Unintelligent Design - Creating Problems

Leopard marking its territory

Simulations reveal interplay between scent marking and disease spread: Accounting for individual animal movement could boost understanding of emerging infectious diseases -- ScienceDaily

In a paper published in PLOS Computational Biology a couple of days ago, Lauren White of the University of Maryland's National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, Annapolis, MD, and colleagues have shown how a solution to the problem of parasitic infections, can create an opportunity for parasites to spread infections in a classic twist of an arms race.

Animals are liable to pass infections between them by physical contact, so one solution to this problem is for some species to be solitary and live within a territory. However, this solution only works if individuals are able to signal the borders of territories to other members of their species. Unlike birds, which often use song or calls, many species use scent markings placed at strategic positions.

Evolution News - Creationists Losing It

Good news: US classrooms are warming to evolution, thanks in part to scientist outreach

The Discovery Institute's plan to subvert the US Constitution and teach creationism at public expense in US public schools is failing badly, according to a recent report published in Evolution: Education Outreach. The proportion of science teachers teaching creationism as valid science in US public schools fell from 32% in 2007 to just 18% in 2017.

Astonishingly, in 2007, two years after a federal court ruled in Kitzmiller vs Dover District, that 'Intelligent design', like its predecessor, 'Creation Science' lacked any scientific merit as was nothing more than fundamentalist, Bible literalist religion dressed up to look like science, American public schools were in breach of the 'Establishment Clause' by allowing creationism to be taught in science class. Only just over half of teachers (51%) were teaching evolution unequivocably as factual.

Fundamentally Violent

Christian crusaders take Jerusalem and massacre the Jewish and Moslem inhabitants

Why People Kill in the Name of God | Psychology Today

Anyone who spends any time talking to religious fundamentalist on social media will be acutely aware of how quickly the conversations turns to abuse and threats of violence, especially towards those who challenge and dispute the claims of religious fundamentalist. Questioning their beliefs or presenting opposing arguments that threaten to undermine them, seem to provoke aggression instead of reflection and honest consideration.

The reasons for this were explained by a study led by Daniel N. Jones, of the University of Nevada Reno, published in the Sage Journal, Social Psychological and Personality Science last April.

Sadly, the paper is behind an expensive firewall but the conclusions are presented in an article in Psychology Today, by Professor David Ludden, PhD, a professor of psychology at Georgia Gwinnett College.

Malevolent Design News - How Meningococci Make Us Sick

False color scanning electron micrograph of meningococci (orange) adherent to human host cells (green).

Image credit: Alexandra Schubert-Unkmeir / Universität Würzburg

Small Protein, Big Impact - Universität Würzburg

Entering the strange world of intelligent [sic] design we find numerous examples, like Covid-19, of the sheer malevolence of any intelligence that could design such things.

Take for example, this recently discovered mechanism whereby the Meningococcal bacteria cause life-threatening meningitis and meningococcal septicaemia. It was discovered by research groups led by the Würzburg University scientists Christoph Schoen and Jörg Vogel and published in the journal Nature Communications a few days ago.

Another Factual Finding Debunks the Bible Narrative

Recent view on the Selenga River close to the archeological site Ust-Kyakhta-3.

© G. Pavlenok

Oldest Connection with Native Americans Identified Near Lake Baikal in Siberia | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

Some 35,000 years before the origin myths in the Bible were being invented by Bronze Age Canaanite hill farmers, the ancestors of Native Americans were living in the Lake Baikal area of Siberia, and even dying of plague.

This was the conclusion of a massive study led by the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

As their press release explains:

Bible Debunked Again by Science Without Even Trying

Illustration of one of the early settlers in the Caribbean. The Caribbean Sea served as a kind of ‘aquatic highway’ that connected the islands with the mainland.

Illustration: Tom Björklund.

Ancient DNA provides new insights into the early peopling of the Caribbean – University of Copenhagen

According to a new study by an international team of researchers from the Caribbean, Europe and North America, led by Cosimo Posth, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, humans were busy populating the Caribbean islands from North and South America at around the time the Bronze Age pastoralists who wrote the Bible were recording their origin myths. These myths include that of a global mass genocide and repopulation of a sterile world from 8 survivors, just a few thousand years ago.

A Life Damaged by Christianity - Rev. Louis Sheldon

Rev. Louis P. Sheldon,
Leading homophobe and persecutor of the LGBTQ community, dies aged 85.

Rev. Louis Sheldon, Who Fiercely Battled “the Homosexual Agenda,” Is Dead at 85 | Terry Firma | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, founder of the extreme homophobic Traditional Values Coalition, has died, aged 85. Few in the LGBTQ community will mourn his passing.

Preacher of hate, Rev. Sheldon has dedicated his life to promoting the bullying, alienation, demonization and stigmatising of homosexuals, based entirely on a passage in the Christian Bible that appears to forbid a man "laying with another man as with a woman" (something a gay man does not do, of course, unless anal sex with a women was the norm in Biblical times).

Evolution News - Europeans' Mixed Ancestry

Maps showing inherited genetic component from hunter-gatherer (blue) and Anatolian Neolithic (orange) populations along time slices. The expansion of the Anatolian component carried by Neolithic migrants and the differences in proportions observed regionally and chronologically illustrate the diversity of processes at work during the Neolithic expansion in Europe.

© Maïté Rivollat

Interaction Between Neolithic Migrants and Hunter-Gatherers | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

A team of French and German scientists have worked out how modern Europeans are derived from two different waves of migration by two different routes, as Neolithic farmers replaced the earlier hunter-gatherer people, but the degree of admixing varied widely, suggesting a complex relationship between the two neolithic groups.

The Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History press release explains:

Analyzing the first archaeogenetic data from the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Western Europe, a team of French and German researchers documents levels of admixture between expanding early Neolithic farmers and local hunter-gatherers seen nowhere else in Europe.

Covidiots - Minnesota Catholic Church 'Above the Law'

Bernard Hebda
Archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis

Showing Backbone, MN Bishops Defy State

Showing not the slightest sign of contrition or humility, following the bankruptcy of the St. Cloud diocese in Minnesota, because of the $22.5 million payout to the victims of its predatory paedophile priests, the Catholic bishops of Minnesota issued a defiant letter about the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, calling for the ban on assembly in places of worship to be lifted and declaring the church to be above the law.

In defiance of Minnesota governor, Tim Waltz, the letter asserting the "independence of Body of Christ has from secular authority" and announced the resumption of public Masses beginning May 26.

Astonishingly, they felt entitled to announce that they had given their parishioners "permission for the resumption of the public celebration of Mass on Tuesday, May 26, which will give us time to be ready for the celebration of Pentecost on May 31." They feel they have the authority to "give permission" to Catholics to defy the lawful instructions of an elected state governor!

The letter, signed by all six bishops (only one of whose dioces is not now in a state of bankruptcy due to having to pay their share of the $210 million paid to 210 victims of their priests) states that the lockdown order is an order "that defies reason." Presumably, a Catholic bishop knows more about viruses and epidemiology than virologists and epidemiologists.

Unintelligent Design - Spittlebugs and Bacteria

Spittlebug, the nymph stage of the froghopper, Clastoptera proteus

Two bacteria allow spittlebugs to thrive on low-nutrient meals | Krishna Ramanujan, Cornell Chronicle

Imagine you're an omniscient, omnipotent designer of living organisms and you've designed an insect you want to live and thrive. How do you go about providing it with food?

Well, you design it to live on the low-nutrient sap obtained from the xylem of plants, then you provide it with a ludicrously complex system of symbiotic bacteria which take this poor food supply and turn it into the essential chemicals the insect needs to live on, apparently.

Of course, you need to design special structures for these bacteria to live in. For some reason, you forgot all about the metabolic processes you designed for millions of creations, so you designed this unique one afresh, like re-inventing a wheel.

Evolution - Letting God Off The Hook for Covid-19

Evolution of Pandemic Coronavirus Outlines Path from Animals to Humans | Duke Health

One of the few amusing aspects to the Covid-19 pandemic is watching intelligent [sic] design creationists trying to explain why their putative creator created the virus in the first place. Attempts have included - er... it wasn't our god but another creator - Satan, and God wanted to teach us a lesson because [fill in whatever hobby-horse is currently upsetting local fundamentalists]. The other problem for creationists to explain was why the virus seems to be spread more easily amongst people who regularly gather in places of worship than amongst those who stay at home.

Now however, some scientists from Duke University Medical Centre, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Texas at El Paso and New York University have shown that it wasn't creationism's creator god who made the Covid-19 virus after all, but a perfectly natural process we call 'evolution'. This process caused the common coronavirus to change into SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) and to become highly infective and dangerous to humans.

The Duke Health press release explains:

Closing Another Gap - Consciousness

General anesthesia has been in use for nearly 175 years, but its mechanism for causing loss of consciousness has been unknown until now. So momentous was the first use of ether that it was memorialized in this painting, "First Operation Under Ether," by Robert C. Hinckley.

Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine,
Harvard Medical School.

Solving the 175-year-old medical mystery of anesthesia’s effects | Scripps Research

Scientists may not have fully explained consciousness and how the brain monitors its own thought processes but, as this piece of research by scientists from the Scripps Institute shows, consciousness does not exist independently of the brain, as some woo-peddling charlatans claim, but is an integral, materialist function of neurophysiology.

Scripps Research News explains:

Using modern nanoscale microscopic techniques, plus clever experiments in living cells and fruit flies, the scientists show how clusters of lipids in the cell membrane serve as a missing go-between in a two-part mechanism. Temporary exposure to anesthesia causes the lipid clusters to move from an ordered state, to a disordered one, and then back again, leading to a multitude of subsequent effects that ultimately cause changes in consciousness.

Bible Authors May Have Been High on Cannabis

Iron Age Judahite shrine

New research reveals Cannabis and Frankincense at the Judahite Shrine of Biblical Arad.

Cannabis was used in early cultic ceremonies in the Iron Age kingdom of Judah, according to researchers from Tel Aviv University. This may explain some of the more bizarre stories and claims of revelations and experiences related in the Bible.

This comes from analysis of the material found on two Iron Age altars discovered at the entrance to the "holy of holies" of a shrine at Tel Arad in the Beer-sheba Valley, Israel, which were found to contain Cannabis and Frankincense.

The findings were published free access yesterday in Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University

Catholic Abuse News - Another Diocese Goes Bankrupt

Catholic cathedral, St Paul, Minnesota.

Photograph: Jim Mone/AP

Catholic diocese in Minnesota to pay sexual abuse victims $22.5m | Guardian

The Roman Catholic diocese of St. Cloud in Minnesota is to go bankrupt but not before paying out $22.5 million to some 70 victims victims of sexual abuse by 41 priests, dating back to the 1950s, according to the terms of a settlement announced last Tuesday.

St Cloud will be the fifth of Minnesota's six diocese to go bankrupt because of sexual abuse compensation payments.

Covidiots - Missi Wimberly the Doctor's Wife

Screen grab of Missi Wimberly's 'Stop Social Distancing' Tweet
(now deleted)

Missi Wimberly: Backlash Over COVID-19 Pedicure Tweet | Heavy.com

Missi Wimberly was so shocked that her pedicurist wore PPE during her 'essential' pedicure that she flew into a rage and started a Twitter campaign to end social distancing. Apparently, the suggestion that anyone could catch something like the Covid-19 virus from her, or that she could catch it from a pedicurist was an unacceptable afront to her dignity.

One could almost accept this behaviour from an ignorant, spoilt little princess daughter of a Bible belt Redneck who had never read a book in her life, but Missi Wimberly is no ordinary Alabama Redneck. She proclaims herself on her LinkedIn page to be "a health, wellness and fitness professional". She is also the wife of a doctor who should understand the rudiments of epidemiology and the danger to people that the Covid-19 virus presents.

Her husband is Lee Thomas Wimberly, MD, an Internist with several Alabama hospitals and CEO of several retirement homes in the state. Together they have five children. One can only hope that, despite Missi's cavalier approach to infection control, their children remain safe during the pandemic.

Evolution News - Women with Neanderthal Genes are More Fertile

Photo credit: Getty Images

Women with Neandertal gene give birth to more children | Karolinska Institutet Nyheter

The one in three European women who have a copy of a Neanderthal gene are likely to be more fertile because they suffer fewer miscarriages and incidents of bleeding in early pregnancy, according to researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

The gene codes for a progesterone receptor. Molecular analyses revealed that these women produce more progesterone receptors in their cells, which may lead to increased sensitivity to progesterone and to protection against early miscarriages and bleeding.

Covidiots - The Catholic Bishop and the 'Fake Shepherds'

Bishop Athanasius Schneider
Auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese of Mary Most Holy in Astana, Kazakhstan

Bishop Schneider: Govt’s are using COVID-19 as pretext to ‘persecute’ Church | Blogs | LifeSite

Never being slow to play the persecution card, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese of Mary Most Holy in Astana, Kazakhstan, has declared the Covid-19 lockdown to be a global conspiracy to persecute Christians by forcing churches to close.

In March this year he told the Catholic News magazine, Life Site News:

Directives canceling all public Masses “are a pure human law; however, the supreme law in the Church is the salvation of souls”.

Covidiots - Dettol Cure (Not True, But Could Be)

Fake News - But not THAT fake

Perma | FROM PASTOR DOOM TO PASTOR DISINFECTANT!

The story about a South African pastor killing 59 people by listening to Trump's idiotic suggestion and giving them Dettol to drink to cure Covid-19 is fake. It did not happen!

At least it did not happen then and to cure Covid-19.

It happened in December 2016 in the AK Spiritual Christian Church, Makgodu, Limpopo, where 'Prophet' Rufus Phala gave his unfortunate congregation Dettol to drink, telling them it would cure them of sickness.

'Prophet' Phala told his congregation that God had told him to give them the Dettol to drink and that he had received several WhatsApp messages from people telling him they had been healed by it.

There are no records of anyone dying as a result of this faith-based stupidity.

A few weeks earlier, 'Prophet' Lethebo Rabelago of Mount Zion Christian Church, Mathibela, Limpopo, had sprayed the congregation with the toxic insecticide 'Doom', telling them it would cure them of all sickness. He has now been banned from spraying anything on his congregation by the Limpopo High Court. His lawyer, Edmond Lubisi, had claimed 'Prophet' Rabelago had prayed over the insecticide, making it holy.

Phophi Ramathuba of the Health Department, welcomed the court ruling and announced that her department would be running various programmes to help poor and vulnerable people understand the effects of these 'unusual practices' performed on them by these pastors.

Why Americans Are Losing Faith

Internet Access and Growth in 'Nones'

How the Internet Is Taking Away America’s Religion | MIT Technology Review

This article in MIT Technology Review is from 2014 but, if anything the correlation is likely to be even more marked today as the increase in non-affiliation (Nones) in USA has increased considerably in the last six years, as has rejection of creationism as an explanation for the existence of humans and of biodiversity.

Data from University of Chicago's General Social Survey, which has been collecting cohort data since 1972, was analysed by Allen Downey, a computer scientist at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts who came up with the following major causes of this decline in religious affiliation in the USA:

Covidiots - South Korea's Wackadoodle Christians

88 year-old Lee Man-hee, "the Second Coming of Jesus"

Prosecutors raid branches of religious group at center of coronavirus outbreak

A wackadoodle Christian cult in South Korea has been linked to 50-60% of Covid-19 deaths. Now the cult's leader faces homicide charges! The cult was founded by Lee Man-hee who claims to be the Second Coming of Jesus. His followers believe the Bible contains secret messages and metaphors that only he can understand (where have we heard that before?).

They also believe they are immune to disease. Now 1.2 million South Koreans are calling for the cult to be disbanded.

According to this report in The Korea Herald