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.