Going, Going... Nearly Gone!

Church of England attendance plunges to record low - Telegraph

Active membership of the Church of England in Britain is in freefall.

The Church has just announced that average church attendance fell by a further 22,000 in 2014 to just 764,700; a fall of 7 percent in just 5 years. Regular weekly total attendance at church is now down to a megre 1.4 percent of the population and fell below 1 million to 980,000 for the first time ever. The C of E estimates that membership is declining by about 1 percent a year due to the deaths of its increasingly aged members alone, and this is at a time when the population is increasing faster than it has done since the late 1940s post-war baby boom.

Holy Brothers!

Georg Ratzinger
Domkapellmeister, Ragensberg Domspatzen, 1964-1994

At least 231 children abused at Catholic boys’ choir run by Pope Benedict’s brother

It's beginning to look like a massive sexual and physical abuse scandal is about to engulf the Catholic Church again, this time in Germany, and involving a private Catholic boarding school for boys aged 10-19 which at the time, was run by former Pope Benedict XVI's brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger.

A lawyer, Ulrich Weber, commissioned by the Ragensberg Catholic diocese, Bavaria, to investigate allegations of abuse made in 2010, has found evidence that 231 boys were systematically sexually abused and subjected to physical abuse including food

To Have And To Harm Until Death Do Us Part

His Excellency Braulio Rodriguez Plaza
Archbishop of Toledo, Spain

Source: Wikipedia

Fury as archbishop says domestic violence is caused by women 'not obeying men' - Mirror Online

You have to hand it to Archbishop Braulio Rodriguez Plaza, Bishop of Toledo, Spain and thus the senior Catholic cleric in Spain; he knows his theology!

So, when he announced in Toledo Cathedral on 27 December that women victims of domestic violence only have themselves to blame because they disobeyed their husbands, you can be sure he reached that conclusion from a close reading of Christian scripture in the Bible. It was undoubtedly based on the revealed Word of God in that reliable handbook of morals upon which all Catholics, and indeed all people, can depend with absolute confidence.

God's mouthpiece, the unmarried and officially celibate Braulio Rodriguez Plaza, told the congregation that women could avoid being hit by doing what their husbands tell them and can avoid physical abuse by not asking their husbands for a divorce.

Laboratory Abiogenesis Observed?

Library synthesis and the mechanism of self-replication.

For description, see original source.

Diversification of self-replicating molecules - Nature Chemistry

The last three years have been dreadful for those who run the creationism industry, but this could be some of the worst news imaginable for them and their willing dupes, and it was only 4 days into the new year when it was published. Scientists led by Jan W. Sadownik at the Centre for Systems Chemistry, Stratingh Institute for Chemistry at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, believe they may have shown how self-replicating structures could have arisen spontaneously.

This is bound to result in hysterical denialism in creationist circles because it is an indispensable article of faith that life could not possibly have come from non-life so a magician must have made it happen. To a creationist, 'life' is of course some ill-defined or undefined magic ingredient that sets living things apart from non-living things and enables them to do things that non-living things don't do, such as reproducing. To anyone who understands basic biology however, living things are simply things that self-replicate. All the chemistry which goes on to use energy to resist the tendency to disorder is simply a means to that end.

Qur'an Quandary - Where is the Original?

Early Qur'an

Broolyn Museum, USA

Qur'an illumniated manuscript 18th-Early 19th Century

Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA

Ask any Muslim what the Qur'an is and who wrote it, and you'll be told almost without exception, that it is Allah's word as revealed in divine revelations to Muhammad through Allah's messenger, the Archangel Gabriel (Jibril). You might even be given the simplistic answer that Muhammad literally wrote it.

This only happened once, apparently. Although spread over some 23 years, there is no record of Allah revealing the same thing several times, least of all the entire Qur'an.

You'll most likely be told that the proof that it is Allah's revealed word is the fact that Muhammad was illiterate and yet was able to write the Qur'an in perfect classical Arabic; that Allah literally guided his hand. This is, of course, the 'lie to children' version. The accepted

Pope Francis - Faking It For The Faithful

No, this is not another blog about how Pope Francis eagerly participates in such obviously fake 'miracles' as the 'St Gennaro blood' trick at Naples Cathedral; it's about how 'honest' Pope Francis is knowingly participating in another hoax in order to distract attention from the many scandals which continue under his leadership, just as under his two predecessors.

Pope Francis is actively participating in the elevation of the odious and unscrupulous nun, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, aka Mother Teresa of Calcutta, to the Catholic sainthood with a second highly dubious 'miracle' which he has ordered should be attributed to her.

Devil's Own Intelligent Design?

Tasmania devil Sarcophilus harrisii

A second transmissible cancer in Tasmanian devils.

A little over 30 years ago, Tasmanian devils, marsupials that lives only on the Australian island of Tasmania, began to develop fatal tumours on their face. It was subsequently found that this devil facial tumour disease (DFTD) was a transmissible cancer which is passed on when one animal bites another on the face and transfers live tumour cells to the new host.

It is thought that these transmitted cells are not recognised by the devils' immune system as foreign and so destroyed because they are genetically so close to the devil's own cells having developed in a highly in-bred population as the population declined and genetic diversity declined with it. Ironically, a parasite has arisen in a host, derived from the host itself.

2015 - Another Miserable Year for Creationism

This is the third year I've written up a brief summary of some of the most interesting papers on evolution and related science for the past year, and, like the previous two, it's been another miserable year for creationism.

To look at their sites like Ken Ham's AiG, though, it's almost as though they haven't noticed any science this year. There is still no dent in their dogmatic insistence that science has never provided any evidence for evolution.

New Book: An Unprejudiced Mind

An Unprejudiced Mind: Atheism, Science and Reason is my latest book - a sequel to The Light Of Reason: And Other Atheist Writing series - again consisting of carefully selected essays and articles from this blog, this time concentrating primarily of the science behind biological evolution and how it has led to biodiversity, and contrasting it with the pseudo-philosophy of theology. It is available in both paperback and Kindle editions. Buyers of the paperback can also obtain the Kindle version at a greatly reduced rate.

The title is a partial quote by one Patrick Matthews (20 October 1790 – 8 June 1874) who has a plausible claim to have been the first to published the idea of evolution by natural selection, in 1831, almost 30 years befor Darwin and Wallace published their idea to the Linnean Society. Charles Darwin himself acknowledged his prior claim but pointed to the obscurity of his chosen publication medium - in a book on arboriculture with a very small circulation. Matthews had even published his claim to be the first to describe natural selection in a letter to an obscure gardening magazine.

Has the 'Intelligent Designer' Got OCD?

African Straw-colored fruit bat,
Eidolon helvum

By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters
Bat Week 2017 - Congressional Reception
CC BY 2.0, Link

African straw-coloured bat

Filovirus receptor NPC1 contributes to species-specific patterns of ebolavirus susceptibility in bats | eLife

OCD or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is characterised by repeatedly and obsessively doing something which appears to have no aim, or at least an aim which isn't furthered by constant repetition.

Yet, when we look at biology, we see examples in great abundance of what would appear to be obsessive, constant repetition which actually achieves nothing, as though the designer is on some sort of mental treadmill and incapable of getting off it - assuming, that is, that you believe in a designer. This is not the act of a mentally healthy or intelligent being.

As though to illustrate this, we have an open access paper this week where the authors believe they have shown that bats and ebola viruses have been engaged in an arms race, possibly for 25 million years.

Why Science Works - Looking at New Evidence

Homo erectus

Source: Wikipedia

PLOS ONE: A Hominin Femur with Archaic Affinities from the Late Pleistocene of Southwest China

A point that's been made many times before here and elsewhere, but which creationists don't seem to be able to understand, is that science progresses essentially because nothing is ever completely ruled out and new evidence is always carefully examined before being accepted or rejected. If acceptance means we need to revise our previous understanding, then we revise our understanding. It would be a complete absurdity for science to know that there was evidence showing that our understanding was wrong yet to ignore it and pretend it just wasn't there.

This of course is in stark contrast to creationism where loons like Ken Ham are actually admired for dogmatically stating that no evidence can ever contradict what creationists 'know' because creationists 'know' the truth, and they didn't get it from the evidence. This dogma, which of course is essential for people trying to maintain a sacred conclusion with the evidence so strongly against them and being added to all the time, enabled creationists to simply wave aside

Happy Christmas - And No Religion Too

Millennials: Christmas more cultural than religious | Pew Research Center

The 'Millennials' in America have been increasingly rejecting mainstream religion and becoming more atheistic for some time now as shown in a Pew Center survey just a few weeks ago.

Now the Pew Research Centre has published a 2013 survey that shows how, rather than rejecting that quintessentially Christian festival, Christmas, Millennials are secularising it and turning it into a cultural celebration rather than a religious one. As a cultural event, Christmas is becoming an inclusive festival rather than an exclusive one that cynically increases in-group cohesion by automatically excludes religious minorities.

Mite Is Right For Evolution

Demodex folliculorum

Global divergence of the human follicle mite Demodex folliculorum: Persistent associations between host ancestry and mite lineages

Evolution is as plain as the mites on your face.

You see, we all have mites living in our hair follicles, especially the hair follicles of our face, such as our eyebrows and eyelashes. We're not unique in this; all mammals have these normally harmless little fellow travellers.

Britain Is No Longer A Christian Country

Baroness Butler-Sloss

LIVING WITH DIFFERENCE - community, diversity and the common good

In a report out a few days ago, a commision of enquiry into the role of religion in public life in Britain led by a former senior judge, The Rt Hon Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss GBE, has acknowledged that Britain is no longer a Christian country and recommends a systematic de-Christianisation of public life.

Not surprisingly, the mainstream Christian churches, who were heavily represented on the enquiry board, are crying foul, squealing like stuck pigs and demanding to be allowed to keep their special privileges and power, despite the fact that they are accountable to no-one and represent only a small and decreasing minority of the population.

The Daft Designer Does It Again

Cellular defense against latent colonization foiled by human cytomegalovirus UL138 protein | Science Advances

Here's a little challenge to Michael Behe and his chums from the Discovery Institute.

No, it's not to explain how it came about because that's too easy. It's to explain why it came about. The problem is not that it is irreducibly complex but that it is irredeemably stupid.

Here's the situation:

A family of viruses, the herpesviruses, has a mechanism for overcoming the human immune system when it infects cells. It basically hides inside the cell nucleus looking for all the world like part of the normal genome and only in certain situations does it come out of hiding, start replicating and

Why Science Works - Doing It Like Adults

The basic difference between science and religion is that science is grown up while religion is essentially childish. This is illustrated by a controversy which has suddenly blown up in a fairly obscure but nonetheless interesting aspect of evolutionary biology in the last week.

An interesting paper was published a few days ago which seemed to show that horizontal gene transfer (HGT) may account for up to 18% of the tardigrade ('water bear') genome, suggesting that HGT could have played a bigger role in the evolution of multicellular organisms than is generally recognised.

HGT is widely suspected to have played a part in the evolution of prokaryote cells so that acquiring genes evolved in another species could have been a short-cut to evolution or a way for new combinations of genes to come together, analogous to sexual reproduction. In eukaryote cells, the incorporation of prokaryotes was a form of HGT after all, but for HGT to have played a wider role in the evolution of multicellular species would be surprising - hence the interest in this paper and why I wrote about it.

Now, however, another group has published a paper which suggests that the result of the genome analysis may have been an artifact produced by contamination:

How Evolution Gave Us Grannies

Human-specific derived alleles of CD33 and other genes protect against postreproductive cognitive decline

There's something special about a granny. Granddads are special too of course, but not quite like a granny. Ask my grandchildren.

Grandparents are biologically, on the face of it, a little bit of a mystery especially in a social species and especially in one like humans where for most people for most of the time until the discovery of agriculture, life consisted mostly of hunting and gathering food. Anyone not capable of joining in would have been a drain on the resources of those who could so it seems logical to suppose that any process which removed surplus people from the group after their fertile and productive years were over would be advantageous to the group and so would be expected to evolve. In fact, when you look at our closest relatives, chimpanzees, you find that the females tend to die soon after their fertility ceases.

Creationism's Big Problem

Otago researchers describe new North Pacific fossil whale, News at Otago, University of Otago, New Zealand.

This week's 'missing' transitional fossil is a new species of baleen whale which lived in what is now the North Pacific, 30 - 33 million years ago. It shows distinct evidence of transition between the toothed and the baleen whales.

Fucaia buelli is described in a paper published today in Royal Society Open Science by Ewan Fordyce and Cheng-Hsiu Tsa of the University of Otago, New Zealand and Dr Felix Marx of Museum Victoria, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

The Blue Tarantulas and the Stupid Designer

Singapore Blue Tarantula (Lampropelma violaceopes)

Source: Wikipedia

Blue reflectance in tarantulas is evolutionarily conserved despite nanostructural diversity | Science Advances

Imagine you're, say, a manufacturer of refrigerators and you've employed a designer to modernise your range. The basic technology is fine - things like the heat-exchange unit, door switch that turns the light on and off - and all you need is some styling to give your range more appeal in the prevailing market.

Now, what would you think if you found this designer was redesigning the heat exchanger or the coolant pump, not to make it any better - in fact some of his designs are worse than the ones you normally use - but because it hadn't occurred to him to use the ones you have in stock. In fact, he didn't know they had ever been designed before.

Northern Ireland - Catching Up On Human Rights

NI abortion law 'breaches human rights' | BBC News

In another example of how secular humanism is replacing archaic Christian bigotry and judgmentalism, the Northern Ireland High Court in Belfast has ruled that the Northern Ireland Abortion Laws, which differ markedly from those in the rest of the United Kingdom, are in breach of fundamental human rights.

Human rights, of course, come from the concept of maximising individual liberty, freedom of choice, freedom of conscience, equality before the Law and