How do you make your offspring grow big and strong?
If you are a sexton beetle, you feed them on dead mice, neglect them and let them fend for themselves. Well, not exactly their immediate offspring but the offspring of your 11 time great grandchildren who will evolve to be better at fending for themselves than those who are cared for, as this observed example of evolution in a laboratory shows.
Sexton beetles, Nicrophorus vespilloides, provide a useful service in the British countryside by burying the dead bodies of mice and other small vertebrates to create food for their offspring. They represent an intermediate level of parental care, between providing for all their needs and providing no care at all. Normally, the females remove the hair from the corpse and make cuts into the skin so their larvae can get into the body more easily. They will also bite off pieces of flesh and feed it to their larvae.
A measure of their values and of their desperation to take over the American judiciary can be got from the hysterical response of fruitloop American Christians to the revelations about the character of their nominee for the vacant SCOTUS seat, the religious fundamentalist and right-wing political extremist, Brett Kavanaugh.
For example, here is fellow fruitloop, Pastor Paul Begley's hysterical outburst. Bear in mind that this is an adult speaking:
An intriguing insight into the Byzantine machinations in the highest echelons of the Catholic Church is beginning to emerge as the fall-out from the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report into Catholic clerical child abuse continues.
And it's becoming apparent why Pope Francis is under a self-imposed code of omerta concerning the allegations made by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò that both Pope Francis and his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, knew of the sexual abuses by disgraced Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick but allowed him to continue in his role as the senior American Catholic Cardinal.
Buried deep in the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report into Catholic child abuse in the state are some horrific stories that are only just coming to light.
One of them is the account of how a priest in Scranton diocese, Father Thomas D. Skotek, sexually abused a girl over a period of five years while serving as pastor of St. Casimir in Freeland, got her pregnant and arranged an abortion for her.
Eagle Mountain International Church's Terri Copeland Pearsons may have cost her father's money-making enterprise a hefty tax bill, if the Freedom From Religion Foundation's complaint to the IRS is upheld.
After turning the church into a political mouthpiece for Donald Trump and the GOP, in violation of the Johnson Amendment which removes the tax exempt, charitable status from churches that are openly partisan in their politics, Terri and her co-preacher Paula White, a 'spiritual advisor' to Donald Trump, boasted that since Trump became president they didn't need to bother about that because the Johnson Amendment has been abolished.
The only problem is, the Johnson Amendment has not been abolished and is still the law of the land. Trump promised to abolish it so the conservative Christian churches could have their greatest wish fulfilled so they could have the political power denied them by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. They would, of course, without exception, support extreme right GOP candidates who would naturally be in hock to them and effectively in the pockets of church leaders like Kenneth Copeland and his daughter Terri. To date, however, Trump has failed to keep that promise.
As I've pointed out many times, biologists these days don't set out to find evidence for evolution any more so than physicists set out to find evidence for the Laws of Thermodynamics nor do chemists set out to prove the Atomic Theory. It just happens, because the theories are true, that whatever they do confirms the underlying theories.
This week for example we have a couple of papers that yet again casually confirm that the TOE is true and the only way to make sense of what can be seen.
The current frantic campaign by Catholics to try to combine their need to dissociate themselves from the crimes of paedophile and sexually predatory Catholic clergy with their desire to victimise and demonise homosexuals, did not start with Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights; he was merely following the party line it seems.
It was the line also taken by Bishop Robert Morlino, Bishop of Madison, Wisconsin, last August when the Pennsylvania report detailing the abuse of over 1000 children by 300 Catholic priest in Pennsylvania was released. In a letter to his diocese Morlino said:
It is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation in the vineyard of the Lord...
My new book, A History of Ireland: How Religion Poisoned Everything, is a bit of a departure for me, delving into other areas of interest - history and Ireland - and combining them into a coherent critique of religion and the harm it does.
Originally conceived many years ago as an objective background to the then prevalent 'troubles' in Northern Ireland, it quickly became inescapable that the underlying cause of them was religion. There are few if any other factors involved. There is no significant racial, linguistic or ethnic difference between what amounted to warring and mutually detesting communities.
The Catholics spoke English as did the Protestants, the 'Old English' had long been assimilated into the Catholic Irish community and the Protestants were mostly Scots whose divergence from the Celts of Ulster had been within the last 1500 years. Both communities now spoke predominantly English which had largely replaced a Goidelic Celtic language so similar and with such recent common origins that they amount to dialects of one another and are mutually intelligible.
The one major difference was religious, and yet the differences ran so deep that the two communities maintained a virtual apartheid; one faction seeing the other as a lesser people destined to be for ever ruled over by the other and that faction seeing the other as usurpers, occupying their ancestral homelands. A hatred that ran so deep that it became more important to avenge some half-legendary wrong done to grandparents than to ensure a peaceful future for grandchildren. A hatred that cost 3000 lives and gained not an inch of territory and not a single significant political concession.
Like so many other Christian churches, the Mormons also have a problem with child abuse and, like other church authorities where the cat is out of the bag and the abuses they thought they were hiding from public view are now common knowledge, the Mormons are acting swiftly. They have taken decisive steps to ensure it carries on by excommunicating a member, Sam Young, who has been campaigning to stop it.
I'm not sure if this will give Catholics any comfort, but it seems their priests are not the only ones who use the trusted access their position gives them to abuse minors and vulnerable adults.
51 year-old Jose Vicente Morales, pastor of the Iglesia Cristiana Impacto de Fe, a small, primarily Spanish-speaking church in Phoenix, Arizona, USA, was doing exactly that throughout the 1990 and again between 2007 and 2011.
He was sentenced to 12 year in prison followed by a life-time on probation by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Warren Granville, last Monday, having been arrested in 2016. His offences came to light when one of his victims, then aged 17, began self-harming and told her mother that Morales had been sexually abusing her since the age of 12. Another victim gave evidence that he sexually abused her regularly when she was between the ages of 7 and 12. Her mother was also sexually abused Morales when she was a child.
What is the world's oldest living and almost certainly the heaviest organism?
No it's not the blue whale, a mere minnow by comparison, or 'Methuselah', the 4850 year-old bristlecone pine tree from California and nor is it General Sherman, the giant sequoia or redwood tree.
It is in fact, Pando, a clone of trembling aspen, Populus tremuloides, around Fish Lake in Central Utah, USA. It gets its name from the Spanish for 'I spread' because of the extensive spread of what has been shown to be a clone of all males trees (so they can only reproduce vegetatively, by root suckers). The total weight of this organism is estimated to be 13 million pounds (5900 metric tonnes).
Although Pope Francis still maintains a positive approval rating amongst Americans, the 53% approval recorded by Gallop between 4-12 September this year masks what amounts to a major shift in perception of his 'approvability' by non-Catholic Americans.
Amongst this group his approval has fallen 18 percentage points in the month since the publication of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, from 63% (and from a high of 72% recorded in February 2014), to the present low of 45%.
From this week's research papers we have a very nice example of how science is an ever developing picture of reality and a very nice example of a new species of dinosaur.
Despite the sensational headlines, this one doesn't really mean we have to forget everything we ever thought we knew; nor does it mean all the textbooks are going to need to be re-written. It means that what we thought we knew turns out to be not quite right and maybe a paragraph or two will need to be added or altered in the next edition of a book on the evolution of the sauropod dinosaurs.
Only hours after announcing an investigation into 'financial irregularities' (i.e fraud, embezzlement and money-laundering) in the running of the Sistine Chapel Choir, Pope Francis had to accept the resignation of yet another bishop involved in a sexual abuse scandal.
This time, as the self-inflicted implosion in the American Catholic Church gathers pace, the bishop to offer his resignation is Bishop Michael Bransfield of Wheeling-Charleston, West Virginia. In a slightly unusual and somewhat refreshing variation on the usual sexual abuse and coverup scandal, Bishop Bransfield's victims were adults whom he allegedly sexually harassed.
"When sorrows come they come not single spies but in battalions." (Hamlet Act IV, Scene V)
"To be or not to be? That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them." (Hamlet Act III, Scene I)
"Get thee to a nunnery; why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?" (Hamlet Act III, Scene I)
As poor Pope Francis contemplates the advancing battalions of sorrows and tries to work out whether and how to take up arms against then or suffer yet more slings and arrows, taking himself off to a nunnery must seem like a tempting option.
This time, it's not yet another few hundred of his priests, bishops and cardinals exposed for routine abuse of another thousand or two children and concealing crimes from the law enforcement and child protection authorities; it's something much closer to home involving choir boys - in the Sistine Chapel Choir.
In a measure of the scale of the problem, the hotline established in New Jersey for reporting cases of Catholic priests abusing children and vulnerable adults was so overwhelmed with calls in the first few hours that people found it difficult to get through. Extra staff were brought in to cope.
According to this report, calls to the toll-free hotline number (855) 363-6548, are now being answered promptly.
The hotline was established by the office of Attorney General, Gurbir S. Grewal, who has set up a taskforce to investigate allegations of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in the state of New Jersey, following the shocking Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, which revealed abuse by predatory paedophile priests and routine cover-up on a massive scale in every diocese in the state.
Spokesperson for the New Jersey Criminal Justice Department, Peter Aseltine, acknowledged the problem and explained that some calls were reporting multiple instances of abuse.
I learned something new today; something I should have known but which had obviously passed me by unnoticed.
It's not something I'm proud of; I should have known and I'm ashamed I didn't! I have learned my lesson, reflected on my failure and will try harder in future.
I learned that Michael J. Behe's son is an Atheist.
Michael J. Behe is of course the famous inventor of the notion of intelligent design for the Discovery Institute and notoriously pedals the idea relentlessly, pushing ideas that have been refuted and frequently making unsupported claims about science papers that the authors themselves refute. He is also notorious for what PZ Myers describes as the fireship for the creation industry, launched into the wind and causing court cases in which he is brought in as an expert witness for creationism to crash and burn.
Now it seems his son Leo doesn't believe a word of his claims either.
You can read his very thoughtful account of his journey from home-schooled indoctrinate Catholicism and Behe Snr's brand of creationism here. Below are just a few quotes to whet your appetites.
The standard techniques of cover-up and concealment of clerical abuse of children was used extensively in the Netherlands, so a report in today's, Guardian claims.
Quoting a report in National Catholic Reporter, the report says that:
Over the course of 65 years, 20 of 39 Dutch cardinals, bishops and their auxiliaries “covered up sexual abuse, allowing the perpetrators to cause many more victims. Four [of them] abused children and 16 others allowed the transfer of paedophile priests who could have caused new victims in other parishes".
It might be some consolation to Catholics in the USA, Australia, Ireland, Chile, Mexico, etc, to know that their children are not the only ones at risk from predatory Catholic priests. According to a report in Spiegel Online (which suffers slightly from Google Translate), German children also are, and have been since at least 1946.
According to a confidential report leaked to Der Spiegel, between 1946 and 2014, 3677 mostly male children were molested by 1670 Catholic priests and the figure could be double that. More than half of the victims were aged 13 or less; one in six were raped and three quarters of them were in a church or pastoral relationship with their abuser.
Far from the forlorn claims of creationist that the Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis, as this recent paper shows, other than citing magic (which by making anything possible, makes any claim meaningless and useless), evolution is the only way to make sense of the natural world.
This example comes from the insect world and in particular the world of eusocial species of the insect sub-order, hymenoptera. It explains how some species of the bees, wasps and ants for colonies in which one female, or sometimes a small number of females, are the reproducing members of the colony while the vast bulk of the colony are sterile worker females.
Why this system arose is easy to explain in evolutionary terms - it gives more descendants. What has been harder to explain is just how this system arose. As the press release from Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany explained:
In an astonishing statement in his morning homily last Tuesday, Pope Francis let slip his real attitude towards the deluge of child abuse and cover-up scandals now engulfing the Catholic Church worldwide. He blamed Satan, not for tempting the priests and bishop, but for revealing their crimes!
According to Catholic News:
In these times, Pope Francis said, it seems like the devil, "the great accuser, has been let loose and he's got it in for the bishops. True, there are, we are all sinners, we bishops."
The great accuser "seeks to reveal sins, which people can see, in order to scandalize the people" of God, he said in his homily during morning Mass at Domus Sanctae Marthae.
It's another one of those 'non-existent' things that creationists must dread being shown.
No. This time it's not yet another of those 'missing' transitional fossils or intermediate forms. This time it's yet another example of something else 'impossible' and 'never observed'. It's yet another example of observed rapid evolution, including the evolution of new structures.
New Cardinal Sergio Obeso Rivera, retired archbishop of Xalapa, Mexico, greets cardinals during a consistory at which Pope Francis created 14 new cardinals in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican June 28.
You know, sometimes I worry that this blog is turning into a blog devoted to stories about yet another Catholic paedophile sexual abuse scandal and not the blog devoted to science and Atheism that I originally intended.
I sometime wonder if I could should ask the Pope to try to put a hold on these revelations, so we are not getting the several a day in the current torrent.
Then I realise that that's exactly what his cardinals and bishops have been trying to do for years now. In fact, it was Pope Francis' predecessor's job to try to keep the lid on them before he himself became Pope Benedict XIV and was accountable to Pope John Paul II, as his 'enforcer'.
The latest British Social Attitudes Survey makes grim reading for the Church of England and hold few crumbs of comfort for leaders of other religions.
The most recent British Social Attitudes survey reveals that the number of Brits who identify as Church of England has more than halved since 2002, falling from 31% to 14%.The sharpest decline happened among 45 to 54 year olds (35% in 2002 vs 11% in 2017). The proportion of people who describe themselves as Roman Catholic (8%), belonging to ‘other Christian affiliations’ (10%) and ‘of non-Christian faiths’ (8%) have remained fairly stable. 52% of people now say they have no religion, compared with 41% in 2002. Men are more inclined to say they follow no religion than women (57% compared with 48%).
Following the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report into Catholic clerical sexual abuse of minors, which revealed a horrific catalogue of abuse by some 300 priests of over 1000 children over 70 years, New York Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood has announced a state-wide investigation and issued subpoenas against all eight Catholic diocese.
The investigation is to be conducted by the Charities Department because churches are registered charities in New York.
An item of news out today falls into three main categories I normally write about in this blog - anthropology, religion and politics.
It is news that Eran Elhaik, a lecturer in population, medical and evolutionary genomics at the University of Sheffield, UK, has written an article in the The Conversation on the origins of the Ashkenazi Jews. The Conversation describes itself as combining journalistic flair with academic rigour.
Firstly, I have to admit to some trepidation in tackling this subject, not so much because the political question of the State of Israel, it's legitimacy and its policies towards the Palestinian Arabs have been the subject of a summer-long controversy in the UK about where criticism of the Israeli government becomes antisemitic, but because of the vicious campaign of abuse I was subjected to some 25 years ago when I raised the subject of the origins of the Ashkenazim in an old CompuServe debate forum. I was accused of being a racist, a Fascist apologist, a Holocaust denier and worse, and even received veiled threats of violence.
The question I had raised was that raised by Arthur Koestler in his book The Thirteenth Tribe. Koestler had argued that the Ashkenazim were actually Turkic people from Central Asia who had settled near the Black Sea in the Early Middle Ages and had founded a state known as Khazaria, converted to Judaism, adopted Yiddish, a language with very many Low German and Slavonic words (but with few if any Hebrew words) with a Slavonic grammar. When Khazaria was overthrown and absorbed into Russia, the Ashkenazim had migrated into Eastern and Central Europe, especially Poland, Ukraine and Germany. Koestler, of German Jewish origins himself, was subjected to abuse and vilification at the time.
The reason this is a political issue with perceived overtones of antisemitism is because it questions the legitimacy of the claim by European Jews to a 'God-given' historical homeland in Palestine, from which they traditionally believe they were expelled by the Romans in or around 66 CE following the Jewish Revolt. Quite why is is perceived as racist is beyond me. One Rabbi with whom I had previously been on very friendly online terms, could not explain how suggesting that the Ashkenazim could be Turkic, not Hebrew was racist unless one assumes the Turks are inferior people - which is itself racist, and nonsensical.
The strength of feelings and emotions that colour and cloud the debate can be see in the comments to Eran Elhaik's article.
...recent DNA analysis of Ashkenazic Jews – a Jewish ethnic group – revealed that their maternal line is European1. It has also been found that their DNA only has 3% ancient ancestry2 which links them with the Eastern Mediterranean (also known as the Middle East) – namely Israel, Lebanon, parts of Syria, and western Jordan. This is the part of the world Jewish people are said to have originally come from – according to the Old Testament. But 3% is a minuscule amount, and similar to what modern Europeans as a whole share with Neanderthals. So given that the genetic ancestry link is so low, Ashkenazic Jews most recent ancestors must be from elsewhere.
To understand why this is the case, we need to go back in time, to look at where these other ancestors came from. It starts in Persia (modern-day Iran) during the sixth century. This is where most of the world’s Jews were living at this time3.
The tolerance of the Persians encouraged the Jews to adopt Persian names, words, traditions, and religious practices, and climb up the social ladder gaining a monopoly on trade4. They also converted other people5 who were living along the Black Sea, to their Jewish faith. This helped to expand their global network6.
Among these converts were the Alans (Iranian nomadic pastoral people), Greeks, and Slavs who resided along the southern shores of the Black Sea. Upon conversion, they translated the Old Testament into Greek, built synagogues, and continued expanding the Jewish trade network.
DNA of Yiddish speakers could have originated from four ancient villages in northwest Turkey.
These Jews adopted the name Ashkenaz, and the DNA of Ashkenazic Jews can be traced to “Ancient Ashkenaz”4 – an intersection of trade routes in eastern Turkey.
We now know that at the time these Jews adopted the name Ashkenaz, they also acquired unique Asian mutations7 on their Y chromosome. This is where another important group of people in our story come into play – and they are called the Gok-Turks.
During the sixth century8, these nomadic people were ruled by a Siberian Turkic tribe called the Ashina. They were forced by the Chinese Tang Empire – who were in power in China at the time – to migrate westwards toward the Black Sea.
Thanks to their organisational and military skills, the Ashina united many tribes in this area – and a new empire called the “Khazar Khaganate” was born. Offering freedom of worship and taxing trade, these people quickly rose to power.
The Asian group of these DNA mutations9, found in Ashkenazic Jews, likely originated from the Ashina elite and other Khazar clans, who converted from Shamanism to Judaism. This means that the Ashina and core Khazar clans were absorbed by the Ashkenazic Jews.
It was also around this time that the Jewish elite adopted many Slavic customs. And based on my previous research, I would suggest that Yiddish was developed as a secret language to assist in trade4.
What happened next was that the Jewish empire began to collapse. By the tenth century, the Jews on the Black Sea migrated to Ukraine and Italy. Yiddish became the lingua franca of these Ashkenazic Jews and absorbed German words while maintaining the Slavic grammar10. And as global trade moved to the hands of the Italians, Dutch and English, the Jews were pushed aside.
What this all shows is that by using modern genetic technology – that enables scientists to track the past of modern-day people – a new appreciation for Jewish ancestry can be discovered.
It has meant a greater understanding of the journeys these people took to arrive in Europe. It has also allowed for increased knowledge as to the significant role the Ashina and the Khazar clans – from which some of the real Jewish patriarchs actually came from – played.
Genetic evidence is providing the definitive answer to these questions of origins, not cultural tradition and myths. Many of the facts such as the linguistic mixture of Slavonic and Low German and absence of Hebrew in Yiddish, and the distribution of the Ashkenazim (and the Sephardim) across Europe are meshing with the emerging genetic evidence of a Turkic and Persian component.
That this subject is even controversial when there is objective evidence on which to decide differences of opinion highlights the problems that arise when religion and politics enter the fray and objectivity is waved aside when it conflicts with dogma and vested interests. The argument then becomes not what is right but what is convenient and fits with a desired narrative.
While panic and hysteria are the order of the day for the Catholic Church in the USA things are little better in Australia where the trial of Cardinal Pell is eagerly awaited by everyone everyone who isn't a Catholic under holy orders.
It has now been revealed after a detailed investigation by the Sydney Morning Herald that the church lied to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse to conceal the true scale of its assets in an attempt to avoid paying adequate compensation to its victims. They had claimed that increasing the payments would put a strain on church finances, necessitating cuts to their social programs.
The tidal wave set in motion by the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report into Catholic clerical sexual abuses and institutional, systematic cover-ups, continues to spread waves through the Catholic world, and, if reports are to be believed, panic and division in the Vatican.
Church Militant, the online Catholic News site which is normally very protective of the Catholic Church, although no lover of the supposedly reformist Pope Francis, is making a sensational claim, citing Vatican sources, which if true will implicate the Pope himself in the ultimate cover-up - effectively giving protection and immunity from prosecution to a Cardinal named in the Grand Jury report - Cardinal Donald Wuerl.
