without warning. The Cretaceous era ended, virtually instantaneously, and gave way to the Triassic.

The cause was a massive chunk of rock hurtling in from space, super-heating the atmosphere, and crashing into Earth, setting off a chain of events which exterminated the large dinosaurs and much else - and cleared the way ultimately for the rise of mammals and birds.

The asteroid impacted at Chicxulub on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. The earth and the asteroid turned liquid with the heat of the impact, exploding liquid glass spheroids high into the atmosphere to rain down again like red hot bullets. The impact set off a seismic shockwave with catastrophic tsunamis which surged up river valleys, destroying everything in their path. These surges of salt and fresh water are known to science as seiches.

And now scientists believe they have found the result of one site of devastation, some 3000 Km from the Chicxulub impact site, at the Tanis deposit in North Dakota, USA. They have found the fossilised, chaotic debris left by one such surge. The species in the jumble are of course only the species that were around at the time, including freshwater sturgeons, apparently suffocated by the glass beads that rained down, blocking their gills.

Another 'Non-Existent' Transitional Fossil

Peregocetus pacificus

© A. Gennari

Ancient four-legged whale with webbed feet and hooves uncovered in Peru | Natural History Museum

Another discovery this week of one of those 'non-existent' intermediate fossils is causing creationists to think of inventive ways to explain it away and so maintain the myth that these things just aren't really there.

This time it closes another gap in the story of the evolution of whales - or as creationists will probably claim, it opens up two gaps now where there was previously only one.

Three-toed Skink Is an Evolutionary Intermediate

Which came first the lizard or the egg? - The University of Sydney

Three-toed skink, Saiphos equalis.

Today from the the reptile world, we have a very nice example of evolution in progress, or at least in a state of dynamic equilibrium between two characteristics, each of which could be advantageous in different circumstances.

This example is an Australian skink which appears to be so finely balanced between egg-laying (oviparous) and live-young bearing (viviparous), that one individual has been observed doing both in the same pregnancy. Several weeks after laying a batch of three eggs, an individual three-toed skink, Saiphos equalis, was seen to give birth to a live young.

Examples of individuals reptiles of the same species being either oviparous or viviparous (bimodally reproductive) are rare but by no means unknown, however this is the first observed example of the same individual being able to be both. The three-toed skink is native to Australia's east coast. In the northern highlands of New South Wales it normally gives birth to live young but in the Sydney area, it lays eggs.

Malevolent Design News - A New Way To Make Us Sick

Asian longhorn tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis

Photo credit: Center for Disease Control and Prevention

New Yorkers Brace for Self-cloning Asian Longhorned Tick | Columbia News.

Creationism's Malevolent Designer has been busy recently. Not only have we recently learned how it has armed a bacterium with a virus to use to trick our immune systems so it can prevent wounds from healing, we have just discovered how it has designed a new way to deliver parasitic pathogens directly into our bloodstream.

This delivery system is the Asian longhorn tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis, an invasive species that is rapidly becoming common in Staten Island, New York, USA, and will almost certainly spread from there. Ticks are arachnids which live as blood-sucking parasites, mostly on vertebrates. Like other blood-sucking parasites they can transfer blood-borne infections between its hosts.

Changing Morals as Society Evolves

Utah Governor Gary Herbert

Utah Gov. Signs Bill That Legalizes Sex Outside Of Marriage : NPR

A lovely example of how the morals of human society evolve and change over time was unwittingly provided by the legislators of Utah, USA, a few days ago, despite a die-hard campaign by the religious fundamentalist forces of reaction.

Governor Gary Herbert signed a bill that decriminalizes sex outside of marriage in the state. Until that point, consensual sexual intercourse between non-married couples anywhere in the state of Utah, USA, was a criminal offence, liable to a fine of up to $1000 and a 6-month prison sentence.

Malevolent Design - A Virus to Help a Bacterium Make Us Sick!

Internalization of Pf bacteriophage within a mammalian cell.

Endocytosis of Pf by dendritic cells and other leukocytes triggers viral pattern recognition receptors, which suppress bacterial clearance. This three-dimensional image was generated by using confocal microscopy and z-stacked images (purple, actin stain; blue, DAPI (4′,6-diamidino-2-phenylindole) stain; green, Alexa Fluor 488–labeled Pf4).

Source

Bacteria partners with virus to cause chronic wounds | News Center | Stanford Medicine

My admiration for the malevolent inventiness of creationism's putative Intelligent (sic) Designer, is growing by leaps and bounds.

Not content with designing a bacteria to infect wounds and prevent them healing, this supposed designer has given it a virus to enhance it's virulence.

We normally think in terms of viruses being parasites and there is a class of viruses known as bacteriophages (or phages) which often are parasitic on bacteria. Bacteria and viruses have been co-evolving for tens of billions of years so it shouldn't really be surprising that some have come to some sort of accommodation where the virus contributes something to the bacterium and the bacterium derives some benefit from being infected.

This example of a degree of symbiosis was however, surprising, and it could not have come about before there were more complex, multicellular organisms that could sustain damage that needed to heal.

Unintelligent Design - God Hates Frogs

Yellow-legged frogs killed by chytrid fungus in Sixty Lakes Basin area of the Sierra Nevada, California, USA

Photo credit: Joel Sartore/Natural History Museum.

Amphibian fungal panzootic causes catastrophic and ongoing loss of biodiversity | Science

Continuing our quest to discover the nature of the 'Intelligent [sic] designer', we continually discover that any such sentient entity is ever-more malevolent in its inventiveness.

Here, for example, is evidence that it hates the frogs it designed and is intentionally killing them off in very large numbers - or so you would be required to believe if you had accepted the ID hoax and were taking an honest view of the reality of the natural world.

An international team led by Ben Scheele of the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, ACT, Australia has estimated that some 501 species of amphibian have severely declined in number with some 90 species becoming extinct in the last 25 years or so, due to two closely related chytrid fungi Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis and B. salamandrivorans.

New Bird Shows How Species are Maintained

Newly-identified Cream-eyed bulbul, previously thought to be a variant of the Cream-vented bulbul.

Credit: Subir Shakya, Louisiana State University
Department of Biological Sciences

New Bird Species Discovered by LSU Researchers

A very nice example of how speciation between closely-related species occupying the same or overlapping ranges is maintained, is illustrated by the discovery of a new species of bird hiding in plain sight in Borneo.

Over most of its range, the Cream-vented bulbul, Pycnonotus simplex, a rather drab olive-brown bird, has white eyes but on the island of Borneo it was thought to have occurred in two forms; the locally more common red-eyed form and the 'normal' white-eyed form.

Now, after painstaking analysis of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of both red and white-eyed bulbuls and other related species, a team of researchers from Louisiana State University (LSU) led by PhD student, Subir Shakya, has shown that the white-eyed form on Borneo is a newly-identified species, genetically distinct from the red-eyed Borneo form and the white-eyed form found elsewhere. They have named this new species, Pycnonotus pseudosimplex.

Their paper was published a few days ago in the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club.

Catholic Bishops Want Privilege to Hate and Abuse Minorities

Archbishop Philip Tartaglia, president of the Scottish Bishops’ Conference
with Anthony Horan, director of the Catholic Parliamentary Office.

Scottish bishops reject proposed hate crime laws, fear criminalization of religion | News | LifeSite

One of the more repugnant tendencies of organised religion is its tendency to demand and require privilege, even assuming it to be theirs of right and seeing it as an attack on their religious freedom to deny it to them. There is a breathtaking arrogance in that assumption that is so embedded in our culture that it passes almost unnoticed. It is even expect.

Religions, or those powerful enough, expect the law to incorporate and accommodate their prejudices and dogmas or at least provide them with exemptions when they conflict with the law of the land.

Casually Refuting Creationism With Codfish Genes

Polar cod, Boreogadus saida

Molecular mechanism and history of non-sense to sense evolution of antifreeze glycoprotein gene in northern gadids | PNAS

The amazing thing is that creationists never seem to notice how frequently scientific research, quite incidentally and without conscious intent, casually refutes creationism and the claims of creationists. It's as though there is a complete detachment from reality in creationism.

This paper, for example, about the evolution of 'antifreeze' genes in an arctic fish related to cod, utterly refutes four creationist claims whilst giving a completely consistent evolutionary explanation supported by evidence.

Human Societies Evolved Gods

Complex societies gave birth to big gods - CSH

Locations of the 30 sampled regions on the world map, labelled according to precolonial evidence of moralizing gods.

Source: Seshat: Global History Databank | Nature

An international research team has investigated the role of "big gods" in the rise of complex societies and, not surprisingly, have found an evolutionary relationship between the two.

The slightly surprising thing was though that their findings show it was not as previously thought - that "big gods" are the cause of the evolution of complex societies, but are a consequence of them.

Gods, it seems are the product of human cultural evolution.