No Doubt Now, Birds Evolved From Dinosaurs

A comprehensive phylogeny of birds (Aves) using targeted next-generation DNA sequencing | Nature.

Just a couple of days ago I wrote about another one of those 'transitional' fossils creatonists insist aren't there, and how this one shows how birds had evolved out of theropod dinosaurs and should more properly be regarded as flying dinosaurs.

I also speculated about whether it was warm-bloodedness and feathers which helps them survive the climate change following the the meteor strike which probably abruptly exterminated the terrestrial dinosaurs so opening up niches for the birds and mammals to radiate into.

Hey Creationists! Guess What A Little Birdie Told Us.

Credit: Stephanie Abramowicz

Source: ScienceDaily

Tiny ancient fossil from Spain shows birds flew over the heads of dinosaurs | Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Would you believe it! Another one of those non-existent transitional fossils has turned up again, this time in a 125 million years ago Cretaceous rock from Spain. And just when creationists were getting used to dismissing all the ones from China as 'forgeries', despite there being no evidence for the claim!

In as clear an example as you could wish for of the transition from dinosaurs to birds, a paper published by an international group of palaeontologists shows that a fossil of a tiny feathered dinosaur proto-bird from Spain has unmistakeable evidence that it had the musculature for sophisticated flight, by being able to control individual flight feathers in its wings.

Special Offer On My Books

My ebook, The Light Of Reason: And Other Atheist Writing is available as a single volume for Kindle at a special discount for the next few days only!

Update: Unfortunately, Amazon have ended the 'Matchbook' scheme so eboks can no longer be bought at a special low price by people who already have the paperback version. They can still be bought for the normal price, however.

And now, the four-volumes of the paperback series are also available as ebooks at a special rate if you buy the paperback versions. They are:

• The Light of Reason: And Other Atheist Writings: Volume 1
• The Light of Reason: Volume II - Atheism, Science and Evolution: Volume 2
• The Light of Reason: Volume III - Apologetics, Fallacies, and Other Frauds: Volume 3
• The Light Of Reason: Volume IV - The Silly Bible: Volume 4

Of course, if you're a subscriber to Kindle Unlimited, you get to read them for free anyway.

And you don't even need to own a Kindle because you can download an app for smartphone or laptop/desktop.

Go on! Treat yourself today. Because you're worth it! Just a click away!

---

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Africans Are Partly Eurasians

Ethiopian cave where the skull was found

Ancient Ethiopian genome reveals extensive Eurasian admixture throughout the African continent

Did we ever imagine that once anatomically modern humans had left Africa to populate Eurasia, they never went back again until modern times?

This seems to be the main thrust of the news media to today's new that a group of geneticists have analysed the genome from a 4,500 hunter-gatherer from the Ethiopian Highlands and found that he was genetically distinct from modern Africans who have since received a massive dose of Eurasian DNA which came into Africa about 3,000 years ago.

Creationism Fails Again! How Elephants Avoid Cancer

Yipee! I've got 20 TP53 genes!

How elephants avoid cancer : Nature News & Comment:

Let's play a game and pretend there really is a magic invisible creator above the sky, like creationists and their pseudo-science version, Intelligent Design, want us to believe. What are we then to make of two research papers which could explain why elephants have such a low incidence of cancer? One team was led by Joshua Schiffman, a paediatric oncologist and scientist at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA and the other by Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, USA.

And God Gave Man Dominion...

Chernobyl after the explosion.

Long-term census data reveal abundant wildlife populations at Chernobyl: Current Biology

According to creationists, their magic invisible friend in the sky created everything on Earth for humans, then put them in charge of it, presumably, because it thought its creation needed managing.

So, on that basis, which should be worse for life on Earth, humans or radioactive contamination? Would nature be better off without humans or with humans running the show?

If the results of a survey of the wildlife around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor is a guide, human beings are far less nature-friendly than even nuclear contamination, and, when left alone, nature can be far more resilient than we might expect.

The Chernobyl nuclear reactor, now in Ukraine, then in the Ukraine SSR and under the direct authority of the Soviet Union, became notorious in 1986 when its reactor ran out of control, destroying the building it was housed in and spraying the surrounding area with

Spider Have Creationists Down On Their Knees

Developing spider embryos.
Lt: expressing the original dachshund gene. Rt: expressing the duplicate gene.

Photo credit: Nikola-Michael Prpic,
Göttingen Center for Molecular Biosciences,
University of Göttingen, Germany

Neofunctionalisation of a duplicate dachshund gene underlies the evolution of a novel leg segment in arachnids | Molecular Biology and Evolution.

If you're an arthropod and unable to fly you need to be good at scuttling, so you need legs that scuttle efficiently. Spiders and scorpions have good scuttling legs because they have kneecaps or patellae. In the arachnid limbs, the patella forms a unique limb segment that gives their legs greater scuttleability.

The way they evolved these patellae has just been worked out and published in Molecular Biology and Evolution. It is acutely embarrassing to the creationist frauds who tell their dupes that no new information can arise by mutation and that mutations are invariably

Smelling Of Poo Is Not All Bad

Ceratocaryum argenteum

Faecal mimicry by seeds ensures dispersal by dung beetles | Nature Plants

Only yesterday I suggested that smelling or tasting of faeces might give an advantage to some species by repelling a potential predator which had evolved faecal aversion for obvious reasons. Now today we have a paper published in Nature Plants which shows how smelling of faeces might have another advantage.

Again, this is an example of an evolved feature in one species creating an environment conducive to evolution in a particular direction in another. It's also an example of the sort of deceptive mimicry I wrote about yesterday.

Lessons From The Dordogne - Evolving Insects

Here are some examples of one of the important drivers in evolution - the need to avoid being eaten. I took these pictures on our recent holiday in France but you don't need to go all the way to France to find similar ones. You can probably find several in your back yard or any roadside verge or hedgerow.

The first, on the right is of a grasshopper. It's slightly above dead center.

Can't see it? Well, that's rather the point. Zoom in to find it.

This species lives in grassland and, if it keeps still, looks just like a piece of brown vegetation, even having marks that mimic the shadows cast by blades of grass.

Scroll down for a close up.

The Perfect End To A Perfect Week - For The Vatican Old Guard

Vatican acts after Polish priest reveals homosexuality - BBC News.

Oops! It'd been another bad week for 'Uncle' Pope Francis, the Pope trying to rehabilitate the Catholic Church after being rocked to its foundations as one scandal after another revealed the stinking cesspit the Vatican had become.

One of Hapless Frank's tasks was to make the Church look a little less bigoted and intolerant and a little more kindly disposed to women, homosexuals, non-Catholics, etc. Although little real progress has

Everyone Needs Their Mummy!

Mummified remains of Britons were preserved by smoking or being placed in peat bogs – a different process to those of ancient Egyptians.

Photograph: Keystone-ZUMA/Rex Features
Source: The Guardian

Mummification was commonplace in Bronze Age Britain | News - University of Seffield.

Need a favour? In dispute with your neighbour over land? Want to adjust the world a little in your favour? No problem; just tell your mummy!

News today that the practice of worshipping bits of old dead patriarch or matriarch which I wrote about a few days ago in the context of the Catholic Church and it's obsession with the body parts of dead 'saints', may predate Christianity by many thousands of years and is just another pagan tradition which was incorporated into Christianity.

You Can't Keep A Good Homophobe Down

What happened when Kim Davis met the Pope? - BBC News.

Despite all his public protestations of goodwill to all gays and his desire to reform the Catholic Church to make it more kindly, tolerant, loving and forgiving and willing to embrace even women and homosexuals - or to at least acknowledge their worth as human beings, though not letting them anywhere near the centres of power, obviously, ‘Uncle’ Pope Francis has let slip the mask.

He has revealed the nastiness and sense of privilege and entitlement to hate and persecute that is still hiding beneath this cloak of affable inclusivity.

Black Rice and Creationist Not-So-White Lies

The Birth of a Black Rice Gene and Its Local Spread by Introgression | The Plant Cell

Here's a nice example of how a change in a species' environment can change the meaning of the information in its genome and so change the direction of the species evolution. Of course, it gives the lie to another basic piece of disinformation traditionally foisted on their willing dupes by creationist frauds.

A team of plant geneticists from Japan led by Dr. Takeshi Izawa have worked out the genetic basis of the black colour in black rice and have traced its origins to a mutation in a gene known to science as Kala4, which controls the amount of anthocyanin pigments the plant produces. The wild rice, Oryza rufipogon, has red grains but, due to a mutation in a gene controlling pro-anthocyanidin biosynthesis, domestic rice, Oryza sativa, fails to produce these pigments so remains white.

Christians for Child Abuse

Florida school apologizes for warning students that evolution deniers were trying to ‘mislead’ them

Close on Pope Francis laying claim to a special privilege for Christians to use their 'faith' as an excuse to abuse minorities, comes news of another mighty blow for lies, disinformation and child abuse by fundamentalists in Florida, USA.

Parents were incensed when they discovered that Heritage Middle School in Deltona, Florida had given students an assignment designed to help them understand the difference between scientific terms like 'theory' and 'law', and how the scientific meaning of these terms differs from their use in colloquial language. The assignment had included the statement:

Pope Francis Just Can't Hide His Bigotry

Pope: Workers Have 'Human Right' to Refuse Same-Sex Marriage Licenses - NBC News

It must be uncomfortable being Pope Francis, as he balances himself on the horns of a dilemma. To mix the metaphor, he needs to stand astride the fence with a foot planted firmly on either side of it. It fair makes yer eyes water.

On the one hand he has to fill his allotted role as the affable, avuncular, love, peace and tolerance-embracing contrast to his sinister predecessor, the former Nazi, Joseph Ratzinger, who, as Pope John Paul II's enforcer, orchestrated the child abuse cover-ups which are still damaging the Catholic Church.

Lessons From The Dordogne - Sacerdos The Fake

The shrine of Saint Sacerdos,
L'église de Saint-Sacerdos, Sarlat-la-Canéda, Périgord Noir, France

Invisible gods just don't cut the mustard when it comes to giving the faithful something to pray to. What they need is bits of body of dead patriarchs; preferably dead patriarchs who were killed 'for their faith' in ways which seem designed to produce plenty of relics for the faithful to worship to.

Dominating the main square in the beautiful Périgord Noir town of Sarlat-la-Canéda is the former Sarlat Cathedral, (Cathédrale Saint-Sacerdos de Sarlat) dedicated to Saint Sacerdos (also known as Sacerdos de Calviac, Sardot, Sadroc, Sardou, Serdon, Serdot) of Limoges, traditionally the first bishop of Limoges who was born in Sarlat in 670 CE and was allegedly martyred in about 720 CE, though no-one seems to know how or why but the important thing is that he was martyred according to local legend.

The cathedral was downgraded to a church in 1801 and the diocese was incorporated in the diocese of Périgueux, but what are claimed to be the remains of Saint Sacerdos are kept in a sealed glass sarcophagus in an ornate chapel in the church. You can't get very close to it but there is what appears to be a clothed wax mannequin in a glass case with a kneeling stool placed thoughtfully in front, so those praying to the bits of dead saint can be seen to be suitably supplicant.

But, powerful though no doubts these bits of dead saint are at granting wishes, very little is actually known about Saint Sacerdos himself and little or nothing is known about how he came to have the reputation of a holy martyr or what he did to earn his place in the Catholic Communion of saints is also a mystery. Some clues however, can be gleaned from the history of the Catholic Church in France and the events immediately preceding Sacerdos' remains being transferred to the newly-created diocese of Sarlat.

Lessons From The Dordogne - Order From Chaos

One of the sacred dogmas of creationism is that it needs a creator to get order from chaos and complexity from simplicity. Like so much else with creationism though, the sacred dogma is contradicted by the readily observable evidence.

Take this photograph for example. It is of the river Dordogne as it runs alongside the lovely village of La Roque-Gageac. Note especially the little pits in the surface caused by little vortices produced as the water flows past the end of the wooden jetty and over the rocks in the shallows.

Lesson From Lot - The Rocamadour Fraud

Rocamadour, Lot, France.

Rocamadour, just outside the Dordogne in the Lot Department, France, is a mediaeval pilgrimage site consisting of a cluster of building clinging to the almost sheer side of a deep gorge. It is also the site of the ‘Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin’ sitting just below the top, accessible only via a steep and winding path (before the modern lift was installed).

If only the pilgrims had looked across the gorge, and had even a superficial understanding of geology and the courage to shake off their theophobic superstition, they would have seen the glaringly obvious evidence that their superstition was (and still is) based on a lie.

Lessons From The Dordogne - Why Are Things Different?

Dordogne Meadow

In case you're wondering where I've been, don't worry - I haven't given up blogging. We’ve been in the Dordogne, South-West France, for a couple of weeks, taking in some of the local culture and history as well as seeing the wildlife. Unfortunately, our gite didn't have broadband and Blogger on Android - well... needs some work.

We were hoping to see the wildlife particularly because it’s different to the wildlife we normally see in the UK. Not entirely different, of course, but different enough to be interesting and certainly different enough to be able to tick off a few more birds, butterflies and wildflowers in my field guides.

But why is it different? I wonder if creationists ever give any thought to this question.

To a biologist, and anyone with even a modicum of understanding of evolutionary biology, the answer to that question is stark-staringly obvious – it’s because the environment is different, so what constitutes ‘fitness’ is different, so the survival value of certain characteristics will be different, so the ecological balances will be different because ecosystems, no less than species, evolve over time.

Geographical diversity is entirely dependent on local environmental factors and how they change. These local factors can include the type of underlying rock strata – chalk, sand, clay, volcanic tufa, etc., – elevation, latitude, average hours of sunlight, average, maximum and minimum temperatures, average rainfall, humidity, human interference, and so on.

Another of Those (Missing) Transitional Species Found!

Homo naledi. Reconstruction by paleoartist John Gurche

Image credit: John Gurche / Mark Thiessen / National Geographic.

Homo naledi: new species of ancient human discovered, claim scientists | Science | The Guardian

We've known about the Rising Star Cave, and that there was something important there, for some time now, so it's no real surprise that palaeoanthropologists have announced this find. In fact, I first wrote about it in November 2014.

What is perhaps surprising is that they've classified these remains as members of our Homo genus rather than members of the Australopithecus genus, because this would be the first archaic hominid from outside East Africa, where it was generally assumed Homo had evolved from Australopithecines such as A. afarensis. But, it ties in quite nicely with the alternative theory that true hominids evolved further south possibly from A. sediba.

This find is stunning not only because of the number of individuals found in the cave but because of their condition. To find so many in one place is almost unprecedented and on a par with the much later Atapuerca site in Spain, which is still yielding up its secrets.

Mutant Clones? Not Darwinian But Science Explains Them

Loss of Karma transposon methylation underlies the mantled somaclonal variant of oil palm | Nature.

Despite its daunting title, this research paper shows the explanatory power of the recently-discovered field of epigenetics.

For those not familiar with this science, epigenetics is the study of the way, in complex multicellular organisms where cells are highly differentiated and specialised to perform very different functions, the same genome is made to perform different functions. Clearly, the genes needed to make and work muscles in mammals or leaves in trees, are not the

The Old Dead Gods Of Wiltshire

Stonehenge

© LBI ArchPro, Geert Verhoeven

The Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project reveals traces of standing stones beneath Durrington Walls super-henge | Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology

Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England is one of the most important, if not the most important, neolithic monuments in Europe. It was clearly immensely important to those who built it, changed it and rebuilt it over hundreds of years. Clearly too, the site itself was of some importance because it is unlikely to have been chosen at random as it is surrounded by other neolithic sites and monuments.

Some of the stones are believed to have been brought

Another Load of Intelligent Design Balls

Puffball"

There are a few sure-fire ways to tell whether something has been designed, even if not particularly intelligently:

1. It has a clear function or purpose.
2. It is as simple as it can be to fulfil that function or purpose - fitness for purpose.
3. It achieves that function or purpose as efficiently as possible.

Of course, as you would expect of something like living things, examples which demonstrate these qualities are about as common as hen's teeth - which is how we know they weren't designed and why anyone who isn't profoundly ignorant of biology finds the claims of Intelligent Design hoaxers so transparently implausible as to be laughably childish.

I'll illustrate this with something I found on a very pleasant walk in Mid-Wales a few weeks ago - puffballs.

OMG! Look What The Intelligent Designer Wants Us to Eat Now!

PLOS Pathogens: Distinct but Spatially Overlapping Intestinal Niches for Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococcus faecium and Carbapenem-Resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae

Let's pretend the Intelligent Design hoax is real and that everything that happens in nature is by design.

I'm afraid we'll have to drop the nonsensical stuff about this designer being benevolent or even particularly anthropophilic though, because the facts just don't sustain that notion at all, even if we bend over backwards to accommodate the notion of Intelligent Design by ignoring so much evidence. Some mental acrobatics require a mental agility that results in too many strains and breakages for comfort.

Idiotic Antics of the Unintelligent Designer.

Arizona’s virgin ant queens could shed light on the predictability of evolution | Science/AAAS | News

It makes you wonder just how many examples of the sheer stupidity and lack of intelligence in so much of biological 'design' it will take to force creationists to abandon their notion that a magic man intelligently designed everything.

I mean, it's like continually showing them the flat surfaces, sharp edges and corners on a cube to convince them it's not a sphere and have them tell you you're the one with the problem; you're the one who can't recognise a sphere when you see one.

Hawks And Jays Made Hummingbirds Evolve

Black-chinned hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri)

Hawks Act as Unwitting Muscle for Hummingbirds | Science | Smithsonian

"My enemy's enemy is my friend" might be a cynical policy when it comes to government foreign relations, but it seems to work at least some of the time when it comes to genes (or maybe memes).

It has long been recognised by ornithologists that the nests of black-chinned hummingbirds in Arizona, USA, tend to be clustered around the nests of goshawks and Cooper's hawks, but the reason for this were not previously understood, and was maybe even somewhat counter-intuitive.

Now a team of researchers from Ecuador, Canada and the USA made detailed observations of the movements

How Rapid Evolution Works

Guppies. Ideal subject to study evolution.

Change in environment can lead to rapid evolution -- ScienceDaily

Many things in science are counter-intuitive, which is the basic reason we use control groups and other methods designed to remove bias, and also why we don't simply do science by thinking about things in the belief that we can work out the answers by intuition.

Human intuition is not the powerful tool that people who dispute science on the basis of personal incredulity, often backed by profound ignorance of the subject, like to imagine.

Victims of Christianity

Cromwell's victim

Durham Palace Green remains were Scottish prisoners - BBC News

One of the claims Christians like to make is that the morals they get from their god through their religion are:

1. Superior to non-Christians.
2. Eternal, objective and unchanging - the so-called fixed 'moral compass'.

Of course, this claim of moral superiority needs to be rationalised when Christians, as happens very frequently and often conspicuously, behave in ways which no decent person would regard as moral, and then blame their god or the Bible for their behaviour.

Cue now the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy where the Christians behaving badly are designated as 'not true Christians' because 'true Christians' don't behave like that. In this way the false universal claim that Christians have superior morals because they were given them by the one true god through the one true religion is protected by simply excluding anyone who doesn't meet that 'universal' truth.

Creationists Lie About Jesus!

When Peer Review Lets You Down: A YEC Quote Problem – Naturalis Historia

After a few days wrestling with the book publishing process and discovering the joys of book promotion, it's time I got back to blogging. This time, we have a wonderful example of how professional creationists lie to their followers and to anyone else they can reach, and how they depend on their marks' ignorance to get away with it.

Normally, the ICR confines its misrepresentations and disinformation to science, especially the sciences which most threaten the Bible literalism they espouse and the literal interpretation of Genesis they try to sell to their followers; evolutionary biology, geology and archaeology, so it's unusual to see them quite blatantly misrepresenting not just the Bible but the Jesus they purport to follow.

This Are The Books What I Wrote!

Publishing a book has a few pitfalls, at least if you self-publish on Amazon. I had assumed you wrote it in Microsoft Word or something similar, then just submitted it. It hadn't occurred to me that size was important - it's never been an issue before.

So, I thought that about 450 pages would be a reasonably generous size because I'd hate my readers to be disappointed. But 450 pages on the default MS Word page size, when uploaded became about 750 when auto-formatted for Kindle.

Okay, I thought, so that's really generous and it costs so little. Go for it! Now for the paperback.

Well, that was easy, I thought. All you have to do it tell Amazon's CreateSpace publishing department to auto-fit it to the page size you've chosen - 8 x 10 inches - and it'll do the rest. All I have to do now is order a few proofs - enough for family and friends at the special price - and wait for the parcel to arrive all the way from America. Best wait to check that they look okay before unleashing them on the waiting paperback book market though, just in case...

Oh No! Not Transitional Penguins!

Eocene Penguin from Peru

New fossil skulls reveal insights about penguin brain evolution -- ScienceDaily

Some 35 million years ago, stem penguins were doing something creationists insist never happens; they were transitioning from flying species to aquatic species.

Evolutionary transition is something that any self-respecting creationist will have had lots of practice at denying because examples of it are so abundant in the fossil record - where they shouldn't be if everything was created as is, by magic. So, rather than incorporate these facts into their world view, they retain their evidence-free world view by denying the facts. This is how we know creationism is a dogma, not a science.

Oh Heck! A Fossil Out Of Place!

Life reconstruction of Gueragama sulamericana in its palaeohabitat.*

Reconstruction created by J. Csotonyi.

Fossil remains of Old World lizard discovered in the New World overturn long-held hypothesis of lizard evolution -- ScienceDaily

Normally, a headline about a long-held hypothesis about evolution being overturned would gladden the heart of any creationist more used to a constant stream of scientific papers showing creationism to be nothing more than an infantile fairy tale based on scientific ignorance. Is this J. B. S. Haldane's Cretaceous rabbit?

Well, no! But it is a Cretaceous lizard in the 'wrong' continent.

But there are a couple of small problems with this one; firstly it clears up something of a mystery in lizard evolution, and secondly, to try to make much of it, a creationist will need to accept a very old Earth, plate tectonics and the fundamental principle of evolution from a common ancestors. Well, either that, or revert to denialism and God did it! assertions as usual.

Another Bible Bloomer - God's Law is Unjust!

Stone 'em, I say! It's the only language these women understand!

The author of the Gospel of Matthew is a bit like a fireship launched into the wind, the way he blunders about stupidly off message and making the Bible stories about Jesus look even more absurd. I think of it as Matthew's Silly Bible. It's a wonder his effort got included in the Bible at all when it was being compiled. It had obviously been read with about as much thought as it was written with.

Here's another of his blunders - he tells us that God's Laws are not just laws, as in laws designed to give justice.

First, God's Law as it relates to pre-marital sex and adultery, especially if a husband finds his wife has played the field a little.

Slaying the Creationist Dragon

The 'pterosaur' of Black Dragon Canyon, Utah

Source: Science.

Credit: WHIT RICHARDSON/ALAMY

Source: Science.

Credit: WHIT RICHARDSON/ALAMY

‘Winged monster’ on ancient rock art debunked by scientists | Science/AAAS | News

Creationism is really little more than an obsession with fossils, probably because creationists realise what a threat fossils pose to their simplistic, Bible literalist views.

When dinosaur fossils were first found, they were dismissed variously as 'Devil stones' planted by Satan to mislead us; the bones of giants or 'Behemoth' so confirming the Bible; forgeries and fakes by lying scientists; diseased versions of living species or indeed

The Wit and Wisdom of Deepak!

Here's a little test.

See if you can pick out the genuine Deepak Chopra quotes taken at random from his twitter feed, from the randomly generated fictional Deepak Chopra quotes from this site.

It has been said by some that the thoughts and tweets of Deepak Chopra are indistinguishable from a set of profound sounding words put together in a random order, particularly the tweets tagged with "#cosmisconciousness". This site aims to test that claim! Each "quote" is generated from a list of words that can be found in Deepak Chopra's Twitter stream randomly stuck together in a sentence.

The enigmatic wisdom of Deepak Chopra

Evolution of HIV Took 11-16 Million Years.

Model of a retrovirus capsid hexamer, showing the conserved beta-hairpin domains common to most kinds of retroviruses (circled) and a pocket containing additional sites thought to affect recognition of lentiviruses by the TRIM5 anti-viral defense proteins of old world monkeys (arrow).

Credit: Johnson et al, CC-BY

PLOS Pathogens: Evolutionary and Functional Analysis of Old World Primate TRIM5 Reveals the Ancient Emergence of Primate Lentiviruses and Convergent Evolution Targeting a Conserved Capsid Interface

If you sincerely want to be a sanctimonious religious bigot presenting yourself as the moral superior of other people, it helps to base it on real facts, not made up ones. Take, for example, those morally reprehensible evangelical Christian and Muslim bigots who like to condemn people suffering from AIDS by pointing the finger and telling them that the virus which causes it was made by God to punish sinners, especially homosexuals.

It ought to be something of a shock to these repugnant bigots then, to discover that the virus wasn't created at all but has been evolving slowly over at least 11 million years and maybe for 16 million years, just as everything else has been, and is an interesting example of the product of an ongoing arms race between pathogen and victim, with all the intelligence to be found in a fruitless arms race - i.e., none at all.

The Sacoshite is Lying Again

Manuel de Dios Agosto, aka Sacerdotus, Sacoshite, Sacodogturds, etc., etc., is quite besides himself with rage and even more desperate for money and attention. What seems to have set him off again is the publication of my Kindle book, The Light Of Reason: And Other Atheist Writing and, in characteristic Manny style, he's plumbing new depths of dishonesty the more desperate he gets.

The unemployable expelled seminarian has now taken to posting on G+ some faked 'screenshots' of Twitter tweets he claims are mine, even accusing me of what amounts to incitement to murder. Bear in mind that this sad little man has even faked emails purporting to come from Oxfam which in an unprecedented intervention on Twitter, Oxfam publically repudiated and confirmed Manny was lying.

Synthetic DNA Cure For Malevolent 'Design'

MERS-CoV

Photo credit: NIAID

Synthetic DNA vaccine against MERS induces immunity in animal study -- ScienceDaily

Supposing you were asked to place individuals on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 as highly moral, caring, compassionate with a desire to help the sick, and 10 as a mass-murdering, uncaring psychopath devoid of any morals whatsoever. Where on that scale would you place someone who designed a means of randomly killing hundreds or thousands of people who had done nothing more than happen to come into contact with someone else who had been randomly selected for this treatment and which especially selected those who tried to care for the sick?

More of that in a moment.

Although proponents of 'Intelligent Design' will normally vehemently deny it, it is almost a defining characteristic that they are also fundamentalist creationists and often Bible literalists. That the supposed 'Intelligent Designer' is actually the Abrahamic god of the Bible, Talmud and Qur'an is one of the worst kept secrets in religious apologetics. 'Intelligent Design' is merely creationism dressed up to look like science.

More Stupidity From the Idiot Designer

A female adult varroa mite, Varroa destructor, feeds on the hemolymph of a honey bee pupa.

Photograph: Jason Graham, University of Florida. Source.

Museum samples reveal rapid evolution by wild honey bees exposed to a novel parasite : Nature Communications : Nature Publishing Group

Although they'll spend hours scraping around for something that seems hard to explain, even when it has been explained (but their followers would never know that), for something to wave around as 'proof', 'Intelligent (sic) Design' advocates never seem to talk about those very many examples to be found in nature where the only explanation, assuming for a moment that it had been designed, is that the designer was an incompetent idiot that designs without forethought and with complete amnesia about what else it has designed.

Ethiopian Double Whammy For Creationists

Detail of the marks on a fossilized rib bone, one of the two controversial bones.

Source: PastHorizons. Image credit: Zeresenay Alemseged

Taphonomy of fossils from the hominin-bearing deposits at Dikika, Ethiopia - Journal of Human Evolution.

Here's something for creationists to try to fit into their notion of a young Earth and a special one-day creation by magic; a team of palaeoanthropologists led by Jessica Thompson, an assistant professor of anthropology at Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA, believe they have shown that the marks on two 3.4 million year-old fossilised bones found at Dikika, Ethiopia, were made by stone tools, probably when butchering the animals.

Sadly, once again the paper sits behind a paywall and the publishers, this time Elsevier Ltd., want to charge for permission even to reproduce the abstract, which can be read here.

What Killed the Megafauna, Humans or Climate Change?

Reconstruction of megafauna of northern Spain.

Source: Wikipedia. Credit: Mauricio Antón

Humans responsible for demise of gigantic ancient mammals: Early humans were the dominant cause of the extinction of a variety of species of giant beasts -- ScienceDaily

A team of scientists believe they have solved the conundrum of what cause the extinction of the so-called megafauna at the end of the last Ice Age. The megafauna is the large mammals such as mammoths, wooly rhinoceroses, sabre-toothed tigers and giant armadillos all of which went extinct between 80,000 years ago and 10,000 years ago.

Dimming Universe, Dumb Creationists

The same galaxy seen at some of the wavelengths examined by the GAMA team

Fading cosmos quantified in 21 colours - BBC News

The lights are going out all over the Universe.

In fact, the energy output of all the suns together appears to have halved in the last 2 billion years. This figure was arrived at by the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey led by Australian director, Prof Simon Driver, of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, Western Australia. The survey measured the energy output from over 200,000 galaxies over as wide a range of wavelengths as possible.

This discovery was arrived at by comparing the energy output of galaxies far away (and so further away in time

Revising Evolution Theory - The Scientific Way

Liolaemus nigriceps

Re-thinking 'adaptive radiation,' one of biology's most important concepts | ScienceDaily

When you see a headline like "Re-thinking 'adaptive radiation,' one of biology's most important concepts" it's bound to raise the eyebrows of the scientifically-minded. What's this? One of the fundamentals of evolution theory could be wrong? Shock horror!

It only takes a minor change of emphasis and the removal of any doubt by merely changing 'could be' to 'is' and you have the makings of another creationist article by Ken Ham or Ray Comfort and another merry tinkle of cash pouring in to help 'spread the good news' that evolution has been overthrown once more and 'evolutionists' all exposed as liars.