Religious 'Nones' Quickly Becoming Less Religious

Religious 'nones' becoming more secular | Pew Research Center

More signs of the growing penetration of secular Atheism into that bastion of Christian fundamentalism, the USA, was published today by the Pew Research Center. One wonders if there will ever again be an honest survey which is good news for religion. It has been relentlessly bad news for about the last 50 years and seems to be getting much worse.

Recent surveys have tended to concentrate not so much on the growth of Atheism in America per se but in the growth on 'nones' as a proportion of the population and consequent decline in the proportion of groups such as Catholics, Episcopalian, Baptist and other Protestants, etc.

Several people have rightly pointed out that 'none' is not the same as Atheist and that many 'nones' remain religious, some deeply so. It simply means anyone who doesn't self-identify as affiliated to any particular faith or denomination.

The Power Of Magical Thinking

Believing What We Do Not Believe: Acquiescence to Superstitious Beliefs and Other Powerful Intuitions | PsycNET

How do religious people manage to hold two mutually exclusive view simultaneously?

How for example, does someone like Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project and passionate advocate for evolution on an old Earth in an older Universe, whose entire academic career depended on his understanding and acceptance of the role of DNA in evolution, still manage to believe he needs to beg forgiveness because he inherited the 'sin' of a founding pair of humans who were made by magic a few thousand years ago?

Blessed Are The Cringe-Makers...

Talking Jesus Booklet | Evangelical Alliance, Church of England & Hope Together

I wrote a few days ago about a survey showing that 39% of English people believed Jesus is fiction. This survey, carried out by Barna Group and ComRes, has now been published in the form of a booklet - and it makes some more astonishing reading.

Firstly, it found that, of those English adults who believe Jesus was real, only 20% believe he was a god. 47% think he was a normal human being, a prophet or a spiritual leader of some sort. If anything, this finding is even more encouraging than the 39% who think Jesus is fiction.

Evolution In Progress In Europe's Smallest Bird

Female Western goldcrest (R. r. regulus)

Photo credit: Missy Osborn Source: Wikipedia

We went to church this morning. To be strictly accurate, we went to a church car park.

Against the backdrop of a leaden sky and slightly damping but unseasonably mild breeze, and following a fair amount of rain yesterday, we decided to go for a slightly muddy walk in St Mary's Fields in Kidlington. What we saw leads me to another illustration of the logical absurdity and scientific sterility of the cult of creationism in its various sub-flavours.

We had to go to Kidlington to check on some work being done to a cottage for an absent relative, so stuck for something to do we decided to explore this village to the north of Oxford which claims to be the biggest

Good Without God - Children of Atheists More Generous

The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World | Current Biology

Despite their posturing as paragons of moral virtue, often shouted out from what more resembles the sewer beneath gutter than the rooftops they imagine they are standing on, a study has shown that children of religious parents, and so it must be assumed the parents from whom these children get their morals, are actually less moral than the children of Atheist parents.

How Humans And Rice Co-Evolved

Three geographically separate domestications of Asian rice : Nature Plants

Here is a good example of how a change in a species' environment can cause evolution and how that evolutionary change can feed back into the environment to cause changes in yet another species. In this case it's about how the different varieties of rice evolved and how these new varieties then facilitated changes in human populations and human culture.

It has generally been assumed that rice cultivation began in China along the Yangtze River Valley some

The Darwin Creationist Award 2015 - Call For Candidates

After a gap of a year, I've decided to reinstate the prestigious Darwin Creationist Award. Well, there are far too many hilarious anti-science, pro-ignorant superstition posts on Facebook and Twitter to waste on the gullible and credulous who probably don't appreciate the funny side or the sheer 22 caret gold balm-pot lunacy that lurks in creationism, so we might as well have a good laugh and allow a wider audience to enjoy them too.

And what better way to discredit creationism than a display of creationist... er... creativity, and lack of critical thinking skills, than to put them on public display?

Unlike the Darwin Award, which is given to anyone who, by an act so stupid, improved the human gene pool by removing themselves and their genes from it, the Darwin Creationist award is given to the creationists who, by a post on the social media so stupid that it helps to improve the human meme pool by removing creationism from it. The winner will be decided by popular vote. The prize will be getting their effort to a wider audience so they can enjoy it too.

Recent winners can be see here, and here. Can anyone beat Joe Cienkowski's winning entry from 2013?

Post links in comments below, in reply to the post on G+ or to my Facebook timeline here or the dedicated Darwin Creationist Award Facebook page. Please supply a link to the candidate post with enough detail to identify the poster and include an optional citation explaining why the candidate is worthy of the award. Posts must be original. Creationists may not nominate themselves, even if under the impression that the award is intended as an endorsement of their post.

Here's a starter:

1. Nominee: Richard Haralambos (Facebook) - 03 Nov 2015
   
   Text: Lots nonsense they drape in science that are nothing but (theories) they call it but rare nothing but logical fallacy and strawman invented stories....
   Smaller then the head of a pin.... Idiots with no common sense can tell that's weak and stupid...
   
   Citation: In typical creationist self-worshipping style, Richard feels he doesn't need to learn any science because his intuition tells him everything he needs to know, including the 'fact' that scientists are mentally defective for not agreeing with him.

Evolution In Progress: New Wasp Species Emerging

Utetes canaliculatus, one of the wasps in the process of evolving.

Sequential divergence and the multiplicative origin of community diversity | PNAS

And another mainstay of creationism - the nonsensical dogma that new species can't arise by evolution - comes crashing down, as does the dogma that speciation has never been observed.

Evolution is primarily driven by environmental change because these changes open up new opportunities for random variations to be an advantage in, so creating something for natural selection to select for (or not to select against). In this way, biodiversity feeds upon itself to give more biodiversity.

Jesus Is Fiction Say 39% of English People

Jesus 'not a real person' many believe - BBC News

According to a poll of 3,000 people living in England, conducted jointly by the Church of England, Hope and the Evangelical Alliance, 39% of those questions didn't believe Jesus was a real person. This was particularly marked amongst the under 35 year-olds who were 25% more likely to reject the historicity of Jesus than the over 35's.

The same survey also found that 'over 43%' of those interviewed believe Jesus rose from the dead. Stated that way round it doesn't look quite so bad for

Transitional Human Ancestor From Spain

Reconstruction of the skull and representation of Pliobates cataloniae.

Photo credit: Marta Palmero, Institut Català de Paleontologia

Miocene small-bodied ape from Eurasia sheds light on hominoid evolution

I said the other day that this was shaping up to be another bad week for creationists (are there ever any good ones?). Now scientists have only gone and found another of those 'non-existent transitional fossils'.

This one is from the our branch of the evolutionary tree at a point soon after the divergence of primates into the Old World or catarrhine monkeys and the anthropoid apes and close to the point where the anthropoid branch diverged again into the gibbons or hylobatids and the hominoids (great apes, including humans). It suggests that the last common ancestor of ours and gibbons was more gibbon-like than has generally been assumed.

Unlike Creationists, Ravens Can Tell Right From Wrong

Tolerance and reward equity predict cooperation in ravens (Corvus corax) : Scientific Reports

Who would you expect to be better at telling right from wrong and deciding on an ethical course of action, a devoutly religious person or a Raven?

The answer, if we take the word of creationists, religious fundamentalists and even many serious theologians, is maybe surprising.

God The Amnesiac Creator

Micromelerpeton credneri from the Early Permian of Germany. Regeneration of the forelimb is indicated in the sequence and results in a hand with malformations.

Credit: Kalliopi Monoyios - Science Illustration and Communication
Source: ScienceDaily

Deep-time evolution of regeneration and preaxial polarity in tetrapod limb development | Nature.

"Why doesn't God heal amputees?"

Despite all the claims of faith healers, all the assurances that if you have enough faith and pray hard enough, God will provide for your needs, humans don't regenerate limbs and nor do any other mammals. I suppose a small handful of amputees could be found who wouldn't want their limb(s) restored in full working order but I've never heard of one and I doubt many people have, so it's safe to assume that amongst amputees there are very many who must have tried prayer.

Yet there is no authenticated case of a human limb ever regenerating beyond the tip of a finger occasionally regenerating in children under 5 years old if the amputation is clean and above the nail bed.

Civil War Erupts In The Vatican

Vatican synod holds its line on gay couples but offers new hope to Catholic divorcees | World news | The Guardian

Pope Francis’s enemies inside the church leaked false story that he had a brain tumour, enraged Vatican says | National Post

Despite starting off with high hopes that Pope Francis would prevail in the Synod of Bishops in his efforts to liberalise the Catholic Church and soften its image, after three weeks of tortuous and acrimonious debate, the conservatives have again prevailed and reaffirmed the Catholic Church's implacably hostile bigotry toward homosexuality, again declaring that homosexuality is an 'intrinsic disorder'.

Why Smelly Eggs Evolved. No Intelligence There, Then!

Stick insect eggs

Photo credit: Piotr Naskrecki/Minden Pictures/Corbis | Source: Science

Stick insects lure ants with fatty knobs | Science/AAAS | News

Here's a lovely example of evolved mimicry, this time in stick insects. Stick insects are noted for their mimicry of, well... sticks really.

By studying the Australian stick insect, Eurycnema goliath, Australian scientists from Macquarie University, North Ryde, New South Wales and The University of Melbourne, have discovered that they also employ mimicry to have their eggs dispersed and protected - by ants.

Earliest Flowering Plants But No Bouquet for Creationists

Montsechia fossil

Photo: Bernard Gomez/Lyon University, France
Source: Smithsonian.com

Montsechia, an ancient aquatic angiosperm

I often used to start these sorts of blogs off with a comment about it being yet another bad week for creationism, but quite honestly it's increasingly difficult to find a week which hasn't been relentlessly bad for creationism.

No wonder they have just about given up trying to refute the scientific evidence against their crackpot notion and have tended to concentrate on trying to discredit the scientific method and even science itself, or simply trying to get away with ancient creationist articles that were long ago refuted by science, in the hope that they'll find a few ignorant dupes who don't know enough to know they've been refuted.

For example, this paper has pushed back the date of

How Science Works - New Thinking From Old Teeth

These 47 human teeth, dated to 80,000-120,000 years ago, were found in a limestone cave system in Daoxian, China.

Photos: S. Xing and X-J. Wu
Source: Nature (reprinted under licence #3733841429431)

Teeth from China reveal early human trek out of Africa | Nature.

An example of how science continually reassesses what it thinks it knows and adjusts its theories in the light of new evidence, was published a few days ago in Nature. It's things like this that makes science such an exciting, living thing, full of surprises and so rewarding for anyone interested in gaining a real understanding of the world we live in.

We thought we had the pattern of the expansion of fully modern humans out of Africa and into Eurasia pretty much worked out, give or take a few thousand years. It also seemed fairly clear that our interaction with the

Order From Chaos, Even In The Rocks Of Ages

Why Hexagonal Basalt Columns? | Physical Review Letters

I've never been to the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, nor to Fingal's Cave on Staffa in the Outer Hebrides but they're on my bucket list. Maybe one day when I'm rich from <irony>all my book sales </irony>. What I have seen though is the Great Whin Sill alongside Hadrian's Wall at Houseteads in Cumbria.

They're not so obvious there but parts of the Whin Sill are composed of hexagonal stacks like the Giant's Causeway. At first glance it would be easy to assume that they are man-made or even superman-made (hence the legend of Benandonner and Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn MacCool)), those remnants of the pre-Christian Irish pantheon.

Creationism Fails! Universe Didn't Need A God To Exist

Short distance physics of the inflationary de Sitter universe - IOPscience.

A team of Canadian theoretical physicists claim to have solved the question of how the Universe arose from nothing. And guess what? It didn't need a magic creator; it can all be explained in materialist terms.

Now, I don't have the maths or detailed knowledge of physics to be able to fully understand the underlying principles they used, let alone to be able to explain it in simple terms, so I'm dependant on what others have said.

Oldest Mammal Skin, Hair and Internal Organs.

Spinolestes xenarthrosus, 125 million-year-old remains, found in Cuenca, in what was the Las Hoyas wetland area of central Spain.

Photograph: Georg Oleschinski.
Source: The Guardian.

A Cretaceous eutriconodont and integument evolution in early mammals | Nature.

Like the stunning early bird fossil from Spain which I wrote about a few days ago, another fossil from Spain, this time of an early mammal from about the same period, demands some answers from creationists. Like the bird fossil, this one sheds a lot of light on the early evolution of this order as they diversified from their reptilian ancestors in an environment still dominated by the dinosaurs.

The thing about this fossil, apart from its age, is the amazing detail of the hair, skin and internal organs which has been preserved. The belief is that the body of this small, rat-sized, insect-eating mammal probably ended up in a bog where it became coated with a bacterial sheet soon after death which offered a degree of protection. It extends the earliest fossil record of mammalian skin back 60 million years to 125 million years.

No Doubt Now, Birds Evolved From Dinosaurs

A comprehensive phylogeny of birds (Aves) using targeted next-generation DNA sequencing | Nature.

Just a couple of days ago I wrote about another one of those 'transitional' fossils creatonists insist aren't there, and how this one shows how birds had evolved out of theropod dinosaurs and should more properly be regarded as flying dinosaurs.

I also speculated about whether it was warm-bloodedness and feathers which helps them survive the climate change following the the meteor strike which probably abruptly exterminated the terrestrial dinosaurs so opening up niches for the birds and mammals to radiate into.

Hey Creationists! Guess What A Little Birdie Told Us.

Credit: Stephanie Abramowicz

Source: ScienceDaily

Tiny ancient fossil from Spain shows birds flew over the heads of dinosaurs | Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Would you believe it! Another one of those non-existent transitional fossils has turned up again, this time in a 125 million years ago Cretaceous rock from Spain. And just when creationists were getting used to dismissing all the ones from China as 'forgeries', despite there being no evidence for the claim!

In as clear an example as you could wish for of the transition from dinosaurs to birds, a paper published by an international group of palaeontologists shows that a fossil of a tiny feathered dinosaur proto-bird from Spain has unmistakeable evidence that it had the musculature for sophisticated flight, by being able to control individual flight feathers in its wings.

Special Offer On My Books

My ebook, The Light Of Reason: And Other Atheist Writing is available as a single volume for Kindle at a special discount for the next few days only!

Update: Unfortunately, Amazon have ended the 'Matchbook' scheme so eboks can no longer be bought at a special low price by people who already have the paperback version. They can still be bought for the normal price, however.

And now, the four-volumes of the paperback series are also available as ebooks at a special rate if you buy the paperback versions. They are:

• The Light of Reason: And Other Atheist Writings: Volume 1
• The Light of Reason: Volume II - Atheism, Science and Evolution: Volume 2
• The Light of Reason: Volume III - Apologetics, Fallacies, and Other Frauds: Volume 3
• The Light Of Reason: Volume IV - The Silly Bible: Volume 4

Of course, if you're a subscriber to Kindle Unlimited, you get to read them for free anyway.

And you don't even need to own a Kindle because you can download an app for smartphone or laptop/desktop.

Go on! Treat yourself today. Because you're worth it! Just a click away!

---

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Africans Are Partly Eurasians

Ethiopian cave where the skull was found

Ancient Ethiopian genome reveals extensive Eurasian admixture throughout the African continent

Did we ever imagine that once anatomically modern humans had left Africa to populate Eurasia, they never went back again until modern times?

This seems to be the main thrust of the news media to today's new that a group of geneticists have analysed the genome from a 4,500 hunter-gatherer from the Ethiopian Highlands and found that he was genetically distinct from modern Africans who have since received a massive dose of Eurasian DNA which came into Africa about 3,000 years ago.

Creationism Fails Again! How Elephants Avoid Cancer

Yipee! I've got 20 TP53 genes!

How elephants avoid cancer : Nature News & Comment:

Let's play a game and pretend there really is a magic invisible creator above the sky, like creationists and their pseudo-science version, Intelligent Design, want us to believe. What are we then to make of two research papers which could explain why elephants have such a low incidence of cancer? One team was led by Joshua Schiffman, a paediatric oncologist and scientist at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA and the other by Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, USA.

And God Gave Man Dominion...

Chernobyl after the explosion.

Long-term census data reveal abundant wildlife populations at Chernobyl: Current Biology

According to creationists, their magic invisible friend in the sky created everything on Earth for humans, then put them in charge of it, presumably, because it thought its creation needed managing.

So, on that basis, which should be worse for life on Earth, humans or radioactive contamination? Would nature be better off without humans or with humans running the show?

If the results of a survey of the wildlife around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor is a guide, human beings are far less nature-friendly than even nuclear contamination, and, when left alone, nature can be far more resilient than we might expect.

The Chernobyl nuclear reactor, now in Ukraine, then in the Ukraine SSR and under the direct authority of the Soviet Union, became notorious in 1986 when its reactor ran out of control, destroying the building it was housed in and spraying the surrounding area with

Spider Have Creationists Down On Their Knees

Developing spider embryos.
Lt: expressing the original dachshund gene. Rt: expressing the duplicate gene.

Photo credit: Nikola-Michael Prpic,
Göttingen Center for Molecular Biosciences,
University of Göttingen, Germany

Neofunctionalisation of a duplicate dachshund gene underlies the evolution of a novel leg segment in arachnids | Molecular Biology and Evolution.

If you're an arthropod and unable to fly you need to be good at scuttling, so you need legs that scuttle efficiently. Spiders and scorpions have good scuttling legs because they have kneecaps or patellae. In the arachnid limbs, the patella forms a unique limb segment that gives their legs greater scuttleability.

The way they evolved these patellae has just been worked out and published in Molecular Biology and Evolution. It is acutely embarrassing to the creationist frauds who tell their dupes that no new information can arise by mutation and that mutations are invariably

Smelling Of Poo Is Not All Bad

Ceratocaryum argenteum

Faecal mimicry by seeds ensures dispersal by dung beetles | Nature Plants

Only yesterday I suggested that smelling or tasting of faeces might give an advantage to some species by repelling a potential predator which had evolved faecal aversion for obvious reasons. Now today we have a paper published in Nature Plants which shows how smelling of faeces might have another advantage.

Again, this is an example of an evolved feature in one species creating an environment conducive to evolution in a particular direction in another. It's also an example of the sort of deceptive mimicry I wrote about yesterday.

Lessons From The Dordogne - Evolving Insects

Here are some examples of one of the important drivers in evolution - the need to avoid being eaten. I took these pictures on our recent holiday in France but you don't need to go all the way to France to find similar ones. You can probably find several in your back yard or any roadside verge or hedgerow.

The first, on the right is of a grasshopper. It's slightly above dead center.

Can't see it? Well, that's rather the point. Zoom in to find it.

This species lives in grassland and, if it keeps still, looks just like a piece of brown vegetation, even having marks that mimic the shadows cast by blades of grass.

Scroll down for a close up.

The Perfect End To A Perfect Week - For The Vatican Old Guard

Vatican acts after Polish priest reveals homosexuality - BBC News.

Oops! It'd been another bad week for 'Uncle' Pope Francis, the Pope trying to rehabilitate the Catholic Church after being rocked to its foundations as one scandal after another revealed the stinking cesspit the Vatican had become.

One of Hapless Frank's tasks was to make the Church look a little less bigoted and intolerant and a little more kindly disposed to women, homosexuals, non-Catholics, etc. Although little real progress has

Everyone Needs Their Mummy!

Mummified remains of Britons were preserved by smoking or being placed in peat bogs – a different process to those of ancient Egyptians.

Photograph: Keystone-ZUMA/Rex Features
Source: The Guardian

Mummification was commonplace in Bronze Age Britain | News - University of Seffield.

Need a favour? In dispute with your neighbour over land? Want to adjust the world a little in your favour? No problem; just tell your mummy!

News today that the practice of worshipping bits of old dead patriarch or matriarch which I wrote about a few days ago in the context of the Catholic Church and it's obsession with the body parts of dead 'saints', may predate Christianity by many thousands of years and is just another pagan tradition which was incorporated into Christianity.

You Can't Keep A Good Homophobe Down

What happened when Kim Davis met the Pope? - BBC News.

Despite all his public protestations of goodwill to all gays and his desire to reform the Catholic Church to make it more kindly, tolerant, loving and forgiving and willing to embrace even women and homosexuals - or to at least acknowledge their worth as human beings, though not letting them anywhere near the centres of power, obviously, ‘Uncle’ Pope Francis has let slip the mask.

He has revealed the nastiness and sense of privilege and entitlement to hate and persecute that is still hiding beneath this cloak of affable inclusivity.

Black Rice and Creationist Not-So-White Lies

The Birth of a Black Rice Gene and Its Local Spread by Introgression | The Plant Cell

Here's a nice example of how a change in a species' environment can change the meaning of the information in its genome and so change the direction of the species evolution. Of course, it gives the lie to another basic piece of disinformation traditionally foisted on their willing dupes by creationist frauds.

A team of plant geneticists from Japan led by Dr. Takeshi Izawa have worked out the genetic basis of the black colour in black rice and have traced its origins to a mutation in a gene known to science as Kala4, which controls the amount of anthocyanin pigments the plant produces. The wild rice, Oryza rufipogon, has red grains but, due to a mutation in a gene controlling pro-anthocyanidin biosynthesis, domestic rice, Oryza sativa, fails to produce these pigments so remains white.

Christians for Child Abuse

Florida school apologizes for warning students that evolution deniers were trying to ‘mislead’ them

Close on Pope Francis laying claim to a special privilege for Christians to use their 'faith' as an excuse to abuse minorities, comes news of another mighty blow for lies, disinformation and child abuse by fundamentalists in Florida, USA.

Parents were incensed when they discovered that Heritage Middle School in Deltona, Florida had given students an assignment designed to help them understand the difference between scientific terms like 'theory' and 'law', and how the scientific meaning of these terms differs from their use in colloquial language. The assignment had included the statement:

Pope Francis Just Can't Hide His Bigotry

Pope: Workers Have 'Human Right' to Refuse Same-Sex Marriage Licenses - NBC News

It must be uncomfortable being Pope Francis, as he balances himself on the horns of a dilemma. To mix the metaphor, he needs to stand astride the fence with a foot planted firmly on either side of it. It fair makes yer eyes water.

On the one hand he has to fill his allotted role as the affable, avuncular, love, peace and tolerance-embracing contrast to his sinister predecessor, the former Nazi, Joseph Ratzinger, who, as Pope John Paul II's enforcer, orchestrated the child abuse cover-ups which are still damaging the Catholic Church.

Lessons From The Dordogne - Sacerdos The Fake

The shrine of Saint Sacerdos,
L'église de Saint-Sacerdos, Sarlat-la-Canéda, Périgord Noir, France

Invisible gods just don't cut the mustard when it comes to giving the faithful something to pray to. What they need is bits of body of dead patriarchs; preferably dead patriarchs who were killed 'for their faith' in ways which seem designed to produce plenty of relics for the faithful to worship to.

Dominating the main square in the beautiful Périgord Noir town of Sarlat-la-Canéda is the former Sarlat Cathedral, (Cathédrale Saint-Sacerdos de Sarlat) dedicated to Saint Sacerdos (also known as Sacerdos de Calviac, Sardot, Sadroc, Sardou, Serdon, Serdot) of Limoges, traditionally the first bishop of Limoges who was born in Sarlat in 670 CE and was allegedly martyred in about 720 CE, though no-one seems to know how or why but the important thing is that he was martyred according to local legend.

The cathedral was downgraded to a church in 1801 and the diocese was incorporated in the diocese of Périgueux, but what are claimed to be the remains of Saint Sacerdos are kept in a sealed glass sarcophagus in an ornate chapel in the church. You can't get very close to it but there is what appears to be a clothed wax mannequin in a glass case with a kneeling stool placed thoughtfully in front, so those praying to the bits of dead saint can be seen to be suitably supplicant.

But, powerful though no doubts these bits of dead saint are at granting wishes, very little is actually known about Saint Sacerdos himself and little or nothing is known about how he came to have the reputation of a holy martyr or what he did to earn his place in the Catholic Communion of saints is also a mystery. Some clues however, can be gleaned from the history of the Catholic Church in France and the events immediately preceding Sacerdos' remains being transferred to the newly-created diocese of Sarlat.

Lessons From The Dordogne - Order From Chaos

One of the sacred dogmas of creationism is that it needs a creator to get order from chaos and complexity from simplicity. Like so much else with creationism though, the sacred dogma is contradicted by the readily observable evidence.

Take this photograph for example. It is of the river Dordogne as it runs alongside the lovely village of La Roque-Gageac. Note especially the little pits in the surface caused by little vortices produced as the water flows past the end of the wooden jetty and over the rocks in the shallows.

Lesson From Lot - The Rocamadour Fraud

Rocamadour, Lot, France.

Rocamadour, just outside the Dordogne in the Lot Department, France, is a mediaeval pilgrimage site consisting of a cluster of building clinging to the almost sheer side of a deep gorge. It is also the site of the ‘Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin’ sitting just below the top, accessible only via a steep and winding path (before the modern lift was installed).

If only the pilgrims had looked across the gorge, and had even a superficial understanding of geology and the courage to shake off their theophobic superstition, they would have seen the glaringly obvious evidence that their superstition was (and still is) based on a lie.

Lessons From The Dordogne - Why Are Things Different?

Dordogne Meadow

In case you're wondering where I've been, don't worry - I haven't given up blogging. We’ve been in the Dordogne, South-West France, for a couple of weeks, taking in some of the local culture and history as well as seeing the wildlife. Unfortunately, our gite didn't have broadband and Blogger on Android - well... needs some work.

We were hoping to see the wildlife particularly because it’s different to the wildlife we normally see in the UK. Not entirely different, of course, but different enough to be interesting and certainly different enough to be able to tick off a few more birds, butterflies and wildflowers in my field guides.

But why is it different? I wonder if creationists ever give any thought to this question.

To a biologist, and anyone with even a modicum of understanding of evolutionary biology, the answer to that question is stark-staringly obvious – it’s because the environment is different, so what constitutes ‘fitness’ is different, so the survival value of certain characteristics will be different, so the ecological balances will be different because ecosystems, no less than species, evolve over time.

Geographical diversity is entirely dependent on local environmental factors and how they change. These local factors can include the type of underlying rock strata – chalk, sand, clay, volcanic tufa, etc., – elevation, latitude, average hours of sunlight, average, maximum and minimum temperatures, average rainfall, humidity, human interference, and so on.

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