Is This Bronx Scam Artist Getting Too Greedy?

Minister Creflo Dollar asked parishioners to buy him a $65 million dollar jet for Jesus « Why Evolution Is True

Bronx-based Manuel de Dios Agosto is going to have to do much better if he is to come anywhere close to matching another Bronx-based religious scam artist who has just asked his victims followers to stump up for a brand new $60 million top of the range G650 Gulfstream jet for him and his family.

The humorously named Creflo Augustus Dollar,

Religion and Mental Illness

Religious fundamentalism is a neurophysiological disorder

Religious Fundamentalism 'May Be Categorised As Mental Illness & Cured By Science'

The opinion that extremist religious beliefs in particular may be symptoms of mental disorder and psychiatric illness seems to be gaining ground in informed neurophysiology and psychiatry circles, though this is hardly news to those of us who spend a while trying to engage religious fundamentalists and creationist in intelligent debate on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Psychosis and paranoia often seem to be endemic in these people, for example the unfortunate individual whom I stopped trying to engage on Facebook recently when he told me he didn't need to read any books or science websites because God was telling him all the facts he needed by putting them straight into his brain, so there was no point in giving him links to follow or articles to read.

Catholic Child Abuse, St.Josephs, Bronx

Father Robert Harrison

Bronx School Ousts Priest After Admissions of Abuse - NYTimes.com

An assistant principal at Cardinal Hayes Catholic High School in Bronx, New York, has been dismissed for sexually abusing ten minors in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Rev. Robert Harrison, of the Capuchin Franciscan Province of St.Josephs, had worked at the school since 1989. The abuses came to light just before last Christmas when it was discovered that Father Harrison was borrowing money from colleagues at the school. When asked why, he admitted it was to pay an abuse victim. He then admitted to the sexual abuse of other boys in Manhattan, Milwaukee and the Bronx during the 1970s and 1980s. None of the abuse victims are believed to have been students at Cardinal Hayes High School.

A spokesman for the province said that none of the victims had ever reported the abuse.

Creationists All At Sea Over Water On Earth

Ganymede

Huge ocean confirmed underneath solar system’s largest moon | Science/AAAS | News

To read a creationist disinformation site, you'd think Earth was the only body in the Solar System - the entire Universe even - to have water, and that the only explanation for how it all got there must be that a magic man magicked it all.

Take this piece of scientific illiteracy and Bible babble, or this attempt to mislead their victims by Creation Misinstries International about the discovery that there is a lot of water bound up in hydrated minerals in Earth's mantle - a false claim that was so easy to predict at the time.

Clearly, creationists pseudoscientist frauds would like their dupes to believe that the presence of water on Earth is some sort of scientific mystery; a miracle - another gap in which to sit their god and explain with "God did it!" Water is, of course, essential for life on

Church Claims Religious Freedom to Cheat Abuse Victims

Cardinal Timothy Dolan,
Archbishop of New York, former Archbishop of Milwaukee.

Catholic Church Claims It Can Refuse To Pay Victims Of Sex Abuse Because Of Religious Freedom | ThinkProgress:

The Catholic diocese of Milwaukee has suffered a setback in its attempt to avoid its moral responsibilities to the victims of its abusive priests. Its former archbishop, Timothy Dolan, now a cardinal and Archbishop of New York, had tried to insulate its funds by transferring $55 million into a trust fund for maintaining the diocese's cemeteries and mausoleums, then claiming they were not the Church's funds but belonged to the Trust, so the Church had no money with which to compensate its victims, and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

However, the sexual abuse victims petitioned the courts to rule that this was a "fraudulent, preferential or avoidable transfer". The diocese then countered with a claim that paying compensation would infringe it religious freedom citing the Restoration of Religious Freedoms Act (RRFA) and the First Amendment. It was this latter claim that was originally upheld by a district court judge.

The RRFA, as clarified by the 'Hobby Lobby' case which appears to give anyone who can find a religious objection the freedom to disregard whatever laws they choose, has already been used by a fundamentalist Mormon sect to obstruct a federal investigation into alleged child slavery on its farm. However, the district court ruling was reversed last Monday by the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Recent Evolution In The Caribbean.

Growth of the West Indian fighting conch (Strombus pugilis) and morphometrics (height, width and lip thickness) taken in this study. (a–d) Juvenile shells with lips less than 1.8 mm. (e–h) Adult shells with lips thicker than 1.8 mm. (e) Dorsal view showing measurement of outer lip thickness. (f) A typically small mature contemporary shell from Isla Carenero with characteristic scorch markings from cooking. Arrow indicates location of outer lip thickness measurement. (g) One of the largest mature contemporary shells from Isla Popa. (h) A large pre-human mature shell. (a–c,h) are pre-human, whereas (d–g) are contemporary. Scale bar, 2 cm.

Evidence of size-selective evolution in the fighting conch from prehistoric subsistence harvesting.

Scientists working for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute have discovered a lovely example of environmental change driving evolution, this time the environmental change being the presence of humans who predated on the Caribbean fighting conch, Strombus puglis, as a source of food.

Juveniles of this species live in muddy sediments and only emerge to mate when they reach sexual maturity - at which point they become easy for humans to catch - but only after they have developed a thick outer lip as a protection from predators. This means that having attained sexual maturity can be assessed in ancient shells by measuring the thickness of this lip.

Careful observation and measurement of modern

Can The 'Intelligent Designer' Get Any Nastier?

Dinocampus coccinellae

Who is the puppet master? Replication of a parasitic wasp-associated virus correlates with host behaviour manipulation | The Royal Society Proceedings B.

Here's a pretty little insect from the wasp family. Like a lot of members of this family, it is a parasitoid species, the females of which lay their eggs in the living bodies of other creatures, often other insects. This particular one, Dinocampus coccinellae, lays its eggs in ladybirds.

For several weeks an infected ladybird will carry on hunting aphids as though nothing much is happening and oblivious of the maggot growing inside it and eating its internal organs, apart from those essential to the ladybird, obviously. The ladybird needs to be kept

Evolution of a Strange Pair of Geese

Left: hybrid Graylag goose, Anser anser
and Canada goose, Branta canadensis

Right: Graylag goose, Anser answer

The thing about knowing you don't know all the answers, but also knowing that nature is amenable to reason, is that when you see something that makes you curious, you know you will probably find the answer if you look hard enough. With nature, that answer will be interesting, thought-provoking and will mean you will understand nature just a little better.

We saw these two wild geese on on lake near Oxford the other day when we went for a long country walk with our grandson and his parents. My grandson would much rather talk about Minecraft and wasn't even interested when I showed him the hole where the little gall wasp came out of an oak-apple gall - how can that not be interesting? He'll soon be old enough to have that copy of Richard Dawkins' "The Magic Of Reality" I bought him when he was about 4.

Anyway, what we noticed about these geese was that, while they are obviously a pair and the one on the right is a perfectly normal-looking graylag goose, the other was a slightly odd-looking Canada goose. Canada geese are an alien species in Britain but have spread very rapidly throughout the Thames Valley and beyond.

2013. Another Very Bad Year For Creationism.

The Most Fascinating Human Evolution Discoveries of 2013 | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network

This is another of those articles I stored away intending to deal with later, but then left them to sink towards the bottom of the stack as other topics intervened. It deals with the most significant discoveries related to the evolution of modern humans in just one year - 2013. It goes without saying that a number of them involved more of those pesky 'intermediate forms' creationists are having to work so hard to ignore so they can pretend there aren't any.

The list is based on an article by Kate Wong, published in Scientific American in January 2014. The commentary is mine. Feel free to hit creationists over the head with it.

No Soul? Rats!

Nobel prize find: search for ‘soul of rat’ revealed brain’s navigation system | Science | The Guardian

I meant to write a commentary on this at the time, but it just kept getting shuffled down the stack as other topics intervened. Last year's Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was shared by Professor John O'Keefe, University College London, for his work on understanding how the brain maps the world around us so we can navigate. He jokingly claims he was looking for the soul of the rat when he discovered 'place cells'. It has now been found by Edvard and May-Brit Moser, that these 'place cells' form a grid of recorded coordinates.

We have known for some time that the hippocampus is involved since a UCL team led by Eleanor Maguire found that as London Taxicab drivers acquire 'The Knowledge' their hippocampus enlarges. 'The knowledge', for those who haven't heard of it is the detailed street knowledge London Black Cab drivers must demonstrate before they qualify for their licence to operate.

Beware of Abusive Imitations

Please Note: This is my only blog.

Others purporting to be by me or bearing my ident will contain plagiarised and altered material from this site or material presented as being by me. They will usually be run and maintained by a well-know unemployable Internet abuser, fraud and expelled Catholic seminarian who appears to have developed an obsessive fascination with me, bordering on the psychotic and who seems to be trying to ride piggy-back on my popularity to lure traffic to his beggar blogs.

Go to his blog and you will find well over 60 articles fantasising about me with all manner of lurid tales. Bear in mind though that he will count the hit as a triumph and routinely deletes comments he doesn't want others to read.

You can read about him here.

Still Making A Difference - Thankyou

Great news that my AdSense account has reached another payment threshold, so I have donated it to Oxfam again.


This donation also benefits from the UK Government's UKAid scheme which doubles donations, in effect making it £140, plus another 25p per pound donated in GiftAid as a UK tax-payer.

Yet Another of Those 'Missing' Transitional Fossils

Fossil jawbone with distinctly hominid teeth

Photo: Arizona State University/Kaye Reed

BBC News - 'First human' discovered in Ethiopia

A fossil lower jawbone with five intact teeth, discovered in 2013 in the Afar region of Ethiopia, may well have pushed back the earliest known hominid by about 400,000 years to 2.8 million years ago. The huge significance of this, if it turns out to be true, is that it sits neatly in time and place between the undoubtedly australopithecine Australopithecus afarensis from the same area about 3 million years ago and the undoubtedly hominid Homo habilis, from about 2.4 million years ago, previously the earliest known hominid.

The key to this new find is the distinctly hominid small teeth. In our evolutionary history, teeth reduced in size

Unreasonable Faith - Robert G. Ingersoll

Why is Robert G. Ingersoll not better known in America, or the rest of the world, for that matter? He wrote and spoke with such power and passion, and regard for truth and honesty above all, that his writing is a joy to read, more lyrical even than that of Thomas Paine and worthy of Christopher Hitchens at his best.

Here he is delivering a 'Thanksgiving Sermon'. This is a cut-down version; the full sermon can be read here.

A THANKSGIVING SERMON.

MANY ages ago our fathers were living in dens and caves. Their bodies, their low foreheads, were covered with hair. They were eating berries, roots, bark and vermin. They were fond of snakes and raw fish. They discovered fire and, probably by accident, learned how to cause it by friction. They found how to warm themselve — to fight the frost and storm. They fashioned clubs and rude weapons of stone with which they killed the larger beasts and now and then each other. Slowly, painfully, almost imperceptibly they advanced. They crawled and stumbled, staggered and struggled toward the light. To them the world was unknown. On every hand was the mysterious, the sinister, the hurtful. The forests were filled with monsters, and the darkness was crowded with ghosts, devils, and fiendish gods.

These poor wretches were the slaves of fear, the sport of dreams.

Some Pictures Just Speak For Themselves

I'm sometimes accused of using too many words in my blogs, which might well be true, though I can appreciate how Mozart felt when he was accused of using too many notes, so it's refreshing to be able to make a point with a few pictures:

Hunting With Wolves - To Catch Creationists

Artists impression: Wolves hunting mamoths in the Upper Pleistocene Epoch

Photo: Alamy

How hunting with wolves helped humans outsmart the Neanderthals | Science | The Guardian

In a book, The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction, to be published this month, US Anthropologist, Pat Shipman, of Pennsylvania State University, puts forward the idea that domestication of wolves played a key role in the conquest of Europe by modern humans, and may have given us the edge over Neanderthals, so driving them to extinction. I haven't read this book so what I know of it is second hand.

Her argument is that wolves, Neanderthals and

Vatican At War As Pell Lives it Up in Rome

Cardinal George Pell arrives for a morning session at the Vatican.

Photo: Alessandra Tarantino

Cardinal George Pell, the Vatican's financial watchdog, slammed for lavish spending

In a leaked document, Cardinal Pell, the former Archbishop of Melbourne who was put into the Vatican by Pope Francis to sort out its finances and root out the endemic corruption, has been accused of living a lavish lifestyle and handing out money to a chum in the form of an inflated salary.

But the real story here is the leak itself and what it shows is going on behind the scenes, as the Pope accuses the Curia of of suffering from fifteen 'spiritual diseases' including 'spiritual Alzheimers' and 'theological schizophrenia and Pell himself reveals that heads of departments in the vast Vatican bureaucracy had been salting away tens of millions in secret bank accounts, made possible because of shoddy bookkeeping and an almost complete lack of financial accountability with no records of where the money came from nor what it's to be spent on. The discovery of these large secret bank accounts potentially transformed the Vatican's financial position from precarious to very healthy.

Pell was put in soon after Pope Francis replaced the odious Pope Benedict who had done nothing to put a stop to the corruption revealed by his 'butler' in the 'Vatileaks' affair.

How Science Works - European History

Bouldnor Cliff submerged pre-historic site

Maritime Archaology Trust

DNA recovered from underwater British site may rewrite history of farming in Europe | Science/AAAS | News

An interesting example of how science works appeared in Science a couple of days ago. It concerns DNA evidence that domestic wheat, normally associated with farming, was being used by hunter-gatherers living in what is now southern England 8000 years ago, 2000 years before agriculture is believed to have reached north-west Europe.

Rather annoyingly, the article quotes archaeobotanist Dorian Fuller, of University College London, who was not involved in the research, as saying "[The work confronts archaeologists] with the challenge of fitting this into our worldview". Now, I'm not entirely sure what a 'worldview' is exactly but I suspect it's some sort of post-modernist nonsensical construction implying that all sorts of views of the world are possible and even equally valid, but reading the article it's very clear that what might need to be adjusted is this 'worldview' itself because this particular 'worldview' is a conclusion based on evidence. There is no fitting of new facts into a pre-existing conclusion; just the opposite in fact. The conclusion is adjusted to allow for the new information, just as the title of the article itself implies.

Britons Now Find Atheists More Moral Than Theists

I must be slipping as my attention was only drawn to this survey today in my copy of BHA News.

An opinion poll carried out for Huffington Post by Survation last November confirmed the astonishing rejection of religion in favour of non-belief in the UK in recent years and a consequent shift in the perception of the relative morality of Atheists and religious people.

Despite the 2011 census in which 55.3% of people in England and Wales described themselves as Christian and only 25.1% described themselves as having no religion, this survey revealed this to be

More of Those 'Missing' Transitional Forms

Mammalian and non-mammalian jaws. In the mammal configuration, the quadrate and articular bones are much smaller and form part of the middle ear. Note that in mammals the lower jaw consists of only the dentary bone.

Source: Wikipedia - Evolution of mammalian auditory ossicles
Uploaded by Philcha

Evolutionary development in basal mammaliaforms as revealed by a docodontan

An arboreal docodont from the Jurassic and mammaliaform ecological diversification

Two papers published in last week's Science by the same team of researchers, describe two more of those 'non-existent' transitional fossils on which so much creationism depends.

They both deal with fossils of two members of an early and now extinct order of vertebrates which seems to sit somewhere between pre-mammalian reptiles and true mammals in that they have a transitional jaw joint closer to the 'squamous' joint typical of reptiles, where the mandible articulates with the squamous bone, and the mammalian jaw joint in which some bones have become reduced and now form the ossicles of the mammalian inner ear, allowing a new jaw joint to form between the quadrate bone and the mandible.

In all other respects these early proto-mammals have a mammalian skeleton and dentition. Because of this difference in jaw joint, the order is not universally accepted as a true mammal but are normally referred to an 'mammaliaforms', i.e., mammal-like - exactly the sort of taxonomic problem we would expect of something which is part-way between two others.