Unintelligent Designer News - Another Arms Race between Bats and Owls is Another Problem for Batty Creationists

Greater mouse-eared bat, Myotis myotis

Bats mimic the sound of bees and hornets to scare away predators | New Scientist

Italian scientists have recently discovered a fascinating example of Batesian mimicry, using sound rather than colour and shape, to deter predators.

Batesian mimicry is where a species comes to resemble a harmful or distasteful species although being harmless and edible itself. Examples are the beetles and butterflies that resemble wasps, or the eyes on a butterfly's wings that resemble the eyes of a predatory animal. These often result in arms races where the predator evolves to be able to tell the difference, but the prey then evolves to improve the mimicry.

The phenomenon of arms races is a subject most intelligent [sic] design creationists understandably steer well clear of. They are almost invariably features of host-parasite and prey-predator relationships. A prey species will benefit from any changes that improve its ability to avoid being prey and a predator will benefit from any changes that improve its ability to catch its prey, so arms races are major drivers in evolution.

It's difficult to see how a single designer switching back and forth between two species, seeing every solution it has just designed for one species as a problem to be overcome for the other species, can possibly be regarded as the behaviour of an intelligent designer. Creationists, by the dogma of the religion they invariably subscribe to, are forbidden from explaining this as the acts of two or more competing creators, of course, so are obliged to continue to present their favourite god as, frankly, a rather stupid amnesiac, not knowing from one day to the next what it is supposed to be achieving and forgetting what the solution it designed yesterday was all for.

I cover these evolutionary arms races and the problem they present for intelligent [sic] design advocates in my popular book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax.

But enough of the problems creationists have in sustaining their childish superstition and the absurd mental gymnastics they need to perform.

The Lunatics Are Now Running the US Asylum

The impending SCOTUS ruling overturning the 1973 Roe vs Wade ruling that legalised abortion in all US states is a sign that the lunatics have taken over and are now running the asylum.

As I reported yesterday, the decision was based, at least in part on the false idea that a foetus suffers during the procedure. This claim was based on a 2020 discussion paper by British scientist, Dr Stuart Derbyshire, that wrongly claimed the work of the Italian professor of neuroscience, Giandomenico Iannetti, had shown that the foetus could feel pain even before its cerebral cortex had developed at 24 weeks.

SCOTUS were not told by the Lawyers representing evangelical Christian extremists that Professor Iannetti strongly refuted Derbyshire's claim, and he was not called to testify to that fact, nor even told that his work was being (mis)used to argue against a woman’s right to abortion - something of which he is strongly in favour.

A highly selective piece of scientific 'evidence', refuted by the majority of neuroscientist, was presented as the mainstream, consensus view of relevant medical experts. SCOTUS seems to have swallowed that, hook line and sinker and failed to consult expert medical opinion which could have given them a balanced view and corrected their misapprehension. They lapped up the pap they were fed because it told them what they wanted to hear to 'confirm' their preconceptions.

Their opinion is not a scientific, evidence-based ruling, but a prejudiced, preconceived religious opinion based on falsehoods and misrepresentation of the real science. The lunatics have taken over SCOTUS.

MAGA pastor/Trump cultist Shane Vaughn declares that conservatives are "always right." Why? "They're just smarter than liberals. Liberalism is a mental disease." pic.twitter.com/AsF43AzV3L

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) May 5, 2022

Another lunatic who wants to be running the show is MAGA/QAnon Trumpanzee cultist, Pastor Shane Vaughn, who has recently announced that "Conservatives are always right" because they are smarter than liberals who are suffering from a "mental disease". Why does he think they are smarter than liberals? Because they are always right, of course. Why are they always right? Because they are smarter than liberals. A neatly circular, self-referencing argument, not grounded at any point in reality, typical of the mental disorder we call narcissistic personality disorder or delusions of grandeur.

Famous examples of Shane Vaughn (real name, John Vaughn) always being right are:

• Being convicted of multiple instances of identity theft, fraud and other felonies when, as an insurance agent in Baton Rouge, he stole the identity of a child who had died aged 4 years, and defrauded, banks, pensioners and others. He had his licence to operate as an insurance agent revoked and was slapped with a $100,000 fine and a 3 years spell in jail. During the trial he was described as "a chameleon, changing his look and name repeatedly". In other words, a shyster and con artist - just the sort to start a megachurch and declare himself to be God's spokesperson.

How Right Wing Christians Fooled SCOTUS With False Witnessing

Professor Giandomenico Iannetti
Work misrepresented in evidence to SCOTUS

British scientist says US anti-abortion lawyers misused his work to attack Roe v Wade | Roe v Wade | The Guardian

If you're an American woman who is about to have her legal right to an abortion removed by the Supreme Court, you might like to know that the decision of the highest law officers of the state is based, at least in part, on lies told to them by lawyers representing fundamentalist Christians in order to mislead them about what the science shows. In other words, their decision is based not on scientific truth but on lies and misrepresentation by Christian extremists with a political agenda.

Commandment eight of the Ten Commandments forbids a Christian from bearing false witness (Exodus 20:15). This is later clarified in Exodus 23:1 to prohibit false testimony with "Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness." Yet American fundamentalist Christians, who demand everyone else be subject to these simplistic Bronze Age tribal laws, don't feel in the least constrained by them when they need an excuse to foist their barbaric rules on the rest of us.

For example, in their testimony to SCOTUS, which might have influenced them in their widely touted impending ruling effectively overturning Roe vs Wade and re-criminalising abortions, Christian lawyers acting for fundamentalist Christians who wish to impose their views on, and re-establish their control over, women in America, cited the British scientist, Dr Stuart Derbyshire, a British associate professor of psychology at the National University of Singapore. In a discussion paper in Journal of Medical Ethics in 2020, Derbyshire suggested that work by Giandomenico Iannetti, an Italian professor of neuroscience, who at the time was working in University College, London and Oxford University, showed that a foetus can feel pain prior to the development of the cerebral cortex at 24 weeks.

Vatican Financial Abuse News - Pell Gets His Revenge As the Stink of Corruption Increases

Cardinal Becciu
Gave a "somewhat incomplete" testimony to the Vatican court where he is accused of embezzlement.

Cardinal Pell highlights 'somewhat incomplete' account given by Cardinal Becciu at Vatican finance trial | Catholic News Agency

There was no hint of that alleged Christian love and forgiveness in the Vatican the other day when Cardinal Pell, former financial controller at the Vatican, put the boot in to Cardinal Becciu, once his detractor in his attempts to reorganise and regularise the Vatican's Byzantine finances, who is now on trial in the Vatican, charged with embezzlement.

In his testimony to the court, Pell accused Becciu of making a "somewhat incomplete" testimony - polite code for lying.

Regular readers may recall how Pell was originally brought in to clean up the Vatican's finances when the Vatican Bank was found to be laundering very large sums of money for organised crime under cover of the diplomatic immunity endowed on the Vatican as an independent state in its own right. The Vatican was reputedly on the verge of bankruptcy, not even having enough funds to pay for its day to day activities.

During the course of his investigations, Pell found that heads of departments in the Vatican had control of secret slush funds running into hundreds of millions of Euros, accountable only to them with no proper records of where the money came from or what it was spent on. When put under Pell's control, they restored the Vatican's finances to good health but in the course of this, Pell made many powerful enemies who resented being accountable and not have vast resources of their own to spend as they wished. One of these was Cardinal Becciu, who as sostituto of the Secretariat of State was effectively Pope Francis Chief of Staff.

Pell eventually ran into difficulties of his own when allegations of his involvement in the sexual abuse of minors began to circulate in Australia where he had been the senior Catholic cleric. At Pope Francis' insistence he returned to Australia to face charges of which he was initially convicted and given a custodial sentence, only to have the convictions quashed by the Australian Supreme Court on a technicality. Before he left Rome, Pell had signed up auditors PriceWaterhouseCoopers, to audit the Vatican's finances. Immediately on Pell's departure to Australia, Becciu celebrated by, for reasons which he has never satisfactorily explained, summarily cancelling the contract with PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Again for reason never explained, the Vatican's own internal auditor, Libero Milone, also resigned, so the Vatican accounts remained unaudited.

The reasons for this cancellation soon began to emerge however when Becciu began using a fund known as "Peters' Pence", which is donated to by Catholics in an annual fund-raising event in the belief that it is for the Pope to use for charitable purposes, for donations to, for example, his brother's Sardinia-based ‘refugee charity’, and to bail out a private hospital in Rome where his niece had recently been taken onto the staff, which was facing financial difficulties, and to pay €500,000 to a 'security advisor', Cecilia Marogna, known in the Italian press as “the cardinal’s lady”. Marogna was subsequently arrested in Milan and charged with embezzlement.

Becciu also invested heavily in a property deal in London which was to be his eventual downfall. According to a report in the online Catholic news magazine, The Crux:

The deal was brokered in 2014, while Becciu was the sostituto, through an Italian financier and drawing upon funds collected by “Peter’s Pence,” an annual appeal directed to Catholics around the world as a way to support the pope’s activity, especially his charitable works. The original deal was for 50 percent of the London property, but the Secretariat of State eventually soured on its relationship with the first financier and planned to purchase the rest of the property with the aid of another.

The Secretariat of State appealed to the Institute for the Works of Religion, the so-called “Vatican bank,” for a loan to finance that transaction, which triggered an internal investigation. In October 2019, Pope Francis authorized raids at Secretary of State as well as the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority (AIF), which monitors for suspicious financial transactions, and seven officials were either suspended or fired along with Becciu who was reported to have 'resigned' suddenly.

Not only did Becciu have to approve the deal, but he’s been accused of attempting to disguise the loans it required by cancelling them out on Vatican balance sheets against the value of the property, a practice prohibited by general accounting norms and specifically forbidden by legislation decreed by Pope Francis in 2014.

The upshot was that the businessman Raffaele Mincione, the owner of the London property in question - the former Harrods shop in Chelsea - was also charged with money-laundering and embezzlement, as was Gianluigi Torzi who had been enlisted to help push through the deal. He was also charged with extortion. Readers may recall how last April, Torzi successfully applied to Southwark Crown Court to have a freeze on his bank accounts lifted. Judge Tony Baumgartner cited the lies and inconsistencies in statements from Vatican officials as his reason for unfreezing the account. The Vatican subsequently applied to have Torizi extradited from the UK to face charges of embezzlement.

However, according to the Italian magazine, Il Messaggero at the time, Becciu's sacking was not over possible misuse of Vatican money in the London purchase, but over allegations of embezzlement, again involving the "Peter's Pence" slush fund, but this time in the form of a 'gift' of €100,000 to a charity run by Becciu's brother in Sardinia. The charity's official purpose it to help refugees, but the money appears to be unused and sitting in the charity's banks account (according to Il Messaggero).

Now the plot has thickened with Pell's testimony. The issue now is over Becciu's account of the payment of $AU 2.3 million [$1.6 million] to the Australian firm, Neustar, allegedly for the rights to the Internet domain name ‘.catholic’, supposedly from the Vatican Council for Social Communications, but Pell raised the question whether this was from that council or from the Secretariat of State. The suspicion now is that it may have been a device for channelling money to pay for Pell's defence in his struggle with the law over the allegations of child sexual abuse.

The murky world of Vatican finances continues to give off the noxious stink of corruption as yet more bubbles burst on the surface of that stinking cesspit in the heart of Rome.

Catholic Abuse News - California's Catholic Bishops go Whining to SCOTUS to Avoid Compensating Their Victims

The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles
Seat of Archbishop Jose H. Gomez

Credit: David Castor/public domain.

California Catholic dioceses ask Supreme Court to hear statute of limitations extension case | Catholic News Agency

In a desperate attempt to avoid paying out even more in compensation to the victims of predatory paedophile Catholic priest, nine of California's Catholic diocese and archdiocese have got together to petition SCOTUS to overrule the State of California's suspension of the statute of limitation (SOL) which bars victims from claiming for lapsed abuses. The state recently passed an order giving former victims a 3-year window of opportunity to register claims which would otherwise fall foul of the SOL.

Catholic priests often hide behind a SOL which serves them well, since many of their victims were young children at the time and at a time when sex was a taboo subject and society was more deferential to religious clerics than now, so children felt uncomfortable talking about their abuses. Indeed, that very culture was why so many priests felt confident they could get away with it. By the time their victims reached adulthood and the psychological effects of their abuse manifested themselves, it was too late to bring the case to court.

The bishops and archbishops behind the collective whinge are:

• Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles
• Bishop Kevin W. Vann of Orange
• Bishop Joseph V. Brennen of Fresno
• Bishop Daniel E. Garcia of Monterey
• Bishop Michael C. Barber of Oakland
• Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento
• Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco
• Bishop Oscar Cantú of San Jose
• Bishop Robert F. Vasa of Santa Rosa

In their petition, the bishops state:

Twenty years ago, California revived decades-old sexual-abuse claims, offering claimants a one-year window to sue even though the statute of limitations had expired long before. When that window closed at the end of 2003, the Catholic Church in California reached a series of settlements that paid out over a billion dollars without regard to the validity of any individual claim. The State tried to revive the same category of lapsed claims three more times between 2004 [*6] and 2018, but Governor Jerry Brown vetoed the bills each time. In 2019, however, the Legislature passed and Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation reviving the claims for a second time, expressly seeking to impose "additional punishment" on the Catholic Church and other institutions for their past acts. This time, defendants' past conduct is subject not only to claims for compensatory and punitive damages that were previously time-barred twice over, but also to additional penalties (in the form of "treble" damages) based on a newly defined category of "cover up" activity.

The final sentence shows that the real concern of these bishops and archbishops: as well as the new claims for compensation they could face, they could face additional claims for compensation for "cover up" activity. A theme running through many of these abuse cases is that the church systematically covered up and thereby facilitated the abuses. Known abusers were allowed to continue to work in positions which gave them access to more victims and those who knew of their predations failed to notify the law enforcement and child protection agencies.

Indeed, some of them were even party to the abuses themselves, having come through the same highly sexualised culture in Catholic seminaries. The objective was to defend the church at all costs and ignore any obligation they had for safeguarding against potential abuses. The sexual predilections of priests was ‘understandable’ given their ‘celibate’ lifestyle, so could be forgiven.

In the introduction to their 21-page petition, the petitioners make several statements of dubious validity. For example, in reference to the original one-year suspension of the the SOL three years ago:

After this one-year revival period ended, Petitioners reached a series of settlements that paid out more than a billion dollars to bring these matters [*9] to a close. To finance these settlements, they expended significant resources, sold vast swaths of Church property, and in some cases exhausted or relinquished insurance coverage for past and future abuse claims. In reaching these settlements, Petitioners relied on the explicit cutoff date in the California statute, which assured them that unasserted lapsed claims would be extinguished at the end of the one- year revival period.

That assurance proved to be false. In 2013, 2014, and 2018, the State attempted to enact additional revival statutes that would have allowed the same category of abuse claims to be asserted yet again.

In other words, we knew there were very many victims who had not come forward and we thought we had got away with those, so, it's not fair that these victims should also be given an opportunity to claim compensation. It is not true that the same victims would have been able to claim for the same abuses again although this statement clearly implies they would have. What this 3-year window offers victims is an opportunity to claim again against those who covered up their abusers’ crimes.

They go on to say:

After Governor Gavin Newsom took office, however, California enacted a new double-revival statute, now with a three-year revival window. This time, the new law not only revives old claims (including claims for punitive damages), but also adds [*10] new punishment in the form of treble damages for a novel category of "cover up" activity. As various legislators proclaimed, this "draconian" measure was designed to "drastically expand[] the actionable conduct" and to make defendants "hurt" by creating " another revival period" and by subjecting them to "additional punishment" for decades-old claims. Pet.App.166a, 170a, 177a, 179a.

California's double-revival statute violates the Constitution in two ways. First, it violates the Ex Post Facto Clause by imposing new punishments on past conduct and reviving claims for punitive damages. In Stogner v. California, 539 U.S. 607, 632-33 (2003), this Court identified punitive revivals as ex post facto violations. But California's courts, despite recognizing that the statute "has changed the legal consequences of past conduct," including by "imposing new or different liabilities," Pet.App.110a-11a, 123a-24a, have allowed these claims to proceed because they purportedly seek to impose only "civil" liability, Pet.App. 30a, 123a-24a. That holding conflicts with both this Court's precedents and the original understanding of the Ex Post Facto Clause, which prohibit retroactive punishment regardless of the label [*11] "civil" or "criminal," see E. Enters. v. Apfel, 524 U.S. 498, 538-39 (1998) (Thomas, J., concurring).

Second, the California statute also violates the Due Process Clause, which prohibits "retroactively . . . creat[ing] liability" by reviving certain time-barred claims. William Danzer & Co. v. Gulf & S.I.R. Co., 268 U.S. 633, 637 (1925). As an original matter, the Clause prohibited States from depriving defendants of ripened limitations defenses, which was understood to be a deprivation of property without due process of law. And while modern precedent has watered down that original rule, this Court's precedents still recognize that States cannot revive certain time-barred claims, particularly when it would impose a "special hardship[]." Chase Sec. Corp. v. Donaldson, 325 U.S. 304, 316 (1945). The paradigmatic example is when a State induces reliance on a statutory time bar but then pulls out the rug by reviving the expired claim, id.--exactly what happened here. Having made significant outlays in reliance on the cutoff date at the end of the last revival period, Petitioners now face potentially ruinous liability as a result of California's virtually unprecedented double-revival law.

[It's not obvious what the numbered asterisks in square brackets relate to in these quotations.]

Of course, the petitioners face 'potentially ruinous liability' not as a result of California's suspension of the SOL for 3 years, but because of the sexual predations of their paedophile priests, and in particular, for theirs and their predecessors’ criminal activity in covering up these abuses and failure to safeguard children in their care. And, again, they do not face renewed claims for abuses that have already been settled, but for new cases that can now come forward and especially for the 'new' offence of covering up.

An organisation which faces bankruptcy and an inability to continue because of its criminal activities does not deserve to continue, let alone have the highest court in the land guarantee their immunity from further claims for compensation on the grounds that they thought they had got away with it. The Catholic Church is massively wealthy but wants its victims to be denied adequate compensation in order to protect that wealth. Once again, the Catholic Church is putting the church and its finances above the needs of its victims.

What will be interesting is whether SCOTUS with its new right wing fundamentalist Christian majority, will come down on the side of abusers because they are Christians or on the side of their victims whom the law should be designed to protect.

Talibangelical News - Evangelical Christians Now Control SCOTUS

On abortion, few Americans take an absolutist view| Pew Research Center

The much trumpeted impending SCOTUS ruling effectively striking down Roe vs Wade and so making abortion illegal in America unless specifically decriminalised at state level, is widely at odds with American public opinion, but largely in line with the views of white evangelical Christians, showing the degree to which entitled white evangelical Christianity, with Donald Trump's help, has subverted SCOTUS.

While 61% of Americans are in favour of legalised abortions, only 37% oppose it. SCOTUS is representing only a minority of American extremists while ignoring the views of the vast majority. On this issue, if no other, SCOTUS can be seen to represent only a minority of Americans, who nevertheless feel entitled to have their views predominating.

This Pew Research survey show that, of all the religious groups in the USA, only the White Evangelicals back a ban on abortion. 73% of white evangelicals say their almost universal opposition to abortion is shaped by their religion, while only 28% of white, non-evangelical Protestants say their views have a religious basis and 7% of non-affiliated cite religion as shaping their views.

Quantum Evolution - How A Quantum Fluctuation Can Cause Mutation

The Double Helix of DNA

Getty Images

Quantum mechanics could explain why DNA can spontaneously mutate | University of Surrey

Another of creationism’s central dogmas was unintentionally laid to rest by science yesterday, when three scientists from Surrey University's Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre, which includes the famous science broadcaster, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, published a paper which showed that DNA can spontaneously mutate due to nothing more than a random quantum fluctuation. Creationist dogma insists, with no evidence to support it and in spite of evidence to the contrary, that no new information can arise in the genome without violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics [sic]. Don't ask! It's based on some half-baked notion that information is like energy and can't be created, or rather, in creation world, can only be created by magic.

But, as the Surrey University team say in their open access Communications Physics paper:

Due to the significance of the quantum tunnelling even at biological temperatures, we find that the canonical and tautomeric forms of G-C inter-convert over timescales far shorter than biological ones and hence thermal equilibrium is rapidly reached. Furthermore, we find a large tautomeric occupation probability of 1.73 × 10−4, suggesting that such proton transfer may well play a far more important role in DNA mutation than has hitherto been suggested.

The Surrey University news release explains what that means:

Evolution News - How the Cephalopods Evolved

The Hawaiian bobtail squid (Euprymna scolopes) is a model system for studying animal-bacterial symbiosis.

Credit: Tom Kleindinst

Squid and Octopus Genome Studies Reveal How Cephalopods’ Unique Traits Evolved | Marine Biological Laboratory

The cephalopods - octopuses, squids and their relatives - are often cited by creationists as something that can't be explained by mainstream evolutionary theory because they, allegedly, have a unique genome. I have even known creationists claim they prove special creation because their favourite creator god created them as a different lifeform. Mind you, I have also known people committed to other wackadoodle notions, claim that they are 'alien' species that arrived on Earth in alien spaceships.

Of course, they are, like all other classes of organisms on Earth, the result of an evolutionary process and there is nothing about their genome that can't be explained in other than standard biogenetic terms. They have exactly the same genetic 'code' as all other life on Earth.

However, that's not to say they don't have some unique characteristics, as these latest papers in Nature Communication show.

As the University of Chicago, Marine Biological Laboratory news release accompanying the two papers explains:

Evolution News - How the Black Rat's Environment was Provided By Humans

Black rats, Rattus rattus

Source: Wikipedia by Kilesson - own work. CC BY-SA 3.0

how the black rat colonised Europe in the Roman and Medieval periods - News and events, University of York

An open access paper published in Nature Communications yesterday, will be understood by anyone with even a basic understanding of evolutionary biology as an example of evolution in progress, but will probably be waved aside by creationists because the subject of it, the black rat, Rattus rattus, didn't change into a cat or a dog or even a new species.

The paper records how the black rat colonised Europe on two separate occasions, separated by a dramatic decline and extinction in some areas. Each rise and fall in population and each wave of expansion was facilitated by patterns of human habitation and trade because the species had evolved to benefit from just those human activities as a commensal species on human civilisation.

We’ve long known that the spread of rats is linked to human events, and we suspected that Roman expansion brought them north into Europe.

But one remarkable result of our study is quite how much of a single event this seems to have been: all of our Roman rat bones from England to Serbia form a single group in genetic terms.

When rats reappear in the Medieval period we see a completely different genetic signature – but again all of our samples from England to Hungary to Finland all group together. We couldn’t have hoped for clearer evidence of repeated colonisation of Europe.

Our results show how human-commensal species like the black rat, animals which flourish around human settlements, can act as ideal proxies for human historical processes.

Dr David Orton, co-author
Department of Archaeology
University of York, York, UK.

The modern dominance of brown rats has obscured the fascinating history of black rats in Europe. Generating genetic signatures of these ancient black rats reveals how closely black rat and human population dynamics mirror each other.

Alexandra Jamieson, co-first author
Palaeogenomics & Bio-Archaeology Research Network
Research Laboratory for Archaeology and History of Art
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

The study was conducted by a team led by scientists from the University of York along with colleagues from the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute, who conducted DNA analysis of archaeological remains. These showed that the rats expanded into Europe in two waves, each with a characteristic DNA signature, showing that they originated from two different populations.

This study is a great showcase of how the genetic background of human commensal species, like the black rat, could reflect historical or economic events. And more attention should be paid to these often neglected small animals.

He Yu, co-first author
Department of Archaeogenetics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany And School of Life Sciences
Peking University
Beijing, China

Archaeological black rat mandible.

Image credit: Ewan Chipping, University of York

The first wave occurred during the Roman Empire when the 'Pax Romana' created the stable conditions for population growth and trade with the black rat able to travel along trade routes and exploit human settlements, crops and refuse. With the collapse of the Roman Empire in the Early Middle Ages, the economy collapsed, the population fell, and along with it, the black rat population. This could have been precipitated by the 'Justinian Plague', an early form of the Black Death, caused by the bacterium, Yersinia pestis which killed about 20% of the population of Constantinople and affected the entire Mediterranean basin, Europe and the Near East.

The second wave came on the back of growth in long range trade in the Middle Ages and the growth of cities as centres of commerce. They have now declined again, this time probably because of competition from the closely related brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, which similarly evolved to be a commensal species on human civilisation, along with the house mouse, Mus musculus and is now the dominant rat in temperate Europe.

Copyright: © 2022 The authors. Published by Springer Nature, Ltd.
Open access

The team's paper was published open access yesterday in the journal Nature Communications:

Abstract

The distribution of the black rat (Rattus rattus) has been heavily influenced by its association with humans. The dispersal history of this non-native commensal rodent across Europe, however, remains poorly understood, and different introductions may have occurred during the Roman and medieval periods. Here, in order to reconstruct the population history of European black rats, we first generate a de novo genome assembly of the black rat. We then sequence 67 ancient and three modern black rat mitogenomes, and 36 ancient and three modern nuclear genomes from archaeological sites spanning the 1st-17th centuries CE in Europe and North Africa. Analyses of our newly reported sequences, together with published mitochondrial DNA sequences, confirm that black rats were introduced into the Mediterranean and Europe from Southwest Asia. Genomic analyses of the ancient rats reveal a population turnover in temperate Europe between the 6th and 10th centuries CE, coincident with an archaeologically attested decline in the black rat population. The near disappearance and re-emergence of black rats in Europe may have been the result of the breakdown of the Roman Empire, the First Plague Pandemic, and/or post-Roman climatic cooling.

A Population dynamics of the black rat (R. rattus), Asian house rat (R. tanezumi) and brown rat (R. norvegicus) estimated by PSMC, with 100 bootstrap replicates. B Demographic modelling of the divergence and migration among the black rat, Asian house rat and brown rat estimated by G-PhoCS. The values represent the average estimates of effective population sizes (in thousands), population divergence times (Mya) and the total migration rate through time. The 95% HPD range of all estimates are listed in Supplementary Data.

Yu, H., Jamieson, A., Hulme-Beaman, A. et al.
Palaeogenomic analysis of black rat (Rattus rattus) reveals multiple European introductions associated with human economic history.
Nat Commun 13, 2399 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-30009-z

Copyright: © 2022 The authors. Published by Springer Nature, Ltd.
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

What is probably lost on creationists with their child-like understanding of evolution where one species changes into another, often by giving birth to it, or by changing physically into it like one of their transformer toys, is that findings such as this example of co-evolution where one species' evolutionary path is dependent on that of another species with which it has formed an alliance, is an illustration of how evolution works. Species do not normally evolve significantly in isolation from the other organisms in their ecosystem but move into and occupy niches as and when these become available, often, as in the case of the black rat, created by another organism.

The first major step in this process was of course, the evolution of the black rat to be able to occupy the niche humans were creating in their buildings, food stores, refuse and trade routes. Then, as these developed in Europe the black rat expanded into this newly available range. When that collapsed, the rats lost their habitat and their population crashed along with the human economy. And so the black rat's evolutionary future became dependent on human civilisation and economic activity, to expand its range again as the economy in Europe recovered to its previous level under the Roman Empire, during the Middle Ages, only to lose out again when the brown rat expanded its range in response to the opportunities human civilisation had provided.

In other words, a very nice illustration of evolution in progress, albeit one which creationists wouldn’t recognise or understand because they have a simplistic understanding of what evolution is.

Evolution News - When Lizards and Snakes Evolved

The fossil of Jurassic lizard Eichstaettisaurus.

Image credit: Jorge Herrera Flores

May: Researchers discover overlooked lizards | News and features | University of Bristol

With so many science papers casually and unintentionally refuting creationism just by revealing the facts, most weeks are bad weeks for creationists and their cults, but this week has been worse than most and it's only half done!

On top of the news of how environmental changes have been shown to influence evolution, just as the Theory of Evolution explains, we now have a paper which sheds more light on the evolution of the squamates (i.e. cold-blooded vertebrates with scales - snakes and lizards) and which shows the scientists involved have no doubts about the TOE being the grand unifying theory in biology that makes best sense of the data.

A collared lizard posing on a rock in Colorado.

Pahcal123 under CC BY-SA 4.0 license

This paper by scientists from the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP) and the University of Bristol, in the best traditions of science, challenges the previous consensus over just when this order radiated into its current diversity and pushes that back from the Cretaceous Era between 145.5 and 65.5 million years ago, into the Jurassic, between 201 and 145 million years ago. It had previously been assumed that the main period of evolutionary radiation had been part of the so-called Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution, when many terrestrial tetrapod groups like mammals, lizards and birds, apparently underwent a great diversification, triggered by the rise of flowering plants.

However, the research team led by Dr Arnau Bolet, palaeontologist at the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont and the University of Bristol, has shown that, although Jurassic squamate fossils are rare, it is possible to detect the more advanced features found in modern species in them, showing that the major phases of evolutionary diversification had occurred by then.

As the Bristol University press release accompanying the team's open access published paper in the online journal, eLife, explains:

Evolution News - How the Distribution of Alaska's Dinosaurs was Determined by Their Environment.

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Sedimentary deposits of the Prince Creek Formation are exposed in bluffs adjacent to the Colville River, on Alaska’s North Slope, in this July 2007 photograph. The sedimentary rocks represent prehistoric river channels, floodplains, lakes and ponds, and thin peat swamps.

Photo: Professor Paul J. McCarthy

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Sedimentary rocks of the Cantwell Formation, representing a prehistoric floodplain environment, are shown in this June 2017 photograph. Dinosaur tracks are visible at the base of the thick, upper sandstone bed.

Photo: Professor Paul J. Paul McCarthy

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Thick fossil soil in the Chignik Formation at Aniakchak Bay, southwest Alaska, is preserved beneath sandstone of a meandering river channel in this July 2021 photograph. Tree trunks that have turned to coal are visible at the top of the fossil soil in a few places.

Photo: Professor Paul J. Paul McCarthy

Precipitation helped drive distribution of Alaska dinosaurs | Geophysical Institute

It's been another terrible week for Creationists, especially those who have been deluded into the absurd notion that the Theory of Evolution is about to be replaced by their favourite childish superstition.

Following quickly on the heels of a paper by a team from Leipzig, Germany, showing that the evolution of plants was strongly influenced by major environmental changes caused by the extermination of large, herbivorous dinosaurs and the rise of large herbivorous mammals 25 million years later, exactly as the theory of Evolution predicts, we have news of another study, by scientists from the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA, Southern Methodist University, Texas, USA, Hokkaido University, Japan and the University of Kansas, USA, showing how the distribution of dinosaurs was affected by the environment in which they lived, just as the TOE predicts.

Evolution News - How the Extinction of Large Dinosaurs affected the Evolution of Plants

Latania loddigesii palm fruits and leaves in Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, China

Picture: Renske Onstein/iDiv

Dinosaur extinction changed plant evolution

A prediction of the Theory of Evolution is that a major change in a species' environment will result in evolutionary adaptation to that change. One such major change in the environment of plants was the sudden extinction of the large herbivorous dinosaurs, followed by a period of some 25 million years until the large herbivorous mammals had evolved. According to the TOE, then, we would expect to see these changes recorded in the genetic and fossil record of plants.

This is exactly what a research team led by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and Leipzig University found when they examined the genetic and fossil records of palm trees, which they chose as a model system for the study. They were also able to show that the changes following the extinction of large, non-flying dinosaurs were so profound that they were only partially reversed by the evolution of large mammals such as elephants.

From the iDiv press release:

With the extinction of large, non-flying dinosaurs 66 million years ago, large herbivores were missing on Earth for the subsequent 25 million years. Since plants and herbivorous animals influence each other, the question arises whether, and how this very long absence and the later return of the so-called "megaherbivores" affected the evolution of the plant world.

We were thus able to refute the previous scientific assumption that the presence of large palm fruits depended exclusively on megaherbivores. We therefore assume that the lack of influence of large herbivores led to denser vegetations in which plants with larger seeds and fruits had an evolutionary advantage.

Defence traits without predators apparently no longer offered evolutionary advantages, however, they returned in most palm species when new megaherbivores evolved, in contrast to the changes in fruits, which persisted.

Dr Renske Onstein, first author
Evolution and Adaptation
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv)
Halle–Jena–Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany

To answer this question, a research team led by iDiv and Leipzig University analysed fossil and living palms today. Genetic analyses enabled the researchers to trace the evolutionary developments of plants during and after the absence of megaherbivores. Thus, they first confirmed the common scientific assumption that many palm species at the time of the dinosaurs bore large fruits and were covered with spines and thorns on their trunks and leaves.

However, the research team found that the "evolutionary speed" with which new palm species with small fruits arose during the megaherbivore gap decreased, whereas the evolutionary speed of those with large fruits remained almost constant. The size of the fruits themselves, however, also increased. So, there were palms with large fruits even after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Apparently, much smaller animals could also eat large fruits and spread the seeds with their excretions.

[…]

However, the defence traits of the plants; spines and thorns on leaves and stems, showed a different picture: the number of palm species with defence traits decreased during the megaherbivore gap.

With their work, the researchers shed new light on evolution and adaptation during one of the most enigmatic and unique periods in the history of plant evolution, during and after megaherbivore extinctions. Understanding how megaherbivore extinctions affected plant evolution in the past can also help predict future ecological developments. For example, the authors have noted the loss of traits during the megaherbivore gap. This loss can affect important ecosystem functions and processes, such as seed dispersal or herbivory. The ongoing extinction of large animals due to human hunting and climate change may thus also affect trait variation in plant communities and ecosystems today and in the foreseeable future.

The technical details of the study are outlined in the abstract to the team's paper, published recently in the Royal Society's journal, Proceeding of the Royal Society B:

Copyright: © 2022 The authors. Published by the Royal Society
Open access

Abstract

The Cretaceous–Palaeogene (K-Pg) extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs (66 Ma) led to a 25 million year gap of megaherbivores (>1000 kg) before the evolution of megaherbivorous mammals in the Late Eocene (40 Ma). The botanical consequences of this ‘Palaeocene megaherbivore gap’ (PMHG) remain poorly explored. We hypothesize that the absence of megaherbivores should result in changes in the diversification and trait evolution of associated plant lineages. We used phylogenetic time- and trait-dependent diversification models with palms (Arecaceae) and show that the PMHG was characterized by speciation slowdowns, decreased evolution of armature and increased evolution of megafaunal (≥4 cm) fruits. This suggests that the absence of browsing by megaherbivores during the PMHG may have led to a loss of defence traits, but the absence of megaherbivorous seed dispersers did not lead to a loss of megafaunal fruits. Instead, increases in PMHG fruit sizes may be explained by simultaneously rising temperatures, rainforest expansion, and the subsequent radiation of seed-dispersing birds and mammals. We show that the profound impact of the PMHG on plant diversification can be detected even with the overwriting of adaptations by the subsequent Late Eocene opening up of megaherbivore-associated ecological opportunities. Our study provides a quantitative, comparative framework to assess diversification and adaptation during one of the most enigmatic periods in angiosperm history.

Onstein, Renske E.; Kissling, W. Daniel; Linder, H. Peter (2022)
The megaherbivore gap after the non-avian dinosaur extinctions modified trait evolution and diversification of tropical palms
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 289(1972); DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2021.2633

Copyright: © 2022 The authors. Published by the Royal Society
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Again, we see a prediction of the TOE confirmed by observation and analysis, and again we see how the TOE is the foundation of modern biology and the only theory capable of making these predictions and explaining the observable facts. We also see the stupidity of any designer who would design large herbivores to eat plant seeds, then protects the seeds against being eaten by the large herbivores it designed to eat them. Then, apparently, had to redo those protective designs when it designed a new lot of large herbivores to eat the seeds, having exterminated the first lot 25 million years earlier.

Bible Blunder News - Scientists Find no Evidence for Noah's Flood in Southern England

Study Reveals Stonehenge Landscape Before The World-Famous Monument | University of Southampton

Why the site on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire in southern England was chosen for the building of the massive stone circle remains a mystery as is the identity of the first builders, although there is now strong evidence that migrants to the area from Southwest Wales, dismantled a bluestone circle and brought it with them, to construct the first phase of the monument.

Now scientists at Southampton University have shown that 4000 years before that, i.e. about 9000 years ago, the area was "covered by open woodland, with meadow-like clearings, inhabited by grazing animals and hunter-gatherers".

The problem this raises for YECs of course, is that this evidence should have been obliterated during the mythical Noahic flood and replaced by a deposit of silt containing jumbled fossils from disconnected landmasses. Not only is that predicted layer of silt not there, but there is no evidence of any inundation in the intervening years, other than that expected periodically in a river flood plain; instead, the archaeological evidence in the geological column shows continuous habitation and a population of earlier mammals, the ancestors of modern domestic animals, such as aurochs, and a continuous series of animal and plant remains progressing from earlier to later forms.

As the University of Southampton news release explains:

Unintelligent Designer News - How Creationism's Designer Could Have Done Much Better

How a soil microbe could rev up artificial photosynthesis | SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Readers may recall that I wrote recently about how the process of photosynthesis, on which almost all life on Earth ultimately depends, involves an enzyme known as RuBisCo, and why it would be a major embarrassment to intelligent [sic] design creationists, if only they understood it. I also wrote about it in my popular book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax as an example of the sort of prolific waste that refutes the notion of intelligent design.

But it just got a lot worse for creationism because scientists have discovered that a soil bacterium, Kitasatospora setae has an enzyme which does the same job, only very much faster, which begs the question for intelligent [sic] design creationists, why didn't their putative intelligent designer give this enzyme to all photosynthesising organisms, so saving waste and making more efficient use of the available CO₂? Did it deliberately give them all a less efficient process?

The discovery was made by an international team of scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, USA, Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Germany, DOE’s Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and the University of Concepción in Chile. They have published their findings, open access in the journal ACS Central Science, this week.

As the Stamford National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) news release explains:

Crisis? What Crisis? Scientists Work Out How Mitochondria Evolved

A white blood cell ingests rod-shaped bacteria (pink) in this micrograph. Legionella bacteria probably evolved to exploit this system about 2 billion years ago.

Ancestors of legionella bacteria infected cells two billion years ago | Press release - Uppsala University, Sweden

One of the mysteries of evolutionary biology was how and when complex (eukaryote) cells acquired mitochondria. Now scientists at Upsala University, Sweden, believe they have solved that problem.

They have discovered that, soon after eukaryotes began to feed on bacteria by phagocytosis (swallowing them whole and digesting them internally) the ancestors of legionella bacteria evolved the ability to exploit this system and live as parasites inside the cells, as early as two billion years ago.

They also believe they have solved one of the chicken-and-egg conundrums in evolutionary biology - which came first, phagocytosis, which requires energy to digest the phagocytosed organisms, or mitochondria, which supply the cell with energy. Some scientists believe that the cell would need mitochondria to supply enough energy for phagocytosis. However, this finding appears to show that phagocytosis was the process by which mitochondria were acquired. This of course, explains why eukaryotes soon evolved a symbiotic relationship from what almost certainly began as a host-parasite relationship. The benefits were so great.

The Upsala team published their findings, open access, in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution last February.

Malevolent Designer News - How Improved Hygiene Defeated Creationism's Divine Malevolence

Prevalence rates of helminths through time.

Prevalence of Ascaris, Trichuris, Taenia and Diphyllobothrium latum for four different time periods (Roman [n = 94], Anglo-Saxon [n = 79], High/Late Medieval [n = 159], and Industrial era [n = 116]). The confidence intervals are calculated using the Wilson Score interval (95% confidence level). Example photomicrographs of parasite eggs from left to right: Ascaris, Trichuris, Taenia and Diphyllobothrium latum Scale bar: 20 μm.

Ancient skeletons reveal the history of worm parasites in Britain | Department of Zoology

Devotees of creationism's intelligent [sic] malevolence will be thrilled by the news that scientists from Oxford University have discovered how successful it was at creating parasitic worms to make the life of Britons from earlier times just a little more miserable. (We can be sure that this was its intention because an omniscient creator could not create something with unintended consequence.)

What they may find harder to explain though, is why it didn't anticipate the improvements in our understanding of biology and the need for good hygiene, that led to a diminution of the problem later on and, with a few notable exceptions such as in London, an almost complete elimination of the problem.

By examining remains from 464 human burials, from 17 sites, dating from the Bronze Age to the Industrial Revolution, a team led by researchers from the Departments of Biology and Archaeology, Oxford, University, Oxford, UK, showed that the problem of parasitic worms was at it's highest in Britain during the late Roman and Late Medieval periods. With improved hygiene, however, the problem began to diminish, although, since progress in hygiene was patchy in the Victorian era, the pattern of parasite infection varied markedly. In London, for example, it was as bad as that seen in the wordst affected areas today, whilst in other areas, it was almost non-existant.

As the OU Department of Zoology News release explains:

Evolution News - How New Genetic Material is Acquired by Horizontal Gene Transfer.

Transmission pathways of snake BovBs via parasites. The representatives of HTs of snake BovBs via parasites are shown. The thick and thin arrows show the direction of HT and the similarities of BovB sequences between taxa, respectively.

Horizontal gene transfer: Frogs have acquired DNA from snakes with the help of parasites | New Scientist

A repetitive theme in the creationism vs science 'debates' is that no new information can arise in a genome because of some vaguely understood, or rather completely misunderstood and misrepresented notion that there is an equivalence between information and energy, so it would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics for new information to arise, apparently from nowhere.

Incidentally, I have never yet encountered a creationist who could explain what genetic information is, exactly or how it is subject to the laws of thermodynamics. For that matter, I have never encountered a creationist who could explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics, though I’ve encountered hundreds who cite it as though it supports them.

Of course, their claim ignores the common phenomenon of accidental gene duplication where additional copies of lengths of DNA are accidentally duplicated in the genome during mitosis or meiosis. It also ignores another, less common, method - horizontal gene transfer - where lengths of DNA from one species can be inserted into the genome of another, often unrelated species, giving it new genetic material, or at least a supply of new DNA which can be randomly mutated and eventually evolve into something useful.

Horizontal gene transfer was thought to have played a major part in the evolution of early, single-celled organism and is still common in bacteria which can swap pieces of their genome in the form of plasmids, or small loops of DNA. However, there is also, in multicellular organisms, a less common, though perhaps more common than is generally realised, method of horizontal gene transfer via a parasite such as a virus, possibly carried by an intermediate host parasite such as a tic or parasitic worm.

A retrovirus inserts the DNA template for its RNA into the host cell's genome (and so escapes detection by the immune system). Later, it will become active and produce RNA versions of itself from that embedded DNA and infect other cells and organisms. Sometimes, however, it will also convert chunks of the host's own DNA into its RNA and carry that to a new host, where it again inserts itself, together with the newly acquired DNA into the new host genome. If this is a cell in the organism's germline, then this will be passed on to future generations.

These genes can then become 'jumping genes', or retrotransposons, which replicate themselves and insert themselves in random parts of the genome, often creating multiple copies of themselves as they do so.

For example, more than 18 per cent of the cow genome is composed of a retrotransposon called Bovine-B (BovB) which originally came from a snake by horizontal gene transfer some 40-50 million years ago. About 10 years ago, Atsushi Kurabayashi at the Nagahama Institute of Bio-Science and Technology, Japan discovered that a Madagascan frog had a version of the BovB gene which was a 95% match for that found in cows.

Since then, Kurabayashi and his colleagues have analysed the DNA from 106 snake species, 149 frog species and 42 species of their shared parasites – like leeches and ticks. This has enabled them to chart the history of this retrotransposon as it jumped between species. They estimate that there have been 54 horizontal transfers between snakes and frogs between 85 and 1.3 million years ago. For some reason, Madagascar seems to be a hotspot for this transfer since it happened about 14 times in the last 50 million years and now 91% of the island's frogs carry the snake BovB gene. By contrast, over the same period, this seems to have happen only once in mainland Africa. The difference is probably due to the prevalence of certain parasites in Madagascar. Curiously, BovB doesn't appear to have any function in any animal.

US Protestant Pastors are Thinking of Quitting in Increasing Numbers as Congregations Dwindle and Trust Falls

Pastors Share Top Reasons They’ve Considered Quitting Ministry in the Past Year - Barna Group

Hard on the news from Gallop that their latest survey shows a steep and accelerating decline in membership of churches and other places of worship, comes news that there has been a sharp increase over the past year in the number of Protestant pastors seriously thinking of quitting.

42% of Protestant pastors have given serious consideration to quitting in the last year, compared to just 29% in 2021. Towards the end of 2021, Barna reported that this figure had reached 38%. This represents a 145% increase in absolute terms over the year and those who say they have given it consideration now far outnumber those who say they haven't.

Unintelligent, Malevolent Design News - How a Pathological Fungus has Been 'Designed' to Bypass a Plant's Defences That Were 'Designed' to Protect It.

A newly discovered protein helps the fungus that causes white mould stem rot in sunflowers and more than 600 other plant species bypass the plants' defences.

Newly Discovered Protein in Fungus Bypasses Plant Defenses : USDA ARS

Scientists working for the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have discovered how a fungus can invading and kill plants, despite the fact that plants have defences in place supposedly for preventing exactly that sort of attack by parasitic fungi.

And, of course, being an observation of reality, their finding utterly refutes the childish notion of intelligent design creationism.

First consider this:

If you were intelligent and tasked to design living organisms, would you design an organism (say Organism B) that lived parasitically on other organisms that you had designed earlier (say, Organism A)? If you did, would you then treat Organism B as a problem and give Organism A a system for resisting Organism B, making it harder for Organism B to live?

And, if you did something that idiotic, would you then treat your protection for Organism A as another problem and modify Organism B so it could still parasitise Organism A by evading the defences you gave it?

Well, if you are Creationism's supposedly intelligent [sic] designer, that it exactly what you would do.

US Religious Affiliation News - Accelerating Decline in Church Membership to Below 50%.

U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time.

According to the latest Gallop survey, religious affiliation and church membership is declining at an accelerating rate in the USA and the religiously unaffiliated are now in the majority, with affiliates to the various religions falling below 50% for the first time since Gallup began polling in 1937!

In the 60 years between 1940 and 2000, this figure declined only 3% from 73 to 70%, a figure that, given the distribution of values over the period from about 66% to 76% probably represents a steady figure of about 70%, subject to random sampling error.

The significant decline began at the turn of the millennium, falling 9%age points from 70 to 61% in the first 10 years, 6%age points in the next 5 years and a full 8%age points in the last 5 years, an annual rate of decline of 0.9, 1.2 and 1.6 percentage points, respectively. In Gallop's survey, religious affiliation means self-identifying as belonging to a church, synagogue or mosque. In Gallop's words:

Gallup asks Americans a battery of questions on their religious attitudes and practices twice each year. The following analysis of declines in church membership relies on three-year aggregates from 1998-2000 (when church membership averaged 69%), 2008-2010 (62%), and 2018-2020 (49%). The aggregates allow for reliable estimates by subgroup, with each three-year period consisting of data from more than 6,000 U.S. adults.

Although not the same thing, there is a close correlation between not having a religious preference and having no religion. The decline in church membership is probably a function of the decline in religious preference. Since the turn of the millennium, the percentage of Americans who do not self-identify with any religion has grown from 8% to 21%; a 162.5% increase in absolute numbers.

Americans are quickly losing faith in faith!

Not only that, but opinions appear to be firming up with the, perhaps surprising, figure for those who, while having no religious preference are nevertheless members of a church, synagogue or mosque, falling from 10% in 1998-2000 to just 4% in 2018-2020.

Given the nearly perfect alignment between not having a religious preference and not belonging to a church, the 13-percentage-point increase in no religious affiliation since 1998-2000 appears to account for more than half of the 20-point decline in church membership over the same time. Most of the rest of the drop can be attributed to a decline in formal church membership among Americans who do have a religious preference. Between 1998 and 2000, an average of 73% of religious Americans belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque. Over the past three years, the average has fallen to 60%.

As has been noted before, there is a marked difference between generations in the degree of affiliation to and membership of, a religion, with the youngest group being the least religious and the most inclined to reject religion, with 'Millennials' (born between 1981 and 1996) only about half as likely to be members of a church, synagogue or mosque as 'Traditionalists' (born before 1946) at 36% and 66% respectively. 'Baby boomers' (born between 1946 and 1964) and 'Generation X' (born between 1965 and 1980) are 58% and 50% respectively.

The two major trends driving the drop in church membership -- more adults with no religious preference and falling rates of church membership among people who do have a religion -- are apparent in each of the generations over time. Since the turn of the century, there has been a near doubling in the percentage of traditionalists (from 4% to 7%), baby boomers (from 7% to 13%) and Gen Xers (11% to 20%) with no religious affiliation.

Religions are suffering the double-whammy of declining religious beliefs per se, and declining church membership amongst those who do admit to holding religious beliefs.

Currently, 31% of millennials have no religious affiliation, which is up from 22% a decade ago. Similarly, 33% of the portion of Generation Z that has reached adulthood have no religious preference. Also, each generation has seen a decline in church membership among those who do affiliate with a specific religion. These declines have ranged between six and eight points over the past two decades for traditionalists, baby boomers and Generation X who identify with a religious faith. In just the past 10 years, the share of religious millennials who are church members has declined from 63% to 50%.

As the final two charts show, the result is always the same, differing only in magnitude and then not by a great deal. No matter how the data is sliced up, every demographic has shown a marked and accelerating decline in church membership, even amongst the conservatives and republicans amongst whom are to be found the Evangelical Christian fundamentalists, who on the US political stage, have tended to be the loudest and most vociferous, so much so that to us from outside the USA, America sometimes seems to be a nation of loopy religious extremists.

Over this period too, the Catholics have had sexual abuse scandal after sexual abuse scandal with even the most senior US Catholic cleric being sacked and defrocked and diocese after diocese declaring bankruptcy to avoid paying the very large compensation and reparation bills. Scandals of sexual and financial impropriety have even engulfed the Vatican with the former pope standing accused of complicity in child abuse scandals and their coverup, in his former German archdiocese of Munich, and making deliberately misleading and inaccurate statements to the enquiry into the abuses.

Nevertheless, the decline in membership of the Catholic church (-18%), while being double that of the Protestant churches (9%), it is within the normal range of decline for other demographics. The highest rates of decline (25%) are to be found in Democrat-leaning voters and residents in the Eastern United States (presumably East Coast, New England). The protestant churches show the smallest decline at 9%. This possibly reflects the fact that evangelical, Republican-voting, Americans tend also to be white Protestant.

Perhaps surprisingly, given that earlier polls tended to show that religiosity was declining faster in American men than women, this polls show a reversal of that trend, with a steeper decline for women (20%) than for men (18%). American women are making up for their earlier tardiness in abandoning religious institutions.

Just as a bit of fun, if the rate of decline over the last 5 years is maintained and projected into the future, let alone continues to accelerate at the rate its's been accelerating since 2000, membership of religious establishments in the USA should be in single percentage points within the next 15-20 years and should be a mere footnote in history by the middle of the 21st century.

What seems to be happening is what Europe and the rest of the industrial world experience since 1945 - the decline in religiosity proceedes exponentially as first a few, then more and finally very many people abandoned religion as Atheism and non-affiliation first became thinkable, then acceptable, and now the norm as we realised that we did not need the church involved in our daily lives and as the church reacted by becoming even more reactionary and condemning of an increasingly Humanist society, freed from the straight-jacket imposed by dubious religious 'morality' with its support for intolerance, division, hate and bigotry.

Hopefully, in the USA, the support given to the odious and deplorable Donald Trump by the Christian churches has opened the eyes of many Americans to the hypocritical, misogynistic, racist, self-serving and socially divisive nature of fundamentalist Christianity in the USA where, more than perhaps anywhere else in the developed world:

Religion provides excuses for people who need excuses.

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