Watching Evolution as it Happens

Evolution and coexistence in response to a key innovation in a long-term evolution experiment with Escherichia coli | bioRxiv

The world's longest running evolutionary experiment has just produced another embarrassing result; embarrassing for creationists that is. The result is, of course, exactly what the Theory of Evolution predicts.

This experiment, Richard Lenski's Long-term Experimental Evolution Project, has been running since 1988 when Lenski set up 12 cultures of a single strain of E. coli. Every day since then a sample of each culture has been taken and used to seed a new culture. Every 75 days a sample of each cultural line is frozen so any future change can be backtracked. The main nutrient in the culture was glucose.

Pope Is Part Of The Climate Change Problem

Generally, Popes talk what can only politely be called cobblers, and so far the current pope has been no exception. Normally it quite easy to read something a pope has said and to write an article pointing out the bigotry, superstition, scientific illiteracy or clerical self-interest which underpins it. A religious commentator might even regard popes as a godsend for the frequency with which they open their mouth just wide enough to get a red-booted foot in it.

But now we see a pope actually talking sense about climate change and man's responsibility for it and for once the Catholic Church isn't supporting the right-wing and the forces of reaction. From a quick skim through an English translation of his encyclical, Laudato Si', it appears to be well informed and even well-argued. No doubt Pope Francis is not personally the author of it and has depended a great deal on his science advisers to do the actual science but that doesn't detract from his responsibility for the contents, and he deserves praise for it.

Toothed Whales Laughing At Creationists

Laughing at creationists

Mx1 and Mx2 key antiviral proteins are surprisingly lost in toothed whales - PNAS

More evidence today that the supposed 'intelligent designer' is neither intelligent nor a designer. It's not clear yet whether the ID industry will become honest as a result of all this evidence against their daft notion and give up exploiting gullible people, or whether they will ignore it all as usual and rely on their victims' aversion to reading any science literature which might shake their 'unshakeable' faith.

Researchers have shown that the toothed whales all have broken versions of two genes (Mx1 and Mx2)

Rapid Human Evolution - Update

Fore victim of kuru

Eating human brains helped Papua New Guinea tribe resist disease, research shows | Science | The Guardian

Researchers have discovered that the gene which arose in the Fore people of Papua New Guinea in response to the prion disease, kuru, also gives protection against other prion diseases.

Some time ago I reported on an unarguable case of rapid Darwinian evolution in the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. Briefly, the local religious custom of ritually eating the brain of dead relatives had produced a high risk of contracting the transmissible prion disease, kuru, an invariably fatal dementia very similar to BSE (mad cow disease) in cattle, scrapie in sheep and CJD in humans. This placed the population under intense selection pressure where any resistance to this disease had high survival value.

Popes, Predators, Paedophiles And Priests

Józef Wesołowski

Photo credit: Manuel Diaz / AP

Vatican Sets Trial for Ex-Ambassador Accused of Sexual Abuse - The New York Times.

Archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis resigns after charges of sex abuse coverup - The Washington Post

For my 1000th blog, it's a pleasure to be presented with not one but two cases of senior Catholic clergy being involved in child abuse and coverup amounting to facilitation of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. These cases involve an ambassador for the Vatican, an archbishop and an auxiliary bishop.

On the day that the Vatican announced it is putting on trial it's former ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Archbishop Józef Wesołowski, for molesting young boys and posessing child pornograpy, came news that the Archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Archbishop John Nienstedt, along with his assistant, Auxiliary Bishop Lee Piché had resigned. The Vatican denies any link between the two cases.

The case of Archbishop Wesołowski is revealing and tells us much of the Vatican's basic instinct - to protect its own and keep them out of the reach of the law-enforcement agencies in the countries where they

Magna Carta - And Why The Pope Tried To Kill It

On this the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, it's worth spending a few minutes remembering how fortunate we are that the Pope Innocent III didn't succeed in his determination to annul it and put an end to this dangerous idea of equality before the law.

Although it was probably never intended as such, Magna Carta has become one of the most important documents in history, being regarded as the origins of several basic principles now taken for granted:

• The idea of equality before the law. This establishes the right to a fair trial and the rule of

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.