Evolution Before Your Very Eyes!

BoxCar2D.

Here's a neat site.

It shows the genetic algorithm in action as it evolves a car 'designed' to go faster and further over a terrain of peaks and troughs designed to filter out the weakest, most unstable and least efficient.

You don't need to do anything other than watch, but you can play around with a few settings like the maximum number of wheels - try 4 or 5 - or the mutation rate.

The first generation is just random stuff, often going nowhere with maybe a few making some progress. The trick is, just like in life, that the best are favoured and hybridize so the best wheel size, axle torque, body shape etc are more likely to be in the next generation. Plus a few more random variations thrown in.

Pretty soon a few different models will evolve. They might even hybridize and produce a new supercar; or they may be incompatible and fail, just like in real life.

Anyway, especially if you don't believe in evolution, take a look. Leave it running overnight and wake up to some pretty nifty cars zipping across the landscape. Remember, everything apart from the selection process is random. The only thing that makes it non-random is selection favouring the most successful models, just like in real life.

Careful though; it can be addictive.

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Evolution In Progress - The Great Ant Escape

Trap-door ant (Odontomachus brunneus)

Great escape: ant uses spring-loaded jaws to jump away from predators | Science | The Guardian.

Here is a nice example of two components of evolution: the arms race between predator and prey and co-opting a structure for a new purpose, showing the opportunist nature of evolution by descent with modification. It involves a trap-door ant and how it tries to escape from a predator, in this case an antlion.

First a little about trap-door ants and antlions:

Trap-door ants have massive jaws which they normally hold wide open as they forage around the forest floor until they come up against something which triggers the sensory hairs between the jaws, when the jaws swing forward and clamp onto the prey at an amazing 140 miles an hour - the fastest known movement of an appendage in a living creature.

Antlion lava

Credit: Johnathan Number, Wikipedia

This speed is achieved with a pair of massive muscles inside the ant's head and jaws which have a latch mechanism which prevents the jaws closing before the muscles are exerting enough pull to snap them shut at this speed. These jaws have clearly evolved for the purpose of catching, holding onto and killing prey as quickly as possible.

Antlions are the lava of a damselfly-like insect. They prey on small crawling creatures, especially ants but rather than actively hunting they make a pit of sand and hide buried in the bottom of it, waiting for something to fall in. They will even throw grains of sand at the victim to make it fall to the bottom of the pit. This behaviour probably evolved from making burrows and hiding inside to rush out and grab passing prey. A neat solution where the ground is too dry and sandy to make good borrows, so enabling antlions to exploit new areas.

In this video we can see a trap-door ant using a surprising method to escape from an antlion.

This mechanism has been known about for a long time but the question was whether it actually improved the ant's survival rate. To test this, researchers at the University of Illinois, USA, glued the jaws of trap-door ants together and compared their escape success to that of a control group with glue applied but the jaws not glued shut. They found that ants still able to use their jaws had a greatly improved escape rate.

Abstract

Animals use a variety of escape mechanisms to increase the probability of surviving predatory attacks. Antipredator defenses can be elaborate, making their evolutionary origin unclear. Trap-jaw ants are known for their rapid and powerful predatory mandible strikes, and some species have been observed to direct those strikes at the substrate, thereby launching themselves into the air away from a potential threat. This potential escape mechanism has never been examined in a natural context. We studied the use of mandible-powered jumping in Odontomachus brunneus during their interactions with a common ant predator: pit-building antlions. We observed that while trap-jaw ant workers escaped from antlion pits by running in about half of interactions, in 15% of interactions they escaped by mandible-powered jumping. To test whether escape jumps improved individual survival, we experimentally prevented workers from jumping and measured their escape rate. Workers with unrestrained mandibles escaped from antlion pits significantly more frequently than workers with restrained mandibles. Our results indicate that some trap-jaw ant species can use mandible-powered jumps to escape from common predators. These results also provide a charismatic example of evolutionary co-option, where a trait that evolved for one function (predation) has been co-opted for another (defense).

Larabee FJ, Suarez AV (2015)
Mandible-Powered Escape Jumps in Trap-Jaw Ants Increase Survival Rates during Predator-Prey Encounters.
PLoS ONE 10(5): e0124871. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0124871

So, not the most important piece of scientific research, coming into the category of "doing silly things to animals to figure out what they're doing", in lead researcher, Fredrick Larabee's own words, but a neat example of how a pair of spring-loaded jaws have been co-opted for use as an escape mechanism in an arms race with a predator. This shows how natural selection works on whatever is to hand and, especially where an arms race between prey and predator involved so the stakes are high, can be a powerful driver of evolution.

Now, project this a long way into the future to some descendants of these ants that have maybe evolved some other mechanism for capturing and killing their prey. We could expect to see these powerful jaws with their spring mechanism retained and fully exapted for an entirely new purpose and apparently having no obvious evolutionary pathway - the sort of structure 'Intelligent Design' creationists point to as examples of 'irreducible complexity' and the subject of another book aimed at people who prefer to believe in simplistic notions like magic performed by an imaginary special friend because only that makes them feel important enough.

'via Blog this'

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Another Gap Closed. No God Found

Blue Beach, N.S. The site is a trove of fossils from about 350 million years ago, when vertebrates first started emerging onto land.

Credit: Jason Anderson

It must seem to creationists that every few days their incredible shrinking little god is evicted from yet another gap and gets just a little bit smaller. It's almost the reverse of the Big Bang. I wonder if we'll hear a small 'pffut' when the little god finally disappears in it's own irrelevance.

A week or so ago, creationism's god was evicted from a gap which palaeontologists have dubbed Romer's Gap. This is (or rather was) a gap in the fossil record of the early Carboniferous era where there should have been fossils of creatures intermediate between fish and terrestrial tetrapods. Now an analysis of fossil fragments found in just one deposit from that era revealed a rich diversity of intermediate fish-tetrapod fauna sitting there right in Romer's Gap.

Abstract

The lack of fossil tetrapod bearing deposits in the earliest Carboniferous (‘Romer’s Gap’) has provoked some recent discussions regarding the proximal cause, with three explanations being offered: environmental, taphonomic, and collection failure. One of the few, and earliest, windows into this time is the locality of Blue Beach exposed in the Tournaisian deposits at Horton Bluff lying along the Avon River near Hantsport, Nova Scotia, Canada. This locality has long been known but, because the fossils were deposited in high energy settings they are almost always disarticulated, so the fauna has not been described in detail. Recent intensive collection has revealed a diverse assemblage of material, including for the first time associated elements, which permits an evaluation of the faunal constituents at the locality. Although not diagnosable to a fine taxonomic level, sufficient apomorphies are present to identify representatives from numerous clades known from more complete specimens elsewhere. The evidence suggests a diverse fauna was present, including whatcheeriids and embolomeres. A single humerus previously had been attributed to a colosteid, but there is some uncertainty with this identification. Additional elements suggest the presence of taxa otherwise only known from the late Devonian. Depositional biases at the locality favor tetrapod fossils from larger individuals, but indirect evidence from trackways and tantalizing isolated bones evidences the presence of small taxa that remain to be discovered. The fossils from Blue Beach demonstrate that when windows into the fauna of ‘Romer’s Gap’ are found a rich diversity of tetrapods will be shown to be present, contra arguments that suggested this hiatus in the fossil record was due to extrinsic factors such as atmospheric oxygen levels. They also show that the early tetrapod fauna is not easily divisible into Devonian and Carboniferous faunas, suggesting that some tetrapods passed through the end Devonian extinction event unaffected.

Anderson JS, Smithson T, Mansky CF, Meyer T, Clack J (2015)
A Diverse Tetrapod Fauna at the Base of 'Romer's Gap'.
PLoS ONE 10(4): e0125446. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0125446

Acanthostega.
The fragments found at Blue Beach were too small to be assigned to particular species.

Not only were the many fragments undoubtedly those of limbed animals, having a limb skeletal plan similar to all tetrapods with a single femur and two lower limb bones but they were intermediate between finned fish and terrestrial tetrapods in having a variable number of fingers and toes. The basic tetrapod plan of five digits maximum had yet to evolve.

Romer's Gap, named after the U.S. paleontologist Al Romer who first wrote about it, was a period of about 15-30 million years following the end of the Devonian era characterised by primitive forests of giant tree ferns and a highly diversified fish fauna, and the appearance of forests with flowering plants, more modern aquatic fauna and a diversified terrestrial fauna. Several hypotheses had been put forward to explain it, including low oxygen levels which couldn't support terrestrial vertebrates, differences in geochemistry which didn't support fossilisation and a mass extinction at the end of the Devonian.

They were present much earlier than we gave them credit for. This gap itself isn't really a thing,it's just the result of a poor fossil record and the difficulty of finding rocks from this particular time. It also means that Romer's gap may be a misinterpretation of the fossil data.

Jason Anderson,
associate professor of veterinary anatomy,
University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada

There has been some geological support for the low oxygen theory and for a mass extinction at the end of the Devonian period, following which a low marine vertebrate diversity might have delayed the evolution of terrestrial vertebrates. However, this discovery suggests the gap may be more apparent than real and is merely due to lack of finds from the period. The authors point out that a rich diversity of terrestrial tetrapods early in the period points to an earlier evolutionary radiation.

Normally, creationism makes a great deal of these gaps in the fossil record and supposed missing transitional forms, claiming that Darwinian evolutionary theory requires all the intermediates and no gaps in the record, otherwise the entire theory disintegrates. This claim is, of course, nonsense, since the TOE is not a theory about fossils but about how change occurs over time.

Nothing in the theory requires a comprehensive record and it only requires a little thought to realise that, with fossilisation being such an unusual and highly unlikely event for most species, the occurrence of a perfect series for every species is so hugely unlikely it could only be explained by design. In other words, a completely gapless fossil record would not be evidence for undirected, unintelligent natural evolution but for just the opposite. The lack of all these perfect series is actually evidence against creationism and for an entirely natural process.

But still, few creationists give much thought to things like that and like to believe that gaps like Romer's Gap somehow supports them, so it's always fun to watch them ignore it when science closes just such a gap, as it did with this find. It seems to be a difficult concept for creationists to grasp that science is essentially about discovery. If there were no gaps there would be nothing to discover. Significantly, of the myriad gaps closed by science, especially in the last few hundred years, not one single god has ever been found in any. Science only started to make real progress when it began to question whether there really was a god in every gap and went looking.

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Chick Embryos Reverted to Dinosaur Features

By blocking two genes that are activated when chicken embryos grow their beaks, U.S. researchers caused their jaws to 'revert' to a velociraptor-like or reptile-like snout.

Credit: Bhart-Anjan Bhullar/Yale University.

Dinosaur-like snouts grown on chicken embryos - Technology & Science - CBC News

It's more bad news for the Creationism and the Intelligent Design industry, and this one is going to take a lot of explaining away.

Scientists have shown that inhibiting a couple of genes responsible for facial development in domestic hen embryos, causes the chick to grow a dinosaur face instead of a bird face. The authors also suggest their method could be used to investigate the mechanism of other major transitions in vertebrate history.

Another Of Those 'Non-Existent' Missing Links Found

Hydrothermal vent field along the Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge

Credit: Centre for Geobiology (University of Bergen, Norway) by R.B. Pedersen.

Missing link in the evolution of complex cells discovered

It must be puzzling and disconcerting for creationists the way a new scientific discovery never seems to support creationism and always seems to support science. Not that this will affect creationist superstition, of course, but there is a very simple explanation for this: science is based on evidence and so is demonstrably true; creationism is a superstition with no supporting evidence and so is not demonstrably true.

It's entirely predictable therefore that evidence will always support science and never supports

Evolution for Brainy People

Gene that makes human brain unique identified by scientists | Science | The Guardian

A friend on Facebook has just drawn my attention to this scientific discovery from last February. I can't think how I missed it with such a catchy title to the paper (Human-specific gene ARHGAP11B promotes basal progenitor amplification and neocortex expansion). Hmm...

It appears then that a single gene might be responsible the the most profound difference between us and the other apes and between us and our immediate hominid ancestors.

Faking It At Lourdes

The Lourdes shrine to Bernadette Soubirous

Bernadette Soubirous

Source: Wikipedia

Continuing my series on the fake miracles used by the Catholic Church to keep the faithful faithful and keep the money flowing in, this one deals with the carefully concocted fraud at Lourdes, France.

This fake is, like the Fatima fake, based on the fantasies of an illiterate peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, from a remote village who, as with Lúcia Santos at Fatima, seems to have been trying to impress a couple of friends and who found herself locked into her own childish fantasies by a Church keen to exploit her.

There are three elements to the Lourdes 'miracle':

• The 'visions' of 14 year-old Bernadette Soubirous.
• The 'miracle' cures which come from drinking the spring water and praying at the grotto.
• The 'incorruptibility' of Bernadette Soubirous' dead body.

None of these stand up to close scrutiny.

Faking It At Fatima

Crowd watch the 'miracle of the sun'

Lúcia Santos (left) with her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto, 1917

Source: Wikipedia - Our Lady of Fátima

With the approaching 98th anniversary of the supposed miracles of Fatima, Portugal, it's worth looking at this particular example of how the Catholic Church operates and how truth becomes an early victim in its incessant search for spectacles to keep the faithful faithful and the money flowing in.

First a bit about 'miracles' in general.

The Catholic Church is notorious for using 'miracles' to convince its believers that it is the one true church, believing in the one true god and that it has a special relationship with the ruler and creator of the Universe. The problem it has to overcome is the problem of having no evidence whatsoever for that claim, so it needs trickery. Experience has shown that 'miracles' are particular effective on the poor, uneducated and unsophisticated people who make up the bulk of Catholic congregations worldwide.

Miracles are especially useful for the Church because, by definition, there can be no physical contradictory evidence, just as there can be no physical evidence for them, because otherwise they wouldn't be supernatural 'miracles' but perfectly natural events with perfectly natural explanations. 'Faith' fills the gap and renders the lack of evidence a mere inconvenience, even, in some strange way, confirmation.

Ignorance & Double-Think - The Bear Necessities of Creationism

Sloth bear, Melursus ursinus

Sloth bear, Melursus ursinus

Genetically isolated sloth bears rely on habitat corridors to connect populations -- ScienceDaily

This paper is interesting from an ecological point of view, illustrating as it does the importance of maintaining a diverse habitat in order to maintain biodiversity, but it also neatly illustrates something which creationists either genuinely don't understand or about which they feign ignorance.

One of the most annoying questions creationists keep asking, as though they imagine it to be a killer question which destroys the idea of evolution, is, "If humans evolved out of monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" The slightly more educated ones will use 'apes' instead of 'monkeys', but the underlying ignorance is the same. This question can only seem even slightly intelligent to those who have no idea how speciation by population isolation occurs.

Crap Intelligent Designer - A Sicko Pervert?

The Intelligent Designer punishing sin

Fecal microbiota transplant cures C. diff, blocks multi-drug resistant pathogens, study shows -- ScienceDaily

There's no getting away from it; if you believe in an intelligent designer (i.e. God, although ID advocates aren't supposed to say that because it gives the game away that ID is biblical literalism in disguise) you believe it intends us to either be very sick, or to put other people's poo up our bottoms.

You see, this intelligent designer designed a nasty little spore-forming bacillus called Clostridium difficile which seems to have only one function - when it gets the chance it causes a really unpleasant condition in

Early Bird Catches the Creationist Worms

Archaeornithura meemannae

Credit: Wang et al., Nature Communications

The oldest record of ornithuromorpha from the early cretaceous of China : Nature Communications : Nature Publishing Group

A team of Chinese paleontologists has discovered a spectacularly well preserved fossil bird from 130 million years ago which neatly fills the gap in the fossil record between proto-birds such as archaeopteryx and modern birds.

This pushes the earliest known ancestor of modern birds back 5 million years and, because it has several well-developed adaptations, shows the main features characteristic of modern birds must have evolved

The Future for World Religion

The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050 | Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project

The recent Pew Research Center's forecast for the growth of world religion has been greeted by theists in general with something approaching glee because it appears to forecast a decline in the proportion of people with no religious affiliation, which includes Atheists and agnostics, although this glee tends to become muted, especially amongst Christians, when they look below the headlines, because the same figures show the number of Muslims worldwide almost equalling the number of Christians by 2050.

However, it reveals something dark and nasty at the heart of religion and upon which religion depends; something of which no religious person with any sense of human decency can be proud.

And in the developed economies the forecast is far from good news for theism. Throughout much of it, the forecast is that the recent growth in non-affiliation and non-belief will continue to increase both in absolute numbers and in proportion of the population. In fact, the number of non-affiliated is set to increase throughout the world but is forecast to decline in percentage terms because of a larger increase in the number of religious people.

Ken Ham Reaches A New Low

Ken Ham

Nepal Suffering After Major Earthquake | Answers in Genesis

Ken Ham is no exception to the routine, run of the mill creationist pseudoscientists in being prepared to lie through his teeth and stoop to any misrepresentation of science to his scientifically illiterate victims for money.

He even boasts openly about teaching the unfortunate children of creationist parents how to disrupt science class at school or talks by scientists, and strike a blow for Jesus, by asking "Were you there?", and so avoid learning anything.

Intelligent Design Arguments Drying Up - Water, Water Everywhere!

Dark knots of gas and dust known as "Bok globules," which are dense pockets in larger molecular clouds. Similar islands of material in the early universe could have held as much water vapor as we find in our galaxy today, despite containing a thousand times less oxyge.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team

Water could have been abundant in first billion years after the Big Bang -- ScienceDaily

Regular readers will remember the dismay that creationists who trot out the 'Goldilocks' argument for intelligent design displayed when it was discovered that yet another body in the solar system may have abundant water.

The problem they have is that they have to convince those to whom they are selling the notion of Intelligent Design that Earth is unique in just about everything that affects life on it - so water on Earth has to be presented as something hugely unlikely, just as Earth's distance from the sun has to be.

Maybe it's just my perception but it seems to me that creationists are not using this argument so frequently

Convergent Evolution - No Intelligence Required

Convergent Evolution of Mechanically Optimal Locomotion in Aquatic Invertebrates and Vertebrates - PLOS Biology

A nice example here of how the environment drives evolution by imposing limits on what is possible and what is optimal, in this case by the physics of fluid dynamics.

Researchers from Northwestern University in Evanston Illinois studied 22 different species in eight clades from three aquatic phyla of a wide range of shapes and sizes that all swim by 'median/paired fin swimming', in other words, by using a pair of long fins, running along each side of their body.

Creationism Is As Dead As The Dodo

Head of a Dodo 1638 - Cornelis Saftleven (1607-1681). Probably the last depiction of a living dodo.
Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Ancient megadrought entombed dodos in poisonous fecal cocktail | Science/AAAS | News

For an illustration of the inability of evolution to predict the future and so lead a species to, if not actual extinction, then the brink of it, it would be hard to find a better example than this one from the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius.

Mauritius is famous, for amongst other things, being the home of that enduring icon of extinction, the dodo. The dodo was a flightless pigeon (itself an example of evolution because flight must have been something it lost after having arrived on the island) which went extinct in around 1662 probably through being hunted for food by humans and predated on by pigs. Hunting is probably too strong a word, as dodos reputedly had no fear of humans or any other predators, as there were none on the island prior to the arrival of European sailors. The Mauritius giant tortoise also went extinct for much the same reason.

But this wasn't the only example of dodos being incapable of adapting

Liars For Jesus Get A Taxpayers' Handout

CMI propaganda cartoon. Probably about as good as it gets.

Australian film agency awarded creationist film AUD$90,000 | Film | The Guardian

Creation Ministries International is the Australian version of Answers in Genesis from which it split when it's founder, Dr. Carl Wieland fell out with it's then president, Ken Ham, who went off to the USA where more money could be made.

It is little different to AiG in that it specialises in misrepresenting science to misinform the people to whom it sells books, and Christian fundamentalist groups who invite guest speakers to provide spurious confirmation of their existing bias by giving it the semblance of a scientific basis.

Closing The Gap - Why Science Is True And Religions Aren't

This salamander arived in South America before the Panama Isthmus formed, if current opinions are right.

Photo: STRI Archives

Ancient connection between the Americas enhanced extreme biodiversity -- ScienceDaily

The thing about science is that it tends to converge on a single answer, no matter what the starting point. Religions, on the other hand, rarely, if ever converge. If anything, they tend to diverge and splinter into different, mutually hostile factions, each clinging to its 'answer', each unable to muster up arguments why their answer is the right one while all the others have it wrong and each never being able to find that definitive, clinching piece of evidence that would make their arguments indisputable and win over the dissenters.

The reason for this is very simple, and is the reason

UKIP Promises a Bigot's Charter - Just For Christians

Extreme right: Nigel Farage

Ukip promises legal protection to Christians who oppose same-sex marriage | Politics | The Guardian

UKIP are scraping the bottom of the barrel for support and have apparently found some disgruntled Christians in the dregs.

UKIP are currently falling in the polls following some disastrous performances by Farage in televised live debates (something he later blamed on a bad back) and are scraping the bottom of the barrel for support. They are now forecast by some pollsters to get somewhere between 0 and 1 candidates elected and Farage may well lose the seat he himself is standing in.

Pain In The Back For Creationists

It's no secret that humans have back problems. About eight in ten of us will suffer back pain at some point in our lives, often chronically. One person in twenty will slip a disc - the fibrous cushions between the bodies of our vertebrae - most often in our lumbar region and most commonly, but by no means exclusively, in men between the ages of 30 and 55.

Actually, the disc doesn't literally slip; the capsule surrounding it tears and some of the contents herniate out. This causes inflammation and swelling; the muscles spasm to protect the injury and the swelling can put pressure on the sciatic nerves coming out of the spine and going to the legs. This causes referred leg pain or sciatica.

Loon At The Bottom

Jim Wells,
Protestant fundamentalist and Young Earth Creationist

Jim Wells resigns as Northern Ireland health minister - BBC News

The Young Earth Creationist and fundamentalist Christian, Jim Wells, who was appointed Health Minister in the Northern Ireland Power-Sharing Executive only last September (see Loon At The Top), has been forced to resign over remarks made in his campaign to become the DUP member for South Down in the Westminster Parliament. Wells had told a meeting that children brought up in households with same sex partnerships were much more likely to be neglected. The meeting was interrupted by uproar from the audience.

He is later alleged to have repeated his remarks during a conversation with a lesbian couple during door-to-door canvassing. Wells later tried to go into the couple's house to apologise but they refused to let him in or to speak to him. The daughter of one of the women involved, a former staunch DUP supporter, later said her mother would no longer be voting for the party. Although expressing regret that his bigotry had caused offense, whilst not withdrawing the allegation, Wells cited his wife's serious illness as the reason for his resignation, not his politically embarrassing bigotry.

Chimpanzees Make Spears To Hunt With

Tool-assisted hunting by chimpanzee at Fongoli, Sénégal. Adult male chimpanzee uses tree branch with modified end to (a–c) stab into a cavity within a hollow tree branch that houses a Galago he ultimately captures as (d) his adolescent brother looks on.

Images credit: BBC.

It's been many years now since we realised the thing that we thought made us uniquely human - the ability to use tools - isn't unique at all, but we still clung to the notion that, while many species use things like sticks and stones as tools, humans were the only species to actually make them. That too has now had to be abandoned since chimpanzees were seen making tools out of plant stems to fish for termites and crows have been filmed making tools out of wire - not a natural material - to solve complex problems.

Now a group of savannah chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) has been observed not only using spears to hunt with, but selecting suitable tree branches and sharpening a point on them. Like

How Wolves Evolved Into Dogs

How the wolf became the dog

There is no doubt now that the domestic dog is a domesticated wolf. It has recently been reclassified by taxonomists as a subspecies of wolf, Canis lupus, so instead of Canis familiaris it is now Canis lupus familiaris. It was almost certainly the first animal to be domesticated but ideas have differed over how this came about.

In 1907, Francis Galton proposed that humans had taken wolf puppies back to their camp and raised them, maybe as playthings for the children, but this view is now seen as naive. You can raise a wolf puppy by hand but you don't get a dog; you get a dangerous wild animal. The genes of children who played with growing wolf puppies would probably have been quite quickly eliminated from the human gene pool as well as the puppies' genes being eliminated from the wolf gene pool.

So, clearly something else happened.

Creationists - More Green Than They're Cabbage-Looking

I thought I'd share some more holiday snaps. These were taken on the coastal path that runs along the Dorset coast near Durdle Door. They're wild cabbage (Brassica oleracea), although, with so many domestic cabbages around it's highly likely that they will have interbred so they may not be pure wild cabbages. Anyway, they're probably as close to the original wild cabbage as you're going to get in Britain.

The reason they're so abundant in this part of the world is because they evolved as a plant on lime-rich chalk and soil with high salt content. The covering of soil over these chalk deposits is ideal because that's what they've evolved to live on.

So why doesn't it look like a typical cabbage? Because, from this original wild type, by a process of evolution driven by human selection over thousands of years, humans have produced a whole range of different plants for food, each filling a different function and each exaggerating a particular feature inherent in the wild form. This neatly illustrates how a wide range of morphologies can be obtained by a simple selection process. We did the same with the close relatives of the cabbage, B. rapa, B. nigra, B. napus, B. juncea and B. carinata

The reason we were able to do this is because, at some time in their evolution, B. oleracea, B. rapa and B. nigra hybridized to form three entirely new species, B. napus, B. juncea and B. carinata and this gave a wide range of genetic potential. This is of course, a complete refutation of three creationist assertions; that mutations are always harmful, that new information can't arise, and that evolution can't give rise to new species.

Evolving Together In Amazonia

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

[Body]

Yanomami hunting party

Bacteria bonanza found in remote Amazon village : Nature News & Comment

Much to the chagrin of creationists, no doubt, we can trace our evolution by the evolution of the obligate parasites and symbiont organisms that live on and in us - our microbiome. Just as with the evolution of our lice, the evolution of which and their diversification from the lice which live on the other African apes, maps exactly onto our diversification from a common ancestor with those same apes, so our microbiome can show how human groups are related and have diversified over history.

It has long been suspected that the number of different species in our microbiome declined as we became more hygienic and especially since we discovered antibiotics, so a team who studied the microbiome of the recently-contacted Amazonian tribe, the Yanomami, expected to find a high degree of biodiversity - which they did, finding some 60 unique genes. However, what they didn't expect to find was that a number of the Yanomami gut bacteria have already evolved antibiotic resistance, including resistance to man-made antibiotics.

The general view of antibiotic resistance is that this evolves in bacteria in the presence of antibiotics because the environment is favourable to those with mutations which convey resistance in a basic Darwinian evolution by natural selection. However, the Yanomami have no history of antibiotic use, at least not in the way antibiotics are used by modern medicines.

So, there are two ways to look at this - either antibiotic resistance has evolved in the Yanomami's gut bacteria in response to naturally occurring antibiotics or toxins (toxic to the bacteria) which resemble them, or they have been exposed to man-made antibiotics even though they have remained isolated. This latter seems the least likely and the team believe they eliminated it, so, if their bacteria evolved resistance to man-made antibiotics the probability is that our gut bacteria already had the capacity to 'switch on' resistance even before we began synthesising them. And that raises some worrying possibilities for future antibiotics in our continuing arms race with bacteria.

Oldest Stone Tools Show Intelligence Pre-Dates Humans

Olduvai Gorge, Kenya

World’s oldest stone tools discovered in Kenya | Science/AAAS | News

Humans are known to science as Homo sapiens, or 'thinking man' partly because the thing which we used to believe distinguished us from other species was out ability to make tools, which was considered a unique skill indicating high intelligence.

That view has of course been under sustained attack for decades now ever since chimpanzees were seen to

Bummer For Behe As Science Proves Him Wrong Again

Credit: Sonja-Verena Albers

Attaching the propeller: How the motility structure of unicellular archaea is fixed to their surface -- ScienceDaily

Scientists working at Freiburg University, Germany, have worked out the structure of the flagellum used by archae. Archae are regarded as the most primitive prokaryotes - the group of single-celled organisms which don't have a cell nucleus and which includes bacteria.

And it's bad news for devotee of creationist loon and virtual designer of the Intelligent Design fraud, Michael J. Behe.

Readers may recall how Michael J. Behe was recently exposed as a liar by molecular biologist, Professor Kenneth R. Miller who

Even Pebbles on a Beach Refute Creationism

I saw something from our hotel room window a couple of days ago. It's not unusual; you can see it on almost any beach in the right conditions. And it utterly refutes one of creationisms central dogmas (to be fair to creationists, it's more a mindless mantra than a dogma and it's used more like a magic spell than a reasoned argument).

The claim is that you can't get order out of disorder (or chaos). They chant this to try to make the evidence for evolution go away because someone has fooled them into thinking evolution is some sort of increasing order from chaos.

Black Flamingo Poser for Creationists

Here are a few simple little questions for creationists to ignore in the hope they'll go away, like ignored facts do.

These pictures are of the only known all black flamingo. It was photographed in Cyprus in the last few days. There was one previous record of a black flamingo in Israel last year. This one from Cyprus may be a different one, but given that the Israeli one has disappeared and given that Cyprus is an easy flight for a flamingo from Israel, there is a strong possibility that this is the same one, and possibly the only one in the world.

Obviously, the mutation which gives rise to melanism (an overproduction of melanin) is a rare event. We know flamingos produce melanin because they have some black wing feather and some black on their beaks, so what is probably happening here is that the gene(s) controlling when and where the gene for making melanin is switched on (or off) has failed.

The New Forest - No Intelligent Design Here

I thought I'd share a couple of holiday photos with you. We've been to Bournemouth for a few days and spent one day in the nearby New Forest, just wandering around, looking at birds and flowers and generally appreciating nature.

But when you look at nature and really try to understand and appreciate why things are as they are, the one thing that stands out most markedly is how utterly stupid so much of it is. It is full of examples of pointless and ultimately wasteful arms races as one species seeks to gain an advantage over another in the general competition for resources or even as one species tries to use another as a resource and the other tries to resist it.

The result is the wonderful complexity and diversity we can see and enjoy but to pretend it all has some ultimate purpose directed towards humans is sheer anthropocentric arrogance.

Look at these pictures of thicker broad-leaf woodland and what do you see?

Bearing in mind that it's early Spring here in the UK and most trees are just breaking into leaf, so what you are seeing is the wood without it's canopy. In a matter of weeks this forest floor will be considerably darker than what you see here.

You Can't Blame Loonies on The Full Moon

OMG! The Lamb of God has appeared on the end of the Isle of Wight!
This must be a sign!

Stop blaming the moon: Intelligent people can develop strong entirely incorrect beliefs -- ScienceDaily

An article published a few days ago in Nursing Research shows how easy it is for people to misinterpret data to see a pattern where there is none. Professor Jean-Luc Margot took the data used in a 2004 paper which purported to show a correlation between the number of people admitted to an emergency department suffering from gastro-intestinal bleeding and the incidence of full moons.

The errors came from imprecision with the method

God The Ignorant Biologist

Jacob's lambs

Of all the passages in the Bible, even allowing for the nonsense about thinking with your heart and breathing 'life' into things, there is one passage which shows the author was utterly ignorant of basic biology. If this was a creator god then it is no excuse that we hadn't discovered basic genetics in the Bronze Age when this stuff was first made up; any decent intelligent designer should understand how its creation works.

That passage is:

How Europeans Evolved

Archetypal European hunter-gatherer

How Europeans evolved white skin | Science/AAAS | News

A new study has provided more detail on the discovery reported a year ago that Europeans evolved white skin fairly rapidly about 8000 years ago but not, as one might assume, in Europe itself but rather in three different distinct populations of hunter-gatherers and farmers who moved into Europe, each contributing genes to the 'European' genome.

A paper published in February this year showed that the origin of the Indo-European languages was probably a population of nomadic herders from the Russian steppe north of the Black Sea who appear to have migrated massively into Europe about 4500 years ago. These people are known as the Yamna Culture. Indo-European languages exist now in about 400 different languages and dialects from Irish in the west to Hindi and Urdu in the east.

Ancestral Adam & Eve Probably Never Even Met

The Y-chromosome point mutation rate in humans : Nature Genetics : Nature Publishing Group

Scientists have revised their estimate of when the last common ancestor of men lived, bringing it much closer to the estimate of when the last common ancestor of women lived. The basis for this estimate is the range of diversity in the Y-chromosome and the estimated rate of mutation.

The calculation for women is based on the same principle but based on mitochondrial DNA (mDNA). We inherit our mDNA from our mothers but males inherit their Y-chromosome from their father. Women don't have a Y-chromosome.

Origin of the Adam & Eve Myth

A pair of Old Testament scholars at Holland's Protestant Theological University, Amsterdam & Groningen believe they have found the origins of the Adam & Eve myth in the Hebrew Bible. It is a version of an old Canaanite myth based on the original Canaanite pantheon.

Dr Marjo Korpel and Professor Emeritus J.C. de Moor claim to have found the evidence on Ugaritic clay tablets of a 13th-century BCE story about the gods who lived on the slopes of Mount Ararat, in modern-day Turkey, in the 'vineyard of the great gods', identified with the Garden of Eden.

The top god was El the creator god and amongst the lesser gods in the pantheon or Elohim (children of El) were Adam and his wife. El is, of course, the Hebrew, Christian and Muslim god whom Arabic speakers still call Allah.

Cowardly Catholic Runs Away Again

Apparently, Mad Manuel, who many people will know as Sacerdotus or other less printable versions of his pseudonym, is claiming I have agreed to debate with him live on a web page he controls. Not surprisingly, given Manny's reputation as a habitual liar, this is a lie, as the record of our conversation on Google+ shows.

What I did do, however, was re-issued the challenge to him to hold an impartially moderated debate on neutral territory that panicked him several years ago. The result was the same - total panic, abuse, crude threats and a desperate attempt to save face.

Dutch Catholics Vindictively Castrated Abused Boys.

Harreveld Catholic boys home, Netherlands, were at least ten boys were abused by monks then vindictively castrated.

Most people are probably familiar with the way the Catholic Church used to routinely castrate choir boys before puberty to prevent their voices breaking so they could provide the 'female' voices in cathedral choirs. Obviously women couldn't be allowed in church choirs because the Bible forbade women to speak in church:

Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law.

1 Corinthians 14:34-35

Moral Compass - The Catholic Church and Excommunication

Fr. Jose Mercau, Excommunicated

Last November, Pope Francis defrocked and excommunicated a convicted paedophile priest from Argentina. Of course, many priests have been excommunicated by the Catholic Church before, but the case of Fr. Jose Mercau was unusual; he is one of the only Catholic priests to have been excommunicated for sexual abuse (technically rape) of a minor.

Pope Francis was apparently trying to convince the world that the Catholic Church had recognised the error of its ways and would no longer tolerate, facilitate and protect priests and nuns who abused children and vulnerable adults and now took a dim view of these previously accepted clerical recreational pass-times.

More Fascist Catholics

Fr. Josef Tiso with his friend and role model, Adolf Hitler

In addition to their close involvement in creating the first fascist state in Europe in Portugal, and their support for Italian and Spanish fascism, the Catholic Church was actively involved in another even more extreme fascist regime in Slovakia.

Unlike Portugal and Spain which stayed out of World War II and have no history of sending Jews to Hitler's slave labour and death camps, Slovakia, under the leadership of a Catholic priest and fascist dictator, Fr. Josef Tiso, enthusiastically shipped around 60% of Slovakian Jews (over 52,000 of the population of 89,000) to the death camps, mostly Auschwitz.

Mother Teresa and the Paedophile Priest

Fr. Donald McGuire, Jesuit, serial paedophile and spiritual advisor to Mother Teresa

Catholicism's favourite new demi-saint, "The Blessed" Teresa of Calcutta, was a friend of a paedophile priest and intervened to get him reinstated in his parish, where he subsequently carried on with his predatory paedophilia, sexually abusing more boys before finally being arrested and imprisoned.

This was revealed in papers leaked to the San Francisco newspaper, SF Weekly in January 2012.

The priest in question was Fr. Donald McGuire, currently serving a 25 year sentence for what the judge described as:

[P]articularly detestable because he abused the trust of parents and had perversely taken advantage of their children. [His Actions were] abhorrent, unacceptable, and‘a very, very serious sin.

USA District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer
(quoted in Chicago Sun Times online, February 11th, 2009)

This sentence exceeded federal guidelines for sentencing for these offences because Judge Pallmeyer felt the crimes were exceptionally serious.