Marriage in Secular Britain

Provisional figures for 2012 released by the UK Government Office of National Statistics (ONS) today show that the number of marriages in England and Wales have increased slightly, both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the unmarried population. However, 70% of marriages are now civil marriages with just 28.6% Christian of one denomination or another.

Source: ONS	Total marriages have declined from about 352,000 in 1981 to 262,000 in 2012 although this was up from just under 250,000 in 2011. Over the same period, religious marriages have declined from just under 180,000 to just under 78,000.
In 1981 more than half of all marriages were conducted in a place of worship with Anglican marriages accounting for the huge majority of them. They have now fallen to half their former numbers. The only religious category to show an increase over this period has been 'Other', which includes Jewish, Muslim and Sikh, up to 2920 from 1488 in 1981.	Source: ONS
Source: ONS	From being less than half of all marriages in 1981, civil marriages now comprise over 70% of all marriages.
The recent upturn in the number of marriages in England and Wales comes after many years of steep decline starting around 1970 when the post-war baby boomers - the 1960s generation - were coming of age, as shown by the blip between about 1965 and 1975. Marriages had been increasing steadily since these records began in line with population growth, being distorted by the two world wars.	Source: ONS

Whether the recent upturn is due to demographic changes with immigration into the UK from Eastern Europe under EU free movement laws, or whether this represents a bottoming out of the decline remains to be seen. There are a number of demographic changes that may have contributed to the decline in religion as an institution in Britain, not least of which has been, until very recently, a general feeling of security as the baby boomers and especially their children were brought up in the welfare state created by the post-war Labour government in response to the Beveridge Plan. People were better housed, better fed, better clothed, better educated, better paid and had more leisure time and disposable income than at any time in history. In addition, they were brought up in a less deferential culture and were more inclined to examine the old assumptions and think for themselves rather than being prepared to think what they were told. And these ideas were able to spread more quickly because of the mass communication media.

Better education made us more willing to see the old religious fables and origin myths as just that, not science or a useful description of the Universe any more. Better security rendered us less susceptible to the false hope that religion offers and better communication made us realise we were not alone in these new attitudes and new-found scepticism. And of course better and more accessible contraception and better sex education has turned sex into a recreational activity carrying far less risk, especially for females, reverting sex to probably it's more natural role in human relationships and freeing it from stigma and guilt that religion had imposed on it.

The strongest predictor of whether a person grows up to be religious is whether their parents are... In terms of keeping people, the non-religious are doing very well indeed. It is extremely unusual for somebody brought up in a non-religious household to join a religion, but it is not at all unusual for somebody brought up with a religious affiliation to end up as non-religious... The very fact that there is such a group, that it is quite big and that there wasn't such a group before is an indicator of secularisation.

Stephen Bullivant, theologian, St Mary's University, UK. Co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Atheism
Quoted in Losing our religion: Your guide to a godless future by Graham Lawton; New Scientist 30 April 2014

Now we have brought our children up to think for themselves, the biggest cause of religion - parental example - has been removed from half the population. Studies have shown that only about 3% of children with Atheist or non-believing parents are likely to become religious, whilst only 50% of children from actively religious parents are likely to follow them. In the UK, for every 10 people to leave Catholicism, only 1 joins.

Source: ONS

Clearly, for most people who bother to get married at all, the reasons are social and/or economic, or simply because of a wish to show commitment. Even for those who get married in a church, the reason often has more to do with wanting a 'traditional' marriage and a nice setting for the ceremony. Marriage now has little to do with seeking permission for sex of an irascible magic man who takes a rather creepy interest in our bedroom activities.

Even for religious people, premarital sex will have been the norm in almost every case and most will have been living as a couple for some time. As the last chart shows, for all but the youngest age group, over 50% had cohabited prior to marriage, rising to over 80% for 30-45 year-olds, only a little below the cohabitation figures for civil marriages at 90%.

Religion has almost ceased to have any relevance to the institution or 'sanctity' of marriage in England and Wales and marriage is no longer seen as a prerequisite to a full sexual relationship.

Sources:

ONS: Marriage Summary Statistics 2012 (Provisional) (Excel sheet 192Kb).
ONS: Marriage Statistics, Cohabitation and Cohort Analyses (Excel sheet 343Kb).
ONS: Facts About Marriage.

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Intelligently Designed Yeast

Students Build the First Eukaryotic Chromosome from Scratch - Scientific American

Interesting news recently in Scientific American. Students at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, have created an entirely synthetic chromosome and it works just fine, just like any other chromosome in fact, and why wouldn't it? Chromosomes are just chemicals after all. There is no magic involved.

The chromosome they were attempting to create was Chromosome 3 of the yeast used in wine-making and baking - Saccharomyces cerevisiae - which controls the yeast sexual reproduction and which contains 316,617 base pairs. However, rather than build the entire DNA chain, they synthesised only the active regions, ignoring the accumulated junk DNA from billions of years of evolution. In fact, all they needed to do was create the correct sequence of 272,871 base pairs. Still a massive task but not nearly so daunting as it might have been.

This is a pretty impressive demonstration of not just DNA synthesis, but redesign of an entire eukaryotic chromosome. You can see that they are systematically paving the way for a new era of biology based on the redesign of genomes.

Farren Isaacs, bioengineer,
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

The interesting thing is that the yeast with the synthetic DNA is thriving and behaving just like regular yeast. The plan now is to breed it through thousands of generations to see how the synthetic DNA evolves and how much junk DNA is produced in the process. The long-term plan is to build an entirely synthetic genome for yeast which can then be manipulated to produce proteins, medicines, biofuels, etc.

From the point of view of this blog, the significant thing is not so much that the DNA was built but that, when real intelligent designers got to work, the best approach was to get rid of all the useless stuff that an unintelligent design process has created over billions of years, resulting in a design which was more efficient in terms of resources and no less efficient in terms of function. Of course, this would have been completely unnecessary had there been any intelligence involved in the original design.

Sorry, creationists, but your pet superstition has been exposed as bogus yet again. There really is no such thing as magic.

Reference:

Narayana Annaluru, et al; Total Synthesis of a Functional Designer Eukaryotic Chromosome
Science 4 April 2014: Vol. 344 no. 6179 pp. 55-58 DOI: 10.1126/science.1249252

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Love Hormone Dogs Creationism

"Science can't explain love! (And because science can't explain love, it can't explain anything. And because love exists, therefore God exists!)". I'm surprised no-one has written a creationist hymn about it, so they can sing it loudly every Sunday to help shout down their doubts.

The lie to that claim was given in a paper published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNSA). A team of scientists from Japan, led by Teresa Romero of the Department of Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan, in a beautifully simple experiment, showed that the hormone oxytocin increases the pair-bond between dogs and their masters.

Significance
Although the positive impact of social bonds on individual’s fitness has recently been demonstrated, the mechanisms underlying the motivation to form long-term associations remain largely unknown. Current evidence shows that oxytocin modulates social behavior but evidence of its effects in bond maintenance remains scant, especially in nonreproductive contexts. We provide evidence that in the domestic dog oxytocin enhances social motivation to approach and affiliate with conspecifics and human partners, which constitutes the basis for the formation of any stable social bond. Furthermore, endogenous oxytocin levels increased after dogs engaged in affiliation with their dog partners, indicating a stimulation of the oxytocin system during social interactions. Our findings highlight the important role that oxytocin has in the expression of sociality in mammals.

Social Sciences - Psychological and Cognitive Sciences:
Teresa Romero, Miho Nagasawa, Kazutaka Mogi, Toshikazu Hasegawa, and Takefumi Kikusui
Oxytocin promotes social bonding in dogs
PNAS 2014 ; published ahead of print June 9, 2014, doi:10.1073/pnas.1322868111

The researchers sprayed either a preparation of oxytocin or saline into the nostrils of sixteen dogs then allowed them back into a room where their owners were waiting. The owners had been instructed to ignore any social contact from their dog and did not know whether they had received oxytocin or saline. There was a statistically significant greater tendency for dogs to try to interact with their owners by licking, pawing and sniffing if they had received oxytocin than if they had received saline sprays.

Oxytocin is known to enhance pair-bonding between parents and offspring in many mammals and makes humans more trusting, cooperative and generous. This experiment also supports the theory that it may be involved in social interaction and friendship and will even act across species, especially where both species have a broadly similar social structure.

So, where does this leave our creationist friends' claim that somehow love can only be explained by God and exists in some spiritual, non-material realm, placing it outside the reaches of science and beyond human understanding? It leaves it where it always was: a nonsensical, evidence-free assertion that science has now shown to be false. Love is a physiological, biochemical response firmly in the realm of neurophysiology and psychology and so fully accessible to science and amenable to rational analysis and measurement.

And no less enjoyable for that.

Another gap closed and found not to be containing a god, of course.

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Snake Bite Shock for Creationism

King Cobra (Ophiophagus hannah)

You know, sometimes, challenging creationist loons and putting up facts for them to either explain away, or more often, ignore all together, feels a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. A proud contempt for learning and an admiration for the moral and intellectual bankruptcy which means they aren't bothered about being right or wrong, must be such great assets for them. No wonder they seem to positively delight in displaying them, yet never enter into serious debate about the biological facts.

Take for example something that struck me in a long and very readable article in New Scientists by Bob Holmes this week about the evolution of snakes. (Unfortunately, this sits behind a paywall but articles like this justify my decision to stump up the £44 per year). The article discusses many aspects of snake evolution, most of which would precipitate ophidiophobia in any dedicated creationist, but the observation which is guaranteed to push any creationist into deep denialism concerned the evolution of snake venom.

Spreading the Creationist Poison - Update.

A mammoth victory in South Carolina?

Regular readers will remember me reporting on the campaign by creationist loons in South Carolina to sneak a piece of Bible literalism into law, despite the Establishment Clause forbidding any such thing. If enacted, the law would have compelled any official mention of the state's official fossil, the Columbian mammoth - No! I'm not joking! - to include the words "which was created on the Sixth Day with the other beasts of the field".

It had all started with a suggestion by 8 year-old Olivia McConnell that the state adopt the Columbian mammoth as its official fossil in honour of the fact that its teeth, found in a swap in the state in 1725, were the first mammalian fossils to be found in North America. In any normal place in the world such a suggestion would probably pass through on the nod as a nice little gesture and in recognition of the state's claim to fame in the field of palaeontology. Not so in loon-infested South Carolina, however, where any mention of fossils raises the dreaded spectre of Darwinian Evolution and sends true-believing creationist loons into a Bible-waving frenzy incase someone gets the right idea about evolution.

The amendment which would have included the above transparent reference to Genesis was inserted by loon's champion, Rep. Robert L. Ridgeway, III and was voted through the House of Representatives without dissent, the Judiciary Committee not having seen any problem with it either. Not a single elected Representative in South Carolina had any problem with trying to insert a piece of narrow sectarianism into law despite it clearly being unconstitutional.

The Senate, however, cried foul and blocked it, forcing the House to put it before a joint committee for final say before sending it to the Governor for approval. With the House having a one-vote majority on the committee and with all the House members having voted for the Ridgeway amendment, the outcome was by no means certain.

For those not familiar with the US Constitution, the so-called Establishment Clause is the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This is what Americans are referring to when they say they live in a free country. It guarantees both freedom of and freedom from religion, freedom of speech, the right of peaceful assembly and the right to have their grievances heard. Basically, it puts the American people in charge of America.

Naturally, the flag-wrapped, super-patriotic, fundamentalist Christians of South Carolina would do almost anything to do away with it.

However, despite four of the six member of the joint committee having voted for the subversion, the committee caved in and agrees a bill which made no mention of anything remotely resembling creationism and the bill went through both House (98-0) and Senate (32-3). It now goes to the Governor for final approval. So, it looks like South Carolinians will soon be able to proudly refer to their state fossil by its official name without having to spout a piece of creationist propaganda whether they agree with it or not, and State employees will not be compelled to include this propaganda in every reference to it, at the expense South Carolinian taxpayers.

The 'patriotic' US Christian right will need to dream up more subtle ways to subvert the hated US Constitution with it's guarantee of religious freedom which is so unfairly denying them the power to which they feel they have a God-given entitlement.

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Chimpanzees Can Outsmart Humans

Chimpanzee choice rates in competitive games match equilibrium game theory predictions : Scientific Reports : Nature Publishing Group

It must be so difficult being a creationist these days.

Hard though it might be to accept, especially for creationists, chimpanzees outsmart humans when it comes to working out the best strategy in a competitive game based on game theory, as a team from the Department of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Japan, show in a paper published in Scientific Reports this week.

Abstract
The capacity for strategic thinking about the payoff-relevant actions of conspecifics is not well understood across species. We use game theory to make predictions about choices and temporal dynamics in three abstract competitive situations with chimpanzee participants. Frequencies of chimpanzee choices are extremely close to equilibrium (accurate-guessing) predictions, and shift as payoffs change, just as equilibrium theory predicts. The chimpanzee choices are also closer to the equilibrium prediction, and more responsive to past history and payoff changes, than two samples of human choices from experiments in which humans were also initially uninformed about opponent payoffs and could not communicate verbally. The results are consistent with a tentative interpretation of game theory as explaining evolved behavior, with the additional hypothesis that chimpanzees may retain or practice a specialized capacity to adjust strategy choice during competition to perform at least as well as, or better than, humans have.

Christopher Flynn Martin, Rahul Bhui, Peter Bossaerts, Tetsuro Matsuzawa & Colin Camerer;
Chimpanzee choice rates in competitive games match equilibrium game theory predictions; Scientific Reports 4, Article number: 5182 doi:10.1038/srep05182

According to Game Theory, there is a limit to the number of games that can be won by any player. This is known as the Nash Equilibrium. This was shown to be a limit by Nobel Laureate mathematician, John Forbes Nash Jr. When tested against university undergraduates and West African villagers, the chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) learned the game more quickly and reached the Nash Equilibrium sooner than their human opponents.

The authors suggest that this could be related to the superior cognitive speed and short-term memory of chimpanzees. When given 'memory masking' tests chimpanzees not only perform better but faster than humans. In this test, when the lowest numerical image is touched on a computer screen, the other eight randomised images are masked with white squares. They then have to be touched in ascending order. Chimpanzees not only identify the lowest value more quickly than humans but are also more accurate in memorising the order of the masked images. In a similar test, when a set of five non-consecutive numerals are briefly shown before being masked, chimpanzees will also memorise the sequence more accurately and more quickly than humans.

The authors suggest that these superior abilities may be due to chimpanzees being generally more competitive than humans whilst humans are more cooperative. It is also suggested that humans may have lost some of this speed of cognition which we may once have shared with our closest relatives as parts of our brains were co-opted for speech, which gave us greater advantage than speed of learning.

So, even the discovery that chimpanzees are better than us at cognition, short-term memory and strategic thinking lends support to the idea that these are evolved abilities.

It must be so difficult being a creationist these days.

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Why Science Works And Religion Doesn't

How Did the Moon Really Form?

The great thing about science is that, unlike religions, it has real, hard evidence. In fact, it's all about evidence. It doesn't matter what clever hypotheses scientists come up with, until they are supported by evidence, they remain just hypotheses. And even when evidence is found it is never assumed to have proved the hypothesis beyond doubt, placing it in some realm of certainty never to be questioned again.

The only certainty in science is that there are no certainties.

Take for example the hypothesis that was devised to explain why Earth has an axis of rotation which is tilted in relation to those of other planets and in relation to the surface of the Sun, and also why Earth has such a large moon relative to its size, compared to what we normally see for other planets like Mars or Jupiter.

The hypothesis that explained this - the so-called 'giant impact hypothesis' - was that the Earth and Moon were formed early in the life of the Solar System from the remains of an impact between the earlier, smaller Earth and another even smaller, Mars-sized planet, which has been named 'Theia', that had drifted out of orbit. The impact tilted the axis of rotation of Earth. Some of the debris from this impact, mostly from Theia which broke up on impact, but some of it from Earth, fell back to Earth and became merged into it, while the remainder formed an accretion disk around the now larger Earth which coalesced into the Moon. The Moon formed by this process would have been hot, driving off the lighter elements and water which, with the low lunar gravity, would have been lost into space, leaving the arid landscape with no atmosphere that the Moon has today.

However, this hypothesis, although explaining what we can observe in terms of Earth's axis of rotation and large Moon, not only suffered from a lack of hard evidence but the evidence available appeared to contradict it. As Daniel Clery explains in an article in Science this week:

But one bit of evidence just doesn’t fit: the composition of moon rocks. Researchers have found that rocks from different parts of the solar system (brought to Earth as meteorites) have subtle differences in their composition. Oxygen, for example, comes in different varieties, called isotopes. Oxygen-16 (O-16) is the most common type, followed by oxygen-17 (O-17)—which has one extra neutron in its nucleus—and oxygen-18, with two extra neutrons. Meteorites from different parts of the solar system have different proportions of these isotopes. So a rock from Mars would have a markedly different ratio of O-17 compared with O-16 than, say, a piece of an asteroid or a rock from Earth. These ratios are so reliable that researchers use them to identify where meteorites come from.

Here’s the puzzle: The giant impact hypothesis predicts that the moon should be made of about 70% to 90% material from the impactor, so its isotope ratios should be different from Earth’s. But ever since researchers got hold of Apollo moon rocks for analysis, they have failed to find any significant difference in isotope ratios on Earth and the moon. Studies of the isotopes of oxygen, titanium, calcium, silicon, and tungsten have all drawn a blank.

Daniel Clery, How Did the Moon Really Form?, Science, June 5, 2014

It was getting to the stage where some people were suggesting that the collision had not taken place.

Dr Daniel Herwartz
University of Cologne, Germany

So, the question for science was, is this apparently contradictory evidence sufficient to destroy the hypothesis or does it's explanatory power for other observed phenomena still make it a viable hypothesis?

For the hypothesis was the fact that both Earth's axis of rotation and the size of the Moon are not really in doubt while the ratios of the different isotopes of oxygen and other elements could have another explanation - it is only an assumption that Theia should have had very different ratios, we don't have any way of knowing for sure what they would have been.

Against the hypothesis was the argument that these difference should have been detected by now so it's beginning to look suspiciously like a prediction made by the hypothesis is being falsified.

The problem was, as I have pointed out above, without knowing exactly what that prediction is in the absence of any information about Theia's oxygen isotope ratios, we can't even say with any degree of confidence that it has been falsified.

It is a relief that a [disparity in ratios] has been found, since the total absence of difference between Earth and moon would be hard to explain.

David Stevenson, planetary scientist
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA
(e-mail to Science quoted in the above article.

Now, however, a team of scientists led by Daniel Herwartz of the University of Cologne, Germany, seem to solved the mystery. The problem may have been that the Moon rock samples previously used were meteorites collected from Earth and so had been subjected to the effects of weathering. This may have skewed the results. When they compared samples brought back by Apollo Missions 11, 12 and 16 with samples from Earth's mantle, they found that the Moon has an O-16 to O-17 ratio 12 parts per million higher than those of Earth rock. The results suggest the Moon may be composed of about equal proportions of Earth and Theia, so strongly supporting the big impact hypothesis.

ABSTRACT
The Moon was probably formed by a catastrophic collision of the proto-Earth with a planetesimal named Theia. Most numerical models of this collision imply a higher portion of Theia in the Moon than in Earth. Because of the isotope heterogeneity among solar system bodies, the isotopic composition of Earth and the Moon should thus be distinct. So far, however, all attempts to identify the isotopic component of Theia in lunar rocks have failed. Our triple oxygen isotope data reveal a 12 ± 3 parts per million difference in Δ¹⁷O between Earth and the Moon, which supports the giant impact hypothesis of Moon formation. We also show that enstatite chondrites and Earth have different Δ¹⁷O values, and we speculate on an enstatite chondrite–like composition of Theia. The observed small compositional difference could alternatively be explained by a carbonaceous chondrite–dominated late veneer.

Herwartz, D., et al., Identification of the giant impactor Theia in lunar rocks; Science 6 June 2014: 344 (6188): 1146-1150
DOI: 10.1126/science.1251117

Now that a difference has been found, many will work to confirm or deny it and do battle over what it means... The possible significance of enstatite chondrites is interesting, but at present we are stuck with speculating about the bodies that went into making Earth, since they are no longer around.

David Stevenson, op. cit.

So, does that settle the issue once and for all? Can science now claim to be certain that the Earth/Moon system was created by the 'big impact' in the early life of the solar system? Of course not. It is always possible that this team's findings might be shown to be wrong, or some unexpected evidence might be found which would cause the entire thing to be revised and discarded. The team themselves point out that Earth may have been bombarded by material with a different oxygen isotope ratio after the impact.

Imagine religious dogma being subjected to this sort of constant review and revision with nothing sacred at all in terms of firm conclusions. What little scraps of evidence they have, no matter how tenuous, like the Turin Shroud, are carefully guarded against too much independent scientific scrutiny and when they are, as is the case with the Turin Shroud where three independant teams all concluded that the shroud is made of linen made from flax which grew in the 14th-century, the results are dismissed or ignored.

Religion has developed a whole edifice of beliefs and dogmas based on nothing more substantial than myths and fantasies and a dogmatic assumption that, for no other reason than wishful thinking and clerical necessity, these myths and fantasies must be true. None of this would be needed if they had any real evidence either for the existence of gods, or the nature of those gods. They then have to defend those dogmas against all arguments by developing apologetics invariably based on circular reasoning and the presupposition that the dogmas are right in the first place.

The art of a good apologist is to convince believers that they were right all along and few of them require much convincing, so refuted fallacies, false claims, circular logic, parochial ignorance and cultural arrogance are all brought into play, like a snake-oil salesman playing to a credulous and anxious audience.

The level of intellectual honesty and moral integrity needed to be a theologian or a professional religious apologists would quickly result in a research scientist being shown the door of any respectable research institute foolish enough to have employed him or her in the first place. It's a level of personal integrity more suited to the role of door-to-door salesman, second-hand car dealer, political spin doctor or real-estate agent.

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Caught in the Act - Evolving Crickets

Teleogryllus oceanicus

Rapid Convergent Evolution in Wild Crickets, Study - News of the World

Male crickets chirp. They do it to attract a mate, so it's hard to imagine how they could evolve to lose the ability to chirp. But, of course, evolution has no need to be obviously intuitive and an environmental change which produces intense selective pressure can produce some surprising solutions. And, as there is more than one way of achieving the same thing, there is no reason why evolution should take on particular path and not another.

This was illustrated by a recent phenomenon seen in a species of Hawaiian cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus, which on two islands in the Hawaiian archipelago have fallen silent, following an infestation by a parasitoid fly, Ormia ochracea. This fly uses the male cricket chirp to locate its victims and lay an egg on them. The grub then burrows into the body of the cricket, killing it within a week. The behaviour T. oceanicus had evolved to ensure continuation of its genes has provided O. ochracea with an opportunity to improve the success of its genes instead, and at the expense of those of T. oceanicus. There is no compassion in mindless evolution.

T. oceanicus parasitised by O. ochracea

This intense selective pressure in turn gave an advantage to mutant male genes which keep them silent by producing the 'flatwing' phenotype in which the sound-producing structures are erased. This was observed first on the island of Kauai and then, two years later, it appeared on the island of Oahu. The mutation was first thought to be the same and to have migrated between the islands having arisen first on Kauai, but closer research by Sonia Pascoal of the Centre for Biological Diversity, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK, and colleagues, has revealed that we have not one case of rapid evolution caused by an environmental change giving intense selection pressure, but two. The same phenotype is due to mutation at different loci on sex-linked chromosomes on each island as the two isolated gene-pools converged on the same solution to the same problem by two different routes.

Are there any proponents of intelligent design prepared to offer an explanation of why an intelligent designer would produce two different solutions to an identical problem given identical starting positions, leaving aside why an intelligent designer would have intelligently designed the problem in the first place?

Reference: Pascoal, S. et al; Rapid Convergent Evolution in Wild Crickets; Current Biology, 29 May 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.04.053

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13,000-year-old American

Flooded cave hides Naia, a 13,000-year-old American - life - 15 May 2014 - New Scientist

As Francis Collins, himself a Christian, observed in his otherwise quite silly book, The Language Of God, "Young Earth Creationism has reached a point of intellectual bankruptcy, both in its science and in its theology". This point is made forcefully by recent discovery in a submerged cave in Mexico of the 13,000 year-old skeleton of a girl who was about 15 years-old when she died, almost certainly by falling into the hole before it was flooded as sea-levels rose at the end of the last ice-age.

Why Science Grows And Religions Stagnate

A couple of interesting articles in the science literature this week showing how science works and why it ultimately corrects it errors, whether because of mistaken claims or deliberately false ones, and above all why it continues to grow and develop. I wonder if any keen theologists can cite examples of religions being extended and kept on track by a similar process.

The first, in Scientific American, concerns the recent announcement of the detection of evidence of gravity waves as predicted by the inflation model of the Big Bang. This model explains a great deal about the observable universe such as why widely separated areas of the Universe that could never have been in contact with one another given the limitations imposed by the velocity of light, appear broadly the same. However, inflation remained a hypothesis pending definitive evidence supported only by the fact of its mathematical elegance and that it explained what can be observed.

Then last March, as reported in this blog and elsewhere a team working on the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization 2 (BICEP2) experiment at the South Pole announced that they had found the evidence in the form of gravity waves, or more precisely, evidence for gravity waves; the smoking gun of inflation.

Now, however, and in the finest traditions of a major discovery, some serious questions are being asked and as yet not being fully answered. Doubts have been expressed about the validity of the conclusions from the data which the team have not yet made available for public scrutiny, nor have they produced a promised 'systematics' paper setting out possible sources of error although one was promised. Another problem for the science community is that, although the peer-review process is underway the team have not yet published their findings in a science journal.

Note that no-one is suggesting any dishonesty or falsification of data here, only questioning the validity and reliability of the conclusions from the data and whether it is the conclusive evidence for inflation that it was hailed as initially. As always, the concern is not whether the evidence agrees with the conclusion but whether the conclusion follows from the evidence. This is a crucial difference and one which can't be overstated.

The second article, this time in Science Magazine, is on a different scale altogether and deals with a strong suspicion of dishonesty and data manipulation or falsification. Although not formally proven there is growing concern about the work of Jens Förster, a Dutch researcher in psychology who resigned recently from the University of Amsterdam. As reported by Frank van Kolfschooten in Science Magazine, doubts had been raised about the statistical probability of his results being genuine and not the result of data manipulation to produce the desired results. One enquiry by the University of Amsterdam concluded that they were 'virtually impossible' whilst another concluded that there had been data manipulation in a 2012 paper.

Förster had accepted the charge of data manipulation but claimed the data used was from research in Germany, mostly at Jacobs University Bremen between 1999 and 2008 and suggested an unidentified and over-enthusiastic assistant had changed the data. However, emails have now emerged from 2009 which appear to be discussing the details of the experimental method to be used and which clearly post-date the pre-2008 German research claim. The offer of a professorship at Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany, supported by a €5 million grant from the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, has now been postponed.

So, in both these examples we see the scientific community using the scientific method to ensure that both genuine mistakes and deliberate falsifications are identified and investigated with all sides of the argument being heard before a final conclusion is reached - and the sanctions which inevitably follow from exposed deliberate falsification which can bring a reputation into disgrace and a career to a sudden end.

The reason for this, and the reason why it raises such concern in the scientific community is because the entire point of science is to arrive closer to the ultimate truth and to ensure that any conclusions are only and precisely what the evidence supports, nothing more and nothing less. It does not matter how badly one wishes that there was data to support a favourite hypothesis or how much one wishes to be the first to provide an elusive proof of a hypothesis, and it does not matter how much one researcher might put his own career prospects above his respect for truth, honesty and integrity, or how easily one researcher falls for the temptation to just change the data a little to show the world the 'truth' as he/she sees it, or to flatters his/her boss with the brilliance of his methods. None of this adds to the strength of the conclusion. The only thing that matters is the truth.

Contrast this to what we witness daily in theology and especially fundamentalist theology and apologetics where the only thing that matters is that the argument arrives at the 'right' conclusion; the conclusion that faith tells them is the right one. This allows apologists like William Lane Craig to get away with blatantly false arguments, circular reasoning, repetition of refuted arguments to a different audience and glaring misrepresentation of statistical methods such as Baye's Theorem which, used correctly would have proved the probability of Jesus resurrecting from the dead was virtually zero, as shown here, not the virtual certainty he claimed to the delight of his Christian audience eager for confirmation of their bias.

This is the simple faith fallacy which allows Muslims, Christians, Jews, Shintoists and Hindus to look at the same evidence and arrive at entirely different conclusions, and why that conclusion never changes. It's also why no evidence that might change that conclusion is ever recognised or taken into account. It doesn't support the conclusion therefore the evidence is wrong, and why when asked for the evidence for their god, all supporters of all religions can, with equal confidence and with a sweep of the arm tell you to, "Look around! The evidence is everywhere". The evidence is everywhere because it is simply deemed to be evidence; their faith tells them so. And it's also the reason that what's presented as a serious science text book for Christian schools can come up with this extraordinarily bigoted statement presented as a basic principle of science:

1. 'Whatever the Bible says is so; whatever man says may or may not be so,' is the only [position] a Christian can take..."
2. If [scientific] conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them.
3. Christians must disregard [scientific hypotheses or theories] that contradict the Bible.

William S. Pinkerton, Biology for Christian Schools

The conclusion is sacred so the facts must be ignored. If science had staggered along with that philosophy we would still be in the Bronze Age arguing about the best shape for wheels and arrowheads, and you couldn't be reading this. Religions, with their sacred conclusions and fixed dogmas, offering nothing more than comforting certainties, the delusion of false 'knowledge' and excuses for hate and ignorance, have no choice but to become increasingly irrelevant as human society progresses without them.

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Closing The Gaps - Early Bird Shows Evolution

The fossil bird with its revealing stomach contents (insert)
Credit: © Senckenberg

Eocene fossil is earliest evidence of flower-visiting by birds

We have an interesting discovery reported this week in Biology Letter of a fossil bird which seems to be the earliest known avian nectar-feeder. It shows how evolution is driven by environmental opportunity as diversifying species move into and exploit the opportunities offered by new and evolving niches as the ecosystem they are part of develops, and how cooperation is at least as likely an outcome as are arms races and competition as 'selfish' genes are selected naturally because they produce more descendants.

Two researches, Gerald Mayr of the Ornithological Section and Volker Wilde of the Palaeobotanical Section, of Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt, Germany have cooperated in examining a fossil bird (Pumiliornis tessellatus) from the middle Eocene of Messel found at Messel, Germany and have shown it to almost certainly be the first known example of a nectivorous bird.

It has long been recognised that flowering plants or angiosperms, and nectar-feeding insects co-evolved as symbiotic relationships - the insects get nectar and the plants get their pollen spread to other flowers of the same species. This process minimises the waste of untargeted wind-blown pollen dispersal and the environmental restrictions of using motile male gamete found in lower plants such as mosses, ferns and liverworts, all of which require a damp environment so the motile gametes have something to swim in.

It's easy to understand how this system could have evolved from crawling insects and ground-hugging plants to flying insects and the wide rage and form of flowering plants now free to move into drier habitats. All this took place prior to the 160 million years ago from when we have the first definite fossil record of flowering plants which are believe to have diverged from the gymnosperms 240-202 million years ago. The major period of rapid diversification seems to have been around 120 million years ago.

Pollen grains in the stomach.
See original paper for explanation.

Meanwhile, the first true birds were diverging from the theropod dinosaurs about 150 million years ago, so they grew up with flowering plants, so so speak, and these provided them with the same ecological niche some insects had moved into, most notably and probably initially a wasp from which the bees have evolved. It's not surprising therefore that some birds such as the humming birds moved into this niche becoming smaller and more bee-like in the process (as incidentally, some other insects such as moths and butterflies, have).

Abstract
Birds are important pollinators, but the evolutionary history of ornithophily (bird pollination) is poorly known. Here, we report a skeleton of the avian taxon Pumiliornis from the middle Eocene of Messel in Germany with preserved stomach contents containing numerous pollen grains of an eudicotyledonous angiosperm. The skeletal morphology of Pumiliornis is in agreement with this bird having been a, presumably nectarivorous, flower-visitor. It represents the earliest and first direct fossil evidence of flower-visiting by birds and indicates a minimum age of 47 million years for the origin of bird–flower interactions. As Pumiliornis does not belong to any of the modern groups of flower-visiting birds, the origin of ornithophily in some angiosperm lineages may have predated that of their extant avian pollinators.

Mayr. G. & Wilde. V.; Eocene fossil is earliest evidence of flower-visiting by birds; Biol. Lett. May 2014 vol. 10 no. 5 20140223; doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2014.0223

As the authors point out, this fossil only provides a minimum estimate for the evolution of ornithophilous (literally, bird-loving) plants but no pre-Eocene plants show any of the characteristics of ornithophilous plants and no earlier avian fossils show adaptation to a nectivorous diet. There is also an interesting reference to the remains of small insects amongst the pollen grains in the bird's stomach, possibly ingested accidentally, as occurs with present-day nectar feeders. However, this could give a clue about the evolution of nectar-feeding in this particular bird having possibly evolved from foraging for insects especially those exploiting the supply of nectar.

I wonder if creationists are able to explain why every single fossil meshes so neatly into our understanding of how evolution works, what it produces and the time-scale over which it operates, and never ever supports their special creation by magic a few thousand years ago notion. Every single discovery seems to be closing the gaps in which they try to fit their ever-shrinking little gods. That should be enough to convince any normal person that their daft notion is wrong, or at least to sow a few seeds of doubt about the wisdom and knowledge of the technologically backward and scientifically illiterate Bronze-Age hunter-gatherers who believed in magic and who came up with it in the first place.

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Sticky Problem For Creationists

Nosil Lab of Evolutionary Biology, University of Sheffield, UK

Is Evolution Predictable? | Science/AAAS | News

Here's one of those nice little pieces of scientific research that so infuriates creationist loons and sends them into deep denialism or a frenzied casting around for a way to dismiss it because it doesn't support their sacred conclusions.

One of the interesting questions in evolution is, just how predictable is it? Could we rewind the clock say ten million years and get the same result we have today? Or is there so much randomness in the process that small random differences both in the environment and the evolving individual species would add up eventually to major differences? And this of course is assuming that the main or only component of evolutionary change is natural selection and all change is adaptive. But, if random genetic drift is as important as some people think, then evolution could not be predictable except perhaps in conditions of intense selection pressure.

To help understand this a little better, a group from the Nosil Lab for Evolutionary Biology, University of Sheffield, UK, examined the differences in the DNA of a widespread species of Californian stick insect, Timema cristinae. This species has evolved two ecotypes adapted to living on different hillside plants. One with a broad body which lives on broad-leaved plants and one with a long, thin body with a central stripe, adapted to narrow-leaved plants. Although the same species, these can be seen as a species in the process of diverging into two daughter species.

Abstract
Natural selection can drive the repeated evolution of reproductive isolation, but the genomic basis of parallel speciation remains poorly understood. We analyzed whole-genome divergence between replicate pairs of stick insect populations that are adapted to different host plants and undergoing parallel speciation. We found thousands of modest-sized genomic regions of accentuated divergence between populations, most of which are unique to individual population pairs. We also detected parallel genomic divergence across population pairs involving an excess of coding genes with specific molecular functions. Regions of parallel genomic divergence in nature exhibited exceptional allele frequency changes between hosts in a field transplant experiment. The results advance understanding of biological diversification by providing convergent observational and experimental evidence for selection’s role in driving repeatable genomic divergence.

Víctor Soria-Carrasco, Zachariah Gompert, et al;
Stick Insect Genomes Reveal Natural Selection’s Role in Parallel Speciation;
Science 16 May 2014: Vol. 344 no. 6185 pp. 738-742 DOI: 10.1126/science.1252136

I think it says that repeatability of evolution is very low.

Andrew Hendry, evolutionary biologist, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

As expected, they found many genetic differences between the two ecotypes, but they also found a wide difference between what appeared to be the the same ecotype collected from different hillsides. Only 17 percent of their DNA had changed in the same way. This indicates that a lot of the change is initially random and then selection works on that randomness to arrive at the same adaptive change, but by different routes and with different genes.

They've actually been able to dig down into the genome and find out a little bit more about [parallel evolution]. [The work] is really starting to give us some mechanistic understanding of the molecular basis of evolution.

Tim Coulson, population biologist, Oxford University, UK

So the team then transferred members of each ecotype onto the 'wrong' plant and analysed the DNA of their offspring to see how the frequency of different alleles had changed from those in their parents. These shifts would be due to selection pressure with those more advantageous to the parents making them more likely to breed and so increasing in frequency in the offspring with a corresponding decrease in their less-favourable counterparts. The result was a significant increase in those genes associated with differences in the two ecotypes. In other words, in a single generation, selection pressure had pushed the species towards the ecotype normally living on the host plant onto which they had been transferred.

These results indicate that divergent selection plays a role in repeated genomic divergence between ecotypes. Furthermore, our results suggest that, although repeated evolutionary scenarios (i.e., replaying the tape of life) would likely result in idiosyncratic outcomes, there may be a repeatable component driven by selection that can be detected, even at the genome-wide level and during the complex process of speciation.

Víctor Soria-Carrasco, Zachariah Gompert, et al; op cit

It would be interesting to hear what one of the loons at the Discovery Institute or the Institute for Creation Research has to says on this subject. Here we see not only environmentally-driven speciation in progress but we can see significant change in the frequency allele of key genes involved in this divergence being measurable in a single generation. If this does not constitute experimental evidence for evolution and an observed instance of speciation in progress so far as they are concerned, then it's probable that there is no evidence that they would accept. It's the equivalent of watching a stone fall to Earth while denying that gravity exists.

The only way this can be dismissed as evidence for evolution is simply to ignore it altogether, or to redefine evolution as something other than the standard scientific description of ".. any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the nex" (Helena Curtis and N. Sue Barnes, Biology, 5th ed. 1989 Worth Publishers, p.974).

Any creationist up for trying for an explanation? If so, please try to spell correctly and use proper English grammar.

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Starting From The Conclusion

Recently, I've been reading A Manual for Creating Atheists by Peter Boghossian. Its purpose is to create 'Street Epistemologists' who can casually engage people in gentle, non-threatening conversations about faith and sow the seeds of Atheism by asking the right questions or making the right point at the right place in a conversation. The weak-point in theistic argument is of course the thing they regard as their strength - their faith in faith as a valid way to determine truth.

But, without evidence, faith is nothing more substantial than pretending to know things you don't know. In effect, the conclusion is whatever the 'faithful' want it to be. As Peter Boghossian goes on the say:

DNA Shows Big Bird Evolution

Emu-style birds have abandoned flight six times - life - 22 May 2014 - New Scientist

Given what we now know of how birds evolved from the therapod dinosaurs, it would be tempting to look at the big flighteless birds like the emu, ostrich, moa, the extinct giant elephant bird or Aepyornis maximus of Madagascar, and not so big New Zealand kiwi, which we collectively call the ratities, and assume they may have missed out on flight altogether and simply distributed themselves on foot from their ancestral homelands somewhere around Africa when the major landmasses were still joined up, marking then out as not very far removed from the early proto-avians and feathered dinosaurs.

However, DNA analysis, which is proving such a powerful tool for answering these little questions and resolving disputes about the precise details of evolution, shows they may not be closely related at all and may have evolved from flying birds on at least six different occasions. Their similar appearance may simply be an example of convergent evolution where broadly similar environments produce broadly similar solutions.

A team lead by Alan Cooper of the University of Adelaide in Australia has sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of the Madagascan Aepyornis maximus and other flightless birds and has shown the the closest relative of A. maximus is the New Zealand kiwi and not the moa as had been assumed from their appearance. Kiwis and A. maximus shared a common ancestor about 50 million years ago, which is some time after New Zealand and Madagascar were last in contact, so the only way they could have their current distribution was by flying. Similarly, the moas, which were thought to be more closely related to A. maximus turns out to be closer to the South American aerial tinamou. Again, this separation is more easily explained if both shared a flying common ancestor.

Abstract
The evolution of the ratite birds has been widely attributed to vicariant speciation, driven by the Cretaceous breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana. The early isolation of Africa and Madagascar implies that the ostrich and extinct Madagascan elephant birds (Aepyornithidae) should be the oldest ratite lineages. We sequenced the mitochondrial genomes of two elephant birds and performed phylogenetic analyses, which revealed that these birds are the closest relatives of the New Zealand kiwi and are distant from the basal ratite lineage of ostriches. This unexpected result strongly contradicts continental vicariance and instead supports flighted dispersal in all major ratite lineages. We suggest that convergence toward gigantism and flightlessness was facilitated by early Tertiary expansion into the diurnal herbivory niche after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Kieren J. Mitchell1, Bastien Llamas1, Julien Soubrier, Nicolas J. Rawlence1, Trevor H. Worthy, Jamie Wood, Michael S. Y. Lee1, Alan Cooper.
Ancient DNA reveals elephant birds and kiwi are sister taxa and clarifies ratite bird evolution
Science 23 May 2014: Vol. 344 no. 6186 pp. 898-900 DOI: 10.1126/science.1251981

The suggestion is that these birds evolved during a brief spell between the extinction of dinosaurs and the evolution of large mammals when they moved into a vacant niche for large terrestrial animals. In all but one instance this involved becoming large in the process. The reason kiwis remained small was because the niche had already been occupied by moas.

So here we see how well the DNA evidence is meshing neatly with the geological evidence for continental drift and the paleontological evidence for the extinction of dinosaurs and the rise of large mammals to replace them. Just like every other test of Darwinian evolution thrown up by new scientific discoveries (Darwin knew nothing of DNA or continental drift of course) the theory is not only passing with flying colours but is strengthened and confirmed by it. There are probably no other scientific theories that can claim that, not even fundamental 'laws' like Newton's Laws of Motion, the theory of gravity and the Law of Conservation of Matter which were all overthrown by Relativity.

Creationists still like to pretend this theory is no more than a guess with no supporting evidence, teach this denialism to their unfortunate children and want to be able to teach it to our more fortunate children at public expense.

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You Got Your Gut Bacteria From Mother's Mouth

Baby's first gut bacteria may come from mum's mouth - health - 21 May 2014 - New Scientist

A lovely example of how through evolution of 'selfish' genes over a prolonged period, humans, and very probably other placental mammals, have formed a mutually cooperative alliance with bacteria. Science has long recognised the role our microbiome of bacteria and fungi play in maintaining our health, and especially the role certain bacteria have in our gut where they are essential for absorbing some nutrients and vitamins.

Of course, there is no reason to think this system of mutual cooperation is unique to humans or even mammals since we share an essentially similar digestive system with all the deuterostome which are believed to have evolved some 558 million years ago, so it's a system which has been being refined and perfected for a very long time.

So how do we get our gut bacteria in early childhood? We have certainly acquired them within a few days of birth and it had been assumed babies are born with a sterile gut and acquire their bacteria from the mother's vagina during birth and from their general environment soon afterwards. Now, however a team led by Kjersti Aagaard of Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, Texas, USA has found that gut bacteria are present in meconium, the tary black fecal matter babies pass in the first day or two after birth which means they must have been present before birth.

Abstract
Humans and their microbiomes have coevolved as a physiologic community composed of distinct body site niches with metabolic and antigenic diversity. The placental microbiome has not been robustly interrogated, despite recent demonstrations of intracellular bacteria with diverse metabolic and immune regulatory functions. A population-based cohort of placental specimens collected under sterile conditions from 320 subjects with extensive clinical data was established for comparative 16S ribosomal DNA–based and whole-genome shotgun (WGS) metagenomic studies. Identified taxa and their gene carriage patterns were compared to other human body site niches, including the oral, skin, airway (nasal), vaginal, and gut microbiomes from nonpregnant controls. We characterized a unique placental microbiome niche, composed of nonpathogenic commensal microbiota from the Firmicutes, Tenericutes, Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, and Fusobacteria phyla. In aggregate, the placental microbiome profiles were most akin (Bray-Curtis dissimilarity <0.3) to the human oral microbiome. 16S-based operational taxonomic unit analyses revealed associations of the placental microbiome with a remote history of antenatal infection (permutational multivariate analysis of variance, P = 0.006), such as urinary tract infection in the first trimester, as well as with preterm birth <37 weeks (P = 0.001).

Copyright © 2014, American Association for the Advancement of Science.

K. Aagaard, J. Ma, K. M. Antony, R. Ganu, J. Petrosino, J. Versalovic, The Placenta Harbors a Unique Microbiome.
Sci. Transl. Med. 6, 237ra65 (2014).

To try to understand where they came from the team then examined the placenta from 320 women after birth, taking tissue samples from deep in the placenta to minimise the risk of contamination. Not only did they find bacteria present but they included the gut bacteria essential for metabolising nutrients and vitamins. However when they checked the genetic profile of these bacteria the result was even more surprising. They most closely resembled the bacteria normally found in the mouth, not the vagina. The conclusion was obvious, if more than a little surprising - bacteria must have travelled from the mothers' mouths to the fetal intestines, yet the only route must be via the mother's blood to the placenta and then either into the amniotic fluid to be swallowed by the fetus, or via the fetal circulation into the developing gut.

The placenta has its own ecology and these were not the bacteria we were expecting. Most people would have expected it to be a vaginal flora.

James Kinross, colon surgeon,
Imperial College, London, UK

The team also found that some species of bacteria were more common in the placentae of women who had delivered before 37 weeks, i.e., prematurely, suggesting a link between bacteria and premature birth which ties in with other findings showing a link between gum disease in women premature births.

So, knowing how fond creationists are of my blog, here's a little something for them to ponder on, and explain if they can. Why would an intelligent, benevolent creator invent this idiotic mechanism to help animals with guts absorb essential nutrients and vitamins from their food in the first place when it could have designed an efficient gut and why did it come up with a mechanism for getting these bacteria into the guts of developing fetuses which entails the risk of premature births and babies being born with serious illnesses?

There is, of course, no problem in understanding this as an evolved system in which the benefits outweigh the risks and which 'favours' only those genes which result in more descendants. Our guts evolved in the presence of bacteria, some of which had a utility value in helping us absorb certain nutrients which in turn removed any pressure to evolve more complex solutions and so we became committed to that evolutionary pathway. Cooperative alliances between replicators, even replicators from different species, are absolutely what the selfish gene view of Darwinian evolution predicts.

I appreciate it can't be easy trying to force-fit these little pieces of scientific evidence into a primitive superstition, but never-the-less, I'd appreciate if it a creationist or two could try.

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Driving Ethical Evolution

I realise they are only doing it so they can bask in that nice warm glow of smug self-satisfaction but when Christians and Muslims pretend to be baffled by why Atheists don't go around raping and murdering people because we don't believe we are going to answer for our crimes to their imaginary friend, I wonder if they realise how ignorant they appear. Surely they only need to take a quick glance at reality to see it doesn't equate to their idiotic assertion, don't they? Here's an everyday example which refutes them entirely.

I have already blogged about this subject a few time (see Xeno's Religious Paradox, Religion: An Abdication of Moral Responsibility and Why Morality Evolved) and tried to make the point that, just like evolved related species, human cultures have broadly similar morals and ethics serving broadly similar purposes, yet differ in detail, just as you would expect of something that evolved over time, diversifying in response to local conditions to form varieties, subspecies and species.

This was brought home to me when I was driving in Naples, Italy over the last few days. If you've never driven there, it's something of an experience to put it mildly. Basically, the traffic is chaotic. The road-markings are absent or indistinct and are mostly ignored anyway as are speed limits, pedestrian crossings and red traffic lights by the first half dozen cars. People live in tenement blocks with no off-street parking, so roads are lined with parked cars - in fact, for the average visitor, parking is almost non-existent. This makes all but the widest roads barely wide enough for two cars to pass and yet slowing down seems to be regarded as something for softies. Driving is competitive, so you will be overtaken on either side if there is room, raced away from traffic lights, cut up on junctions, and nine out of ten cars will be battle-scarred. Our nearly new hire-car picked up its first scrape in a carpark in Sorrento. Luckily, I was fully insured otherwise I would have been 820 Euros out of pocket.

Horns are used frequently and yet headlights are rarely flashed. On the one occasion I flashed a car with a short flash, which in the UK unofficially means, "Go ahead, I'm giving way to you", I got a stare that would have turned a cockatrice to stone. And yet road-rage is rare, if my experience is anything to go by and the Neapolitans are generally actually considerate and helpful people, or so I found. It took me a couple of days to work out what was going on. and then it became much easier to drive. When in Naples, do as the Neapolitans do.

In Naples, you expect a car to pull out of a turning or to turn across your path because they assume you will give way to them. It's a social norm which is taken so much for granted that no one thinks anything of it. It's a bit like the old rule of the road you still see quite a lot in France where you give way to someone pulling out from the right. You are expected to push into a small gap or overtake either side if there is room. It isn't meant to be aggressive and it isn't taken as such. In the UK what could easily end up as a road-rage incident is the norm in Naples.

On the other hand, flashing your headlights in Naples is a big no-no. That's the equivalent of a rude stare and is assumed to be aggressive. In the UK, it's a sign of courtesy unless you give a long flash, or flash from behind, then it's aggressive. We all know this and take it for granted. Short flash to give way; long flash to get out of my way.

And we hardly ever sound a horn unless it's in anger. In Naples, a short toot simply means take care. Normally given when you want to warn of your presence - as a courtesy more than anything (in fact what it should mean in the UK according to the Highway Code, except that no-one uses it that way) and with much less of the aggressive connotations it has in the UK.

So, in two European countries, both predominantly Christian and both of which have had the motor car for about the same length of time, two very different cultures have developed so far as driving, sounding horns and flashing headlights are concerned. And these two different sets of ethics have evolved in less than a hundred years and mostly in the last fifty. One uses the horn extensively, assumes the right to cross another car's path and hardly ever flashes headlights because that shows aggression; the other flashed headlights as a courtesy, only normally sound the horn in aggression and crossing another car's path unless given permission to is a big insult which may well get an aggressive retaliation.

It's fair to assume that these have evolved as extensions of the human voice for a horn and a stare for headlights. Clearly, they must have had different nuances pre-motorcar to have acquired different meanings in the context of driving today. And then there is the assumed courtesy of giving way in Naples which is mostly absent in Britain although it's okay when permission has been given and permission often is given.

Nowhere in this evolution of driving ethics is there anything in the Bible that wasn't basic to all human cultures already - like the Golden Rule - and nowhere has religion contributed to their development, never to my knowledge has the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury ever expressed an opinion on the use of horns or headlights and there is no theological doctrine concerning giving way at a road junction, yet we have evolved ethics, and two very different sets of ethics in such a short space of time. We even take driving on the right or the left respectively as absolutely basic, right and proper and assume it's based on some sound reasoning or other.

And I could probably write a similar comparison for every country I have driven in in Europe and North America.

How do the sanctimonious religious bigots who like to pretend to occupy the moral high-ground and the creationists who claim not to be able to understand why anyone would be good without threats and rewards explain this? How does this equate to the Craigite claim that morality couldn't have come from nowhere, in a thinly disguised plagiarism of the Intelligent Design frauds who claim life couldn't have evolved? For a biologist or sociologists who understands the evolutionary memetic nature of human ethics, there is no difficulty in explaining it, though the exact cultural origins of it and the forces which caused it to evolve would be a fascinating subject for a doctoral thesis.

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Obscenities Of Sorrento - Church of St. Anthony

Interior of the Basilica di Sant'Antonino, Sorrento, Italy

Tucked away in a small piazza alongside a busy road through beautiful Sorrento at the end of the Sorrentine Peninsula, south of Naples, Italy, you can find the Basilica di Sant'Antonino or the Church of St. Anthony. The inside is a tribute to the skilled craftspeople who made the marble inlay, much of it looted from surrounding villas of the Roman Imperial era, and the wooden marquetry which is used to decorate the 'Stations of the Cross' all round the walls and other features throughout the church.

And central to it all is that hideous depiction of a blood sacrifice of an innocent person that is somehow supposed to have given everyone who believes it absolution for something they didn't do either, turning the whole thing into a shrine to morbidly paranoid theophobia.

All along the sides of the main body of the church are shrines to various saints together with the traditional candles of various sizes and prices, and the money box for superstitious people to put their money in, apparently in the belief that if you give the church some money and light a candle, the saint will smile favourably on you and ask God to grant your wishes. Apparently, the smoke from the candle carries your thoughts up to Heaven where they don't seem to have invented emails, faxes or Facebook pages yet, and although they can apparently read your thoughts, they need them confirmed by candle smoke.