Another of Those (Missing) Transitional Species Found!

Homo naledi. Reconstruction by paleoartist John Gurche

Image credit: John Gurche / Mark Thiessen / National Geographic.

Homo naledi: new species of ancient human discovered, claim scientists | Science | The Guardian

We've known about the Rising Star Cave, and that there was something important there, for some time now, so it's no real surprise that palaeoanthropologists have announced this find. In fact, I first wrote about it in November 2014.

What is perhaps surprising is that they've classified these remains as members of our Homo genus rather than members of the Australopithecus genus, because this would be the first archaic hominid from outside East Africa, where it was generally assumed Homo had evolved from Australopithecines such as A. afarensis. But, it ties in quite nicely with the alternative theory that true hominids evolved further south possibly from A. sediba.

This find is stunning not only because of the number of individuals found in the cave but because of their condition. To find so many in one place is almost unprecedented and on a par with the much later Atapuerca site in Spain, which is still yielding up its secrets.

Mutant Clones? Not Darwinian But Science Explains Them

Loss of Karma transposon methylation underlies the mantled somaclonal variant of oil palm | Nature.

Despite its daunting title, this research paper shows the explanatory power of the recently-discovered field of epigenetics.

For those not familiar with this science, epigenetics is the study of the way, in complex multicellular organisms where cells are highly differentiated and specialised to perform very different functions, the same genome is made to perform different functions. Clearly, the genes needed to make and work muscles in mammals or leaves in trees, are not the

The Old Dead Gods Of Wiltshire

Stonehenge

© LBI ArchPro, Geert Verhoeven

The Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project reveals traces of standing stones beneath Durrington Walls super-henge | Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology

Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England is one of the most important, if not the most important, neolithic monuments in Europe. It was clearly immensely important to those who built it, changed it and rebuilt it over hundreds of years. Clearly too, the site itself was of some importance because it is unlikely to have been chosen at random as it is surrounded by other neolithic sites and monuments.

Some of the stones are believed to have been brought

Another Load of Intelligent Design Balls

Puffball"

There are a few sure-fire ways to tell whether something has been designed, even if not particularly intelligently:

1. It has a clear function or purpose.
2. It is as simple as it can be to fulfil that function or purpose - fitness for purpose.
3. It achieves that function or purpose as efficiently as possible.

Of course, as you would expect of something like living things, examples which demonstrate these qualities are about as common as hen's teeth - which is how we know they weren't designed and why anyone who isn't profoundly ignorant of biology finds the claims of Intelligent Design hoaxers so transparently implausible as to be laughably childish.

I'll illustrate this with something I found on a very pleasant walk in Mid-Wales a few weeks ago - puffballs.

OMG! Look What The Intelligent Designer Wants Us to Eat Now!

PLOS Pathogens: Distinct but Spatially Overlapping Intestinal Niches for Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococcus faecium and Carbapenem-Resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae

Let's pretend the Intelligent Design hoax is real and that everything that happens in nature is by design.

I'm afraid we'll have to drop the nonsensical stuff about this designer being benevolent or even particularly anthropophilic though, because the facts just don't sustain that notion at all, even if we bend over backwards to accommodate the notion of Intelligent Design by ignoring so much evidence. Some mental acrobatics require a mental agility that results in too many strains and breakages for comfort.

Idiotic Antics of the Unintelligent Designer.

Arizona’s virgin ant queens could shed light on the predictability of evolution | Science/AAAS | News

It makes you wonder just how many examples of the sheer stupidity and lack of intelligence in so much of biological 'design' it will take to force creationists to abandon their notion that a magic man intelligently designed everything.

I mean, it's like continually showing them the flat surfaces, sharp edges and corners on a cube to convince them it's not a sphere and have them tell you you're the one with the problem; you're the one who can't recognise a sphere when you see one.

Hawks And Jays Made Hummingbirds Evolve

Black-chinned hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri)

Hawks Act as Unwitting Muscle for Hummingbirds | Science | Smithsonian

"My enemy's enemy is my friend" might be a cynical policy when it comes to government foreign relations, but it seems to work at least some of the time when it comes to genes (or maybe memes).

It has long been recognised by ornithologists that the nests of black-chinned hummingbirds in Arizona, USA, tend to be clustered around the nests of goshawks and Cooper's hawks, but the reason for this were not previously understood, and was maybe even somewhat counter-intuitive.

Now a team of researchers from Ecuador, Canada and the USA made detailed observations of the movements

How Rapid Evolution Works

Guppies. Ideal subject to study evolution.

Change in environment can lead to rapid evolution -- ScienceDaily

Many things in science are counter-intuitive, which is the basic reason we use control groups and other methods designed to remove bias, and also why we don't simply do science by thinking about things in the belief that we can work out the answers by intuition.

Human intuition is not the powerful tool that people who dispute science on the basis of personal incredulity, often backed by profound ignorance of the subject, like to imagine.

Victims of Christianity

Cromwell's victim

Durham Palace Green remains were Scottish prisoners - BBC News

One of the claims Christians like to make is that the morals they get from their god through their religion are:

1. Superior to non-Christians.
2. Eternal, objective and unchanging - the so-called fixed 'moral compass'.

Of course, this claim of moral superiority needs to be rationalised when Christians, as happens very frequently and often conspicuously, behave in ways which no decent person would regard as moral, and then blame their god or the Bible for their behaviour.

Cue now the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy where the Christians behaving badly are designated as 'not true Christians' because 'true Christians' don't behave like that. In this way the false universal claim that Christians have superior morals because they were given them by the one true god through the one true religion is protected by simply excluding anyone who doesn't meet that 'universal' truth.

Creationists Lie About Jesus!

When Peer Review Lets You Down: A YEC Quote Problem – Naturalis Historia

After a few days wrestling with the book publishing process and discovering the joys of book promotion, it's time I got back to blogging. This time, we have a wonderful example of how professional creationists lie to their followers and to anyone else they can reach, and how they depend on their marks' ignorance to get away with it.

Normally, the ICR confines its misrepresentations and disinformation to science, especially the sciences which most threaten the Bible literalism they espouse and the literal interpretation of Genesis they try to sell to their followers; evolutionary biology, geology and archaeology, so it's unusual to see them quite blatantly misrepresenting not just the Bible but the Jesus they purport to follow.

This Are The Books What I Wrote!

Publishing a book has a few pitfalls, at least if you self-publish on Amazon. I had assumed you wrote it in Microsoft Word or something similar, then just submitted it. It hadn't occurred to me that size was important - it's never been an issue before.

So, I thought that about 450 pages would be a reasonably generous size because I'd hate my readers to be disappointed. But 450 pages on the default MS Word page size, when uploaded became about 750 when auto-formatted for Kindle.

Okay, I thought, so that's really generous and it costs so little. Go for it! Now for the paperback.

Well, that was easy, I thought. All you have to do it tell Amazon's CreateSpace publishing department to auto-fit it to the page size you've chosen - 8 x 10 inches - and it'll do the rest. All I have to do now is order a few proofs - enough for family and friends at the special price - and wait for the parcel to arrive all the way from America. Best wait to check that they look okay before unleashing them on the waiting paperback book market though, just in case...

Oh No! Not Transitional Penguins!

Eocene Penguin from Peru

New fossil skulls reveal insights about penguin brain evolution -- ScienceDaily

Some 35 million years ago, stem penguins were doing something creationists insist never happens; they were transitioning from flying species to aquatic species.

Evolutionary transition is something that any self-respecting creationist will have had lots of practice at denying because examples of it are so abundant in the fossil record - where they shouldn't be if everything was created as is, by magic. So, rather than incorporate these facts into their world view, they retain their evidence-free world view by denying the facts. This is how we know creationism is a dogma, not a science.

Oh Heck! A Fossil Out Of Place!

Life reconstruction of Gueragama sulamericana in its palaeohabitat.*

Reconstruction created by J. Csotonyi.

Fossil remains of Old World lizard discovered in the New World overturn long-held hypothesis of lizard evolution -- ScienceDaily

Normally, a headline about a long-held hypothesis about evolution being overturned would gladden the heart of any creationist more used to a constant stream of scientific papers showing creationism to be nothing more than an infantile fairy tale based on scientific ignorance. Is this J. B. S. Haldane's Cretaceous rabbit?

Well, no! But it is a Cretaceous lizard in the 'wrong' continent.

But there are a couple of small problems with this one; firstly it clears up something of a mystery in lizard evolution, and secondly, to try to make much of it, a creationist will need to accept a very old Earth, plate tectonics and the fundamental principle of evolution from a common ancestors. Well, either that, or revert to denialism and God did it! assertions as usual.

Another Bible Bloomer - God's Law is Unjust!

Stone 'em, I say! It's the only language these women understand!

The author of the Gospel of Matthew is a bit like a fireship launched into the wind, the way he blunders about stupidly off message and making the Bible stories about Jesus look even more absurd. I think of it as Matthew's Silly Bible. It's a wonder his effort got included in the Bible at all when it was being compiled. It had obviously been read with about as much thought as it was written with.

Here's another of his blunders - he tells us that God's Laws are not just laws, as in laws designed to give justice.

First, God's Law as it relates to pre-marital sex and adultery, especially if a husband finds his wife has played the field a little.

Slaying the Creationist Dragon

The 'pterosaur' of Black Dragon Canyon, Utah

Source: Science.

Credit: WHIT RICHARDSON/ALAMY

Source: Science.

Credit: WHIT RICHARDSON/ALAMY

‘Winged monster’ on ancient rock art debunked by scientists | Science/AAAS | News

Creationism is really little more than an obsession with fossils, probably because creationists realise what a threat fossils pose to their simplistic, Bible literalist views.

When dinosaur fossils were first found, they were dismissed variously as 'Devil stones' planted by Satan to mislead us; the bones of giants or 'Behemoth' so confirming the Bible; forgeries and fakes by lying scientists; diseased versions of living species or indeed

The Wit and Wisdom of Deepak!

Here's a little test.

See if you can pick out the genuine Deepak Chopra quotes taken at random from his twitter feed, from the randomly generated fictional Deepak Chopra quotes from this site.

It has been said by some that the thoughts and tweets of Deepak Chopra are indistinguishable from a set of profound sounding words put together in a random order, particularly the tweets tagged with "#cosmisconciousness". This site aims to test that claim! Each "quote" is generated from a list of words that can be found in Deepak Chopra's Twitter stream randomly stuck together in a sentence.

The enigmatic wisdom of Deepak Chopra

Evolution of HIV Took 11-16 Million Years.

Model of a retrovirus capsid hexamer, showing the conserved beta-hairpin domains common to most kinds of retroviruses (circled) and a pocket containing additional sites thought to affect recognition of lentiviruses by the TRIM5 anti-viral defense proteins of old world monkeys (arrow).

Credit: Johnson et al, CC-BY

PLOS Pathogens: Evolutionary and Functional Analysis of Old World Primate TRIM5 Reveals the Ancient Emergence of Primate Lentiviruses and Convergent Evolution Targeting a Conserved Capsid Interface

If you sincerely want to be a sanctimonious religious bigot presenting yourself as the moral superior of other people, it helps to base it on real facts, not made up ones. Take, for example, those morally reprehensible evangelical Christian and Muslim bigots who like to condemn people suffering from AIDS by pointing the finger and telling them that the virus which causes it was made by God to punish sinners, especially homosexuals.

It ought to be something of a shock to these repugnant bigots then, to discover that the virus wasn't created at all but has been evolving slowly over at least 11 million years and maybe for 16 million years, just as everything else has been, and is an interesting example of the product of an ongoing arms race between pathogen and victim, with all the intelligence to be found in a fruitless arms race - i.e., none at all.

The Sacoshite is Lying Again

Manuel de Dios Agosto, aka Sacerdotus, Sacoshite, Sacodogturds, etc., etc., is quite besides himself with rage and even more desperate for money and attention. What seems to have set him off again is the publication of my Kindle book, The Light Of Reason: And Other Atheist Writing and, in characteristic Manny style, he's plumbing new depths of dishonesty the more desperate he gets.

The unemployable expelled seminarian has now taken to posting on G+ some faked 'screenshots' of Twitter tweets he claims are mine, even accusing me of what amounts to incitement to murder. Bear in mind that this sad little man has even faked emails purporting to come from Oxfam which in an unprecedented intervention on Twitter, Oxfam publically repudiated and confirmed Manny was lying.

Synthetic DNA Cure For Malevolent 'Design'

MERS-CoV

Photo credit: NIAID

Synthetic DNA vaccine against MERS induces immunity in animal study -- ScienceDaily

Supposing you were asked to place individuals on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 as highly moral, caring, compassionate with a desire to help the sick, and 10 as a mass-murdering, uncaring psychopath devoid of any morals whatsoever. Where on that scale would you place someone who designed a means of randomly killing hundreds or thousands of people who had done nothing more than happen to come into contact with someone else who had been randomly selected for this treatment and which especially selected those who tried to care for the sick?

More of that in a moment.

Although proponents of 'Intelligent Design' will normally vehemently deny it, it is almost a defining characteristic that they are also fundamentalist creationists and often Bible literalists. That the supposed 'Intelligent Designer' is actually the Abrahamic god of the Bible, Talmud and Qur'an is one of the worst kept secrets in religious apologetics. 'Intelligent Design' is merely creationism dressed up to look like science.

More Stupidity From the Idiot Designer

A female adult varroa mite, Varroa destructor, feeds on the hemolymph of a honey bee pupa.

Photograph: Jason Graham, University of Florida. Source.

Museum samples reveal rapid evolution by wild honey bees exposed to a novel parasite : Nature Communications : Nature Publishing Group

Although they'll spend hours scraping around for something that seems hard to explain, even when it has been explained (but their followers would never know that), for something to wave around as 'proof', 'Intelligent (sic) Design' advocates never seem to talk about those very many examples to be found in nature where the only explanation, assuming for a moment that it had been designed, is that the designer was an incompetent idiot that designs without forethought and with complete amnesia about what else it has designed.

Ethiopian Double Whammy For Creationists

Detail of the marks on a fossilized rib bone, one of the two controversial bones.

Source: PastHorizons. Image credit: Zeresenay Alemseged

Taphonomy of fossils from the hominin-bearing deposits at Dikika, Ethiopia - Journal of Human Evolution.

Here's something for creationists to try to fit into their notion of a young Earth and a special one-day creation by magic; a team of palaeoanthropologists led by Jessica Thompson, an assistant professor of anthropology at Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA, believe they have shown that the marks on two 3.4 million year-old fossilised bones found at Dikika, Ethiopia, were made by stone tools, probably when butchering the animals.

Sadly, once again the paper sits behind a paywall and the publishers, this time Elsevier Ltd., want to charge for permission even to reproduce the abstract, which can be read here.

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.