A Little Man Thinks He's Finally Achieved Something!

As expected little Manuel de Dios Agosto, who stalks the internet under a variety of bogus names hoping no one will realise who he is, and who seems to have devoted his life to stalking me and getting me banned from the Internet because he was too cowardly to take me on in a simple debate, has descended to a new low as he plumbs the depths of infantile behaviour.

Regular readers will know him as @Sacerdotus, @Rationallyfaith2012, @BronxBomber777, @CatholicBlog, @YearOfFaith2012, @NYCLATINO2013, and a host of other Twitter names, some of which are listed here and many of which have been permanently suspended or taken down altogether because of the sexually explicit abuse and threats of violence he was posting with them.

He seems desperate to claim credit for the current suspension of my @RosaRubicondior Twitter account and has re-commenced spamming this blog with dozens of infantile and deranged comments again - a habit he had managed to control for a couple of weeks.

Oops! Here We Go Again

I wonder how long it will be this time.

Last time it took a week and I increased my Twitter following by about 1500 and my blog hits went up by 50%. The terms 'counter-productive' springs to mind.

That'll teach me to tell creationists that they're not made of dirt and to keep winning debates against religious apologists.

I'm in France from Saturday for a week and won't have Internet access, so I could be away some time.

Love and kisses to anyone who posts a link to my blogs on Reddit. They don't like me doing it myself, for some reason. Weird the obstacles those freedom-loving Christians and Muslims feel they have to put in front of Atheists and Humanists just because they don't have any facts, reasons or logic they can use and so can't debate freely, openly and honestly.

Another Easy One For Muslims... Or Not!

My friend being inspired to write his book

It's not just Christians who won't answer simple questions about their 'faith'. Muslims are no less prone to showing their faith relies on them applying a much lower standard to their god and their dogmas than they do to normal life, and how circular reasoning and logical fallacies are the common currency of religious belief. It seems that intellectually dishonest double standards are essential for religious faith.

For example, I challenged Christian to apply their beliefs about Jesus to a scenario set in modern times with Help! What Should I Do? In this scenario I said someone had told me about someone he's heard about who was now dead but could do miracles and claimed I would live forever if I believed in him. I asked why should not believe him? I've not had a sensible reply in nearly 18 months at the time of writing and yet this is exactly the scenario Christians accept without question in order to maintain their belief in the biblical Jesus.

I also asked Christians, Jews and Muslims which of the stories in their favourite holy book they would believe without more evidence if a passing stranger told them was happening right now a mile or two down the road, in Why Believe The Holy Books?. None have them have been able to think of any, and yet they believe what a stranger told them in their favourite holy book. Why the double standard?

So let's see if Muslims can fare any better with this one:

Edith's Butterfly Shows How Evolution Works

Ediths Checkerspot
(www.jeffpippen.com)

I recently came across this striking example of how the ability to evolve fairly rapidly in response to environmental change can be both a benefit and a threat to a species. It also illustrates how a basic understanding of evolution can help us understand distribution patterns for species like this butterfly.

Edith's checkerspot butterfly (Euphydryas editha) is a group of very many subspecies of butterfly from north-western North America. Wikipedia lists 30 subspecies which have so far been identified, many of which are critically endangered. Each tends to be a specialist feeder in that adult females lay their eggs on one specific plant species on which the caterpillars feed. This makes it vulnerable to environmental changes affecting the occurrence and distribution of its host plant species.

A clue to why there are so many subspecies can be found in this abstract to a letter published in Nature from 1993:

Abstract
RAPID evolution of host association is now occurring independently in two populations of the host-specialist butterfly Euphydryas editha, each of which has recently incorporated a novel host species into its diet. The reasons for these episodes of rapid evolution lie in human land use practices: logging in one case and cattle ranching in the other. In contrast to other insects that have used tolerance of human activities to expand their ranges into disturbed habitats, these rare butterflies have remained at their original sites and evolved adaptations to the changes occurring at those sites. At both sites, the proportion of insects preferring the novel host has increased, in one case clearly because of genetic changes in the insect population. This process is now starting to generate insects that refuse to accept their ancestral host, foreshadowing a new problem in conservation biology. By adapting genetically to human-induced changes in their habitat, the insects risk becoming dependent on continuation of the same practices. This is a serious risk, because human cultural evolution can be even faster than the rapid genetic adaptation that the insects can evidently achieve.

Singer, M.C., Thomas, C.D, & Parmesan, C.; Rapid human-induced evolution of insect–host associations;
Nature 366, 681 - 683 (16 December 1993); doi:10.1038/366681a0

It seems that Euphydryas editha is able to switch it's dependence on one food species to dependence on another but isn't able to extend the number of plant species on which it is dependent. Hence it is easily directed down an evolutionary dead end by its environment and so is vulnerable to short-term changes with which it simply can't keep up.

The environment can change very quickly, in as little as a year or two, but it takes at least a few generations at one or two generation per year for the genepool to acquire the necessary level of allele frequency to make a new subspecies viable, then the species needs to evolve mechanisms to prevent interbreeding to prevent dilution of the new alleles in a larger genepool.

This can only be understood by an appreciation of how evolution is an adaptive response to environmental change but necessarily lags behind it. When the environment is subject to rapid change, as it is under human interference for example, the process of evolution can be too slow and the species can go extinct.

There is simply no way this can be presented as the result of directed evolution by some benevolent intelligence, or as a single act of creation just a few thousand years ago. The reason the distribution of Euphydryas editha, and the large number of subspecies into which it is divided, looks for all the world like it was produced by Darwinian Evolution is because that's exactly what produced it.

Simple little examples such as this entirely refute the infantile notion that a magic man created everything, of course, and yet almost half of American adults continue to believe it to be the best available explanation for the diversity of life on Earth, and of the distribution patterns and existence of so many subspecies of species like the Edith's checkerspot butterfly. This can only be because of ignorance, willful or otherwise, of the facts, or a refusal to acknowledge them.

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Did Cultural Conflict Exterminate Neanderthals?

Neanderthal range.
(May have extended further north than this map shows)

First bone tools suggest Neanderthals taught us skills - life - 12 August 2013 - New Scientist

A fascinating report in New Scientist gives added weight to the idea that modern Homo sapiens may not only have co-existed with Neanderthals (H. neanderthalensis) in Euro-Asia and interbred with them, forming a de facto ring species, but that they also exchanged elements of their culture.

It has long been recognised that soon after H. sapiens arrived on the scene in Europe, H. neanderthalensis started using more sophisticated tool which, it has always been assumed, they copied from H. sapiens. Now however, it seems the traffic in ideas and tool-making techniques (and use) may not have been all one way.

A team of archaeologists has found evidence to suggest that Neanderthals were the first to produce a type of specialised bone tool, still used in some modern cultures today. The find is the best evidence yet that we may have – on rare occasions – learned a trick or two from our extinct cousins.

First bone tools suggest Neanderthals taught us skills; Colin Barras, New Scientist 13 August 2013

The bone tool in question, known as a lissoir, was used for making animal skins more pliable so they could be used to make clothes and is still used in some human cultures today.

The recent finds in south-west France have been dated to between 45,000 and 51,000 years ago, which is just before the earliest known appearance of H. sapiens, hence the assumption that H. neanderthalensis invented the tool and we acquired it from them.

Of course, it is always possible to argue that we invented it independently or that we arrived in Europe earlier than is thought, but given that H. neanderthalensis lived for 200,000 years in Europe, which places them there during the whole of the last Ice Age (between 110,000 - 10,000 years ago) it's hard to imagine that they hadn't invented a way to make clothes from animal skins which they could actually bend. Apart from stone tools such as spear-points, hand-axes and skin scrapers it is highly likely that they would have had tools for making clothes. It's hard to see how they could have survived in the harsh conditions of arctic tundra they would have endured for close on 100,000 years without decent clothing.

For us as a single global species it's hard to imagine existing in a relationship with another species so close to us that we could not only interbreed but also exchange cultural ideas. For example, did H. neanderthalensis teach us to make the clothes we needed to survive at the tail-end of the last Ice Age for about 40,000 years in Europe, in a prequel to the way the Native Americans helped the first settlers from Europe get through their first winter? It would be nice to think so.

But how would we have viewed these people? Would we have regarded them as just another animal, like we regard elephants and horses, or even our present-day closest relatives, the chimpanzees? Or would we have regarded them as just other people? To have interbred with them and to have exchanged cultural ideas with them suggests the latter and yet interbreeding seems to have been a rare event and no modern male human has yet been found with a Neanderthal Y chromosome, which we would expect if we had a male Neanderthal ancestor.

And how would a religion which has a creator god and which places its believers at the centre of creation or even the purpose of it, like Christianity or Islam, which presents humans as separate from all the other species, cope with having at least two species of human? Would they regard the other humans as an earlier mistake or as the creation of a lesser god or a demonic attempt to copy their god's special creation? Would they launch a genocide in the name of their god, urged on by their priests and shamans, as the biblical Hebrews believed they were authorised to do in the 'Promised Land'?

Is this what finally exterminated the Neanderthals, like the European settlers in the New World tried to exterminate the people who had helped them survive the first winter because they believed their god had crossed the Atlantic with them and the land was theirs by right because they were the superior people?

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How Science Really Tells Right From Wrong

Based on the structure of Arboroharamiya's lower jaw,
palaeontologists believe that the animal had a mammalian-like ear.

Fossils throw mammalian family tree into disarray : Nature News & Comment

This article by Sid Perkins in Nature a couple of days ago illustrates how new information in science often opens up more questions than it answers and challenges previous ideas. It also illustrates how science responds to such challenges and so moves continually closer to the truth.

Creationists hold two diametrically opposite views of science simultaneously - never a problem for creationists who don't do joined-up thinking or bother too much about having inconsistent and contradictory views. They traditionally trot out whichever one they think will fool most people when the opportunity arises. They believe:

• Science is like a religion and has unchallengeable fixed dogmas which all scientists have to subscribe to.
• Science is always changing its mind and saying that what they thought was the case yesterday is now wrong and should be disregarded.

The article reports the discovery of two fossils which seem to tell two different stories about the early evolution of mammals around 250 million years ago; or was that 180 million years ago?.

The fossils represent previously unknown species, described today in Nature ^{1, 2}. Both are members of the haramiyids, a group of animals that first appeared around 212 million years ago and that researchers first recognized in the late 1840s. Until now, the creatures have been known only from isolated examples of their distinctive teeth — which have some rodent-like features — and a single fragmentary jawbone. But both fossils described today include not only the distinctive teeth, but also vertebrae and bones from the limbs, feet and tails.

Sid Perkins; Fossils throw mammalian family tree into disarray; Nature 07 August 2013

The controversy comes about because one fossil, placed in the genus Arboroharamiya, has characteristics typical of mammals, including a mammal-like lower jaw where some bones present in reptilian jaws have evolved into the small bones of the middle ear. This seems to have lived in trees. Placing this species in the mammal evolutionary tree suggests mammals had evolved somewhere between 282 ands 201 million years ago.

The other specimen, placed in the genus Megaconus, lived between 164 million and 165 million years ago and had characteristics closer to the pre-mammalian reptiles, suggesting that the common ancestor of all living mammals evolved about 180 million years ago and that Megaconus branched away from that tree some 40 million years before true mammals evolved.

These sorts of controversies are of course characteristic of science and are to be expected when looking at fossils from a point close to the divergence into new branches when species would not have diversified that far from ancestral species. We would expect it to be difficult to place these species accurately.

What is really interesting here is how disagreement and conflicting evidence is actually welcomed by science because it raises new questions and causes us to re-examine and re-evaluate evidence and rebuild our understanding. No one minds at all if older ideas are overthrown because that is precisely what good science should seek to do.

But how does science resolve these differences and difficulties?

With more evidence.

Cifelli [a vertebrate palaeontologist at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History] says that the confusion can be cleared up only with more fossils — preferably ones that include all or a significant part of a skull, whose anatomical features are particularly instructive in working out evolutionary relationships. “To break this tie, we really need more information,” he says.

Op. Cit.

So, creationists may be right in one respect. If there is a dogma in science it is that nothing is certain and the only way to know what is right and what isn't is with evidence.

Contrast that with religion, particularly with Creationism, where everything is certain and the last thing wanted is evidence especially the sort of evidence that would shake their unshakeable certainties. Science is reasonable uncertainty; religion is unreasonable certainty.

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Now A Human Ring Species In West Africa?

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

Image: Ton Koene/Corbis

Arabian flights: Early humans diverged in 150 years - life - 02 August 2013 - New Scientist

Dramatic news this week showing how, when humans diverged out of Africa they encountered many new environments and quickly diversified into them. The record of this has been found in the Y chromosome, which males uniquely inherit from their fathers. Females inherit two X chromosomes, one from each parent so it is impossible to say from which unless you have the parents' genome too. Males inherit their Y chromosome from their father and an X chromosome from their mother. For this reason the Y chromosome represents the history of the male line.

Researchers David Poznik and Carlos Bustamante and their colleagues of Stanford University found that within the space of about 150 years, some 50,000 years ago, a single site on the Y chromosome mutated to form two distinct male lines, followed very quickly by a second mutation at the same site creating a third line. These three lines can still be traced in the modern Euro-Asian populations.

It is believe the mutation occurred probably in the Arabian peninsula:

Debate - The Kalam Cosmological Argument

This debate is about the Kalam Cosmological Argument, a favourite of religious apologetics. Here, the Christian blogger, Richard Bushey, who runs the Therefore God Exists blog attempts to establish the proposition that "The Kalam Cosmological Argument Proves The Existence Of God".

It will be echoed here and his blog The Kalam Cosmological Argument.

Opening statement by Richard:

Human Evolution In Progress

Why We "Got Milk": Scientific American

An excellent article on the human lactose tolerance genetic mutation and how it has played an important part in human success. I have blogged about this before in Lactose Tolerance And Creation 'Science' so I won't go into much detail beyond covering the main facts.

Human babies 'normally' (i.e. those who have the normal gene for lactose intolerance) breast-feed for about 18 months to 2 years then develop a distaste for milk due to losing the ability to digest the sugar (lactose) in it. They lose this ability because they stop producing the enzyme lactase which digests it. This natural mechanism ensures babies don't continue breast-feeding indefinitely and are forced to change to an adult diet.

Breast-feeding is a natural contraceptive because the act of suckling stimulates the mother to produce a hormone which inhibits ovulation so, when the baby stops breast-feeding the mother can become pregnant again. Through evolution a balance had been established so a baby gets the mother's attention for the first couple of years, then she can reproduce again. Meanwhile, if the baby dies, the mother can become pregnant again more quickly. This strategy produced most descendants in the long run so it became the normal mechanism.

Four Deceptions of Apologetics

In response to The Four Miracles of Atheism

Sadly, the following seems to pass for religious apologetics these days, as religious superstitions continue to retreat in the face of science. Where once they could rely on a swift execution of heretics to defend their 'faiths' without having to bother justifying it with evidence, reason or logic, they now have to try to mount some sort of defence on the science playing field, and at least look as though they are playing to science's rules. It is taken from one of very many religious apologetics websites which purports to be meeting the challenge from science.

About the only positive thing to say about this site is that, if it has the begging button traditional on these sort of sites, it is very well hidden. Normally one can dismiss them as merely selling spurious confirmation to creationists who'll pay good money to be told that their ignorant superstition trumps science and reason and who crave nothing more than a scientific-looking refutation of the science they so despise.

Why Morality Evolved

BBC News - Selfish traits not favoured by evolution, study shows

The laughably absurd claim by followers of religions that they have the one true morality because it was handed down to them by the one true god, took another blow today when, as reported by in this BBC item, research showed that cooperation is an evolved trait and that, contrary to widespread belief and intuition, selfishness is not a successful long-term strategy.

A Tale of Picky Women

BBC News - Do you think I'm sexy? Why peacock tails are attractive

One of the most spectacular displays in the bird world. It shows the power of 'selfish' genes and how they have no regard for the individuals whose bodies they are using to get themselves through time, one generation at a time.

The peacock's tails is a product of female sex selection and comes from the differential investment male and female organisms make to ensuring their respective reproductive cells, their gametes, produce a new carrier of their genes. Females produce a small number of sedentary games, or egg cells while males produce a large number of motile gamete. In the vertebrates these are called sperm cells. Males can therefore afford to be relatively liberal and carefree with their sperm provided at least one finds a 'female' gamete, but the female needs to guard every one of hers.

This means that a female needs to pick and choose her mate because a poor choice could result in a wasted egg. Males, on the other hand, only waste a single ejaculation if they make a poor choice.

So how did this translate into peacock's tails?

Well, with picky females, males have to compete with other males for her attention and her favour, which puts her in charge. So, anything which makes the male more noticeable or more attractive becomes bound up with the evolutionary process by being strongly favoured. Female sex selection thus becomes a powerful form of natural selection; a particularly demanding and unforgiving natural selection sieve only allowing through those genes which are allied to those which the females will choose.

I can see no good reason to doubt that female birds, by selecting, during thousands of generations, the most melodious or beautiful males, according to their standard of beauty, might produce a marked effect.

I strongly suspect that some well-known laws with respect to the plumage of male and female birds, in comparison with the plumage of the young, can be explained on the view of plumage having been chiefly modified by sexual selection,

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1859

As the above research showed, the peacock has to work hard to keep the attention of the peahen because she is easily distracted by other things in her environment - which itself has evolved because she is a prey species for several predators so can't afford to be distracted for too long. The peacock is having to compete not just with other males but potentially with tigers and other predators and even with the wind rustling leaves and bushes. He has also had to overcome dense vegetation, so, although the peacock having gained her attention, the peahen only bothers to take notice of the lower parts of his display, he needs a long tail to get her attention in the first place because their environment has dense vegetation in it. The environment tells the peacock genes, grow a long peacock tail - or don't reproduce.

The result of this is that the males have been driven down an evolutionary path by female sex selection which has resulted in him being disposable. His long tail makes flight difficult and his bright colour and elaborate display seems to be practically designed to attract tigers and other predators. The female can always find another eager male with which to fertilise her few precious eggs. Female sex selection, for peacocks, has obviously out-competed the other natural selection factors which would be expected to produce birds which can hide from predators and easily escape from them.

No intelligent, compassionate designer would design males so they need adopt a practically suicidal strategy in order to reproduce. Selfish genes, on the other hand, have no compassion and no plan. They do exactly what the environment selects them to do and the only measure of effectiveness is that they reproduce themselves and survive into the next generation. That's what they built their carriers for.

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The Great Atheist Follow List Blunder

Looks like sad Manuel de Dios Agosto has boobed again. He's published the following list of Atheist's Twitter accounts on his blog asking people to spam-block them and to file false reports in his panic to prevent the truth about him being circulated.

He's spent most of today putting in the usual focussed fanatical effort of the seriously psychotic, no doubt gloating at the 'devastation' his latest 'brilliant' plan to silence Atheists will have, following his latest warning from Twitter about his abusive behaviour - and has succeeded in producing one of the best sources for great Atheist tweeters on Twitter.

I commend this list, though I haven't checked them all. Manuel's idea of an Atheist may not be that of normal people and probably includes people who have merely disagreed with him, so exercise caution. I've removed one fanatical Christian from the list.

Religion to Disappear By 2038

Nigel Barber: Atheism to Defeat Religion By 2038

In a recent book, "Why atheism will replace religion: The triumph of earthly pleasures over pie in the sky", Nigel Barber makes a very strong case for thinking atheism will have replaced religion across the world as a whole by 2038, in other words within the next generation.

Accepting the evidence showing a very strong correlation between the wealth of a country, measured by per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - a measure of average wealth generation - he arrives at this by taking two measures of Atheism:

1. The projected date by which the average country will reach the 2004 GDP of the nine most godless countries - Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom (proud to see the UK up there!) who transitioned to Atheism in that year. The International Monetary Fund gives an average annual increase in GDP of 3.33%.
2. Relative religiosity - that is, how important people think religion is in their lives. When they regard it as unimportant they become functionally atheist - in other words, they behave like perfectly normal atheists do - and a country in which more than 50% of the population regard religion as unimportant has effectively become a secular society. On this measure, taking Gallop Organization data, the most godless countries are Spain, South Korea, Canada, Switzerland, Uruguay, Germany and France. This has been increasing at a rate of 1% per annum.

Incidentally, that figure of 1% is exactly the figure reported for the USA between 2004 and 2013 by YouGov poll a few days ago, although the rate of increase appears to be increasing there, being 1.2% for the five years from 2008 to 2013.

Twitter Under Attack for Permitting Abuse

BBC News - Twitter 'report abuse' button calls after rape threats

BBC News - Twitter abuse case leads to arrest

It seems that Twitter may be becoming submerged in complaints of harassment and abuse, and of permitting this to continue as it becomes something of a safe haven for people with acute personality disorder to feel powerful in the safety of their bedroom.

At the moment the only weapon normal users have appears to be the ability to spam block offending individuals, which appears to trigger an automated algorithm not requiring human intervention, resulting in the account being suspended. In effect, policing Twitter is in the hands of the Twitter community whilst Twitter either can't, or won't defend their clients against inadequate and dysfunctional individuals whose only achievement in life is to get some attention, presumably working on the assumption that if they can tell themselves they've made someone elses life worse, this will somehow make theirs better.

The inadequacy of this method can be seen by the frequency with which it is used by those wishing to suppress free speech because they know their case is untenable. This is most often religious groups who are well aware that their public religiosity is merely a cover for otherwise unacceptable attitudes and actions and so will go to extraordinary lengths to prevent that being exposed.

Now combine this with, for example, a psychotic personality disorder in someone who has been frustrated in his ambition to gain trusted access to vulnerable people disguised as a priest, and you have a potent mixture for abuse which Twitter almost seems at times designed to facilitate.

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Science Has Life After Death

Stephen Hawking tells how doctors offered to turn off life support in 1985 | Science | guardian.co.uk

The news that doctors in Switzerland asked Stephen Hawking's then wife Jane to consider allowing them to turn off his life support when he was seriously ill with pneumonia in 1985, before he had completed his most famous book, A Brief History of Time set me thinking.

Apart from depriving us of one of the best-known popular physics books of all time and one of the greatest theoretical physicists of all time, what else would Stephen Hawking's death have cost humanity?

You Really Won't Want To Miss This

As most of you will know by now my Twitter account has been suspended. The reason why is shown here.

I've used a screen capture because otherwise Manuel will accuse me of making up emails like he does. As you can see, it had nothing to do with him, in any of his many guises. (See Manny's Many Twitter Accounts.) In fact, I appear to have triggered some algorithm, probably because I was replying to too many Creationist tweets in @TakeThatDarwin's timeline. They were just too tempting...

Sorry it's a little indistinct but the relevant passage reads: Your account was suspended because it was found to be violating the Twitter Rules (https://twitter.com/rules), specifically those rules around interacting with others by sending unsolicited or duplicate @replies or mentions. Double click to see it full size.

Winning With Science

Belief in evolution up since 2004

The recent dramatic advance in the understanding of science and the corresponding rejection of primitive superstitions as an explanation for life on Earth across America was illustrated by a stunning YouGov poll published a few days ago. The last nine years between 2004 and 2013 when the poll was conducted has seen acceptance of the science of undirected, unguided Darwinian evolution as the explanation for human beings rise from just 13% to 21% - an increase of almost 1% per annum.

And it's even more of a shock for Creationists when we look at those figures more closely. Between 2004 and 2008 the increase was 0.5% per annum but this more than doubled to 1.2% per annum between 2008 and 2013. The rate of increase has doubled in just five years. This is beginning to look like the beginnings of an exponential growth phase where the rate of increase also increases steadily, just as we saw, and are still seeing in Europe.

Religiously Hypocritical.

Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury

BBC News - Archbishop of Canterbury 'furious over' Church investment in Wonga

This made me chuckle. The background to the story is that the new Archbishop of Canterbury and pastoral head of the world-wide Anglican Community, Justin Welby, had said that he has told the head of Wonga, a notorious loan-sharking company , "we're not in the business of trying to legislate you out of existence; we're trying to compete you out of existence".

Wonga specialises in luring poor people into spiraling debt then hitting them with extortionate penalty payments they can't possibly afford, eventually sending in bailiffs to seize their possessions, like a blood-sucking parasite bleeding its victim to death with all the morality of the financial marketplace.

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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