Watching Evolution in Florida!

Study spots evolution in action in Florida bird | Science | AAAS

It's become something of an online ritual; almost a religious rite. Creationists come bursting into a debate group and announce confidently that evolution has never been observed and then they get given several examples of observed instances of evolution. Then they declare that that wasn't evolution and insist evolution is something unrecognisable as the scientific theory of evolution or the observable phenomenon the theory seeks to explain.

It's the equivalent ofsomeone posing as an expert on geometry and claiming there is no such thing as a circle, then, when shown a circle, declaring that a real circle should have a circumference to radius ratio of exactly 3 because the Bible says so.

Intelligently Evolving Elephants

Genetic connectivity across marginal habitats: the elephants of the Namib Desert - Ecology and Evolution.

The importance of intelligent, memetic evolution, as opposed to genetic evolution, is being increasingly recognised especially in sentient species. Groups of sentient animals can appear to be a different species based on lifestyle, habitat, social organisation, etc and yet be genetically almost indistinguishable. Pods of killer whales, for example, may have very different hunting strategies and occupy different parts of the ocean but differ only from other pods by culture.

Catholicism In Ireland In Disarray!

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin - "unhappy about an atmosphere that was growing"

Irish archbishop moves priests after gay culture claims at Catholic seminary - BBC News.

From being the major power in the land in the Republic of Ireland just 25 years ago, Catholicism continues to degenerate into farce and disrepute.

The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin has now said he will stop sending trainee priests to the Republic's top Seminary, St Patrick's College, Maynooth and will be sending them to Rome's Irish College instead. This is because of what Archbishop Martin called a "poisonous culture of anonymous letters" amid persistent rumours and whistleblower attempts to expose a growing gay culture at the seminary.

Unintelligent Design - Evolving Blindness

Fossil cyclostomes from the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte
(For caption see original paper)

Pigmented anatomy in Carboniferous cyclostomes and the evolution of the vertebrate eye - Proceedings of the Royal Society B

No sooner do we have a paper on the evolution of mammalian eyes that shows any hypothetical 'intelligent (sic) designer' as an incompetent fool with no plan, we have another paper which shows pretty much the same with regards to the evolution of eyes in the early vertebrates.

This time, creationist have to explain why their supposed designer gave hagfish perfectly good eyes then set about making them go blind with just remnants of their former functional eyes. It's revealing that creationist regard this as evidence of intelligence!

Using scanning electron microscopes, the research team led by Professor Sarah Gabbott from the Department of Geology, University of Leicester, UK, examined the 300 million year-old fossils of lampreys (Mayomyzon) and hagfish (Myxinikela) from Carboniferous rocks in Mazon Creek fossil bed, Illinois, USA. What they found has changed our understanding of the pace of the evolution of the vertebrate eye.

Unintelligent Design - Evolution Of Colour-Blindness

Seeing you in black and white.

Recruitment of Rod Photoreceptors from Short-Wavelength-Sensitive Cones during the Evolution of Nocturnal Vision in Mammals - Developmental Cell

Why do dogs (and most mammals) not have colour vision? The answer seems to be that they lost it so they could better compete with predatory dinosaurs!

So how did that work? You would expect colour vision to be advantageous so if early mammals needed to compete with dinosaurs - which probably had colour vision, wouldn't having better colour vision be the way to go? But of course, evolution doesn't think and plan. Maybe if it did and used human intuition that's what it might have tried. However, the dinosaurs would also have been evolving and responding to the challenge of these better-equipped mammals and there is no guarantee that the mammals would have won that particular arms race.

Extinction Of The Mammoths. No Intelligence Seen.

Timing and causes of mid-Holocene mammoth extinction on St. Paul Island, Alaska - PNAS

We probably now know what caused the final extinction of mammoths. It was a simple lack of fresh water in their last island refuge as the climate changed.

What creationists now have to tell us is why their intelligent (sic) designer decided to kill them off and why it chose this method, because it looks for all the world like the sort of thing that might well happen with a mindless, undirected natural process. But of course, a creationist has to believe nothing happens because of chance or unfortunate accident and everything happens for a purpose and according to a plan.

Minnesota Sex Scandal - Pope's Envoy in 'Criminal' Cover-up.

Archbishop Niestedt

Minnesota Priest’s Memo Says Vatican Ambassador Tried to Stifle Sex Abuse Inquiry - The New York Times

The simmering sex scandals that have beset the US Catholic Archdiocese of Minnesota and St Paul bubbled over again this week with the news that an outraged priest, the Rev. Dan Griffith, released a memo in which he detailed possible criminal activity by none other than the Papal Nuncio. The Rev Griffith was working at a high level in the diocese and was the diocesan liaison with lawyers appointed to investigate the handling of sex abuse scandals.

The memo records how Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the Vatican's ambassador to the USA, ordered the destruction of evidence which implicated the former Archbishop of Minnesota and St Paul, Archbishop John C. Nienstedt, in possible criminal activities. In the memo Rev Griffith said the actions of the Papal Nuncio amounted to “a good old fashioned cover-up to preserve power and avoid scandal.”

The 'Intelligent Designer' Gets Up Our Nose.

MRSA

Photograph: By R Parulan Jr./Getty Images/Flickr RF

Human commensals producing a novel antibiotic impair pathogen colonization : Nature : Nature Research

Although examples of stupid design abound in nature, especially in the related fields of biological arms races and parasitism, this one take some beating. It's been going on not just under our very noses but up them.

The story so far (if you believe in intelligent (sic) design, that is): the common bacterium Staphylococcus aureus comes in several varieties, most of which are harmless to humans but a few are harmful. Intelligent (sic) design proponents who normally deny that intelligent (sic) design has anything to do with religion because that would make it difficult to get this Bible literalism disguised as science taught in schools in secular countries, will never-the-less tell you that these harmful bacteria are God's punishment on mankind for original sin.

Another End Of The World!

Rev John Hagee

For people who enjoy these regular ends of the world when Jesus returns, saves a few self-righteous Americans and kills everyone else, John Hagee is the man to follow!

His current prediction is for 30 August this year. There is no doubt at all about this. Like all his other predictions, this has been revealed to him by God and from his study of 'God's Holy Word' in the 'inerrant' Bible, so there can't be any doubt. There never is any doubt! There was never any doubt about all the previous predictions either!

Morality And Pre-Roman Civilisation in England

Field system in South Downs, England

South Downs National Park Authority

South Downs pre-Roman 'farming collective' discovered - BBC News

A little news item from southern England has been causing a flutter of excitement by posing a few questions for historians recently. It should, if properly understood, cause fundamentalist theists to ask themselves a few questions too.

The news item concerned a recent discovery that agriculture was highly organised in the immediate pre-Roman era in England. This was shown by the discovery of an extensive field system in what is now modern West Sussex and Hampshire. It was discovered using a new laser-based aerial survey technique known as LiDAR.

Gut Microbes Confirm Our Evolution

Artist's impression of hominin gut microbiota.

Image credit: The University of Texas at Austin. Illustration by Jenna Luecke

Cospeciation of gut microbiota with hominids | Science

Further confirmation that scientists have the hominid family tree about right in terms of time and branching has been provided in a paper published today in Science. It shows that some of the symbiotic bacteria we carry in our gut today have been with not only us but our close relatives from before we diverged into the different African apes and humans, and that they diverged and speciated at the same time.

This isn't really a surprise to evolutionary scientists because that is exactly what we would expect to happen. Mere confirmation of what is already known from the fossil and genetic evidence would scarcely raise an eyebrow and might not even be considered worth publishing. But, from a scientific point of view, the interesting thing here is that we don't, as was thought, acquire all our gut microbiota from our general environment. At least some of it seems to be inherited, hence forming a relatively isolated genetic line which has been maintained in the different diverging species over hundreds of thousands of generations.

Kendall House Abuse: What God Was Watching?

Kendall House Abuse Centre

Kendall House: Girls drugged and abused at church-run home - BBC News

The report of the review of Kendall House, an Anglican girls' home in Gravesend, Kent, ordered by Bishop of Rochester, is truly shocking! It reveals a regime of systematic physical, psychological and sexual abuse of young, troubled girls, some as young as 11 years old, to the extent that almost every child was subjected to this abuse routinely and as a matter of 'normal' practice.

Bear in mind as you read this that one of the supposed 'selling points' of religion is that unlike 'atheistic' or secular institutions, they provide these social support institutions out of a sense of moral duty and obligation to their fellows - and because Jesus told them to!

European Union - Impact of EU Immigration

Brexit Lie

Brexit and the Impact of Immigration on the UK

Maybe I'm talking to the converted and maybe I'm saying "I told you so!" but this report from the Centre for Economic Performance of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) by Jonathan Wadsworth, Swati Dhingra, Gianmarco Ottaviano and John Van Reenen, vindicates just about everything I have written about the immigration issue in respect of the EU referendum.

It reveals the blatant lies peddled by the Leave side for their own Machiavellian political ambitions, and it has to be said, shows the failure of the Remain side in failing to counter those lies.

Transitional Bird Wings In Cretaceous Amber!

For description see original paper

Mummified precocial bird wings in mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber : Nature Communications : Nature Publishing Group

More bad news for creationists to find coping strategies for. An interesting find in amber deposits from Myanmar has revealed a little more about the evolution of birds, or more precisely feathers, during the Cretaceous. It shows a bird wing with a transitional skeleton!

The details were published in an open access paper in Nature Communications a few days ago by an international research team was led by Dr Xing Lida from the China University of Geosciences, and colleagues from Canada, United States and Professor Mike Benton from the University of Bristol, UK. It shows tiny wings in astonishing detail, including bones, skin, muscles and feathers. The fine structure of the feathers even shows what is probably evidence of colour.

The significance of this find, apart from the fact that the wings were tiny - only two to three centimeters long - is that they are from hatchling enantiornithine birds which still had fingers with well-developed claws. This group of early birds became extinct along with dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous.

Just Another Catholic Paedophile Seminarian

Seminary Student Sentenced To 15 Years For Arranging Sex With Infants

It would not be fair to assume that all expelled Catholic seminarians were expelled for paedophilia, but this example shows the continuing weakness in the Catholic Church's recruitment procedures in that these predators are still not being picked up earlier. If they hadn't been so careless they might well have made it into the priesthood where they had trusted access to vulnerable people.

And No Religion Too...

People of no religion outnumber Christians in England and Wales – study | World news | The Guardian

Having been away from active blogging about religion for a while, what with a few personal family issues and a little matter of my fellow countrymen and women having voted to commit economic suicide by trying to go back to the 1970s instead of forward as part of a united Europe, it's good to come back with some good news, albeit a little late.

Ironically, it is news that illustrates how much like the rest of Western Europe we are. As with many other European countries, religious affiliation and church attendance continues to tumble in England at a rate that is causing panic and despondency in the established churches. The reaction of the established churches may reveal something about the attitude of clerics to 'faith'.

Faith Is A Feminist Issue

In the concluding chapter, Freedom to Choose, in my book, Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It,I point out the following after reproducing an extract from http://www.allaboutgod.com/ which spells out in minute detail the role of both husband and wife in a marriage accordign to Christian dogma:

Note the entire ‘justification’ for men declaring the role of women, and for abrogating to themselves the right to do so with no reference to women’s opinions. It is wholly and solely that they can find excuses for it in a book of highly dubious provenance, which some people assert is the inspired word of an invisible magic man for which there is not an iota of definitive evidence.

The stories in the Bible were written by people with a Late Bronze Age Middle Eastern tribal misogyny who saw women as goods, not people. The cultural norms, prejudices and assumptions in that society are expected to be appropriate for today and half the world’s population are expected to meekly comply, because some men say so – and they have a book they can blame.

European Union - After The Storm

Oh! This was just a mistake!

It's now clear that Cameron's decision to try to shut up the minority of Europhobes in his own party and head off UKIP with a simple in/out referendum on Britain's EU membership was a monumental political blunder; a blunder possibly worse even than Eden's decision to invade Egypt and occupy the Suez Canal almost 60 years ago. It was a gamble that has ended his political career and may well lead to the breakup of the United Kingdom as Scottish independence is now very much on the cards.

The result has already wiped £200 billion off the value of UK shares - some 20 years EU contribution - caused Sterling to fall to it's lowest level for 30 years, relegated Britain from the fifth to the sixth largest economy and caused credit agencies to downgrade our credit worthiness.

European Union - The Three Big Brexit Lies

The defining feature of the Brexit campaign has been its dishonesty and use of lies and distorted statistics right from the beginning. This intensified and became even more overtly racist and xenophobic when opinion polls began showing the Remain side pulling comfortably ahead and panic set in amongst those whose political ambitions depend on Cameron being forced out if he loses.

The main lies concern three major question:

1. Britain's Contribution.

The Brexiteers claim that it costs Britain £350 million a week in EU contributions. This is a lie. After the famous Thatcher rebate of £100 million and after the amount the EU gives back to finance regional development, improved transport infrastructure, etc, this falls to £161 million or $23 million a day. This is 1% of total government spending!

European Union - Why I'm In

I'll be departing from my usual science and Atheism posts for the next few days to concentrate on the impending referendum on the UK's continuing membership of the European Union.

The EU is important to me because I believe it represents one of the most significant achievements of human history. For the first time, previously waring and generally hostile states decided to put aside historical differences and build something new. Within an increasingly united Europe, trade wars and tariff barriers were to be abolished and political differences were to be settle by consensus.

Lessons From Menorca - Religious Intolerance

Statue of Jesus on Menorca's highest point - Monte Toro

As I said in my previous post, Menorca has a lot of history, having a large natural harbour and occupying a strategic location almost midway between the Spanish mainland and Italian Sardinia and relatively close to France.

At the end of the Punic wars between Rome and Carthage, Minorca fell under Roman control. By the fifth century it had acquired a large Jewish population which seems to have coexisted more or less peacefully with the predominantly Christian population. However, this was not to last.

In 415 AD there was a forced conversion of the Jews as related by a bishop Severus in The Letter on the Conversion of the Jews. 540 Jews were forcibly baptised, including many of the leading and most wealthy members of the community. Those that remained were expelled to the centre of the island. The synagogues were burned. However, many Jewish families retained their religion whilst showing an outward appearance of Christianity. These went on to form the persecuted and shunned Xueta community with it's distinct form of non-Catholic Christianity.

Lessons From Menorca - More Dead Gods!

Naveta d'Es Tudons, Menorca. A burial tomb for about 100 bodies between 1200 and 750 BCE. Possibly the oldest roofed building in Europe.

We've just spent a very pleasant few days in Menorca - one of the Spanish Balearic Islands and one of the few places we've visited twice.

Menorca has a very long history of conquest and religious persecution which will be the subject of another blog post; what I want to deal with here is how religions and gods that we know little or nothing of can inspire their believers and shape their cultures, yet they disappear without trace when their last believer dies.

It's a theme I've previously written about in my book, Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It, and in earlier blog posts such asThe Old Dead Gods of Wiltshire, Old Dead Gods - Lessons From Silbury Hill, Old Dead Gods - Lessons from Cirencester, Gods Come And Go But Truth Remains, etc.

How Evolution Works - Suffering Saxifrage!

I noticed this saxifrage which has been struggling for about three years to survive on a the patch of gravel which constitutes my front garden and it suddenly dawned on me how neatly it illustrates some aspects of evolution. It shows how a species fits itself into an available niche and how it diversifies as it spreads its range, not necessarily because it changes but because the environment in which it finds itself changes. The genetic information doesn't need to change for the meaning of that information to change because meaning is given to the information by environmental context.

If that idea seems a little obscure, consider the word karutis. It is probably meaningless to the average reader of this blog. Show it to a Latvian speaker however, and the meaning will be obvious - wheelbarrow. Of course, if you showed the word 'wheelbarrow' to a Latvian, it would be as meaningless as 'karutis' is to an English speaker. The information in the words is the same in either language; only the meaning changes with the language environment

Saxifrage is good ground cover for gravel because it can survive in shallow soil and spreads mostly vegetatively by short runners and so forms colonies of what are essentially clones of the parent plant. It can also survive being scuffed and kicked occasionally, which is useful when postmen and others going door to door walk to your neighbours door across your gravel garden as though it's a public footpath. It's there partly for ground cover but also for the pretty red flowers it puts up at the right time of the year.

Human Evolution and Neanderthal Inbreeding

The Genetic Cost of Neanderthal Introgression - Genetics

According to a paper recently published in Genetics^PDF, interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals in Eurasia may have been much more common that the small quantity of Neanderthal DNA in modern non-African peoples suggests. The two populations may even have behaved like a single breeding group, in which Neanderthals were eventually genetically swamped by Homo sapien DNA.

The team led by Kelley Harris, of Stanford University used computer simulation of mutation accumulation during Neanderthal evolution to model how humans were affected by imported neanderthal genes. The simulations used known data on mutation rates and population dynamics of hominids.

Habitable Planets Are Probably Commonplace.

Kepler-62f (Artist's impression).
A planet in the 'habitable zone' of a star located about 1,200 light-years from Earth.

Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

A planet 1,200 light-years away is a good prospect for a habitable world: Researchers combine climate, orbit models to show that Kepler-62f might be able to sustain life -- ScienceDaily.

News that astronomers have identified yet another possibly habitable planet raises a number of questions for religion, especially the Abrahamic religions, and even more so for creationist fundamentalism based on a literal reading of the Bible or Qur'an.

Both these books portray a Universe created especially for Earth-bound human beings and a creator god who has, or wants, a close relationship with these specially-created Earthlings. Both Christianity and Islam insist that their god created humans simply to worship it. The entire Universe is supposedly here for somewhere for humans to live as they worship this creator god.

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...

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