God Hates Frogs

The Invasive Chytrid Fungus of Amphibians Paralyzes Lymphocyte Responses

The problem with being an intelligent designer is that when you change your mind and decide your creation was a mistake it can be very difficult to kill just that creation off and not harm the others. Look what happened when it decided to correct its mistake with humans, for example. It ended up killing everything else off too when it used a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

So, when the Intelligent Designer decided it had made a mistake with all those frogs it had to come up with something really clever. It chose a fungus - Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis - to do the work but that wasn't as simple as it sounds. The problem was it had provided frogs with a way to fight fungal infections, what with them living in conditions normally conducive to fungal growth. It had provided them with a group of specialist body cells to cope with them, as well as bacteria. These cells normally crawl around looking for invading cells and ingesting them, then they program other cells to produce antibodies which quickly kill off any more cells if they get into the frog's body.

So, this was a problem for the Intelligent Designer's plan to kill of all the frogs with a fungus.

Luckily it thought up another brilliant plan and changed the fungus a little bit so it now turns off the frog's immune response and allows it to kill the frog and use its body to produce more fungi.

Abstract
The chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, causes chytridiomycosis and is a major contributor to global amphibian declines. Although amphibians have robust immune defenses, clearance of this pathogen is impaired. Because inhibition of host immunity is a common survival strategy of pathogenic fungi, we hypothesized that B. dendrobatidis evades clearance by inhibiting immune functions. We found that B. dendrobatidis cells and supernatants impaired lymphocyte proliferation and induced apoptosis; however, fungal recognition and phagocytosis by macrophages and neutrophils was not impaired. Fungal inhibitory factors were resistant to heat, acid, and protease. Their production was absent in zoospores and reduced by nikkomycin Z, suggesting that they may be components of the cell wall. Evasion of host immunity may explain why this pathogen has devastated amphibian populations worldwide.

The Invasive Chytrid Fungus of Amphibians Paralyzes Lymphocyte Responses
J. Scott Fites, Jeremy P. Ramsey, Whitney M. Holden, Sarah P. Collier, Danica M. Sutherland, Laura K. Reinert, A. Sophia Gayek,
Terence S. Dermody, Thomas M. Aune, Kyra Oswald-Richter, and Louise A. Rollins-Smith
Science 18 October 2013: 342 (6156), 366-369. [DOI:10.1126/science.1243316]

This, of course, looks just like the sort of destructive arms race that evolutionary biologists predict will happen frequently by Darwinian Evolution, and looks just like there is no intelligence behind it because what Intelligent Designer would have to be that creative to overcome a problem of its own creation because it wouldn't have created frogs in the first place if it was going to kill them all off. Nor would it have given them an immune system to overcome fungal infections it it planned all along to kill them all with a fungus, but I expect creationists, especially the professional frauds at the Discovery Institute can think up a good reason why the Intelligent Designer works this way.

Or maybe they'll just ignore the devastation in the frog population which is now occurring on a global scale and just hope their scientifically illiterate and environmentally unaware target audience won't be aware of it either.

Reference:

The Invasive Chytrid Fungus of Amphibians Paralyzes Lymphocyte Responses
J. Scott Fites, Jeremy P. Ramsey, Whitney M. Holden, Sarah P. Collier, Danica M. Sutherland, Laura K. Reinert, A. Sophia Gayek, Terence S. Dermody, Thomas M. Aune, Kyra Oswald-Richter, and Louise A. Rollins-Smith
Science 18 October 2013: 342 (6156), 366-369. [DOI:10.1126/science.1243316]. (Subscription required)

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Transitional Spiders and Nervous Scorpions

BBC News - Big clawed fossil had spider-like brain

Here's another one of those 'non-existent' intermediate fossils that creationists keep telling us about.

Admittedly, this isn't intermediate between a human and an ape or between one human species and another - which are what most creationists seem to think evolution is all about. This one is intermediate between two major divisions of the arachnida, the spiders or arachnids and the scorpions or dromopoda. This class also includes the horseshoe crabs, one of those 'living' fossils' creationists love because they imagine they prove evolution didn't happen.

Arthropods, or jointed legged, creatures include insects, crabs, shrimps, barnacles, lobsters, millipedes and several other marine and terrestrial invertebrates including the extinct trilobites. They all have a more-or-less hard exoskeleton composed of chitin and segmented bodies with pairs of appendages used for walking, swimming and, in the case of insects, flight. These appendages have also evolved to become mouthparts. This particular specimen is from 520 million years ago and is of one of an extinct group of arthropods known colloquially as the "great appendage" arthropods, which have large claw-like appendages on their heads. It was discovered in South China and is part of the segmented Alalcomenaeus genus.

The nervous systems of related phyla tend to be similar with the differences reflecting the divisions of the phylum into classes and orders, so studying the nervous systems of living creatures can help establish their evolutionary relationships. However, this method of classification is not normally available with fossils because nerve tissue, like all soft tissues, does not fossilise so readily as the hard body-parts.

But, using a new technique with a CT scanner and 3D software, researchers were able to see the basic structure of the nervous system and compare it to that of other arthropods. It was clear that this species was from a group that were ancestral to both the spiders and the scorpions and its nervous system also bore many similarities with the nervous system of larval forms of the horseshoe crabs.

It is hoped that this technique will now enable the evolutionary relationship of other arthropods to be worked out, so filling in another small area of the jigsaw puzzle of evolution.

And still no fossil has yet been found which is inconsistent with Darwin's and Wallace's theory of descent with modification or with the neo-Darwinian gene-based theory of evolution. Had one ever been found, I wonder how many creationists would suddenly have become convinced of the soundness of the scientific method and of the irrefutable nature of solid evidence.

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Dying For Sex

Competition drives marsupial males to suicidal sex - life - 07 October 2013 - New Scientist

I thought I'd share this as a beautiful example of how genes build bodies for the sole purpose of replicating themselves - not that they have any choice in the matter because everything flows from the simple fact that whatever characteristic, whether it's body form, metabolism, ability or behaviour, produces the most descendants in that particular environment, leaves the most descendents.

The marsupial mouse, Antechinus stuartii, also known as the brown antechinus, is not a mouse; it's closer to the kangaroos and koalas than it is to the mice and is an example of convergent evolution where species living a similar lifestyle in a similar environment tend to evolve superficially similar bodies, however, that's not the point here.

Male marsupial mice expend so much time and energy on sex during a very short breeding season that they die at the end of it due to immune system collapse caused by very high stress hormone levels. Breeding occurs only once a year probably due to females needing their insect prey species to be at a peak when they breed. Unlike small placental mammals which can rear several lots of young in a single year, marsupials are much slower breeders as the young are born very under-developed and take longer to achieve independence, so, to be able to breed successfully, females need to concentrate all their efforts on this single batch, which in turn restricts the males to very limited opportunities to breed.

This is how the authors of the original paper put it:

Abstract
Suicidal reproduction (semelparity) has evolved in only four genera of mammals. In these insectivorous marsupials, all males die after mating, when failure of the corticosteroid feedback mechanism elevates stress hormone levels during the mating season and causes lethal immune system collapse (die-off). We quantitatively test and resolve the evolutionary causes of this surprising and extreme life history strategy. We show that as marsupial predators in Australia, South America, and Papua New Guinea diversified into higher latitudes, seasonal predictability in abundance of their arthropod prey increased in multiple habitats. More-predictable prey peaks were associated with shorter annual breeding seasons, consistent with the suggestion that females accrue fitness benefits by timing peak energy demands of reproduction to coincide with maximum food abundance. We demonstrate that short mating seasons intensified reproductive competition between males, increasing male energy investment in copulations and reducing male postmating survival. However, predictability of annual prey cycles alone does not explain suicidal reproduction, because unlike insect abundance, peak ovulation dates in semelparous species are often synchronized to the day among years, triggered by a species-specific rate of change of photoperiod. Among species with low postmating male survival, we show that those with suicidal reproduction have shorter mating seasons and larger testes relative to body size. This indicates that lethal effort is adaptive in males because females escalate sperm competition by further shortening and synchronizing the annual mating period and mating promiscuously. We conclude that precopulatory sexual selection by females favored the evolution of suicidal reproduction in mammals.

Diana O. Fisher, Christopher R. Dickman, Menna E. Jones, and Simon P. Blomberg
Sperm competition drives the evolution of suicidal reproduction in mammals; PNAS 2013 : 1310691110v1-201310691.

Just another example of why evolution is not driven by an intelligent, compassionate and all-loving designer having the best interests of his creation in mind, but by an unemotional, thoughtless and uncaring process which mimics selfishness. It is all about producing more copies of genes in the next generation. Any strategy which achieves that result is the one which is bound to be adopted because no-one and nothing has any say in what is just as inevitable a process as is planetary motion and chemical reactions.

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Selfish Genes and Termite Indigestion

Creationist pseudo-scientists will assure their credulous customers that genetic evolution alone can only lead to selfish organisms. Maybe this mistake comes from assuming their own greed and selfishness is a result of their own genetic evolution. It isn't of course, it results from a sociopathic personality disorder.

But one only need to look at nature to see that cooperation is actually the norm - so common in fact that we either take it for granted or it's operating at a level which is too small for us to see easily. Just one example is the termite - if one can accurately even speak of them in the singular. Termites only exist as part of a cooperative colony.

But it's not the obvious cooperation in the termite colony that I'm talking about here.

Termites are a very old order of insects which branched off the group which gave rise to cockroaches about 150 million years ago so have been evolving into their specialised niche for a very long time. They are not at all closely related to the other social insects like the many hymenopterans like ants, wasps and bees. They live exclusively on decaying wood which presents them with very special digestive problems because decaying wood is almost completely cellulose and lignin (with fungal hyphae) and cellulose is notoriously stable and hard to break down. It is the main structural substance for plants and the last thing plants, especially long-lived ones like trees, need is for their structural material to break down.

In fact, very few animals can digest wood. Those which eat lots of plant matter have a specialised digestive system which normally contains a sizeable fermentation vat - which is one reason that herbivore mammals tend to be comparatively large. Termites are no different in this respect but have evolved a gut which achieves the same thing on a very small scale.

Termites depend entirely on cooperative symbiotic organisms living in their gut - and of course these organisms depend entirely on termites.

First Horse Makes An Ass Of Creationists

The Przewalski’s horse, Equus ferus przewalskii
The last remaining wild horse, recently saved from extinction in Mongolia.

First horses arose 4 million years ago : Nature News & Comment

Yesterday's Nature brings us news of yet another advance in evolutionary science in the form of a major advance in genome sequencing from ancient sources. As reported by a team led by Ludovic Orlando of the Centre for GeoGenetics, Natural History Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, scientists have been able to sequence the full genome from an ancient ancestor of the modern horse from a specimen found in Canadian permafrost. The specimen is believed to be between 780,000 and 560,000 years old.

The sequence was extracted from a foot bone of a horse that lived between 780,000 and 560,000 years ago. By sequencing the animal's genome, along with those of a 43,000-year-old horse, five modern domestic horse breeds, a wild Przewalski’s horse and a donkey, researchers were able to trace the evolutionary history of the horse family in unprecedented detail. They estimate that the ancient ancestor of the modern Equus genus, which includes horses, donkeys and zebras, branched off from other animal lineages about 4 million years ago — twice as long ago as scientists had previously thought.

“We have beaten the time barrier,” says evolutionary biologist Ludovic Orlando of the University of Copenhagen, who led the work with colleague Eske Willerslev. Noting that the oldest DNA sequenced before this came from a polar bear between 110,000 and 130,000 years old2, Orlando says: “All of a sudden, you have access to many more extinct species than you could have ever dreamed of sequencing before.”

First horses arose 4 million years ago; Erika Check Hayden; Nature 26 June 2013

This is great news and should spread despair and despondency amongst the loons and liars of the Discovery Institute and other frauds who make a living from Creation pseudo-science, unless they manage not to notice it, as the techniques could be adapted to other DNA samples if and when they are obtained, so giving us a clearer picture of the evolution of other species and so better able to understand the nitty-gritty of how evolution works.

As well as recognising what a powerful tool this is, what caught my attention particularly was the paragraph:

The researchers were also able to trace the size of the horse population over time by looking for genomic signatures of population size, and were thus able to show that populations grew in periods of abundant grassland, in between times of extreme cold.

Bwaaahhhaaa! Creationists say what!?

Here we see how evolutionary theory is meshing in with other disciplines like climatology with each discipline supporting the other. We can tell the relative extent of things like grasslands through analysis of pollen in permafrost, polar ice cores, bogs, etc. It is interesting, but not really surprising, that this is echoed in the DNA of a genus like Equus. The DNA is merely evolving in response to environmental change, just as we would expect.

DNA is acting like a record of a species history on this planet and so of the planet itself, and the scientific theory which integrates it with the rest of science is the Theory of Evolution - one of the most profound, powerful and far-reaching theories in the whole of science. No wonder it so terrifies those who make their living from promoting Bronze-Age superstition and who so need to spread lies and misinformation about science.

Not for them the road to discovery and enlightenment. Far too risky. There's a lot of money at stake.

References:

First horses arose 4 million years ago; Erika Check Hayden; Nature, 26 June 2013

Recalibrating Equus evolution using the genome sequence of an early Middle Pleistocene horse; Orlando, L., et al; Nature, 26 June 2013; doi:10.1038/nature12323

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Now The Earliest Primate!

Archicebus achilles fossil

Xijun Ni / Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing

Archicebus achilles. Tarsier or Monkey?

Mat Severson / Northern Illinois University

Crucial Link in Primate Evolution - ScienceNOW

It's difficult to keep up with all this. Yet another 'transitional' fossil from the remote human evolution story has been found, this time in China, from 55 million years ago. Only last week I reported on a veritable deluge of reports and scientific papers reporting 'transitional' fossils such as early newts and turtles, and the finding that about eight percent of modern people have feet with characteristics found in an early hominin from South Africa, Australopithicus sediba, which itself had a skeleton which could only be regarded as transitional between fully bipedal hominins and the chimpanzees, from the period when our ancestors were evolving from a tree-dwelling to a ground-dwelling ape.

This little creature, which has been given the scientific name Archicebus achilles, has been extensively examined for the past ten years by a team of researchers who have concluded that it is the earliest primate so far discovered. Primates are the order of mammals which includes humans and the other apes as well as the monkeys, tarsiers, lorises, tree-shrews and lemurs. It was found in central China in the remains of an ancient lake bed and has been dated to 55 million years old.

Evolution Of A Plague of Locusts

Magicicada adults and final stage nymphs.

Photo credit: Arthur D. Guilani

If it hasn't happened already, and you live in the Eastern USA, you are in for a rare treat very soon. Rare, that is if you regard once every 17 years as rare, and a treat if you like fair-sized insects that can make a sound approaching the decibel level of a pneumatic drill.

I'm talking about the emergence of the so-called 17-year locust. Actually, it isn't a locust at all, which is a member of the grass-hopper and cricket family, but a cicada, which is closer to the aphids. The first Europeans in America to witness an emergence had heard of biblical plagues of locusts but had no real idea what a locust was, and assumed they were witnessing a similar biblical plague and called the cicadas locusts.

Does God Hate Bees?

Something nasty is attacking our honey bees.

If you believe a benevolent, loving god created Earth and all the creatures on it for mankind, then you have to be able to explain what's going on here and how it's all to the good.

First a brief outline of what bees do and why they are important to us and the world we live in, apart from providing us with honey. To understand this we need to go back to a time before there were flowering plants and before there was nectar out of which bees could make honey or pollen from which they make the wax to build their honeycomb with.

We need to go back to a time when the most advanced plants were the ferns which dominated the Carboniferous forests as large tree-ferns. Ferns, along with their more primitive ancestors, the mosses and liverworts do not produce flowers or pollen; instead they produce 'male' and 'female' gamete which depend on the 'male' gametes or sperms (yes, some plants have sperm too) being motile (i.e. able to swim with a flagellum) and finding a 'female' gamete with which to unite, rather like the system used by most higher animals. This means that ferns do best in a moist environment where the motile gamete has moisture to swim in, tied as it still is to the water in which green plants first evolved, with an aquatic form of locomotion.

This requirement to live in moist conditions obviously restricted the range of mosses, liverworts and ferns and made much of the planet inaccessible to them. However, there was a solution available in the form of the very many arthropods - insects, etc, which had colonised the land early on and had proliferated in the hot, moist, oxygen-rich conditions which prevailed in the Carboniferous Era. Clearly, anything which helped a fern sperm find a fern egg, and especially if this worked in dry conditions, would help ferns colonise new niches and would help ensure their success. So, something which attracted insects to crawl over the reproductive structures, picking up sperm on its body and transferring it to the egg would produce more ferns, and what better to do that with than a sugar-rich secretion which the insects were going to actively seek out?

So the symbiotic link between some insects and some plants was probably established which pushed the plants into producing more attractive reproductive structures at the cost of losing some of the pollen as food as well as supplying the sugars in the nectar in return for greater breeding success and being able to move into a whole range of new niches.

And so the class of flowering plants we call the angiosperms evolved and diversified into the vast number of different species we have today in which the motile male sperms have become passive pollen grains, and so a whole variety of insects species co-evolved, most, but not all of them, as flying insects like the bees.

This process has produced a complex system of mutual interdependence in a process so typical of mindless, unplanned, undirected evolution which can so specialise a species that it only takes a small change to put it into extinction mode. This is one reason why 99% of all species which ever existed are extinct.

Now very many plants are dependent on bees to be pollinated, some of them important crops to humans who have themselves co-evolved dependent on plants that are dependent on bees. Without bees, there will not be a next generation of these crops unless we adopt the hugely expensive and labour intensive method of hand pollination we now use for very careful plant breeding.

So, if you believe in an intelligently designed world, you're probably marvelling at the wonderful system which this has provided for us, though you may have had to find a reason to dismiss the evolutionary process I described as having produced it. Asked for evidence for your creator god you will point to 'everything'; you will point to our crops, to bees and flowers and to nature but for some reason you only ever point to the good, the positive and the beneficial.

Now you have to explain something else.

You have to explain a little mite, the Varroa destructor mite to be precise. V. destructor is busy wiping out honey bee colonies, apparently for no other reason than to produce more V. destructor mites. Not for humans, or bees, or flowering plants but for V. destructor. It's almost as though an intelligent designer has designed a system because it loves V.destructor mites. That's if you believe in intelligent design, that is.

You see, back in the Carboniferous, other arthropods, including the arachnids and their close relatives the mites were also evolving by a process which exploits the potential of new niches as they arise and become accessible. The mites evolved out of, probably, sap-sucking arthropods which learned to suck not plants but animals. Some of them were later to evolved to be parasites on mammals, such as tics; some evolved to be the normally harmless little mites that live in your eyelash follicles (yes yours!) and some of them evolved to suck the body fluids from insects, especially those which live in crowded colonies like bees do.


But that's not the worst of it. Bees could possibly survive the need to feed a few mites as well as themselves but what they can't survive is an even nastier little thing. V. destructor is host to an RNA virus which it almost seems to be designed to pass on to its victims. It causes deformity in bees wings so they can't fly. Other viruses they carry harm bees in other ways. Basically, a hive of bees which becomes infested with V. destructor has been given a death sentence unless drastic action is taken, but often it is discovered only when the colony collapses and dies.

Without honey bees many of our crops, as well as many wild plants on which other species and other ecosystems depend, will fail. The Varroa mite has pushed entire ecosystems to the edge of an extinction precipice, and, given the mindlessness of evolution, it is perfectly capable of going over the cliff and taking everything with it. If they go over the edge, the effects will be catastrophic not just for humans for but for much of the planet. The planet, of course, will recover and life will go on as though nothing has happened. New species will evolve and move into vacant niches and life will continue, leaving only vague fossil records that anything significant happened. But no species has a guaranteed right to be involved in its future. The future does not care whether we are there or not. It's up to us to ensure we are.

So, if you are an intelligent design proponent you can't escape the Varroa mite. You have to explain why it was designed and how it fits into your intelligently designed universe; designed as you believe by a benevolent god because it loves us. Regrettably, your inability to let go of that cosy simplistic answer may prevent us taking responsibility for our own continued existence and so may ensure we never do.

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A Golden Case Of Rapid Evolution

If you want a beautiful example of very rapid recent evolution there are few better than the beautiful golden jellyfish, Mastigias cf. papua etpisoni which inhabits Jellyfish Lake (Ongeim'l Tketau) on Eil Malk island in the tiny Micronesian state of Palau in the Pacific.

Eil Malk island is one of a group of islands known as the Rocky Islands in Palau's Southern Lagoon, the remnants of a Miocene coral reef. Jellyfish lake, like several other similar lakes, is connected to the surrounding lagoon only through the porous rock of the island. This means that, so far as the marine environment is concerned, Ongeim'l Tketau is an isolated micro-environment.

It has been so since 12,000 years ago when geological evidence shows was the last time the ocean level was high enough for the lake to be directly connected to the surrounding ocean. The effect of this was to reset the clock so to speak, so far as biodiversity is concerned. At that point, every species then present in the lake became effectively isolated from it's parent population and a population of (probably) the spotted jellyfish Mastegias papua became isolated from those in the surrounding lagoon. It mimics the sort of experiment biologists would love to do on this scale and over this time-span.

The lake is one of about 200 known world-wide in which the water is stratified into distinct layers which do not mix. In Jellyfish lake, there is a top layer which is oxygenated and which receives sunlight, and an anoxic dark layer which is rich in hydrogen sulphide from the decaying remains on the lake bed. At the interface between these layers (known as a chemocline) there lives a group of photosynthesising purple sulphur bacteria.

Like the spotted and several other related jellyfish, golden jellyfish rely on single-celled, photosynthesising algae, which live symbiotically in cells in their 'clubs', for most of their food. The algae receive protection and are taken to the sunlight and supplied with all their nutrients by the jellyfish and supply the jellyfish with sugar in return. Juvenile jellyfish quickly build up their population of algae from the micro-organisms they take in whilst feeding in the normal jellyfish way.

Left image: golden jellyfish (Mastigias cf. papua etpisoni) in Jellyfish Lake, Palau.

Right image: spotted jellyfish (Mastigias papua) at the New England Aquarium.

The red bars indicate the extent of the clubs. The clubs are almost completely absent in the golden jellyfish that inhabits the jellyfish lake.

What may have started off as a predator-prey relationship with the jellyfish eating the algae, or a parasite-host relationship with the algae being parasites on the jellyfish has, through the selfish interests of both genomes become a mutually cooperative and highly beneficial relationship to both, but that's not the evolution we are talking about here, though it may have progressed even further in the golden jellyfish and its algae in Jellyfish Lake. We are talking about the degree of divergence from the founder species in just 12,000 years.

In just that short time, Mastigias cf. papua etpisoni has undergone considerable evolution. Incidentally, the 'cf.' in the scientific name of the golden jellyfish is because it's not certain that it is a subspecies of M. papua and not of one of several such closely related species. M. papua seems the most likely candidate because it is common locally.

And this problem serves to highlight the degree of separation that a mere 12,000 years of isolation in a unique environment has produced. The changes are not just morphological either.

Golden jellyfish have unique daily pattern of migration within Jellyfish lake.

• Night - For about 14 hours a day the jellyfish make repeated vertical excursions between the surface and the chemocline in the western basin possibly to acquire nitrogen and other nutrients from near the chemocline for their symbiotic algae.
• From early morning to about 0930 - The jellyfish move from center of western basin to the eastern basin
• From early afternoon to about 1530 - The jellyfish move from eastern basin to near western end of lake
• As the sun sets - The jellyfish move briefly eastward from western end to western basin where they remain through the night

Spotted jellyfish also exhibit migratory behaviour in the lagoon moving with the sun as it moved across the lagoon, but it is nothing as complex as that of the golden jellyfish.

It is thought that the difference is caused by evolutionary change driven by the jellyfish-eating anemones Entacmaea medusivora that inhabit the eastern regions of Jellyfish Lake. The jellyfish avoid shadows and in the morning with the shadows on the eastern end the jellyfish also avoid the anemones. By moving east to west in the early afternoon the jellyfish avoid the time of day when the setting sun would eliminate shadows on the lake in the eastern end and thereby avoid the anemones in the afternoon.

So we see not only a striking morphological change but also a change in life-style in as little as 12,000 years, all driven by an environmental change which first isolated a founder population and then moulded it to suit the particular micro-environment which ensued.

For me, understanding how evolution produces this with a few easy to understand 'rules' makes these little snippets of information about life on earth one of the great joys of living. Who could not want to understand what has created this amazingly beautiful and complex planet?

What a waste of a life to spend it finding ways to deny all that wonder and enjoyment because of the mind-numbing theophobia of religious superstition. What disgusting specimens of human life are those parasites who promulgate this superstitious phobia and encourage the scientific ignorance that facilitates it, simply to create and maintain a credulous market to feed off and something behind which to hide their politics of racism, hate, greed and selfishness.

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What a Wonderful World

This amazing video was shot with a mobile phone in Kruger National Park.

Intelligently Designed With Love?

Look at this beautiful little jewel of a wasp (Ampulex compressa). Any Creationist 'scientist' worth his/her salt would point at this and assert that it must have been designed, and hope you'll just gaze in wonder at the exquisite skill of such a marvellous designer who could intelligently design such a thing, and then hopefully you'll buy his books, visit his museum and give him lots of money to help spread the good news.

What you won't be told however, is what this lovely little insect actually does; and there is a very good reason for this. Appearances can be deceptive, and the Creationist 'scientist' will understandably be sensitive in this respect. Like him, the deceptive little thing is a parasite, and a particularly nasty one at that.

This little wasp hunts down cockroaches.

"And what's wrong with that?", you might ask. "Who wants cockroaches around?"

Well, cockroaches do for a start, and, if you believe in an intelligent designer, or even a designer who is not particularly bright, you surely must believe it intended cockroaches to be around too.

But it's what the wasp does to cockroaches which should at least make you wince, if not question the entire basis of your 'faith'.

As early as the 1940s it was reported that female wasps of this species sting a roach (specifically a Periplaneta americana,Periplaneta australasiae or Nauphoeta rhombifolia)^[1] twice, delivering venom. A 2003 study^[2] using radioactive labeling demonstrated that the wasp stings precisely into specific ganglia of the roach. It delivers an initial sting to a thoracic ganglion and injects venom to mildly and reversibly paralyze the front legs of its victim. The biochemical basis of this transient paralysis is discussed in a 2006 paper.^[3] Temporary loss of mobility in the roach facilitates the second venomous sting at a precise spot in the victim's head ganglia (brain), in the section that controls the escape reflex. As a result of this sting, the roach will first groom extensively, and then become sluggish and fail to show normal escape responses.^[4] In 2007 it was reported that the venom of the wasp blocks receptors for the neurotransmitter octopamine.^[5]

The wasp proceeds to chew off half of each of the roach's antennae.^[1] Researchers believe that the wasp chews off the antenna to replenish fluids or possibly to regulate the amount of venom because too much could kill and too little would let the victim recover before the larva has grown. The wasp, which is too small to carry the roach, then leads the victim to the wasp's burrow, by pulling one of the roach's antennae in a manner similar to a leash. Once they reach the burrow, the wasp lays a white egg, about 2 mm long, on the roach's abdomen. It then exits and proceeds to fill in the burrow entrance with pebbles, more to keep other predators out than to keep the roach in.

With its escape reflex disabled, the stung roach will simply rest in the burrow as the wasp's egg hatches after about three days. The hatched larva lives and feeds for 4–5 days on the roach, then chews its way into its abdomen and proceeds to live as an endoparasitoid. Over a period of eight days, the wasp larva consumes the roach's internal organs in an order which maximizes the likelihood that the roach will stay alive, at least until the larva enters the pupal stage and forms a cocoon inside the roach's body. Eventually the fully grown wasp emerges from the roach's body to begin its adult life. Development is faster in the warm season.

Adults live for several months. Mating takes about one minute, and only one mating is necessary for a female wasp to successfully parasitize several dozen roaches.

While a number of venomous animals paralyze prey as live food for their young, Ampulex compressa is different in that it initially leaves the roach mobile and modifies its behavior in a unique way. Several other species of the genus Ampulex show a similar behavior of preying on cockroaches.^[1] The wasp's predation appears only to affect the cockroach's escape responses. Research has shown that while a stung roach exhibits drastically reduced survival instincts (such as swimming, or avoiding pain) for approximately 72 hours, motor abilities like flight or flipping over are unimpaired.^[6][7]

Source: Wikipedia - Emerald Cockroach Wasp

Which is all very well, if you're an emerald cockroach wasp; not so good if you're a cockroach.

What gruesome intelligence could come up with such a plan? Why on earth would an intelligent designer design cockroaches and equip them with all the paraphernalia needed to be a cockroach, then think up something so malignantly horrific as our exquisite little wasp, which seems to have no other purpose in life but to make cockroaches die slowly and helplessly by having their internal organs eaten?

Of course, as intelligent design, and especially intelligent design by an omni-benevolent designer, emerald cockroach wasps make no sense at all. Neither do cockroaches in a world intelligently designed for humans, for that matter.

As the products of a thoughtless, unemotional, undirected process, where the only thing that matters is what gives more living, breeding descendants, they make perfect sense. The emerald cockroach wasp does what it does because evolution has pushed it in that direction by naturally selecting for whatever produces most reproducing emerald cockroach wasps. There is no need for an explanation more complicated than that.

And of course, a similar process is currently pushing parasitic Creationista pseudo-scientificus in the direction of evolving more and more ways to exploit the susceptibility to mind-control that religion has produced in their victims - those who have been stung into senselessness by religion and now allow themselves to be led by the nose and to be fed on and used by self-seeking Creationist pseudo-scientists, preachers and right-wing politicians, having been stripped of their ability to think for themselves.

And these sad little mind-controlled zombies actually think it gives their lives meaning to try to produce even more potential victims for these nasty little parasites - and I'm not talking about wasps. Wasps have a nobility and elegance which cannot be granted to human 'religious' parasites. Unlike these humans, they can be forgiven, for they know not what they do.

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A Thing Of Beauty

Vincent Van Gogh. Wheat Field with Cypresses at the Haute Galline Near Eygalieres Saint-Rémy - June 1889

As a materialist, one of the accusations often thrown at me is that materialism cannot account for our aesthetic appreciation; of our understanding of beauty. Now, I'm no philistine. One of my enduring passions in life is art, especially impressionism, post-impressionism and modern art. I also get enormous aesthetic pleasure watching wildlife and looking at plants, even the mundane and ordinary. In fact, nothing in this world is really mundane to me. I can see beauty in a pebble, a lichen-covered wall, the roots of a tree, a spider or a beetle.

I also enjoy classical music, especially that of J. S. Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Elgar and Vaughn Williams, and could listen to the great classical guitarists like André Segovia, Julian Bream or John Williams all day long. Oh how I wish I could play half as well. Although not my favourite piece of classical music, I once totally converted a girl who worked for me to classical music by playing her Pachelbel's Canon in D.

The nave of Winchester Cathedral, England

So what is this sense of aesthetic appreciation? And why do religious people assume they hold a monopoly on it and that somehow it comes from some supernatural being? Presumably, they believe either that they are somehow being told that something or other is beautiful so they believe it is, or they are seeing what they think is their god's work and marvelling at the god rather than the object it supposedly created.

To me, these things debase the object of beauty. Neither of them seem to recognise the inherent beauty of the thing itself. The idea that I should regard this thing as beautiful because I've been told to, or because of who supposedly made it, rather than for what it actually is, is almost abhorrent to me. That's not to say I don't appreciate good craftsmanship of course. I love churches and cathedrals not for their function but for the craftsmanship of, very often ordinary and completely anonymous, craftsmen - the carpenters and stone masons, stained class makers and iconographers - who actually created the place.

A stooping peregrine, a tree, a hunting cheetah, a swimming seal and a diving whale are all things of great beauty and wonder to me and my wonder is no less because I understand a little of how they work and how they came to be what they are; the evolutionary forces and the balance of competition in their environment which selected those best able to compete from amongst their ancestors.

Water Lilies; Claude Monet, 1906 (Art Institute of Chicago)

The sense of peace and relaxation I get from looking at Monet's Water Lilies is no less because I know a little about Monet and how his work developed and the influences on him. I can see the illusion he is creating and admire the skill with which he insinuated the most obvious thing in his painting - the surface of the water - without actually painting it at all. Here is a master craftsman at work; a man who has spent a lifetime honing his skill. I can see that, and I can still see a phenomenally beautiful painting; a painting which works on so many levels and can exert such a powerful influence of those who stand in front of it and yet which is 'just' paint on canvas.

Can we analyse beauty and come up with a universal definition? The Star-spangled banner can inspire most Americans to patriotic fervour, but to a bat it's probably a cacophonous sequence of discords, and to an Englishman, just another national anthem. Beethoven's Ode to Joy is for me the essence of the EU and it stirs something in me for it. The German national anthem is still, after 60 years, a little sinister. Does 'uber ales' really mean 'above all else' or 'over everyone'...?

Audrey Hepburn

The human face is surely one of the strangest of all the mammals with its flatness, receding mouth and silly little triangle sticking out for a nose, yet what a face! What a thing of great beauty! How did Audrey Hepburn, Jean Shrimpton or Mohammed Ali look so good with such unpromising material?

No. We can't define or analyse beauty because it means different things to different people and probably nothing at all to another species, no matter how intelligent. To coin a cliché, beauty is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder.

So where did we get this aestheticism from?

As a materialist, and of course an evolutionist, I know that we must account for it in terms of a benefit conveyed to our ancestors from back in our history, or it is an ability which co-evolved on the back of some other evolving characteristic. Did we evolve our sense of wonder and appreciation along with our intelligence?

Did we become 'hooked' on the endorphin rush we have when we see something beautiful or relaxing? Is it part of our sex-selection where there is a clear survival advantage for our genes in selecting 'beautiful' partners because what we think of as beauty is actually an assessment of good health - symmetry, good muscle structure, curves in the right places, breasts, and yes, genitalia.

Does our appreciation of nature (does everyone have that?) convey a benefit for a hunter-gatherer because it helps us learn and understand nature, the better to find and eat it, and the better to avoid being eaten by it?

Watersmeet, Devon, England

Do we like a scene with water in it - and almost everyone does - because possession of water supply would have been so beneficial to us? What more could we ask for in life than food, shelter, company and a clean (= babbling, trickling) water supply?

We know our aesthetic values are determined to a large extent by our culture and our back-ground. Would Vaughan Williams 'Lark Ascending' mean so much to a Bantu or Inuit? Why do I find the singing voice of a Bollywood actress quite unpleasant and yet it can send someone from Karela or Gujarat into raptures?

You see, even contemplating the possible reasons for our aestheticism opens up more questions and make it more wonderful for a curious mind.

Rainbow Stag Beetle, Phalacrognathus muelleri

Christchurch College, Oxford

The poet Keats once light-heartedly accused Isaac Newton of spoiling the beauty of the rainbow by unweaving it and reducing it to a prism of colours.

Certainly, my atheism has not lessened my love of nature for the great beauty it holds; and that is not diminished in the slightest because I have tried to understand it. Quite the contrary, it has immeasurably enhanced it because the more I learn the more I realise just what a magic world in a magic universe we have the great good fortune to experience for this brief instant of intelligent life that chance has given us.

Perhaps the real beauty of the rainbow lies not in it colours, nor in the way these are split up by rain drops, nor even in the way we see and perceive them.

Perhaps the real beauty of the rainbow lies in understanding why we perceive it as beautiful in the first place.

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The Evolutionary Tree of Life | Unreasonable Faith

A stunning diagram of life on earth tracing all species back to their common origin

The Evolutionary Tree of Life | Unreasonable Faith:

'via Blog this'

Posted on Unreasonable Faith by Daniel Florien.

And Let Them Have Dominion...

Genesis 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. (KJV Bible)

Photograph: Martin Harvey/WWF International
The white rhino Ceratotherium simum. Killed by poachers for its horn and fuelled by demand from Vietnam,
rhino poaching in South Africa shows no signs of abating, with a record 341 killed there this year to date.