Human Evolution - Another Piece Of The Jigsaw

35,000 year old female skull found in the Pestera Muierii cave in Romania.

Source: Daily Mail

The mitogenome of a 35,000-year-old Homo sapiens from Europe supports a Palaeolithic back-migration to Africa : Scientific Reports

The basic evolutionary history of Homo sapiens is now so well established that new discoveries are tending to fill in the detail rather than cause existing thinking to be substantially revised. Far from being a 'theory in crisis' as the creation industry would have people believe, Darwin's fundamental principles of evolution are actually being confirmed with each new find and the Theory of Evolution is proving to be the only scientific theory capable of making sense of the entire picture.

We know that H. sapiens evolved in Africa and that there was a subsequent migration out of Africa and into Eurasia on at least one occasion. Everything else is now more or less filling in the details of what happened next and how that migrant population spread, diversified and re-mixed to give the modern Eurasian populations with its present geographical distribution of genes.

Are Theists Afraid of Something?

You know, theists seem a frightened little lot especially when it comes to even basic argument against 'faith'. They seem almost to be afraid you'll read something that makes them feel uncomfortable, as though they think it'll expose the vacuous nonsense they rely on to keep the flock of sheeple together. They'll do almost anything to deter you reading criticism, including abandoning even the basic principles of the 'morality' they claim their 'faith' gives them.

The important thing, so far as a theist is concerned, is keeping you from not thinking about your 'faith' rather than thinking about it and finding it worthless.

Take, for example this ludicrously inaccurate, anonymous 'review' of my book, Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It.It was almost certainly posted by someone who isn't interested in truth since there is not a word of truth in it.

Recycled banal arguments already refuted by scholars. Don't waste your money on this junk. The book has many errors both in grammar and content. This author uses a fake name and plagiarizes other atheists. This book is poor scholarship and offers nothing new. The conclusions that she comes up with are illogical and based on anecdotal inferences, not logic or reason. Over 90% of the book is meandering and doesn't make any points. The reader will get bored and will realize that this author is an amateur and has no academic credentials.

How Evolution Works - Evolving Ichthyosaurs

A large aberrant stem ichthyosauriform indicating early rise and demise of ichthyosauromorphs in the wake of the end-Permian extinction : Scientific Reports

A nice example this week of how a major, possibly the main, driver of evolution is not as creationists pretend science says, random mutation, but environmental change. It also seems to go some way to solving something of a mystery in marine evolution during the period following the end-Permian mass extinction.

The Permian Era came to an abrupt end about 250 million years ago when increased volcanic activity and climate change and led to rising sea levels causing the extinction of ninty-six percent of all marine life. Unlike terrestrial metazoans which radiated rapidly to fill the newly-vacated ecological niches this mass extinction provided, the marine reptiles were thought to have evolved much more slowly.

A Whale of a Problem For Creationism!

Hector's beaked whale found at Waitpinga Beach

Photo credit: South Australian Museum

Rare whale found on Australian beach believed to be evolutionary throwback | Science | The Guardian

A problem which creationists have to cope with, normally by simply ignoring or denying the evidence, is the problem of redundant structures and genes. These frequently appear in organisms which do not need them any more and look for all the world like they were once needed in an earlier ancestor. They may even still be present in a related species as evidence of common descent.

One of these is the genes for making egg yolk which are still present in placental mammals - which don't have eggs with yolk in them. In humans we have the wonderful example of wisdom teeth which seem to be there now only to provide work for dentists. They are entirely consistent with the fossil evidence that the human maxilla and mandible have become reduced during evolution but our dentistry hasn't kept up with the changes due to a lack of selection pressure, probably because impacted wisdom teeth tend not to inhibit reproduction very much.

Sac Watch - Doppy Dotus Does It Again!

Manuel de Dios Agosto (aka Sacerdotus and very many other aliases) - one of the least competent Internet beggars and frauds in the business - really does take some beating for sheer stupidity on a quite astonishing scale.

Readers may remember his very long list of Twitter atheists. He spent several days compiling it in a desperate attempt to get people to file false reports on them to get them shut down because they were exposing his scams and refuting his lies, only to discover that he had blundered stupidly into compiling one of the best source lists of atheists to follow. This rapidly became 'Manny's List' which indignant atheists soon began complaining of being omitted from.

Now it seems he did it again in even more spectacular style! This time he's compiled and published a list of blog posts about himself that he doesn't want anyone reading! No, honestly!

Evolving A Loss Of Complexity!

Monocercomonoides

Monocercomonoides

First eukaryotes found without a normal cellular power supply | Science | AAAS

One of the problems creationism suffers from, apart from not having any supporting evidence, is that it relies almost entirely on counter-factual dogma. One such dogma, for example, is that scientists believe evolution is all about life progressing from the simple to the complex and that somehow all evolutionary change must involve an increase in complexity.

Yes, I know this is nonsensical and at odds with the facts, but that's the point of dogma; it means evidence doesn't need to be bothered with because the truth is 'known' by fiat. The dogma says so...

Carrot Evolution And Creationism

A high-quality carrot genome assembly provides new insights into carotenoid accumulation and asterid genome evolution:

Can there be any other group of people who cling to a belief so tenaciously in spite of all the evidence against it as creationists?

I suppose, to be fair, there are climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, moon landing conspiracy nut-jobs and other associated wack-a-doodle cults, but there can be few who do it with such fanaticism as creationists. There just doesn't appear to be any connection between their fanatically-held beliefs and what the evidence shows to be true. For example, a central dogma of creationsm is that mutaions are

Why You Need To Lose Faith

Another excerpt from my book, Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It,this time explaining why you would be better off without faith and by embracing the doubt and uncertainty that comes from acceptance of evidence as the only basis for making rational decisions.

It is not insignificant that for everyday life, and for any activity where material reality has to be taken into account, the only way to make rational decisions is to behave atheistically. The simple task of crossing a road is the same for an atheist as for a theist, even though a theist might want to mutter a few prayers as well. In the end, it is the physical evidence that the road is safe to cross that determines the appropriate action.

Atheists and theists leaving a sinking ship must go through exactly the same process of getting into a lifeboat even though the theist might spend a moment in prayer. Only the most insane of theist would decline to get in a lifeboat believing a god would be along to save them shortly. In effect, theists crossing a road or theists getting into a lifeboat are behaving just like atheists. Even Christians have a saying, ‘God helps those who help themselves’, to explain why people need to behave like atheists in everyday life. That rather begs the question though of why the Christian god would favour people who behave like atheists.

A Crisis of Faith

The phenomenon of the 'crisis of faith' is curious. Theology must be the only academic discipline where practitioners regularly have severe doubt about their subject being real. A 'crisis of faith' should more properly called an intrusion of reality, as common sense tries to take over and allow reality in.

The following is an excerpt from my book, Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It,dealing with this curious phenomenon that seems to be an occupational hazard in clerical circles.

There is probably a very good evolutionary explanation for the tendency to check the evidence before making a life or death decision. Those who did not check had a greatly reduced likelihood of passing on their genes, so the genes for not bothering about evidence would tend to lose out in competition with their counterparts which regarded evidence as important.

So, when it comes to life and death decisions in real life, normal people not only rely on evidence but look for it and regard it as the best available basis for the decision. Importantly, they regard absence of evidence of cars as perfectly reliable evidence of the absence of cars. Why would they not? What would be the purpose of looking for evidence then regarding its presence or absence as evidence of the same thing?

Why Dinosaur-Birds Evolved Beaks

Diet affects the evolution of birds -- ScienceDaily

One of the nicest things about studying biology, and particularly evolutionary biology, is the way it all dovetails neatly into place and fits in with, for example, climate change, geology, etc., to form a complete coherent picture that tells us not only why things are as they appear today but how.

For example, we it take for granted that there will be birds around. The world as we know it would be quite a different world without birds. Flowering trees might not have small berries; humans might not have colour vision because our simian ancestors would not have needed to recognise ripe fruit by the colour change that signals to birds that the fruit is ripe.

Evolution or Sadistic, Idiot Designer?

(A) Two males on a parasitized A. vaga (Osnabrück, 10.ii.2008).
(B) Five males on a parasitized host (Osnabrück, 23.ii.2008).

Photographs © W. Rutkies.

Traumatic insemination and female counter-adaptation in Strepsiptera (Insecta)

Parasitism itself, with it's inevitable arms race as the host evolves to combat the parasite and the parasite evolves to overcome its host's defenses is a major embarrassment to anyone trying to believe in any intelligence behind living things, or even intelligent evolution because, frankly, arms races are not intelligent.

But, even more of an embarrassment to intelligent (sic) design advocates, especially those who unashamedly link it to biblical literalism complete with the Christian god as the magic creator, are the exquisitely nasty mechanism some parasites have evolved. Their sheer malevolent nastiness precludes design by a benevolent designer and cannot possibly be presented as the work of a loving god or anything approaching one.

What? No Flood? - Australia's 50,000 Year History

Australian Aborginals have one of the oldest histories of any peoples, dating back 50,000 years.

Photo Credit: Rusty Stewart/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Deep Roots for Aboriginal Australian Y Chromosomes: Current Biology

If you are a creationist who insists that Earth is somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years old and that everyone save for a single family living in the Middle East were drowned in a global flood about 4,000 years ago, it really doesn't help that you have no evidence for that claim.

Imagine then having to cope with scientists continually coming up with evidence that it couldn't possibly be true! Evidence that modern humans have lived continuously and with little or no contact with other human groups, for 50,000 years in a single continent, for example.

Pope Francis And The Predatory Priest

Father Joseph Jeyapaul – ABC News

Sexual abuse case: US woman files lawsuit against Indian Bishop

You might think, with all the fanfare of publicity surrounding Pope Francis' 'reforms' of the Catholic Church in view of the tidal wave of child abuse scandals engulfing it, that something might have actually changed.

Well, that was what you were supposed to think, of course, but, as so often with the Catholic Church, what they actually do bears scant relationship to what they say they will do, or what they say others should do. For example, weren't we led to believe that predatory

Another of Those 'Non-existent' Transitional Forms!

Artist's impression of the amphibious ichthyosaur, Cartorhynchus lenticarpus, crawling over dry land

Credit: University of California at Davis.
Photograph: Stefano Broccoli/PA

A basal ichthyosauriform with a short snout from the Lower Triassic of China : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

I'm beginning to wonder if creationists are using a private definition of 'non-existent'; a definition that includes not only existent but lots of examples and evidence of existence. It's one of the weirdest aspects of creationism that relies so heavily on simple, repetitive denial of the evidence and the assertion that what can be clearly seen just isn't there, and yet it is firmly believed by so many people.

Here, for example, is yet another example of one of those transitional fossils that creationist fraud tell their willing dupes almost daily do not exist, even claiming that 'evolutionists' have been searching for years for one and have never found any. To be fair, this one was only reported a little over a year ago, so creationist frauds probably won't have thought up an excuse to dismiss it yet, so won't have mentioned it on one of their disinformation sites.

Dung Beetles Bury Creationism

Phylogeny of the Oniticellini and Onthophagini dung beetles (Scarabaeidae, Scarabaeinae) from morphological evidence

You might think that dung beetles are not especially interesting but to an entomologist, they are a fascinating and diverse group of beetles, often performing ecologically-essential functions such as burying dung, improving soil nutrient content and even distributing seeds.

However, very many species do not do the classic dung beetle thing of rolling dung into balls and burying in the ground as food for their grubs. Some feed on fungi; some have formed a close association with termites and some even eat dead arthropods such as millipedes.

Now Dr T. Keith Philips, a biologist with Western Kentucky University, Kentucky, USA has worked out that the two main tribes, the onthophagines and oniticellines, which comprise the vast majority of dung beetles, and which are distributed worldwide except for Antarctica, evolved from a single common ancestor.

Abstract
A phylogenetic study was conducted to hypothesize relationships of most of the genera of the Oniticellini and Onthophagini for the first time using morphological characters from a diverse array of external and internal sclerites. The monophyly and sister relationship of both tribes was found using Bayesian and parsimony analyses with heavily to moderately weighted data. An alternative hypothesis based on parsimony analyses of unweighted or slightly weighted data show a paraphyletic Oniticellini without the Onthophagini, although recognition of the subtribe Helictopleurina as a tribe would eliminate non-monophyly.

Of the three Oniticellini subtribes, the Helictopleurina and Drepanocerina are monophyletic. There is no support for the monophyly of the Oniticellina or the Onthophagini subtribe Alloscelina, as currently defined. The genus Liatongus is paraphyletic, while strong support was found for monophyly of the Madagascan genus, Helictopleurus. The genus Onthophagus is never monophyletic in any analysis performed. Two new subtribes are also proposed: Liatongina subtr. n. including the genus Liatongus and Attavicina subtr. n. including the genera Attavicinus and Paroniticellus.

Topological evidence shows that the ancestral oniticellines and onthophagines were all coprophagous with alternative food sources evolving relatively recently. Both myrmecophily and termitophily probably evolved only once in the onthophagines. The phylogenetic analysis supports an African origin for the two tribes, with a relatively early age for the split of the Madagascar helictopleurines from the remaining oniticellines via dispersal. Furthermore, the presence of the oniticellines in the New World is hypothesized to be due to two relatively old dispersal events via Beringia and two relatively recent trans-Atlantic invasions of the Caribbean.

Philips TK (2016)
Phylogeny of the Oniticellini and Onthophagini dung beetles (Scarabaeidae, Scarabaeinae) from morphological evidence.
ZooKeys 579: 9-57. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.579.6183

Copyright © The author. Reprinted under terms of Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0)

The interesting this here is how this group has evolved from a single, coprophagous, African ancestor and spread worldwide, diversifying into non-coprophagous species fairly recently. Divergence and distribution fit neatly into known plate tectonic geology and the entire family tree only makes sense as the result of evolution into different geographical and ecological niches.

Once again, we see a scientific paper by a biologist who seems to be completely unaware that, if creationist claims are correct, evolutionary theory is a theory in crisis and is no longer regarded as valid by a large number of biologists. In fact, curiously, there don't seem to be any serious science papers published by practicing biologists that show any awareness that the theory of evolution is not the best available explanation for biological diversity, morphology, physiology and genetics.

Perhaps one of my creationist readers would like to explain this curious disparity between what can be seen and what they claim...

'via Blog this'

How Science Works - Evolving Mammoths

Frontiers | Mammuthus Population Dynamics in Late Pleistocene North America: Divergence, Phylogeography and Introgression | Paleontology

To the delight of creationists no doubt, evolutionary paleontologists are changing their minds about North American mammoth evolution.

To most black-and-white-thinking creationists and other science deniers, science is either right or wrong and, since scientists frequently update their knowledge and understanding, to most of them this shows science is always wrong. It isn't of course; it's just science being honest and revising it opinion in view of new information. Science isn't so much a process of proving what's right and what's wrong as a process of gaining more understanding through new or better knowledge.

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.