Bacteria Are Winning With Evolution

Antibiotic resistance: The last resort : Nature News & Comment

Evolution is the weapon of choice for bacteria fighting the war on antibiotics.

Except, of course that there is no choice involved and bacteria are not even aware they are fighting a war. All that's happening is that an environment with antibiotics in it has given those few bacteria which have a genetic resistance to antibiotics such a massive advantage that they are quickly replacing the non-resistant form in the population. Bacterial genes are simply doing what they have done since the first self-replicating molecules arose on Earth - they are replicating themselves. The natural environment is sorting out the fittest and allowing them through the natural selection sieve into the next generation.

The above article in yesterday's Nature superbly illustrated evolution in progress. We have created the classical Darwinian model for evolution to be inevitable:

1. Replication.
2. Variability.
3. Selection.

[A]ntibiotic resistance should be added to the UK government’s list of threats to national security, alongside pandemic influenza and terrorism.

Sally Davies, the UK chief medical officer.

Previously, before we started to use antibiotics, any chance variation in the relevant genes might have had no meaning whatsoever, and may even have disadvantaged the carrier. The environmental change we created has changed the meaning of the information carried by the genome. The amount of information hasn't changed, only it's meaning.

As Maryn McKenna points out, we are now reaching the point where bacteria are evolving resistance to one of the last drugs on the shelf. Unless we can invent antibiotics more quickly we will eventually lose this arms race and a purely natural undirected and aimless process, will have beaten everything that human science can muster against it. Such is the power and inevitability of evolution by natural selection. So far, we have not managed to exterminate a single known bacterial species. Even tuberculosis, once having looked to be on it's way out, is making a comeback having overcome our antibiotics of choice.

Of course, we have exterminated smallpox and the cattle disease rinderpest in the wild and have come close to exterminating poliomyelitis, but these are viruses not bacteria and are not touched by antibiotics. The only non-viral organism we have had any real impact on has been the Plasmodium species which cause malaria and they are now showing signs of a similar resistance to antimalarial drugs as are the mosquito vectors which transmit them to us to insecticides.

We have a very serious problem, and we need to sound an alarm.

Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Many protozoans such as bacteria have a very short generation time - as low as 10-20 minutes in favourable conditions - so they represent a speeded up version of evolution - humans are several orders of magnitude slower at about 25 years. Bacteria also have a much smaller genome so they show us much more clearly what can be produced in a few generations by environmental change and under intense selection pressure such as a new antibiotic. A multicellular organism, with its much slower generation time would be expected to evolve much more slowly but, with a larger genome, they are likely to be evolving with several gene-lines in parallel.

Bacteria sharing genetic information

Bacteria don't reproduce sexually, of course, which on first consideration might be thought to reduce the scope for evolution which sexually reproducing organisms get from frequent shuffling and mixing of the genomes from two individuals, however, bacteria do exchange genetic material in the form of plasmids by which they can pass antibiotic resistence to other bacteria and even to another species - a process known as horizontal gene transfer. This appears to give bacteria at least the same degree of 'evolvability', in other words, the ability to adapt quickly to environmental change, as does sexual reproduction in more complex organisms.

So here we have a wonderful example of evolution in progress and an illustration of how an arms race can be won not by planning and intelligent design but by a mindless, undirected, yet inexorable and inevitable process of evolution driven by natural selection which looks for all the world to an uninformed observer like an intelligent one.

Now, those few Creationists who didn't stop reading when I opened with the word 'evolution' and who have made it to this point without becoming too afraid to continue reading may still be telling themselves that an invisible magical friend who loves them above all else is directing things, the way the Discovery Institute likes to tell them, have to answer a couple of question:

1. Why would a benevolent intelligent designer be ensuring our defense against killer bacteria is abolished by making them resistant to it, unless it is on their side and wants to make us sick and die?
2. Why has it made it look like a natural process, which can be fully explained without the need for magic or gods, or a designer of any description?

If you think you can answer these, you are free to avail yourself of the comment section here to do so.

If you can't, you might like to explain why you still like to believe an imaginary friend is directing things for your benefit.

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A Persecuted Minority

Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury and
unelected member of the bicameral UK Parliament's Upper Chamber

As the Humanist march continues, in Europe at least, we are seeing case law being made which establishes that even Christians now have to obey the law. Indeed, this is a common cause of their whinging.

I've noted before how hypocritical Christians like former Archbishop of Canterbury and pastoral head of the Anglican Communion, Lord Carey, keep whining about Christians being a persecuted minority. Carey, in particular is often heard complaining when Christians have lost another court case brought against them for denying goods and services to people, or discriminating against, bullying or committing other hate crimes againt people on the grounds that their religion requires them to.

Carey sees it as a basic human right for Christians to deny basic human rights to non-Christians and regards it as persecution to insist that they comply with the law of the land, which, as an unelected member of the UK parliament he has the right to influence the framing of.

It's not just in the UK where Christians have this inflated sense of entitlement and regard any denial of privilege as a denial of their rights. We recently had an outstanding example from the USA where Christians were complaining that they were having to remain 'in the closet' about their homophobia and not being able to keep homosexuals in the closet where they belong.

Yes! It's a baby!

However, one small event which, if you were watching the BBC News a couple of days ago, seemed to happen on a day when, by great good fortune, nothing else happened anywhere in the world puts this persistent whining into context. The wife of the second in line to the hereditary title of Head of State of the UK (and several other Commonwealth countries, including Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and titular head of the World-wide Anglican Christian Church, produced an offspring.

This child, if it, and the monarchy, survives that long, will succeed to the post currently held by his great grandmother. In effect, unless the law changes, my grandchildren's children's, and even their grandchildren's ruler has already been chosen, as has the head of whatever is left of the Anglican church. He need do nothing at all to earn that post for which there is no formal job description and no basic standards against which performance can be measured. Of course, given that time-scale and the likelihood of Scotland leaving the Union with possibly Wales following suit, we don't know what he will be king of.

In the UK, the monarchy symbolised both the class system based on hereditary privilege, and how closely interwoven the Anglican Church has been in this system since Tudor times. The right of certain Anglican bishops to sit in the House of Lords and the tradition of some retired ones continuing so to do is a reflection of the privilege which Anglicans have traditionally had in Britain.

One wonders what Prince George has inherited in his DNA which entitles him to this future power but, unless the law is changed under pressure from Humanists, one thing we can be sure of is that one of Lord Carey's 'persecuted' Christians will hold the post of Head of State at least of England, quite possibly into the twenty-second century, and will need to have done nothing at all to deserve it.

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Battle of the Chimpanzee Sexes

Chimps have experimented with sex more than humans - life - 18 July 2013 - New Scientist

Science is moving a little close to working out what our common ape/human ancestors got up to in the bedroom, or whatever their forest equivalent was. And in doing so have discovered a fascinating example of a battle of the sexes in the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes)

Unlike the other great apes, us included, male chimpanzees use the barrier method of contraception, not to prevent their sperm from finding the female's ovum, mind you, but to prevent those of rival males finding it. The sperm of the common chimpanzee coagulates and forms a plug in the vagina because it contains a coagulating enzyme. The normal method of choosing a mate for the common chimpanzee is to simply offer herself to any available male when she is oestrus. In this way she ensures that she finds at least one fertile and effective male to father her offspring.

With gorillas, the alpha male is the mate of choice for the females, not that she has much choice because he vigorously enforces his right over other males, so is the only male available. She can have any male she wants so long as it's the silver-backed male. This method ensures the female's offspring have the strongest, fittest father. Male gorilla genes have ensured they produce the most descendents by evolving this particular strategy which works because of the slow reproductive cycle of the gorilla, even though it leaves many males redundant. So long as the females reproduce at close to maximum capacity, it matters not to male genes if they all come from the alpha male and leave the other males redundant.

With the common chimpanzee however, there is no particular alpha male so far as the females are concerned. How then do male chimpanzee genes ensure they maximise their chance of success? With very great difficulty, unless they use subterfuge. So, at some time in the past an enzyme which causes the sperm to coagulate in the vagina, so acting as a barrier to other male's sperms, gave those males who carried it an enormous advantage because, if they were selected first, they had a much better chance of success. These genes would have quickly spread throughout the population.

This illustrates perfectly how an arms race (in this case between a female wanting a spread bet and a male wanting to exclude competitors) can lead to no particular advantage to anyone in the long run but mindless, undirected, unplanned and unintelligent evolution ensures it happens anyway.

However, as with many things in evolution, it's not quite that straightforward. Researchers have found that male humans and the other apes all have an enzyme in their sperm which prevents this coagulation occurring. In the common chimp this enzyme is broken, so effectively turning it off. We all have the same gene. Humans have four times as much of this enzyme as chimpanzees do.

Michael Plavcan at the University of Arkansas agrees that the study is consistent with the idea that chimps evolved a unique mating system since their lineage split from ours. "People often forget that chimps, like humans, have evolved from a common ancestor and are not some relict species frozen in time," he says.

Chimps have experimented with sex more than humans, Colin Barras, New Scientist magazine issue 2926, 18 July 2013

What seems to have happened is that an even more remote common ancestor had a similar arms race but that females hit back with a gene to prevent coagulation, which countered that of the male. If this gave them more descendants, this would have come to dominate the genepool. At some point after divergence, the common chimpanzee switched off this gene and a new arms race ensued with the result we see today.

From an evolutionary point of view since this method is absent in all other apes we can be fairly certain that it evolved in the common chimpanzee after they diverged from gorilla and then from us and the bonobo where the female counter enzyme is still active. In the gorilla, male genes have adopted a different strategy in the form of a patriarchal social structure and in humans a more-or-less monogamous relationship, at least for most people most of the time but with cuckolding frequent, and a gorilla-like hareem system in a few, especially for high-caste males.

And this in turn suggests that the chimpanzees have evolved their promiscuous female mating strategy after divergence too.

One intriguing question remains: why hasn't this system evolved in the bonobo, which is notorious promiscuous in it's mating habits, using sex as a social bonding mechanism and for pleasure as well as for reproduction.

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Evolution For Brainy People

Neanderthal. Why did we succeed and not him?

First look into workings of the Neanderthal brain - life - 17 July 2013 - New Scientist

It's beginning to look like our (Homo sapiens) ultimate and apparently quite sudden success over our close cousins the Neanderthals (H. neanderthalensis or maybe H. sapiens neanderthalensis) and the recently-discovered Denisovans who don't seem to have been awarded a scientific name yet, may have been due to changes in a very small number of genes, and maybe whether they were 'switched on' or not.

Incidentally, this same article illustrates how anatomical complexity need not involve increased genetic complexity, as Creationists wrongly claim the evolution theory says. In fact it doesn't even need to involve an increase in information, merely what that information is. I'll expand on this later.

Scientists working for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany have analysed the epigenomes of Neanderthals and Denisovans and compared them with those of modern humans and have found that there was about a 99% match. However, of those 700 or so which differed, about 200 of these were common to Neanderthals and Denisovans but where theirs were active ours were inactive, and vice versa. Many of these are involved with immunity and metabolism and, when they go wrong, with disease. A very large number seem to be associated with psychiatric and neurological conditions.

Too Many Transitional Fossils

Australopithecus sediba

Homo erectus

The strange ape that's rewriting our family tree - life - 15 July 2013 - New Scientist

Far from there being no transitional fossils as Creationists claim, we now have what's turning out to be too many of them. Rather than the tree of human evolution being a simple one with just a single branch off the African ape limb, it's turning out to be a much richer, more complicated and interesting one with several different hominins co-existing for most of our history. In fact, the last few thousand years, since the last Neanderthals and Denisovans died out as distinct species, have been unusual and maybe unprecedented; we are now the only member of the Homo genus to survive.

How We Know The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People

A stone axe from near Shanghai, eastern China. May show a form of primitive writing.

Photograph: AP

Inscriptions found in Shanghai pre-date 'oldest Chinese language by 1,400 years' | World news | guardian.co.uk

This article in today's Guardian got me thinking about how ridiculous the Bronze Age origins myths in the Bible are and how easy it is to refute them by just looking at the world today.

For example, in Genesis we read about a worldwide flood which only a single family survived. It is inconceivable that the details of this and the names of Noah and his family, the people who saved the world and from whom we are all descended, would have been forgotten in just a few generations.

The Cult of Pope Worship

We spent a few days in Rome last month and took in the obligatory tour of St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican City to see the Michelangelo ceiling in the Sistine Chapel and the murals by Raphael in the Stanze di Raffaello - book in advance on line for speedy entry; the queues are frightening.

Apart from very obviously being a vast, highly organised money-making industry, the thing that struck us most was how central the figure of the Pope is to everything. Every stall (there is one every few yards) selling tourist tat and over-priced strings of coloured beads to the 'faithful' carried a huge assortment of pictures of smiling Popes in various forms of fancy dress, sometimes with humorously phallic headwear, making pious magic gestures with two fingers, or just grinning beatifically.

Most of them were of the current Pope (how quickly they must have got those to the printers and out onto the stalls in such quantities); quite a lot were of his predecessor, Benedict XVI trying hard not to look like a leering paedophile who can't believe he's gotten away with it, and a few were of the Polish Pope, John Paul II. Conspicuous by their absence were photos of John Paul I whose mistaken election is reputed to have been corrected just 33 days later when he was found dead, allegedly by a nun who was visiting his chamber early in the morning.

Outside in St Peters Square, almost the entire area is divided up with crowd-control barriers for the vast numbers of Catholics who descend on the Vatican whenever a planned papal manifestation is announced. A couple we met in our hotel were telling us excitedly how they had queued (no seats are provided) for hours in the shade-free square in temperatures approaching 35-40 degrees and had been 'rewarded' with a brief glimpse of 'His Holiness'. One could only sympathise. Nuns in various costumes, looking for all the world like devout Muslim women in a hijab, only dressed in white, blue or brown, with every hair, ankle and neck well covered lest they arouse uncontrollable passions in men, twitter excitedly like groupies outside the stage door of the latest boy-band, hoping for a glimpse of the Pope - even the hem of a disappearing white cassock or the wave of a hand from a window will induce raptures.

Some even believe the image of John Paul II will cure terminal illness.

What we both noticed particularly was how the proverbial visitor from outer-space would see Catholicism as Pope worship, with the Pope as a living god in just the same way that the Japanese Emperor was to pre-WWII Japanese and the way the Emperor was in the latter days of the Roman Empire. It looks for all the world as though the pre-Christian official Pontifex Maximus, or high priest of all the gods, had been transformed into the Christian Bishop of Rome.

Emperor Augustus 27 BCE - 14 CE,
Pontifex Maximus. The first Pope.

And this, of course, is precisely what did happen. The first Emperor to declare himself both Pontifex Maximus and a god was Augustus. As Pontifex Maximus he was uniquely placed to declare his elevation to the post of God-King to be the revealed will of God.

This explains why the Catholic Church is still rigidly hierarchical with the cult leader being the source of all clerical powers, the source of all religious dogma and the inerrant, infallible mouthpiece of God. To a devout Catholic, the Pope and God are as one. The Pope speaks the mind of God and announces His will. And with theological matters such as the existence of Limbo, and the qualifications for entry into Heaven, the Pope hands down policy to God.

Catholicism is the cult of Pope worship. The Pope is not the heir to an invented 'St Peter', but the heir to Augustus, the Roman God Emperor who died in 14 CE and whose title and role was passed down to the Christianised ruling god-king, the Pope, Papa or Holy Father.

If you want to see the last Roman god, Pontifex Maximus, a relic of a bygone age and the invention of a degenerate ruling class, go and stand for hours in the Roman sun - and remember to take plenty of money with you.

And women! Cover yourself up. God hates having to oggle at your bodies!

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A Sick World

A sick world in gorgeous close-up - health - 26 June 2013 - New Scientist

This stunning image, published in today's New Scientist is by the artist Odra Noel who trained as a doctor. It represents the major health problems in each area of the world.

I wonder how religious people, who attribute illness to their god as some sort of retributive punishment account for it. For that matter, even if they don't subscribe to the divine punishment by a vindictive god idea and just believe that their god created everything for a human-centered purpose, how do they account for their god creating what looks suspiciously like a broad-brush approach to inflicting diseases on mankind, for whatever reason?

Wouldn't you expect a god who cares for each and every one of us and takes a close personal interest in all aspects of our lives, to show a little finesse? Why, for instances, do Americans get the obesity, Europeans get degenerative diseases associated with longevity whilst South-East Asians get diabetes and Greenlanders seem to have a fertility problem?

Could the most vicarious explanation be that gods don't play any population health and that it's a combination of economics, culture, geography, genetics and climate?

You can see more of Odra Noel's work here.

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Tasteless Rebuff to Intelligent Design

Normal mouse testes. Streaks are healthy sperm tails

Losing the “taste” for sperm | The Scicurious Brain, Scientific American Blog Network

Scientists investigating the sense of taste have discovered something which illustrates nicely something Intelligent Design pseudo-scientists would much rather you weren't aware of.

As reported by Scicurious in Scientific American a couple of days ago, discussing a paper published in PNAS, a team of scientists were researching the sense of taste and found something really quite unexpected and fascinating.

Taste depends on receptors which are composed of several protein subunits which, being proteins, are coded for by specific genes. If one or more of these proteins is defective or absent it can affect the sense of taste, often in very specific ways. Two of these receptor subunits have the scientific names TAS1R3 - which is a component of two different receptors, for sweet and for umami - and GNAT3 which is essential for "basic taste". The researchers had bred mice in which either one or the other of these two subunits were absent and wanted to see what would happen if both were absent in an individual mouse. It turned out to be surprisingly difficult to breed them.

Abnormal mouse testes. No sperm and strange dark blobs

It turned out that male mice with both these subunits missing were sterile. They simply did not have functioning testes and produced no sperm. These proteins are also needed for normal testicular development and sperm production - something which, at first sight would appear to have nothing at all to do with a sense of taste. Clearly, a protein, or rather the gene which codes for it, which evolved for one process has been co-opted for a different use at some point in mammalian evolution.

Now, a serious professional liar for the Discovery Institute, or for one of the many online Creationist book marketing and money-making scam sites, will tell you that structures like taste receptors are 'irreducibly complex', depending on being fully formed for their function with no obvious way in which it could have evolved gradually. So, they will argue, they could not have arisen by a gradual evolutionary process and must have been designed at produced as fully-developed structures.

In the fruit fly Drosophila, the vestigial gene plays a critical role in wing development. In fact, if these flies are homozygous for the recessive form of the vestigial gene (vg), they will develop short wings, and they will be unable to fly as a direct result. Along with regulating wing development, the vg gene is also pleiotropic. Indirectly, the gene changes the number of egg strings in a fly's ovaries, alters the position of bristles on a fly's scutellum, and decreases the length of a fly's life (Caspari, 1952; Miglani, 2002).

Scitable - Pleiotropy: One Gene Can Affect Multiple Traits, Ingrid Lobo, 2008

What they would rather not tell you is that structures can arise fully formed by incorporating pre-existing components which evolved gradually for an entirely unrelated purpose.

Examples of this include the flagellum, which Creationist frauds still cite as an example of irreducible complexity and which could not have evolved gradually, despite the fact that plausible mechanism for its evolution has been described and are widely accepted. The "Type III Secretion System", out of which the so-called proton motor of the flagellum may well have evolved, for example, includes very similar structures which evolved for an entirely different function and which themselves could have evolved gradually.

In fact, there are multiple examples of a single gene affecting multiple traits - the technical term for this is pleiotropy

The phenotypic effects that single genes may impose in multiple systems often give us insight into the biological function of specific genes. Pleiotropic genes can also provide us valuable information regarding the evolution of different genes and gene families, as genes are "co-opted" for new purposes beyond what is believed to be their original function (Hodgkin, 1998). Quite simply, pleiotropy reflects the fact that most proteins have multiple roles in distinct cell types; thus, any genetic change that alters gene expression or function can potentially have wide-ranging effects in a variety of tissues.

Scitable - Pleiotropy: One Gene Can Affect Multiple Traits, Ingrid Lobo, 2008

Several examples are given in the above article on pleiotropy.

Of course, the ID charlatans, loons and liars market their wares to customers who can't tell a bird from bat and have no problem with talking snakes, and want above all for them to stay that way. They would rather their dupes imagined that evolution means every new structure has to evolve in isolation and is somehow estopped from using pre-existing structures, without explaining how a perfectly natural, undirected and unintelligent process could be prevented from incorporating any suitable structures, proteins, processes, metabolic pathways, etc into a mechanism if using it gave the genes an advantage which would make them more likely to produce descendents.

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The Ontological Blunder

Prof. Ian Stewart, Dr. Terry Pratchett and Prof. Jack Cohen

I've previously blogged about the 'Ontological Argument' for gods (I use the plural because, idiotically, if the argument is valid - and I have seen it referred to as a conclusive proof - then it should only work for one god, yet it works for any. Make one up yourself and try it).

Briefly, the idea was thought up by Anselm, an early Anglo-Norman archbishop of Canterbury. He argued in his Proslogion that,

God [is] "that than which nothing greater can be conceived", and then argued that this being could exist in the mind. He suggested that, if the greatest possible being exists in the mind, it must also exist in reality. If it only exists in the mind, a greater being is possible—one which exists in the mind and in reality.

Source: Wikipedia - Ontological argument

Apparently, this is still trotted out in all seriousness by (especially) Christian apologists, who apparently see nothing wrong with essentially claiming they can define a god into existence and that such a god is obliged to exist.

I came across this elegant illustration of the simple, intellectually dishonest, fallacy behind this apologetic in a book by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld IV - Judgement Day.

This book is the fourth in a series dealing with basic scientific principles in a very readable way using stories set in Terry Pratchett's Discworld. The science is almost all Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, two popular science writers. I can highly recommend both the Discworld series and the Science of Discworld series.

On Anselm's Ontological Argument, they have this to say, though they refer to it as Thomas Aquinas's argument from Summa Theologica which is virtually identical in form:

Logicians and mathematicians are painfully aware, however, that this argument is flawed. Before you can use a characterisation of some entity to deduce its properties, you have to provide independent proof that such an entity exists.

The classic example is a proof that the largest whole number is 1. Consider the largest whole number. Its square is at least as big, so it must equal its square. The only whole numbers like that are 0 and 1, of which 1 is the larger. QED. Except, 1 is clearly not the largest number. For instance, 2 is bigger.

Oops.

What's wrong? The proof assumes that there is a largest whole number. If it exists, everything else is correct, and it has to be 1. But, since that makes no sense, the proof must be wrong, and that implies that it doesn't exist.

So, in order to use the ontological argument to infer the existence of the greatest conceivable being, we must first establish that such a being exists, without simply referring to the definition. So what the argument proves is 'if God exists, then God exists'.

Congratulations.

So the ontological argument is nothing more than sleight of hand; a circular argument which surreptitiously assumes its conclusion and then feeds that a priori assumption into the argument in order to produce the required answer. That is why, just like the Cosmological Argument so beloved of William Lane Craig, it works with any god or any daft notion you can dream up. If you didn't spot it earlier, Anselms fallacy was in the opening sentence. He first defined God as "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" without first providing any independent proof that such an entity actually exists.

Quite obviously, had such proof been available to Anselm, or anyone else for that matter, he wouldn't have needed to invent the ontological argument in the first place, let alone perform that little bit of deception. We can be sure then that Anselm knew there was no available proof of the Christian god, just as we can be sure that those who still try to get away with it know they have no such proof.

As I've said before, substitute a peanut butter sandwich for 'God' in any theological apologetic and you can justify worshipping peanut butter sandwiches. If you are gullible enough to to fall for religious apologetics, exercise caution here or you could end up worshipping equally insane and inanimate objects. You could even start your own cult if you can find a few equally gullible idiots with thinking difficulties

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To A Mouse

I had a brief encounter with a mouse the other day. Not one quite so dramatic as Burns' - it's a long while now since I followed a horse-drawn plough. In fact, to be strictly accurate, it's a long while now since I saw a horse-drawn plough. They even had them-there tractor things when I was a child.

No. My encounter was a lot more mundane.

Every morning I feed my birdies - a flock of (mostly) wood-pigeons, collared doves, starlings, house sparrows and other assorted birds in season - at the bird table and various feeders we have in the back garden. I buy the mixed birdseed in 20 Kg. sacks along with bags of dried meal worms and peanuts and store it in our garden shed.

To a Mouse

(Written by Robert Burns in Gallowegian dialect supposedly after he had turned over the nest of a field mouse with his plough. This poem illustrates Burns' tolerance to all creatures and his innate humanity.)

Wee, sleekit, cowran, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave 'S a sma' request:
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' wast,
An' weary Winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald.
To thole the Winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

Robert Burns, 1785

I used to just stand the sacks of seed in the shed and fill a small container to take to the bird table until a family of mice set up home in the shed and learned to chew holes in the sacks, so I bought a plastic dustbin with a clip-on lid in which I also keep a plastic bucket to take seed, mealworms, peanuts and scoop to the garden in. Initially I felt a little bad about locking their food away and use to put a little seed and a few peanuts out for the mice but I decided it was best to wean them off their increasing welfare dependency and encourage them to earn an honest living.

A couple of days ago though, one little mouse had decided to use its entrepreneurial initiative and, when my back was turned and the lid was off, had had jumped or fallen into the deep plastic bin - with smooth sides.

My initial surprise was to discover that there were still mice in the shed. The mouse's initial surprise was to see the bottom of a large, black plastic bucket begin to descend, followed quickly by a large pair of eye and a human voice saying, "Hello! Okay! Let's see you get yourself out of there then!"

Isn't it interesting how quickly mice get over that initial panic and, after running round the perimeter of the bin three times, stop, look up, sit back on their haunches and wash their face.

So, what to do now then? In times gone by I would have thought nothing of picking it up by the tail and giving its head a quick flick against a wall then chucking it to the nearest cat or onto the compost heap. Maybe I'm getting soft or maybe I just appreciate living things a little better. Whatever, I decided to let nature take its course and do a little experiment. How would the mouse get itself out of an impossible situation?

Maybe it didn't appreciate the situation fully but my little mouse just picked up a sunflower seed and proceeded to take out the kernel and eat it. Maybe it needed some energy.

Of course, given a practically unlimited supply of food in comparison to its size, and not needing water beyond what they can get from their food, even dry seeds, the mouse wasn't actually in any real danger. It could have lived its entire life in that bin so maybe its risk assessment was a little different to what mine would have been. Never-the-less, my little mouse did try to climb up the sides a few times, then it tried jumping - as though its ability to jump about four inches was going to be enough to get to the top, about 30 inches away. But it was obviously worth a try - yer gets owt for nowt!

So I thought, let's see how intelligent you are. How quickly can you learn to climb a piece of garden string?

So I pulled out a length of string from one of those balls of green garden twine which was standing on the rack next to the food bin, and let it hang loosely down to the surface of the seed.

1. Mouse finds string and starts to climb. String is loose and stretches out so mouse makes no progress and gives up.
2. Mouse tries again and pulls string to make it tight then starts to climb it. Falls off.
3. Mouse tries again and climbs string until it can reach the rim of the smooth plastic bin with its front feet. Lets go with its hind feet but loses grip and slips back into the bin.
4. Mouse climbs up above the rim of the bin so its hind feet can stand on it. Walks round the rim of the bin a short distance then hops onto the rack, washes its face, and disappears.

In four steps the mouse had learned progressively by trial and error, and had got itself out of the bin.

What we had there was an interesting interaction in terms of genes and memes.

The mouse found itself in a predicament brought about because it exists in an environment in which I exist and in which the meme for enjoying nature and wanting to attract birds into my garden exists. The mouse genes had produced an animal which needs to feed and which actively looks for food, using a whole range of senses and abilities, not least of which is curiosity and an ability to discover by trial and error.

It survived because I have a mixture of memes and genes which make me interested in wildlife and an appreciation that they, like us, are the end-products of an incredible evolutionary process in which every one of our ancestors survived, that to end that gene-line would bring to a halt a process which started three and a half billion years ago and which has never yet failed, and an understanding that the simple fact of sharing our history and having ancestors in common with all living things gives us a connectedness and a kinship with it which is truly inspiring and deeply spiritual.

And the mouse had genes which allowed it to make an intelligent assessment of its situation, plan an escape strategy and improve its technique by trial and error whilst learning from its mistakes and keeping its objective in sight. With a little help from its friend.

And I spent a magical twenty minutes or so enjoying an interaction with a wee, sleekit, cowran, tim'rous beastie.

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Is The Pope Calling For Holy War?

Let’s learn to lose our lives for Christ, like a gift or a sacrifice. With Christ we lose nothing!

— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) June 29, 2013

In an astonishingly careless tweet today, and reminiscent of a medieval Pope sending tens or hundreds of thousands of people to commit genocide or die for Jesus in the 'Holy Lands' in a 'Crusade', Pope Francis appeared to be calling the Catholic faithful to holy war and martyrdom!

Cardinal Bergoglio with
Junta leader General Videla

Pope Francis, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, Argentine-born son of Italian immigrant parents, and first Jesuit Pope, is no stranger to guerrilla warfare. During the neo-fascist military junta's 'dirty war' in Argentina between 1976 and 1983, when Jorge Mario Bergoglio was progressing through his clerical career, an estimated 30,000 Argentinians, the so-called Desaparecidos, were murdered by right-wing death squads working for the junta, as the Argentinian people tried to take their country back from the cabal of neo-fascist army officers who had stolen it, and bring it back under the democratic control of the people.

Screen capture of the tweet. These divine revelations have a tendency
to become Desaparecidos when 'clarified' later.

He is widely thought to have been complicit in, or at least equanimous with, the kidnapping and torture of two Catholic priests, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics, in Argentina during this period. Both were later found drugged and semi-naked, five months later. Both had been tortured. Although Franz Jalics, having initially refused to discuss the affair, from his sanctuary in a German Catholic monastery, now (two days after Bergoglio became Pope) denies Bergoglio's involvement, Yorio put on record before his death in 2000 that, "Bergoglio did nothing to free us, in fact just the opposite" (Miroff, Nick (17 March 2013). "Pope's activity in Dirty War Draws Scrutiny". Chicago Tribune (Sec. 1). Washington Post. p. 27.)

One wonders where and when Pope Francis anticipates his devoted followers pursuing this jihad holy war and seeking this martyrdom.

Maybe we'll soon see another hurried 'clarification' from the Vatican such as we saw the other day when Pope Francis went off message and forgot his Catholic dogma, telling the faithful that they didn't need to believe in Jesus any more to get to Heaven because even Atheists could get there provided they did good things. Some people saw the hand of the other Pope, Benedict XVI, who seems far from being a 'Desaparecidos', in that 'correction' 'clarification'.

I notice that he isn't offering unrestricted access to any virgins as a reward, so the Catholic Church doesn't seem to have moved that far out into the lunatic fringes under his guidance, never-the-less, his call to Catholics to be prepared to 'lose their lives for Christ' is surely sinister and extreme.

Strangely, 'His Holiness' seems to have forgotten to mention the fact that another Vatican cleric has been arrested over the Vatican banking fraud and money-laundering allegations which have been rumbling on for many years now, and which resulted in the Vatican's bank card account being frozen by Italian banking authorities last January.

The parallels between the Catholic Church and other Italian-based international criminal organizations, who also tend to have a cosy relationship with neo-fascist groups, are becoming more and more marked. Are we seeing the lead up to a new turf war between two of the world's major criminal gangs - the Christians and the Muslims - over who controls the lucrative income from protection racketeering and farming the peasantry for tithes?

Reference:

The Truth Behind Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis: Breaking the Silence, the Catholic Church in Argentina and the ‘Dirty War’; Horacio Verbitsky.

Religion's Living Fossils

In my back garden in Oxfordshire, England, I have a rather dilapidated horseshoe crab shell, a souvenir of a trip to Cape Cod a few years ago which we brought back to show our grandchildren. (It was very dead and there were literally thousands of them along the high-tide line on the bay side just south of Wellfleet, I hasten to assure any wildlife conservationists!) The long spike 'tail' is a particularly good for clearing out the feeding holes in bird feeders when they get clogged.

I sometime wonder what future paleontologists would make of it if it had the great good fortune to become fossilised and then to be discovered again in a couple of million years. Horseshoe crabs in central England!

And that leads me to the main topic here - so-called 'living fossils', of which the horseshoe crabs (plural because there are four different species) are frequently cited as an example.

The rather annoying oxymoronic term 'living fossil' need not apply (and rarely does) to a species:

First Horse Makes An Ass Of Creationists

The Przewalski’s horse, Equus ferus przewalskii
The last remaining wild horse, recently saved from extinction in Mongolia.

First horses arose 4 million years ago : Nature News & Comment

Yesterday's Nature brings us news of yet another advance in evolutionary science in the form of a major advance in genome sequencing from ancient sources. As reported by a team led by Ludovic Orlando of the Centre for GeoGenetics, Natural History Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, scientists have been able to sequence the full genome from an ancient ancestor of the modern horse from a specimen found in Canadian permafrost. The specimen is believed to be between 780,000 and 560,000 years old.

The sequence was extracted from a foot bone of a horse that lived between 780,000 and 560,000 years ago. By sequencing the animal's genome, along with those of a 43,000-year-old horse, five modern domestic horse breeds, a wild Przewalski’s horse and a donkey, researchers were able to trace the evolutionary history of the horse family in unprecedented detail. They estimate that the ancient ancestor of the modern Equus genus, which includes horses, donkeys and zebras, branched off from other animal lineages about 4 million years ago — twice as long ago as scientists had previously thought.

“We have beaten the time barrier,” says evolutionary biologist Ludovic Orlando of the University of Copenhagen, who led the work with colleague Eske Willerslev. Noting that the oldest DNA sequenced before this came from a polar bear between 110,000 and 130,000 years old2, Orlando says: “All of a sudden, you have access to many more extinct species than you could have ever dreamed of sequencing before.”

First horses arose 4 million years ago; Erika Check Hayden; Nature 26 June 2013

This is great news and should spread despair and despondency amongst the loons and liars of the Discovery Institute and other frauds who make a living from Creation pseudo-science, unless they manage not to notice it, as the techniques could be adapted to other DNA samples if and when they are obtained, so giving us a clearer picture of the evolution of other species and so better able to understand the nitty-gritty of how evolution works.

As well as recognising what a powerful tool this is, what caught my attention particularly was the paragraph:

The researchers were also able to trace the size of the horse population over time by looking for genomic signatures of population size, and were thus able to show that populations grew in periods of abundant grassland, in between times of extreme cold.

Bwaaahhhaaa! Creationists say what!?

Here we see how evolutionary theory is meshing in with other disciplines like climatology with each discipline supporting the other. We can tell the relative extent of things like grasslands through analysis of pollen in permafrost, polar ice cores, bogs, etc. It is interesting, but not really surprising, that this is echoed in the DNA of a genus like Equus. The DNA is merely evolving in response to environmental change, just as we would expect.

DNA is acting like a record of a species history on this planet and so of the planet itself, and the scientific theory which integrates it with the rest of science is the Theory of Evolution - one of the most profound, powerful and far-reaching theories in the whole of science. No wonder it so terrifies those who make their living from promoting Bronze-Age superstition and who so need to spread lies and misinformation about science.

Not for them the road to discovery and enlightenment. Far too risky. There's a lot of money at stake.

References:

First horses arose 4 million years ago; Erika Check Hayden; Nature, 26 June 2013

Recalibrating Equus evolution using the genome sequence of an early Middle Pleistocene horse; Orlando, L., et al; Nature, 26 June 2013; doi:10.1038/nature12323

'via Blog this'

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Evolution In Progress - Complex Cells

Tiny Genomes May Offer Clues to First Plants and Animals | Quanta

When we think of evolution in progress we almost always think of higher animals evolving by changing over time or of bacteria and viruses adapting to environmental changes like antibiotics or host resistance, more rarely of a new species having been found to have arisen by hybridization like the Italian sparrow which I described recently in Evolution In Progress - A Tale Of Three Sparrow. It's not often that we get to witness a stage in life's evolution which we think of as having happened a long time ago as

The Darwin Creationist Award 2013 - Nominations

Announcing the coveted Darwin Creationist Award 2013!

Stand by for another summer of glorious moronitude as creationists struggle to put a coherent thought into words or wrestle with the intricacies of basic science, logic and joined-up thinking, as they try to convince the world that their ignorant stupidity and Bronze-Age superstition trumps anything which science has to offer.

The Darwin Creationist Award, like its illustrious bigger brother, the Darwin Award, which is awarded annually to the person who, by their utter inept stupidity has contributed positively to human evolution by removing their genes from the gene-pool, is awarded to the Creationist who similarly has done most to remove the meme of creationism from the human meme-pool. Self-sacrifice is not required for this award. All it takes is a tweet, blog, Facebook or other on-line comment, illustrating the utter moronic stupidity it takes to be fooled by professional Creationist charlatans and frauds, so making people think twice before falling for it themselves.

Of Chickens And Eggs

We've all seen it. For some reason Creationists seem to think they've come up with an unanswerable question for 'Evolutionists', apparently under the impression that a single unanswerable question will totally destroy any science regardless of whether it has any relevance to the field of science in question.

The whole point of scientific debate, from a fundamentalist Creationist point of view, is to shut down debate, not to elicit information and enhance understanding.

And of course, as we all know, since we are all too stupid to spot a blatant false dichotomy when one is staring us in the face, if you can destroy science then either Islam or Christianity, or whatever other primitive superstition is being promoted, will automatically become the only possible answer, and then they will have won.

The 'devastating killer question' is of course, 'Which came first; the chicken or the egg?'

Evolution in Progress - A Tale Of Three Sparrows

Italian sparrow, Passer italiae

While sitting enjoying the shade in a very hot Villa Borghese Park in Rome the other day [sniff!] I noticed all the male sparrows were different to our 'normal' house sparrow that we see in Britain and most of the rest of Europe. They all have chestnut coloured heads whereas the usual house sparrow males have grey heads. Their backs looked a little brighter too. The females are indistinguishable (to me) from the usual female house sparrows. I have seen these 'Italian sparrows' before, in Switzerland on the south side of the Alps just a few miles from the Italian border. It's the kind of small difference that makes you think, "there's something different about that bird!" Most people who have no interest in wildlife probably wouldn't even notice it.

Causality

The Illustrated Sutra of Cause and Effect. 8th century, Japan

In the end, all theological apologetics boil down to one thing - causality. Ignoring for the moment the circularity of assuming your favourite deity doing magic is the only possible cause, then including that assumption to the exclusion of all else, as apologists do with the Cosmological Argument so it always comes up with the god they first thought of, there is still the unsupported assumption that 'everything' must have had one single cause.

Apologists find no difficulty with this assumption yet the more fundamentalist of them get quite hysterical at the thought that all living things might well have had a single common ancestor, but that's a different problem. Let's stick to causality.

Why this assumption?

How many phenomena actually have a single cause?

Let's forget for the moment that some quantum events appear not to have any cause and that the Big Bang, if there ever was a Big Bang, was probably a quantum event, and let's indulge religious apologists and grant them their prefered version of reality in which things happen or not according to the convenience of whatever argument they are trying to deploy at the time. Let's assume that everything that happens actually does have a cause.

Causality (also referred to as causation) is the relation between an event (the cause) and a second event (the effect), where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first.

In common usage, causality is also the relation between a set of factors (causes) and a phenomenon (the effect). Anything that affects an effect is a factor of that effect. A direct factor is a factor that affects an effect directly, that is, without any intervening factors. (Intervening factors are sometimes called "intermediate factors".) The connection between a cause(s) and an effect in this way can also be referred to as a causal nexus.

Source: Wikipedia - Causality

Now, try this mind experiment. Think of a single event which has a single cause, and not a multiplicity of causes, each of which has a multiplicity of causes.

I've previously blogged about how many apparent basic laws, such as the Gas Laws, are only laws of mass action; emergent properties which depend on statistical probabilities involving chaotic motions of atoms or molecules. Nothing at the level of the atom or molecule is obeying a Gas Law; only in aggregated probability across the whole population does the property emerge from an underlying chaos.

What caused the Herald of Free Enterprise to sink?

Blow a balloon up until it bursts. What single event caused it to burst? Was it the last molecule of air you blew in? What about the effect of all the others? Without them, that last molecule would have had no effect. Was it pressure in your lungs or cheeks? How did that get there? What about the fabric of the balloon; the rubber? Was it the parting of a single atomic bond somewhere in the organic polymer that the rubber is composed of? How did that happen unless it was caused by the mass action of the atoms of air inside the balloon pushing on the balloon skin with a high enough average force exerted by chaotically moving molecules of air?

Make a splash in water by dropping a stone into it. What single event cause that splash? Gravity? Letting the stone fall? How did your fingers move to cause that event? How about the atomic structure of the rock which gave it solidity and enough density to allow it to fall through the air with enough force to push the water molecules out of the way? How many molecules of water constitute a 'splash'? We're back to laws of mass action and emergent properties from the chaos of water molecules again. Even the atoms of the rock and the water, or rather the fundamental particles from which they are made may well be emergent properties from an underlying chaotic structure of force fields and vibrating multi-dimensional superstrings. The positions of fundamental particles in those atoms can only be described as a probability distribution derived from integrating all possible paths through spacetime.

Which snowflake caused the avalanche? How could it have done that without all the others and in the absence of gravity or without the mountain side? And if there is a single, predictable chain of causality in an avalanche it should be entirely predictable. Guess what! It isn't. An avalanche in progress is a system in total chaos and it's not even possible to accurately predict their occurrence. This is what makes them so dangerous.

The problem is we have evolved to deal with reality at the level at which we, as complex, multicellular organisms can perceive it by processing the photons which come into our eyes and the vibrations which come into our ears, or through other senses which only work at the level of organisation within which we operate. There would be no evolutionary advantage in being able to detect things at a different level because we can't eat it, be eaten by it, use it for shelter or have sex with it.

So we assume that the Universe behaves pretty much the way things do in our world. We flick a switch or turn a key and something happens. We throw a spear and it flies through the air. If it hits the antelope in the right place the antelope dies and we get food. We press a key on our keyboard and it makes 'p' appear on our computer screen. We assume a narrative - a story behind the event.

We assume A->B->C->D. We assume that there is a simple chain of causality like there seems to be when we strike the match with which we light the fire which burns the wood which boils the water which cooks the food. Actually, I switch an electric hob-ring on, but you get the point.

In fact almost nothing happens because of a single, identifiable cause or even as the endpoint of a chain of single cause-effects. Normally, many things need to happen, some of them in sequence, some in parallel. We can't throw a spear without our brain firing off a salvo of signals to work a myriad of muscle fibres, coordinated by our eyes detecting incoming photons, processing them and passing signals on to our brains for further processing, and after a complex process by which we've weighed the spear, judge the distance, computed the trajectory and coordinated muscles in our arm, shoulder, hands, legs, back, chest and abdomen. And then, of course, gravity and inertia, explained by Newton's Laws of Motion, takes over, as well as a whole mass of small effects as the spear pushes molecules of air around causing friction and drag. Throwing a spear is not a single event in any causal sense of the word. It is a whole bunch of different events coming together to produce a single effect - the spear travelling from A to B.

So why assume a universe exists because of a single, identifiable cause?

Perhaps the major challenges in physics is to come up with a Grand Unified Theory which unifies quantum mechanics with Einsteinian Relativity because it is assumed there should be a single principle as the basis of all physics. At the moment, Relativity explains gravity while quantum mechanics explains the other three forces - the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism. Because gravity exactly balances the sum of the other three forces, making the total energy in the Universe equal precisely zero, it is assumed they have a common 'cause' expressible by a single theory. The problem is that no one has managed to unify them yet (note: this isn't the same as saying they can't be, or won't be).

But why do we assume there should be a single cause? Why can't relativity and quantum mechanics have different causes which together caused the Universe? Why limit it to two causes even? It is said that a tendency to assume a single cause is more likely in scientists from monotheistic cultures. Is this merely an example of a culturally biased assumption; of intuition over-riding what the evidence points to; of an argument from personal incredulity?

There is of course nothing other than a baseless assumption behind the religious apologist's insistence that the Universe had a single cause, just as there is nothing behind their assumption that the single cause must have been their favourite magic friend. It is nothing more than a manifestation of their insistence that the Universe must be as they require it to be. Just because a medieval theologian who knew nothing of physics or cosmology, and probably believed that Earth was a flat disc round which a small sun orbited, thought there should be a single cause, and just because primitive people from the beginnings of recorded history who knew even less thought that the Universe worked by magic, doesn't mean there is or it does.

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Evolutionary Snail Trail

Scientists Use Snails to Trace Stone Age Trade Routes in Europe | Surprising Science

Cepaea nemoralis

Scientists studying the distribution of beautiful little group of snails, abundant in Britain, the grove snails and their close relatives, the white-lipped snail has discovered something surprising which could shed light on human migration some 8-9,000 years ago as we spread throughout Europe and into the British Isles and Ireland.

They were hoping to find genetic clues to the origins and diversity of this group of common European snails by looking at their mitochondrial DNA.

Abstract
The origins of flora and fauna that are only found in Ireland and Iberia, but which are absent from intervening countries, is one of the enduring questions of biogeography. As Southern French, Iberian and Irish populations of the land snail Cepaea nemoralis sometimes have a similar shell character, we used mitochondrial phylogenies to begin to understand if there is a shared “Lusitanian” history. Although much of Europe contains snails with A and D lineages, by far the majority of Irish individuals have a lineage, C, that in mainland Europe was only found in a restricted region of the Eastern Pyrenees. A past extinction of lineage C in the rest of Europe cannot be ruled out, but as there is a more than 8000 year continuous record of Cepaea fossils in Ireland, the species has long been a food source in the Pyrenees, and the Garonne river that flanks the Pyrenees is an ancient human route to the Atlantic, then we suggest that the unusual distribution of the C lineage is most easily explained by the movements of Mesolithic humans. If other Irish species have a similarly cryptic Lusitanian element, then this raises the possibility of a more widespread and significant pattern.

Irish Cepaea nemoralis Land Snails Have a Cryptic Franco-Iberian Origin That Is Most Easily Explained by the Movements of Mesolithic Humans;
Adele J. Grindon, Angus Davison; PLoS ONE 8(6): e65792. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065792

Distribution of main Cepaea nemoralis mitochondrial lineages across Europe.
C = Irish and Eastern Pyrenean gene line.

What they found were seven distinct genetic lines but the one commonest in Ireland is only found in mainland Europe in the Eastern Pyrenees - the range of mountains forming the border between Spain and France. As the authors point out, it isn't possible to rule out the possibility that this line was once widespread and has since gone extinct in all but these two ends of it's range but the fossil record, extending back in Ireland more than 8,000 years, the long history of C. nemoralis being a food source in the Eastern Pyrenees and the Garonne river providing a navigable route to the Atlantic, the much more likely explanation is human transportation taking them to Ireland, either accidentally or as food for the voyage. The earliest C. nemoralis fossils also coincide with the archaeologically inferred first arrival of humans in Ireland following the end of the last ice age.

There are other clues suggesting a link between these two areas in the form of the Kerry slug, Geomalacus maculosus found only in County Kerry, Ireland, northwest Spain and central Portugal, a species of strawberry tree, Arbutus unedo native to the Mediterranean and southwestern Ireland, and the Pyrenean glass snail, Semilimax pyrenaicus found in the Pyrenees and Ireland.

At first sight it might seem strange that people, and the plants and animals they took with them, would get to Ireland without going via Britain (and so leaving their snails there too) until you consider the geography of the time. There were no roads to speak off by which to cross Brittain, which was, especially in the south, heavily wooded, even on the hills. The valleys would have been difficult to travel through often being thickly wooded and boggy. Additionally, there were no pack animals, the horse and donkey were not domesticated for another 4-5,000 years, apart from the small problem of getting them across the Channel even if they had been domesticated earlier.

If you could sail or row a boat, water was by far the easiest way to travel. In effect, the sea, especially inshore waters, and rivers were the highways. The boat becomes the pack animal and the means of transport. Wind and/or manpower was the energy source. Not surprisingly then the main route for human migration, especially the initial migration out of Africa, was by coastal spread, and so Ireland, and maybe southern and western Britain was very probably first colonised by people from the Iberian Peninsula who had themselves reached those locations by coastal spread around the Mediterranean.

That's all very interesting from the perspective of human history of course, but the interesting thing here for an evolutionary biologist is how the distribution of species was affected by human migration and trade. The spread of humans was a major change in the environment of these species, specifically the grove snail. Not only did human agriculture and changes in land use change the landscape on which they lived, sometimes opening up new niches, sometimes closing existing ones and, in the case in point, redistributing a species to a new range which it was highly unlikely to have reached on its own.

Cepaea nemoralis. One of many colour forms.

Paradoxically, just as with domesticated species like sheep, cattle, pigs and fowl, being used by humans for food has worked in favour of these snails, which have been introduced to a new range so they now form two different isolated gene-pools, biologically acting as a distinct species, though not yet diversified genetically. Without any conscious decision or intelligent planning, two sets of genes, human and snail, became temporarily linked in an alliance which turned out to be mutually beneficial in the long-term. Humans had food to sustain a range extension and snails hitched a ride by providing that food.

The 'selfish' snail genes of course had no concern that most of the snails would have been eaten. The 'strategy' worked because it worked. Had it not done the grove snail would now be confined to the eastern Pyrenees and no one would be any the wiser. Human history might have been a little different too.

Here we have an example of evolution in progress. An environmental change created an opportunity for the grove snail to move into a new range, facilitated by a temporary alliance between two species which turned out to be mutually beneficial. Given time the two populations of C. nemoralis will diverge and form genetically distinct populations. Eventually they will lose the ability to interbreed and we will have two new species where once there was one. Of course, no intelligence, no planning and no design was involved in that process. Nothing and no-one planned to have these snails introduced to Ireland just as nothing and no-one planned to have them in the Pyrenees in the first place. It was merely living things doing what living things do, and the consequences turning out to be what they were.

As a final note, I wonder how many readers spotted the way Darwinian evolution underpinned the use of biodiversity to elucidate and explain human distribution and early human history. This is just another example of how this scientific theory is now regarded as a basic science and how it has hugely powerful explanatory powers, and not just in the province of biological diversification.

References:

Scientists Use Snails to Trace Stone Age Trade Routes in Europe | Surprising Science

Grindon AJ, Davison A (2013) Irish Cepaea nemoralis Land Snails Have a Cryptic Franco-Iberian Origin That Is Most Easily Explained by the Movements of Mesolithic Humans. PLoS ONE 8(6): e65792. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065792

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What A Silly Rabbi

Jonathan Sacks

By cooperniall - Photo link,
CC BY 2.0, Wikipedia

Chief Rabbi: atheism has failed. Only religion can defeat the new barbarians » The Spectator

In a quite extraordinarily display of whistling in the dark to keep his spirits up, the UK Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks made the following statement in the Spectator a few days ago:

Future intellectual historians will look back with wonder at the strange phenomenon of seemingly intelligent secularists in the 21st century believing that if they could show that the first chapters of Genesis are not literally true, that the universe is more than 6,000 years old and there might be other explanations for rainbows than as a sign of God’s covenant after the flood, the whole of humanity’s religious beliefs would come tumbling down like a house of cards and we would be left with a serene world of rational non-believers getting on famously with one another.

Really? Atheists believe the whole of humanity's religious beliefs depend on those things? All of them? Hindu, Buddhist, Shintoist, Daoist, Parsi, Sikh? It's not clear if this includes all historical religions too, or just the present-day ones.