How can elephant DNA teach us about why science works and creationism doesn't?
Creationists, with their simplistic black vs. white view of the world, often pour scorn and derision on science for changing its collective mind so frequently. This comes of course from a mindset which values 'certainty', no matter how illusory, more highly than truth. Truth is sacrificed in the search for the cosy comfort of 'certainty'.
But science doesn't look for certainty. Science simply tries to get as close to the truth as possible and a truth which can be demonstrated. The analogy is of a car being driven to a destination. Every movement on that journey is a sign of progress, not a sign of failure. Constant change of position is the method of progress. Science has to change its collective mind to make progress. Religions fail to make progress because they can't change their collective minds without abandoning their religion. With religions, the dogma is everything.
In an orgy of gratuitous anti-gay hate and abuse, Serbian Orthodox Christians, incensed at a gay pride parade in the Serbian capita, Belgrade, held a rally and march to ritually cleanse the streets of 'homosexual contamination'. The parade had been heavily protected by police preventing Orthodox and far-right nationalist extremists violently breaking it up as earlier years.
Amongst the expressions of Christian 'love' was a banner showing a homosexual being pushed into Hellfire by a Christian with a cross. The love of Jesus
"I personally ask for forgiveness for the damage [some priests] have done for having sexually abused children. We will not take one step backward with regards to how we will deal with this problem, and the sanctions that must be imposed".
In an extraordinary move, and one which flies in the face of official Vatican pronouncements on the subject of child-abusing Catholic priests, the Archdiocese of Mexico has formally acquitted an HIV carrying priest of any wrongdoing even though he admitted having sex with about 30 girls aged between 5 and 10 over many years.
The assaults were committed on indigenous girls in the southern province of Oaxaca which has a predominantly indigenous population and where the influence of the Catholic Church is very powerful, especially amongst the indigenous people. No criminal charges have yet been brought against the priest, José Ataulfo Garcia, despite his admission, almost certainly due to the Church's political influence in Mexico.
In another attempt to understand the recent rapid growth in the 'nones' - those who don't self-identify with any religion - the Pew Research Centre took another look at the data to identify the factors driving this rejection of organised religion:
The share of Americans who do not identify with a religious group is surely growing: While nationwide surveys in the 1970s and ’80s found that fewer than one-in-ten U.S. adults said they had no religious affiliation, fully 23% now describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular.”
But there are differing ideas about the factors driving this trend – and its implications for society. While it appears the U.S. is becoming less religious, some contend that’s not necessarily the case. Instead, they say, the growth of the “nones” may simply indicate that people who are not religious are becoming more forthright and willing to say they have no religious affiliation, perhaps because being a “none” has become more socially acceptable.
Clearly this topic is exercising the minds of a lot of worried people. Although this study is a relatively superficial treatment of the phenomenon, analysing only a few factors such as age, former religion and strength of former religious commitment rather than any underlying cause of change in opinion, it shows a number of interesting and related trends. An earlier Pew Centre FactTank report had shown some of the reasons people give for rejecting religion, including a better understanding of science, but it would have been good to see some analysis of lifestyle changes such as ready access to information and exposure to the behaviour, ignorance and downright stupidity underpinning religious fundamentalism.
The thing about the modern Catholic Church is its modernity and the way it has enthusiastically embraced science and abandoned those old, mediaeval, unscientific superstitions like a flat Earth, six-day creation and the inferior status of the black, brown, yellow and red-skinned races.
They've even turned their back on the notion which lead to the persecution of women as witches - a world in which evil spirits could enter and take over human... er... except they haven't.
News that a cave near the Black Sea in Romania which has been isolated from the outside world for 5.5 million years has multiple examples of unique and strange creatures living it it, comes as no surprise at all to evolutionary biologists.
In fact, provided that there is a source of energy so living things can continue to live, this is exactly what we would expect of an evolutionary process.
If only they were little less disingenuous and arrogantly certain, you could almost feel sorry for creationists. Just when they're settling down to feel smugly self-satisfied that they've invented a workaround for all the evidence that evolution fully explains biodiversity without involving their imaginary friend science comes up with another paper that illustrates the disingenuous fraud of this workaround. Their workaround was to deliberately misrepresent the terms 'macroevolution' and 'microevolution' as they are used by science.
With the two major Middle Eastern Islamic powers, one, Iran being 95% Shi'a and the other, Saudi Arabia being 90% Sunni, indulging in a bitter war of words, it is worth looking at the history of the religious differences between these two branches of Islam.
The origin of this schism goes right back to the events following the death of Muhammad in Medina, Saudi Arabia in 632 CE. Muhammad himself had no male descendants, brothers or nephews so there was no clear line of succession and no rules of succession to be found in the Qur'an or Hadiths.
The early Muslim leadership, still centred on Medina, formed three different groupings; the first being the close associates of Muhammad who had made the hijra (the journey from Mecca into exile in Medina) with him; the later converts from amongst the leading families in Medina and the later still converts from Mecca. Whilst the first group regarded themselves as the natural successors to Muhammad and regarded the other two with suspicion as Johnny-come-latelies who had failed to support Muhammad in the early days.
An undercover pair of reporters for the Irish edition of the Times has exposed the systematic lies being told to vulnerable pregnant women seeking safe, confidential and accurate abortion advice.
The Women's Centre, Berkeley Street, Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland, which poses as an independent advice centre but which is in reality a front for a Catholic anti-abortion group, was visited by the two reporters, Ellen Coyne and Catherine Sanz, pretending to be pregnant. They used concealed cameras to filmed the session. The report regretably sits behind a paywall so this blog post draws on other sites which report on its contents.
They were told:
Taken from the Abortionadvice.ie website.
The ovaries and breasts are connected so when a pregnancy is terminated, it can cause breast cancer.
An abortion can harm a woman's reproductive system.
Women who have had abortions may go on to abuse their other children.
The abortion pill can't be used after the 6th week of pregnancy.
Abortions often lead to the death of the woman having the abortion.
UK abortion clinics can give you infections so only the group's centres should be used.
All of these are wrong or grossly misleading. As doctors from Doctors For Choice, an Irish organisation that campaigns for reform of Irish abortion laws, pointed out:
The videoed "information" given to a young woman who presented herself as pregnant to a Dublin "advice" clinic is entirely untrue and dangerous. International medical guidelines state that the abortion pill can be prescribed up to at least 9 weeks in pregnancy. Furthermore there is no reputable published research and no medical evidence for an increased risk of breast cancer or psychological sequelae from abortion, when compared to women who have completed pregnancies. To suggest that women who have had abortions are more likely to perpetrate child abuse is to heap insult on top of the stigma already imposed on the more than 100,000 women who have been forced to leave Ireland to access safe legal abortion services.
Irish women deserve access to safe, legal abortion, regulated as are other medical services. They deserve evidence-based, unbiased information provided in a setting where basic first principles regarding counselling apply - where there is no agenda regarding the decisions they reach and the advice is non-directive.
Berkeley Street, Dublin, 2014
Abortions are illegal under the Irish Constitution unless as the result of medical intervention to save the life of the mother. Although there is a constitutional right to obtain information about abortion services in other jurisdictions, abortion advice centres such as this are completely unregulated, so luring unsuspecting, vulnerable women into them to be fed lies, misinformation and propaganda is perfectly legal in the Republic of Ireland. They are not regulated by medical or other professional ethical standards.
Prior to disguising itself as an independent advice center, this militant pro-life group set up shop adjacent to a family planning clinic in Berkeley Street and harangued women using the service with unwanted 'advice'. They now seem to have decided to be a little more subtle which means pretending not to be an overtly Catholic front organisation.
Although the Bible does not explicitly forbid the telling of lies and the ninth Commandment only forbids bearing false witness against a neighbour, this is generally held to be a general prohibition on telling lies. This Catholic group however seems to feel exempt from this fundamental piece of Christian 'morality'. Presumably, they would expect Jesus to tell lies too if the truth wasn't what he wanted it to be or what he wanted people to hear.
Following on from the canonization yesterday of the sadistic Albanian nun and friend of poverty, Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu (aka Mother Teresa) showing how Catholic Church leaders exploit the gullible credulity of their followers for their own nefarious purposes, come two news items from Nigeria showing how the same tendency to abuse power for personal gain is not restricted to the bigger and more organised churches.
As 'Honest' Pope Frankie prepares to elevate the sadistic nun, Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu (aka Mother Teresa) to the Catholic sainthood it is worth looking at the second 'miracle' that is being attributed to her and used as the pretext for this bizarre Medieval ceremony.
The details of the alleged 'miracle' have been kept under wraps for reasons which will become understandable and have only recently been made public. Even the identity of the alleged subject was kept secret until he came forward recently to claim the fame and fortune which will undoubtedly accrue to him in the superstitious parts of the world.
It works because it is firmly rooted in reality and so is reproducible and repeatable. This means that no matter who is doing it or when, or what the cultural setting is, done properly, the result should be the same.
The same can be said of mathematics, of course. It doesn't matter how many times you do the maths, who does it or when, the answer will be the same providing the maths is done correctly.
The stromatolites in figure a are from Greenland; those in c and d are younger stromatolites from Western Australia. Figure b shows the layers created by microbes as they formed the Greenland stromatolites (blue lines). ‘Stroms’ are several overlapping stromatolites.
The answer to this question is probably relevant to the likelihood that life will be found on other suitable planets too because it it happened quickly on Earth this suggests the process was not the vastly unlikely event that creationists try to present it as but a process (or processes) that can happen in just a few hundred million years if not even more quickly.
Yes, I know that a few hundred million years is not a short time but, compared to the 4.5 billion years or so that Earth has been around, it is during Earth's early childhood. It also suggests that Earth was not the hot, inhospitable, volcano-strewn and desiccated ball of rock that it was once thought to be but that it settled down quite quickly to be closer to what we have today (sans life, initially, of course). It also brings the early Mars within the timescale over which life could have arisen there at a time when Mars was thought to have been suitable, complete with liquid water, atmosphere, etc.
The discover of these stromatolites in Greenland rock pushes the earliest age at which cellular life was known to exist on Earth with a fair degree of certainty back to 3.7 billion years ago from the previous earliest known evidence dated at 3.48 billion years old found in Australian rocks.
Readers may remember a post from last December about the sad decline of Tasmanian devils due to a highly contagious and almost invariaby fatal facial cancer that was devastating their already low numbers. Now, however there is some slightly better news - the devils are rapidly evolving under this intense selection pressure to become resistant to this cancer.
Evolution and ecology are one and the same really because ecology is all about how species adapt and interrelate to form a complete system of interdependent organisms. Without evolution none of the interdependent organism could fit into their particular niche and compete with other organisms for resources. So, evolution created ecosystems and ecosystems drive evolution.
But in the early days of life on Earth, before life emerged from the oceans where it had first evolved and diversified, there was no ecosystem as such on land, so how did the first emerging life manage to eke out an existence and what reason did it have to go there in the first place?
Now scientists believe they may have found how an early plant, related to the club mosses, may have created its own ecosystem by interaction between its rhizomes and silt-laden floods. Rhizomes are
Cranial endocast and comparison of brain anatomy in pterosaurs.
(A, B), Volume-rendered CT-based reconstruction of the braincase of the holotype of Allkaruen koi, in dorsal (A) and left lateral (B) views (the bone is rendered semitransparent to show the cranial endocast and the inner ear). (C–H), schematic drawings of brain anatomy in Rhamphorhynchus (C, F), Allkaruen (D, G), and Anhanguera (E, H) in dorsal (C–E) and lateral (F–H) views. Colors (C–H) indicate equivalent brain regions (blue, cerebrum; green, optic lobe; yellow, cerebellum; red, floccular process of cerebellum; pink, semicircular canals). The horizontal black line shows the relationship between the dorsal expansion of the anterior semicircular canal and the forebrain. Abbreviations: asc, anterior semicircular canal; cer, cerebral hemisphere; de, dorsal expansion; f, frontal; floc, floccular process of cerebellum; lab, labyrinth of inner ear; lsc, lateral semicircular canal; lag, lagena; ob, olfactory bulb; oc, occipital condyle; ol, optic lobe; pbt, basipterygoid process; pit, pituitary body; psc, posterior semicircular canal; sc, sagittal crest. Roman numerals indicate cranial nerves. Brain anatomy of Rhamphorhynchus and Anhanguera modified from Witmer et al. (2003). Scale bars are 10 mm.
It's always rewarding to watch creationists try to cope with something they claim shouldn't be there when it quite clearly is there and can be seen to be there. One thing they can't do however is admit reality because reality is the one thing that undermines their evidence-free and reality-denying dogma.
There shouldn't be any transitional fossils because transitional fossils show evolution so, so the 'reasoning' seems to go, all those transitional fossils can't be there because evolution doesn't happen. So, this latest discovery of a transitional fossil between two different orders of aerial reptile will need to be explained away somehow.
Scientists today announced the discovery of a new species of pterosaur from the Patagonia region of South America. The cranial remains were in an excellent state of preservation and belonged to a new species of pterosaur from the Early Jurassic. The researchers have named this new species ‘ Allkauren koi’ from the native Tehuelche word ‘all’ for ‘brain’, and ‘karuen’ for ‘ancient’.
About 3 million years ago a creature midway between a chimpanzee-like ape and a human being fell out of a tree and died of her injuries.
This creature was the best known of some 300 specimens of a species now known to science as Australopithecus afarensis, a species which is one of the candidates for being the direct ancestor of the Homo genus. She is known to the worlds as 'Lucy'.
New figures released by the Pew Research Center have revealed something interesting going on in the American religious profile and they make dismal reading for those trying to cling to the belief that religion shows little real sign of a major decline in the USA comparable to that in Europe and elsewhere.
They suggest the traditional American attachment to religion, which has made America such an outlier in the general distribution of religious belief and how it has changed over time, may be waning and even on the point of a major shift. It appears to be heading in the same direction that has seen a massive rejection of religion in the rest of the developed world.
Why do so many Americans believe in the Judeo-Christian god compared to most Western European countries?
Although religious affiliation and belief in any god are both falling in the USA according to recent research, America still lags about a generation behind Western Europe in its rejection of religion. Percentage figures of 80% plus for belief in god and in the upper 60s for the importance of religion in their lives are typically returned for US surveys while the equivalent in UK, France, Holland and even formerly staunchly Catholic Ireland and Spain are typically under 50% and 30% respectively.
Now, I don't believe in all that karma nonsense and I know it's unkind to laugh at a fellow human being's misfortune, but there is a certain delicious poetry about this story.
Pastor Tony Perkins is well known for trying to make gays and women who have had abortions feel uncomfortable with his hate speeches using his religion as an excuse. In 2015 he agreed with extreme Messianic Jewish pastor Jonathan Cahn who told him that Hurricane Joaquin, which devastated Hawaii last year, was a "sign of God's wrath". He is President of the controversial Christian group 'Family Research Council'. Never one to be deterred by mere facts when in need of a good smear, he also preaches that paedophiles are homosexuals (or is it that homesexuals are paedophiles?)
If humans are good at anything we are good at recognising things.
In fact we are so good at it that we see lots of things that aren't really there. Take a good look at this picture. What do you see, other than a very beautiful vista of a low mountain range seen over water. It is a view of Mt Susitna seen from Anchorage, Alaska, USA but it is supposed to look like a familiar object from which it gets it's popular name.
Can you see it? Don't cheat but have a good go. What do you see when you look at that scene - other than the obvious?
Americans who are prejudiced against Atheists tend to have a lower than average IQ, according to research published in the Journal of Social Psychology and Personal Science a couple of weeks ago.
The research was conducted on a representative sample of 5,914 Americans by Mark J. Brandt, Department of Social Psychology, Tilburg University, Tilburg, Netherland and Jarret T. Crawford of The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ, USA. The paper sits behind a paywall but according to a press release by the Society for Personal and Social Psychology:
In a neat demonstration of a fundamental Christian principle, allegedly taught personally by Jesus to his followers, a South African Christian 'prophet' killed one of his congregation - a young girl - because she didn't have enough faith.
Or that was his excuse anyway - an excuse provided by Jesus no less. The principle being demonstrated was the one Christians often cite, claiming that with enough faith you can move mountains, even though a mountain has never been seen to be moved by faith alone.
If you're a virus using and inevitably damaging your host in order to get yourself replicated you have a few problems to overcome.
First, there is the problem that damaging your host makes it less likely that it'll breed as successfully as non-infected hosts. Secondly, your host's genome will be at an advantage if it develops genes which make it resistant to you. So, you'll inevitably find yourself in a wasteful evolutionary arms race unless you can find a way round these two problems.
The real miracle of miracles is that anyone ever believes them. By definition a miracle is something which allegedly happened but for which there can be no scientific explanation. The problem with that definition is that it is self-defeating. If there can be no scientific explanation there can be no scientific evidence for it.
An almost identical problem exists for very many Christian saints, all of whom are claimed to have performed miracles either before or after death. Most of them also contrived to die in miraculous ways, often in ways which provided a plentiful supply of body parts with which to consecrate future cathedrals and to channel the prayers of the faith to God, Jesus or Mary via the saint's Heavenly remains.
In many cases however, the miracle of saints is that people believe such unlikely tales in the first place, but this was never a problem for the Medieval Christian church because truth could be determined by fiat and what the church said had the sanction of God so became unquestionable truth. The legend behind Santiago (early Spanish form of the Latin Sanctus Iacobus (James)) and the pilgrim routes to his shrine at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain, simply beggars belief. There is not a single shred of evidence that any of it is true; not a single document, eyewitness testimony, inscription or written reference or even allusion to it in any contemporaneous record. The legend only appears to have emerged in about 800 CE.
Go into the English countryside right now and you could see a major ecological change occurring. I saw this example on a walk earlier today with my grandson. This change started in about 1976 or 1977 and is continuing still.
What you will see in most hedgerows at least in Southern England will be the sad sight of English elm saplings succumbing to Dutch elm disease and quickly turning their leaves brown and dying. Around them you will very likely see what look like perfectly healthy smaller elm sapling.
When Dutch elm disease first struck in the mid 1970 it altered the English landscape as massive elms that had stood for a century or more along the side of our country lanes and whole woods of elms quickly turned brown and died in August. It looked in places like Autumn had come a full two months early. Many feared that the elm was doomed and frantic efforts were made to conserve a few trees by annual 'injections' of fungicide to kill off the culprits (there are three related ascomycete microfungi which cause the disease).
But the English elm didn't die out completely. Instead it became a hedgerow plant as young saplings sprang up from the roots of the old dead trees. Spreading by root suckers rather than seed is a characteristic of the English Elm. But to understand why they didn't also die off it's necessary to understand the way Dutch elm disease is spread. It doesn't spread by wind-blown spores like many other fungi but depends entirely on being spread by the elm bark beetle. This beetle lays its eggs underneath the bark of the elm by depositing them via an ovipositor into the layer immediately beneath the bark, transferring the fungal spores beneath the bark as it does so.
Sex feels good. Sex is fun and makes us feel happy.
Sex is a primary instinct and good sex is fulfilling and rewarding. Sex is two people enjoying one another in the closest and most intimate way possible.
Good sex is euphoric! There is nothing wrong with consensual sex between willing adults!
And yet the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam teach that sex is sinful unless in very precisely detailed and controlled conditions, otherwise it is a source of guilt and shame and feelings of self-loathing and hate.
The Piltdown Hoax, contrary to creationist claims, is not an embarrassment for science but a vindication of the scientific method. It shows us how even if human weakness and vanity intrude into science, or even if the evidence is viewed through the distorting lens of cultural assumptions, the scientific method eventually weeds them out.
The process of reexamination - of allowing doubt and uncertainty to drive reassessment - and above all to be prepared to admit it when previous beliefs and accepted wisdom begin to look out of kilter with more recent discoveries, it what makes this weeding-out process an integral par of the scientific method. And of course the original perpetrators of hoaxes and falsification of data eventually die, so future generations have no vested interest in maintaining the deception and everything to gain from exposing it.
Creationists frauds continually feed their dupes with the absurd notion that somehow the Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis and is about to be abandoned by science and replaced by the absurd notion that it was all magicked by a magic man in the sky.
What is even more astonishing than their flagrant disregard for the self-evident fact that the TOE remains the fundamental theory underpinning all biological science is that their dupes readily convince themselves that for the first time in history an established scientific theory is going to be abandoned and replaced by a Bronze Age myth with not a single shred of evidence. No other scientific theory has ever been abandoned and replaced by 'Goddidit'.
More evidence today that humans are not the only species with the intelligence and cognitive abilities to make and use tools.
We now know that several other species have the cognitive ability to make tools and at least one, the Caledonian Crow, goes one step further and not only makes simple modifications like stripping leaves from a twig but actually shapes the tool precisely, designing a tool fit for purpose.
We have known since 2002 that captive Caledonian crows such as the famous 'Betty' will bend wire into a hook to retrieve food. Wire is of course not a natural substance yet these crows appear to understand not only the shape and dimensions of the hook they need, but they also understand the tensile and maleability qualities of the wire they use. Because they were captive crows however it was always a possibility that there had been an element of training involved, even inadvertently.
Life can be so hard for a humble Catholic priest! You wonder sometimes how they manage to put up with it.
Take for example Rev. Louis Brouillard. Brouillard served in Guam from the 1940s through the 1970s, teaching at San Vicente and Father Duenas Memorial schools. He is now 95 and lives quietly on his church pension in Pine City, Minnesota, USA.
While in Guam he molested somewhere between two and twenty boys - he could not remember the exact number. Nor could he remember Leo B. Tudela, now aged 73, who gave an emotional testimony to the Guam Legislature appealing for it to raise the statute of limitations from the current two years for those who have sexally abused minors, so that a case can be brought against the former Archbishop of Guam, Anthony S. Apuron, under whose jurisdiction the abuses took place.
The news from CERN that I wrote about yesterday reminded me for some reason about a blog post from a few years ago that neatly illustrates the fundamental difference between the way good science is done and the way 'good' religious apologetics is done.
The news from CERN was, of course, the news that scientists there had called a press conference to announce that what they thought was tentative evidence of a new, unexpected and unexplained fundamental particle was actually nothing of the sort. It was almost certainly a statistical anomaly as shown by the fact that they had been unable to replicate it.
These little news items about science getting something wrong, or changing it's collective mind, seem to excite creationists inordinately, appealing as creationism does to the ignorant and scientifically illiterate in society.
But of course, this is exactly what science is all about. It is all about honestly assessing and reassessing the evidence; about checking and rechecking and above all being prepared to change its collective mind when the evidence changes.
Evidence of the exceptional outburst flood in the upper valley of the Yellow River.
(A) Distributions of OFS, DLS, and landslide dam. Light purple and dark green shaded areas indicate purple-brown mudrock and greenschist, respectively. Line AB across the Lajia site shows the location of the reconstructed cross section in fig. S6C.
(B) The vertical distribution of the OFS, landslide dam, DLS, Lajia site and reconstructed lake levels relative to the longitudinal profile of the present Yellow River.
DLS are classified into lacustrine sediments (LS) and fan delta deposits (FD).
One of the many problems faced by Bible literalists is the singular lack of evidence for any of it, especially the much-cherished early creation myths found in Genesis. This means that those who try to cling at all costs to this primitive superstition have to perform all manner of frankly idiotic mental gymnastics to either explain away the lack of evidence or try to force-fit other geological evidence into their mythology.
One traditional attempt is to claim that many/most/all other cultures have a flood myth in their history. No matter how little these, where there are in fact any, match the biblical flood myth, they will always be waved around as proof of the historical accuracy of the Bible, as though not actually equating to the biblical myth in time, location, scope or detail actually mattered. There is the story of a flood at some point, therefore this is the biblical flood - case closed!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
