Scientists at Harvard Medical School have discovered that a gene that regulates bone and muscle growth may also be involved in brain development and activity in primates, including humans. In particular, this gene appears to be active in areas of the brain involved in cognition and learning. Their finding were published yesterday in Nature.
This is a good example of how genes can be used by the evolutionary process for new functions, and, because this particular retooled gene is only found in primates, it suggests that the repurposing occurred in a common ancestor of this clade.
The Catholic Church scored a victory in Louisiana, USA, a few days ago in it's struggle to prevent priests having to report cases of child abuse to the law enforcement agencies. The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that Catholic priests do not have a duty to report instances of child abuse if they learn about them in the confessional.
The Batton Rouge diocese had contested a case for negligence brought against them and Fr. Jeff Bayhi by Rebecca Mayeux, now 22. She had claimed that in 2008, when she was 14, she told Fr. Jeff Bayhi that she was being sexually abused by a fellow parishioner but Fr. Jeff Bayhi did nothing to prevent the abuse continuing.
Popes are supposed to be infallible and to be the absolute, ultimate authority on all spiritual and ecumenical matters - but not when it comes to trying to ride two horses simultaneously, it seems.
Face with a question from a Swiss journalist about whether women ever being admitted to the Catholic priesthood, Pope Francis confirmed that the ban would remain in place. When pressed he blamed Pope John Paul II who confirmed the ban in 1994, saying, "Saint Pope John Paul II had the last clear word on this and it stands, this stands".
Still trying to understand why American fundamentalist Christians regard Donald Trump as such a great role model and eminently suited to being President of the USA, I looked further into how Christian fundamentalists see a man's marital infidelities. So I turned again to the Biblical Gender Roles blog for an explanation.
Maybe fundamentalist Christians won't be surprised by the hypocritical double standards and cherry-picking approach to the Bible that I found there, but I suspect normal people might at least raise an eyebrow. After all, don't fundamentalists normally make a big thing of the Ten Commandments, including the instruction to not covet a neighbour's wife? Well, that was a mistake, apparently, or maybe it just applies to other people.
Wholesome Christian husband using God-approved moral blackmail to force sexual compliance.
In a bid to understand the fascination of fundamentalist Christians with Donald Trump, and especially with their apparent admiration for his seduction technique, I thought I would conduct a little research into Christian teaching on bedroom matters, and in particular the approved gender roles within a marriage.
Remember, Donald Trump's seduction technique, and one of the qualities that so endear him to fundamentalist Christians, is to grab a passing woman by her 'pussy' and expect her to become uncontrollably aroused at the thought of his large wealth. So how does this fit in with current Christian teaching? For this I turned to the fundamentalist Christian blogsite, Biblical Gender Roles.
In one of my occasional forays into American politics, let's take a look at what the almost universal endorsement of Donald Trump for POTU by the American conservative Christian right tells us about the American conservative Christian right.
It can best be summed up in a single word - 'hypocrisy'. The longer version is 'power and influence at any price'.
Of course, with the Bible being a cherry-picker's delight, with it being possible to find a passage or two, or maybe a whole chapter, that supports almost any cause, it can be difficult to discern what might be termed 'Christian values' in the it. And most of these can usually be contradicted with another passage somewhere, but perhaps the nearest thing to a definitive statement of what Christian are supposed to behave like is the so-called Beatitudes from the 'sermon on the mount'.
According to research results publish open access in Nature Communications yesterday, there could be life in water which has been isolated in rocks deep below Earth's surface for at least 1 billion years and possibly 2.7 billion years, i.e for maybe half the life of the planet.
This water, which is now seeping to the deep Kidd Creek mine 2.4 Km below Timmins, Northern Ontario, Canada, had been shown to have been isolated for this long in 2013. What is new in yesterday's report is the news that this water is capable of sustaining sulphur-based life similar to that found elsewhere in isolated subsurface water. Bacterial life has been found in similar structures in South Africa but this, if proven, would be ten times older.
We are getting used to the relatively new science of genome analysis throwing up regular surprises and calling into question a few things we thought we understood reasonably well, but then that's science. Science wouldn't be any use if we didn't keep learning new things, revising old assumptions and so making progress.
For example, we once thought that modern humans evolved in East (or possibly South) Africa and that a small band of Homo sapiens followed an earlier migration of H. erectus and left Africa for Eurasia and thence into the Americas and the Pacific. We
In a victory for basic human rights over Christian bigotry, the Court of Appeal has ruled that a Northern Ireland baker was wrong to refuse to make and decorate a cake for a gay campaign to legalise same-sex marriage because they disagreed with their life-style. The cake was to bear the slogan 'Support gay marriage".
Ashers, a family firm of Belfast, initially accepted the order from gay rights activist, Gareth Lee, but then declined it on the grounds that it went against their religious belief. The cake had been ordered for a private party to celebrate the end of Northern Ireland Anti-homophobic Week.
A lovely example of a structure evolved for one purpose being used for another, unrelated purpose was published very recently in a short communication in The Wilson Journal of Ornithology.
The author, Olle Terenius, of the Department of Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden, described seeing mute swans, Cygnus olor, using their raised wings to windsurf for some considerable distance. Regrettably, the full text sits behind a paywall.
There are so many different forms of creationism that it's difficult to find any consistency between any two creationists and even in the same creationist at times. This make it handy for them to move the goalposts around of course because they can always change this or that definition or declare this or that impossible or possible according to the needs of the argument in hand.
However, there are a couple of pieces of dogma that are fairly consistently trotted out and are common to most flavours of creationism:
Mutations are always harmful and can't give rise to new information.
New species can't arise by natural processes so have to be created.
It must come as a shock then when a scientific paper is published showing both of these to be untrue, and untrue moreover in the same species!
A couple more of those little unknowns that drives science forward may have been solved this week by a team from Uppsala University, Sweden and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing, China.
The first is where did our jaws come from in our evolutionary past and the second is where exactly do the 'armour-plated', fish-like placoderms fit in with the evolution of bony fish and via them, the tetrapods, including us mammals. The Silurian placoderms lived over 400 million years ago and it was not clear whether they were the direct ancestors of the bony fish or a sister clade with the ancestral bony fish along with the cartilaginous fish.
Black painting of bison (putative European bison, or wisent) at Grotte de Niaux (Niaux cave in Ariège, France), dated to the Magdalenian period (~17,000 years ago).
Photo credit: via University of Adelaide (under Creative Commons licence)
For a creationist claim, the assertion that no new species have been seen to evolve takes some beating for its sheer denial of the readily available data. Now geneticists working at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, have shown that even the Stone Age painters of the caves such as Lascaux Cave, France, captured one such event in their art. Their findings were published yesterday in Nature Communications.
Birth of Venus (Aphrodite). Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510)
When you're the goddess of love, everyone, and especially men, are bound to sit up and take note, especially if your beauty is legendary.
Cyprus, that beautiful, arid island in the eastern Mediterranean and possession of every Mediterranean power from Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Ottoman Turkey, and latterly Britain, is the place of legend. It is remote enough to be mysterious and culturally distinct, yet close enough to the major centres of regional power to be familiar. Not surprisingly, Cyprus had its own gods and its own legends about gods but, unlike those of Minoan Crete, we know quite a lot more about these gods if for no other reason than that, again unlike Minoan Create, the culture which worshipped the Cypriot gods didn't get wiped out in a sudden catastrophic natural disaster.
A measure of just how much contempt there is in the Irish Republic for the Catholic Church can be seen in an astonishingly frank attack on Archbishop Eamon Martin, Primate of Ireland, for his comments on the subject of the proposed liberalisation of Ireland's draconian abortion law, which is enshrined the Constitution.
A Fine Gael TD, Kate O’Connell, told the Irish Examiner,
A few days ago in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, the Pope gave an almost perfect illustration of how the Catholic Church is completely incapable of reforming itself without giving up being the Catholic Church.
He reportedly told an audience of priests and seminarians that there is a 'global war to destroy marriage'. He was of course referring to moves to legalise same-sex marriage and so give equal human rights to homosexual couples rather than to stigmatise, persecute and deny basic rights to them as the church would prefer.
I don't normally comment here on American politics, if for no other reason that I'm not American and believe Americans should decide their own affairs.
However, Donald Trump provokes me to make an exception. Donald Trump is not fit to run a used car lot, let alone the most powerful nation in history with a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying everything on this planet several times over. He has shown himself to be emotionally unstable and quite incapable of controlling his most hateful impulses. He has a sociopathic, even psychopathic disregard for other people. This latest revelation should have done for him as a serious presidential candidate but it
A female dark fishing spider (left) and its male counterpart, which sacrifices itself as a food source immediately after mating. A new study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Gonzaga University has found that this cannibalism can benefit the male's offspring.
Altruism is one of those evolutionary traits that creationists claim not to be able to comprehend for a couple of reasons:
It seems to require some sort of morality and a knowledge of outcomes, and they normally find it hard to think why anyone would do something for someone else if there is no promise of a reward. At least that is normally behind their claim that you need their god to be moral.
How can a trait which is detrimental to the individual in that it causes loss or harm, be advantageous in the Darwinian sense, and so be passed on differentially in preference to a trait for selfishness?
It's now well known that humans are not the only species capable of learning new skills and passing these on to others.
Despite the old religious-based view of humans as having a unique intelligence not seen in other animals, and thus standing us apart from the rest of 'creation', like tool construction and use and the ability to solve problems, learning and culture are now being seen in a whole range of other animals. Until now though, this had been confined mostly to vertebrates and almost exclusively to mammals and birds.
You can understand a creator being quite fond of axolotls. There is something fascinating about them, especially the way they look and behave a lot like some sort of fish with legs and even breathe underwater using gills.
Basically, the Mexican axolotl, Ambystoma mexicanum, is a big salamander which spends most of its life as a tadpole. They even breed in their juvenile form and only become land-based adults when their water dries up. They also have a massive genome by mammalian standards, all packed into just fourteen chromosomes. Their genome is far larger than any other known amphibians but this appears to be due almost entirely to repetitive gene duplication.
The great thing about science is the way it all meshes neatly together. Although there may currently be gaps in our understanding these gaps are getting smaller and the piece that fills the gap almost always neatly fits in with what we already know.
Of course, there may be occasions when the piece doesn't quite fit and so we need to look again at the surrounding science, but in the long run, these conflicts are always resolved to smooth out the wrinkles and fill in the cracks.
And another one of these little gaps looks as though it might have been filled in. Despite the ever and unrealistically optimistic hope of creationists that the very next gap will be found to be where their god lives, no such god was found by science yet again. The answer was entirely consistent with what we already know - which is inevitable, when you think about it. It is inevitable because science is about reality and reality is consistent.
Creationists struggle with archaic human like Neanderthals, Homo erectus and H. habilis trying out various ways to dismiss them as diseased and deformed individuals, forgeries, etc.
The slightly less delusional ones have learned that there are limits to the amount of evidence that can be denied without looking more than a little insane, so have learned to accept a form of evolution, albeit a ludicrously rapid one which requires several fully-formed new species to spring into existence every generation. To these, all hominids are merely minor variations and have all developed from the fully human people who supposedly got off the Ark about 4000 years ago.
Parasites in general and viruses like the zika virus in particular continue to be an embarrassment to creationists who insist everything is intelligently designed for a purpose.
The main embarrassment of course is in explaining why it designed them in the first place, although 'The Fall' is regularly trotted out as the excuse. But, this gives away the fact that the 'intelligent (sic) designer' is the Christian god and that intelligent design 'science' is fundamentalist, Bible-literalist Christianity posing as science to try to sneak past the 'Establishment Clause' in the US Constitution.
An open access paper published yesterday shows something which should be frightening the wits out of creationists frauds, even if their willing dupes won't understand or accept the significance of it. An international team of researchers has shown the proteins can persist in the fossil record for at least 3.8 million years - some 50 times longer than DNA.
The protein was found bound to the fossilised fragments of ostrich eggshells. The finding open up the possibility of detailed analysis of human evolution where DNA has not survived.
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 of Osteocrin as an activity-regulated factor in the primate brain : Nature : Nature Research
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