Evolution Observed in Darwin's Finch

Meduim ground finch, Geospiza fortis

A beak size locus in Darwin’s finches facilitated character displacement during a drought | Science

Every now and then we get an exquisitely simple and irrefutable example of evolution being witnessed and reported with supporting data. Despite this, however, creationists continue to deny that evolution occurs and continue to chant their dogmatic insistence that it has never been observed.

Firstly, the scientific evidence:

Moral Compass - Pastor Says Raping a Child Same as Stealing Candy

Senior Pastor Michael Orten of The Truth Apostolic Church, Madisonville, KY

As a Humanist I have no problem at all with the idea that someone could make a mistake when young and then realise the error of their ways and turn their lives around. I don't believe people should pay for the rest of their lives for mistakes they make in their youth. I believe in the redemptive power of real atonement and prefer to think that all people deserve to be given another chance.

So I have no problem with the idea that a sex offender who has spent time in jail could acknowledge his crimes, reform his character and be a gainfully employed useful member of society, provided if, as in this case where the offence was committed against a child, parents of children in the area know about it.

But what this story demonstrates is the strange morals of Pastor Orten of The Truth Apostolic Church in Madisonville, Kentucky.

And This Week's 'Non-Existent' Transitional Form Is...

Cryptotora thamicola.

Tetrapod-like pelvic girdle in a walking cavefish : Scientific Reports

There are enough of these 'non-existent' transitional fossils to fill a large museum and several more are added most months, as a scan of the relevant scientific literature will show. This doesn't stop creationist frauds telling their dupes that there aren't any of course, but then where would they be without false claims and misrepresentations of the scientific facts?

One of the transitions that excites creationists the most is that between fish and the early terrestrial tetrapods (salamander-like limbed vertebrates). Despite the example of Tiktaalik and Eusthenopteron with incontrovertible features mid-way between fish and salamanders, they continue to insist on either denying they exist altogether or arbitrarily designating them as either fish or salamanders. This is intended to avoid the embarrassment that they are quite obviously both because, at that stage in the evolution of terrestrial tetrapods, they had not diverged from fish.

One of the slightly more sophisticated arguments creationists use to dismiss the evidence is the argument that the change

Holy Smoke and Mirrors! Heavenly Selfies With Jesus!

Meet Paseka Motsoeneng, aka, Mboro.

Pastor Motsoeneng, of the Incredible Happenings Church in Katlehong, South Africa, is personal friends with Jesus who was so impressed by Motsoeneng's devotion that he invited him up to Heaven last Easter Sunday and invited him to take lots of selfies on his G5 Galaxy iphone. No! Honestly!

There is no doubt about this because we have the word of a Christian pastor, Paseka Motsoeneng aka Mboro, that it happened and he has the photographs to prove it. He even offered to sell copies of these selfies for a mere £238-266 each, although why he

What The Critics Say! Ten Good Reasons To Buy It!

My latest book, Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It is already receiving critical acclaim from readers:

..and this book shows nicely why it is better to let go of it ... (5 stars)

This is a cracking read from the author of the Rosa Rubicondior blogs. If you aren't familiar with them then I would suggest you rectify that.
Faith is a pernicious thing, and this book shows nicely why it is better to let go of it and walk away. Religion is a drug, and faith is its pusher, binding people more and more closely to religion.
Read the book. It says it all better than I can.

W. J. Wight

---

Whichever side of the fence you sit - read this! (5 stars)

Ten very good reasons. Easy to read and clearly written.

Amazon Customer

Where Did The Neanderthal Y Chromosome Go?

Missing Y chromosome kept us apart from Neanderthals | New Scientist

There is no serious doubt outside creationist circles these days that a) modern humans and Neanderthals were different species of human who lived contemporaneously in Eurasia, and b) they interbred very occasionally but not often and not very successfully.

Neanderthal DNA has been identified in non-African modern humans, mostly on the X chromosome. It has been associated with pale skin and other cold-climate adaptations but also with arthritis, auto-immune conditions, depression and even addiction.

But there was one little problem. Had we got our Neanderthal genes from male Neanderthals we should expect to see some

Hey Creationists! We've Found A Unicorn!

Elasmotherium sibiricum

A fossilised skull has revealed when the last 'Siberian unicorn' lived on Earth - ScienceAlert

The good news for creationists is that unicorns really did exist - well, for one very loose definition of unicorns which is so loose as to include rhinoceroses but at least creationists can cling to this small crumb of comfort.

The problem is, the last one seems to have died out about 29,000 years ago, some 20,000 years before Earth was created - created according to creationist dogma, that is!

News of this discovery was published a few days ago with open access in the American Journal of Applied Sciences by a combined team from Tomsk University, Tomsk, Russia and Pavlodar State Pedagogical Institute, Pavlodar, Kazakhstan.

Religion Spiraling Downwards in Scotland

Most people in Scotland 'not religious' - BBC News

It's a measure of just how irrelevant religion is becoming in the UK that this little news item passed almost unnoticed and certainly without comment in mainstream media, but Scotland has become the latest part of Europe to become majority atheist.

These figures, which can only be regarded as catastrophic for the Church of Scotland, were revealed in the latest Scottish Social Attitudes survey which show that 52% of Scots now say they are not religious. This compares with 40% when the survey was first carried out in 1999. This latest survey was conducted between July 2015 and January 2016, hence this decline has taken place in just sixteen years.

It's not just these headline figures that make grim

Ten Reasons To Lose Faith - Update

If you haven't heard already, Ten Reasons To Lose Faith is a major new book aimed at non-believers, believers and those undecided - especially those undecided.

Unlike my previous books which were based on posts in this blog, this one consists of ten original extended essays on aspects of faith, why faith is fallacious, delusional and dangerous and designed to mislead and control both the individual and society as a whole.

The ten essays lead the reader naturally from an understanding of why faith is a useless tool for understanding the world, through the benefits of growth-enhancing doubt and uncertainty, to an understanding of how faith conditions, constrains and controls the mind of the faithful. Finally it explains how losing faith liberates the individual and creates a more inclusive, kinder, more caring society, free from the mutual hostility and distrust of the present faith-based, faith-ghettoised society which is causing so many of the world's problems.

The ten essays are:

1. The Fallacy of Faith.
   Explaining why 'faith' alone cannot lead to the truth with any degree of confidence. It is nothing more than a dishonest but satisfying pretense of knowledge in the face of ignorance; of pretending to know something you don't know. Faith is not a shortcut to understanding but a shortcut to delusion.

Unintelligent Design - As Plain As The Nose On Your Face!

PLOS Computational Biology: Impaired Air Conditioning within the Nasal Cavity in Flat-Faced Homo

Don't get me wrong! The human face is beautiful - to another human! Who could look at a human face and see it as ugly?

Well, of course, we're genetically 'programmed' to be attracted to an 'attractive' face. That's why we define it as attractive! But looked at objectively from, say, the point of view of the proverbial space alien studying life on Earth, the human face is surely one of the strangest in the mammalian order. It is rotated down through ninety degrees so that it still points forward even though our spine now points upwards and not forwards like most other mammals.

Nature Running Rings Around Creationists

'Fairy-Rings' in Western Australia

Discovery of fairy circles in Australia supports self-organization theory.

The two sacred chants of the creation industry are, "You can't get order from chaos, so order implies design!" and "Design needs a designer!" They are careful always to avoid saying 'biblical god' instead of 'designer' because they still like to pretend people don't know this is fundamentalist biblical creationism masquerading as science, of course.

Anyone who has seen a snowflake and knows that all the millions of different 'designs' of snowflakes all arise spontaneously from the chaotic distribution of water molecules in air under nothing more than the operation of physics and chemistry will know that claim is false but, as with so many other claims of the creation industry, being false is never seen as a reason not to keep repeating it.

My New Book! Ten Reason To Lose Faith

Faith is a fallacy!

Faith is delusionary. It produces the illusion of knowledge and certainty in the absence of real knowledge and understanding.

Faith is not a virtue; it is the sin of intellectual indolence and the abdication of personal responsibility. It is pretending to know things you do not know. It has failed mankind and now represents a clear and present danger, not just to humanity but to life on Earth itself.

Ten Reasons to Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It, looks at the reasons why people should reject faith and why a 'crisis of faith' is not a problem to be avoided but something that should be welcomed and encouraged because it represents a mind trying to come to terms with reality. A 'crisis of faith' is a triumph of reason and the starting point for personal liberation.

Recent events in Pakistan, Turkey, Paris and Belgium can leave little doubt that faith, far from being the basis of a kind, caring and peaceful society, is harmful to the point of being positively dangerous. Religions which once might have produced united, cohesive societies in relative isolation, now produce ghettoised, mutually suspicious, warring and uncompromising factions in an increasingly globalised, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-faith world where exactly the opposite is needed.

Radovan Karadžić's Faith-Based Initiative

Radovan Karadžić. Genocide for Jesus.

Radovan Karadzic's road to the International Criminal Tribunal - BBC News

It was almost prophetic!

The day I was making the very last edits to my new book, Ten Reasons To Lose Faith, as though to reinforce one of the central messages in it, the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague announced the conviction of Radovan Karadžić for genocide. Karadžić's crimes were committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war as Orthodox Christian Serbian forces led by Karadžić attempted to impose Serbia's traditional hegemony over neighbouring Bosnia, following the collapse and break-up of former Yugoslavia.

Unintelligent Design - Rejuvenating Parasites

Schistosoma mansoni

Stem cell progeny contribute to the schistosome host-parasite interface | eLife

It gets a bit tedious to keep writing about all these examples of mindless stupidity in biological 'design' but my creationist readers love having something to ignore, or in some cases, post abusive comments on to impress Jesus.

So, not wishing to disappoint, here's another one. It is the discovery, published today in eLife, that a particularly nasty flatworm parasite, Schistosoma mansoni, that causes schistosomiasis in tropical parts of the world, has a simple defense to the human immune system that is trying to destroy them.

My Intelligent (sic) Design believing friends tell me that everything in nature was made by magic by the same magic man they believe also wrote the Bible so they believe this Intelligent (sic) Designer made these parasites especially so they could live in our blood and make us sick. The problem is, it then seems to have

Snappy End to Creationism!

A computer generated reconstruction of the crocodile ancestor Carnufex carolinensis which lived on land and walked on two legs and may have been a top predator before dinosaurs took over the world, scientists believe.

Photograph: Jorge Gonzales/PA

Early crocodylomorph increases top tier predator diversity during rise of dinosaurs : Scientific Reports

I don't suppose the discovery of a 320 million year-old fossil of a giant crocodile is going to change many creationists' minds about Earth being around 6,000 years old but then nothing ever seems to. Evidence is such a difficult thing when it doesn't tell you what you want to believe - unless you're honest, like normal people.

This particular new example of how creationists need to go to quite idiotic lengths to retain their childish superstition was found by paleontologists from North Carolina University led by Lindsay Zanno, and practically on their doorstep in the Triassic Carnian Pekin Formation. The authors have named this long-legged, bipedal crocodile, the Carolina butcher (Carnufex carolinensis). With its long snout, large mouth, long legs and probable speed, it would have been a menacing beast. C. carolinensis would have been about 9 feet (3 metres) long and about 5 feet (1.6 metres) tall with blade-like teeth.

Even Fish Walk All Over Creationists

Comparable disparity in the appendicular skeleton across the fish–tetrapod transition, and the morphological gap between fish and tetrapod postcrania

How creationists love those gaps!

Real or imaginary, you'll find creationism's magic creator stuffed into as many gaps as they can find to stuff it into. Until, that is, science actually looks at the gap. At that point there is always one of two outcomes:

1. The magic creator isn't there and the gap is full of perfectly natural, scientifically understandable stuff.
2. The gap wasn't there in the first place. It was either made up, the product of creationist wishful thinking, or, rarely, due to a scientific mistake.

USA Religious Decline Confirmed

Is the United States a Counterexample to the Secularization Thesis?: American Journal of Sociology: Vol 121, No 5

According to data produced in the American Journal of Sociology, the USA should no longer be regarded as an outlier when it comes to religiosity, compared to the rest of the Western, developed world.

Although the movement has been small compared to Europe, there are distinct signs that Americans are moving in the same direction and for pretty much the same reason - each generation is becoming less religious.

New Rattlesnakes Rattle Creationists

Reassessing Those Rattlers | Research Frontiers.

One of the indispensable dogmas of creationism in its desperate attempt to fool people into thinking the Theory of Evolution is fatally flawed is that 'microevolution' and 'macroevolution' are different things needing different processes to explain them. 'Microevolution' is supposedly the evolution of variation, varieties, races, subspecies etc, while 'macroevolution' is supposedly the evolution of a new species.

Rotating Rocks of Ages Rock Creationism!

The Cantabrian orocline is a large structure that bends the Variscan orogen of Western Europe in NW Iberia.

Photo credit: J. Fernández Lozano et al.

New kinematic constraints on the Cantabrian orocline: A paleomagnetic study from the Peñalba and Truchas synclines, NW Spain

It's normally the plentiful evidence for evolution and against intelligent (sic) design, provided by the biological sciences, that creationists have to practice ignoring or dismissing with a wave of the hand and denialism, so it must be doubly difficult when evidence from geology shows their superstition is false too.

To make matters worse, this time it involves one of

Misleading Christians

On Darwin Day, 5 facts about the evolution debate | Pew Research Center

Although all but the most honest creationists will try to pretend that their unscientific, anti-science views are actually good science with masses of scientific support, because that is the impression that the fraudsters who misinform them give them, the evidence from a Pew Research Center study into the views of Americans on evolution, re-published on Darwin Day this year, shows something completely different.

It shows that these unfortunate people are getting their 'science' not from proper scientists but from preachers and pastors who normally have no training in science whatsoever and that their opinions are based on religious dogma, not a rational examination of the scientific evidence. There is a clear correlation too between the degree of fundamentalism in religious affiliation with the degree of rejection of the scientific view of evolution by an unguided, natural process.

Jehovah's Witness (6%), Mormons (11%), Evangelical Protestants (11%) and 'Historically Black' Protestants (16%) all report astonishingly low (by European standards) levels of understanding that humans are the result of evolution by a natural process. This figure only rises to 28% for Mainline Protestants, 29% for Orthodox Christians and 31% for Catholics, still low by European standards.

The mainstream Christian figure is close to that for Muslims at 25%. It may surprise many fundamentalist Christians to discover that they are more extreme in their views than Muslims, who they traditionally regard as extremists.

Fundamentalist Christians and Un-Christian Politics

Click to enlarge

U.S. religious groups and their political leanings | Pew Research Center

Rarely do I venture into American politics in these blog posts, but the increasingly right-wing political extremism of the Republican Party, as it cements its ties with Christian fundamentalism, becoming, in effect, the political wing of the Christian theocratic and anti-science movement, is worth commenting upon.

First a little test.

Supposing, just for the moment, that Jesus were to return, and was pretty much the way he is portrayed today in his social attitudes, given the following choices, which would he be most likely to go for?

• Would he:
  
  1. favour giving even more money to the rich?
  2. favour giving money to the poor?
• Would he:
  
  1. favour leaving the sick to fend for themselves as best they can?
  2. favour helping the sick to get better, regardless of their income?
• Would he:
  
  1. favour sending more people to prison for longer?

The Malevolent Designer Does It Again!

Host cell invasion and replication by the influenza virus.

Source: Wikipedia By User:YK Times, CC BY-SA 3.0

Influenza A virus targets a cGAS-independent STING pathway that controls enveloped RNA viruses : Nature Communications : Nature Publishing Group

For those wingnuts who still believe in intelligent design, the hardest thing to explain, if they ever give much thought to it, is why their putative intelligent (sic) designer so often resembles a malevolent, hate-filled and completely evil designer who hates everything it has designed.

The story goes that this intelligent (sic) designer created the entire Universe just so it could make a tiny planet in a remote part of it (bear with me! I'm not making this up!) so it could make intelligent beings to worship it. So thrilled was it with it's invention, which it had taken an infinite amount of time to think up, that it loves it more than anything.

Filling The Gap and Evicting Creationism's Magic Friend

"Ribbo"

Illustration: Karen Carr.

Closing Romer's Gap | The National Museum of Scotland

To any decent creationist, it's all about those lovely gaps. Gaps in the current knowledge, gaps in the fossil records, gaps in our understanding or ability yet to explain! Any gap will do, and if the right one can't be found, one can easily be invented with a childish parody of science. No-one will ever notice because the target audience couldn't tell a childish parody of science from the real thing. It's all magic anyway.

Vatican Issues Abuse Cover-Up Code - Omerta!

Catholic bishops not obliged to report clerical child abuse, Vatican says | World news | The Guardian

This report from last week slipped under my radar unnoticed.

The Vatican has issued new training material for newly-named bishops which tells them they don't have any obligation to report cases of clerical abuse of children unless the local law requires it. Their only obligation is to deal with the matter internally. Apparently, the notion of a moral obligation over and above an obligation to merely comply with local laws, to protect children and expose abusers is not a Catholic thing.

Shark Bite For Creationists

An ancient dental gene set governs development and continuous regeneration of teeth in sharks | ScienceDirect

Astonishing news today that the creationist industry's intelligent (sic) designer favours sharks over humans.

Although humans notoriously suffer from all manner of dental problems, including dental caries caused by bacteria, abscesses formed in the gums and jaw when these caries erode the tooth to the point where the dentine and root canals are exposed, and gum diseases leading to the teeth actually falling out, sometime by middle age, the intelligent (sic) designer apparently designed a system for replacing teeth but switched it off in humans, and most of our vertebrate relatives, way back in our evolutionary history. It left the genes there, not doing anything useful though.

Gravity Waving Goodbye To Big Bang Doubts?

Gravitational waves: Scientists might be about to announce detection of 'ripples in the fabric of spacetime' | Independent.

It looks like creationists are about to be hit with another scientific discovery they are going to have to work hard to ignore, as another gap slams shut and no god was found in it.

There are persistent rumours in the scientific world that a team working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) system will announce tomorrow that they have discovered 'primordial gravity waves'. These are gravity waves from the first moments of the Big Bang and, if confirmed, could increase our knowledge of exactly what happened in that first few microseconds of the Universe's existence.

Lesson From Toulouse - How Christians Lie To Us

Aerial view of the Basilica of Saint Sernin, Toulouse.

St Saturnin being dragged by a bull

source: Wikipedia

This is a blog post I intended to write last Autumn when we got back from Dordogne in France but it got put on the back burner for a while as other things intervened. It is the ludicrously silly tale of Saint Saturnin (or Sarin) of Toulouse, legendary first bishop of Toulouse in Southwest France.

We had some time to kill before our flight home from Toulouse, so spent it in the town, mostly browsing the wonderful vegetable market, but this church down a side street caught our eye so we went to investigate. The church of St Sarin is a wonderful building in mock Romanesque style, slightly reminiscent of Eastern Christian churches. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and houses what are alleged to be St Saturnin's mortal remains. It is supposedly built on the site where his body was hidden after his curious method of execution. Saint Saturnin is known by several names depending on language and local dialect; Sernin in French, Sarnin in Occitan, Sadurní in Catalan, etc.

Manny the Bronx Fraud is Still Trying

Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

Manuel de Dios Agosto, aka Sacerdotus, the expelled former Catholic seminarian from Bronx, has been inventing some more online personae. This time, the platform he displays them on is Amazon.com, where he pretends to be different people posting 'objective' reviews on his own books and books he hasn't read.

Take these he's recently posted on one of my book's page, for example:

This book is a disaster of intellectual thought. Old refuted arguments are represented by the author and are uninteresting. They expose the author as lacking literacy in science and philosophy. She attempts to spin science in the favor of atheism and while doing so, fails logically. Do not waste your time and money on this rubbish. There are far better sources out there that argue for the atheistic viewpoint. This author, Esther Harrison, is clearly inexperienced as a writer and doesn't have the academic know-how to publish professionally. Lastly, her books are on her blog so you can read it there for free.

Diabolically Fishy Problem For Creationists

Devil's Hole pupfish, Cyprinodon diabolis.

Image credit: Olin Feuerbacher / US Fish and Wildlife Service / CC BY 2.0

Diabolical survival in Death Valley: recent pupfish colonization, gene flow and genetic assimilation in the smallest species range on earth | PRSB.

Something diabolical indeed for creationism!

Now we have an example of rapid genetic diversification leading to a new species in just a few hundred years, and this could well have happened several times with repeated cycles of repopulation, evolution and extinction.

The Devil's Hole pupfish, Cyprinodon diabolis, has been described as one of the rarest fish on Earth and exists only in a small, aquifer-fed geothermal pool in a

Even Voles Have 'Human' Emotions

Oxytocin-dependent consolation behavior in rodents | Science.

It is probably one of the more subtle, insidiously harmful aspects of religion that they encourage humans to feel in some way superior to the rest of nature and somehow to be separate from it, rather than part of the whole with a close connectedness to all of it.

One of the ways it has done this is to inculcate a belief that only humans have 'refined' emotions such as love, empathy, compassion, even conscious thought itself. Fundamentalists even come at this

More Nastiness From the 'Intelligent Designer'

WHO warns over spread of Zika virus - BBC News

It looks like creationism's intelligent (sic) designer has come up with another brilliant plan to add to human misery. Like so many of it's nasty little designs this one is another virus and it is using a tried and tested delivery system to make sure it spreads to as many people as possible - a blood-sucking parasite - in this case, mosquitoes of the Aedes genus, usually Aedes aegypti.

Unintelligently Designed War Between Sexes

(a) Histogram of pigmentation score on the last two abdominal segments in ten females in three melanogaster subgroup species grown under similar conditions. Only D. erecta (red) shows a bimodal distribution, whereas both D. orena (green) and D. melanogaster (blue) show a continuous, unimodal distribution.
(b) Photomicrographs of male and female D. erecta showing the dark (male-like) and light female morphs. Scale bar, 1 mm.

Ancient balancing selection at tan underlies female colour dimorphism in Drosophila erecta | Nature Communications

Imagine a designer coming up with something so bizarre as sexual reproduction in which the female gets so badly injured by the male that she has to be redesigned to avoid him because the designer keeps redesigning the male to do her more damage! Would this be a sign of intelligence or a sign of either malevolent sadism or stupidity?

Yet, if we fall for the Intelligent Design hoax, this is what we are required to believe this 'intelligent (sic) designer' has done.

Yes, it's our old friend the arms race, only this time it isn't a war between hunter and prey or parasite and host; it's a war between sexes, this time in a species of fruit fly, Drosophila erecta. You might think that sexual reproduction would be a cooperative thing where both sexes have the same interests - getting their respective gametes fused as efficiently as possible. The problem is

Is Fundamentalism An Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?

A thought occurred to me today, prompted by an online friend - fundamentalist religion has some striking parallels with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

According to an online pamphlet produced by the Royal College of Psychiatrists:

OCD has three main parts:

1. the thoughts that make you anxious (obsessions)
2. the anxiety you feel
3. the things you do to reduce your anxiety (compulsions).

Early Hunting Lesson for Creationists.

Mammoth ribs with hunting lesions collected at Yana RHS [(A) to (F)], showing the mechanism for the formation of bone injury on the fifth rib of the SK mammoth (G).

(A) Mammoth rib with embedded lithic tool fragment. (B) Mammoth rib with two injuries that retain lithics. (C) View of the upper cut at (B). (D) View of the lower cut at (B). (E) Bone injury with no lithic in it but clearly left by the same action as for (A) and (B). (F) Bone injury that resulted from sliding of the lithic implement that removed part of the bone. (G) Hunting lesion on the fifth left rib of the SK mammoth; compare to (A) to (F) and note the same scale for all images.

Photo: Aleksei Tikhonov
© 2016, The American Association for the Advancement of Science

Early human presence in the Arctic: Evidence from 45,000-year-old mammoth remains | Science

More shocking evidence for creationists emerged this week in the form of evidence of hominid occupation of Northern Siberia some 39,000 years before they believe their god created the Universe.

A team of archaeologist at the Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg have found distinct evidence that a dead mammoth had been injured by stone-tipped weapons before and after death. The conclusion must be that it was killed by an armed hunting party using Stone Age tools. The problem for creationists is that the remains of the 15 year-old male mammoth has been carbon dated to 45,000 years ago, which puts its death before the height of the last Ice Age.

The evidence includes fragment of stone embedded in the bone as well as cuts which must have been made by a sharp instrument capable of cutting into bone. The remains of the mammoth were recovered from a frozen coastal bluff in central northern Siberia near the Kara Sea at 72^o N, well inside the Siberian Arctic and only made accessible in the last twenty years.

Abstract
Archaeological evidence for human dispersal through northern Eurasia before 40,000 years ago is rare. In west Siberia, the northernmost find of that age is located at 57°N. Elsewhere, the earliest presence of humans in the Arctic is commonly thought to be circa

Going, Going... Nearly Gone!

Church of England attendance plunges to record low - Telegraph

Active membership of the Church of England in Britain is in freefall.

The Church has just announced that average church attendance fell by a further 22,000 in 2014 to just 764,700; a fall of 7 percent in just 5 years. Regular weekly total attendance at church is now down to a megre 1.4 percent of the population and fell below 1 million to 980,000 for the first time ever. The C of E estimates that membership is declining by about 1 percent a year due to the deaths of its increasingly aged members alone, and this is at a time when the population is increasing faster than it has done since the late 1940s post-war baby boom.

Holy Brothers!

Georg Ratzinger
Domkapellmeister, Ragensberg Domspatzen, 1964-1994

At least 231 children abused at Catholic boys’ choir run by Pope Benedict’s brother

It's beginning to look like a massive sexual and physical abuse scandal is about to engulf the Catholic Church again, this time in Germany, and involving a private Catholic boarding school for boys aged 10-19 which at the time, was run by former Pope Benedict XVI's brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger.

A lawyer, Ulrich Weber, commissioned by the Ragensberg Catholic diocese, Bavaria, to investigate allegations of abuse made in 2010, has found evidence that 231 boys were systematically sexually abused and subjected to physical abuse including food

To Have And To Harm Until Death Do Us Part

His Excellency Braulio Rodriguez Plaza
Archbishop of Toledo, Spain

Source: Wikipedia

Fury as archbishop says domestic violence is caused by women 'not obeying men' - Mirror Online

You have to hand it to Archbishop Braulio Rodriguez Plaza, Bishop of Toledo, Spain and thus the senior Catholic cleric in Spain; he knows his theology!

So, when he announced in Toledo Cathedral on 27 December that women victims of domestic violence only have themselves to blame because they disobeyed their husbands, you can be sure he reached that conclusion from a close reading of Christian scripture in the Bible. It was undoubtedly based on the revealed Word of God in that reliable handbook of morals upon which all Catholics, and indeed all people, can depend with absolute confidence.

God's mouthpiece, the unmarried and officially celibate Braulio Rodriguez Plaza, told the congregation that women could avoid being hit by doing what their husbands tell them and can avoid physical abuse by not asking their husbands for a divorce.

Laboratory Abiogenesis Observed?

Library synthesis and the mechanism of self-replication.

For description, see original source.

Diversification of self-replicating molecules - Nature Chemistry

The last three years have been dreadful for those who run the creationism industry, but this could be some of the worst news imaginable for them and their willing dupes, and it was only 4 days into the new year when it was published. Scientists led by Jan W. Sadownik at the Centre for Systems Chemistry, Stratingh Institute for Chemistry at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, believe they may have shown how self-replicating structures could have arisen spontaneously.

This is bound to result in hysterical denialism in creationist circles because it is an indispensable article of faith that life could not possibly have come from non-life so a magician must have made it happen. To a creationist, 'life' is of course some ill-defined or undefined magic ingredient that sets living things apart from non-living things and enables them to do things that non-living things don't do, such as reproducing. To anyone who understands basic biology however, living things are simply things that self-replicate. All the chemistry which goes on to use energy to resist the tendency to disorder is simply a means to that end.

Qur'an Quandary - Where is the Original?

Early Qur'an

Broolyn Museum, USA

Qur'an illumniated manuscript 18th-Early 19th Century

Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA

Ask any Muslim what the Qur'an is and who wrote it, and you'll be told almost without exception, that it is Allah's word as revealed in divine revelations to Muhammad through Allah's messenger, the Archangel Gabriel (Jibril). You might even be given the simplistic answer that Muhammad literally wrote it.

This only happened once, apparently. Although spread over some 23 years, there is no record of Allah revealing the same thing several times, least of all the entire Qur'an.

You'll most likely be told that the proof that it is Allah's revealed word is the fact that Muhammad was illiterate and yet was able to write the Qur'an in perfect classical Arabic; that Allah literally guided his hand. This is, of course, the 'lie to children' version. The accepted

Pope Francis - Faking It For The Faithful

No, this is not another blog about how Pope Francis eagerly participates in such obviously fake 'miracles' as the 'St Gennaro blood' trick at Naples Cathedral; it's about how 'honest' Pope Francis is knowingly participating in another hoax in order to distract attention from the many scandals which continue under his leadership, just as under his two predecessors.

Pope Francis is actively participating in the elevation of the odious and unscrupulous nun, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, aka Mother Teresa of Calcutta, to the Catholic sainthood with a second highly dubious 'miracle' which he has ordered should be attributed to her.