Human Evolution News - Icelanders' Neanderthal Ancestors

Models of male and female Neanderthals in the Neanderthal Museum, Mettmann, Germany.

Photo: UNiesert / Frank Vincentz (assembly: Abuk Sabuk) /
Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL

Icelandic DNA puzzle gives new knowledge about Neanderthals

A new study into the Neanderthal component in the genomes of modern Icelanders has raised a couple of interesting questions:

1. Did anatomically modern humans breed with Neanderthals and Denisovans when they first entered Eurasia from Africa?
2. Or had Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred before hand so denisovan DNA was widespread in the Neanderthal population moderns interbred with.

This question is raised by the finding from examining the genomes of 27,566 Icelanders whose genome is in the deCODE database.

Covid-19 Stupidity and Magical Thinking

The late Bishop Gerald O. Glenn
Told packed church "God is larger than this dreaded virus"!

A COVID-Denying Pastor Died of COVID-19. Now His Family Has the Virus, Too. | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

The sad death of Bishop Gerald O. Glenn of the New Deliverance Evangelistic Church of Richmond Virginia from the Covid-19 virus and news that his entire family have now caught the deadly virus is a reminder that these unfortunate people are victims as much of the religion virus as they are of the Covid-19 virus.

A week before he died, Bishop Gerald O. Glenn preached to a packed church and boasted that "God is larger than this dreaded virus", in defiance of public advice to limit the size of public gatherings and to cancel church services.

Covid-19 Scam - Not Just the Christians

Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky

Charity Run by Ultra-Orthodox Leader Promises Coronavirus Cure to Large Donors | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos.

It's not just the American fundamentalist Christians who have spotted a good money-making opportunity in the Covid-19 pandemic. An ultra-orthodox Jewish group in Israel has dipped its bread in the gravy bowl too. In return for a monthly payment of NIS 100 for 30 months, donors will receive a silver amulet which, it is claimed, will give protection to the household from all illnesses.

It is not clear at this time whether the protection only comes into effect after all 30 payments have been made or whether it strats with the first payment and is withdrawn if the donor defaults.

Run by Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, a leading Haredi Rabbi, a charity called Kupat Ha’ir (City Fund), set up with the noble aim of bringing relief to families suffering from illness, and based in the Covid-19 hotspot of B’nei Brak, has promised:

Christian Scam Alert - Christians For Greed and Selfishness

Pastor Tony Spell "Give me your money!"

COVID-19-Defying Pastor Wants People to Send Him Their $1,200 Stimulus Checks | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

Pastor Tony Spell, the head of Louisiana’s Life Tabernacle Church, always has one eye open for the main chance, and Covid-19 is it! He has his eyes on the stimulus money his target dupes are getting to help the USA out of the virus-induced recession.

Not only did he refuse to close his church to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 on the basis that real Christians don't mind dying (and he doesn't mind helping them so long as they bring money along to his church before they do) but he is now telling them they should give him their $1200 stimulus money rather than spend it on food, rent and essential bills!

Another Cynical Christian Scam

con-artist Jim Humble, inventor of MMS

US halts sale of bleach product touted as 'miracle' virus cure | France24

Never slow to miss a get-rich-quick opportunity, a Christian church has been selling a phony 'cure' for multiple ills, including Covid-19 and claiming it as a 'sacrament'.

The quack cure is the invention of con-artist Jim Humble, who set of the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing as a vehicle for selling industrial bleach for around $50 a bottle under the brand-name "Miracle Mineral Solution" (MMS) with the claim that it will:

Cure, mitigate, treat, or prevent coronavirus, which includes COVID-19, as well as other diseases including Alzheimer’s, autism, brain cancer, HIV/AIDS, and multiple sclerosis.

How Religion Damages Children.

It’s difficult for young children to differentiate between fact and fiction after they have been exposed to religion.

Study Shows Children Raised With Religion Find It Challenging To Judge Fact From Fiction.

A 2014 study published in Cognitive Science shows a marked difference in their ability to distinguish fact from fiction between children brought up in secular households and those brought up in a religious ones.

Children conditioned to accept the magical content of religious stories as factual, find it harder to understand that such stories are actually impossible, not true accounts of real events. For example, when asked to classify the story of Moses waving a magic wand and making a pathway open up through the sea, children subjected to a religious upbringing will be more likely to classify the story as factual rather than fictional, despite the express inclusion of a magical element in the story.

Catholic Child Abuse - Pell Faces 26 More Allegations

Cardinal George Pell "Facing 26 more allegations"

George Pell’s Andrew Bolt interview: Cardinal facing fresh investigation.

There are persistent rumours that Cardinal Pell, former number 3 in the Vatican, who was recently cleared by the Australian High Court, after being convicted of the sexual abuse of two boys in the 1990s, is facing a further 26 allegations and is under investigation by the police.

Four Officers from the Auburn Police Area Command arrived at about 2.30 pm at The Good Shepherd Seminary in Abbotsford Road, Homebush, Sydney, NSW, where Pell is staying, for what was describes as a pre-arranged meeting to 'discuss security protocols".

Catholic Child Abuse - Baptism With Violence

Father Jacques Lacroix - Baptism with violence

Imagine! You're a devout Catholic family and you take your baby to the local church to be baptised into the faith - supposedly a joyous and happy occasion - only to have the priest lose his temper and launch a brutal assault on your child during the ceremony.

This was the experience of a French family in the Collegiate Church in Champeaux, near Melun, in the south-eastern suburbs of Paris, in June, 2018.

As this video shows, Father Jacques Lacroix (89), struggled to calm the child down and repeatedly told him to 'calm down' before squeezing his face, then staring him in the eyes before losing his temper and slapping his face with his left hand. There then followed a brief struggle as the horrified parents attempted to prise the distressed child out of the clutches of the priest, who eventually angrily pushed the child into the arms of its father.

Father Jacques later told France Info radio that it was more of a caress than a slap because the child wouldn't hold his head still while he poured water over it. He also announced that he wouldn't be conducting any more baptisms.

Pope Francis Celebrates As Pell Acquitted

Pope Francis decries 'unjust sentences' after cardinal George Pell acquitted | Australia news | The Guardian

In an astonishing intervention in the internal affairs of Australia, Pope Francis, who professes to be determined to rid the Catholic Church of the routine, recreational abuse of children by his priests, has likened Cardinal Pell to Jesus. This followed Pell's acquittal by Australia's Supreme Court, for the child sex-abuse charges for which he had been convicted by lower courts.

Pell had been convicted of the sexual abuse of two choir boys and had further charges against him dropped because it was felt he would not receive a fair trial after his conviction had been leaked to the press, despite an injunction preventing any comment on his trial from appearing in the Australian press. He was the highest ranking Catholic cleric to be so convicted and sentenced to prison. His conviction had been upheld by the Court of Appeal but has now been reversed on a technicality by the Supreme Court - the highest court in the land. The court ruled that the jury in the original trial should have allowed for 'reasonable doubt'.

During the original court case, Pell's lawyer, Robert Richter, in attempting to minimise the offence, describe it as 'just vanilla sex' - penetration without ejaculation and without the boy's active participation!

Catholic Child Abuse - The Practice Continues

Father Matthew Jolly

Photo: Manchester Evening News

Catholic priest thought he was meeting paedophile from Grindr to arrange abuse of his 'two-year-old-son'... it was an undercover cop - Manchester Evening News

Given the enormity of the scandals involving predatory paedophile priests and given Pope Francis' profesed determination to put a stop to it and introduce reforms to prevent it, you would expect it to be a thing of the past by now.

Not a bit of it, it seems. Predatory paedophilia is alive and well inside the Catholic Church and abusers are still being recruited into its ranks, if this case from UK is anything to go by.

Father Matthew Jolly was ordained in 2015 and while in Belgium, made contact with a man on Grindr. Unbeknown to him, the man was an undercover police officer who had only set up a fake account 20 minutes earlier. He was posing as a 36 year-old bisexual with a 2 year-old son. During the conversation, Jolly told the man that he was interested in sex with children. He expressed an interest in young girls but said a 'cute boy' would also be of interest.

Moral Self-Licensing - Catholic Extremists Steal From the Vatican

Members of Amazon indigenous populations walk during a Via Crucis procession from St. Angelo Castle to the Vatican, Saturday, Oct. 19, 2019. Pope Francis is holding a three-week meeting on preserving the rainforest and ministering to its native people as he fended off attacks from conservatives who are opposed to his ecological agenda.

Credit: AP Photo/Andrew Medichini

Thieves steal Amazon fertility statues as synod nears end

A neat illustration of the hypocrisy inherent in religious fanaticism, where 'faith' and piety are used to excuse moral self-licensed exemptions from the standards they would impose on the rest of us, was on display in Rome a few days ago.

Catholic vandals, attending the Vatican for a synod on preserving the Amazon Rainforest and ministering to the indigenous population there, called by Pope Francis, ignored the 8th Commandment, stole religious fertility symbols known as the Pachamama idols, and threw them in the River Tiber. The statues, symbolic representations of a pregnant women, had been paraded to the Vatican from St. Angelo Castle and presented to Pope Paul as symbols of fertility and life.

Basic Logic for Creationists - Lesson From Pompeii

As a service to creationists, I decided to provide a little explanation, by way of an example, of how deductive logic works.

No doubt, inspired by Ken Ham's stock method for dismissing historical evidence as an explanation for the present, by dismissing anything that hasn't been directly witnessed by the person advancing it with, "Were you there?", one creationist recently made the astonishing claim on Twitter in the tweet below.

"Timothy", known variously as "Dim Tim", "Dimmy" and "Tiny Tim" uses multiple accounts to try to advance creationism, usually making himself a laughing stock in the process. He appears to be a prime example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, being incapable of ever admitting that he could be wrong, no matter how blatantly he is so.

Triple Trouble for 'Intelligent' Design Creationists

Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Resistance to last resort drug arose in patient over 3 weeks -- ScienceDaily

Any truly intelligent designer knows exactly what the results of his or her design will be. A designer who simply blunders along making random changes without any idea what these changes will mean, could not conceivably be called 'intelligent' within the commonly-understood meaning of the word. Stupid would be the more correct term.

A designer who designs something to do harm to people could not possibly be called loving.

So, what are we to make of the news that resistance to antibiotics of last resort has been observed to arise in the bacterium, Pseudomonas aeruginosa?

Hurry For a Good Deal on My Books

Sadly, Amazon are ending the Kindle MatchBook program on 31st October this year.

Under this scheme, customers who have already bought a book through Amazon, could also buy a Kindle ebook version at a special low price, if the author had enrolled in the program.

So, if you want to take advantage of this program and get a reduced-price Kindle version of any of my books, you need to either already own it or order it before 31st October! You do not even need to own a Kindle device as free Kindle readers as available for PCs and Android smartphones.

A list of my books can be found here. The current best sellers are listed below.

Another announcement by Amazon that might affect readers of this blog is that Amazon are also discontinuing their support for blog subscriptions on Kindle. Under this scheme, Kindle owners could, for a small subscription (in the case of my blog, £0.99 per month) receive copies of a blog on their Kindle soon after publication.

If you're wondering why my blog has gone, sadly, that's the reason.

Meanwhile, of course, you can still get copies of my books for your Kindle, and, if you already own a paperback version, you can do so at a very low price!

Silly Bible - History The Authors Got Wrong

The Bible is not only full of bad science - which is at least understandable given that the earliest parts of it were based on myths and legends from, as Christopher Hitchens put it, the fearful infancy of our species - but it is full of very bad history too.

Much of the 'history' is a retrospective attempt to give legitimacy to land claims or to give credence to the claim to power and authority of dubious regimes, or supremacy over neighbours, of course. Giving this spurious credence to despots and insecure rulers of one form or another has frequently been the role of 'historians' and 'genealogists' throughout history, no less in Canaan and the Levant, than in more recent times and places.

The problem is, much of this 'history' was written by people who knew little or nothing of actual history, so they made what can only be described as wonderfully anachronistic schoolboy howlers. Not that they expected their readers (or mostly listeners) to realise this of course. They would have been equally ignorant of real history.

Evolution News - Cambrian 'Explosion' Blows up in Creationists' Face

Yilingia spiciformis and the track it left as it moved.

Credit: Z. Chen et al./Nature

Ancient worm fossil rolls back origins of animal life.

It's another of those bad days for creationism, like most days in biology research, in fact.

This time, one of their favourite misrepresentations - the so-called Cambrian Explosion - just got a lot harder to misrepresent. Fossil evidence has been found of a much earlier complex multicellular, worm-like organism.

This gives the lie to any claims that the Cambrian biota appeared suddenly without ancestry, as though some celestial designer arrived on Earth one day and plonked a whole lot of different, fully formed species, in the sea.

Christian Gay Conversion Therapy Leader Converts - To Honesty

McKrae Game
“I was a religious zealot that hurt people. Why would I want that to continue?”

Conversion therapy leader for 2 decades, McKrae Game disavows movement he helped fuel | News | postandcourier.com

McKrae Game was a leading exponent of the 'gay cure' or 'conversion therapy' that feeds off the guilt Christianity inflicts on homosexuals. He founded Truth Ministries, later rebranded as Hope for Wholeness, a faith-based conversion therapy program in South Carolina.

But now he has had his own conversion - to honesty. He has come out as gay and is campaigning to undo some of the harm he and his fellow 'gay cure' parasites did to people.

For two decades he preached that homosexuality would send gays to Hell and that they could be saved by his Conversion Therapy course. As stark an example of how Christianity, In Hitch's words, declares you ill and commands you to be well - and sells you the 'cure' - as you could wish for.

Evolution News - Another Piece of the Jigsaw

Facial reconstruction of A. anamensis by John Gurche

© Matt Crow, Cleveland Museum of Natural History

A new fossil cranium reveals the face of Lucy's ancestor | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

What is probably the most important hominin fossil since 'Lucy' was announced by the Max Planck Institute a few days ago. Like all significant scientific discoveries, it means a revision of our understanding is now needed to accommodate this new information.

Sadly for creationists, it doesn't mean that our understanding of human evolution was fundamentally wrong, but that it was incomplete. We now know a little more and so have a better understanding of the exact path our evolution from pre-hominin ancestors took.

Regrettably, the paper in Nature by Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Stephanie Melillo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and their colleagues sits behind an expensive paywall. However, we have the detailed press release from Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.

It really is time that major papers of this importance are published open access.

Catholic Abuse News - Cardinal Pell Conviction Stands

Cardinal George Pell. Outside court, wearing prison cloths and clerical collar

Cardinal George Pell loses appeal against sexual abuse convictions - BBC News

Cardinal Pell, former archbishop of Melbourne, Australia, formerly number three in the Vatican and the personal choice of Pope Francis to sort out the rapant financial corruption at the heart of the Catholic Church, has lost his appeal against conviction for child sexual abuse. Pell now becomes the most senior Catholic to be convicted of child abuse offences.

By a majority of two to one, the Australian appeal court judges upheld the conviction last December and dismissed the claim that the chief witness - one of the two whom Pell had sexually abused as a child - was unreliable and therefore there was insufficient evidence on which to convict.

Big Bat Cave Bother For Creationists

Gomantong Cave, Borneo, Malaysia

Photo: Donald McFarlane

https://eos.org/articles/how-bat-breath-and-guano-can-change-the-shapes-of-caves

Deep inside a massive limestone cave in Borneo, there is a mound of bird and bat droppings, produced by a constant 'rain' of fresh excrement from the bats and birds that occupy the ceiling of the cave, some 60 metres above.

This is not a place for the squeamish, and probably not a nice place for creationists desperate to believe Earth is just a few thousand years old.

In places, this mound can be 10 to 12 metres high. So massive it it that is sustains a whole ecosystem of cockroaches, microorganisms and other creatures that depend entirely on the fresh guano.