Censorious Catholics

Continuing my theme of religion and the history of censorship, this blog deals specifically with the role of censorship in the Catholic Church and how it handles dissent in general - or did when it had the power before the forces of democracy got its autocratic abuses under control.

One might expect that an intellectually honest belief, confident in its reasoning and certain of its factual basis, would welcome questioning and disagreement, knowing that it will either win any debate or will have the good grace and honesty to admit defeat and adjust it's thinking accordingly. This is of course anathema to the Catholic hierarchy which knows full well that the 'faith' has no such basis and so must be maintained by bullying and abusing its power to silence dissent and disagreement and prevent questioning at all costs.

The main method for handling dissent was of course to define anything not in full accord with Papal dogma as a heresy, and therefore Satanic, for which the only penalty was excommunication and death by burning. This was relatively simple when the only real way to promulgate ideas was by word of mouth, or by hand-written tracts which had to be laboriously copied to be reproduced, making it very difficult to disseminate new ideas and then only to an educated intelligentsia who could actually read. New ideas could be quickly nipped in the bud and the offending 'heretic' could be easily identified and 'cauterised'.

The invention of the moveable type printing press in Germany in the mid fifteenth century presented the Papacy with a more serious problem, demanding a different, more drastic approach however. For the first time, ideas could be put into print, even anonymously, and mass-produced for a wide readership. Even the Bible could, horror of horrors, be translated into the common tongue to be read by ordinary people!

To make matters worse, the nation states that the Vatican used to control were becoming more and more independent and, although they too took fright at the thought of all this information getting into the wrong hands and set up controls of the press, their interests did not always coincide with those of the Vatican and in some cases were even hostile to it.

After the dissolution of the Index, when some people thought the printing and distribution of the work was permitted, people were reminded again in L'Osservatore Romano (15 June 1966) that, as was published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis (1966), the Index retains its moral force despite its dissolution. A decision against distributing and recommending a work, which has not been condemned lightly, may be reversed, but only after profound changes that neutralize the harm which such a publication could bring forth among the ordinary faithful.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, 31 January 1985, in a letter to Cardinal Giuseppe Siri.

This called for drastic action by a church not used to having its authority and especially its dogma questioned. The only solution was to ban and burn publications which didn't have the personal approval of the Pope and to frighten anyone who read them with the traditional threat of Hellfire. Not exactly the response of an Islamic cleric panic-stricken at the thought that someone might question the authenticity of the Qur'an or the authority of an Ayatollah, but not far removed from it.

To that end the Vatican drew up a list of banned publications called the Index Librorum Prohibitorum or List of Prohibited Books and it became a cardinal sin to read them or even discuss them. Often the entire body of work of a particular author was added to this list, which was assiduously maintained until 1946 when, due to the sheer volume of published works it proved impossible to maintain the list. The list was officially downgraded (not abolished) in 1966 when the vatican announced in its official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, that, while the Index maintained its moral force, in that it taught Christians to beware, as required by the natural law itself, of those writings that could endanger faith and morality, it no longer had the force of ecclesiastical positive law with the associated penalties. (Wikipedia - Index Librorum Prohibitorum)

A list of all works on the Index can be found here. You will be amazed at the books good Catholics were not allowed to read. Amongst the very many authors who found themselves on this list, often for seemingly political rather than religious or doctrinal reasons were:

Galileo before the Holy Office, Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury

Johannes Kepler (for advocating heliocentrism), Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, André Gide, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Milton, John Locke, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, Hugo Grotius and Giordano Bruno. All of these are now considered major works of science and philosophy. Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for heresy in Campo de' Fiori in Rome in 1600 is considered the founder of modern cosmology.

Notable by their absence from the Index are works by Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. Maybe no one in the Vatican fully grasped the significance of these books.

Had the Vatican's censorship succeeded in suppressing science and philosophy we might still believe Earth is the center of the Universe around which everything else revolves and that the only route to knowledge is by reading the Bible and the opinions of early medieval theologians who had reached the status of the semi-divine. Had we not managed to strip the Vatican of its powers it might still be executing anyone who said otherwise.

Ironically, the Index, rather than succeeding in banning the spread of ideas, now serves as a grotesque record of the Catholic Church's doggedly brutal attempt to prevent human progress in the fields of theology, ethics, philosophy and science and to hold us back in the Dark Ages where superstition and ignorance were more conducive to Papal authority and institutionalised abuse of power by Catholic clerics.

Not surprisingly, the first response of Pope John Paul II and his enforcer, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, to the growing number of allegations of Catholic clerical abuse of children since the 1980s, was to ban their publication and bully those who complained or who wouldn't cooperate and obey the code of omertà.

And not surprisingly, one of the first acts of the new Pope Francis, on taking over from Benedict XVI, was to tighten the rules regarding leaking of secret Vatican information or anything concerning the "fundamental interests" of the Holy See, or Church government. This followed quickly on him being handed a report by his predecessor detailing corruption and criminal activities inside the Vatican and, so it has been rumoured, details of a procurement ring for discretely supplying male prostitutes. Leaking now carries an eight-year prison sentence. It has been argued that this effectively prohibits any Vatican official or anyone under Catholic Holy Orders from informing the secular authorities of any wrong-doing by anyone under Holy Orders. It certainly covers disclosure of the financial irregularities, including money laundering and other criminal activities, of officials in the Vatican's bank.

Fortunately, the option of burning at the stake is no longer available to the Vatican.

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That Natural Wow! Factor

The walk and jump of Equisetum spores

One of the things I get from reading about science is that little frisson of pleasure in finding out something new and being amazed at the sheer inventive ingenuity of nature and especially of the process of evolution.

You can quite understand why designers of things like modern aircraft wings use a genetic algorithm. The unintelligent, trial and error approach, free from preconceptions and fixed ideas about what something should look like or how it should work, often comes up with the the completely unexpected; the sort of solution to a problem an engineer sitting at a draughtboard would take several lifetimes to come up with.

To appreciate this fully it helps to know a little about a group of plants known as horsetails. Briefly, horsetails, sometimes called horsetail ferns, though they are not true ferns, are considered to be intermediate between the ferns and the flowering plants. Characteristically, they have a stem which looks in cross-section like a bundle of simple stems and have feature looking a little like the 'vascular bundles' of flowering plants. Like the ferns they reproduce through spores rather than the seeds of the flowering plants.

Like all plants, one of the challenges they face is in dispersing their spores or seeds. The last thing a spore or seed needs is to find itself germinating right next to its mother, who will have grabbed all the resources. The study of how flowering plants alone have overcome this challenge is a major branch of botany in itself. Apart from wind dispersal, the precise mechanism used by the horsetails to disperse their spores was unknown, until now. And it's in the method of dispersal of these spores where our little surprise is to be found.

They walk and jump.

Horsetail spores. Above - contracted; below - expanded.

Abstract
Equisetum plants (horsetails) reproduce by producing tiny spherical spores that are typically 50 µm in diameter. The spores have four elaters, which are flexible ribbon-like appendages that are initially wrapped around the main spore body and that deploy upon drying or fold back in humid air. If elaters are believed to help dispersal, the exact mechanism for spore motion remains unclear in the literature. In this manuscript, we present observations of the ‘walks’ and ‘jumps’ of Equisetum spores, which are novel types of spore locomotion mechanisms compared to the ones of other spores. Walks are driven by humidity cycles, each cycle inducing a small step in a random direction. The dispersal range from the walk is limited, but the walk provides key steps to either exit the sporangium or to reorient and refold. Jumps occur when the spores suddenly thrust themselves after being tightly folded. They result in a very efficient dispersal: even spores jumping from the ground can catch the wind again, whereas non-jumping spores stay on the ground. The understanding of these movements, which are solely driven by humidity variations, conveys biomimetic inspiration for a new class of self-propelled objects.

Philippe Marmottant, Alexandre Ponomarenko, and Diane Bienaimé,
The walk and jump of Equisetum spores;
Proc. R. Soc. B November 7, 2013 280 1770 20131465; doi:10.1098/rspb.2013.1465 1471-2954

The secret to how these ribbon-like elaters work is in their two layers. One of these layers absorbs moisture out of the atmosphere more quickly than the other does, so they straighten out, or curl up, according to the prevailing humidity. This causes them to move around randomly. Sometimes they become stuck to the surface of the spore or tangled up, so a tension builds up which is suddenly released and the elater spread out causing the spore to jump. Given that the movement is random and there are more ways of moving away from the parent plant than towards it, the result of this random walking and jumping is dispersal.

And that's it.

The sort of unexpected yet functional mechanism which evolution can come up with and which probably hasn't been improved upon since the Paleozoic era when horsetails evolved, some 250 to 540 million years ago.

Further reading:

Pamela J. Hines, Dessicated Dispersal; Science 4 October 2013: Vol. 342 no. 6154 p. 17
DOI: 10.1126/science.342.6154.17-b

'via Blog this'

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Religion at the Dawn of Civilisation

Hunter, gatherer… architect? Civilisation's true dawn - life - 03 October 2013 - New Scientist

This article by David Roberts in this week's New Scientist is interesting for a couple of reasons:

• Firstly, it casts doubt on the standard model for the historical development of civilisation where it is assumed that the development of agriculture led to settled communities and the start of permanent buildings, settlements, towns, etc, and also that political organization came as a consequence of the need for these communities to be organised into something more than extended family groups with minimal division of labour.
• Secondly, it throws a spotlight on how religious apologists, especially Bible literalists, handle this sort of information.

A team of archaeologists led by Steven Mithen of the University of Reading, Berkshire, UK, excavating a site in eastern Turkey at Wadi Faynan, specifically a hill named Göbekli Tepe, have discovered what may well be a site for religious ceremonies and ritual, complete with monuments and seating. The site itself looks as though it was deliberately buried at some point to give the Göbekli Tepe hill. It seems highly likely that the rituals practiced there may have been blood sacrifices of some sort, judging by the drainage channels running under the floor.

But what is really interesting here is that the site is 11,000 years old - which predates the earliest evidence of agriculture by some 3,000 years. So it looks as though pre-agrarian (presumably still hunter-gatherer) societies in the area may well have been both settled and organised. Organised because it requires organisation to build large, communal buildings and to have a religion requiring such a building for religious rituals.

Now, I can see religious apologists getting excited by the thought that organized religions may well have been part of the daily lives of even our earliest modern ancestors from before even farming was invented, and that they might have been the trigger for forming settled communities - around ceremonial sites, for example. But this thought is bound to set up some unpleasant cognitive dissonance in the minds of Bible-literalists as we shall see in a moment.

For anthropologists, the discovery merely raises some interesting questions about how a settled community - which implies organisation and division of labour - could sustain itself. It has always been assumed that agriculture produced a surplus of food, i.e., more food than those who produced it needed for themselves, so the surplus could go to those who performed other tasks, like making pots (for cooking and storage), building roads and buildings, governing, soldiery, full-time priests, etc, etc. But this discovery implies there was some sort of surplus from hunter-gathering - which implies a very fertile location - and that then raises the question of why agriculture was invented if food was plentiful enough.

Well, the answer to that might not be fully known yet but none of it is a bar to accepting that human society progressed from hunter-gathering, through agrarian to urban civilisation and that the discovery of agriculture played a major role in this process. It simply raises the possibility that, at least in that part of the world, building and urbanisation might have preceded agriculture because the local conditions allowed it to.

In fact, thinking about this, it makes sense that agriculture would begin in a settled community, especially if we accept that it came about almost accidentally as people discovered that seeds gathered locally, when accidentally dropped around the settlement could be harvested later with very little effort, and that some animals captured alive would breed and provide food which didn't need to be hunted. None of this could happen if the group wasn't settled in the first place. And none of it could happen if the group wasn't strong enough, and organised enough, to be able to defend its territory from other bands of hunter-gatherers and from animals.

So, although the precise details of this transition are thrown into question by this discovery, we can begin to formulate alternative hypotheses and develop new models for the growth and development of human civilisation and adjust the time-scale accordingly. New information might well cause us to rethink and reassess so we incorporate it, knowing that our new model is probably better than the old one which we can eventually discard as more knowledge is added to confirm or falsify our hypotheses.

That's how science works, why new information is never a threat and why science always progresses towards a more complete understanding.

So what about religious apologists and especially Bible literalists? How do they cope with this sort of information?

Well, when the excitement of the discovery that early civilisation might have been facilitated by religion and that early humans might have believed in gods has died down and they try to fit the rest of it into their existing model - which has the sanctity of religious dogma so can't be changed - all sorts of conflicts begin to arise.

First there is the problem with the date. Bible literalist 'know' that Earth is only 6000 years old and that it was effectively re-set about 4000 years ago, so a date in 9,000 BCE is out of the question. This fact has to be dismissed tout suite one way or another.

There are a few standard approaches here:

• Ignore it altogether. It can't be right because it doesn't fit the 'known' facts.
• Rubbish the science. The dating method must be wrong and/or the scientists are lying or part of a massive conspiracy. Or Satan planted the evidence.
• God made it look that way to test our faith. He's tricky that way.

Whatever the method, the fact of the date is dismissed. The conclusion is sacred so facts have to be ignored, so lots of extraneous 'facts' have to be inserted and a straightforward, uncomplicated narrative has to be confused and hedged around with exceptions and unproven assertions to either make it fit or to dismiss it. The conclusion is sacred so the 'facts' must change.

Secondly there is the problem of whatever religion it was, it wasn't the one in the Bible so, although people at the dawn of civilisation may well have been religious, and it may well have been religions which 'caused' civilisation, it was the wrong one. As any Bible literalist will tell you, there is only one true religion - the Christian one - so all other religions are Satanic, by definition. This means Satan was behind the earliest civilisation.

Oops!

Need to rewind and re-think here.

So, I'll let any Bible literalist who had the courage to stay the course to this point tell me how they handle this one. The god of the Bible obviously would not allow human civilisation to be started by people with a Satanic religion so, disregarding the embarrassment over the date, why did the god of the Bible give a false religion to the founders of human civilisation and why did they forget they were all descended from Adam and Eve through Noah?

Or was it Satan who started human civilisation?

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Portugal's Catholic Fascists

Continuing my study of Portuguese history prior to going to Lisbon at the end of this month, I was not at all surprised to discover the role of the Catholic Church in the establishment of the first European fascist dictatorship in Portugal in 1926.

I was not surprised because I was already aware of the role the Catholic Church played in Spain, Germany, Hungary and various Latin American right-wing dictatorships of the twentieth century and how it has almost invariably been on the side of anyone determined to restrict the rights of ordinary people and maintain conditions of superstitious ignorance, squalor and want for ordinary people.

But I didn't fully appreciate how close the Pope and his clerics were to the Portuguese fascists. In fact, the military coup of 1926, which put an end to the Portuguese First Republic established in 1910, was effectively a Catholic coup d'état. It was led by the odious and deeply repugnant António de Oliveira Salazar, a devout Catholic and college roommate of Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira who later became Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon. Salazar had himself been a Catholic seminarian before studying law.

The Constitution Salazar imposed on the Portuguese was closely based on two Papal encyclicals, Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931).

In 1940, a Concordat governing Church-State relations was signed between Portugal and the Vatican. The Church was to be "separate" from the State but to enjoy a special position. The Concordat of 1940 reversed many of the anticlerical policies adopted during the First Republic, and the Catholic Church was given exclusive control over religious instruction in the public schools. Only Catholic clergy could serve as chaplains in the armed forces. Divorce, which had been legalized by the republic, was made illegal for those married in a Church service, but remained legal with respect to civil marriage. The Church was given formal "juridical personality," enabling it to incorporate and hold property.

Under Salazar, critics believe that Church and State in Portugal maintained a comfortable and mutually reinforcing relationship. While assisting the Church in many ways, however, Salazar insisted that it stay out of politics — unless it praised his regime. Dissent and criticism were forbidden; those clergy who stepped out of line — an occasional parish priest and once the Bishop of Porto — were silenced or forced to leave the country. The rest of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, led by Cardinal Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira, a great friend and supporter of Salazar, remained silent on the issue.

Wikipedia - Religion in Portugal

Under the Salazar dictatorship Portugal's economy continued to lag behind the rest of Western Europe. Portugal was effectively a third-world economy. Portugal also continued to cling to its remaining African colonies, having lost its South American one (Brazil) in 1822 and Goa, liberated by India, in 1961. Africans were regarded as a lesser people, there to be colonised and exploited and not entitled to the fruits of their labour which was all for the white Portuguese.

During the dispute with the British when the white minority regime in Rhodesia led by Ian Smith unilaterally declared independence from Britain and tried to set up a South-African style apartheid system in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) Portugal had helped organise boycott-busting fuel supplies to Rhodesia through the Mozambique port of Beira. Portugal, apartheid South Africa and the British Conservative Party were about the only outside supporters of the white racists in Rhodesia.

As 'front-line' states, Portuguese Mozambique and Angola, which bordered South African-administered South-West Africa (now Namibia) had been solidly behind the racist South African apartheid regime - and all under the beatific and approving gaze of the Catholic Church in the form of Salazar's old college chum, Cardinal Cerejeira and the Pope.

The wars that ensued in the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea were to have a major effect on Portugal's political development. In a curious twist of history, the African liberation forces led by educated intellectuals Agostinho Neto in Angola and Samora Machel in Mozambique civilised their colonial 'masters' by exposing the young Portuguese military officers sent to suppress them to political thinking they had been carefully insulated from in their native Portugal where 'politics' consisted of praising the very wonderful António de Oliveira Salazar and blaming everything on socialists and foreigners. Many of these officers became politically and class conscious for the first time and began asking questions about what they were doing in Africa, and more importantly, why Portugal was lagging behind the rest of Europe and why the people could have no say in their own futures.

Salazar had a severe stroke in 1968 and was succeeded by the equally odious Marcello José das Neves Alves Caetano. Unable to contemplate even the thought of giving independence to the 'lesser races' on whose labour what little wealth Portugal had depended, Caetano continued to pour money (up to 40 percent of GDP) and troops into increasingly hopeless African counter-revolutionary campaigns until, in 1974, a military coup led by the young enlightened army officers who had been politicised by the African revolutionaries, Caetano and his fascist regime were overthrown in the 'Carnation Revolution'.

In February 1974, Caetano determined to remove General António de Spínola in the face of increasing dissent by Spinola over the promotion of military officers and the direction of Portuguese colonial policy. At this point, several left-wing military officers who opposed the war formed a conspiracy — the Movimento das Forças Armadas (MFA, "Armed Forces Movement"), to overthrow the government by military coup. The MFA was headed by the majors Vitor Alves and Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho and captain Vasco Lourenço and joined by Salgueiro Maia. The movement was significantly aided by other officers in the Portuguese army who supported Spinola and democratic civil and military reform. Some observers have speculated that Costa Gomes actually led the revolution.

There were two secret signals in the military coup: first the airing (at 10:55 pm) by 'Emissores Associados de Lisboa' of the song E Depois do Adeus by Paulo de Carvalho, Portugal's entry in the 6 April 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, which alerted the rebel captains and soldiers to begin the coup. Next, on 25 April 1974 at 12:20 am, Rádio Renascença broadcast Grândola, Vila Morena, a song by Zeca Afonso, an influential folk and political musician-singer forbidden on Portuguese radio at the time. This was the signal that the MFA gave to take over strategic points of power in the country and "announced" that the revolution had started and nothing would stop it except "the possibility of a regime's repression".

Six hours later, the Caetano regime relented. Despite repeated appeals from the "captains of April" (of the MFA) on the radio warning the population to stay safe inside their homes, thousands of Portuguese took to the streets, mingling with the military insurgents and supporting them. One of the central points of those gathering was the Lisbon flower market, then richly stocked with carnations, which were in season. Some military insurgents would put these flowers in their gun-barrels, an image which was shown on television around the world. This would be the origin of the name of this "Carnation revolution". Although there were no mass demonstrations by the general population prior to the coup, spontaneous civilian involvement turned the military coup into an event with unexpected popular participation.

Caetano found refuge in the main Lisbon military police station at the Largo do Carmo. This building was surrounded by the MFA, which pressured him to cede power to General Spínola. Both Caetano (the prime minister) and Américo Tomás (the President) fled to Brazil. Caetano spent the rest of his life in Brazil, while Tomás returned to Portugal a few years later.

The revolution was closely watched from neighbouring Spain, where the government and opposition were planning for the succession of Francisco Franco, who died a year later, in 1975.

Wikipedia - Carnation Revolution

In a poignant echo of the revolutionary Maoist slogan that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, Portuguese revolutionary political power grew from carnations in the barrels of guns. Only four people died in the Carnation Revolution, shot by secret police before they realised the game was up. The people had taken their country back.

Very quickly the Portuguese colonies were given independence, democratic elections were organised and Portugal joined most of the rest of Western Europe as a civilised, democratic country owned now by the Portuguese people and no longer by a small wealthy elite and a cabal of Catholic clerics doing everything and anything in their power to maintain their privilege and unelected, unaccountable power, in the Catholic tradition.

For neighbouring Spain too the writing was on the wall. Within a year, Spain's Catholic-backed fascist dictator, Franco was dead and soon a restored monarchy under Juan Carlos restored a democracy stolen from the Spanish people in 1936. In 1986 Portugal and Spain joined the European Union.

The brutal experiment in political Catholicism called fascism which began in Portugal and which was copied in Spain, Italy, Hungary and Germany where it cost tens of millions of young lives to extinguish, was effectively ended when Portuguese soldiers put red carnations symbolising socialism in their gun barrels and declared the Carnation Revolution.

Viva a democracia Português.

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An Earthquake in Theology

Ruins of the Convento do Carmo, Lisbon, Portugal

Towards the end of this month we'll be going to Lisbon, Portugal, for a few days for no other reason than we've never been there before and we got a good deal on a hotel. We normally go to a European capital city in December for the atmosphere and the Christmas markets. We'll be a little early this year. Such is the joy of semi-retirement and all chicks having flown the nest.

Devoutly Catholic Lisbon was the site of a major disaster in 1755 when large areas of it, and the surrounding area and coastline of Portugal, were destroyed by a massive earthquake and tsunami which was to set up major shockwaves in European culture and philosophy which are still being felt today.

The earthquake struck on All Saints Day, a religious public holiday on November 1, at about 09:30 a.m. local time, as Africa moved a little further north on a journey which has pushed the Iberian Peninsula and Italy north, raising up the Pyrenees and the Alps, and the Chiltern Hills in southern England as a secondary ripple and caused the depression now filled with the Mediterranean.

The earthquake's strength has been estimated as 8.5 - 9.0 on the Richter scale with it's epicenter about 120 miles off shore. Morocco was also hit and suffered major damage. Eighty-five percent of Lisbon's buildings were destroyed, including the Lisbon Cathedral, all major churches, the largest hospital where hundreds of patients burned to death, the national archives including detailed records of voyages of exploration by Portuguese navigators such as Vaso da Gama, the royal palace, the 70,000 volume royal library, hundreds of works of art by Titian, Rubens, and Correggio and the Carmo Convent.

Unintelligent Design

It's amazing how, when you have a modicum of understanding of evolution - and I like to flatter myself that I know a little about it - you can find examples of it in other areas of life, not just in biology.

While waiting for the powers that be at Twitter to get their act together and decide what to do about my @RosaResurrected account being suspended for reasons which they just don't seem to be able to put their finger on right now, I'm busying myself with a pass-time I've had for some ten years or so now. I'm a volunteer transcriber for the FreeBMD website. This charity aims to put the official indices (sorry spell-checker but I refuse to call them indexes) of English & Welsh births, marriages and death registrations on line in an easily searchable format for people who want to research their family tree. To date I've transcribed over 1.25 million entries though rather fewer in recent years than I once did.

It suddenly occurred to me how an aspect of it is an almost perfect analogy for a feature which can sometimes be hard for non-biologists to understand about evolution - how redundancy can be built in and retained and why inefficiency is not always eliminated.

Briefly, and without being too technical, the indices we transcribe are scans of alphabetical indices to the actual registrations of births, marriages and deaths, since the second half of 1837, giving enough information for people to obtain a copy of the birth, marriage or death certificate if they require one. The indices themselves can be use to confirm the dates and places of the events and, in later years, the mother's maiden surname, the age at death, or the spouse's surname without needing to buy the certificates from the UK Government's General Registration Office. This, together with census records, is often all a genealogist needs to build up a family tree.

The software most transcribers use is WinBMD, a brilliant piece, designed by software devoloper Ian Brooke and intended to make the transcription process as fast and as accurate as possible. To that end, when entering the forename, the numbers 1-9 on the keyboard are predefined with what were the nine most common forenames in England and Wales. This list is user-definable but comes with default settings along with several other background files.

The 'problem' is that this list was derived from transcriptions from around 1850-1880 which were some of the earliest indices we transcribed. Obviously the fashion for forenames changes over time and what were the most common in those days are not the most common ones in use when transcribing the 1967 indices for example.

But users like me are now used to the list and know that pressing '5' will enter the name 'James' or that '3' will enter 'Elizabeth', etc. We don't want the list to change because we would have to get used to a new one and would probably keep selecting the wrong one while we learned it. By repetitive usage of the software we have developed a set of reflexes so that when we see 'John' we hit '6' or when we see 'Mary' we press '7'. For other names we start typing then select from a drop-down list by number - a drop-down list we've built up over the years by adding 'new' names to it when we transcribe them for the first time.

To learn a new common names list, or even just to change it slightly by reordering it, would slow down the transcription process and introduce possible errors, so we are stuck with an increasingly illogical and inappropriate list which becomes more out of date as time goes on, yet the investment in effort and loss of productivity entailed in changing it is never a cost worth bearing.

Just so with evolving organisms where an intelligent designer would be able to scrap an increasingly inefficient design and start afresh with a new improved version, whereas Darwinian Evolution never has any mechanism for a radical redesign because any tendency to do so will always involve a loss of efficiency, so any carriers of these genes will be less successful, not more, and so will be eliminated. The process of Darwinian evolution is invariably upwards towards peaks in the evolutionary landscape but only in very rare and exceptional circumstances, such as genetic drift in a non-selective environment, is evolution ever to able to move a very small way down this fitness landscape.

This is exactly what we see with the mammalian eye where a redesign would result in a better eye yet any moves towards rearrangement would produce a loss of function and a complete reorganisation with a single mutation is simply not possible because of the way the eye develops in the embryo. Not a problem for an intelligent designer, who would not have made such a silly mistake in the first place anyway, but quite impossible for Darwinian Evolution.

We see a very similar problem with the mammalian recurrent laryngeal nerve where, even in the giraffe with it's long neck, the nerve takes a ludicrously long path to get from the brain to the larynx - via the thoracic cavity where it passed under one of the aortic arches before going back up the neck again. This path made sense in our remote fish ancestors with their short neck where the heart lies just a little below and behind the brain, but with evolution's small steps forward and the impossibility of going backwards, we've ended up with an unintelligent design because the overall change led to more descendants and the one small step at a time lengthening of the nerve never gave a disadvantage large enough to counter the overall improvements.

The extreme detour of this nerve (about 15 feet in the case of giraffes[16]) is cited as evidence of evolution. The nerve's route would have been direct in the fish-like ancestors of modern tetrapods, traveling from the brain, past the heart, to the gills (as it does in modern fish). Over the course of evolution, as the neck extended and the heart became lower in the body, the laryngeal nerve was caught on the wrong side of the heart. Natural selection gradually lengthened the nerve by tiny increments to accommodate, resulting in the circuitous route now observed.

Wikipedia - Recurrent laryngeal nerve.

This is how we can tell that life is not intelligently designed. It quite simply isn't what an intelligent designer would end up with.

I hasten to add that Ian Brooke's WinBMD design is far from unintelligent but even he can't avoid his designs being subject to the natural force of evolution and so accumulating some of the features of it such as the increasingly inefficient yet not easily redesigned 'commonest' names list.

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Religion And The History of Censorship

The recent phenomenon of the mass blocking campaign on Twitter and the various attempts to shut down blogs and websites is just another manifestation of the fear of dissent and debate that has always gripped religions. It tells us a great deal about the honesty and integrity of those who promote religion and who are desperate to suppress criticism. It tells us they know they will lose the argument in a free and open debate. It tells us they know they are pushing a lie and that their greatest fear is that they will be rumbled. It tells us their agenda is not what they claim and that they are too ashamed to tell us what it is.

One might expect a belief founded on good, established and unarguable evidence and principles of logical deduction would be confident enough in its methodology and basic philosophy to not only tolerate and allow dissent and argument but to positively welcome it, confident that it can win all arguments and dispel all doubts by good, honest argument and a dispassionate examination of evidence. One might also expect such a belief to be prepared to reassess, adapt and change whenever new evidence is found.

This, after all, is the proven methodology of scientific debate. No scientist worthy of the respect of his/her peers would present a paper to an audience of fellow scientists and then refuse to answer questions and demand that doubters be removed from the auditorium and even prohibited from practicing science. No scientist would publish a paper in a journal and demand the editor refuse to publish any papers which weren't in full agreement with it.

In fact, we would be fairly sure that seeking to suppress dissent and discourage discussion would betray a distinct lack of confidence. We might well suspect some low skulduggery or dishonest dealings; a deliberate attempt to mislead, probably in support of some secretive vested interest or in pursuit of a hidden agenda.

So, because all religions claim to know the truth with complete confidence, shouldn't we expect them all to welcome dissent and debate, confident that their beliefs are going to be strengthened by the ease with which doubt can be dispelled and misunderstandings or misinterpretations can be corrected?

Only if you are naive in the extreme.

Even the slightest contact with religion will show you that the last thing they will tolerate is doubt and disbelief. If you want to lose a religious friend, tell them you think their religion is wrong and another is right. Better still, tell them you think all religions are delusions and that only atheism makes any sense when the evidence, or lack of it, is examined objectively, honestly and dispassionately. Every atheist in the closet will tell you it's their religious friends' reactions they fear most.

No religion in the history of religion has ever tolerated dissent when it has had the power to prohibit it. They have all been keen on religious freedom when they were small minorities but that support is always inversely proportional to their strength in society. When they have gained absolute power, dissent is the first thing to be banned and no measure is considered too extreme to enforce it, as the long bloody history of religious persecutions, massacres and genocides shows. When the printing press was invented their first reaction was to control it and proscribe any printed matter which questioned religious dogma and especially religious authority and privilege.

Religious censorship is a form of censorship where freedom of expression is controlled or limited using religious authority or on the basis of the teachings of the religion. This form of censorship has a long history and is practiced in many societies and by many religions. Examples include the Edict of Compiègne, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (list of prohibited books) and the condemnation of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses by Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.77

Wikipedia - Censorship by religion

The antics of religious fundamentalists and creationist frauds on Twitter is the equivalent of shouting, "Shut up! Shut up! La la la la la! Can't hear you!". Like frightened rabbits caught in the glare of headlights they've panicked and resorted to the only method they know - suppression and censorship, imagining that questions go away and arguments are won by ignoring them. And in so doing they've drawn attention to themselves, to the dishonesty of their faith and and to their own awareness of its fraud and vacuosity.

They have shown the world they know their faith is a lie and is used as an excuse for attitudes and behaviour which would otherwise be unacceptable in a decent society not conditioned to think of piety as something to be admired and of faith as a virtue.

But don't treat these frightened little rabbits as a joke, laughable and pitiable though their antics might be and how cowardly and socially inept they might be as individuals. The real lesson here is what these inadequate little people would do to other people in real life if only they had the power. The great challenge of the growing atheist movement is to make sure that we will never ever make the mistake of finding out. As it is the worst they can do is to sit in their rooms cowering in fear at what the next unanswerable question might be, what challenge they will need to run away from next, how much longer a pretence of piety is going to work as an excuse, and fantasising about what they would like to do to the person who had the temerity to stand up to them.

It's better they stay that way and hopefully never realise that their behaviour on the Internet is probably the biggest single cause of the recent phenomenal growth in atheism.

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Thanks For Your Support

Very many thanks to my many supporters on Twitter for your continuing support. It is very much appreciated and more than a little humbling. I see that some have offered to tweet links to my blog in my absence. This would be very much appreciated, as would posting links on other media such as Reddit and Facebook.

I'm hoping that Twitter will reinstate my @RosaResurrected account soon but given their refusal to with @RosaRubicondior one never knows. As with @RosaRubicondior, there is still no response from Twitter Safety to multiple requests for an explanation in terms of specific tweets and the rule(s) they breached, so I am left wondering what to avoid tweeting even if I am reinstated.

Is there anything specific or does their silence indicate that they don't have anything specific either, and have effectively handed over policing of Twitter to whicher cabal of extremists and control freaks can organise a mass censoring of opinions they don't want people reading? Spam-blocking may have originally been a means of reporting actual spamming but even a single original tweet can be reported as spam with no comeback on the person who is effectively filing a false report. Lies or genuine, it seems to make no different to the way Twitter handles it.

I suspect to avoid another suspension I would have to refrain from tweeting anything promoting atheism and anything critical of religion and creationism. I short, I would have to desist from exposing bigots, frauds and liars. I wonder it that's what Jack Dorsey had in mind when he set Twitter up.

One thing I am becoming convinced of is that the spam-block option on Twitter is their cowardly way out of bothering to police Twitter effectively - which would require staff, money and training. Spamming is quite simply not an abuse on the scale of threats of violence, lies, harassment, personal abuse, racism, sexism, child pornography, etc and can be handled just as effectively by blocking if a user does not want to see repeated tweets, advertising, etc.

On the other hand, spam-blocking, when used to trigger a suspension, puts another form of abuse in the hands of abusers to be used apparently with impunity - the unjustified suspension, and effective censoring of adverse opinion - which I would suggest is a far more serious form of abuse than spamming. Apparently when the 'secret' is known, by using spam-blocking at the right time, a user can be suspended almost instantaneously.

By contrast, I have now had outstanding for 8 days another explicit threats of actual violent to myself and my family from a Christian with nothing more that an automated acknowledgement. Recently it took Twitter 12 days to respond to a series of explicit death threat and then their action was a polite reminder to the abuser that threats are against the rules and please don't do it again. I say again: this was a response to a repeated death threat!

I also have outstanding complaints against a particularly obnoxious and probably clinically insane individual with a history of abusive tweets who currently has several accounts suspended, some for threats of sexually explicit violence against women. This has remained unanswered for 12 days following the standard acknowledgment.

All this make one call into question Twitter's handling of complaints when organised triggering of some algorithm can instantly auto-suspend an account without any checking, yet explicit death threats, threats of violence again a user's family and a continued campaign of harassment goes unchecked because it doesn't trigger an automated response and the few staff dealing with these complaints haven't gotten round to it yet, and can then only select a response from a pre-defined drop-down list.

Once again, thanks for your continued support, and thanks in advance for anything you can do to promote my blog and particularly the message it contains for truth, honesty, humanism and respect for all people.

I think it's time we organised a campaign to make Twitter more responsible in the way it handles abuse.

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How Early Cells May Have Got Complex DNA

DNA-grabbing bacteria hint at early phase of evolution - life - 26 September 2013 - New Scientist

How did the simplest cells early in the evolution of life build their DNA?

It has always been assumed that DNA evolved by three separate processes:

1. DNA transfer between living organisms.
2. Sexual reproduction where DNA is shuffled with that of a partner to produce descendants with different combinations.
3. Random mutation with natural selection sieving out the less fit mutations and favouring the more fit ones.

Now we can add a fourth: mopping up pieces of DNA from dead and decaying organisms and possibly viruses and incorporating them into the genome where they will be replicated in future generations.

DNA is notoriously stable as a molecule, which is why it can be recovered from long-dead bodies, dried up smears of body fluids and the partially fossilised remains of Neanderthals, mammoths and ancestral horses. Genetic material would have been more abundant in the environment in which early cells were evolving than in an adolescent boy's bedroom, especially since, prior to the evolution of photosynthesis, there would have been very low levels of free oxygen.

Søren Overballe-Petersen of the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen found that when he fed fragments of DNA to a culture of Acinetobacter baylyi they were passively absorbed. They even absorbed fragments of 43,000 year-old mammoth DNA. The fact that this was a passive process suggests it may be a very primitive ability. By contrast, assimilating pieces of DNA passed across from another microorganism takes at least 40 genes.

So we have the possibility that very early cells acquired pieces of DNA from that sloshing about in their environment and that natural selection did the rest, sieving out those new combinations which were less successful at surviving to replicate and allowing through those which gave most descendants. With possibly billions of cells taking part in this process, it would have very quickly led to the accumulation of more and more complex and successful genomes. And of course the most successful organisms left more DNA fragments for others to mop up when they eventually died, so 'success' was not only inherited by descendants but could be picked up by the descendants of less successful organisms.

References:

Michael Marshall, DNA-grabbing bacteria hint at early phase of evolution, New Scientist Magazine issue 2936, 26 September 2013.

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How Can You Tell A Creationist Is Lying?

Entelognathus (Image: Brian Choo)

Fish fossil suggests our skeleton evolved face first - life - 25 September 2013 - New Scientist

Obviously you can tell when a professional creationist, like those who are paid to lie by the Discovery Institute, are lying because their lips are moving. What I'm talking about are the bog-standard creationist such as those who swarm onto the Internet every day to try to convince people they know more than biologists do about biology, more than geologists do about geology and more than physicists and cosmologists do about physics and cosmology and who can even spell the odd word of more than two syllables.

One sure fire way to tell they are lying is not so much the patently ludicrous claims they implicitly make about their own expertise and qualifications in science but the way the things they claim are not supported by the real-world facts.

One such patently false claim is that there are no transitional fossils as is predicted by Darwin's and Wallace's theory of descent with modification, and so no evidence to support the idea that living species evolved and diversified over time from earlier common ancestors.

Manta rays. More primitive?

As the above article in this week's New Scientist shows, these are in fact common in the fossil record. One such is the recently-found Entelognathus, a fish clearly displaying transitional features showing how bony fish evolved from the extinct primitive common ancestor of the bony and cartilaginous fish known as the placoderms.

To the consternation of creationists, Entelognathus from 419 million years ago, found very well preserved in a quarry near Qujing, Yunnan, China, has a typical placoderm skull and body and the jaw of a typical bony fish almost identical to that found in modern bony fish - features which were later to evolve into the typical amphibian, reptilian, mammalian and avian jaws in the descendants of those bony fish which evolved into the terrestrial vertebrates.

The find also suggests that, contrary to popular opinion which has sharks and rays as the more primitive fish because they lack the bones of bony fish, having cartilage instead, they may be the more highly evolved in they they could have replaced bone with cartilage. As so often with science, an answered question simple poses some more unanswered ones, and so we progress.

Just another transition fossil for creationists to lie to us about as they wait forlornly for a single drop of evidence supporting their infantile notion to be found, whilst trying not to see the tsunami of evidence for Darwinian Evolution engulfing them.

Reference:

Colin Barras, Fish fossil suggests our skeleton evolved face first, New Scientist, 25 September 2013 (subscription required).

Min Zhu, et al; A Silurian placoderm with osteichthyan-like marginal jaw bones, Nature, 2013

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Suspended Again

Sac O' Doughnuts

Yep! My Twitter account (@RosaResurrected)has been suspended again, and once again no specific reason has been given nor offending tweet identified.

And once again little Manuel de Dios Agosto is quite beside himself with delight and trying to claim the credit for it because he was once publicly humiliated by having to run away from a simple debate his infantile boasting had gotten him into, so exposing his claims of expertise in both science and theology to be fraudulent.

But before my followers understandably retaliate by filing complaints about him and his many accounts in an attempt to get him banned, think on what I said last time something like this happened.

Imagine what it would be like to have to live out your entire life fantasising and boasting about yourself on Twitter because your life is so meaningless and devoid of reason that you have no social life outside your room and the responses you can provoke on Twitter by being an unpleasant little abuser, liar and general nuisance. Your only claim to fame and your only sense of achievement came from conning a handful of credulous simpletons into believing that you were personally responsible for getting someones Twitter account suspended! And all this while desperately hoping no one makes public the reason you were expelled from seminary - the reason you have been ostracised and confined to your room by your community in the first place.

Do you really want to be responsible for depriving little Manny of the one thing he's achieved in life - being the reviled laughing stock of the Twitter #Atheist hashtag?

I'm not telling you what to do, merely asking you to consider the humanitarian aspect first.

A more effective remedy might be to get a campaign going to make Twitter adopt a fairer and consistent policy which is not open to the abuse of mass spam-blocking and in which offenders are given a specific reason for a suspension, including the offending tweet and the rule it contravenes, together with a right of appeal and review.

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Religious Sneaks

Why is God suddenly so big in the schools we all pay for? Zoe Williams, The Guardian

This article by Zoe Williams (@zoesqwilliams) reveals how religions - for that read religious people - are using the underhand tactics of the sneak who has no regard to democracy and whose morals are those of the market place where the bottom line is all that matters, to force their religion onto the most vulnerable section of UK society - our children.

The degree to which this is driven not so much by a misguided humanitarian motive (to be charitable to them) but by the perceived need to maintain control of the people through established religion, and the belief that their religion grants them the special privilege of being in charge, can be gauged by the way it is being actively facilitated and encouraged by the right-wing coalition government with its cabinet full of aristocratic multimillionaires and public school grandees.

As Zoe Williams points out:

Apologists' Dilemma

Universe's baby pictures suggest a bubbly birth - life - 19 September 2013 - New Scientist

In this week's New Scientist we have another example of how detached modern religious apologetics has become from reality. The above article deals with the science behind the origins of our Universe and never once needs to invoke magic or deities. Instead it offers evidence for an explanation which has been mooted for many years - that our Universe arose by a perfectly natural (albeit difficult to comprehend) process, from a pre-existing metaverse. Nor is intuition invoked or an insistence that the explanation has to be easy to understand by people with little or no understanding of physics or advanced mathematics.

Contrast this with my recent public debate with Christian Apologist, Richard Bushey, who was trying to argue the line William Lane Craig takes that the so-called Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) leads to only one possible conclusion - that the Universe was created by magic by the locally popular god, who of course just happens to be the Christian one of whatever denomination you had the great good fortune to be born to parents who were believers of.

A great deal of that debate centred around the question of whether, even if we ignore the evidence of quantum mechanics that quantum events, of which the Big Bang is an example, do not require a cause, and that causality is a property of Relativity not of quantum mechanics, we have still not established that the only cause of the Big Bang must be supernatural because nature did not exists prior to it.

In fact this conclusion of the KCA is not only based on the circularity of assuming a priori that the god in the conclusion existed and was the only entity capable of creating a universe, but it also relies on the scientific ignorance of it's target audience. Any reading of the readily available literature will show that science offers several possible, perfectly natural, explanations for what the Big Bang could have occurred in and what could have caused it.

In this New Scientist article compelling evidence from a detailed analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) (the 'echo' of the Big Bang and one of the strongest pieces of evidence for it) suggests our Universe could have arisen by a process termed 'bubble nucleation'.

In this picture, our universe arose from quantum fluctuations in a much bigger cosmos called a metaverse. The quantum effects caused a phase transition in the fabric of the metaverse, and our universe popped into being, like an air bubble forming in boiling water.

Andrew Liddle of the University of Edinburgh, UK, quoted in Universe's baby pictures suggest a bubbly birth by Lisa Grossman, New Scientist, 19 September 2013, Magazine issue 2935

Incidentally, I could almost kick myself that in my debate with Richard Bushey I completely forgot Stephen Hawking's 1993 book, Black Holes and Baby Universes, in which the hypothesis that this Universe could have arisen in a non-zero energy field in a black hole in another universe was dealt with at length. It's not as though this hypothesis is new, since Hawking was writing about it twenty years ago. Surely this is enough time for people genuinely interested in scientific truth to have updated their knowledge.

And that's the dilemma for apologists. Do they update their arguments and incorporate the latest science into them, which would be honest but would mean continually abandoning old arguments, admitting they were wrong and having to think up some new ones and find smaller and smaller gaps in which to fit their shrinking god, or do they simply continue to try to fool a shrinking target audience and concentrate on those who know nothing about science and so won't have heard the science that refutes the lie they are being sold?

The contrast between science and religious apologetics is starkly revealed here. The KCA manifestly depends on the state of scientific knowledge and understanding of the Universe as it was when the KCA was first stated in its modern form a thousand years ago. This was a Universe centred on Earth where the debate still raged about whether Earth was flat or spherical and magic spirits and demons were assumed to be influencing things. It was a Universe where another physical realm was assumed to exist above the sky, inhabited by magical beings and operating the Universe as a mechanic operates his machines. It was a Universe where angels were assumed to be pushing the stars and planets on their daily circuit of the heavens.

To maintain this position, religious apologists need to avoid incorporating advances in scientific knowledge which undermine any of the basic assumptions which must have seemed intuitively true to people with that primitive level of knowledge and understanding in the eleventh century. As we saw with Richard Bushey's arguments and as we see with the identical ones put forward by people like William Lane Craig, advances in Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Astrophysics, Particle Physics and Chaos Theory all have to be assiduously ignored because they never support their apologetic. And so religious apologetics becomes more and more detached from reality, increasingly only working in the scientifically illiterate parts of the world where religion's power-base resides and where an understanding of the world is closer to that of an early medieval camel trader or a Bronze-Age nomad than to someone from a twenty-first century, technological society.

They will happily wave science around when they imagine it supports them, or where they imagine their audience will think it does, yet where it destroys their basic premises and assumptions, and so destroys their apologetic altogether, science can be dismissed with the wave of a hand, can be wished away by pretending it isn't there or, with the arrogance of those who believe their faith is the best measure of reality available, can be rationalised as a conspiracy by evil scientists.

And those few apologists who are able to adjust their knowledge and update their thinking will undoubtedly show they will be unable to let go of the basic intellectual dishonesty which underpins their 'art'. They will still insist the metaverse must have begun to exist and that the god they are promoting was the only thing capable of creating it, so simply shifting their argument up one level. And they will still depend on the circularity of demanding we accept a priori that their cause of the metaverse exists and has the properties they have ascribed to it in order to make their conclusion come out the way they want it to.

None of them will do what science does and start from the premise that we don't know, yet, so let's go look at the evidence and see what we can make of it. For an apologist, their 'knowledge' of what the answer will be is the only evidence required. They call this 'faith' and claim the right to special respect and the power to make rules for us based on it.

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Fishy Fossil Monogamy

Coelacanths give birth to live young
Image: Peter Shunula

Zoologger: The fossil fish that's a serial monogamist - life - 20 September 2013 - New Scientist

Following close on my blog about so-called 'living fossils', our closest living fishy relative, the Coelacanth, is back in the news once again, with this New Scientist article by Andy Coghlan. As so often with science, the answer to one question leads to a couple more questions.

Female coelacanths give birth to a large number of large live young after a gestation lasting three years. This represents an enormous investment for the female, so we would expect her to use a spread bet strategy and mate with several males rather than risk all on a small number of mates. However, DNA analysis of two pregnant Latimeria chalumnae females caught in 1991 and 2007 respectively by Kathrin Lampert and colleagues of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, showed that all the young had the same male parent.

Coelacanths are carnivorous and live mainly on squid and small fish. The reason for a long gestation and live birth of relatively large young could be because, living together in caves would put small young at risk of being quickly eaten by parents and other coelacanths. Being large and immediately independent would give them a fighting chance of escaping.

So, we now know that females are monogamous, admittedly based on just two examples, but that raises a couple of questions:

1. Why monogamy when polygamy would be expected?
2. How does internal mating occur when males don't appear to have the necessary apparatus for penetration?

These massive fish - up to 1.5 meters (nearly five feet) long - live in deep ocean volcanic caves in what are believed to be colonies of a few individuals. It is believed that there are only a few hundred coelacanths still alive, so it could be that males are in short supply. It could also be the mating is a prolonged process, maybe involving mating rituals intended to bring the male and female cloaca into the right alignment for sperm transfer to occur.

But the real answer is that we don't yet know and can only hazard educated guesses.

I wonder if one of my keen creationist readers could suggest an 'Intelligent' Design explanation for males not have the required equipment for internal fertilisation and why females put all their eggs in one basket as a mating strategy. Could it be that a slow lingering extinction is what the benevolent Intelligent Designer had in mind all along when he created coelacanths?

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Playing With Evolution

Probability = 1:100,000. Advantage factor = 51%

One of the things people sometimes find difficult to understand about evolution is the idea of a species evolving up an improbability gradient so that something which was highly improbable becomes the norm over time because of the multiplying effect of natural selection. Creationist frauds will point at an evolved characteristic and come up with some spurious notional estimate of the probability of it evolving 'by random chance alone' and dismiss the idea as too preposterous for words. It's the equivalent of standing at the bottom of a cliff and declaring that life can't possibly exist at the top of it because nothing could jump that high in a single bound.

Indeed, this is one of the stocks in trade of professional Discovery Institute liars who earn a living misrepresenting the mathematics of biology as part of the Wedge Strategy to discredit science because of the way an understanding of the Universe undermines religious superstition and makes it harder to retain the unelected political power that controlling the people's religion gives them.

Richard Dawkins devoted an entire book, Climbing Mount Improbable to explaining the idea of the improbability gradient.

Here's a very crude, simple spreadsheet for modelling in very simple terms how this works. You'll need Microsoft Excel^© and the ability to create a simple chart with it.

Here's what you do:

Open up a new Excel spreadsheet and type the following into the given cells. Have particular care with the formulae.

Cell	Content
A1	Population
A2	Advantage Factor
A3	Initial number of mutants
B1	100000
B2	51%
B3	1
D1	Generation
E1	Population A
F1	Population a
G1	Percentage of A
H1	Percentage of a
D2	=Row()-2
E2	=B1-F2
F2	=B3
G2	=100*E2/(E2+F2)
H2	=100*F2/(E2+F2)
D3	=Row()-3
E3	=($E$2+$F$2)*(E2*(100%-$B$2))/((E2*(100%-$B$2))+(F2*$B$2))
F3	=($E$2+$F$2)*(F2*$B$2)/((F2*$B$2)+(E2*(100%-$B$2)))
G3	=100*E3/(E3+F3)
H3	=100*F3/(E3+F3)

Now copy down all the formulae in columns D through F to at least row 500 or as many more rows as you wish. You can always add more later.

What this has done is set up a model for calculating the average number of alleles in each generation in a population of 100000 if the mutation (a) gives a differential probability of reproducing of 51:49 compared to the normal form (A). It also gives you the same figures expressed as a percentage of the population. It replicates what would happen if the probability of the initial mutation was one in one hundred thousand but ignores any future mutations. You can play with these settings to see what happens in a larger population or with a different probability. For example, to test out a 1 in a million chance, change the value in B1 to 1000000 and leave B3 with a value of 1. To change the modelled advantage change the parameter in B2. You may need to adjust the number of rows.

To appreciate fully how the numbers change over time, create a chart and plot either columns E and F, or Columns G and H, with column D as the X-axis. You can then make changes and see how the shape of the graph changes. I find a stacked bar-chart gives the best result but you can experiment with others.

If you want to use this as a starting model and build in things like random drift where there are no significant selection pressures, population growth from a small founder population or several co-evolving genes interacting, be my guest. Your skill and patience with Excel will be greater than mine, but I would be interested in seeing the results.

Enjoy.

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