How Science Works - Tracking How Great Tits In An Oxfordshire Wood Are Responding To Climate Change

Wytham Wood, Oxfordshire, UK

Early morning, Wytham Wood

The great tits in this Oxford wood are adapting their breeding times as climate changes – here’s how

This article caught my eye because it concerns the birds in a wood which is local to me - Wytham Wood, near Oxford, to which I have licensed access. This is reputedly the most intensively studied area of woodland in the world, belonging, as it does, to Oxford University.

Wytham Woods form an iconic location that has been the subject of continuous ecological research programmes, many dating back to the 1940s. The estate has been owned and maintained by the University of Oxford since 1942. The Woods are often quoted as being one of the most researched pieces of woodland in the world, and their 1000 acres are designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

The wooded parts of the Wytham Estate comprise ancient semi-natural woodland (dating to the last Ice Age), secondary woodland (dating to the seventeenth century), and modern plantations (1950s and 60s). The fourth key habitat is the limestone grassland found at the top of the hill. Other smaller habitats include a valley-side mire and a series of ponds.

The site is exceptionally rich in flora and fauna, with over 500 species of plants, a wealth of woodland habitats, and 800 species of butterflies and moths.

https://www.wythamwoods.ox.ac.uk/

Through intensive observation over successive years, researchers are able to measure changes in behaviour of species such as the Great Tit, Parus major with some of the best examples of observational biology in the form of research papers. For example, a few years ago a team of researchers showed that the British race of Great tits were diverging from their European relatives with changes in the beaks probably reflecting the fact that we in Britain provide feeding stations for birds to sustain them through the winter much more frequently than other Europeans, so the British Great tits are evolving so they can get the food in the bird feeders in British gardens.

In the following article, ecologist, David López Idiáquez, a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Behavioural and Evolutionary Ecology, University of Oxford, explains how their research is measuring how Great tits are responding to climate change. His article is reprinted here from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency, with photographs from Internet sources:

Wonderful World - Ten Reasons to Like Spiders

Top left: Giant trapdoor spider Euoplos dignitas

Bottom left: European garden spider, Araneus diadematus

Top right: Gooty Sapphire Ornamental tarantula, Poecilotheria metallica

Bottom right: Banded Garden spider, Argiope trifasciata

Female house spider, Tegenaria domestica

Don't like spiders? Here are 10 reasons to change your mind

Back in the past, in what now seems like a lifetime ago, I managed the Emergency Operations Centre for my local Ambulance Service which was housed in a single-storey building in the grounds of the Church Hospital, Oxford. One of my nicknames was 'Spiderman' because of my fondness for spiders.

The roof space of this building was home to a population of 'house spider' or Tegenaria domestica, a good-sized one of which can be 4 inches or more across its outstretched legs. They frequently paid us a visit by coming through the light fittings or round the edges of the aircon unit.

The house spider is well-named, being one of those commensal species that, like barn swallows, can't exist without human habitation and so must have evolved after we became settled and built permanent dwellings.

Despite its large fangs, it is entirely harmless to humans, even if it does manage to pierce the skin - something I tried to impress on my staff, whose first response to one running across the floor was to stamp on it.

Despite this reassurance, one of my assistants was so arachnophobic she refused to enter the room until the spider was gone - although what she thought it would do to her was a mystery, so one of my tasks was to gently catch the spider in my hands and put it outside, whereupon I would deliver my famous (or maybe infamous) spider talk, in which I explained why spiders are such fascinating creatures - their very long evolutionary history from a common ancestor with scorpions; their multiple eyes (some for binocular vision and some for detecting movement) and above all their amazingly engineered webs.

Orb web spiders like the common garden spider, Araneus diadematus, make two sorts of silk - one to act as scaffolding and the radial threads of the web and sticky one to form the circular strands. Each thread of silk consists of multiple fine filaments that stretch very quickly to catch a flying insect without it bouncing off, then recoil slowly to avoid throwing the insect free. All this is controlled by the fine molecular structure and electrostatic bonds between the filaments. The result is a thread that, weight for weight, is stronger than steel.

One small spider that is common on walls and buildings in Oxford is the zebra spider, Salticus scenicus, a tiny black and white-striped spider, only a few millimeters long, that has amazing eyes. It is a hunting spider that preys on small insects, even some three times its size, by jumping on them. Its modus operandum is to crawl over the surface of walls and roofs and, when it sees its prey, it approaches slowly and when close enough, judges the distance perfectly and pounces. It will also jump across gaps, again with a perfectly judged jump, many times its own body length, rather like a human jumping the Grand Canyon from a standing start, but before it does so, it dabs the tip of its abdomen down to fix a 'safety line' of silk, just in case. To perform these feats, the zebra spider needs a high degree of visual acuity and binocular vison. The amazing thing about this spider is the way it overcomes the problem for visual acuity of such a small retina; it rapidly moves the retina up and down, effectively increasing its size.

The jump is accomplished, not by muscles in the legs, but by a sudden increase in haemocoelic blood pressure which straightens the front and back legs, so the spider always jumps with its legs extended.
I always hoped my spider talk would impress my staff enough to take an interest in spiders rather than seeing them as creepy-crawly things to be half-feared and killed simply for sharing the building with us. Alas, only one or two ever followed my example and picked them up to put them out of a window.

All that was by way of introduction to an article in The Conversation in which Leanda Denise Mason, an Associate Lecturer, Curtin University, Australia give her ten reasons to like spiders, or at least change your mind it you don't. Her article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here.

Conservation News - Why 'Extinct In The Wild' is Not Always a Death Sentence

Conservation News

Why 'Extinct In The Wild' is Not Always a Death Sentence

The Socorro Dove, Zenaida graysoni

© Josep del Hoyo
Macaulay Library

1754 painting of a passenger pigeon.
(Plate 23 in Volume 1 of The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and Bahamas)

By Mark Catesby, George Edwards - The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and Bahamas V. 1 (1754) A version by Seligmann 1749, Public Domain, Link

The animals and plants that only exist in captivity – and why time is running out to restore them to the wild

In southern Ontario, Canada, in 1866, a flock of migrating passenger pigeons, was estimated to be 1.5 Km (.93 miles) wide and 500 Km (310 miles) long. It took 14 hours to pass and contained an estimated 3.5 billion birds. The passenger pigeon was then probably the most abundant species of bird on Earth and certainly in North America.

On September 1, 1914, at Cincinnati Zoo, less than 50 years later, 'Martha' the last known passenger pigeon died and the species became extinct. The species had been functionally extinct when the last male died some years earlier. Its death went unrecorded. The last wild passenger pigeon is believed to have been shot in 1901.

The extinction of this species was due entirely to human intervention, including hunting for cheap meat on a massive scale, deforestation and habitat destruction. Because of its habit of migrating in closely-packed flocks, a single shot could bring down several birds.

Why passenger pigeons went extinct a century ago - Eric Guiry, The Conversation

A passenger pigeon flock being hunted in Louisiana. From the ‘Illustrated Shooting and Dramatic News’, 1875.

Credit: (Wikimedia/Smith Bennett), CC BY-NC-ND

A gene line that had taken 3.5 billion years to evolve was ended.

Biodiveristy News - A Rare Bit of Good News as 29 Australian Species Come Back From the Brink of Extinction

Biodiveristy News

A Rare Bit of Good News as 29 Australian Species Come Back From the Brink of Extinction

Lord Howe Island Stick Insect, Dryococelus australis

Source: Wikipedia
By Granitethighs Own work (CC BY-SA 3.0), Link

Male adult Gouldian Finch, Chloebia gouldiae

Source: Wikimedia

We found 29 threatened species are back from the brink in Australia. Here's how

It's not often these days that we have some good news about biodiversity and the mass extinction now underway due to human interference with the environment, climate change, competition for living space and food production, etc, but here are a few small crumbs from Australia, where recent surveys have shown that 29 species which were once critically endangered, are now back from the brink of extinction.

The following article reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license is by five leading Australian conservationists. The article has been reformatted for stylistic consistence. The original can be read here.

Walking in Bagley Wood in November - Slide Show

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Bagley Wood, near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK is a lightly managed ancient mixed broadleaf and conifer wood belonging to St Johns College, Oxford, who acquired it in 1557. Prior to that it had been owned by Abingdon Abbey between 955 and 1538. It is now used for field research by members of the University Zoology Department and is probably one of the most closely studied areas of woodland in Europe.

These photographs were taken on a sunny sunday afternoon in November on one of the warmest November days on record. Of particular note are the profusion of holly berries and the variety of fungi to be seen.

Walkers are welcome to use the wood but are politely requested to stay on the footpaths, to keep dogs on a lead and not to disturb the wildlife, so the woodland remains almost completely undisturbed.

A feature in Late Spring are the carpets of bluebells as well as the many nesting birds, especially finches, warblers, blackcaps, chiff chaffs and tits. In recent years, red kites and buzzards have both increased in numbers, and muntjac deer have become common.

Another Newly-Discovered Substance Shows Why Biodiversity is Important

Leaf-cutter ants

New antifungal compound from ant farms - American Chemical Society

Following close on my article a few days ago on the antibiotic found in the skin of an Australian toadlet and how this demonstrates the need to maintain a rich biodiversity if only for the resource of natural medicines yet to be discovered in nature, we have another example of an unlikely compound being found - within the nest of leaf-cutter ants.

This time, it's an antifungal compound, produced by bacteria that live on the attine ants (ants of the Atta genus of what are more commonly known as leaf-cutter ants that farm fungi on a substrate of moist chewed-up leaf matter). The ants use this antifungal compound, called attinimicin, to keep their crop and its substrate free from fungal parasites.

A Newly-Discovered Antibiotic Shows Why a Rich Biodiversity is Vital

Australian Western toadlet, Uperoleia mjobergii

Toadlet peptide transforms into a deadly weapon against bacteria | EMBL

Researchers at The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, Germany, together with colleagues from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology - have discovered a potential powerful new form of antibiotic - in the skin of an Australian Amphibian, the Western toadlet, Uperoleia mjobergii.

This discovery highlights the vital importance of maintaining a rich biodiversity on Earth because, if nothing else, we could be losing valuable sources of new medicines and antibiotics.

It consists of a polypeptide (a short chain of amino acids) that, when they come into contact with the cell membrane of a bacterium, change to become powerful bactericides. The researchers found that the peptide self-assembles into a unique fibrous structure, which via a sophisticated structural adaptation mechanism can change its form in the presence of bacteria to protect the toadlet from infections.

Doing Science With Elephants

Straight-tusked elephants (models)

Source: Wikipedia

Elephant history rewritten by ancient genomes : Nature News & Comment

How can elephant DNA teach us about why science works and creationism doesn't?

Creationists, with their simplistic black vs. white view of the world, often pour scorn and derision on science for changing its collective mind so frequently. This comes of course from a mindset which values 'certainty', no matter how illusory, more highly than truth. Truth is sacrificed in the search for the cosy comfort of 'certainty'.

But science doesn't look for certainty. Science simply tries to get as close to the truth as possible and a truth which can be demonstrated. The analogy is of a car being driven to a destination. Every movement on that journey is a sign of progress, not a sign of failure. Constant change of position is the method of progress. Science has to change its collective mind to make progress. Religions fail to make progress because they can't change their collective minds without abandoning their religion. With religions, the dogma is everything.

So what has this to do with elephant DNA?

DNA Shows Big Bird Evolution

Emu-style birds have abandoned flight six times - life - 22 May 2014 - New Scientist

Given what we now know of how birds evolved from the therapod dinosaurs, it would be tempting to look at the big flighteless birds like the emu, ostrich, moa, the extinct giant elephant bird or Aepyornis maximus of Madagascar, and not so big New Zealand kiwi, which we collectively call the ratities, and assume they may have missed out on flight altogether and simply distributed themselves on foot from their ancestral homelands somewhere around Africa when the major landmasses were still joined up, marking then out as not very far removed from the early proto-avians and feathered dinosaurs.

However, DNA analysis, which is proving such a powerful tool for answering these little questions and resolving disputes about the precise details of evolution, shows they may not be closely related at all and may have evolved from flying birds on at least six different occasions. Their similar appearance may simply be an example of convergent evolution where broadly similar environments produce broadly similar solutions.

A team lead by Alan Cooper of the University of Adelaide in Australia has sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of the Madagascan Aepyornis maximus and other flightless birds and has shown the the closest relative of A. maximus is the New Zealand kiwi and not the moa as had been assumed from their appearance. Kiwis and A. maximus shared a common ancestor about 50 million years ago, which is some time after New Zealand and Madagascar were last in contact, so the only way they could have their current distribution was by flying. Similarly, the moas, which were thought to be more closely related to A. maximus turns out to be closer to the South American aerial tinamou. Again, this separation is more easily explained if both shared a flying common ancestor.

Abstract
The evolution of the ratite birds has been widely attributed to vicariant speciation, driven by the Cretaceous breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana. The early isolation of Africa and Madagascar implies that the ostrich and extinct Madagascan elephant birds (Aepyornithidae) should be the oldest ratite lineages. We sequenced the mitochondrial genomes of two elephant birds and performed phylogenetic analyses, which revealed that these birds are the closest relatives of the New Zealand kiwi and are distant from the basal ratite lineage of ostriches. This unexpected result strongly contradicts continental vicariance and instead supports flighted dispersal in all major ratite lineages. We suggest that convergence toward gigantism and flightlessness was facilitated by early Tertiary expansion into the diurnal herbivory niche after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Kieren J. Mitchell1, Bastien Llamas1, Julien Soubrier, Nicolas J. Rawlence1, Trevor H. Worthy, Jamie Wood, Michael S. Y. Lee1, Alan Cooper.
Ancient DNA reveals elephant birds and kiwi are sister taxa and clarifies ratite bird evolution
Science 23 May 2014: Vol. 344 no. 6186 pp. 898-900 DOI: 10.1126/science.1251981

The suggestion is that these birds evolved during a brief spell between the extinction of dinosaurs and the evolution of large mammals when they moved into a vacant niche for large terrestrial animals. In all but one instance this involved becoming large in the process. The reason kiwis remained small was because the niche had already been occupied by moas.

So here we see how well the DNA evidence is meshing neatly with the geological evidence for continental drift and the paleontological evidence for the extinction of dinosaurs and the rise of large mammals to replace them. Just like every other test of Darwinian evolution thrown up by new scientific discoveries (Darwin knew nothing of DNA or continental drift of course) the theory is not only passing with flying colours but is strengthened and confirmed by it. There are probably no other scientific theories that can claim that, not even fundamental 'laws' like Newton's Laws of Motion, the theory of gravity and the Law of Conservation of Matter which were all overthrown by Relativity.

Creationists still like to pretend this theory is no more than a guess with no supporting evidence, teach this denialism to their unfortunate children and want to be able to teach it to our more fortunate children at public expense.

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If Only Noah Had Known About Evolution!

Noah's ark on the Mount Ararat, Simone de Myle 1570

Tree of bird life could solve Noah's Ark problem - life - 27 March 2014 - New Scientist

One of the many absurdities in the Noah's Ark myth, several more of which can be found in No Way Noah!, is the sheer impossibility of providing an ocean-going sea-worthy wooden boat large enough to house something like 19 million animals of all shapes and sizes, many of which require highly specialised environments, together with enough food, to last something over a year.

Creationist pseudo-scientists who make their living trying to explain away these absurdities have no option but to fall back on an almost equally absurd version of warp-speed evolution so they can reduce the numbers to mere few thousand from which all the species have evolved in the last few thousand years, apparently with no one noticing all the new species popping into existence every generation. We're expected not to notice that they also tell their credulous followers that evolution is impossible but holding two diametrically opposite views simultaneously has never been a problem for creationists.

Now scientists have suggested a way we could, should the need ever arise in the future to take the world's species into protective custody to prevent the extinction of life on Earth, whilst not needing to take a pair of every single species. What we would need to safeguard is the DNA of all different species, not in test-tubes but in living members of those species which are the most evolutionarily distinct. From these, we could, theoretically reconstruct other related species.

You could increase the amount of evolutionary diversity that is currently protected by 25 per cent by expanding the reserve system by 5 per cent.

Laura Pollock, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

For example, we would not need to save a pair of every wild cat but nor would it work to save, say, lions, or tigers because these have close relatives, so most of their DNA would survive their extinction. What we need to do is to preserve the main limbs and major branches of the evolutionary tree of life rather than the terminal twigs. Losing a species which is closely related to several others, such as the lion, would merely remove a twig from the tree. Conserving an evolutionary distinct species with few living relatives however will conserve more of the DNA from further down the branch for the same effort.

The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) has been running the Edge of Existence Project since 2007. This seeks to identify key endangered and evolutionary unique species and to rank them into an order of priority for conservation. At the moment, effort tends to be concentrated on a few high-profile species, often at the expense of a higher priority species according to this ranking.

Now, Walter Jetz of Yale University has ranked the world's birds in terms of evolutionary distinctness using genetic data from 6500 of the 10,000 species combined with data on threats and population size to produce a list of just 100 priority species. He has also shown that concentrating on just 113 sites could conserve 60 percent of the most endangered evolutionary unique species.

Jetz has used the ranking to point to species that should be protected. For example, the highly distinct shore plover (Thinornis novaeseelandiae) lives only on the tiny Chatham Islands, near New Zealand. Just 250 are left. Focusing on plover habitat would preserve 14.46 million years of evolution for each 10,000 square kilometres conserved. In contrast, the ostrich is the 10th most distinct species, but as it has a large range only 0.05 million years would be preserved per unit area.

Andy Coghlan, Tree of bird life could solve Noah's Ark problem, New Scientist, 27 March 2014.

It's a beautiful irony that, had the Bible's authors had the least inkling of evolution or DNA and how it allows species to be arranged in a tree of life, they could have made their absurd tale just a little more plausible by explaining that Noah had reduced the number of species to conserve by doing just what conservationists are now doing. They would have had to explain how Noah had then reconstructed all the other species by careful bioengineering of course but at least their daft notion would have been just slightly less implausible.

Unfortunately, they had to try to force-fit the story into what little they knew and understood, and the prevailing superstition of the orthodoxy they were selling, and so ended up with a story so implausible that only children and scientifically illiterate, gullible adults could believe it.

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Myxy Sticks, Rabbits And Rapid Evolution

When I was a child of about 10 or 11, the English countryside saw one of the most impressive cases of rapid evolution yet witnessed in a wild mammal. It took just about ten years. It was also witnessed in Australia and the rest of Europe. It was how the European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) and the myxoma virus co-evolved to accommodate one another.

I remember still how during the first onslaught of rabbit myxomatosis the countryside suddenly became full of pathetic 'myxy' rabbits staggering blindly (and deafly) about, their eyes and ears swollen and closed with hideous pustules, completely lost and disorientated to be squashed by cars, killed by dogs and cats and dispatched mercifully by us humans who carried our 'myxy sticks'. The foxes had a heyday and their population exploded for a year or two. I once killed twenty rabbits in the corner of a single field in a few minutes. You had to be careful how you handled a myxy stick as the wrong end was a gory, pusy mess. You could easily spot a distant myxy rabbit because the swelling exposed the pale under-fur making it look like they had pale bases to their ears and pale stripes over their eyes.

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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Not Yeti?

Gigantopithicus still alive?

Has the Yeti mystery been solved? New research finds 'Bigfoot' DNA matches rare polar bear - Science - News - The Independent

Has the yeti question been answered?

Like so much with science, it depends on what the question is. If the question is, "Is there a humanoid creature living in the Himalayas?" then Prof. Bryan Sykes findings don't actually refute the claim that there is, but they certainly don't support the claim either.

If the question is, "Is there a large, unidentified (until now) creature living in the Himalayas?" then these finding are a qualified "quite probably". What the team in Bryan Sykes's Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project have found is that the DNA from two samples of hair, allegedly from yetis, and collected from locations 800 miles apart, one in the Ladakh region, the other in Bhutan, is identical to that extracted from the jawbone of an ancient bear from northern Norway which lived between 40,000 and 120,000 years ago. This species of bear is believed to be ancestral to both polar bears and brown bears, which are known to be closely related, even interbreeding where they come into contact. The match was discovered when the DNA from the samples was compared with DNA held on an international DNA database.

In fact, this illustrates a point scientists keep having to make. It is technically impossible to prove a negative; the best one can do is to fail to falsify the positive claim. A determined critic, and especially one who isn't averse to using the absurd to support her claim, can always raise the "Ah! But..." objection to any evidence which fails to support her. For example, a die-hard yeti fan can always argue that the samples analysed weren't from yetis. And of course that's true - they were from bears.

So a devout Yetiist would probably feel vindicated, even more convinced in his own mind that yetis do exist - which is why someone has faked the evidence to try to disprove them. Why would they do that if there were no yetis? Just like a Millerite in the Great Disappointment when Jesus failed to materialise as prophesied. They decided God had postponed Judgement Day because he was so impressed with their piety and wanted to give them more time to convert those of us who just couldn't see the sense in that argument. They founded the Seventh Day Adventists.

What's probably more interesting to biologist, in addition to the possibility that a large unknown bear may well be alive at high altitude in the Himalayas, is that this bear seems to have once been widespread during the last Ice Age, and a remnant population may be hanging on at a high altitude in the Himalayas to where it may have taken refuge as the climate warmed up and the ice sheets retreated.

So, creationists, you can now go around trying to impress people by asking, "If polar bears evolved out of ancient bears, why are there still ancient bears?". You'll be told, of course, by those who bother to answer you, that it's because they both evolved out of genetically separated populations, just like humans and the other apes did.

Bryan Sykes is no stranger to exciting creationists and Bible literalists. He was the author of the 2002 book, The Seven Daughters of Eve, which showed, from an analysis of mitochondrial DNA, that all non-Africans are descended from just seven women, themselves descendants of a nominal single common ancestral female whom he termed 'mitochondrial Eve'. Hoards of delirious Bible literalists immediately swarmed onto the Compuserve Religion Forum and elsewhere in the early days of the Internet to announce that a 'brilliant scientist' had proved Adam and Eve existed and that the Bible story was a scientific fact - how they crave validation by science. Part of their 'evidence' was that this scientist had even worked out the names of Eve's seven daughters!

None of them had read the book, of course. Few of them had even seen it and even fewer knew what mDNA is. Like present day commenters on Reddit, they were simply reacting to the title and saw no reason to actually read what they were commenting authoritatively upon.

Sykes, of course, like any self-respecting scientist, is urging caution and says much more analysis is needed before any firm conclusions can be drawn from this (as yet unpublished) work.

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God's Poachers

There is a lucrative market in religious memorabilia, statues of gods and saints, and dolls dressed up to look like someone's notion of what a first century Judean virgin would look like - a white European, obviously.

So when it comes to choosing a material to make these little baubles out of, naturally it has to be expensive, and white because spending a lot on them shows piety, and obviously gods and saints and Judean virgins were all white. So what better than ivory?

You can see lots of these beautiful religious artifacts photographed by the photojournalist Brent Stirton here and here. Brent has investigated the links between religion and the ivory trade. Don't worry, Christians! It's not just you. Buddhists, Hindus and Shintoists are equally guilty, and equally racist, it seems.

To get the ivory, poachers slaughter elephants in Africa, where it is illegal in most countries. They frequently slaughter game wardens and police too. You can contrast these beautiful religious carvings with the work done by those who supply that raw materials here. I've shown a small sample below.


It's nice to see that worshiping a creator god makes people keen to care for its creation... though not at the expense of ostentatious displays of piety, obviously.

Brent Stirton's photographs won him this year's Wildlife Photojournalist Award by Wildlife Photographer of the Year. Their exhibition can be seen in London's Natural History Museum, from 18 October 2013 until 23 March 2014.

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