No Comfort For Ray As God Hits Bananas

Americas may be hit by catastrophic banana disease -- ScienceDaily

In a long-expected response to Ray Comfort's cruel attempt to make American Christian fundamentalists look even more stupid with his banana 'proof' of creationism and Intelligent Design, God is sending a disease, Fusarium wilt, to decimate the American Cavendish banana crop.

Comfort, readers may remember, hilariously exposed the credulity of his creationist followers and simultaneously showed his contempt for them by

Grand Canyon Catastrophe For Creationism

Geomorphic constraints on the age of the western Grand Canyon

It can't be easy being a creationist.

The problem is the need to be increasingly inventive to cope with the troublesome cognitive dissonance that comes from trying to stick to a belief while the evidence against it just keeps on piling up. This makes them prey to pseudoscience charlatans who will try to sell them spurious confirmation of their bias with lies, misinformation and misrepresentations of the data.

It also means they have to avoid reading proper science like a claustrophobe avoids lifts.

Guess Who!

Guess who this is a description of:

...described as a “man spiralling downwards”. He had no job but many debts... Seeking “power and influence”...

Pretending to be an important cleric... Sordid crimes... was rejected as too “weird”. “His constant goal in life appears to have been achieving significance.”

Diagnosed with a number of mental health problems, he was a relentless attention seeker with delusions of grandeur and a con man, who elevated his personal grievances with the heavenly glow [of a religious campaign]... ^*

The Bigots Are Whinging Again

In what is becoming something of a tradition in Christian circles, Christians are whinging again because they've lost another court case in which they sought to defend what they see as their God-given right to persecute people of their choice. The need for martyrdom seems as strong as ever in fundamentalist circles.

In this case, the Court of Appeal refused leave for a fundamentalist Christian charity, Core Issues Trust, to appeal the ban on putting offensive, homophobic advertising banners on London buses, in a spiteful response to the Stonewall advertisement pictures below.

Spider Venom Toxic To Creationism

Tegenaria agrestis

Weaponization of a Hormone: Convergent Recruitment of Hyperglycemic Hormone into the Venom of Arthropod Predators: Structure

These examples of unintelligent design just keep piling up in the science literature. No wonder trying to get a creationist to read a proper, peer-reviewed science paper is like trying to get an acute arachnophobe to pick up a spider.

This paper, for example, if the Intelligent Design hoax was taken seriously by proper biologists who actually work in the field of biology and value their academic reputation, could only be seen as an example of this designer designing something to do the same job, even starting from the same point but doing it differently with one result not as good as the other.

Ice Age Camels Give Creationists The Hump

North American Western Camel (artist's impression)

Ice age camel DNA discovered in Canada change theories on species | World news | The Guardian

Here we have a good example of how our understanding of DNA and the fact that evolution occurs at the genetic level, is informing biological research. It perfuses this paper concerning camel evolution and how the extinct North American Western Camel was related to the Asiatic camels, the Bactrian camel and the dromedary, and to the South American llamas, guanacos, alpacas, and vicuñas.

Based on morphology of fossil bones, it had been thought that the Western Camel was a giant llama. That view has now been disproved; it was a sister species of the Asiatic camels.

Mutant Europeans

Yamnaya skull from the Samara region colored with red ochre.

Photo Credit: Natalia Shishlina

Nomadic herders left a strong genetic mark on Europeans and Asians | Science/AAAS | News

More news yesterday on the subject of the origins of Euro-Asian people and in particular, lactase persistence in Europeans, which should, if they understood it, be causing creationists to rethink their superstitions.

So, if you've fallen for the 'Intelligent Design' hoax and want to stay duped, or if you need to believe you have a close personal relationship with the creator of the Universe so you feel important enough, stop reading now because there will be some hard questions at the end designed to make you think.

The news comes from two rival teams of geneticists who analysed the DNA from a total of 170 individuals from archaeological sites in Europe and Asia. These people lived between 3000 and 5000 years ago so covering the period when the Bronze Age spread from the Middle East out into Europe and Asia. The debate has always been about whether this was a spread of ideas as neighbours learned the

A Catholic Explains Why Atheists Are Cleverer Than Catholics

Catholic Religion Quiz, Part I

Having had close on five years to work out why Atheists were shown in a Pew Research Center survey to know more about religion than theists and in particular, Catholics, Mark Shea, writing in the National Catholic Register has come up with an 'answer'. To be more precise, he's come up with an excuse:

The reason atheists did better is that, being at war with all mankind about the thing that matters to it most, they oppose all theists and are wary of the whole broad spectrum of religious belief...

So that's that then. The only reason to investigate and learn is to wage war. It's not to discover the truth or anything like that. But of course:

Christians, in contrast, can hold up their end when talking about Christianity, but have never boned up on Jewish, Mormon, Islamic, or Hindu teachings since, well, they're Christian.

Night-Flowering Bloomer For The Unintelligent Designer

Night-flowering catchfly (Silene noctiflora)

Maintaining a massive mitochondrial genome

This pretty little plant, known as the night-flowering catchfly (Silene noctiflora), is a native to Eurasia and is an introduced species in North America where it is a weed in cereal crops. It's also a major embarrassment for the Intelligent Design industry - or would be if they weren't carefully ignoring it.

Like so much else in biology, when you look at the detail, the notion of Intelligent Design is reduced to an absurdly ignorant superstition.

But first a little background (skip the next three paragraphs if you know about mitochondria):

Like all eukaryotic organisms, S. noctiflora has organelles called mitochondria within its cells. These are the powerhouse of the cell whose role is to convert glucose and oxygen into carbon dioxide and water and to use the released energy to turn ADP into ATP by adding an additional phosphate and so binding up some of the energy in a chemical bond. This energy store is then used to power the cells metabolic processes by breaking ATP back down to ADP and phosphate.

Psychosis, Miracles And Catholic Frauds

Psychological Medicine - Psychotic-like experiences in a community sample of 8000 children aged 9 to 11 years: an item response theory analysis - Cambridge Journals Online

It seems that hallucinations are far more common in children that was previously thought, and in fact are fairly frequent. In one 2011 study of nearly 8000 children, two-thirds were found to have had at least one psychotic-like experience (PLE) which was more than a simple childhood play fantasy.

Do we have here a simple, and above all natural, explanation for many of the supposed miracles, very often involving young girls, of visions of, in Catholic countries, the Virgin Mary?

Dinosaur Teeth Another 'Intelligent' Design Blunder?

Wear biomechanics in the slicing dentition of the giant horned dinosaur Triceratops ! Science Advances

One of the more popular fallacies taught to their dupes by the creation industry and Intelligent Design hoaxers is that humans are what it's all for; the entire universe was created as somewhere for humans to live.

Even those few who know and understand enough about evolution, so accept that it happens, manage to rationalise it as 'Intelligent Evolution' with a magic man ensuring that evolution produced humans complete with all the animals and birds we need to have food, clothes and somewhere nice to live.

Bird Sex And The Intelligent Design Hoax

Evolutionary analysis of the female-specific avian W chromosome

One of the things you need to believe, if you believe in an Intelligent Designer and know just a little bit of biology, is that the 'Intelligent Designer' isn't very intelligent. It's not very intelligent to keep on re-inventing different solutions to the same problem, for example.

Speak to any half decent professional computer programmer and they will tell you they use a modular approach to design. They have a library of tried and tested routines and functions for doing a specific task. No decent programmer is going to reinvent a way to send a document to a printer, request and handle a password input or send a MySQL string to a server.

All These Transitional Fossils To Be Ignored!

Ossinodus pueri

Based on figure 11 of "New data on Ossinodus pueri, a stem tetrapod from the Early Carboniferous of Australia" by A. Warren Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 27(4):850-862.

Source: Wikipedia - Ossinodus

Oldest Pathology in a Tetrapod Bone Illuminates the Origin of Terrestrial Vertebrates - PLOS ONE

While creationist doctrinal, evidence-free pseudoscience continues to insist that there are no transitional fossils, and certainly none showing the evolution of a major taxon such as the evolution of terrestrial tetrapods from bony fish, real, evidence-based science not only accepts the available evidence but has moved the debate on. The question is no longer 'if', but when, where and what?

As this new fossil from Queensland, Australia, now suggests, the first land vertebrates may have emerged from water earlier than we thought and not in what is now Europe, but in Gondwana before it split to become,

Conservation, Ecosystems and Evolution 101

Conservation challenges of predator recovery - Conservation Letters

If anyone seriously doubts that evolution happens and can be seen to be happening, simply observing what happens when conservation measures inevitably change the ecosystem should convince them they are wrong.

The only way to retain a belief that evolution can't happen is to use the tried and tested creationist technique of simply ignoring the evidence and maintaining a belief at the expense of intellectual integrity.

New Frogs Expose The Intelligent Design Hoax

Brachycephalus mariaeterezae
(The intensity of the light of the flash during photography led the light-blue coloration along their vertebral column to become less apparent.)

Seven new microendemic species of Brachycephalus (Anura: Brachycephalidae) from southern Brazil - PeerJ

In what appears to be a spooky example of Richard Dawkins' analogy of 'Climbing Mount Improbable', where he likened a species evolving in a fitness landscape to occupying the peaks by moving up an improbability gradient a small step at a time as small changes accumulate into big difference, we have this lovely example of seven new species of frog, each occupying a different mountain peak.

This was also something I tried to illustrate with a blog a few years ago which, with typical disingenuity, several creationists managed to 'misunderstand' completely,

The News Just Keeps Getting Better

British Social Attitudes: Church of England decline has accelerated in past decade

Another survey and again we see the inexorable decline in religious belief in the UK and the accelerating increase in Atheism. This is such a common thing nowadays that it would probably make the news if the decline in religion was halted or reversed.

This survey comes from NatCen, the leading independent social research agency:

The Church of England has been in decline for over

How Africa Shaped Humans

Body composition in Pan paniscus compared with Homo sapiens has implications for changes during human evolution

As I've said several times here, if you want to understand modern humans, think East African plains. Almost all about us can be explained by the basic human model which evolved on the plains of East and South Africa as we gradually changed from an arboreal ape to a terrestrial one and changed from a primarily vegetarian one to a hunter-gatherer eating a mixed diet and opportunistically eating whatever was available when it could be found.

Now evolutionary anthropologists Adrienne L. Zihlmana and Debra R. Bolter have published the results of a comparison of the soft tissues, mostly fat, muscle and skin, of humans and our closest relatives, bonobos, to understand better the adaptive changes that occurred during this process over the past 4-5 million years. During this time, proto-human apes

Taslima Nasrin Needs Your Help

Help Taslima Nasrin:
Secular Activist’s Life Threatened by Islamic Radicals

The following appeal has been launched by the Centre For Inquiry to keep Talima Nasreen safe in the USA. Taslima is an online friend of mine who did much to promote my blog on the Indian sub-continent and elsewhere. She did me the gret honour a few years ago of inviting me to guest blog on her No Country For Women blog.

A champion of free expression needs your immediate help. Islamic radicals reportedly linked to al-Qaeda, the same violent extremists who claimed responsibility for the recent murders of freethought writers Avijit Roy, Washiqur Rahman, and Ananta Bijoy Das, have been threatening the life of Taslima Nasrin.

Taslima is a world-renowned secular activist and author, whose uncompromising advocacy of human rights and criticism of religion forced her into exile from her native Bangladesh in 1994. A physician by training, she has written innumerable books, articles, and poems, and she has been at the forefront of political activism for secularism, free expression, and equality. Since 2004 she has lived in India, but even there she has faced persecution and threats.

Driving Ban For Jewish Women Shows Why We Need Human Rights Act

Orthodox Jewish women driving ban unacceptable, says Nicky Morgan - BBC News

Leaders of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect in London, UK, has issued an edict banning women members of the Belz Hasidic sect from driving and warning that their children will be excluded from the sects faith school if they are driven there by their mother. They claim women driving "goes against the laws of modesty" in their community.

Apparently, this ban follows an instruction from the the

New Possible Human Ancestor Discovered

Upper jaw of Australopithecus deyiremeda

Credit: Yohannes Haile-Selassie / copyright Cleveland Museum of Natural History

New species from Ethiopia further expands Middle Pliocene hominin diversity - Nature

A great deal of religion, especially the Abrahamic religions, depends on humans seeing themselves as a special creation. The entire thrust of the Genesis origin myth, for example, is an attempt to explain why human beings are different to, and above, the rest of the animals. It went without saying to the people who invented this myth that this was simply a matter of obvious fact. It probably never even occurred to them that this was merely an assumption, just as it doesn't seem to occur to some people today.

Humans are different and special, so there must be a reason. That belief almost certainly doesn't come from the myth; the myth was very probably invented to explain the 'fact'.

Bird Chicks Can Be Reverted To Grow Dinosaur Feet

Image credit: Universidad de Chile

Skeletal plasticity in response to embryonic muscular activity underlies the development and evolution of the perching digit of birds - Scientific Reports.

Following close on the publication of a paper showing that if a couple of genes are switched off in their embryological development, hen chicks can be reverted to develop a dinosaur face instead of a chicken face, comes the equally devastating news for creationists that a developing chick can be reverted to develop dinosaur feet.

It would be the act of an idiot designer to design birds as

Decline in Religion in USA Is Accelerating.

Religion contemplates the best way forward.

Generational and Time Period Differences in American Adolescents’ Religious Orientation, 1966–2014 - PLOS ONE.

Despite the shrill histrionics that seem at times to swamp the social media and, at least in the USA by all accounts, the TV channels, with toe-curling religious fundamentalism, creating the impression that religion is not only strong but growing and becoming more fundamentalist, the facts are very different.

Survey after survey shows that religion is declining and that that decline is accelerating.

More Nastiness From the 'Intelligent Designer'

Phylogeographical analysis of the dominant multidrug-resistant H58 clade of Salmonella Typhi identifies inter- and intracontinental transmission events : Nature Genetics : Nature Publishing Group

It's an open secret that the 'Intelligent Designer', who is central to the ID hoax, is the god of the Christian Bible.

All those who invented the hoax and are perpetrating it on a gullible, uninformed public, are fundamentalist Christians determined to subvert the US Constitution prior to establishing a Taliban-style, extremist Christian Theocracy in the USA. The Discovery Institute was specifically set up with this aim in mind and even produced The Wedge strategy as an initially secret program to achieve this within five years (that was some 15 years ago).

Old Catholic Nuns Turn To Jews For Care

Aging Catholic Nuns Get Care at Jewish Nursing Home - ABC News

As the Catholic Church winds down in the USA, what to do with so many aging nuns is becoming a major problem. But have no fear, centuries of bigotry, persecution and racism can be cast aside when the need arises.

The aging nuns are being put into Jewish retirement homes to be looked after by the very people that they once taught others to despise and persecute. Fortunately, it seems that Jews are prepared to forgive their enemies and do into others what they would have others do unto them.

So You've Decided To Be An Internet Creationist

So, you've decided you are going to campaign for creationism on the Internet. This handy, print-off-and-keep, handbook contains lots of tricks and techniques you can use to win arguments against scientists and people who have read books on evolution and so understand it.

The most important thing is that you must never accept any evidence which doesn't support one of the different versions of creationism, no matter how good it is or how well it's been proven. Always tell yourself that there is no such thing as scientific proof so science can never prove what it claims. This means that your beliefs are just as good as science and science is just another faith. Obviously, because yours is the only true faith that means science is wrong.

Catholic Whinge - The Irish Were Bought

Smarting from the historic slap in the face for the Catholic Church by the people of the Republic of Ireland in last Thursday's referendum, which returned a landslide for legalising same-sex marriage, the Catholic Register has concluded that the Irish were bought.

Apparently, the reason can't be that 62% of those who voted believe homosexuals should be treated like full human beings with the same rights as other human beings, and should be free from centuries of persecution and demonization by the Catholic Church.

More Poo For Creationists.

Bent posture improves the protective value of bird dropping masquerading by caterpillars

The thing about evolution is that it's opportunistic. If something can be done by an organism and it gives it an advantage in their particular environment at that particular time, there is every chance that it will be done.

Some time ago I wrote a series of blogs on mimicry showing how a perfectly harmless species can come to resemble a harmful one if that deters predators.

Irish Vote Is A Massive Rejection Of Catholicism

The stunning victory for the pro equality, pro same-sex marriage side in the Irish referendum is an event of huge historic significance because it represents a massive rejection of the Catholic Church in Ireland and signifies another huge penetration of Humanism into this formerly devoutly Catholic part of Europe.

Just as with Germany a few days ago, the message from Ireland for the Vatican is that Catholic Church has a choice: either it has to abandon centuries of dogma, bigotry and exclusion - in effect abandon Catholicism, or the people will abandon the Church. The Church's teaching, behaviour and attitude is no longer acceptable in a modern, civilised and above all Humanist society.

Yeast Takes The Rise Out Of Intelligent Design

Baker's Yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae)

Systematic humanization of yeast genes reveals conserved functions and genetic modularity

Here is something for 'Intelligent Design' propagandists to cope with (probably by ignoring it, lying about it or abusing the scientists and people who report it).

Evolutionary biologists will tell us that the presence of the same or very similar genes in widely different organisms points to a common origin. Indeed, the fact that all living things can be arranged into a hierarchy of genetic similarity, and the fact that

Old Dog Teaches Science New Tricks

Ancient DNA suggests dogs split from wolves 40,000 years ago - life - 21 May 2015 - New Scientist

Here we have a very nice example illustrating why science gets it mostly right most of the time in contrast to religions which, if it ever gets anything right, it gets it right by accident. This is something that people like creationists and religious fundamentalists who seek certainty in everything, above even truth, find confusing. They seem to confuse certainty with knowledge and uncertainty with not knowing.

If The Bible Is True, Why So Many Religions?

Let's assume for the moment that the Bible is true in its substantive claim that there was once a single couple from whom we are all descended and that, some time later, the population of the Earth was reduced again to a single family. This family all believed in and worshipped the 'one true god' and had even spoken to this god and witnessed his powers first hand in ways in which few people could have any doubts.

This all happened just a few thousand years ago. Although there is no common agreement about

Faith Is No Excuse To Victimise - Official

Gareth Lee - Victim of Christianity

'Gay cake' row: Judge rules against Ashers bakery - BBC News Northern Ireland.

A Belfast Court has ruled that Christians are not exempt from Northern Ireland's equality laws and free to discriminate, as they had claimed. This ruling establishes the principle that a person's religion does not entitle them to victimise those with whom they disagree or those with a lifestyle of which they disapprove.

It is illegal in Northern Ireland, under UK (and European) Human Rights law to discriminate against a person in the provision of goods and services on the grounds of their sexuality (amongst other things).

Reader may remember me reporting on this case last November when the story first made the news. Briefly, Ashers, a bakery from County Antrim had refused to bake and decorate a cake for gay rights activist, Gareth Lee, because he had wanted the slogan "Support Gay Marriage" included in the decoration along with a picture of Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street and the logo of the Queerspace organisation. Same sex marriage is still not legal in Northern Ireland and the cake was to be part of a campaign to have it legalised.

The Bible's Bad Science

One of the central claims of Christian apologetics is that the Bible contains science. Muslims make exactly the same claim of the Qur'an, of course, and like those claims, those for the Bible either don't stand up to scrutiny or are completely unremarkable because they are simple observations of natural phenomena.

I think the intention of these lists is that you don't actually check either the science or the Bible passage cited. You're just supposed to scan down the list and marvel at how all that science could have been included in the Bible if it hadn't been written by a god. Then you conclude that you're obviously right to believe in the god your parents told you was the real one and feel that nice warm glow of self-satisfaction that comes from being right all along.

Catholic Church's Exquisite Paradox

Cardinal Reinhard Marx, "Theologically unacceptable"

Top German Lay Catholic Group Pushes Communion for Civilly Divorced-Remarried and More - National Catholic Register.

The Catholic Church in Germany, as elsewhere, faces a nightmare paradox - give up being Catholic to retain members and a degree of authority, or remain Catholic and cease having any relevance to people.

The panic spreading through the Catholic Church as it crumbles under the assault of secular Humanist ideas and becomes ever less relevant to the lives of decent, ordinary people throughout the developed world, can be judged from what's going on in Germany, where the Catholic Church is teetering on the brink of collapse.

Look What Religion Can Be Used For

Rev. Austin Miles
Liar for Jesus

If you want to see an example of what religion does to people, look no further than the paranoid ravings of a Man of God, one Rev. Austin Miles.

After citing his own evidence-free earlier claim that the German Pilot who crashed his plane in the Alps killing all on board was a Muslim, he manages to connect this event to the Obama administration with:

A similar tragedy is, at this moment, playing out in America. The cockpit is the Oval Office which guides our country to its destination. Sitting at the controls is Barrack [sic] Hussein Obama who, according to many reports (which includes photos), also possesses sexual confusion regarding straight and gay. He executes insane decisions with what appears to be a deliberate scheme to nosedive our country into oblivion.

Obama is not clinically insane but has been specifically programmed by his Communist handlers along with his Muslim allies to take America over the cliff. He is not dumb but a very useful idiot for the Communist Party (Josef Stalin's description for those who help his cause). Obama is totally controlled as an authentic Manchurian Candidate.

An 'Intelligent Design' That Really Gets Up Your Nose

Brain-eating amoebas kill by turning your body against you - health - 13 May 2015 - New Scientist

There was me thinking the 'Intelligent Designer' couldn't get any nastier when I wrote a couple of months ago about the parasitoid wasp that turns a ladybird into a zombie by injecting it with a mind-controlling virus. Now I've come across something else which surely competes with this for sheer malevolent nastiness. Of course, sheer incompetence could also explain it.

It's an amoeba which destroys the human brain, but it doesn't do it simply by eating it - that would be too simple for our malevolent 'Intelligent Designer'. It does it by making us destroy our own brain, not just because our immune system isnt fit for purpose but also because of the way our brain is fitted into our skull.

Naegleria fowleri is a species of amoeba which lives in warm, freshwater pools, normally living on a diet of local bacteria. However, should someone take a dip in one of these pools and gets water up their nose, some of the amoebas might penetrate the mucous membrane and find their way up the nerves to the brain, where they start eating brain cells.

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.