What Killed the Megafauna, Humans or Climate Change?

Reconstruction of megafauna of northern Spain.

Source: Wikipedia. Credit: Mauricio Antón

Humans responsible for demise of gigantic ancient mammals: Early humans were the dominant cause of the extinction of a variety of species of giant beasts -- ScienceDaily

A team of scientists believe they have solved the conundrum of what cause the extinction of the so-called megafauna at the end of the last Ice Age. The megafauna is the large mammals such as mammoths, wooly rhinoceroses, sabre-toothed tigers and giant armadillos all of which went extinct between 80,000 years ago and 10,000 years ago.

Dimming Universe, Dumb Creationists

The same galaxy seen at some of the wavelengths examined by the GAMA team

Fading cosmos quantified in 21 colours - BBC News

The lights are going out all over the Universe.

In fact, the energy output of all the suns together appears to have halved in the last 2 billion years. This figure was arrived at by the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey led by Australian director, Prof Simon Driver, of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, Western Australia. The survey measured the energy output from over 200,000 galaxies over as wide a range of wavelengths as possible.

This discovery was arrived at by comparing the energy output of galaxies far away (and so further away in time

Revising Evolution Theory - The Scientific Way

Liolaemus nigriceps

Re-thinking 'adaptive radiation,' one of biology's most important concepts | ScienceDaily

When you see a headline like "Re-thinking 'adaptive radiation,' one of biology's most important concepts" it's bound to raise the eyebrows of the scientifically-minded. What's this? One of the fundamentals of evolution theory could be wrong? Shock horror!

It only takes a minor change of emphasis and the removal of any doubt by merely changing 'could be' to 'is' and you have the makings of another creationist article by Ken Ham or Ray Comfort and another merry tinkle of cash pouring in to help 'spread the good news' that evolution has been overthrown once more and 'evolutionists' all exposed as liars.

We Found Jesus!

It's Jesus. Hallelujah!

Yes, it's Jesus! And we found him while looking for Mary and Joseph! (I'm really not making this up!)

We found him on a gravestone in the Radnorshire village of Nantmel, Wales, while looking for the graves of my grandfather's cousins, Mary and Joseph Hathaway.

We've just had a short break in Mid-Wales and were casually driving around after an Indian meal in Builth Wells, when I noticed a turning to Nantmel, a name which has fascinated me since the early days of my family history research because, for reasons not entirely clear, my maternal grandfather's uncle lived there, so we decided to go and look for these graves, or to see if there were any Hathaways buried there.

Mary's and Joseph's story is an interesting and sad little one but all too typical of the times, and it tells the social history of England and Wales in the 19th-Century.

Young Joseph Hathaway was a carter on a farm in the Wychwood Forest village of Leafield near Witney, Oxfordshire. He was born in nearby Crawley, the son of George Joseph Hathaway and Anne Greenaway. George Joseph Hathaway was the son of master blanket weaver George Hathaway and Sarah Early, the sister of the founders of the Early Witney Blanket dynasty.

So I've Written This Book...

Click image for details

In response to numerous requests, I've finally produced an ebook, based on a selection of my Atheism and Science blogs. The Light Of Reason: And Other Atheist Writing, is available for Kindle users only at this time.

The selection is a more-or-less random one but include many of my personal favourites (and by that I mean those that gave me most satisfaction to write) and those which have proved most popular judging by the number of hits recorded by Blogger. I've tried to arrange them into four sections each dealing with a different aspect of Atheism and science and the interface between science and religion.

Those sections are:

1. Religion and Atheism, which looks at the reasons why Atheism is the position of choice for critical thinkers and people who allow the evidence to determine their beliefs and who suspend judgement in the absence of evidence.
2. Evolution and Other Science, which deals with aspects of science which normally feature in creationist and other religious apologetics and about which most creationists are ignorant or at least feign ignorance.
3. Religious Apologetics, dealing with the common apologetic fallacies.
4. Silly Bible, exposing the utter nonsense and implausibility of the stories found throughout the Bible.

Evolution in the Blink of an Eye

A male Eggfly or Blue Moon Butterfly, Hypolimnas bolina

Photo credit: Sylvain Charlat/Science

Extraordinary Flux in Sex Ratio | Science.

This example of evolution from 2007, the evolution of the Blue Moon butterfly on the South Pacific Samoan islands of Upolu and Savaii, is one of the fastest on record other than the rare occasions of a stable hybrid giving rise to a new species.

It appears to have happened in just a few years, over some ten generations, in response to intense selection pressure from a killer bacterium.

In 2001, researcher found that in the Samoan Islands, in populations of this butterfly, only about 1% were males. This was caused by a bacteria of the, Wolbachia genus, which infects females and which causes male embryos to die before hatching. The resulting success rate for egg hatching was also low.

Confirmation Bias And The Stain on a Toilet Wall

The Prophet at prayer

Crowds flock to Mali's 'religious wall sign' - BBC News

It's official. The Prophet is a stain.

And all those blasphemers who have been drawing images of Muhammad have got it all wrong. We now know Muhammad is shaped like a white blob.

Crowds are flocking to a toilet in a compound in the Mali capital, Bamako, to see his image which appeared on an outside wall last weekend.

Riot police and the national guard have been deployed to keep the crowds under control. Visitors who queue throughout the night include several Malian government ministers. The image has been widely circulated on mobile phones and is drawing in visitors from neighbouring Senegal.

Another Bad Day For the 'Malevolent Designer'

Electron micrograph of an Ebola viral particle

Source: Wikipedia
Photo credit: US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Ebola vaccine efficacy trial suggest vaccine provides high protection against disease | Science Daily

It's been a bad couple of days for this 'Intelligent (sic) Designer' creationist loons keep telling us made everything and did everything they don't understand.

In this fantasy world, this assumed designer did everything, but we have to ignore the bad stuff. We have to ignore childhood cancer, the fact that illness and misfortune strike the pious and the impious alike, that there are random large-scale slaughters from natural disasters.

We have to ignore the fact that supposed design with intent and for a purpose produced genetic diseases, worms that make children blind by eating their eyeball from the inside; that the viral, bacterial, protozoan, helminth and arthropod parasites that make us sick, disabled or dead were also designed by the same assumed designer, and we have to ignore the fact that this designer appears to be on the side of these harmful parasites when it redesigns them to overcome the antibiotics, insecticides and anti-heminitics we've made to defend ourselves against them.

We have to ignore all this stuff because creationists like to imagine they have a close personal relationship with the creator of the Universe and it made it all just for them because it loves them.

New Wolf Dogs Creationists

African golden jackal, Canis anthus

Photo credit: Eyal Cohen
Source: AAAS Science Magazine

Genome-wide Evidence Reveals that African and Eurasian Golden Jackals Are Distinct Species | Current Biology

The world has a new species of dog - and creationists have another embarrassing fact to ignore.

Although strikingly similar, scientists have shown that the African and Asian golden jackal, until now classified as a single species, Canis aureus, are actually two different species which diverged from ancestral coyotes and grey wolves at different times; 1.3 and 1.9 million years ago, respectively. The similarity is probably due to very similar habitats, food and lifestyle giving rise to parallel evolution. The team have proposed the new name Canis anthus (African golden wolf) for the African species.

Beating the Malevolent 'Intelligent Designer'

Poliovirus (bar = 5nm)

Photo Credit: F.P. Williams, U.S. EPA
Source: http://www.epa.gov/nerlcwww/polio.html

Nigeria's polio-free year sees Africa inch closer to eradication - New Scientist

The great news for creationists is that we are on the verge of defeating their malevolent 'Intelligent (sic) Designer'. How can that be good news for creationists? Read on.

One especially nasty little invention of this invisible magic entity (for those who've fallen for the hoax) is the virus that cause poliomyelitis, normally, but not exclusively, in children, hence its formerly common name, 'infantile paralysis'. It couldn't have evolved so it must have been designed, and design always has a purpose, if you've swallowed the hoax. So creationists have no alternative but to accept that their imaginary friend is hideously malevolent.

It might well be extinct within a year or so in Africa, despite the best efforts of religious fundamentalists to prevent it, thanks to medical science.

Polio, as it's also called, strikes without warning. In 90-95% of cases it causes no symptoms at all, in most of

Pygmy Puzzle for Creationists

Baka Pygmies of Gabon

Growth pattern from birth to adulthood in African pygmies of known age : Nature Communications : Nature Publishing Group

How do African Pygmies make the 'Intelligent (sic) Designer' look like an incompetent amnesiac?

Imagine you're a designer and you design something that's fit for purpose and does the job perfectly, why would you start again and design something else to do exactly the same job? Well, maybe if you're a chronic amnesiac and can't remember from one day to the next what you've designed, you'd maybe have an excuse, but you're hardly likely to be much of a designer and certainly not what people would regard as an intelligent one.

Why Is the 'Intelligent Designer' Siding With Bacteria?

Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Source: New Scientist
Image Credit: Juergen Berger/Science Photo Library

Fitness cost of antibiotic susceptibility during bacterial infection - Science Translation Medicine

You know, if you buy into the Intelligent Design hoax, it's becoming harder and harder not to conclude that the Intelligent Designer created Earth for bacteria and that higher life is simply somewhere for bacteria to live and something for them to live off.

We are used to seeing bacteria evolving resistance to the antibiotics human science creates to help us win the struggle against the bacteria that seem to randomly make us sick and even kill us, striking the pious and impious; the sinners and the saintly alike and in equal measure, as though whatever is designing and redesigning them is on the side of the bacteria.

Sudden Climate Change 6000 Years Ago!

Akkadian Empire

Source: Wikipedia - Akkadian Empire

Abrupt climate change may have rocked the cradle of civilization: Effects of climate on human societies -- ScienceDaily

This discovery could be really exciting news for bible literalists, who are obliged to believe highly unlikely tales with no evidence whatsoever. For example, one tale which seems to be precious to them is the story of how their magic invisible friend once drowned everything in a global flood. Apart from feeling smug about the fact that this monstrous genocide didn't involve them, it's hard to see why they find this story so compelling, but that's another matter.

Imagine then, if some of those scientists that creationists so despise because they keep finding out inconvenient things, actually came up with evidence

Now! A Four-Legged Transitional Lizard Snake!

Four-legged snake, Tetrapodophis amplectus

Source: Science Daily.
Image credit: University of Portsmouth.

A four-legged snake from the Early Cretaceous of Gondwana | Science.

I'm getting a bit tired of all these transitional fossils. It's getting so you can't pick up a decent biology or palaeontology journal without another team of researchers having found yet more of them. It's also getting so you can't turn to any creationist website, blog or Facebook group without seeing creationists flatly denying that they exist and refusing to look at the contradictory evidence.

I'm now seriously thinking of starting a new blog called No Transitional Fossils. The problem is I'm not sure I'd have time to write about them all and still have time for this one.

Who Really Wrote The Qur'an, and Why?

The Qur'an fragments from the Mingana Collection, Birmingham University Library, UK

'Oldest' Koran fragments found in Birmingham University - BBC News

Who wrote the Qur'an?

1. God.
2. Muhammad.
3. Nobody knows.

A basic Islamic apologetic is the claim that God wrote the Qur'an by guiding Muhammad's hand and the 'proof' of this is that an illiterate camel trader would have been incapable of writing it and such perfection

Building Blocks of Life Can Form In a Puddle

Ester-Mediated Amide Bond Formation Driven by Wet–Dry Cycles: A Possible Path to Polypeptides on the Prebiotic Earth - Forsythe - 2015 - Angewandte Chemie International Edition - Wiley Online Library

How will the Creation Industry handle this one?

Abstract
Although it is generally accepted that amino acids were present on the prebiotic Earth, the mechanism by which α-amino acids were condensed into polypeptides before the emergence of enzymes remains unsolved. Here, we demonstrate a prebiotically plausible mechanism for peptide (amide) bond formation that is enabled by α-hydroxy

Winged Transitional Dinosaur Puts Creationists in a Flap

An artist’s impression of Zhenyuanlong suni.

Image credit: Chuang Zhao.

A large, short-armed, winged dromaeosaurid (Dinosauria: Theropoda) from the Early Cretaceous of China and its implications for feather evolution : Scientific Reports

Another bad week for creationism as yet more of those 'non-existent' transitional fossils are found. This time, yet another of those feathered dinosaur fossils showing the evolution of birds from velociraptor dinosaurs that creationism is required to pretend didn't happen because it proves the biblical/qur'anic creation myth is laughably naive and based on ignorant guesses.

This one was found, like so many of these recent discoveries, was found in the Liaoning Province in northeastern China:

Unintelligent Design - Rapid Evolution No Guarantee of Success

Evidence for a Mid-Jurassic Adaptive Radiation in Mammals | Current Biology.

A large-scale assessment of skeletal and dental changes in Mesozoic mammals by a team from Oxford University, UK and Macquarie University, Australia has shown that mammal evolution during that period was up to ten times faster in the Middle Jurassic (200-145 million years ago) than it was at the end of it.

Highlights

So Farewell Then 'Pillars of Creation'

A higher-resolution HST image of the Pillars of Creation, taken in 2014 as a tribute to the original photograph

Source: Wikipedia - Pillars of Creation

Slightly sad news today that the iconic 'Pillars of Creation' are no more, blown away in a massive supernova explosion in the star nursery, the Eagle Nebula.

The 'Pillars of Creation', a formation of gas and dust first photographed in 1995 by the Hubble space telescope quickly became one of the top ten deep space images. They were so named because they are (or were) the early stages of star formation, being condensing gas and dust clouds which would normally collapse to form stars. The taller pillar is a mere five light-years tall.

The Eagle Nebula is 7,000 light-years from Earth which means that the image we see was as it was 7,000 years ago - a bit of a problem for creationists who like to imagine the Universe is only 6,000 years old.

This was discovered by a team from l'Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, Orsay, France who used an infrared image of the region taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope, which revealed a hitherto unseen cloud of hot gas advancing on the pillars. They presented their findings last Thursday to a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington, USA.

Creationism - Ignoring the Elephant

First comprehensive analysis of the woolly mammoth genome completed -- ScienceDaily

Creationism is largely about ignoring evidence. In fact, it depends almost entirely on pretending the evidence either isn't there or means something else, whilst simultaneously pretending there is a lot of evidence supporting creationism - if only it could be found and didn't need to be misrepresented.

Take, for example the known evolution of the

Creationism's 'Goldilocks' Fairy Tale Debunked

Artist's impression of gas and dust - the raw materials for making planets - swirl around a young star. The planets in our solar system formed from a similar disk of gas and dust captured by our sun.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Bricks to build an Earth found in every planetary system | Royal Astronomical Society.

Contrary to the creationist fantasy that there is something special about Earth which makes it the only place in the Universe where intelligent life could live, and where everything is 'just right' for humans, a paper presented to the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, Wales last Wednesday by Prof Brad Gibson, of the University of Hull, showed how Earth-like planets are very probably the norm in solar systems in the Milky Way galaxy.

Minerals made from building blocks of carbon, oxygen, magnesium, and silicon are thought to control the landscape of rocky planets that form in solar systems around Sun-like stars. A subtle difference in

Another Intermediate Fossil - Dinosaur Ancestor

Wendiceratops pinhornensis, artists reconstruction

Photo credit: Danielle Dufault

PLOS ONE: Cranial Anatomy of Wendiceratops pinhornensis gen. et sp. nov., a Centrosaurine Ceratopsid (Dinosauria: Ornithischia) from the Oldman Formation (Campanian), Alberta, Canada, and the Evolution of Ceratopsid Nasal Ornamentation | PLOS ONE.

Like I said in a previous blog, these intermediate fossils, which creationists stoically maintain don't exist because they illustrate something they are desperately trying to convince themselves doesn't happen, are so common one could almost dedicate a weekly blog to listing the new ones.

Mistletoe Shoots Creationism in its Achilles Heel

Mistletoe species lacks genes found in all other complex organisms -- ScienceDaily

Creationism and the Intelligent Design hoax require a simple narrative to appeal to simple people who know little of science, have no intention of learning any and who believe their ignorant intuition is the best available measure of reality.

For the creation industry, this narrative includes the simplistic notion that the scientific theory of evolution states that all evolution involves increasing complexity brought about by mutation in functional genes.

Integrity - The Difference Between Science & Religion

Dong-Pyou Han, faked results.

Photo credit: Charlie Neibergall/AP

Scientist behind fake HIV breakthrough sentenced to prison after spiking results | Society | The Guardian

News that Dong-Pyou Han, a former scientist working at ISU, has been sentenced to four and a half years in prison for making a fraudulent misstatement so obtaining millions of dollars of government funding, should be a matter of pride for the scientific community because it shows how scientific fraud is exposed by the scientific method. In the long run, results which are not reproducible by other teams and which begin to stand out as outliers, come under closer and closer scrutiny and will eventually be discarded.

What a Shocker! Another Creationist is Lying Again!

.@AtheistAdvocate Creationists predicted radiocarbon would be found in dinosaur bones. It was. http://t.co/kajZi8fstN

— Creation-Evolution (@crevinfo) July 1, 2015

When you don't have any evidence but you have a sacred dogma to not only defend at all costs but which you're desperate to get other people to believe too, in the belief that the more people who believe it the more true it will become, what else is there for creationists but to lie?

I came across this exchange on Twitter today. It's a claim that is currently doing the rounds on creationists sites and something I was challenged with on Facebook about a week ago. The claim is that scientists have isolated soft tissue from dinosaur 'bones' which has been carbon-dated to not more than four thousand years old, in a fossil which was believed to be 65 million years old.

When faced with this on Facebook, my reply was that if the recovered 'soft tissue' had been carbon-dated to four thousand years old then that would be evidence that sample had been contaminated. My proponent promptly disappeared and has not been seen since. It turns out he had been repeating a lie, knowingly or unknowingly anyway. Maybe he realised he'd been duped and ran in embarrassment.

What Was Creationism's God Doing For Eight Billion Years?

Kepler-186f, first validated Earth-size planet to orbit a star in the habitable zone (artist's impression)

Credit: NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech

Even stars older than 11 billion years have Earth-like planets: Precise ages of largest number of stars hosting planets ever measured -- ScienceDaily

A paper published a few days ago in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of researchers from the Stellar Astrophysics Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark have shown what they believe is evidence of Earth-sized planets orbiting 33 stars in the Milky Way galaxy that are about 11 billion years old. In other words, these planets were formed at least 8 billion years before Earth in a Universe that appears to have had the right conditions for creating these planetary systems right here in our own galaxy.

What Idiot Designed a Worm That Injects Sperm Into Its Own Head?

Macrostomum hystrix

Hypodermic self-insemination as a reproductive assurance strategy | Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences

You really have to laugh at creationism's 'Intelligent (sic) Designer' when you see the idiot stuff it supposedly designs.

Take this hermaphroditic flatworm that uses its penis as a hypodermic syringe to inject sperm into it's own head, for example! What sort of idiot would come up with a solution like that to the occasional problem of not finding another flatworm of the same species to exchange sperm with?

But it gets worse! The sperm then have to swim all the way down the length of the flatworm's body to get to the eggs in the tail, so they can fertilise them and produce what are, in effect clones of their parent.

Unlike Fundamentalists, Chimps Can Tell Right From Wrong.

Chimpanzees’ Bystander Reactions to Infanticide | Human Nature

Unlike fundamentalist Christians, who proudly boast that they have to use their holy book to understand what's right and what's wrong, and so bizarrely claim to be more moral than people who don't need a handbook, it seems even chimpanzees understand the difference, either instinctively or through culturally-inherited memes. Ironically, this indicates that this ability may even have been present in the last common ancestor shared by chimpanzees and humans.

This was the conclusion of a team from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, who allowed chimpanzees to

Catholic Church Just Doesn't Get It!

Anthony Colin Fisher, Archbishop of Sydney. Inconceivable tht he would not have approved the letter.

Catholic church writes to companies that support same-sex marriage | World news | The Guardian

The Catholic Church really doesn't get it.

It's not just the paedophile priests and nuns, abuse of vulnerable adults, financial corruption, support for autocratic right-wing dictatorships, the sale of 'confiscated' children, the systematic, sometimes brutal, cover-ups, the habitual avoidance of responsibilities for their crimes and casual hypocrisy of the church and it's clerics, bad though they are, that are causing people to vote with their feet and stay away from church.

Cardinal Brady Admits Official Abuse Coverup

Cardinal Seán Brady. Intimidated victims to keep abuses secret.

Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry: Cardinal Seán Brady admits 'shroud of secrecy' over Church sex abuse inquiry - BBC News

Cardinal Seán Brady, former head of the Catholic Church in all Ireland, has admitted the official church enquiry into the sexual abuse of young boys by Catholic priest, Fr Brendan Smyth, was conducted under a cloak of secrecy designed not to reveal the truth and protect and compensate the victims, but to protect the abuser and the church against scandal.

For his part in this coverup, Cardinal Brady, who has never been officially sanctioned by even so much as being stripped of his title, was allowed to retire on a full pension at the normal retiring age for a priest, after spending a year on fully-paid gardening leave whilst an underling did his work for him.

Brady made this admission to the Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry and admitted that the questioning of a 14 year-old victim was intimidatory, intrusive and

Another Transitional Fossil Turtle!

Grandfather turtle, Pappochelys

Photo credit: Rainer Schoch. Source: Smithsonian.com

A Middle Triassic stem-turtle and the evolution of the turtle body plan : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

These examples of what creationists tell us don't exist - transitional fossils - are getting so frequent that I'm wondering whether it's worth writing yet another blog about yet another one being found, or whether it would be simpler to just publish a weekly list of the latest.

But, having almost certainly just shed any creationists who might have had the courage to read the blog at all with that shocking title, I'll carry on, as those interested in truth might find it interesting.

This example, published in Nature yesterday, is of a 240 million year-old fossil from Germany which is

Now Something Else For Creationists To Ignore!

One gene may drive leap from single cell to multicellular life - life - 22 June 2015 - New Scientist

Creationists need to isolate themselves as far as possible from the reality around them - which why they're oblivious to that fact that, to normal people, they resemble a comical King Canute, ordering the tide to retreat, except that they also have their eyes shut and are pretending to not even notice the tsunami of scientific evidence engulfing them.

Actually, to be fair to the much maligned Canute, whose tale was told by the eventual winners, he was almost certainly trying to demonstrate to his army that even a king's powers are limited, so he shouldn't really be compared to a creationist.

More Sex With Neanderthals But No Original Sin

Smile!

Photo credit: AFP/Getty

An early modern human from Romania with a recent Neanderthal ancestor | Nature

This isn't so much new information as adding detail to what we already know.

We've known for several years now that all non-African populations have some Neanderthal DNA, showing without a doubt that humans came up against and interbred with, to a limited degree, the Neanderthal population that had evolved from members of an earlier migration out of Africa.

Does God Hate Vultures Too?

Lappet-Faced Vulture, Torgos tracheliotus

Another Continental Vulture Crisis: Africa's Vultures Collapsing toward Extinction | Conservation Letters - Wiley Online Library.

With so many species in serious decline and under threat of imminent extinction, creationists and Intelligent Design hoaxers have some explaining to do. They at least owe it to their followers to explain why their creator god either intended this to happen or is powerless to prevent it. Admittedly, they will need to face up to some unpleasant realities to do so, but at least they'll know they aren't living a lie.

What they need to grasp is that their notion, it it were any good, would be applicable across the entire range of biological science, not just the cherry-picked pieces that make their dupes feel important or to provide easy, default answers to the parts that are hard to understand without learning basic science, putting aside

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