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.
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.
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
"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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As 'Honest' Pope Frankie prepares to elevate the sadistic nun, Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu (aka Mother Teresa) to the Catholic sainthood it is worth looking at the second 'miracle' that is being attributed to her and used as the pretext for this bizarre Medieval ceremony.
The details of the alleged 'miracle' have been kept under wraps for reasons which will become understandable and have only recently been made public. Even the identity of the alleged subject was kept secret until he came forward recently to claim the fame and fortune which will undoubtedly accrue to him in the superstitious parts of the world.
It works because it is firmly rooted in reality and so is reproducible and repeatable. This means that no matter who is doing it or when, or what the cultural setting is, done properly, the result should be the same.
The same can be said of mathematics, of course. It doesn't matter how many times you do the maths, who does it or when, the answer will be the same providing the maths is done correctly.
The stromatolites in figure a are from Greenland; those in c and d are younger stromatolites from Western Australia. Figure b shows the layers created by microbes as they formed the Greenland stromatolites (blue lines). ‘Stroms’ are several overlapping stromatolites.
The answer to this question is probably relevant to the likelihood that life will be found on other suitable planets too because it it happened quickly on Earth this suggests the process was not the vastly unlikely event that creationists try to present it as but a process (or processes) that can happen in just a few hundred million years if not even more quickly.
Yes, I know that a few hundred million years is not a short time but, compared to the 4.5 billion years or so that Earth has been around, it is during Earth's early childhood. It also suggests that Earth was not the hot, inhospitable, volcano-strewn and desiccated ball of rock that it was once thought to be but that it settled down quite quickly to be closer to what we have today (sans life, initially, of course). It also brings the early Mars within the timescale over which life could have arisen there at a time when Mars was thought to have been suitable, complete with liquid water, atmosphere, etc.
The discover of these stromatolites in Greenland rock pushes the earliest age at which cellular life was known to exist on Earth with a fair degree of certainty back to 3.7 billion years ago from the previous earliest known evidence dated at 3.48 billion years old found in Australian rocks.
