F Rosa Rubicondior: Sociology
Showing posts with label Sociology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sociology. Show all posts

Tuesday 13 February 2024

Creationism in Crisis - Humans Were Making Beads In North America 2,900 Years Before 'Creation Week' - And The Evidence Survived The Legendary Genocidal Flood!


UW Archaeology Professor Discovers Oldest Known Bead in the Americas

The problem with having counter-factual beliefs that are only believed because you want to feel more important than you're afraid you really are, is that you need a vast array of strategies for ignoring the vast amount of evidence that your beliefs are wrong. This is especially important if you live in a technological society where there is free access to that vast amount of evidence and news such as this discovery of what could be the oldest known bead from the western hemisphere, dated to 12,940 years ago.

It was recovered from a site in Wyoming, USA at an archaeological site known as the La Prele Mammoth site:
What information do you have on the La Prele Mammoth site in Wyoming, USA?

Tuesday 26 December 2023

60 Years Ago Today - Remembering the Big Freeze - From My Book, 'In The Blink Of An Eye: Growing Up In Rural Oxfordshire'


The winter of 1962–63 was something else. It deserves a special mention. It came almost as a punctuation mark for me as my life was about to change when I left school and entered the working class in Oxford.

I was the village’s provider of Sunday newspapers! I felt I had an important job to do because without me, no–one would have anything to read on Sunday mornings! It was my sacred duty to get the Sunday newspapers delivered!

So, on Sunday, 30th December 1962 I got up as usual to go to Charlbury to buy my 60 newspapers for which I charged a penny each for delivery. I noticed there had been some snow and, unusually, the snow on the lower window frame on the back door seemed to be three or four inches up the glass.

The winter had actually started a few days earlier with snow on Boxing Day, the next best thing to a white Christmas, but it was nothing more than the usual few inches which everyone assumed would be gone in a few days. How wrong we were, as I was about to find out!

I opened the door to go to the outside toilet. A pile of snow fell into the kitchen. The back yard was full of snow, literally. It wasn't just piled up on the edges of the windowpanes, but against the door itself.

I went out of the front door to find the world had changed beyond recognition! The Lane was full of snow! A snowdrift came straight off our garage roof, across the front garden, over the garden wall and up to the wall of the house opposite. It was deeper by far than my, by now, 5 feet 10 inches.

And the snow was still falling thick and fast, driven by a gale-force wind! Southern England was in the grip of a major blizzard not seen since 1947 and probably much earlier. Bitterly cold Arctic winds drove the dry, powdery snow into every hollow and piled it up until the hollow was full, then moved on to fill the next, deeper hollow, until the countryside was a smooth as plastered wall.

But the newspapers had to get through!

So, donning wellies with two pairs of thick socks, jumpers, overcoat, scarves – one over my head and over my mouth, another round my neck twice – a balaclava helmet and two pairs of gloves, I slung my paper bag, made out of an old hessian corn sack, over my shoulder and set out. It was a strange landscape, but Main Road wasn’t too deeply covered. There were no car tracks!

I trudged up through the village to just beyond the Finstock turn, marveling at the deepening drifts, and even stopping to help a man trying to get his car out of his drive. He wasn't going to get very far. It was there I met our neighbour’s son-in-law walking over from Charlbury to check on her.

“You goin’ to get yer papers?” he asked incredulously.

“Well, Dad can’t drive me so I’m walkin’!” I explained.

“Well, turn round and go ‘ome” he said. “No–one’s goin’ to get their papers today!”

“Is it that bad?”

“Corse it is! Even the trains ent runnin! Nothin’s movin’ anywhere.”

So, I turned round and walked ‘ome with him, and had a cup of hot soup made out of the remains of the Christmas goose. The village was totally shut off! For the first time on my watch, the Sunday newspapers had not been delivered.

We dug out the lane down to The Green so people could get to Wally Scarrot's shop, but the shop couldn’t get supplies in and was beginning to run down as a village shop anyway, as people got cars and could shop at the new supermarkets in Witney and Chipping Norton. The bakery had ceased to operate several years earlier. It was a time for community action!

Monday 20 November 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Bonobos Show Cooperative Behaviour - And Another 'Uniquely Human' Trait... Isn't


Bonobos offer insight into evolution of cooperation — Harvard Gazette
The researchers considered grooming behaviors of bonobos an indicator of out-group cooperation.

Photos by Martin Surbeck
One by one the human traits that creationists like to cite as evidence of our special creation, apart from the other animals, are being shown to be anything but unique, and very often it turns out that they are in fact evidence of common descent, being present in our closest relatives.

In this case, bonobos have been shown by two Harvard researchers to form relationships for mutual benefit not only with immediate kin groups but across them and even with strangers, something that was thought to be uniquely human, requiring intelligence, empathy, a sense of 'self' and an ability to predict different outcomes from different options.

This conclusion comes as a result of two years of data collection in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the only place where endangered bonobos exist in the wild in a population of about 20,000.

The findings of senior author, Assistant Professor Martin Surbeck and first author, Martin Surbeck of Harvard's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, are published open access in Science.

The research and its significance are explained in an article in the Harvard Gazette by Anne J. Manning:

Friday 10 November 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Head Lice Bring More Lousy News For Creationists


Head lice hitched a ride on humans to the Americas at least twice
Male human head louse, Pediculus humanus capitis
According to the creationist favourite arguments - the argument from ignorant incredulity and the false dichotomy - anything which is complex, such as cells, multicellular organisms, cultural ethics, etc., must have been intelligently designed by their particular god by magic, because that is the only answer allowed. Evolution is ruled out by dogmas, as too hard to understand, by someone too lazy to learn biology and too afraid to consider being wrong.

So, following what passes for creationist logic, creationists should believe that the species-specific, obligate parasite, the head louse, Pediculus humanus capitis, must have been intelligently designed by the creationists' god.

Which begs the questions, why would an omnibenevolent designer:
  1. design an irritating parasite?
  2. design its DNA to look like head lice had co-evolved with humans over millions of years from a common ancestor with the louse, Pediculus schaeffi, that parasitises chimpanzees?
And, as with all host-specific, obligate parasites, like pubic lice, chlamydia, and other STDs, there is the little matter of who on the Ark, was host to them and how did they acquire them?

Of the three lice that can infest humans, the head louse, Pediculus humanus capitis, the closely-related body louse, P. h. humanus and the more distantly-related pubic louse, Phthiriasis pubis, all have their counterparts in our nearest great ape relatives, in the latter case, the gorilla, and all have genomes that map closely onto the evolutionary history of different human populations.

Humans inherited the ancestor of P. humanus when we diverged from the chimpanzees and, as we lost body hair, it became isolated to our head and facial hair. Later, when we started wearing clothes, our lice diverged into two sub-species, P. h. capitis and P. h. humanus (also called P. h. corporis) respectively. How we managed to acquire the sexually-transmitted pubic or crab louse, Phthiriasis pubis, from an ancestor of gorillas about 3.3 million years ago, is a matter for speculation.
What are the three species of lice that infest humans and what can they tell us about our evolutionary history and the history of different human populations? There are three species of lice that infest humans:
  1. Pediculus humanus capitis:This is the head louse, which infests the human scalp and hair.
  2. Pediculus humanus corporis:This is the body louse, which lives and lays its eggs on clothing and only feeds on the human body.
  3. Pthirus pubis:This is the pubic louse, which infests coarse body hair, especially in the genital area but can also be found in other coarse body hair.
These lice can provide insights into our evolutionary history and the history of different human populations through a field known as "phylogeography." Phylogeography involves studying the genetic variation within a species to understand its historical migration patterns and population dynamics. Lice are highly host-specific, meaning that they have evolved to live on and feed exclusively from humans. The divergence of head and body lice is thought to have occurred when humans began wearing clothing. The body louse adapted to live in clothing and only feeds on the human body when needed, while the head louse remained adapted to living in human hair. Research on the genetic diversity of human lice has contributed to our understanding of human evolution and migration. For example, studies have used genetic data from lice to estimate when humans started wearing clothing, which is linked to the migration out of Africa. The idea is that as humans migrated to different climates, the need for clothing increased, leading to the divergence of body lice from head lice. Additionally, the study of lice genetics has been used to investigate the timing and patterns of human migration and to trace the movement of human populations over time. This research helps scientists map out the historical interactions and separations of human populations, providing valuable information about the peopling of different regions of the world. In summary, the genetic diversity of human lice provides clues about our evolutionary history, including migration patterns, the development of cultural practices like clothing use, and the historical interactions among human populations.
Now, a group of scientists led by Marina Ascunce, of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS), together with colleagues, have used this knowledge to show that head lice came to America twice; once with the first wave of human migration from Siberia via the land bridge, Beringia, which was located between Siberia and Alaska, what is now the Bering Strait, when sea-levels were lower, and again with European colonists. They report these findings in a new study published on November 8 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

The new study analysed the DNA of 274 human lice from 25 geographic sites around the world. This analysis revealed the existence of two genetically isolated clusters of lice that only rarely interbred. Cluster I had a worldwide distribution, while cluster II was found in Europe and the Americas. There is also a population found in the Americas which appears to be the result of a mixture between lice descended from populations that arrived with the First People carrying cluster I lice and those descended from European (cluster II) lice, which were brought over during the colonization of the Americas.

The researchers also identified a population of lice in Central America which shows a close genetic with lice in Asia. This is consistent with the idea that people from East Asia migrated to North America and became the first Native Americans. These people then spread south into Central America, where modern louse populations today still retain a genetic signature from their distant Asian ancestors.

Abstract The human louse, Pediculus humanus, is an obligate blood-sucking ectoparasite that has coevolved with humans for millennia. Given the intimate relationship between this parasite and the human host, the study of human lice has the potential to shed light on aspects of human evolution that are difficult to interpret using other biological evidence. In this study, we analyzed the genetic variation in 274 human lice from 25 geographic sites around the world by using nuclear microsatellite loci and female-inherited mitochondrial DNA sequences. Nuclear genetic diversity analysis revealed the presence of two distinct genetic clusters I and II, which are subdivided into subclusters: Ia-Ib and IIa-IIb, respectively. Among these samples, we observed the presence of the two most common louse mitochondrial haplogroups: A and B that were found in both nuclear Clusters I and II. Evidence of nuclear admixture was uncommon (12%) and was predominate in the New World potentially mirroring the history of colonization in the Americas. These findings were supported by novel DIYABC simulations that were built using both host and parasite data to define parameters and models suggesting that admixture between cI and cII was very recent. This pattern could also be the result of a reproductive barrier between these two nuclear genetic clusters. In addition to providing new evolutionary knowledge about this human parasite, our study could guide the development of new analyses in other host-parasite systems.
Fig 1. Humans and lice.
The map shows the geographic distribution of the modern human head lice included in this study using green dots. Archeological findings of human lice are shown with the figure of a human louse on the map with the corresponding estimated dates from: [3, 5, 6, 21, 22]. In addition, the map reflects the approximate locations of hominin fossil remains and their proposed distribution based on: [2338]. Each hominin is color coded as follows: Neanderthal (Blue), Denisovan (Black), and Anatomical Modern Humans (Orange).

The outline map was downloaded from Wikimedia: Map author: Maulucioni (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_with_the_Americas_on_the_right.png).
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode.

Fig 5. Proposed global co-migration of human lice and humans.
Top: Map depicting the collection sites of the human lice included in this study. The color of each circle corresponds to the majority nuclear genetic cluster to which sampled individuals were assigned. Sites with admixed lice are indicated with patterned circles including colors of the two major genetic clusters at that site. The proposed migrations of anatomically modern humans out of Africa into Europe, Asia and the Americas, as well as the more recent European colonization of the New World are indicated with thick grey arrows. Hypothetical human louse co-migrations are indicated with orange and blue arrows. At the bottom, the STRUCTURE plot from Fig 3A corresponding to the assignment of 274 lice from 25 geographical sites at K = 4 (Table 1) is shown.

The outline map was downloaded from Wikimedia: Map author: Maulucioni (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_with_the_Americas_on_the_right.png).
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode.


As the author point out, analysis of the DNA of host-specific obligate parasites such as lice can help fill in gaps in the fossil record because their evolution is closely linked to their host's evolution, patterns of migration and , in our case, to cultural changes such as wearing cloths. Again, in the case of humans, a clear pattern emerges which maps exactly onto other evidence of migration, isolation and remixing, confirming the value of DNA analysis in this respect. There is a clear line of migration out of Africa into Asia and from Asia into the Americas with the earliest human migrants. The lice Europeans inherited, had been partially isolated in the European Peninsula with their hosts, or possible had evolved with Neanderthals who then passed them on the modern humans, were the able to remix with the Asian/American variety from the 15th century onwards.

So what creationists need to explain, as well as why their putative designer went to the trouble of designing an obligate parasite to live on us, is why it then gave them DNA that looked like they had evolved over millions of years, share a ecommon ancestor with those of chimpanzees and reflected our pattern of migration out of Africa and across the world over a period of several tens of thousands of years.
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Wednesday 13 September 2023

Creationism in Crisis - No-One Mourns For The Old Dead Gods of Arabia - Part 2


Mirrored building at the ancient al Ula Maraya archaeological site, Saudi Arabia

7,000-year-old animal bones, human remains found in enigmatic stone structure in Arabia | Live Science

Archaeologists are uncovering evidence of religious rituals in Norther Arabia, 3000 years before creationists believe Earth and humans were created!

Creationists love to point to the fact that all cultures, ancient and modern, tend to have religion as a central element to the culture, as though that fact somehow proves the locally popular god is real.

Of course, it also points to the fact that we have evolved to 'fail safe' and assume agency where there is none, to naively believe what our parents believe, to accept simplistic answers to complex questions and find it impossible to imagine total oblivion at death.

But, ask a creationists to explain why we should accept the locally popular god is the only real one and all the ancient gods are false, and they will probably cite much of that list as reasons why they had false beliefs, stopping short of going just one god (or one pantheon) further and applying that logic to their own god(s), citing all sorts of nebulous reasons why they believe in their particular god(s).

The team found animal horns from a variety of animals, including cattle and caprines, or animals in the goat family, at the site.

Image credit: Wael Abu-Azizeh et al. 2022/RCU
So, it must be embarrassing to realise that those nebulous reasons were very probably cited by believers in those ancient gods as 'proof' that they existed.

Did the sun not rise in the morning because they had performed the right rituals? Did the crops not fail when they had failed to chant the right prayers in exactly the right way at the right time, or had broken the rules in some other way?

Did the gods not reward them by helping them prevail in battle or punish them for an assumed transgression when they lost a battle?

And could they too not 'look at the trees' and marvel at the wonders their gods had created? And did their priests not also have the power of prophesy and claim they heard the god(s) speaking to them?

One thing we can be sure about is that belief in their god(s) was a strong motivation for rituals associated with life, death and probably animal husbandry, as it is for believers today. The evidence for that is in the artifacts they left behind as discovered by archaeology, such as that currently going on at al Ula in the Ashar Valley in Northern Arabia, where researchers have now discovered evidence of ritual sacrifice and burials in the remains of stone structures known as mustatils, which are believed to have been used for religious purposes.

To add to the embarrassment for creationists, these structures have been dated to about 7,000 years ago, i.e., some 3,000 years before Earth and humans were created!

Regular readers may recall how the archaeological site in Northern Arabia, close to the Fertile Crescent was the subject of a blog post here last March. Now the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCA), set up to investigate the site, has produced an update. It concerns the remain, both animal and human, found in some of the graves associated with the buildings.

As the RCA news release reports:

Tuesday 16 May 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Chimpanzee Vocalization Shows Common Ancestry With Humans

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

Chimpanzees form complex vocalisations

© Adrian Soldati
Chimpanzees Combine Calls to Communicate New Meaning | UZH News

Creationists insist that humans were specially created separate from the other mammals as a special type of 'life’ and point to unique characteristics as evidence of this claim, not realising that having unique characteristics is what defines any given species. Elephants, for example, could claim to be a special form of life because they have unique characteristics that distinguish them from, say, giraffes or hyenas.

A unique characteristic of humans often cited by creationists is language - in other words, our ability to combine simple sounds into complex words and words into meaningful sentences. So, it will come as something of a shock to creationists to learn that this ability is not a uniquely human ability and that chimpanzees also have that ability, so it was very probably an ability of the last common ancestor of human and chimpanzees that lives some 6 million years ago.

The discovery was made by a team of researchers led by Maël Leroux of the Department of Comparative Language Science, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland, and including researchers from Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands, the Budongo Conservation Field Station, Masindi, Uganda, the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE), University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland, and the Department of Psychology, University of York, York, UK.

Their findings were published open access a few days ago in the journal Nature Communications.

The University of Zurich news release, explains the research and its significance:

Sunday 16 April 2023

Human Evolution - What Darwin Got Wrong, and Why the Far-Right Embrace Social Darwinism

Human Evolution

What Darwin Got Wrong, and Why the Far-Right Embrace Social Darwinism

Racist and sexist depictions of human evolution still permeate science, education and popular culture today

The far right in politics have never been bothered about truth.

They have no concerns about the scientific validity of the claimed scientific basis for their belief in their superiority over other peoples. It's whatever excuse they think they can get away with that's importan,t and more often than not, religion provides that excuse for them.

So, while simultaneously appealing to the Christian fundamentalists who reject Darwinian evolution on doctrinaire grounds, they sell the notion of white supremacy and male superiority over women based on Darwin's social ideas, so-called social Darwinism, that Darwin got from the Christian culture he grew up in.

While Social Darwinism has been rejected by the egalitarian left in politics as having no scientific basis, it is ironic that this is the only aspect of 'Darwinism'; that the far-right embraces, but it's closeness to Christian fundamentalism makes it doubly attractive to them.

Charles Darwin, who trained for the priesthood as a young man before turning to biology, was a man of his age and took it as established fact that there was a racial hierarchy in the world and that men were naturally superior to women, because that was the reality he saw, but the reality he saw was the result of 18 centuries of Christianity. Rather than question those basic cultural assumption on which English and European imperialism depended, and which seemed to be borne out by its success in dominating the world, he looked for a scientific basis for them in the framework of the evolutionary biology he and Wallace had identified as the explanation for biodiversity and the origin of species.

Darwin was right about a great deal, but fundamentally wrong about the biological superiority of white males. Indeed, given that all species, and all races have been evolving for the same length of time, and the process of evolution has no goal but is shaped by the prevailing local environment, it makes no sense at all to talk about one species or race being more highly evolved than another. All living organisms are more or less perfectly adapted by natural selection to fit their evolutionary niche and when their environment changes, the pressure to adapt changes. There is no pinnacle; no supreme achievement of evolution. All species are liable to find themselves less than perfectly adapted to a changing environment in different places at different times and to evolve accordingly.

But Darwin saw a hierarchy, both racial and sexual - and a hierarchy that the Christian religion he was raised in accepted as the natural order and promulgated it as the right and proper form of society, much as white supremacist Christians do today, so he saw his task as explaining what he saw rather than explaining why the 'natural order' was an illusion created by circumstance. In the words of the Anglican hymn, written in 1848, just 11 years before Darwin's Origin of Species was published:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.
The circumstance was, as Jared Diamond points out in his book, Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years due to the good fortune of Europeans having several domesticable animals in Eurasia so Europeans had horsepower for work whereas much of the rest of the world never had more than manpower. Europeans also co-evolved with a range of viruses, mostly acquired by living in close proximity to domestic animals, so when they came into contact with the rest of the world, their germs devastated their societies and weakened their resistance to colonial powers.

As Diamond points out, had Bantus been able to domesticate rhinoceroses, imaging the consequences for history if Roman legions had come up against Bantu cavalries mounted in rhinoceroses. We would probably now have far right Africans trying to justify their colonization and Africanization of Eurasia and carrying off millions of white West Europeans into slavery in Africa where their descendants were being treated as a social underclass, as proving the biological superiority of the black races and why the 'white lives matter' campaign is dangerous radical extremism aimed at overthrowing the God-given order (the god being some West African local god which featured in their origin myths). White sports people would be being taunted with monkey noises and thrown bananas while thanking the West African god for their sporting success.

And enlightened scientists such as the author of the following article would be campaigning for an end to the pervading black supremacist thinking in science and decrying the influence of a black evolutionary biologist who, 170 year ago wrote a book explaining why black men were the superior form of the species and why black culture was superior to the primitive cultures of the pale-skinned races.

The author is Rui Diogo, Associate Professor of Anatomy, Howard University. His article from The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.



Racist and sexist depictions of human evolution still permeate science, education and popular culture today

Human evolution is typically depicted with a progressive whitening of the skin, despite a lack of evidence to support it.


Rui Diogo, Howard University

Systemic racism and sexism have permeated civilization since the rise of agriculture, when people started living in one place for a long time. Early Western scientists, such as Aristotle in ancient Greece, were indoctrinated with the ethnocentric and misogynistic narratives that permeated their society. More than 2,000 years after Aristotle’s writings, English naturalist Charles Darwin also extrapolated the sexist and racist narratives he heard and read in his youth to the natural world.

Darwin presented his biased views as scientific facts, such as in his 1871 book “The Descent of Man,” where he described his belief that men are evolutionarily superior to women, Europeans superior to non-Europeans and hierarchical civilizations superior to small egalitarian societies. In that book, which continues to be studied in schools and natural history museums, he considered “the hideous ornaments and the equally hideous music admired by most savages” to be “not so highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, in birds,” and compared the appearance of Africans to the New World monkey Pithecia satanas.
Science isn’t immune to sexism and racism.
“The Descent of Man” was published during a moment of societal turmoil in continental Europe. In France, the working class Paris Commune took to the streets asking for radical social change, including the overturning of societal hierarchies. Darwin’s claims that the subjugation of the poor, non-Europeans and women was the natural result of evolutionary progress were music to the ears of the elites and those in power within academia. Science historian Janet Browne wrote that Darwin’s meteoric rise within Victorian society did not occur despite his racist and sexist writings but in great part because of them.

It is not coincidence that Darwin had a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, an honor emblematic of English power, and was publicly commemorated as a symbol of “English success in conquering nature and civilizing the globe during Victoria’s long reign.”

Despite the significant societal changes that have occurred in the last 150 years, sexist and racist narratives are still common in science, medicine and education. As a teacher and researcher at Howard University, I am interested in combining my main fields of study, biology and anthropology, to discuss broader societal issues. In research I recently published with my colleague Fatimah Jackson and three medical students at Howard University, we show how racist and sexist narratives are not a thing of the past: They are still present in scientific papers, textbooks, museums and educational materials.

From museums to scientific papers

One example of how biased narratives are still present in science today is the numerous depictions of human evolution as a linear trend from darker and more “primitive” human beings to more “evolved” ones with a lighter skin tone. Natural history museums, websites and UNESCO heritage sites have all shown this trend.

The fact that such depictions are not scientifically accurate does not discourage their continued circulation. Roughly 11% of people living today are “white,” or European descendants. Images showing a linear progression to whiteness do not accurately represent either human evolution or what living humans look like today, as a whole. Furthermore, there is no scientific evidence supporting a progressive skin whitening. Lighter skin pigmentation chiefly evolved within just a few groups that migrated to non-African regions with high or low latitudes, such as the northern regions of America, Europe and Asia.
Illustrations of human evolution tend to depict progressive skin whitening.
Sexist narratives also still permeate academia. For example, in a 2021 paper on a famous early human fossil found in the Sierra de Atapuerca archaeological site in Spain, researchers examined the canine teeth of the remains and found that it was actually that of a girl between 9 and 11 years old. It was previously believed that the fossil was a boy due to a popular 2002 book by one of the authors of that paper, paleoanthropologist José María Bermúdez de Castro. What is particularly telling is that the study authors recognized that there was no scientific reason for the fossil remains to have been designated as a male in the first place. The decision, they wrote, “arose randomly.”

But these choices are not truly “random.” Depictions of human evolution frequently only show men. In the few cases where women are depicted, they tend to be shown as passive mothers, not as active inventors, cave painters or food gatherers, despite available anthropological data showing that pre-historical women were all those things.

Another example of sexist narratives in science is how researchers continue to discuss the “puzzling” evolution of the female orgasm. Darwin constructed narratives about how women were evolutionarily “coy” and sexually passive, even though he acknowledged that females actively select their sexual partners in most mammalian species. As a Victorian, it was difficult for him to accept that women could play an active part in choosing a partner, so he argued that such roles only applied to women in early human evolution. According to Darwin, men later began to sexually select women.

Sexist narratives about women being more “coy” and “less sexual,” including the idea of the female orgasm as an evolutionary puzzle, are contradicted by a wide range of evidence. For instance, women are the ones who actually more frequently experience multiple orgasms as well as more complex, elaborate and intense orgasms on average, compared to men. Women are not biologically less sexual, but sexist stereotypes were accepted as scientific fact.

The vicious cycle of systemic racism and sexism

Educational materials, including textbooks and anatomical atlases used by science and medical students, play a crucial role in perpetuating biased narratives. For example, the 2017 edition of “Netter Atlas of Human Anatomy,” commonly used by medical students and clinical professionals, includes about 180 divs that show skin color. Of those, the vast majority show male individuals with white skin, and only two show individuals with “darker” skin. This perpetuates the depiction of white men as the anatomical prototype of the human species and fails to display the full anatomical diversity of people.
Textbooks and educational materials can perpetuate the biases of their creators in science and society.
Authors of teaching materials for children also replicate the biases in scientific publications, museums and textbooks. For example, the cover of a 2016 coloring book entitled “The Evolution of Living Things”“ shows human evolution as a linear trend from darker "primitive” creatures to a “civilized” Western man. Indoctrination comes full circle when the children using such books become scientists, journalists, museum curators, politicians, authors or illustrators.
One of the key characteristics of systemic racism and sexism is that it is unconsciously perpetuated by people who often don’t realize that the narratives and choices they make are biased. Academics can address long-standing racist, sexist and Western-centric biases by being both more alert and proactive in detecting and correcting these influences in their work. Allowing inaccurate narratives to continue to circulate in science, medicine, education and the media perpetuates not only these narratives in future generations, but also the discrimination, oppression and atrocities that have been justified by them in the past. The Conversation
Rui Diogo, Associate Professor of Anatomy, Howard University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

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Tuesday 4 April 2023

Superstition News - Why Do People Fall For Wackadoodle Ideas?

Superstition News
Why Do People Fall For Wackadoodle Ideas?

Supernatural beliefs have featured in every society throughout history. New research helps explain why

Jesus and Mo cartoon in which they discuss the loss of gaps to occupy
It seem the 'God of the gaps' explanation carries a great deal of weight, especially as an explanation for natural phenomenon such as disease, drought, floods, earthquakes, etc., in smaller societies. Only as societies get larger are these supernatural explanation used to explain man-made disasters such as war, theft, mass murders, etc.

It's also true that, while developed societies such as the USA tend to look for supernatural explanations for man-made disasters, they also, with better education tend to look to science to explain natural phenomena and less so to imaginary supernatural causes.

The result is that the search for gaps in which to sit their god becomes an obsession of those who benefit from people's superstition, such as fundamentalist televangelists and Creation cult leaders, who continually attack science looking to find gaps, either real or imaginary in which to sit their ever-shrinking god and keep the income stream flowing.

Cartoon in which the God of the Gaps is thankful for Creationists
Quite why there should be a difference between larger and smaller societies is discussed in an article by Dr. Joshua Conrad Jackson, postdoctoral fellow, Kellogg School of Management, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA and Professor Brock Bastian, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Australia.

The article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here.

Saturday 11 March 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Not All Science Has to be Done in a Laboratory

Creationism in Crisis

Not All Science Has to be Done in a Laboratory

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How we discovered flamingos form cliques, just like humans

A few days ago I wrote about a paper which incidentally refutes the notion that humans are a special creation with unique characteristics that distinguish us from other animals in a way over and above those handful of characteristics that distinguish any distinct species from others.

One of these, so Creationists would have us believe, is having higher emotions and cognition which enable us to form close friendships and empathise with other people, for instance. The paper showed how Caribbean flamingos forms 'cliques' or friendship groups with other flamingos with similar personalities, just like humans do.

Another piece of disinformation that the cult leaders feed their dupes, in order to attack and undermine the science behind the Theory of Evolution (TOE), is the nonsensical claim that a scientific theory must be verified with experiments in a laboratory or else it isn't real science but an unproven hypothesis which is no more valid than a belief in magic. This trick enables Creationists to present their evidence-free superstition as a theory which should carry equal weight to the TOE and so should be taken seriously as an alternative to the science.

Curiously, Creationists who despise science and try to undermine and misrepresent it at every opportunity, would like nothing more than Creationism being regarded as serious science.

Saturday 14 January 2023

Trumpanzee News - What Causes People to Fall For Conspiracy Theories?

Bullying, power and control: why people believe in conspiracy theories and how to respond
QAnon conspiracists in the failed insurrection
A supporter of President Donald Trump, seen wearing a QAnon shirt, is confronted by Capitol Police officers outside the Senate Chamber during the invasion of the U.S. Capitol
Credit: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
It's probably hard for rationl people to understand why some people fall for such ludicrous conspiracy theories as the QAnon hoax that Donald Trump was fighting the Satanic cannibalistic paedophile ring led by Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama that is secretly running the 'deep state', or that the 2020 election was stolen (apparently without leaving a trace of evidence that would stand up in court). The same fruit loops have also been convinced that the odious liar, crook, serial adulterer, and incompetent narcissist, Trump was send by God to fight Satan and that God had told various self-appointed 'prophets' that Trump would win by a landslide in 2020, so he must have done really.

As it became more and more apparent just how badly Trump lost, being the only presidential candidate in American political history to lose the popular vote twice and that Joe Biden had won it by a record margin, so the conspiracy theories became more and more lurid.

So why do some credulous fools fall for these unlikely theories, usually involving vast secret conspiracies such as the entire scientific community together with all their technical and administrative staff and everyone involved in publishing scientific books, periodicals and papers, or senior military leaders and heads of government of even hostile states, together with their advisors and civil service?

In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, Daniel Jolley, Assistant Professor in Social Psychology, University of Nottingham, UK and Anthony, Lantian, Associate Professor in Psychology, Université Paris Nanterre – Université Paris Lumières, France, explain the psychology and the social causes of this gullibility and readiness to believe the patently absurd. The article, the original of which can be read here, is reformatted for stylistic consistence.

Wednesday 23 November 2022

Creationism in Crisis - What if Neanderthals Had Won?

8 billion people: how different the world would look if Neanderthals had prevailed
Neanderthal woman
Neanderthal woman
Artist: Tom Björklund, Moesgård Museum

In the third of this series of articles reprinted from The Conversation, dealing with the recent evolutionary history of modern humans, Professor Penny Spikins, Professor of the Archaeology of Human Origins, University of York, UK, poses the question of how different the world would look today had the Neanderthals prevailed and not gone extinct, or, as more recent research suggests, been absorbed into the increasing and expanding population of Homo sapiens as they moved into the territory formerly occupied by Neanderthals.

An intriguing thought from this article is that humans, by forming large, urbanised groups, effectively domesticated themselves and so acquired some of the attributes of domestication that we see in, for example, domestic cattle, who now live in far larger, and more tolerant groups than their wild ancestors who lived in small groups where each individual could have a wide 'personal space'. Tolerance for others, the key to successful human groups, thus may have been a consequence as well as a cause of the formation of large human groups.

Because of the nature of their societies, where small, isolated extended family groups, separated from other bands by considerable distances, Neanderthals never self-domesticated, so never developed the mutual tolerance needed to form large, cooperative groups of unrelated individuals. In addition to their lack of genetic diversity within the group, this may have played a part in their eventual demise/absorption.

Professor Spikins' article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here:

Tuesday 22 November 2022

Creationism in Crisis - How Evolution Resulted in 8 Billion Humans

8 billion people: how evolution made it happen
Based on estimates by the History Database of the Global Environment and the UN.

This is the first of three blog posts dealing with human evolution, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency.

A few days ago, sometime during November 15th 2022, the human population of Earth exceeded 8 billion. In the following article by Professor Matthew Wills, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at the Milner Centre for Evolution, University of Bath, UK, explains how our large brains and complex social structures allowed this to happen.

Cultural or memetic evolution is of course closely analogous to genetic evolution, so human evolution can be seen as the result of gene-meme co-evolution, with cooperation and the evolution of social ethics being an important part of our success, enabling us to create organised urban societies and nation states having evolved sets of ethics in common.

Professor Wills' original article can be read here:

8 billion people: how evolution made it happen


One in 8 billion.

Matthew Wills, University of Bath

November 15 2022 marks a milestone for our species, as the global population hits 8 billion. Just 70 years ago, within a human lifetime, there were only 2.5 billion of us. In AD1, fewer than one-third of a billion. So how have we been so successful?

Humans are not especially fast, strong or agile. Our senses are rather poor, even in comparison to domestic livestock and pets. Instead, large brains and the complex social structures they underpin are the secrets of our success. They have allowed us to change the rules of the evolutionary game that governs the fate of most species, enabling us to shape the environment in our favour.

But there have been many unintended consequences, and now we have raised the stakes so high that human-driven climate change has put millions of species at risk of extinction.
The golden toad (Incilius periglenes) is an extinct amphibian that was once abundant in a small area north of Monteverde, Costa Rica. Amphibians have extremely high rates of extinction in response to climate change and habitat fragmentation.
Understanding population growth

Legend has it the king of Chemakasherri, which is in modern day India, loved to play chess and challenged a travelling priest to a game. The king asked him what prize he would like if he won. The priest only wanted some rice. But this rice had to be counted in a precise way, with a single grain on the first square of the board, two on the second, four on the third, and so on. This seemed reasonable, and the wager was set.
A chessboard with each square containing twice the number of rice grains as the one before. K = a thousand, M = a million, G = a billion.
When the king lost, he told his servants to reward his guest as agreed. The first row of eight squares held 255 grains, but by the end of the third row, there were over 16.7 million grains. The king offered any other prize instead: even half his kingdom. To reach the last square he would need 18 quintillion grains of rice. That’s about 210 billion tonnes.

The king learned about exponential growth the hard way.

In the beginning

Our genus – Homo – had modest beginnings at square one around 2.3 million years ago. We originated in tiny, fragmented populations along the east African rift valley. Genetic and fossil evidence suggests Homo sapiens and our cousins the Neanderthals evolved from a common ancestor, possibly Homo heidelbergensis . Homo heidelbergensis had a brain slightly smaller than modern humans. Neanderthals had larger brains than us, but the regions devoted to thinking and social interactions were less well developed.
Facial reconstruction of Homo heidelbergensis.
When Homo heidelbergensis started travelling more widely, populations started to change from one another. The African lineage led to Homo sapiens, while migration into Europe around 500,000 years ago created the Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Scientists debate the extent to which later migrations of Homo sapiens out of Africa (between 200,000 and 60,000 years ago) displaced the Neanderthals or interbred with them. Modern humans who live outside Africa typically have around 2% Neanderthal DNA. It is close to zero in people from African backgrounds.
Reconstruction of Homo neanderthalensis.
If unchecked, all populations with more births than deaths grow exponentially. Our population does not double in each generation because the average number of children per couple is fewer than four. However, the pace of growth has been accelerating at an unprecedented rate. Those of us alive today are 7% of all the humans who ever existed since the origin of our species.

Why aren’t all species booming?

Biological intervention normally puts the brakes on population growth. Predator populations increase as their prey becomes more abundant, keeping numbers in check. Viruses and other disease agents sweep through populations and decimate them. Habitats become overcrowded. Or rapidly changing environments can turn the tables on once successful species and groups.
Thomas Malthus was famous for his 1798 essay ‘On the Principle of Population’.
Charles Darwin, like the 18th-century scholar Thomas Malthus before him, thought there might be a hard limit on human numbers. Malthus believed our growing population would eventually outpace our ability to produce food, leading to mass starvation. But he did not foresee 19th and 20th-century revolutions in agriculture and transport, or 21st-century advances in genetic technology that allowed us to keep making more food, however patchily, across the globe.

Our intelligence and ability to make tools and develop technologies helped us survive most of the threats our ancestors faced. Within about 8,500 years humans went from the first metal tools to AI and space exploration.

The catch

We are now kicking an increasingly heavy can down the road. The UN estimates that by 2050 there will be nearly 10 billion of us. One consequence of these vast numbers is that small changes in our behaviour can have huge effects on climate and habitats across the globe. The rising energy demands of each person today are on average twice what they were in 1900.

But what of our cousins, the Neanderthals? It turns out, in one sense, their fate was less dire than we might suppose. One measure of evolutionary success is the number of copies of your DNA that are dispersed. By this measure Neanderthals are more successful today than ever. When Neanderthal populations were last distinct from Homo sapiens (around 40,000 years ago) there were fewer than 150,000 of them. Even assuming a conservative average of 1% Neanderthal DNA in modern humans, there is at least 500 times as much in circulation today than at the time of their “extinction”.

The Conversation Matthew Wills, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at the Milner Centre for Evolution, University of Bath

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

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