How Thieves Exploit Religious Gullibility

Balls

[Although this site was taken off line soon after it was exposed here and in New Scientist, this doesn't affect the thrust of the article which is about how unscrupulous people exploit religious gullibility, apparently seeing religious people as especially good targets for this sort of scam, relying as it does on scientific ignorance and superstitious credulity. Fortunately, I copied all the relevant parts.]

Believe it or not, godparticle4u.com is a website set up to exploit the credulous gullibility of religious people, rather like all those emails from Nigeria looking for a kind Christian with a bank account where they would like to place a very large amount of money in return for a cut - just send your full account details including access codes, passwords, etc.

The site claims to be supplying parts of the Large Hadron Collider from CERN where the 'God Particle' was discovered and which they claim have magical properties curing almost everything from migraine to - you've probably guessed it already - sexual dysfunction. Apparently, the LHC has now been dismantled and sent to laboratories around the world for testing, presumably by Flying Pig Air Freight Services™.

Small parts of it - ball-bearing to be precise - can be yours for a mere $199.00 each inc. p&p.

Here's the bait they think will catch credulous, superstitious and scientifically illiterate (in other words, religious) suckers.

The God Particle, which was recently discovered by our colleagues in CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, forever the Holy Grail of particle physics and nuclear research. The God particle is regarded as one of the fundamental forces of the cosmos. Many religious philosophers believe it constitutes the very ground of being, while others assert that it is the fabric of creation upon which the tapestry of the universe is woven. There are some who refer to the God particle as the clay of existence, whereas the Shaivites of India know it as Brahman and regard it quite reverently as sacred supreme Consciousness.

We still don't know if one of these theories is true, or maybe they all are. What we do know is that you are on the verge of a once in a lifetime opportunity of letting this infinite power into your life.

You deserve God's help, you deserve God's particle.

Making history - How they searched and found the boson in the particle accelerator
Using the particle accelerator, protons are accelerated to nearly the speed of light causing them to collide with each other. The collision creates many particles, among those particles the God Particle is found. The energy required is almost as enormous as the energy of the big bang which created the universe (sic). These particles are absorbed by huge detectors the size of an office building. The information obtained is then analyzed by 33,000 giant computers. The amount of electricity used is incredible - 120 Megawatts - about as much as all of the homes in the neighboring Swiss Canton of Geneva.

The conclusions, based on data collected in the past two years of research are now cleared for publication and there is now unequivocal evidence for the existence of the God Particle.

This discovery was crowned by the global scientific community as one of the defining moments of science and one of the most important steps towards understanding the universe.

The evidence found in the material remaining from the accelerated protons has been used to confirm the already well-established theoretical assumptions. Moreover, the new knowledge has opened a whole new world of practical possibilities.

Further surprising discovery
In addition, it turns out that the presence of the God Particle in the material has an unexpected effect. The days following the most talked about collision, were exciting for everyone involved. Meanwhile, an interesting phenomenon has emerged, which could be noticed only after the euphoria of the discovery slowly subsided. With the return to the normal work routine, most of the employees returned to their usual mental-emotional state, and except for an obvious sense of optimism, no unusual symptoms were registered.

However, an interesting occurrence had been noticed by some of the staff involved in the project. As the days passed their general mood was improving, accompanied by a significant sense of clarity, balance, relaxation and unusual vitality.
This phenomenon, realized and verified by those lucky workers led the researchers to an unequivocal conclusion: prolonged physical contact with the internal metal parts of the accelerator, is the cause of that phenomenon. Those employees, mostly technicians and engineers whose task required them to stay and work inside the accelerator were the ones diagnosed as being affected by the amazing phenomenon.

"God is in the small details"
Naturally to a place as teeming with scientists as CERN, researchers from a wide variety of scientific backgrounds decided to try and figure it out.

The employees who were most exposed to the particle energy were required to undertake an extensive series of tests.

Samples from the parts exposed to the surge of energy which showed substantial evidence of having the God Particle were sent to the leading universities and research centers in the world.

According to preliminary evidence found thus far by researches in the medical field, the energy of the God Particle has some amazing effects on migraine prevention, on treating different kinds of skin conditions, up to a surprising improvement among those who ailing from sexual dysfunction disorders. All those among a long list of other medical conditions.

The effects of the God Particle is also tested in the field of mental health and in this field the patients are also getting some surprising improvements in a wide range of medical cases, for example treating phobias and depressions of different kinds.
One of the theories being researched by the scientists is that the God Particle doesn't really cure the listed conditions but provides the human body with the energy needed to normalize and cure itself.

All those researches are performed in scientific methods demanding them to comply with a strict criteria before publication.
Therefore all the above should not be taken as a scientific fact, but should only be understood the way it is, a positive influence of material exposed to the God Particle on treating and preventing a wide range of medical problems.

The results of the researches are still censored. But there is an increasing assumption in the scientific community that in the future, when it becomes less expensive to produce the particle, it will completely change the face of modern medicine.

Providing a rare opportunity
We are a part of a maintenance team in CERN. Among our responsibilities is to replace some of the worn out parts inside the collider.

We notices (sic) that something amazing was happening to many people during those days, and when we were summoned for tests by the research groups we realized that we were not the only ones who felt that way.

When the moment came to replace some of the parts around the center of the collision, we felt that we cannot dispose this material as waste. Instead, we started collecting the remaining bearings from the section which is under our responsibility. This material was exposed to the most powerful energy. After the remaining bearings are collected, we remove them from the compound and later from the country, back to our countries of origin.

Initially we gave small spheres which came from the collected bearings to our relatives and friends. In a short period of time the spheres started to leave their mark, and along with great responses we were flooded with requests from other acquaintances who heard about the amazing experience.

When we realized what a significant finding we have in our possession, we decided to try and bring it also to other people who will want to seize this opportunity.

One of our team member’s wife, who works as a jewelry [sic] designer for a known fashion brand, was worried about losing the sphere while carrying it in her pocket. She decided to design a pendant to help her keep it close to her.
When the decision to start distributing the spheres was made, we recruited her to design a new pendant based on the one she made for herself. Our main goal was to enable the use of the sphere in a wider variety of ways, for both men and women, and to make it fashionable.

With that goal in mind, she created an original jewel, with a unisex modular design enabling a few different ways of 'wearing' the sphere. Using a leather band and designated magnets the sphere can be worn as a necklace or as a bracelet and the pendant design itself can be easily changed to satisfy everyone's personal preference.

The pendant comes in a designed gift box, and includes a throughout explanation about the sphere and the God Particle, so the receiver will truly appreciate its incredible value.

As the supply of the bearings is very limited and unstable (highly dependent on planned collision dates), we didn't feel right to throw away the outer parts of the bearings as well, even though their shape is not ideal for carrying, these parts were also exposed to the same energy as the inner spheres. We cut these parts to smaller pieces and they are also available for people who care less about carrying it around in their pockets.


May God be with you!

And may your money be with us!

A magic ball-bearing on a string! Now don't laugh! It's not nice.

Well, okay, laugh a little bit...<giggle>

Anyway, how is this claim any less credible that the claims of Islam and Christianity, and the claimed cures they provide for a non-existent problem with magical powers and spells in return for money and obedience? How much more credulous and gullible do you need to be to swallow this story than to swallow stories about talking snakes, flying horses, messengers from Heaven and the power of blood sacrifices to save us from imaginary sky bogeymen?

And are these frauds being any less moral than the clerics of religion who sell magic spells and phony cures to gullible and vulnerable people in return for an easy life and freedom from the bother of having to earn an honest living?

[Update 04 October 2013] The site is now 'down for maintenance'.

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Evolving A Quickie

Related species, Gambusia puncticulata, showing the gonopodium

A lovely piece of research published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology today illustrates perfectly how environmental differences can quickly lead to genetic divergence. It doesn't seem to be available online yet but is reported on in a New Scientist article by Victoria Druce

It was published by Justa Heinen-Kay of North Carolina State University who does most of her research in the Bahamas on the mosquitofish, Gambusia hubbsi, a small, promiscuous, live-bearing fish that inhabits blue holes. Mosquitofish eggs are fertilised internally and males have modified anal fins called gonopodia with which to deposit sperm into females in an act of copulation. The problem is, a big gonopodium makes fast swimming difficult and copulating pairs of fish are vulnerable to predators because they make a larger target and may well be distracted.

Typical blue hole

The blue holes in which these fish are found are vertical caves which filled with water when the sea-level rose at the end of the last ice-age, some 10,000 years ago. All blue holes have acquired their fauna since that time. They are also found in Mexico and Belize. Some of these holes have also acquired a large predator fish, the bigmouth sleeper (Gobiomorus dormitor), while others have remained predator free. Thus we have a ready-made laboratory test-bed to see what happens when a species is subject to predation while a control group is free to evolve without predators.

Heinen-Kay and her team caught and examined specimens of Ga. hubbsi and noticed that where predation was present, males had smaller gonopodia than those found in predator-free blue holes. She explains the idea in her profile:

In order to gain genetic benefits for their offspring, females should prefer males that are successful in their local environment. But, the most important type of whole-organism performance will depend on local selection pressures. Rapid-burst escape swimming speed is of utmost importance for Bahamas mosquitofish living with predatory fish, yet that performance is irrelevant in blue holes without predators. At the same time, although resource availability does not differ between high- and low-predation blue holes, low-predation populations have much greater population densities, so competition for resources and foraging efficiency will be more intense than in populations with predators.

Justa Heinen-Kay

Basically, when predators are present, it produces more descendants if mating is quick and fast swimming is possible. In predator-free environments, female selection for large gonopodia will ensure mating is more successful and so well-endowed males will produce more offspring.

To anyone with even a basic understanding of evolutionary biology and how the resulting phenotype is the product of several competing factors, this is probably astoundingly obvious, but to a creationist who believes an omni-benevolent magic man magicked everything into existence and everything is descended from a couple of ancestors who lived on a boat, is must seem incomprehensible.

Why would this magic man have given some varieties of Ga. hubbsi smaller gonopodia so they could get mating over with quickly to escape the predators he put there to eat them? Did this creator have a day when he was in favour of Go. dormitor, so he put them in blue holes with food in, then the next day, changed sides and gave Ga. hubbsi smaller gonopodia so they could avoid becoming Go. dormitor food?

And how on Earth can this be described as Intelligent Design by anyone with even a modicum of intelligence?

References:

Victoria Druce, Mosquitofish are efficient lovers New Scientist 14 September 2013, Magazine issue 2934.

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Evolution's 'Big Bang' Explained

Marine life during the Cambrian explosion (~520 million years ago).

Image credit: Katrina Kenny & Nobumichi Tamura.
Copyright © 2010 The University of Adelaide

Biologists measure evolution's Big Bang

Unlike religion, where problems are disturbing and need special measures to explain them away or suppress them and keep knowledge of them away from the faithful, science thrives on them and actively looks for them.

One such problem has for a long time been the so-called 'Cambrian Explosion' in which a large number of very different major taxa suddenly seem to appear in the fossil record over a relatively short time scale, suggesting a rate of evolution which is hard to explain in conventional Darwinian terms.

However a paper published today in Current Biology ^PDF by Associate Professor Michael Lee of Adelaide University, Australia, and Dr Greg Edgecombe of the Natural History Museum of South Australia, to which the above link relates, shows that, although there was indeed rapid evolution immediately prior to and into the Cambrian Era, it was not inconsistent with Darwinian theory.

First a little background:

Recent Evolution Underground

Culex pipens taking a meal

If you travel on the London Underground you might consider using a good insect repellent. We have a newly-evolved species of mosquito living there and it is a voracious blood-sucker. It has been classified by taxonomists as Culex pipiens f. molestus. It lives off the blood of rats, mice and especially humans, unlike the birds it's parent species lives off.

It has evolved very recently, certainly since the London Underground was built, starting in 1863, almost certainly from a population of C. pipens, and made life miserable for those who took shelter in London Underground stations during the blitz of WWII, as though Hitler wasn't making it miserable enough. The fact that hybrids between it and C. pipens are usually sterile suggests that speciation has occurred and the subterranean variety should more properly be classified as a new species rather than a variety or subspecies of C. pipens.

The evidence for this mosquito being a different species from C. pipiens comes from research by Kate Byrne and Richard Nichols. The species have very different behaviours, are extremely difficult to mate, and with different allele frequencies consistent with genetic drift during a founder event. More specifically, this mosquito, C. p. f. molestus, breeds all-year round, is cold intolerant, and bites rats, mice, and humans, in contrast to the above-ground species, which is cold tolerant, hibernates in the winter, and bites only birds. When the two varieties were cross-bred, the eggs were infertile, suggesting reproductive isolation.

Source: Wikipedia - London Underground mosquito

I'd love a liar for Jesus/money/power from the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, or any other pseudo-science creationist scam site to come here and explain to my readers how this fits with their infantile 'Intelligent (sic) Design' model. Why would a benevolent creator god suddenly come up with a subterranean mosquito in the last 150 years which seems to exist solely to make more mosquitos and for making the life of travellers, staff and maintenance workers on the London Underground a little less pleasant, unless he was on Hitler's side in WWII and was doing his bit to help by being an irritating little nuisance and has just left his secret weapon hanging around?

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Even Our Bacteria Show How We Evolved

The distribution of H. pylori populations in Asia and the Pacific.

I've written a couple of blogs recently showing how several different strands of evidence support the idea that modern humans diversified from an initial population in Africa. With Speaking of Evolution I reported on the findings of a team who had examined language difference and similarities of Pacific Islanders and analysed them using a program designed for examining DNA differences to produce evolutionary trees. The findings closely paralleled archaeological and other evidence. The point of this was to show how the basic principles of Darwinian Evolution apply not just to biological evolution but to any system which has variation, replication and selection, such as language.

In an earlier blog, Lousy Creator, I explained how obligate parasites like lice evolve in parallel with their hosts and how the three human lice exactly parallel and confirm archaological and genetic evidence for human evolution from a common ancestor with the other African apes and subsequent diversification into Euro-Asia and then the rest of the world.

So, not only do we have genetic and archaeological evidence showing how we evolved but we also have linguistic and parasitic evidence. Now I've learned of another piece of research which not only supports this theory but neatly brings the latter two strands together.

Global patterns of migration between eight pairs of H. pylori populations
as calculated by the isolation with migration model.

In The Peopling of the Pacific from a Bacterial Perspective, Yoshan Moodley of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Department of Molecular Biology, Berlin, Germany, et al. showed how an analysis of the distribution of different variants of the human bacterial parasite, Helicobacter pylori closely parallels the language distribution and reinforces the idea of two main phases of human migration into Austronesia and the Pacific from south-east Asia, with the second phase originating in Taiwan.

I'm grateful to blogger Grumpy Bob, of The British Centre For Science Education for bringing this to my attention.

It's really becoming quite astonishing how even adult Creationists manage to ignore the massive amount of evidence such as this and continue to insist, despite there being not a single scrap of supporting evidence, that the infantile fairy-tale of a magic man in the sky magicking all forms of life into being as is, a few thousand years ago, is somehow a better explanation of the observable facts.

It's not difficult to see why the frauds, professional liars and pseudo-scientists of the Discovery Institute continue to pedal their anti-science agenda. They know full well how science undermines their political ambition to set up an extremist, Taliban-style crypto-fascist Christian dictatorship in which they become the self-appointing government without having to bother with being elected, and have pursued the Wedge Strategy of trying to discredit science with lies. What is difficult to understand is how their followers - the credulous simpletons who eagerly buy their propaganda - manage to avoid reading the evidence for themselves, with such a wide availability of good, scientific sources on the Internet.

It is truly astonishing how a subversive organisation like the Discovery Institute, which depends entirely in ignorant superstition and scientific illiteracy, manages to keep its dupes in the required state of brain-dead credulity. It takes a special skill at self-delusion to know what you must avoid reading because you know it will shake your faith if you see it written down.

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Speaking of Evolution

Voices from the past: Ancient secrets in today's words - life - 05 September 2013 - New Scientist

An article in this week's New Scientist illustrates something I've mentioned before. Languages evolve by Darwinian Evolution.

Regular readers will remember how I showed that we can tell the Bible was written by people who were ignorant of many things, including geography, history, biology and language distribution, when they wrote the absurd tale of the Tower of Babel to try to explain language diversity. (See How We Know The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People and More Bible Babble.) Of course, their primitive, simplistic, parochial and essentially ignorant explanation was the default 'God did it!", which was code for "I don't know but I'll pretend I do" no less in those days than it is today. Indeed, we see exactly the same primitive level of parochial ignorance and use of simplitic default answers in lieu of actual knowledge in culturally backward and scientifically iliterate societies today, where religious fundamentalism is still found.

It also illustrates how the basic principles of evolution don't just apply to DNA/RNA-based life but to any replicators, provided the three basic components of Darwinian Evolution are present. The article is about languages and how they evolved and diversified from common ancestors.

The three essential components of Darwinian Evolution are:

• Variation.
• Replication.
• Selection.

If those components are present then evolution is bound to occur. If there is separation then diversification is also bound to occur as the system adapts to local conditions.

The New Scientist article by Douglas Heaven is about the work of New Zealanders Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson of Auckland University.

As a trained biologist, Gray notes these [language] differences with the same eagle-eyed curiosity that he has used to study the evolution of bird behaviour. "If you're looking at courtship displays in birds and how their differences are produced by descent with modification, it doesn't seem like a huge leap to think about languages in that way," he says. Living among the Pacific Islands – a hotspot for language diversity – Gray just has to listen to the sounds around him to hear the way that languages can mutate, splinter and proliferate like separate species.

Douglas Heaven; Voices from the past: Ancient secrets in today's words; New Scientist 05 September 2013, issue 2933.

Gray and Atkinson's trick was to feed language data into an evolutionary computer algorithm designed to work out relationships between genomes. It produces a range of possible 'family trees' together with the likelihood that each tree fits the known data.

So far, they have used the technique to try to resolve a dispute concerning the origins of the Indo-European group of languages for which there are two proposed models. One has the origin in Anatolia (the area corresponding to modern Turkey) and spreading out from there with the spread of agriculture starting some 8-9,000 years ago. The other places the origin in what is now Ukraine some 3000 years ago, with the spread being due to marauding horsemen. Gray and Atkinson's method estimated that the origin must have been around 8-10,000 years ago, which fitted almost exactly with the out of Anatolia hypothesis.

Now they have refined their technique and applied it to the Pacific Islands. What they found exactly matches what was already known from archaeological and genetic evidence - that the languages (and by implication, the people) spread out from Taiwan into the East Indies and the Philippines, and then to the Pacific Islands in a series of migration pulses between 3000 and 800 years ago.

So it seems the powerful science of Darwinian Evolution is proving fundamental to understanding another subject, just as I showed with Darwin's Powerful Science.

And once again we see the idiotic nature of a Bible story of the Tower of Babel, which claims totally unrelated and mutually incomprehensible languages were created as is in juxtaposition by a magic man in the sky, just as Darwinian Evolution shows the idiotic nature of the Bible story of the creation of all species by the same magic man. The truth, of course, is that there is a perfectly natural explanation for languages just as there is for species, and magic is nowhere involved in the process.

Almost unbelievably, despite the abundance of contrary evidence, people still earn their living selling people bad science and downright lies designed to reinforce their primitive superstition and the parochial ignorance on which it depends and people still imagine their simplistic, default "God did it!" answer is going to convince educated people that their ignorance trumps all the science and learning to which we all now have access.

References:

Douglas Heaven; Voices from the past: Ancient secrets in today's words, New Scientist 05 September 2013 Magazine issue 2933.

Russell D. Gray & Quentin D. Atkinson; Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin; Nature 426, 435-439 (27 November 2003) | doi:10.1038/nature02029

Gray, R.D, Drummond, A.J, Language, Greenhill, S.J; Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement; Science 23 January 2009: Vol. 323 no. 5913 pp. 479-483; DOI: 10.1126/science.1166858

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Evolution. It's Enough to Give You Goosebumps

You see, the hallmark of intelligent design is that features are there for a purpose. It follows from that, that anything which is included in the design which either doesn't have any purpose, or makes the design less efficient for being there than it would be if it were not there, is, at best, evidence of unintelligent design and at worst, no design at all.

It was quite chilly in Oxfordshire, UK, today. Yesterday we had a glorious English late summer day with mid-afternoon temperatures in the high 20s. What a contrast today with temperatures a full 10 degrees lower at around 15 degrees mid morning! So, when I went outside with bare arms first thing I got goosebumps!

My deal old body was trying to protect me from heat-loss by making the hairs on my arms fluff up and act as better insulators by trapping a layer of warmed-up air next to my skin and reducing the heat loss due to airflow!

What on earth was it thinking of? I don't have hairy arms - well not so's you'd notice. What hairs I do have are short, fine and sparse, so useless as an insulator, whether fluffed up or laying down. What they are good for though is detecting any unwanted small wild-life which might be strolling about on my arms. They do this because they have a sensitive nerve-ending in the hair follicle which detects tiny local movements. This is probably one reason we haven't got rid of body hair altogether.

So why did my hair try to fluff up?

Because we still have the same mechanism which our earlier, hairy, ancestors had, just like the other apes have, and just like many other mammals such as cats and dogs have, and just like many birds have with respect to their feathers. Our skin detects coldness and initiates a nerve reflex known as arasing, piloerection, or the pilomotor reflex. This causes tiny muscles called arrector pili, attached to the base of each hair follicle, to contract and so pull the normally slanting follicle more upright. It all happens automatically with no conscious thought on our part. Other causes of the reflex can be fear, sexual arousal, even nostalgia and euphoria.

As well as protecting them from cold, in other mammals, having big hair can also make them look bigger, more powerful or more aggressive. In humans, it is utterly useless. It serves no useful purpose because we have lost most of our body hair during the last few million years of our evolution. We probably lost it to help with heat-dissipation when hunting down running animals or to improve sweat evaporation - which amounts to the same thing really.

But what we haven't lost is the nerve-endings, nerve pathways that provide the reflex, and muscles which pull the hairs upright because there was nothing to be gained by losing them as the cost of retaining them is minimal. There is nothing to drive their loss because losing them would not give us any particular advantage over others of our species who kept them, so there was nothing for natural selection to select.

So, what we get now is goosebumps, as the pulling of the arrector pili muscles causes little bumps to form on our skin where the other end of the muscle is attached.

It goes without saying that this system wasn't intelligently designed of course. It is completely without logical explanation if the human body was intelligently designed. It makes perfect sense as the product of evolution, as I've explained above.

So, next time you get goosebumps, look at it as your body trying to show you how you evolved from the common ancestor of many other mammals over many millions of years and that there was no intelligence involved. You really weren't made from a lump of dirt or dust; you have been perfected by natural forces and are the direct descendent of survivors who passed the fitness test at every generation and never once failed to breed - for three and a half billion years.

That thought should give you goosebumps.

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God's Haemorrhoids or The Grapes of Wrath

God's Haemorrhoids

>Here's a strange thing.

It seems the Old Testament god was not only paranoid about his little design error with foreskins, but he also had a fascination with haemorrhoids.

We discover this in a rather silly story which the priest obviously made up to deal with the fact that the 'sacred' Ark of the Covenant was actually empty. They had claimed it contained the stone tablets on which Moses had supposedly written one or other version of the Ten Commandments, and the staff of Aaron. In other words, some magic stones and a stick.

The problem was that it was just an empty box, as we shall see by the fantastic tales they made up to stop people looking in it.

It starts in 1 Samuel 4 where we are told of a battle between the Israelites and the Philistines which was going badly for the Israelites (maybe Yahweh was distracted that day), so they went to get their box of magic stones and a stick and took it to the battle, thinking it would turn the tide. If Yahweh had been indifferent to the battle, what on Earth they thought a magic box would do remains a mystery, but the Bible is rarely strong on logic and is set in a magical fantasy world where things like that work.

Miniature Frog Can Hear With Its Mouth!

Zoologger: Miniature frog can hear with its mouth - 02 September 2013 - New Scientist

This beautiful little frog (Sechellophryne gardineri or Gardiner's Seychelle frog), found only on two small islands in the Seychelles, illustrates a couple of principles of evolution. Being so small - it is the smallest known vertebrate - the normal amphibian ear wouldn't work.

Unlike mammals and birds, most amphibians have their eardrum on the outside instead of down a tunnel. They still have a middle ear and a cochlea as the sensory organ however. S. gardineri has no eardrum and even lacks the small bone which transmits sound to the cochlea. It does have a cochlea though, and the males are especially vocal. Tests have confirmed that they have no problem hearing sounds.

Now Renaud Boistel of the University of Poitiers in France has discovered that S. gardineri hears through its mouth. This is the first vertebrate known to hear with its mouth, but Boistel thinks it could explain how about six percent of frogs manage without a middle ear as do all salamanders and caecilians.

This shouldn't really surprise us because we actually hear our own voice mostly through the bones of our skull, which is why we can hear ourselves speak when we have headphones on or ear-plugs in, although we tend to speak louder to compensate for the slight loss of hearing via the 'normal' route. It also explains why our voice seems different to us when we have a cold and our sinuses are blocked. With S. gardineri this effect has been enhanced by its mouth acting as a resonance chamber.

What S. gardineri illustrates is a couple of important principles:

• An organism's potential for evolution can be constrained by loss of function being detrimental. We can assume that S. gardineri once had normal hearing because so many frogs do compared to the few which don't, that it was probably present in their common ancestor and has since been lost in the six percent without it. It obviously conveyed an advantage on S. gardineri's ancestor to become very small - the reasons for this aren't important and can only be guessed at. However, there was a lower limit to this miniaturization due to loss of hearing - until the mouth was co-opted. This rendered the normal auditory mechanism redundant and allowed it to atrophy whilst the frog was now able to become even smaller with no loss of function. This also illustrated the pragmatic nature of evolution and how, once a barrier to evolution has been overcome, a new evolutionary landscape opens up which evolution can explore. By the simple, unguided process of trial and error, evolution can often find a way round barriers, sometimes in surprising ways.
• Pre-existing structures can be co-opted to new functions (a process known as exaptation). In this case the mouth was exapted to become part of the auditory mechanism. This explains many examples of what creationist pseudo-scientists claim to be examples of irreducible complexity but which are, in reality, examples of exaptation of pre-existing structures and processes to a new function.

Listening through your mouth may seem unnatural, but Gardiner's Seychelles frog is one of many species that use familiar organs for unusual purposes. Organs often evolve to become better at doing one thing, then wind up doing something else entirely. Biologists call this re-purposing exaptation. Other examples are equally bizarre: the giant California sea cucumber can eat through its anus, while the Chinese soft-shelled turtle regularly urinates through its mouth.

Michael Marshall; Miniature frog can hear with its mouth; New Scientist 02 September 2013

So a beautiful little gem of a frog from two tiny Indian Ocean islands gives the lie to creationist frauds.

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Brotherly Love - How Christians Settle Disputes

Christians settling technical matters of theology

You have to hand it to French Catholics, they certainly know how to deal with those who disagree with them.

You might think that, being good Christians and so valuing every human life as sacred, and valuing truth an honesty above just about all else, they would deal with dissent and disagreement on the basis of honest exchange and debate between equals, with arguments for and against being weighed in the balance and a rational decision being arrived at with honours even all round.

You might think that they would use the methods which, by and large, scientist use to resolve their differences, albeit with some robust exchanges of opinion and occasional regrettable descent into ad hominem and abuse, usually to the detriment of the abuser's reputation. But when was the last time you heard of science splitting into two or more warring factions over some obscure point of interpretation, each launching murderous attacks on the other and the state organising official persecutions against holders of the minority opinion? When was the last time a scientific court ordered the execution of a scientist for disagreeing with Newton or Galileo?

Strangely though, and unlike the impression Christians like to give of their regard for other people, being the creations of their god, French Catholics, like so many Christians elsewhere, use very unChristian methods when it comes to dealing with disagreement.

Impressions of Paris - Sacré-Cœur

We spent our last few hours killing time in Paris before our train to Londres left Gare du Nord, by visiting the Sacré-Cœur, the large white basilica which stands on the highest point of the city - Butte Montmatre. The Sacré-Cœur can be seen from miles away and dominates central Paris like a malignant menace ready to wreak revenge on a truculent people, should they have the temerity to step out of line again.

The story of the Sacré-Cœur is illustrative of the struggle between the forces of democracy and the power of the Christian (in this case Catholic) Church which has invariably sided with the forces of autocracy and repression of the lower orders in society. It starts with the socialist-led uprising in Paris in 1871 following the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war.

The war itself had been fought largely because it suited both sides at the time to have a war. The Machaevelian Otto von Bismark for Prussia had wanted an excuse to unify the multitude of autonomous German states and statelettes under Prussian dominance, and the French Emperor, Napoleon III, had wanted a foreign victory to emulate those of his uncle, Napoleon I, and so bring France to heel under his autocratic rule. He had been elected president by popular vote in 1848 and mounted a coup d'état in 1851 to avoid all the unpleasantness and inconvenience of facing another election. He then had himself crowned Emperor and effectively restored the French monarchy in 1852.

In the event it was Napoleon III who had badly miscalculated and German troops were able to lay siege to Paris for four months during which the aristocracy and much of the middle class fled the city and poor peasants from the surrounding countryside came in to escape the Germans. France had clearly lost the war.

Following a series of strikes and demonstrations in Paris mostly demanding the overthrow of the Emperor and the restoration of a republic, it became clear that the feared mob was gaining the upper hand and the government panicked and fled to nearby Versailles, taking with them what troops and police who would still obey orders, and who hadn't yet shot their officers, elected new ones and defected to the insurrection, as they could round up. The socialists' leaders occupied the Hôtel de Ville (Town Hall) and proclaimed the Government of National Defense and sued for peace with the besieging Germans. A condition of the armistice was that a token German occupation force would be allowed to enter Paris.

It had long been a grievance of Parisians that, unlike other French cities, Paris did not have its own local government but was ruled directly by the national government. The Communards were so-called because they were demanding their own Commune, or local government. So the Paris Commune emerged from the power vacuum and chaos in Paris which followed the war with Prussia. Provision of services and the restoration of orderly government fell to the Communards by default, the government having deserted the city. It should not be confused with a Communist uprising. The term 'Commune' owes more to the word 'community' than to the Communist commune. The French still refer to the area controlled by a local council as a Commune. Communism was to come later, drawing on some of the lessons and demands of the Communards from the Paris Commune. Marx and Engles drew extensively on the experience (and mistakes) of the Communards.

The success of the uprising caused panic and consternation to the ruling classes who had naturally thrown in their lot with the autocrats and who wanted nothing more than a compliant and obedient urban proletariat and rural working class. What enraged them was the demands they made for the government of all France, not just of Paris. There was some confusion over whether they had overthrown the national government and so could lay claim to be the legal government of all France, or were merely in charge of Paris - which had not heretofore had its own government. In any case they decided they were at least a rival national government to the one now reorganizing and regrouping in Versailles.

The decrees they issued for Paris, and which clearly they wished to extend to the whole of France included:

• the separation of church and state;
• the remission of rents owed for the entire period of the siege (during which, payment had been suspended);
• the abolition of night work in the hundreds of Paris bakeries;
• the granting of pensions to the unmarried companions and children of National Guards killed on active service;
• the free return, by the city pawnshops, of all workmen's tools and household items valued up to 20 francs, pledged during the siege; the Commune was concerned that skilled workers had been forced to pawn their tools during the war;
• the postponement of commercial debt obligations, and the abolition of interest on the debts; and
• the right of employees to take over and run an enterprise if it were deserted by its owner; the Commune, nonetheless, recognized the previous owner's right to compensation.

Source: Wikipedia-Paris Commune

Apart from this assault on the right of the middle classes to screw the poor for everything they could wring out of them and to put private greed above social need, and the demand for workers' rights, what really panicked the church was the first clause, a direct copy from the American constitution, for the abolition of the church's political power and influence. The decree separated the church from the state, appropriated all church property to public property, and excluded the practice of religion from schools. The people understood full well how the church aided and supported the anti-democratic forces and how the ruling elite uses the church to control the people in a mutual benefit society where the clergy supports and sanctifies the ruling elite in return for the state's protection and the granting of privileges to the clergy.

Like the American revolutionaries of 1776, the Paris Communards understood that they could never have a proper democracy with government of the people, by the people and for the people if the church-ruling elite mutual benefit society were allowed to continue.

In the event, the Communards failed to extend their influence to other French cities and especially the countryside where the food was produced. They also stupidly failed to take control of the French national bank in Paris which was able to transfer its billions of francs to Versailles where it was used to finance the government army. After "La Semaine ensanglante" (the bloody week) the Paris Commune was brutally supressed by French regular troops... and the church could exact its revenge.

So we come to the building of the Sacré Cœur, officially as an act of atonement for the Paris Commune; in reality as a reminder to working class Parisians that the Church rules. Okay! The official account says:

The inspiration for Sacré Cœur's design originated on September 4, 1870, the day of the proclamation of the Third Republic, with a speech by Bishop Fournier attributing the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to a divine punishment after "a century of moral decline" since the French Revolution, in the wake of the division in French society that arose in the decades following that revolution, between devout Catholics and legitimist royalists on one side, and democrats, secularists, socialists and radicals on the other. This schism became particularly pronounced after the Franco-Prussian War and the ensuing uprising of the Paris Commune of 1870-71. Though today the Basilica is asserted to be dedicated in honor of the 58,000 who lost their lives during the war, the decree of the Assemblée nationale, 24 July 1873, responding to a request by the archbishop of Paris by voting its construction, specifies that it is to "expiate the crimes of the Commune". Montmartre had been the site of the Commune's first insurrection, and many dedicated communards were forever entombed in the subterranean galleries of former gypsum mines where they had retreated, by explosives detonated at the entrances by the Army of Versailles. Hostages had been executed on both sides, and the Communards had executed Georges Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, who became a martyr for the resurgent Catholic Church. His successor Guibert, climbing the Butte Montmartre in October 1872, was reported to have had a vision, as clouds dispersed over the panorama: "It is here, it is here where the martyrs are, it is here that the Sacred Heart must reign so that it can beckon all to come".

Source: Wikipedia - Sacré-Cœur, Paris

...the hour of the Church has come [that would be expressed through the] Government of Moral Order... a project of religious and national renewal, the main features of which were the restoration of monarchy and the defense of Rome within a cultural framework of official piety.

Louis-Édouard-François-Desiré Pie,
Bishop of Poitiers, 1873

It was to take until 1905 for the final separation of church and state in France to be achieved and for France to become a modern secular democracy.

So today the Sacré Cœur dominates the Paris skyline in a symbolic, triumphalist reminder of how, as recently as 1873, the Catholic Church believed it should dominate the government and control the people and how any threat to its power and privilege was going to be met by brutal suppression and the denial of basic democratic rights, and how working-class people daring to take control of their own destiny was to be regarded as a mortal sin to be punished with all vigour.

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Is God Omni-Irrational?

Enjoying the sun on the terrace of our gite in France the other day (sniff) I came across the following passage in The Grand Deception: Fallacies in Theology and Faith, by Christopher Kragel:

In order for God to be considered as the complete manifestation of goodness, he would not be able to do anything considered evil. Since God is omnipotent, he should be able to do anything, even that which is considered evil. We see contradictory traits here, as being omnipotent conflicts with that of being completely good. Can God do an evil action? It would seem that one of his bestowed traits of omni-ism has failed him here, since he is in fact incapable of committing certain actions. Either God is not completely good or he is not omnipotent; these are not cohering traits.

Kragel, Christopher (2012-12-25). The Grand Deception : Fallacies in Theology and Faith (Kindle Locations 865-869). Kindle Edition.

Of course he is right: if there is anything a god can't do, it is not omnipotent. Conversely, an omnipotent god can think and do evil. This is just one example of the muddle theists get themselves into when they try to flatter their imaginary gods with unbounded characteristics like omnipotence, omnibenevolence, omniscience, etc., but fail to apply even a modicum of logic.

With this in mind I started to compile a list of logical fallacies theists have got themselves into with this lack of clarity of thought and insistence on omni everything for their own favourite god or gods.

Omni-merciful.
Muslims especially are fond of telling us how their god is all or infinitely merciful yet they also tell us he is also the most just. As Dan Barker pointed out in Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists, a god can't be both. If it is infinitely merciful it will forgive everything and not exact any punishment for anything, yet to be perfectly just means that the punishment will be exactly proportional to the crime. Clearly, it can't both punish and forgive everything so one or the other claim must be false.

Incidentally, an infinitely merciful god would forgive non-belief and even belief in another god. No behaviour would exclude you from Heaven so there would be no need to worship, rituals, or even basic standards of behaviour to get to Heaven. It would make not one iota of difference how you behaved in life.

Omnipotent
Not only does being omnipotent mean that a god can't not think or do evil, it also means it could both make an object too heavy for it to lift and not be able to make such an object, at the same time. In either case its power would be constrained, and a god with constrained powers is clearly not in full control and is subject to some superior power or principle.

Omniscience
Christians, Muslims and Jews, almost without exception, will claim their god knows everything. This means it not only knows everything that has happened but it also knows everything that will happen. But knowing everything that will happen means the god in question has no free will. Combine this with omni-infallibility or inerrancy and you have a totally powerless god with no free will. It is merely an observer of events and had no more power than a rock on the Moon. It exists in a pre-ordained, unchangeable Universe in which all the future is fixed, otherwise something could happen that the god didn't know would happen so it would be neither omniscient nor infallible.

Claiming their god has the power of prophecy is another form of the claim to omniscience. A god which can accurately prophesy the future, either directly or via a prophet, must exist in a predictable Universe, yet a predictable Universe can't be changed in any way after the prophecy is made or the future becomes unknowable, so the god is rendered impotent and ineffective. If the Universe remains changeable the god won't be able to make accurate prophecies.

Yet all three major Abrahamic religions as well as Sikhism, and many minor sects such as Mormonism, claim to have been founded by prophets!

Omnibenevolence
This claim is perhaps the most obvious example of a religious claim being made which simply defies glaring evidence to the contrary, especially when, as it it invariably is, it is combined with a claim of omnipotence and omniscience. It is indisputable that suffering and want exist in the Universe, not just for humans but for all forms of life, yet an omnibenevolent, omnipotent god would not permit them to. It follows from the existence of suffering and want that, if a god exists it:

• Is aware of it yet is powerless to prevent it, so is not omnipotent.
• Is aware of it but is indifferent to it, so is not omnibenevolent.
• Is unaware of it, so is not omniscient (nor omnipotent since an inability to know shows a lack of power).

But you have to question whether these universal claims made by all major religions about their gods' qualities and character are genuinely believed or merely attempts to flatter and mollify the gods in question. If they really believe them, why do they pray to these gods? Prayer is only necessary if you don't trust the god to made the right decision or to be aware of what is happening.

It betrays a lack of trust in the god's omniscience to tell it about something, such as your love for it or your gratitude, or that something unwanted is happening, like a disease or a natural disaster. An omniscient god would be aware of these things.

It betrays a lack of trust in the god's benevolence to request it to change something for the better because an omnibenevolent god would ensure only the best best was happening anyway.

It betrays a lack of trust in the god's omnipotence to think that it needs human intervention and praise to empower it.

So the only omni which seems to fit gods accurately is that of omni-irrationality, or rather omni-irrationality is the belief in such gods in the first place.

But maybe Christians, Jews, Muslims or Sikhs can explain away these beliefs and show how belief in such gods is rational. I think people will understand if you can't. Religion is nothing if not irrational, hence the need for 'faith' in the absence of any evidence and the need for apologetics when even faith isn't good enough.

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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?

'via Blog this'

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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.

'via Blog this'

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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.