An interesting piece of research published yesterday shows how birds use song to recognise members of their own species, so avoiding hybridisation between closely related species, especially when there is little or no difference in appearance.
The researchers believe they have identified 21 new species of bird from Central and South America in the 72 related populations examined where different songs effectively produce isolated breeding populations.
Normally, when people talk about systematic, institutionalised child abuse, we think of priests and male teachers abusing vulnerable children in their care or over whom they have trusted authority. It speaks of the sheer volume of these cases that yet another exposure barely rate a mention in the news any more. It's as though we have come to expect men of the cloth to abuse their power for their own gratification.
But, despite the documented abuses in Ireland and Spain where it was nuns, sometimes with the connivance of priests, who were doing the abusing, it still comes as something of a shock when we hear of female clerics abusing children. Somehow it seems even sicker when a supposedly maternal female is looking at children as a source of amusement and sexual or sadistic gratification, yet these cases seem to have been no less prevalent in institutions where nuns were in similar positions of power over children as are the abusive priests.
Arguably the most attractive British snake of the three native species, and certainly the largest, is the grass snake.
Now it seems, according to a paper published in Scientific Reports a few days ago, it is the Western representative of what is an example of speciation in progress. It also illustrates the conflict between genetics and taxonomy.
A neat illustration this week of how the popular media distort and misrepresent science in order to appeal to a wider audience and in doing so, feed and reinforce popular misconceptions.
First, we have MSN news announcing that six million year-old human footprints have been found in Crete. This then, of course, is presented as raising 'major questions' about our evolution. Creationists groups on Facebook and elsewhere are already full of claims that this proves science has got everything about evolution all wrong, either neglecting the six million years of explaining them away as proving science even gets the dating wrong.
The source of this story was the press release from Upsala University, Sweden, which announced the publication of a paper by a team based there. Unlike the MSN headline - "Fossil footprints challenge established theories of human evolution" - the headline on this press release was more muted (and of course more accurate). No mention of human footprints there, although there was an attempt to associate the discovery with current understanding of human evolution.
When the roof fell in in the Ta’ Giezu church in Rabat, Malta, Claire Chretien, a devout Christian who writes for the LifeSite blog, knew exactly what had caused it.
It was same-sex marriage.
She wrote:
MALTA, August 25, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – In what could be considered symbolic of the state of the Catholic Church in Malta, or even most of Europe, the ceiling of the country's oldest Catholic church mysteriously collapsed this week.
A former Catholic priest has come up with a novel excuse for downloading and distributing child pornography. According to a report in the Scranton Times Tribune, he told a Wayne County court that he did it to get revenge on God because of his gambling addiction!
The Rev. Kevin A. Gugliotta, 55, a resident of Mahwah, New Jersey and a priest at the Holy Spirit Church in Union, New Jersey, was arrested in September 2016 and charged with 20 counts of downloading child pornography and 20 counts of disseminating images of children involved in sexual acts. He plea-bargained this down to one admitted case of disseminating child pornography in return for the other 39 charges being dismissed.
A recent discovery in Antarctica could shed some light on the origin of viruses.
Ricardo Cavicchioli of the University of New South Wales in Australia and his colleagues found a microorganism, an archaean, Halorubrum lacusprofundi R1S1, in lakes on the Rauer Islands, Antarctica. That's not unusual in itself; new organisms are discovered daily. What was slightly unusual with this particular one is that it contains an independent plasmid that the team have names "pR1SE". Plasmids are small fragments of DNA, often circular, that are self-replicating and often carry a gene that is beneficial to the organism. Bacterial antibiotic resistance is often carried on a plasmid and, as such, can be transferred to other bacteria.
It must be difficult being a dedicated creationist. You need to believe so many diametrically opposed views simultaneously.
This paper presents an almost perfect example because a dedicated creationist must hold at least two such views simultaneously. They need to hold to the view that this bacterium was intelligently designed to circumvent the human immune system (that the same designer had designed to protect us and then had apparently regarded that as a problem to be solved!) and to the view that something capable of this degree of mendacious malevolence is an omni-benevolent, maximally good god.
Venomous snakes make interesting subjects for study in that they represent an example of a complex evolutionary arms race which can be traced in their venom. This is often a complex mixture of related but subtly different chemicals, often coded for by genes which are themselves subtly different versions of one another.
The arms race is due to snakes usually preying on a range of prey species, each of which has selection pressure to evolve resistance to the snakes venom. But, if the snake merely responded to one prey's resistance by changing it's venom, this might be less effective against another of its prey species, so there is evolutionary pressure on the snake to retain it's 'older' venom but supplement it with a newer version as well. This occurs by gene duplication, then mutation of the 'spare' copy.
There are actually adults who believe the sun can stand still and performs strange manoeuvres in the sky!
Not just that but they believe these could be visible only in a small village or town, and non-one else on Earth would see them!
Seriously! There are actual grown ups who believe the following:
Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day. And there was no day like that before it or after it, that the LORD hearkened unto the voice of a man: for the Lord fought for Israel. And Joshua returned, and all Israel with him, unto the camp to Gilgal. But these five kings fled, and hid themselves in a cave at Makkedah.
One of the enduring mysteries of the story of the human migration into North America is the exact route taken and the timing of the migration(s). There is now no real doubt that North America was populated first with a subsequent rapid spread into Central and South America, and that the people came from Siberia via the Beringia; the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, the remnants of which are the Aleutian Islands.
Looking south through what was once the “ice-free corridor” in present-day Canada. A new study suggests that humans couldn’t have traversed through the corridor until about 12,600 years ago - too late to have been the route taken by the first inhabitants of North America.
Credit: Mikkel Winther Pedersen
Now the relatively new techniques for recovering and analysing environmental DNA (eDNA) is helping to fill in these gaps.
The fundamentalist Christian unhealthy obsession with homosexuality took a slightly unusual turn a few days ago.
Instead of blaming the latest earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, terrorist attack, influenza outbreak or forest fire on homosexuality, the curator of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, palaeontologist, Anthony Othman has a new theory; dinosaur extinction was caused by homosexuals!
One of the mysteries of dinosaur evolution has been explained. It's another of those 'missing' links! It's a transitional species between two major groups of dinosaur - the herbivorous species like stegosaurus and the carnivores like T. rex.
Publishing in Biology Letter Matthew G. Baron of the Department of Earth Science, Cambridge University, UK and Paul M. Barrett of the Natural History Museum, have shown that a dinosaur from the Late Jurassic, found in Chile, formerly believed to be a theropod dinosaur turned vegetarian, is actually the stem species that was the progenitor of two quite different groups - the saurischians and the ornithischians.
I won't call creationism a theory in crisis because that would be giving it a scientific standing far about what it deserves. It's a notion; a guess with no supporting evidence; an idea with no practical application other than making a few deeply ignorant people feel important enough.
A point I've made several time recently, but which I'll repeat again for those who may have missed it, science, especially biological, geological, archaeological and cosmological science, daily and routinely refutes creationism without the slightest effort or intent simply by reporting the facts.
It's another bad week for creationism. Is there ever a good week?
Close on the report of the earliest known primate fossil we now have the remarkably complete skull of an infant who lived 13 million years ago in what is now Kenya, and which is close to the common ancestor of the hominids and the other African apes. It gives us a fairly good idea of what the last common ancestor would have looked like.
The skull was found by fossil hunter John Ekusi in 13 million year-old rock layers in the Napudet area, west of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya; a formation that is easy to date reliably because of the activity of a nearby volcano. The skull, along with forest trees, was buried by volcanic ash, showing that they were buried during the same catastrophic event.
As a keen fossil hunter in my early days, I dreamed of finding something more than the usual marine shells - the muscles, oysters, bivalves and marine snails that are common in North Oxfordshire limestone deposits - so I can imagine how two Japanese fossil-hunting brothers, Masatoshi and Yasuji Kera, on the island of Hokkaido must have felt when they found nine skeletal elements of what turned out to be the oldest early Asian diving bird.
Fossils of these birds are relatively common in the Northern Hemisphere, but this is the first to be found in Asia and the first from the easterm margin of the Eurasian continent.
I'm thinking of starting another blog called Filling The Gaps. There are just too many examples of these 'missing' fossils to include in this one without it coming to resemble a blog devoted to nothing else.
These examples of things creationists insist are missing being found and described by science are almost a daily occurrence from the field of biology alone. If science was bothered about creationism and scientists felt they still needed to prove evolution and disprove creationism there would probably be several scientific journals called something like the Journal of Creation Falsification or Journal of Evolution, but of course it isn't needed because science has no such need.
There is a reason creationism is absolutely obsessed with falsifying and misrepresenting science and presenting science as some sort of vast conspiracy theory or based on false assumptions and therefore invalid - unless it can be made to appears to support creationism, then it's conclusive and irrefutable, of course.
Not long ago we weren't even sure how and where Neanderthals fitted in the human family tree. Were they ancestors of modern Europeans? Were they just a regional variant; a subspecies; a different species entirely? Did they or could they interbreed with modern humans?
Now most of those questions have been answered with some degree of confidence, and not a few surprises, thanks to DNA analysis, and we're just left with questions about how, why and exactly when anatomically modern humans replaced Neanderthals across western Eurasia.
Was it our superior technology? Hardly. We both used stone tools and hunted with spears. Was it our higher intelligence? Our brains are actually smaller but maybe organised differently, so maybe we could learn and adapt more quickly? Was it a better social organisation? Neanderthals seem to have lived in small, relatively isolated family groups in which incestuous breeding was common if not normal. Did this lead to genetic weaknesses accumulating? Did it mean hunting large game was more difficult with fewer numbers?
Flowering plants are by far the most diverse group of plants comprising some 300,000 different species. They were, however, late on the scene in evolutionary terms, only evolving some 140 million years ago.
This puts their evolution towards the end of the age of dinosaurs in the Cretaceous when the ancestors of mammals were still mammaliaform synapsids. The evolution of the first flowering plants is one of those enduring mysteries for evolution to explains, Darwin himself referring to it as "an abominable mystery".
Now a new study coordinated by Juerg Schoenenberger from the University of Vienna and Hervé Sauquet of the Université Paris-Sud has shed more than a little light on what the first flowers looked like. The same study has also reconstructed what flowers at the key divergence point looked like.
An illustration shows nanocrystals assembling into an ordered ‘superlattice’ – a process that a SLAC/Stanford team was able to observe in real time with X-rays from the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL).
Illustration: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
One of the major problems that creationism suffers from is that so many of its claims are demonstrably untrue and can be seen to be untrue.
The leading frauds are acutely aware of that problem so have a work-around for it. They tell their followers that if the evidence tells them their beliefs are wrong, the evidence must be wrong because their beliefs can't be. Then they witter on about 'evidence' and try to mislead people about it as though it does matter after all. They must be the only people who call themselves scientists but argue you should ignore evidence unless you can persuade yourself it agrees with you.
Here, for example, is an example of scientists watching something happen that creationists insist doesn't happen. They watched order (and a high degree of order) emerge out of chaos.
I took this photo today, in a park in Oxford. It shows why intelligent design is a stupid idea.
The white goose is almost certainly a hybrid between an Egyptian goose, Alopochen aegyptiaca, and a feral domestic goose. Domestic white gees in Britain are mostly a variety of greylag goose, Anser anser domesticus, so this strange looking goose is a probably a hybrid between the Egyptian and the greylag goose. The give-away is the strange-looking eyes that look spectacled from a distance, the pale brown wing feathers - not obvious in this photo (this one wasn't completely white) - and the long, pink legs.
It is highly unlikely that this was simply a leucistic Egyptian goose. It was also on it's own, not with the typical small group that Egyptian geese are normally seen in. Egyptian geese are believed to be related to the shelduck and so come somewhere between the ducks and geese. They were introduced as an ornamental bird into the UK and have become established in Norfolk, the only place I have seen them before. They have since spread to the Thames Valley (my son has seen them on the Thames).
Incidentally, the other geese in this photograph are Canada geese, an introduced species that has become widespread and which also interbreeds with 'local' geese.
But why does this show how intelligent design is a stupid idea?
There is something appealing about a tardigrade! There is a certain air of mystery about them - like, for instance, what on Earth are they?
They are justly famous for their ability to withstand just about any extreme environmental conditions other than extreme heat. They are just a few millimetres long and can withstand years of dehydration, being blown about in dust; they can withstand years of freezing. They can even go into space and withstand ionising radiation. They will live in your guttering through a long, hot dry summer, apparently lifeless, and within a few minutes of it raining, will be crawling about happily as though nothing has happened.
Until this study we weren't even sure where they fitted in with the rest of the animal kingdom. Were they primitive or degenerate arthropods; were they nematode worms with legs or some other distinct multicellular organism on a branch of their own? Well, actually, they are related to both nematodes and arthropods, distantly. The question was which are they closest to? The study doesn't settle the matter but it sheds a lot more light on the subject.
We've known for a long time that the supposed 'history' in the Old Testament is mostly, if not completely, fiction, and I'm not just talking about the frankly ludicrous creation myths in the opening chapters.
As Silberman and Finkelstein showed in The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, not only did the events described in Exodus never happen but nor did the destruction of the cities and the Canaanite genocide. Indeed, the Bible contains evidence of its own inaccuracy, being clearly written by people who did not know the history of the times in which they set their tales. Briefly, and by no means exhaustively:
The North Caroline megachurch, Word of Faith Fellowship, can't be accused of not being a traditional Christian fundamentalist church.
The sect, founded by Jane Whaley, a former math teacher, and her husband Sam, uses slaves taken from Brazil to work for the church and in the businesses owned by it's senior ministers. These slaves are trafficked from Brazil, as a Associated Press investigation has revealed. They are attracted to the USA by a branch of the World of Faith cult in Sao Joaquim de Bicas, Brazil and enter the USA on tourists and student visas.
In saliva, scientists have found hints that a “ghost” species of archaic human may have contributed genetic material to ancestors of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa today.
As an example of how divorced religion is from reality, these examples of archaic hominids interbreeding with other hominid species take some beating.
The Abrahamic superstitions require people to believe in a single founder couple from whom everyone alive is directly descended and from whom we have inherited some notional 'original sin' for which we need to constantly atone and beg for forgiveness.
The reality of course is that not only was there never such a single founder human couple but there was not even a single founder human species. The reality is that we are hybrids of three or more species who occasionally interchanged genes and that for a large part of our recent evolutionary history we behaved like an incompletely speciated 'ring species' as an example of evolution in progress.
A failing group will normally turn inwards, degenerating further into mutually recriminating factions. This is no less true of the 'loving' Anglicans currently showing brotherly and sisterly love by trading insults over the latest attempt to reform their cult to try to halt the haemorrhage of members.
The vitriol also illustrates the problems faced by a dogma-driven cult as it tries to reform to attract back the former members to whom it has become increasingly irrelevant and who have left in disgust at its abuse of minorities. The decreasing number of moderates comes up against an increasingly large proportion of vocal extremists trying to retain their traditional dogmas.
As Christianity continues to dwindle into a minority cult in the UK, and as more and more of its privileges are lost, so the whining about persecution, coupled with that old craving for martyrdom gets louder.
This collective whine was revealed in the results of a survey by Premier published last Sunday. The full survey is freely available as a pdf file here but be warned, you'll need to give your name and email address before you can access it.
The reality is of course that Christians in the UK enjoy precisely the same legal rights as anyone else regardless of their faith or lack of it. Rights and privileges are not granted on the basis of membership of a particular church or faith group in the UK anymore; they are granted on the basis of a shared humanity. There are not Christian rights, Atheist rights, Jewish rights or Muslim rights; there are only human rights.
But this survey shows that isn't enough for Christians. Christians feel persecuted if they're not granted the privileges to which they feel entitled. They are not granted the right to state mythology and prejudice as facts and not have them challenged. They're not granted the right to publicly condemn, abuse and persecute others for not sharing their chosen life-style. They're not granted the privilege to 'share' their superstition in the workplace and be quietly and respectfully listened to as they spout their bigotry and tell others that they're morally inferior and will be condemned to Hell.
Religions in the workplace do nothing but spread division, disharmony and isolation. The law requires employers to provide a healthy and safe working environment in which the Human Rights of all employees and visitors are safeguarded. No faith group is entitled to a special dispensation to pretend to occupy some notional moral high-ground with sanctimonious posturing and condemning others as morally inferior. Using what is in effect a captive audience to preach to is an abuse.
Typical of the judgemental sanctimony of the Christian church was the reaction of the Rt Rev Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Chelmsford:
[B]elievers should not be surprised or downhearted when the sheer beauty of the Gospel is a shock and an affront to a fallen world. The world has never been in accord with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and we've always had the challenge that we need to live it and share it.
I have a book and it entitles me to tell other, lesser, mortals how to live! Ironically, this is exactly the sort of hypocritical judgmentalism that drives people away from a church that spouts this while covering up and facilitating clerical abuse of children, while wining about being treated the way it would like to treat others.
Christians are still vastly over-represented in positions of power in the UK in comparison to their dwindling numbers. No other religion has its titular head as head of state; no other religion has its leading clerics entitles to a seat in the upper chamber of our legislature and no other religion has its senior clerics appointed by the head of government on behalf of the head of state. Culturally we are still expected to defer to the moral authority of someone because he or she has an imaginary friend and dresses in robes and a silly hat.
If Christians feel marginalised then they only have themselves to blame. It's by and large their holier-than-thou judgemental sanctimony and hypocrisy that has driven so many people away from the church. The struggle to emancipate women into the priesthood and their continuing difficulty with accepting members of the LGBT community as entitled to the full range of Human Rights has rightly marginalised the Christian church in UK society. They have done this, not anyone else. The attitude of Christian bigots towards minorities has itself made them a minority now whining wrongly that they are being treated the way tho openly treated minorities themselves.
For anyone who still imagines creationism is based on real-world facts and observable evidence, this little factoid should go some way to dispelling that myth.
It is yet another example of one of those beneficial mutations that creationists tell us don't and can't exist - usually followed by some garbled nonsense about information theory and thermodynamics that isn't recognisable as real science or even real information theory.
The thing about something well-designed is that it is as simple as can be and fit for purpose. The hallmarks of good design are minimal complexity and fitness for purpose.
Now, you would expect the Intelligent (sic) Designer to at least be good at one of those things wouldn't you! You would expect to be able to look at any of its designs and see an elegantly design, beautiful for it's simplicity, and a fitness for purpose so obvious that this purpose positively leaps out at you.
You should be able to look at anything designed by the creationism industries' Intelligent (sic) Designer and be immediately struck by the beautiful simplicity of it and how perfectly it does what it was obviously designed to do.
The problem is, this is never what we see. Instead, we see immensely complex things which apparently do nothing very much and for which any real purpose is difficult to discern other than making more copies of itself, apparently for no other reason than to make more copies of itself... and so ad infinitum.
Pastor Paseka Motsoeneng is a very busy man and constantly at God's beck and call, but at least Christians and Muslims can sleep soundly tonight. Satan is dead!
He was killed by Pastor Paseka Motsoeneng, aka Prophet Mboro, who went to Hell on a special mission from God's to kill the world's number one enemy.
He told his jubilant Facebook followers:
...when I got to hell there was a queue of millions of people waiting to be braai’d [roasted] by Satan. I even saw some prominent South African politicians. I was so shocked because they lived like angels here on earth. I thought they went to heaven. When Satan saw me he panicked and directed his army to kill me. Like Samson in the Bible, I defeated them. Satan was my last victim.
I almost laughed out loud when I read this one. Not only is it a lovely little piece of biology and so easy to explain in terms of genetic evolution but it's also an example of the mind-numbing stupidity of any sentient designer who had to come up with such a design to solve a problem it had designed!
Abstract
Plants are attacked by myriad herbivores, and many plants exhibit anti-herbivore defences. We tested the hypothesis that induced defences benefit tomato plants by encouraging insects to eat other members of their
A paper published recently in Proceedings of the Royal Society B by researcher from McGill University, California, USA, illustrates a couple of interesting aspects to evolution and how species diverge.
The team found that zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) reared in the absence of their fathers do no react in the same way to male courtship songs as those raised by both parents.
Now, this in itself might not be particularly important apart from one thing - female sex selection. Females normally select the best singers as their mates and there is growing evidence that the best singers are also the healthiest and fittest males. Females who don't have the ability to discriminate lose out in the competition for the best mates. This, after all, is probably one of the main drivers for the evolution of female sex selection.
If you're a Catholic and you have a sick child, you know really that prayer doesn't work so you send them to a hospital where they apply science instead, unless of course it's the 'Baby Jesus' children's hospital, run by the Vatican with branches throughout Italy.
These hospitals were dirty, badly run money-making organisations that had little to do with curing and caring or sick children. Corners were cut, safety protocols were ignored and sick children were suffering as a result.
In typical Vatican style, a 2014 report on the secret three-month investigation following complains from staff and patients' families, was itself kept secret. Some of the recommendations were allegedly implemented, but many were not.
It's reassuring to learn that in the Vatican at least, some things just never change. Everything is carrying on much as it was in the 16th Century.
You might have missed the latest piece of gossip because it seems such events are now scarcely worthy of the epithet 'news'. There simply isn't anything to justify several column inches of news print of several minutes of airtime to report something that scarcely raises an eye-brow these days. It was just another gay sex and drugs party in the Vatican involving a middling official with friends and considerable influence in high places. It was just another example of the hypocrisy we have come to expect of the Catholic clergy.
Now, what would be news is if we went a whole year without another sex and drugs, financial or rent-boy scandal at the Vatican, or even (not that this is even remotely possible) a whole year without another child sexual, emotional and physical abuse scandal involving Catholic priests and/or nuns complete with institutionalised cover-up or even active facilitation of it, somewhere in the world
Diagram of production of carbon-14 in the upper atmosphere by reaction of neutrons with nitrogen, and of the subsequent incorporation of carbon-14 into the biosphere.
Having been called a liar by a creationist for saying there were no scientifically valid examples of 14C dating of dinosaur fossils, and then, despite his claim that there were 'lots' of them, being treated to him prevaricating and deflecting for several days before failing to provide any such examples even after numerous requests, I decided I would look closer at this claim.
First a brief background. For more detail see this article by A. J. T. Jull, a research scientist at the NSF Arizona AMS Facility and Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, in Tucson, Arizona, USA.
Carbon-14 (14C) dating is, when done correctly on carefully decontaminated specimens, an accurate method of dating an organic specimen within well-known limits of confidence and within a well-defined date range. The date obtained will always be expressed as x years BP ± y years.
Doing it correctly not only means careful decontamination but also understanding its limitations, the major one being the date range over which it is reliable, why this limit exists and, importantly, exactly what carbon you are measuring in the sample and how it got there.
Not all carbon is organic in origin and not all carbon in archaeological samples is derived from the original organic carbon. For example, although carbonates may be present in the mineralised bones of which fossils are made, this does not mean it came from the original bone. After all, fossils will contain large amounts of silicates but bone does not normally contain silicon. The minerals in fossils are replacements for the original material, not necessarily the products of it.
Scientists working for the Department of Integrative Anatomical Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC have closed another one of those gaps in science that creationists scrabble around in, desperately searching for as somewhere to fit their god.
Although no serious biologist these days sets out to confirm evolution or to refute creationism, papers such as this one do that quite incidentally because they report on the reality of the natural world and objectively assess the evidence. Quite naturally, this refutes any notions such as creationism which are not based on real-world evidence.
Interesting news came a few days ago from Royal Holloway, University of London, that a new research project is to start next month, aimed at mapping the spread of humans out of Africa and across the globe, to occupy all major landmasses other than Antarctica. The research is financed by a £450,000 grant from Leverhulme Trust.
Haematite tubes from the NSB hydrothermal vent deposits that represent the oldest microfossils and evidence for life on Earth. The remains are at least 3,770 million years old.
Science is moving closer to an explanation of a process whereby the earliest proto-cells could have developed naturally on Earth. It's looking increasingly as though the best explanation of where suitable conditions could be found - in the rock precipitates around hydrothermal vents on ocean floors - is the right one.
It's also looking as though the process got going even earlier than we thought - when Earth was just few million years old, if the interpretation of the evidence presented in this paper is correct. It is strongly suggestive that the process may have got going at least 3.77 billion and maybe even 4.28 billion years ago.
The evidence was found in rocks from the Nuvvuagittuq belt in Quebec, Canada, which are believed to have been formed by precipitation around seafloor-hydrothermal vents.
Here is yet another fascinating example of the ingenuity of biological adaptability - and an example that should make any self-respecting intelligent design advocate cringe with embarrassment.
Constantino Macías Garcia at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and his colleagues have been studying a curious phenomenon observed in the Mexican urban house finch (Carpodacus mexicanus) in which they collect cigarette butts and place then in their nests. There was inconclusive evidence that the effect was to deter parasitic ticks and other nest parasites so they designed a simple experiment to settle the matter. It was strongly suspected that nicotine and other chemicals in the butts acts as a deterrent to parasites. House sparrows (Paser domesticus) have also been observed to use the same strategy.
It's ironic really! Just when I go on holiday to Italy, the centre of the organised global Catholic paedophile ring that we discovered existed some ten to fifteen years ago, a similar, though smaller, scandal breaks in England and it's not even involving the Catholic Church!
This one involves a form Anglican bishop, Peter Ball, and a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord George Carey. Peter Ball had been Bishop of Lewes and then Bishop of Gloucester during which time he groomed, exploited and sexually abused eighteen young men and boys who went to him seeking spiritual guidance. He was jailed for thirty-two months in October 2015 for these offences but was released last February after just sixteen months.
Now a report into the church's handling of the affair, ordered by the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and chaired by the former chief executive of Camden Council, Dame Moira Gibb, makes harrowing reading, according to Welby. Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury, a cabinet minister and a high court judge all conspired to protect Ball and wrote letters to the police and the Crown Prosecution Service in his defence.
