Feel That Christian Love!

A faith which is afraid of contradiction is not a faith - it is a fear.

You would think anyone secure in their beliefs would be content to explain their reasons and have done with it, confident that their beliefs are based on sound reasoning which can stand the test of doubt and counter argument. Even in the absence of good evidence you would think they could explain the inescapable logic behind their beliefs and the faults with all the other logic.

Surely, Christianity, with it's worship of 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild' who tells us to forgive our enemies and turn the other cheek, and of a god of peace and goodwill to all, is going to use non-violence against its doubters, especially those who simply disagree over some detail or other of the nature of their god and how exactly it should be worshipped? Surely, in the spirit of brotherly love, a good Christian secure in his own beliefs would simply explain to the doubter where and why he had gone wrong and trust the doubter to see the good sense of his argument.

Well, if you believe what they tell us, that might be what you expect, but is that expectation born out by the facts?

Not a bit of it.

The facts show that's not how religion, and particularly Christianity works. What we see is not a confident presentation of the arguments, but an assertiveness and ready resort to violence which betrays a lack of any such confidence and which betrays an underlying fear of counter-argument.

This time next week we'll be well on our way to the South of France, to the Languedoc-Rousillon region where, in the middle ages, one of Christianity's many little wars of persecution and violent suppression of dissent and disagreement took place - the crusade against the Cathars, also known as the Albigensians after the town of Albi, called the Cathar or Albigensian Crusade of 1209-1229.

The Cathars regarded themselves as Christians. Catharism had spread into Northern Italy and Southern France, especially the Languedoc region into the Pyrenees. It's origins are slightly obscure but seems to have included elements of the Paulician movement from Armenia, Bogomil gnosticism from Bulgaria, Egyptian Arianism and Persian Manichaeism.

In those days, the more powerful centres of Christianity, despite a frenzy of persecution and document burning which followed the recognition by Constantine of Christianity as the official state religion, had not managed to suppress all the various sects which the early Christians had spawned in the first few centuries after Paul of Tarsus and others had exported their different versions of the myths to various parts of the Eastern Roman Empire. In addition, many of these were co-existing with Islam and rubbing shoulders with other ideas like Buddhism coming along the developing trade routes across Central Asia, so there were a large number of bizarre creeds all coming under the broad umbrella of Christianity on the basis that they were centred on a belief in the Biblical Jesus and on various translations and interpretations of early versions of documents and 'gospels', some of which found themselves sanitized and bound up into the official Bible.

Basically, Cathars believed there are two gods, a bad one (Satan) who created the material world, and a good one (Jehovah), and that Jesus was a messenger from Jehovah whose teachings should be followed to avoid Satan's evil. They believed that at best, Jesus was only God's son and not God, so they denied the Trinity as taught by both the Roman and Orthodox Churches. They also rejected oaths, including marriage and taught that sex was sinful and anything which was the result of sexual reproduction was also satanic, so they were vegetarian. Obviously no one had told them how plants reproduce but at least they knew it didn't involve dangley bits and pleasure.

The presence of the Cathars was encouraging regional independence in southern France which meant the Catholic French King was losing his grip on his southern barons, but of course their worst 'sin' was in rejecting the authority of Pope Eugene III and even refusing to pay tithes! To make matters worse, in theological debate, the Cathars were winning more often than not, seeming to appeal particularly to the theologically literate, so the Catholic church was losing its local intelligentsia, and being humiliated. Whole congregations were reputedly converting en masse along with their clerics (who probably knew which way the wind seemed to be blowing). This clearly could not be tolerated, so, after feeble attempst to convert them by sending a Cistercian monk, a cardinal and a bishop to preach to them, all to no lasting effect, the Papacy resorted to the time-honour fall-back theological arguments - violence and murder.

When Pope Innocent III came to power he asked King Phillip Augustus of France to launch a military campaign against the Cathars. Phillip Augustus sent Simon de Montfort and Bouchard de Marly, two of his more ambitious barons. To encourage their religious zeal, Pope Innocent III ordered that all Cathar land could be seized. There followed twenty years of 'persuasive' murder and persecution. In one siege, Simon de Montford ordered that 100 captured Cathars should have their eyes gouged out and their lips and noses cut off, then be sent back to the town of Béziers, led by a captive with one eye remaining.

Béziers was also defended by a large number of Catholics who had opted to stay to protect their homes and property when offered free passage at the start of the siege. As the siege came to an end, Arnaud, the Cistercian abbot-commander who had ordered that all the Cathars were to be killed, was asked how to tell the Cathars from Catholics. His answer was a tribute to his humanity and Christian love for his fellow man. "Kill them all, the Lord will recognise his own". When the doors of the church of St Mary Magdalen were broken down, the 7,000 people who had taken refuge in it were dragged out and killed. In all, up to 20,000 people from the town were killed by being used for target practice and by being dragged behind horses for sport, interspersed no doubt, with bouts of brotherly love, goodwill and reasoned discourse on matters theological. Or perhaps not.

On 16 March 1244, 200 Cathars were ritually massacred by being burned alive on a large fire outside the Cathar-held castle of Montségur.

So, it's good to see that Christians, confident in their faith and in their reasons for holding to it, are able to persuade their fellow man to see the good sense of their theological arguments and are able to practice the teaching of Jesus to forgive their enemies and not live by the sword, the way they tell the rest of us we should live.

Or it would be, if only examples of them doing so were virtually non-existent and if only there were not so many examples of them doing exactly the opposite.

Further reading:

Cathars and Cathar Beliefs in the Languedoc
The Cathars: What was the Albigensian Crusade?
Cathars & Albigenses: What Was Catharism? What did Cathars Believe?

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The Outsider Test Of Faith

Faith - the sure and certain way to tell that all other faiths are wrong.

The Outsider Test Of Faith:

John W. Loftus' challenge to believers to apply the same test they use for other faiths to their own:

If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you would be a Muslim right now, say it isn't so? That is a cold hard fact. Dare you deny it? Since this is so, or at least 99% so, then the proper method to evaluate your religious beliefs is with a healthy measure of skepticism.

Test your beliefs as if you were an outsider to the faith you are evaluating. If your faith stands up under muster, then you can have your faith. If not, abandon it, for any God who requires you to believe correctly when we have this extremely strong tendency to believe what we were born into, surely should make the correct faith pass the outsider test. If your faith cannot do this, then the God of your faith is not worthy of being worshipped.

To this I would add:

• If you were born in Madrid, New York, Rome or Kansas you would almost certainly be Christian.
• If you had been born in first century BCE Jerusalem you would be Jewish.
• If you had been born in fifth century BCE Greece you would believe in the Greek pantheon.
• If you had been born in pre-WWII Japan you would be Shinto.

Wherever and whenever you were born you would almost certainly have the same faith as your parents.

Unless, that is, you had applied exactly the same standard to your parents' faith as you have to all the others. If you had, you are very unlikely to have any faith at all because, like every other faith, yours has no evidential basis and so would fail John W. Loftus' Outsider Test Of Faith.

In fact, if you were honest, you would admit that you have never really even thought about the other gods and other faiths, let alone applied any of the tests you just assume someone else must have made when they accepted your faith and rejected all the others.

If you disagree, please show your reasoning:

Hint: Arguing that all the other faiths must be wrong because yours is right won't work because that could be used with equal non-validity by all the others.

Debunking Christianity: The Outsider Test.....:

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Christian's Christians

1960s Replica of HMS Bounty

The Pitcairn Islanders are devoutly religious Christians so you would expect them to behave like true Christians, wouldn't you?

Yet, they have a culture which included the routine sexual abuse of girls from the age of about 12.

The people of this group of the Pitcairn Islands, four remote islands in the South Pacific, are all descended from the Bounty mutineers and the Tahitians who set out from Tahiti with them. Led by the Bounty's master's mate, Fletcher Christian, the mutineers had returned to Tahiti to collect a few friendly Tahitians as servants and wives after they had seized the Bounty and set her Captain, William Bligh and his loyal sailors adrift in a small boat. In an astonishing feat of seamanship and navigational skills he had learned under Captain James Cook, Bligh succeeded in navigating 3,618 nautical miles to Timor in 47 days, otherwise we would probably know nothing of the mutiny.

Having arrived at Pitcairn, the Bounty was burned and scuttled to prevent anyone leaving and betraying the mutineers, after her cargo was stripped of everything, including a Bible, a prayer book and a still.

Racial tensions, which arose because of the sexual imbalance and the fact that the Tahitians found themselves to be virtual slaves, caused fighting in which most of the mutineers were killed, the rest dying of alcoholism or disease. The last remaining survivor was John Adams who found solace in the Bounty's Bible. As leader of the community he imposed a strict Christian fundamentalism on the islanders based partly on childhood recollections. Apparently having remembered that it was traditional to fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday he decreed that the islanders should fast every Wednesday and Friday.

However, one of the Christian moral codes which was ignored, probably because it would have meant not only total abstinence from sex but also the extinction of the population, was the prohibition on incest, or rather the definition of incest in the prayer book. With all the islanders closely related, having been founded by such a small founder population, these rules were relaxed. Not so the Levitican laws however, which were strictly enforced, particularly the dietary laws. 'Unclean' birds were strictly prohibited. The Pitcairn Islands Study Centre website, a Seventh-Day Adventist site, has more details on this.

And so the Pitcairn Islanders' religion waxed and waned, given a boost now and then when a ship called with a chaplain to preach a sermon or two, until in a large box of Seventh-Day Adventist literature was delivered on a ship from California in 1787. At first this was ignored until it was 'rediscovered' by the daughter of the islanders' leader Simon Young. One of the changes he introduced was changing the 'Sabbath' from Sunday to Saturday, which was ironic because they had been calling Saturday the Sabbath thinking it was Sunday until they were told the Bounty had crossed the International Date line without anyone noticing and their calendar had been a day out. I wonder if their god minded.

Seventh-Day Adventist Church, Adamstown, Pitcairn Island

Eventually, after a concerted 'mission' in 1890, almost all the islanders converted from their own distinct form of 'Church of England' Christianity to Seventh-Day Adventism, and a strict moral code which included a prohibition on dancing, displays of public affection, smoking and drinking alcohol was imposed and remained in place until recently.

Another Christian tradition which seems to have been adopted with more than a little enthusiasm is hypocrisy, especially in matters of private versus public sexual attitudes and activity. The islanders had been unwilling to reform their sexual practices which had been tolerated by John Adams and bring it into line with their new-found Christian fundamentalism. In 2004, seven men from Pitcairn were charged with 55 sexual offences with minors. In 2005 another 6 were charged with a further 41 offences. All were convicted of some or all of the offences. It transpired that sexual abuse of girls from the age of about 12 was routine.

Mayor of Pitcairn, Steve Christian.
A Conviction Christian.

Protected by their remoteness and by the reticence of the subservient women to break the code of silence of which any Sicilian Mafioso or Vatican enforcer would be proud, good, upright, God-fearing fundamentalist Christian men had been uninhibited in their abuse of their female 'underlings'. Obviously, there was nothing in the Bible which told them it was wrong.

A study of the island's records showed that most girls had their first child between the ages of 12 and 15. In a strongly patriarchal society in which women had no real option but to accept the abuses, they had become institutionalised and routine, and even defended by some of the older women on the grounds that it had done them no harm. In a society dominated by moralising 'Christian' male leaders, sexual abuse of children was even more systematic than that frequently found in Christian boarding schools, orphanages, choirs and almost anywhere where priests and nuns have unsupervised control of children, now being exposed throughout the developed world, where abused children are gaining the courage to talk about their abuse, just as the abused girls of Pitcairn have.

Just another example of how religion is used to control a population and how it works in favour of the powerful and against the interests of the weak and powerless whom it works assiduously to keep that way, and an illustration of what religion can produce when left unchecked and feels itself to be above the law.

Religions provides excuses for people who need excuses.

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What's In A Name?

Wouldn't it be good if we had a record of how genes are spread through a population going back some 500 years or so? It would be a bit like watching ripples spread out when we drop a stone in a pond or genes flowing through a population over time.

What we need is some sort of marker which got recorded fairly frequently, unlike hair or eye colour, which, if they got recorded at all before we had photography or passports, were far too patchy and were probably only written about then if they were unusual and belonged to a person of some importance. We all know about Queen Elizabeth I's red hair, but what colour was Henry II's or Thomas Beckett's hair? Who know what colour Alfred the Great's eyes were?

As it happens, we have just such a marker, which has been recorded in England since 1837 and since about 1500 or even earlier in some places. We have the Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages and, before that the records of baptisms, marriages and deaths maintained by churches, albeit in a non-standard format and often badly stored so that many have fallen foul of mildew, mice, water, fire and fading ink so that getting back beyond 1600 is often a matter of luck.

But what has that got to do with genes?

Until recently, the law in England required a child to take the surnames of the father if the parents were married, or the mother if not, so, even though birth out of wedlock was common, families were large and the majority of births were in marriage. This means that males tended to inherit their y chromosomes along with their surnames. (For the uninitiated: males have an x and a y chromosome; females have two x chromosomes. Sperm always has either an x or a y chromosome and ova always have an x. The gender of the baby is determined by the chromosome in the successful sperm, so men determine the gender of the baby and boys will always have their father's y chromosome). Not that the y chromosome is of any special interest in this because breeding success, and especially producing more males, may have nothing to do with it. It is a convenient metaphor, however.

What all this means is that, since boys always have a copy of their father's y chromosome and they usually have their father's surname, the y chromosome is 'marked' by the surname and the surname has been recorded, so, in effect the y chromosome has been marked.

This is not an exact mapping for two reasons:

• Children of unmarried mothers take their mother's name, not their fathers. While the mother may well have taken her father's name, she didn't take his y chromosome.
• Children may not have the father they think. It's a wise child who knows his own father.

Now, suppose something about a man's genes made him more likely to have male children or more healthy children, or just more children? What we would expect is that, over a few generations from a more-or-less even spread of surnames, his surname would become more common in a small area to begin with and to spread out from that focal point at each generation. But, because of the diluting effect of the two factors above, this effect would die away as it spread.

Is this what we see?

These surname distribution maps for names in my family tree are taken from the 1891 census. They are from Ancestry.co.uk:
It is quite clear from this random sample that surnames are not randomly distributed across the country but tend to be much more common in some areas than in others. Major centres are also surrounded by zones of diminishing frequency, just as I hypothesised above.

One of these maps is especially interesting and not just because I'm related to probably all the people in it. The Pratley surname has been the subject of a One-name Study by Michelle Hawke, an Oxfordshire genealogist. From Michelle's website:

The origins of the Pratley surname are clear to see, but not so easy to explain. The very first Pratley was originally William Spratley, who came to Leafield, Oxfordshire from a town near Banbury in around 1620. During his life in Leafield, the surname in the records fluctuates between Spratley and Pratley, but after his death in 1660, the family permanently took the surname Pratley...

The first few generations of Pratleys are easy to trace from parish registers and wills. William married twice, producing a dozen children, four of whom were boys who went on to continue the Pratley line. After a few generations, each branch of the family became quite distinct - not only were Pratleys marrying other Pratleys, but Pratley gamekeepers were arresting Pratley poachers! But it was still more than a hundred years before more than a few Pratleys left Leafield and started families in other villages.

By this time they filled all strata of working society - from paupers living on parish relief to farmers of a couple of hundred acres. At first they migrated to neighbouring villages and counties, but with the advent of the railways, and a couple of notable events in Pratley history, they spread across England and off to America, Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand.

Today there are more than a thousand Pratleys around the world - not a large number as surnames go, but not bad for just three hundred and fifty years! And there are still Pratleys living in Leafield today, all these years after William first arrived.

April 30, 1832 First Pratley Baptism.
Baptisms for Leafield were performed at Shipton-Under-Wychwood until
A church was built at Leafield. L in the margin indicates from Leafield

We can see how, from a single 'seeding', the Pratley name, and with it, the Pratley 'gene for success', which I'll use as a general term for whatever factor it might be for any particular surname because it might well be any number of possible factors, spread from it's nucleus in the Wychwood forest. Now, anyone like me who is descended from families who were present in Oxfordshire at least before 1500, and who isn't a recent new-comer to the area is almost certainly related to one or more Pratleys. If you are a 'native' of North West Oxfordshire, from the general Witney - Chipping Norton - Woodstock area, and you think you aren't related to a Pratley, you or one of your ancestors, have probably been lied to.

If my theory is correct, that this local success of a surname is due to something in the male genes which either produces more healthy children or, even better, more sons, we should see this in the record.

And guess what?

A quick count of the number of Pratley births registered between 1837 and 1887 in the Witney and Chipping Norton Registration Districts. of 688 registered births, 53% were of males and 47% of females. I got this from a search on FreeBMD.org.uk

But if that were true, you might expect the 'Pratley gene' to spread very rapidly because each new centre, as Pratleys moved out of the area, should have set off a new explosion. And this is just what did happen when George Pratley, a forester from Leafield in the Wychwood Forest upped and moved to Perthshire in Scotland in 1829, taking his foresting skills, his wife Jane and his two surviving children with him to work on the Scottish estate of his employer, who also owned the Cornbury Estate in the Wychwood Forest. As this map shows, Edward and his Wife Jane soon founded a new colony of Pratleys, producing another nine children .

But this doesn't always apply and the tendency is for the 'gene for success' to lose it's vigour as time goes by. This apparent reduction in 'vigour' is caused by the two things I mentioned earlier - marital infidelity, and the law of matronymics for children of unmarried mothers. This means that some 'Pratley' genes will be in people with other surnames and some Pratleys will not have the Pratley genes.

This isn't the only interpretation of course, and it is equally possible that William Pratley (or Spratley) had the good fortune to marry a woman who carried a gene for making more breeding males. However, I think it is easy to see how a gene which is firmly linked to something which gives breeding success, will spread out from an initial 'seeding' or advantageous mutation.

This of course is exactly what we would expect to see if a new advantageous mutation arose in a local area of a wide-spread population. However, this is not the only mechanism by which alleles spread and change their frequency in the gene pool. Genetic drift plays a part and so does the 'founder effect' when a small population becomes isolated from the main population. The founders are statistically unlikely to have the same proportion of different alleles as the parent population and, with a small population, the effects of chance will be more marked. In these populations, and especially if there are local environmental pressures different to those acting on the main population, shifts in allele frequency can be marked.

Using the surname analogy again, a 'founder effect' can be seen in the population of Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific, which was populated by the Bounty mutineers and a few islanders, mostly women, from Tahiti. The leader of the mutiny, Fletcher Christian had married a Tahitian girl named Maimiti with whom he had two sons before he died, Charles and Thursday October (No! Really!). Fletcher and all but one of the mutineers, John Adams, either died of illness or were murdered in in-fighting. A very large proportion of the Pitcairn Islanders now have the surname Christian or Adams and like me and the thousands of Oxonians with our little pieces of Pratley in us, so they have a little bit of John Adams or Fletcher Christian in them.

The Ascott Martyrs

I just came across this story when researching for another blog. It happened in 1873 in a very rural part of Oxfordshire, in one of a group of villages collectively known as the Under Wychwoods, a stone's throw from where David Cameron now lives. It seems deference to the ruling class and the landed gentry was not always what it is today where anything with a blue rosette will get elected to Parliament and local and county councils.

I'm proud to think I'm almost certainly related to Ellen, Elizabeth and Mary Pratley who played a leading role in this important piece of Trades Union Movement history in Britain.

The trouble started when Mr Hambidge of Crown Farm Ascott sacked his men who had joined the Agricultural Workers' Union and then employed men from Ramsden to do his hoeing. The Ascott women stopped these men from working, and tried to persuade them to join the Union. The women were arrested, taken to Chipping Norton, and charged with obstructing and coercing John Hodgkins and John Millen with a view to inducing them to leave their employment on 20th May.

The two magistrates conducting the trial were Rev. T. Harris and Rev. W.E. Carter. Mr Hambidge engaged a solicitor (Mr Wilkins) to conduct the prosecution but the women were not defended by counsel. The magistrates pleaded with the farmer not to proceed with the prosecution, as they would have no option but to send the women to prison. This he refused to do.

Read more... The Ascott Martyrs

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The Good Shepherd's Purse Is Bad News For Creationists

Capsella grandiflora

Creationists will always wave aside examples of observed evolution as 'micro-evolution' but not 'macro-evolution', which is what they call the evolution of new species. For some reason they seem to find this a threat to their favourite easy answer of the creation of all living things out of nothing by a magic man, so it must be devastating for them to hear of yet another example of it.

This one has recently been found in the family of common garden weeds, which I have always known as 'Shepherd's purse', with the generic name Capsella. They have a characteristic heart-shaped seed capsule which gives them their English name. These plants are something of a garden pest because they can harbour the fungal root infection of the cabbage family known as club root disease.

Capsella grandiflora, like many species of plant, has a mechanism which prevents self-pollination or 'selfing', known as self-incompatibility. Loss of this mechanism is fairly common in some plants because if offers a short-term solution where pollinators are rare. In that situation the disadvantage of not exchanging genes with another individual can be outweighed by the advantage of being able to produce fertile seeds, so natural selection can favour it in the right circumstances and work against in in other circumstances.

Capsella rubella

A very closely related species, Capsella rubella (red shepherd's purse), however is self-compatible.

By comparing the genomes of the two species, a team of researchers working at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Germany, found that the two species diversified only 30-50,000 years ago and, because of the low number of different alleles in C. rubella, it must have gone through a very narrow bottleneck and probably arose from a single incidence of selfing, probably in Greece. Its spread, and maybe its survival, was facilitated by the spread of agriculture in the area at about the same time.

So, human agency at the dawn of agriculture may well have created the right environmental conditions in which 'selfing' became an advantage. That allowed a new species to arise and prosper, and one which continues to be an agricultural weed.

Source:

Recent speciation of Capsella rubella from Capsella grandiflora, associated with loss of self-incompatibility and an extreme bottleneck. Guo YL, Bechsgaard JS, Slotte T, Neuffer B, Lascoux M, Weigel D, Schierup MH.
Department of Molecular Biology, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A.;2009 Mar 31;106(13):5246-51. Epub 2009 Mar 23.

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More Rapid Human Evolution

Tibetan Plateau

In Rapid Human Evolution we saw how the Fore people of Papua New Guinea evolved resistance to the prion disease, kuru in as little as 200 years under intense selection pressure, so giving the lie to Creationist claims about evolution. This blog is about an almost as impressive example of recent human evolution, albeit at a somewhat slower rate, but not, like the Fore example involving a single gene, but involving more than 30 genes. Again, the observable facts destroy another Creationist myth.

This example is found in Tibetans who have adapted to live in the high altitude of the Tibetan plateau, over 13,000 feet above sea level, where oxygen levels are 40% lower than at sea level. (To be technical, it's not the ratio of oxygen in the air which is lower but the air-pressure itself. This means the partial pressure of oxygen is 40% lower than at sea level, so it is much harder for it to cross the thin membrane in the lungs into the pulmonary capillaries, where it can be taken up by the haemoglobin in blood.)

Religion And Neurological Disorders

Lobes of the human brain

Neurotheology is a branch of psychiatry which studies the correlation between neural phenomenon and 'spirituality' or religious experience. These 'experiences' can be

• The perception that time, fear or self-consciousness have dissolved
• Spiritual awe
• Oneness with the universe
• Ecstatic trance
• Sudden enlightenment
• Altered states of consciousness

Creationists Don't Have A Leg To Stand On

Creationists really do need to get a grip.

Problem is, they only have two limbs to do this with, unlike all the other modern anthropoid apes, which have four. This is because we've had to adapt one set of limbs for walking upright. For that, we need a rigid foot with an arch to transmit the force our leg muscles are applying from our ankles to our toes, and especially our big toe, so that, as our body moves forward we push on the ground with our toes and so keep the momentum going.

I Have Primitive Ears

Darwin's Tubercle on Homo sapiens and Macaca fascicularis

I'm not one to boast, but I have primitive ears. I have the sort of ears of which my remote ancestors might have been proud, if they had had the cognitive ability to be proud.

I have Darwin's Tubercles and I can wiggle my ears without wrinkling my forehead. Both these things are vestigial fossils of my remote ancestry.

Darwin's Tubercle was described by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, although he called it the Woolnerian tip after the sculpture Thomas Woolner who actually first recorded it.

It has no known function in humans, but in our simian and anthropoid cousins it, or rather the point, is probably useful in focussing sound. It is a vestige of the ear point found in many simians and, presumably, in our common ancestors. Mine is larger on the right ear than on the left, where it's a tiny little nodule I can just about feel but the important thing is that I have them. Only about ten percent of us do.

And, I can wiggle my ears!

To quote from Why Evolution Is True by Jerry A. Coyne:

... if you can wiggle your ears, you're demonstrating evolution. We have three muscles under our scalp that attach to our ears. In most people they're useless but some people can use them to wiggle their ears. ... These are the same muscles used by other animals, like cats and horses, to move their ears around, helping them localize sounds. In those species, moving the ears helps them detect predators, locate their young, etc. But in humans the muscles are good only for entertainment.

But, to be fair on the rest of you, it's not just me. We're all walking evidence for Darwinian Evolution. These quaint little vestigial structures merely confirm what the rest of our anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and genetics are all shouting at us so loudly that those who are afraid to hear it have to howl even more loudly to drown it out.

Footnote: you may be able to wiggle your ears if you practice enough. Here's how: How To Wiggle Your Ears.

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Unintelligent Design And Vitamin C Deficiency

Vitamin C is essential for normal health. In fact, if you don't have enough vitamin C in your diet, you will die of an especially nasty disease called scurvy. Vitamin C is a relatively simple organic molecule chemically called ascorbic acid. Fortunately, a normal varied diet usually contains enough vitamin C, especially one containing fresh fruit and vegetables because plants manufacture vitamin C. When the cause of scurvy, which was a major problem amongst sailors on long ocean voyages, was discovered in 1747, simply adding lime juice to their diet cured it almost overnight, hence the British sailors who travelled to and from the New World earned the nickname 'Limeys'.

So, what about animals which don't eat lots of fruit and vegetables, animals like carnivores, or those who eat a fairly plain diet like many herbivores whose diet might or might not contain vitamin C? Not a problem for them because their livers manufacture ascorbic acid. Birds, and many other animals produce it in their kidneys.

Which begs the question: why doesn't our liver produce ascorbic acid if it is so essential for us?

Biochemical pathway for producing ascorbic acid from glucose

The daft thing is that, just like the vast majority of animals which do make their own ascorbic acid, we, along with a small number of other mammals, have the genes to make it, and our liver cells contain three of the four enzymes for making it out of glucose, just like all the others. The only problem is that the fourth (L-gulonolactone oxidase) is missing because the gene for making it is broken! A small copying error millions of years ago effectively turned off something which is essential for many other animals.

But why didn't that get quickly eliminated from the gene pool?

Almost certainly because of the alternative way to get vitamin C, and the one we now use exclusively, by eating food with enough of it. It almost certainly arose in an early ancestor whose diet was rich in fresh fruit and vegetables. Those who didn't make their own vitamin C were now saved from the need to get rid of the excess, so not making it might well have been an advantage in an environment in which their food contained enough of it. Even today, many of the members of our limb of the evolutionary tree have a diet which is mainly or wholly comprised of ripe fruit and leaves.

Chart of the Fossil Record of the Primates with the Occurrence of Active L-Gulonolactone Oxidase in the Livers of Living Primates.

And those other mammals I mentioned earlier? Many of them are primates occupying branches on our limb of the evolutionary tree. If we plot these, together with what we know of their relationship to one another from fossil records and genetic evidence, the pattern is quite striking. All those who occupy one of the two branches which diversified from a common ancestor some 60-63 million years ago have the same genetic defect. The rest still make vitamin C in the perfectly normal way and don't need it in their diets.

All of this is, of course, fully understandable in terms of Darwinian Evolution by Natural Selection and descent with modification, without needing to invoke magic and in which neither intelligence nor design played any part.

Can any Creationist explain why an intelligent designer would provide the mechanism for making vitamin C in our livers, and then break it, and why it would do the same in other species which just happen to look like they share a common ancestor with us which lived some 60-63 million years ago?

Further reading:

The Natural History of Ascorbic Acid in the Evolution of the Mammals and Primates and Its Significance for Present Day Man, By Irwin Stone
Vitamin C Deficiency In Humans: An Issue Of Evolution.

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Thinking Intuitively

Bat + ball cost $110; Bat costs $100 more than the ball

How much does the ball cost?

A recent piece of research published in Science suggested a correlation between analytical thinking and disbelief in religion. This article on boingboing.net illustrated the difference between the alanytical and intuitive thinking with a neat example:

Q: If a baseball and bat cost $110, and the bat costs $100 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?

If you answered $10 you are inclined to believe in religion. If you answered $5 you are inclined to disbelieve.

To be honest, I answered $10, and for several minutes couldn't see what was wrong with that answer until I read the comments - which is rather worrying because I think of myself as an analytical thinker and earn my living at it - and yet, when I knew the right answer, I found it hard to understand why I found it hard to understand, if you follow me.

I've written a few times about how intuition is a poor measure of reality (see Xeno's Religious Paradox). This is particularly true in the realms of quantum mechanics and cosmology where the very small and the very large just seem to be counter-intuitive and yet the analytical tools of observation and mathematics tell us the counter-intuitive answer is actually the right one. A particle is also a wave and can be in several places at the same time; the universe is finite yet unbounded and everything really is nothing.

How does this translate to religious belief versus disbelief?

Rapid Human Evolution

Fore People of Papua New Guinea.

A Novel Protective Prion Protein Variant that Colocalizes with Kuru Exposure, Mead et al, New England Journal of Medicine, Nov 2009.

Humans have been observed to evolve very rapidly in just 200 years, in one of the most clear-cut examples of human evolution.

Until the late 1950s the Fore people of Papua New Guinea had an unusual way of honouring their dead - they ate them, or more particularly, they ate their brains in a funeral ritual. This ritual meant that they caught kuru, a disease of the brain which killed some 2500 Fore before its cause was identified and the practice was stopped.

Lactose Tolerance And Creation 'Science'

You've probably heard of 'lactose intolerance'. It is the term use to describe the inability to digest milk in adulthood. In actual fact the problem is with digesting the sugar found in milk - lactose - hence its name. It is cause by a loss of the ability to produce the enzyme lactase in the digestive tract. It illustrates one of the problems with medical advances being made mostly in the developed world and so 'normal' being defined in terms of what is normal in the prevailing culture.

Lactose intolerance is fairly uncommon in much of Europe and parts of Asia and populations which are mostly Euro-Asian in origin. In these populations, where milk forms an integral part of an adult diet, the problems associated with not being able to digest milk are a problem needing special diet, etc. For that population, it is seen as a medical condition needing treatment.

God The Protection Racketeer

Have you found time in your life for Big Ron?

Big Ron saves!

The fool hath said there is no Big Ron... but we still look after his widow.

We've seen how the Christian god resembles an abusive spouse in God The Abusive Spouse. In many ways the tactic of the abusive spouse resemble those of a protection racketeer - the use of violence, or the threat of it, blackmail, intimidation and control - so it's hardly surprising to find that the Christian god closely resembles a protection racketeer too.

The difference is that, unlike a real protection racketeer, the Christian god is just used by the priesthood and the preaching/evangelical industry as though he were real. It's a bit like the small-time hoods who work for the local Godfather have invented a Mr Big. You never see him, nor any sign of him, but they keep telling you what great protection he provides if only you pay your respects, and how he protects you from the misfortune which will befall you as sure as fate, if you don't show him enough respect.

And, of course, exactly what is enough respect is for the hoods... er... priests to decide on the basis of what 'Mr Big' revealed unto them.

So, if you let 'Big Ron' into your lives, and make sure you let Him know how much you appreciate Him by giving His men a reasonable donation - say ten percent of your income - Big Ron will make sure nothing unpleasant happens. Can't say fairer than that gov can I now? It's only money and what use is money if you haven't got yer health and strength? You know how it is around these parts - a decent person can't earn an honest living without someone causing a hurricane to destroy his house or inflicting a fatal illness on his wife and children or causing their car to crash, or shooting him in a drive-by shooting one night on his way home.

And if you just do 'Big Ron' a little service now and again, when He asks, He will try to make sure you get that job you want - or that new car, or house, or a long life - can't guarantee anything mind and 'Big Ron' might just take it into His head that you haven't done enough service yet, or you don't deserve a break. He's like that you know, 'Big Ron'. Heart of gold but He does get some funny ideas at times so you can never tell what he's thinking. Kinda ineffable if you get my drift. He's nice to old ladies and the widows of people who've let Him down in the past, though. Always a bag o'coal or a ham at Christmas!

Anyway, enough about 'Big Ron'. Show Him your appreciation when we pass the plate along the pews and you'll probably be safe for another week. How's that knee doing? Still not able to bend it? Nasty business that. Rough neighbourhood but Big Ron's working on it. Trouble is you see, the local police used to do what Big Ron told 'em, but those pinko commy liberals on County Hall stopped all that so Big Ron has to show 'em who's in charge around here sometimes, or there'd be anarchy and rampant crime. The neighbourhood wouldn't be fit for decent folk any more.

Will you be voting for those decent folk who want to put Big Ron back in charge? He won't like it at all if you don't you know, but it's your choice. Big Ron's a firm believer in letting people make mistakes if they don't know what's good for them. "You tell 'em", He says, "they can do what they like so long as they accepts the consequences..."

Wouldn't hurt a fly, Big Ron... but he knows some people who would...

Come along Knuckles. Time we were going. What have I told you about dropping things? Shake hands with the nice gentleman now - gently. Gently! Oops!

See you in church on Sunday! That hand'll get better in time.

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Seeing Eye To Eye With A Butterfly

Peacock Butterfly

Eyes to die for!

Well, eyes to live for actually.

So, what on Earth is an insect doing with such obviously mammalian 'eyes' on it wings, albeit eyes that can't see? You would think a tasty morsel like that would want to keep hidden and not have bright colours advertising it, wouldn't you? They surely can't be there for us to admire, can they?

But of course, it has nothing to do with us. It has to do with birds!

You see, to find a mate, the butterfly needs to advertise itself, and reproducing is what it is for. But it needs to avoid getting eaten too, so we have a classic tension leading to an equilibrium where finding a mate needs to be balanced against the need to avoid being eaten - at least until after it's found a mate and produced eggs for the next generation.

Enter our predatory bird.

This bird needs to find food for itself and it's chicks and it also needs to avoid being eaten. So again we have another equilibrium resulting from the tension between finding food and being exposed to predators.

Let's see things from a bird's eye view.

An upside down butterfly.

But cover the fore wings and what do you see?

Fox

Or maybe:

Stoat

You see, the birds who survived were those who didn't stop to think, "Oh! What lovely eyes!", because those would be eyes to die for, but those who were up and away before they even knew what their wings were doing. Those who did it best left more descendants, so a rapid flight response to a mammalian eye evolved in the presence of mammalian predators.

Now what has this got to do with the Peacock Butterfly? We'll, birds with these super-fast reflexes were in their environment and were trying to eat them, so, whilst the butterfly was needing to evolve ways of attracting a mate without being eaten, it happened upon a pattern which looked a bit like the eyes of a fox or a stoat, or some other predatory mammal, which is what the bird's genes needed not to be eaten by.

To begin with, the marks might not have looked very much like mammal eyes just so long as in poor lighting or for birds with poor eyesight, they triggered the flight reflex. As the survivors with these slightly eye-like markings became more numerous it was those on whom natural selection worked, so the eye marks became more eye-like and better at attracting butterfly mates.

Also, the butterflies who carried genes which meant they found the eye-like markings attractive would have left more descendants because those genes would have benefited from the presence of genes for making the eye-like markings, so sex-selection would have reinforced this evolutionary process.

From the bird's genes point of view, it was a better trade off to miss a snack than to be eaten. From the butterfly's genes 'point of view' (it's a metaphor, don't get over-excited) it was better to avoid being eaten and to find a mate. Win:win for the butterfly genes and a powerful driver in favour of greater and greater perfection. But perfection not in looking exactly like mammalian eyes but in triggering the flight reflex in the bird. So, maybe two sets of eyes worked better than one, and additional marks which make it look like the eyes are coming closer were even better.

All it has to do is open it's wings and flash those eyes, and the same mechanism works with a prospective mate too!

So, we have insects with mammalian eye-markings because their predators were preyed on by mammals.

And all the butterfly was trying to do was find a mate and avoid getting eaten. Now, what intelligent designer would have have designed that, unless it was one who loved watching birds get the surprise of their lives and denied a meal with a trick?

Snake

Atlas moth

Atlas moth and 'snake'. Not too hard to work out what eats the atlas moth's predators. Go on! You know you can.

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God The Abusive Spouse

Have you ever noticed how closely the god of the Bible resembles an abusive spouse and how often it's believers seem to be in an abusive relationship with it?

Abusers use fear, guilt, shame, and intimidation to wear you down and keep you under his or her thumb. Your abuser may also threaten you, hurt you, or hurt those around you.

HELPGUIDE.org - Domestic Violence and Abuse.

This site gives a list of 23 questions to help you decide if you are in an abusive relationship. The more "yes" answers, the more abusive the relationship is. Here are some of them. How many apply to a Christian's relationship with their god?

Do you:

• feel afraid of your god much of the time? (Psalms 19:9 The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever)
• avoid certain topics out of fear of angering your god? (Psalms 19:14 Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD)
• believe that you deserve to be hurt or mistreated? (Ezra 9:13 And after all that is come upon us for our evil deeds, and for our great trespass, seeing that thou our God hast punished us less than our iniquities deserve, and hast given us such deliverance as this;)

Does your god:

• blame you for their own abusive behavior? (Leviticus 26:14-46)
• have a bad and unpredictable temper? (2 Chronicles 30:8 ...and serve the LORD your God, that the fierceness of his wrath may turn away from you.)
• hurt you or threaten to hurt you or kill you? (Deuteronomy 30:19 I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live)
• threaten to take your children away or harm them? (Exodus 20:5 ..for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me)
• act excessively jealous and possessive? (Exodus 34:14 For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God)
• control where you go or what you do? (Deuteronomy 6:2 That thou mightest fear the LORD thy God, to keep all his statutes and his commandments, which I command thee, thou, and thy son, and thy son's son, all the days of thy life; and that thy days may be prolonged.)
• constantly check up on you? (Psalms 94:11 The LORD knoweth the thoughts of man,)

So, with "yes" to 10 out of 23, I reckon that makes it a fairly abusive relationship.

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