How Science Works - Evolving Mammoths

Frontiers | Mammuthus Population Dynamics in Late Pleistocene North America: Divergence, Phylogeography and Introgression | Paleontology

To the delight of creationists no doubt, evolutionary paleontologists are changing their minds about North American mammoth evolution.

To most black-and-white-thinking creationists and other science deniers, science is either right or wrong and, since scientists frequently update their knowledge and understanding, to most of them this shows science is always wrong. It isn't of course; it's just science being honest and revising it opinion in view of new information. Science isn't so much a process of proving what's right and what's wrong as a process of gaining more understanding through new or better knowledge.

Evolution Observed in Darwin's Finch

Meduim ground finch, Geospiza fortis

A beak size locus in Darwin’s finches facilitated character displacement during a drought | Science

Every now and then we get an exquisitely simple and irrefutable example of evolution being witnessed and reported with supporting data. Despite this, however, creationists continue to deny that evolution occurs and continue to chant their dogmatic insistence that it has never been observed.

Firstly, the scientific evidence:

Moral Compass - Pastor Says Raping a Child Same as Stealing Candy

Senior Pastor Michael Orten of The Truth Apostolic Church, Madisonville, KY

As a Humanist I have no problem at all with the idea that someone could make a mistake when young and then realise the error of their ways and turn their lives around. I don't believe people should pay for the rest of their lives for mistakes they make in their youth. I believe in the redemptive power of real atonement and prefer to think that all people deserve to be given another chance.

So I have no problem with the idea that a sex offender who has spent time in jail could acknowledge his crimes, reform his character and be a gainfully employed useful member of society, provided if, as in this case where the offence was committed against a child, parents of children in the area know about it.

But what this story demonstrates is the strange morals of Pastor Orten of The Truth Apostolic Church in Madisonville, Kentucky.

And This Week's 'Non-Existent' Transitional Form Is...

Cryptotora thamicola.

Tetrapod-like pelvic girdle in a walking cavefish : Scientific Reports

There are enough of these 'non-existent' transitional fossils to fill a large museum and several more are added most months, as a scan of the relevant scientific literature will show. This doesn't stop creationist frauds telling their dupes that there aren't any of course, but then where would they be without false claims and misrepresentations of the scientific facts?

One of the transitions that excites creationists the most is that between fish and the early terrestrial tetrapods (salamander-like limbed vertebrates). Despite the example of Tiktaalik and Eusthenopteron with incontrovertible features mid-way between fish and salamanders, they continue to insist on either denying they exist altogether or arbitrarily designating them as either fish or salamanders. This is intended to avoid the embarrassment that they are quite obviously both because, at that stage in the evolution of terrestrial tetrapods, they had not diverged from fish.

One of the slightly more sophisticated arguments creationists use to dismiss the evidence is the argument that the change

Holy Smoke and Mirrors! Heavenly Selfies With Jesus!

Meet Paseka Motsoeneng, aka, Mboro.

Pastor Motsoeneng, of the Incredible Happenings Church in Katlehong, South Africa, is personal friends with Jesus who was so impressed by Motsoeneng's devotion that he invited him up to Heaven last Easter Sunday and invited him to take lots of selfies on his G5 Galaxy iphone. No! Honestly!

There is no doubt about this because we have the word of a Christian pastor, Paseka Motsoeneng aka Mboro, that it happened and he has the photographs to prove it. He even offered to sell copies of these selfies for a mere £238-266 each, although why he

What The Critics Say! Ten Good Reasons To Buy It!

My latest book, Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It is already receiving critical acclaim from readers:

..and this book shows nicely why it is better to let go of it ... (5 stars)

This is a cracking read from the author of the Rosa Rubicondior blogs. If you aren't familiar with them then I would suggest you rectify that.
Faith is a pernicious thing, and this book shows nicely why it is better to let go of it and walk away. Religion is a drug, and faith is its pusher, binding people more and more closely to religion.
Read the book. It says it all better than I can.

W. J. Wight

---

Whichever side of the fence you sit - read this! (5 stars)

Ten very good reasons. Easy to read and clearly written.

Amazon Customer

Where Did The Neanderthal Y Chromosome Go?

Missing Y chromosome kept us apart from Neanderthals | New Scientist

There is no serious doubt outside creationist circles these days that a) modern humans and Neanderthals were different species of human who lived contemporaneously in Eurasia, and b) they interbred very occasionally but not often and not very successfully.

Neanderthal DNA has been identified in non-African modern humans, mostly on the X chromosome. It has been associated with pale skin and other cold-climate adaptations but also with arthritis, auto-immune conditions, depression and even addiction.

But there was one little problem. Had we got our Neanderthal genes from male Neanderthals we should expect to see some

Hey Creationists! We've Found A Unicorn!

Elasmotherium sibiricum

A fossilised skull has revealed when the last 'Siberian unicorn' lived on Earth - ScienceAlert

The good news for creationists is that unicorns really did exist - well, for one very loose definition of unicorns which is so loose as to include rhinoceroses but at least creationists can cling to this small crumb of comfort.

The problem is, the last one seems to have died out about 29,000 years ago, some 20,000 years before Earth was created - created according to creationist dogma, that is!

News of this discovery was published a few days ago with open access in the American Journal of Applied Sciences by a combined team from Tomsk University, Tomsk, Russia and Pavlodar State Pedagogical Institute, Pavlodar, Kazakhstan.

Religion Spiraling Downwards in Scotland

Most people in Scotland 'not religious' - BBC News

It's a measure of just how irrelevant religion is becoming in the UK that this little news item passed almost unnoticed and certainly without comment in mainstream media, but Scotland has become the latest part of Europe to become majority atheist.

These figures, which can only be regarded as catastrophic for the Church of Scotland, were revealed in the latest Scottish Social Attitudes survey which show that 52% of Scots now say they are not religious. This compares with 40% when the survey was first carried out in 1999. This latest survey was conducted between July 2015 and January 2016, hence this decline has taken place in just sixteen years.

It's not just these headline figures that make grim

Ten Reasons To Lose Faith - Update

If you haven't heard already, Ten Reasons To Lose Faith is a major new book aimed at non-believers, believers and those undecided - especially those undecided.

Unlike my previous books which were based on posts in this blog, this one consists of ten original extended essays on aspects of faith, why faith is fallacious, delusional and dangerous and designed to mislead and control both the individual and society as a whole.

The ten essays lead the reader naturally from an understanding of why faith is a useless tool for understanding the world, through the benefits of growth-enhancing doubt and uncertainty, to an understanding of how faith conditions, constrains and controls the mind of the faithful. Finally it explains how losing faith liberates the individual and creates a more inclusive, kinder, more caring society, free from the mutual hostility and distrust of the present faith-based, faith-ghettoised society which is causing so many of the world's problems.

The ten essays are:

1. The Fallacy of Faith.
   Explaining why 'faith' alone cannot lead to the truth with any degree of confidence. It is nothing more than a dishonest but satisfying pretense of knowledge in the face of ignorance; of pretending to know something you don't know. Faith is not a shortcut to understanding but a shortcut to delusion.

Unintelligent Design - As Plain As The Nose On Your Face!

PLOS Computational Biology: Impaired Air Conditioning within the Nasal Cavity in Flat-Faced Homo

Don't get me wrong! The human face is beautiful - to another human! Who could look at a human face and see it as ugly?

Well, of course, we're genetically 'programmed' to be attracted to an 'attractive' face. That's why we define it as attractive! But looked at objectively from, say, the point of view of the proverbial space alien studying life on Earth, the human face is surely one of the strangest in the mammalian order. It is rotated down through ninety degrees so that it still points forward even though our spine now points upwards and not forwards like most other mammals.

Nature Running Rings Around Creationists

'Fairy-Rings' in Western Australia

Discovery of fairy circles in Australia supports self-organization theory.

The two sacred chants of the creation industry are, "You can't get order from chaos, so order implies design!" and "Design needs a designer!" They are careful always to avoid saying 'biblical god' instead of 'designer' because they still like to pretend people don't know this is fundamentalist biblical creationism masquerading as science, of course.

Anyone who has seen a snowflake and knows that all the millions of different 'designs' of snowflakes all arise spontaneously from the chaotic distribution of water molecules in air under nothing more than the operation of physics and chemistry will know that claim is false but, as with so many other claims of the creation industry, being false is never seen as a reason not to keep repeating it.

My New Book! Ten Reason To Lose Faith

Faith is a fallacy!

Faith is delusionary. It produces the illusion of knowledge and certainty in the absence of real knowledge and understanding.

Faith is not a virtue; it is the sin of intellectual indolence and the abdication of personal responsibility. It is pretending to know things you do not know. It has failed mankind and now represents a clear and present danger, not just to humanity but to life on Earth itself.

Ten Reasons to Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It, looks at the reasons why people should reject faith and why a 'crisis of faith' is not a problem to be avoided but something that should be welcomed and encouraged because it represents a mind trying to come to terms with reality. A 'crisis of faith' is a triumph of reason and the starting point for personal liberation.

Recent events in Pakistan, Turkey, Paris and Belgium can leave little doubt that faith, far from being the basis of a kind, caring and peaceful society, is harmful to the point of being positively dangerous. Religions which once might have produced united, cohesive societies in relative isolation, now produce ghettoised, mutually suspicious, warring and uncompromising factions in an increasingly globalised, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-faith world where exactly the opposite is needed.

Radovan Karadžić's Faith-Based Initiative

Radovan Karadžić. Genocide for Jesus.

Radovan Karadzic's road to the International Criminal Tribunal - BBC News

It was almost prophetic!

The day I was making the very last edits to my new book, Ten Reasons To Lose Faith, as though to reinforce one of the central messages in it, the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague announced the conviction of Radovan Karadžić for genocide. Karadžić's crimes were committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war as Orthodox Christian Serbian forces led by Karadžić attempted to impose Serbia's traditional hegemony over neighbouring Bosnia, following the collapse and break-up of former Yugoslavia.

Unintelligent Design - Rejuvenating Parasites

Schistosoma mansoni

Stem cell progeny contribute to the schistosome host-parasite interface | eLife

It gets a bit tedious to keep writing about all these examples of mindless stupidity in biological 'design' but my creationist readers love having something to ignore, or in some cases, post abusive comments on to impress Jesus.

So, not wishing to disappoint, here's another one. It is the discovery, published today in eLife, that a particularly nasty flatworm parasite, Schistosoma mansoni, that causes schistosomiasis in tropical parts of the world, has a simple defense to the human immune system that is trying to destroy them.

My Intelligent (sic) Design believing friends tell me that everything in nature was made by magic by the same magic man they believe also wrote the Bible so they believe this Intelligent (sic) Designer made these parasites especially so they could live in our blood and make us sick. The problem is, it then seems to have

Snappy End to Creationism!

A computer generated reconstruction of the crocodile ancestor Carnufex carolinensis which lived on land and walked on two legs and may have been a top predator before dinosaurs took over the world, scientists believe.

Photograph: Jorge Gonzales/PA

Early crocodylomorph increases top tier predator diversity during rise of dinosaurs : Scientific Reports

I don't suppose the discovery of a 320 million year-old fossil of a giant crocodile is going to change many creationists' minds about Earth being around 6,000 years old but then nothing ever seems to. Evidence is such a difficult thing when it doesn't tell you what you want to believe - unless you're honest, like normal people.

This particular new example of how creationists need to go to quite idiotic lengths to retain their childish superstition was found by paleontologists from North Carolina University led by Lindsay Zanno, and practically on their doorstep in the Triassic Carnian Pekin Formation. The authors have named this long-legged, bipedal crocodile, the Carolina butcher (Carnufex carolinensis). With its long snout, large mouth, long legs and probable speed, it would have been a menacing beast. C. carolinensis would have been about 9 feet (3 metres) long and about 5 feet (1.6 metres) tall with blade-like teeth.

Even Fish Walk All Over Creationists

Comparable disparity in the appendicular skeleton across the fish–tetrapod transition, and the morphological gap between fish and tetrapod postcrania

How creationists love those gaps!

Real or imaginary, you'll find creationism's magic creator stuffed into as many gaps as they can find to stuff it into. Until, that is, science actually looks at the gap. At that point there is always one of two outcomes:

1. The magic creator isn't there and the gap is full of perfectly natural, scientifically understandable stuff.
2. The gap wasn't there in the first place. It was either made up, the product of creationist wishful thinking, or, rarely, due to a scientific mistake.

USA Religious Decline Confirmed

Is the United States a Counterexample to the Secularization Thesis?: American Journal of Sociology: Vol 121, No 5

According to data produced in the American Journal of Sociology, the USA should no longer be regarded as an outlier when it comes to religiosity, compared to the rest of the Western, developed world.

Although the movement has been small compared to Europe, there are distinct signs that Americans are moving in the same direction and for pretty much the same reason - each generation is becoming less religious.

New Rattlesnakes Rattle Creationists

Reassessing Those Rattlers | Research Frontiers.

One of the indispensable dogmas of creationism in its desperate attempt to fool people into thinking the Theory of Evolution is fatally flawed is that 'microevolution' and 'macroevolution' are different things needing different processes to explain them. 'Microevolution' is supposedly the evolution of variation, varieties, races, subspecies etc, while 'macroevolution' is supposedly the evolution of a new species.

Rotating Rocks of Ages Rock Creationism!

The Cantabrian orocline is a large structure that bends the Variscan orogen of Western Europe in NW Iberia.

Photo credit: J. Fernández Lozano et al.

New kinematic constraints on the Cantabrian orocline: A paleomagnetic study from the Peñalba and Truchas synclines, NW Spain

It's normally the plentiful evidence for evolution and against intelligent (sic) design, provided by the biological sciences, that creationists have to practice ignoring or dismissing with a wave of the hand and denialism, so it must be doubly difficult when evidence from geology shows their superstition is false too.

To make matters worse, this time it involves one of