And So The 'Moderates' Enable The Extremists

On March 28th, the white march in honor of Mireille Knoll brought together thousands of people in Paris.

Credit: LP / Guillaume Georges

PressTV-Anti-Islam 'manifesto' sparks outrage in France

A letter signed by 300 French public figures, including ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy and three former prime ministers, calling on Islamic leaders to publicly reject the more violent passages in the Qur'an which call for the murder and punishment of Christians, Jews and non-believers, has been met with outrage by the very people who profess to condemn terrorism and proclaim it to be "pas a mon nom" (not in my name).

According to a report in Middle East Eye the letter entitled Manifesto "against the new anti-Semitism” published in Le Parisien, has been condemned as "Vile, racist, contemptible, Islamophobic, provocative..."

And Another of Those 'Missing Links' Isn't

Jurassic croccodile, Magyarosuchus fitosi (artist's impression)

Credit: Márton Szabó

Jurassic fossil is missing link in crocodile family tree | The University of Edinburgh

This week's example of creationism's non-existent missing links comes from the crocodile family tree in the Jurassic. Creationism has no problem with declaring these things to be non-existent to try to force-fit the facts into their preferred model of reality, of course.

This specimen was found by amateur collector, Attila Fitos (hence it's specific name) on a mountain range in north-west Hungary in 1996 and stored in a museum in Budapest. It was unearthed on a mountain range in north-west Hungary in 1996 and stored in a museum in Budapest, where it was examined by a team of palaeontologists including Dr Mark Young from the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh.

Science Shows Creationists and Conservatives Are Ignorant

Source: Deena Skolnick Weisberg et al., in Bioscience, Vol. 68, No. 3; March 1, 2018
No Missing Link: Knowledge Predicts Acceptance of Evolution in the United States
Bioscience, Vol. 68, No. 3; March 1, 2018

Credit: Amanda Montañez

People Who Understand Evolution Are More Likely to Accept It - Scientific American

A study published in BioScience last March and reported on in Scientific American shows a clear link between scientific ignorance and rejection of evolution in favour of creationism in America.

It also shows the same link between scientific ignorance and political conservatism. In both cases the more ignorant of science a person is the more likely he/she is to be a creationist and politically conservative.

Neanderthal Were Skilled Engravers

The engraved flint flake from Kiik-Koba layer IV.
The arrow indicates the point of impact. Scale = 1 cm.

Assessing the significance of Palaeolithic engraved cortexes. A case study from the Mousterian site of Kiik-Koba, Crimea

By examining the markings on a flake of flint from a Mousterian (Neanderthal) site in Crimea, researchers have concluded that they were made deliberately by a skilled Neanderthal engraver.

Abstract
Twenty-Seven Lower and Middle Paleolithic sites from Europe and the Middle East are reported in the literature to have yielded incised stones. At eleven of these sites incisions are present on flint cortexes. Even when it is possible to demonstrate that the engravings are ancient and human made, it is often difficult to distinguish incisions resulting from

Lesson From Goa - Temple to Shriva.

Shri Nageshi Temple, Ponda, Goa, India

First a confession; I know very little of the Hindu religion other than that there are multiple gods and that the stories of these gods are contained in the sacred books, the Vedas, Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Agamas. The Bhagavad Gita is itself part of a much larger work, one of two Indian epics, Mahabatha. These books also contain the basic philosophies of Hinduism.

So, all of our guided visit to the temple to Shriva or Shri Nageshi, at Ponda, Panjim, Goa, was new to me and to my partner. Neither of us had been to a Hindu temple before.

The Shri Nageshi temple is reputedly on the site of the oldest Hindu temple in Goa which was destroyed by the Portuguese colonialists who tried to impose Catholicism on the inhabitants. Ironically, we visited the Shri Nageshi temple immediately after visiting the Catholic church of Bom Jesus (Good Jesus) which contains the body of St Francis Xavier, co founder of the Jesuits and responsible for imposing Catholicism on the people of Goa. The church of Bom Jesus proudly boast of being the oldest religious building in Goa. Something it achieved by default when all the older Hindu, Jain and Muslim religious buildings were destroyed.

Another Piece of the Jigsaw Puzzle

Fossil reconstruction and illustration of Ichthyornis dispar.

Photo Credit: Michael Hanson/Yale University

Scientists find the first bird beak, right under their noses | Yale News.

Yet another piece of the jigsaw puzzle completing the picture of how a sub-order of dinosaurs transitioned into modern birds was put in place yesterday when researchers from Yale published a paper showing how the beak evolved from a dinosaur jaw. The paper was published in Nature. Unfortunately, it sits behind a paywall and the copyright holders require payment for reproducing even the abstract. However, it can be read here, and the Yale press release contains much of the essential information.

Ichthyornis dispar holds a key position in the evolutionary trail that leads from dinosaurian species to today’s avians. It lived nearly 100 million years ago in North America, looked something like a toothy seabird, and drew the attention of such famous naturalists as Yale’s O.C. Marsh (who first named and described it) and Charles Darwin.

Lessons From Goa - Saint Francis Xavier

Basilica of Bon Jesus (Good Jesus)
Old Goa, Near Panjim

Body of Saint Francis Xavier in a silver casket of Basilica of Bom Jésus in Goa.

source: Wikipedia

While on a recent vacation in Goa, India we were treated to a guided tour of some of the historic places, including the UNESCO World heritage church of Bom Jésus (Good Jesus in Portuguese - is there a bad one?).

This church is notable mostly because it contains the remains of St Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuits with St Ignatius Loyola.

The body of St Francis is allegedly incorruptible. Our guide assured us that it is exactly as St Francis was in life, despite being buried and exhumed multiple times before being placed in the air-tight silver casket. Curiously, given the importance of such miracles, this incorruptibility of St Francis' body is tantalisingly displayed through little windows showing selected body-parts barely visible from ground level as the casket is mounted some twenty feet up in an elaborate shrine, richly endowed with gold, silver and precious stones, presumably in tribute to his vow of poverty. Who wants to look directly at a rotting corpse?

What can be seen of the body suggests, if the legend of incorruptibility is true, that St Francis had the appearance of a blackened and desiccated corpse in life, which is curious because a statue of St Francis, which our guide assured us was a miraculously accurate statue, perfect in every details, shows him to be on the short side but otherwise a perfectly normal European, albeit with a rather strange posture.

Cardinal Pell to Face Sex Abuse Trial

Cardinal George Pell leaving court in Melbourne on Tuesday.

Credit Joe Castro/EPA, via Shutterstock
Source

Cardinal George Pell to Stand Trial on Historical Sex Offenses - The New York Times

Cardinal Pell, the Vatican's third most highly ranking official, is to stand trial in Australia on several sex-abuse charges. A Melbourne magistrate, Belinda Wallington, found there was sufficient evidence to justify a full trial.

This ruling came after a three-month pretrial hearing during which witnesses described abuse from decades ago. However, the majority of the charges against Pell were either dropped or dismissed, including some of the more serious allegations of abuses which were said to have taken place in a playground, on an altar, on a mountaintop and during a 1970s screening of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” in Ballarat.

Covering Up Down Under

Archbishop Denis Hart

Melbourne archbishop says he'd rather go to jail than report child abuse heard in confession | Guardian

This little news item from last August that slipped beneath my radar at the time, highlights the Catholic Church's commitment to defending and protecting children, or more accurately, the complete lack of any such commitment in-so-far as the victims of it's child-abusing clerics are concerned.

It highlights the fact that the first priority of the church is still to protect and defend the abusing priests, despite Pope Francis' crocodile tears and expressions of regret and the fact that Catholic clerics feel they are above the law and entitled to special exemptions. They feel they are operating outside the constraints of society in general and are accountable only to themselves; not a part of the society in which they operate.

Neanderthals Were Not Primitive

The wooden pointed tool immediately following its recovery.

Source

Found the oldest Neanderthal wooden tools in the Iberian Peninsula | CENIEH - Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana

Coincidentally, the subject of Neanderthals being in some way more primitive that the modern humans with which they are now know to have interbred, came up in a Facebook group today. Apparently, there are some Africans who make the racist claim that somehow non-Africans interbreeding with Neanderthals in Eurasia resulted in non-Africans incorporating 'backward' features, leaving Africans more highly evolved.

This is, of course, nonsense and is exactly the reverse of the thinking that Europeans used to try to justify the slave trade and the European nations annexing most of Africa, the New World, East Asia and Oceania on the grounds that these places were inhabited by inferior, under-developed and less highly evolved people. It comes from a fundamental misunderstanding, or deliberate misrepresentation of the Theory of Evolution.

The fact is that everything alive today has been evolving for the same length of time and so is as well or badly adapted to its current environment as anything else, because the degree of adaptation is entirely in the context of the population's environment. Given the rate at which early European explorers died of diseases in Africa and South and Central America, a much better case can be made that they were much less well adapted to that local environment than the local population.

In the early days of European exploration of West Africa, there was a popular saying, "Beware, beware the Bight of Benin! Few come out though many go in". The Bight of Benin is the bay where the west coast of Africa first turns south after going East under the 'bulge' at the top. So many of the sailors who landed in or south of the Bight of Benin died of tropical diseases that it held back European exploration for some considerable time and only the lucrative slave trade tempted them further south.

Now back to the Neanderthals after that brief excursion into Africa.

No Transitional Neanderthal Forms!

Neanderthal skeleton and artist's reconstruction.

Source: Wikipedia
Credit: Photaro (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Appealing to their ignorance and desire for confirmation of their bias, creationists fraud often dupe their followers with assertions that there are no transitional fossils showing evidence of change from one species to another. This is nonsensical, of course, because all archaic fossils are transitional between their ancestors and their descendants.

Having said that, however, there is a very good reason why there are no transitional forms between some earlier species and later ones - the later ones did not evolve from the earlier one as a superficial reading of the geological column might suggest. I explained this some years ago using the apparent 'transition' from red squirrels to greys in Britain, but there is an even better European example from our own ancestry.

Neanderthals were first discovered in 1829 in Belgium but it was not until 1864 that, following other discoveries, they were identified as an archaic species of humans and a different species to Homo sapiens, H. neanderthalensis. This was just a few years after Darwin's Origin of Species and before any of the many African hominin fossils had been found.

The Christian Cult of Child Abuse

The Twelve Tribe cult's base at Klosterzimmern near Deiningen, Bavaria

European court upholds German move to take kids from sect

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that members of a Christian sect do not have the right to abuse children and that the German child-protection agency that intervened and took the abused children into care was right to do so.

The case had been brought by four families, members of the fundamentalist Twelve Tribes sect, who had had their children taken away. A fundamental tenet of faith for the cult is that children need to be beaten regularly to drive the Devil out of them. According to one former member, daily beatings of the cult's children are normal.

Good News From the Catholics

Europe's Young Adults and Religion | St Mary's University Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society.

A recent poll conducted jointly by St Mary's University Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society, UK and the Institute Catholique de Paris, France makes miserable reading for it's target readership - 2018 Synod of Bishops, due to be held in Rome in October 2018. In brief, it shows the massive haemorrhage of church members is continuing apace especially amongst the young. The survey was concerned with the religious views and practices of the key sixteen to twenty-nine year-old.

The key findings are:

Triple Alliance

Brown-throated three-toed sloth (Bradypus variegatus)

Credit: Tauchgurke [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

One of the fascinating aspects of evolutionary ecology is how two or more species can become inextricably bound together in an evolutionary alliance of mutual dependency.

One such alliance, actually an alliance between three completely unrelated species, can be found in the Amazon jungle, centred on one of the strangest and more specialised mammals, the three-toed sloth. The three-toed sloth (in fact there are four closely related species, all in the South and Central American jungles) is one of the most slowly moving mammals on Earth, spending almost all its time hanging beneath tree branches high in the canopy, eating leaves or sleeping. However, they descend from the trees to the forest floor once a week to defecate, which they do in a large pile.

Its slow speed, although conserving energy, makes it especially vulnerable to depredation by harpy eagles, jaguars and other predators, so its descent to the forest floor to defecate is all the more puzzling, placing it at additional risk when it could simply defecate in the trees where its faeces could simply drop to the forest floor.

But all this begins to come together and make sense as an alliance with other species.

Chimpanzee Gestures Confound Creationists

Bonobos, Pan paniscus

Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning

The thing about evolutionary biology is that researchers can't help providing evidence for it. It's not intentional; it's not as though there is any doubt, it's just that the reality is that species evolved from common ancestors. So, inevitably, reality shows the evidence.

Take, for example, this piece of research published yesterday on the subject of bonobo (Pan paniscus) and chimpanzee (P. troglodytes) and their use of non-verbal communications or gestures which both use extensively to communicate with others of their species.

It turns out that there is an approximate 90% overlap between the two species. This is far more than chance alone could account for. The research was conducted by scientists based at the Department of Psychology, University of York, York, United Kingdom and the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, United Kingdom.

Since there is almost zero probability that the two species could interact and learn from one another, there has to be another explanation.

The overlap in gesture meanings between bonobos and chimpanzees is quite substantial and may indicate that the gestures are biologically inherited.

Dr Kirsty Graham, Lead author
Research Associate, Department of Psychology University of York

All-female Fish Makes Creationism Look Stupid

Amazon molly (Poecilia formosa)

Photo credit: Manfred Schartl

Universität Würzburg: No sex for all-female fish species

No wonder American creationists all seem to be uncritical fawns of Donald Trump, hoping he'll build a wall to shut Mexico out. Right on the Mexican border with Texas, that centre of Christian fundamentalism and creationism, is a little fish that could cause the whole thing to come down - creationism that is, not the wall which hasn't even been started yet, the truculent Mexicans not agreeing to pay for a Trump foible.

The little fish, the Amazon molly, Poecilia formosa, like the newly emerged new species of crayfish I wrote about earlier, is all-female and reproduces asexually. The daughters are all clones of their mother.

An Intermediate Spider-Scorpion!

Chimerarachne yingi, preserved in Myanmar amber

Photo: Bo Wang

Chimerarachne yingi, preserved in amber in exquisite detail.

Photo: Bo Wang

Part spider, part scorpion creature captured in amber | Science | AAAS

Continuing with what has turned out to be another dreadful week for creationism, we now have two papers about a 100 million year-old species, beautifully preserved in exquisite detail in amber, which has characteristics of both spiders and scorpions.

Spiders, a group of arachnids are characterised by modified body appendages called spinnerets which extrude silk, and, in males, a pair of pedipalps which are used to insert sperm into females. All but the most primitive spiders also have smooth, non-segmented abdomens. Scorpions, on the other hand have segmented abdomens and lack spinneretes and pedipalps. They also have the characteristic tail.

Yet Another Newly Evolved Species

Marbled crayfish, Procambarus virginalis

By Chucholl C. (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0],
via Wikimedia Commons

An aquarium accident may have given this crayfish the DNA to take over the world | Science | AAAS

Like most weeks, it's been a pretty dreadful one for creationists so far as scientific research is concerned. Another week and still not one iota of support for creationism or its lab-coated mock-science version, intelligent (sic) design. Instead we have the usual plethora of papers which quite incidentally, and with no effort or intent on the part of the authors, refutes creationism and confirms evolution.

I've already written about two - bacteria evolving to digest plastic and the extraordinary evolutionary history of the house dust mite. Now we have this observed evolution of a new species of crayfish which fills all the criteria for what creationists call 'macro-evolution', which they claim is impossible. Later, I'll be writing about a beautiful example of a fossil of an intermediate ancestor of both spiders and scorpions - again, something creationists tell their dupes don't exist. That one 'impossible' thing and one 'nonexistent' thing in the same week!

Mites Evolving All Around Us

A scanning electron microscope image of an American house dust mite, Dermatophagoides farinae.

Image credit: Ellen Foot Perkowski

House dust mites evolved a new way to protect their genome | University of Michigan News

Unless you have a microscope or exceptionally good eyesight you are never likely to see one but you are living now with millions of them in your carpets, furniture and beds. They are of course the ubiquitous house dust mites, and they have an interesting and unusual evolutionary history.

This history in turn is probably responsible for a unique solution to a common problem faced by all organisms - how to cope with those pieces of non-coding DNA called transposons, part of the junk DNA, that can randomly relocate themselves within a genome, causing mutations and diseases. Transposons behave a little like independent strands of DNA with evolutionary pressures to survive despite evolutionary pressure on their 'hosts' to control them.

Bacteria Evolved to Eat Plastic

ILLUSTRATION: P. HUEY/SCIENCE

Feeding on plastic | Science

One of the more subtle aspects of evolution, and one that creationists are either unable or unwilling to understand, is the difference between genetic information and the meaning of that information. A paper published in March 2016 by a Japanese team, illustrates that principle very well. It is about the discovery of a strain of bacteria that has evolved the ability to digest the man-made plastic, poly(ethylene teraphthalate) (PET).

Currently, the world-wide production of PET is over 50 million tons and none of it was biodegradable - until now!

Evolutionary Transition To Modern Humans

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

Brain shape evolution in Homo sapiens: brain shape of one of the earliest known members of our species, the 300,000 year-old cranium Jebel Irhoud 1 (left). Brain shape, and possibly brain function, evolved gradually. Brain morphology has reached the globularity typical for present day humans surprisingly recently (right).

Copyright © 2018 MPI EVA/ S. Neubauer, Ph. Gunz
CC-BY-SA 4.0

Modern human brain organization emerged only recently | Max Planck Society

The fossil record shows a distinct gradual transition to the modern human brain and cranial capacity from more ape-like origins, even within the species we recognise as Homo sapiens.

This is the finding of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, according to an open access paper published a few days ago in Science Advances. The finding also illustrates nicely how science incorporates new information, even information that at first glance doesn't seem to fit what we thought we knew, and how that new information can lead to a revised understanding and an improved explanation.

New Poll - Creationism Declining in USA

In U.S., Belief in Creationist View of Humans at New Low

Slightly encouraging news a couple of days ago from a Gallop poll in the USA. I say slightly encouraging because the change is small on a small data set (just 1011 adults aged 18 or over) and the same poll is also disappointing in other ways.

The poll shows that belief in creationism as the best explanation for humans fell to 38%, the lowest since polling began in 1981 and below 40% for the first time.

However, a two percentage point fall is within the margin of statistical error on that size data set. None-the-less, it is encouraging - for the USA.

Modern Humans May Have Left Africa 200,000 Years Ago

Misliya-1

This ancient jawbone suggests our species left Africa 40,000 years earlier than expected | Science | AAAS

The story of when and where modern humans first left Africa is continuing to develop and looks like becoming more complicated than first thought when the evidence seemed to point to a single migration by a small group around 50,000 years ago.

A large international team led by Israel Hershkovitz from Tel Aviv University have concluded that the jaw bone found in a Misliya Cave on the western slope of Mount Carmel in Israel is that of a Homo sapiens, but that it is between 177,000 and 194,000 years old. This is some 40,000 years earlier than modern humans were believed to have left Africa to begin their world-wide dispersal. The previous earliest H. sapiens remains were those found nearby in the Skhul Cave on Mount Carmel and Qafzeh Cave in Israel, dated to between 80,000 to 120,000 years old.

How Creationists Lie To Us - Creation Ministries

Lesser green sandpiper or yellowlegs, Tringa Flavipes

Credit: Wwcsig via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

When you show the world you need to lie for your faith
You show the world you know your faith is a lie

The meme on the right recently popped up in a Facebook group.

It is of course a lie.

The lie originated in one of the usual creationist disinformation sites, Creation.com, the online front for Creation Ministries, the Australia-based creationist organisation from which Ken Ham split when he realised America was a more lucrative place for scamming fundamentalist Christians, in an article penned by Jonathan O'Brien, a Creation Ministries staffer.

O'Brien is notorious for, amongst other things, his claim that the primitive carving of a rhinoceros in front of some leaves at Angkor Wat in Cambodia is really a carving of a stegosaurus, a creature with which it has little resemblance, and the claim that because a volcanic cone in Mexico grew in a year, this is evidence that mountains did not take millions of years to form, so could all have formed in the last few thousand years (ignoring the fact that most mountain ranges are not volcanic in origin but are due to plate tectonics).

Pope Attacks Sex Abuse Victims.

Bishop Juan Barros

Pope accuses sex abuse victims of slander

In an astonishing end to his less than triumphal visit to Chile, Pope Francis shocked his hosts by, not to put too fine a point on it, calling those accusing a Catholic Bishop of assisting a cover-up of child abuse, liars.

His visit had been met with demonstrations and much smaller crowds than previous visits because the Catholic Church in Chile is currently embroiled in the now traditional clerical sex abuse of minors scandal. Police had to use tear gas and water cannons to break up one demonstration outside the Pope's open-air address in the centre of Santiago.

Neanderthals Had Sex With Anyone

Upper view of the Montmaurin-LN mandible.

Source

The Montmaurin-La Niche mandible reveals the complexity of the Neanderthals’ origin | CENIEH - Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana

We now know that modern humans interbred with at least two, probably three and possibly more different hominin species when they left Africa. What this new analysis shows is that Neanderthals also interbred with archaic hominins and may not even have formed as single lineage in Eurasia.

Instead, this analysis by a team of scientists from the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (National Research Centre for Human Evolution - CENIEH) in Spain, led by José María Bermúdez de Castro, together with the French researcher Amélie Vialet, from the Musée d'histoire naturelle (Natural History Museum) in Paris, suggests that Neanderthals may have diversified, evolved as isolated populations, then interbred with one another so that later Neanderthals were a mosaic of earlier and divergent populations.

Birds of a Feather - New Species Evolve

Large cactus finch (Geospiza conirostris)

Study of Darwin's finches reveals that new species can develop in as little as two generations

Birds of a feather: U of T researchers discover Amazon bird to be rare hybrid species

This week we have a couple of examples of new species arising - that thing that creationists insist can't happen. The evolutionary process that created them was hybridisation which occurs very much faster than the more usual (at least in vertebrates - speciation by hybridisation is common in plants) divergence by a combination of genetic drift and natural selection. And in these cases, the species are birds.

The first is from those devil figures for creationists - Darwin's finches or Galapagos finches. This was originally reported and commented extensively upon last November and revealed an observed incidence of apparent speciation when a vagrant male appeared on the island of Daphne Major. This was much larger and had a larger, more robust beak than any of the other three species present on the island. It also sang with a different song.

Two More Catholic Clerics - Two More Sex Abuse Scandals

Archbishop Anthony Apuron of Guam

Archbishop Anthony Apuron stands in front of the Dulce Nombre de Maria Cathedral Basilica in Hagatna, Guam, Nov. 2014.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Grace Garces Bordallo

Guam archbishop faces new sexual assault allegation | CRUX

The US Pacific territory of Guam, which is almost wholly Catholic, has been rocked by a series of allegations that vehemently homophobic Anthony Apuron, Archbishop of Agana, sexually abuses altar boys in the 1970s. He has vigorously denied all the allegations and has not been criminally charged, but now another accuser has come forward.

The latest accuser, a relative of Archbishop Apuron, has claimed in the local media that he was abused by Apuron in 1990. This latest allegation has been reported to the Vatican. According to Archbishop Michael Byrnes, an earlier Vatican tribunal investigation into the earlier allegations has reportedly concluded and reached a verdict late last year but, for reasons unknown, has not yet made its findings public. Archbishop Byrnes has been given administrative responsibility for the diocese while Apuron is on administrative leave.

Changing Our Mind When the Evidence Changes

European brown bear (Ursus arctos)

Photo credit: Ivan PC

The Iberian brown bears do not descend from those fled from the north during the Ice Age / News / SINC - Servicio de Información y Noticias Científicas

To a creationist, with their simplistic black vs white, right vs wrong mentality, the fact that science can make mistakes or that the understanding is provisional - and all scientific understanding is provisional, even the best-supported - tells them that science, unlike their firmly held and unchangeable dogmas, is unreliable and therefore wrong. Little better than a guess, in fact.

To a scientist, and to anyone interested in truth rather than simple certainty, however, discovering that you have been wrong is actually welcome news and news that was well worth doing the research to discover because it means that what you now think you know is closer to the truth than it was before. Science works because scientists can and do change their minds when the evidence changes, unlike fundamentalist religions, where not changing your mind and not even questioning the dogmas is a prerequisite.

Massive Evolutionary Reduction in Genome Size

A Chilean cicada, which hosts particularly unusual symbiotic bacteria.

Photo credit: Piotr Lukasik

UM Publishes Research on Unusual Gene Evolution in Bacteria - UM News - University Of Montana:

Hopefully getting back to blogging again after spending time on another book, it's a pleasure coming back with details of two papers published by the same team a few days ago that shatter so many creationist dogmas, it's hard to keep count.

Creationists will tell you, for example, that evolution involves an increase in complexity and therefore an increase in information in the genome, and that this is impossible because of some mysterious application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which ignore the fact that an organism, Earth, and even the solar system are not closed systems. Never-the-less, they'll confidently assure you that in this way science has proved evolution can't happen, it's just that millions of working biologists never got the memo and have been mistaking the observed instances of not evolution for examples of... well... evolution.

Climate Change is Shrinking Moose

The researchers measured the length, width and height of moose skulls to study the impact of climate change on the iconic Northwoods species. The team measured 662 moose skulls and observed a 16 percent decrease in size over 40 years.

Credit: Sarah Bird/Michigan Tech

The Shrinking Moose of Isle Royale | Michigan Tech News:

Moose on Isle Royale, Michigan, USA are evolving rapidly in response to environmental change, especially climate change.

Unlike nearby populations of moose which have halved in the past 12 years, the Isle Royale moose population has increased by more than twenty percent per year for the last six years - but they are getting smaller. Measurements of skulls collected over a forty year period show they have shrunk by about sixteen percent. Life-span is also reducing.

Suffer Little Children - At the Hands of Priests and Nuns

Smyllum Park Catholic Children Abuse Centre, Lanarkshire, Scotlanda

Nun broke girl's arm after discovering she was being sexually abused by a priest | Metro News

When a nun caring for children at the Catholic-run Smyllum Park children's home in Lanarkshire, Scotland walked into the chapel and found a priest sexually abusing an eight year-old girl, she sprang immediately into action.

She grabbed the girl by one arm and flung her against the wall, breaking her arm, called her a 'whore' and shouted “get the f*** out of here” at her.

Pope Francis Thinks the Bible is Wrong!

Lord's Prayer: Pope Francis calls for change - BBC News

Pope Francis has been thinking.

No, it's not about how the church can avoid taking responsibility for the child abuses carried out by it's priests and nuns and certainly not about how it can compensate and support their victims and avoid creating any more.

It's about how to resolve a curious contradiction in the Bible that has been taxing the brains of theologians and biblical scholars for close on 1700 years, ever since the Bible was compiled. The contradiction is between James 13:1 with:

Human Evolution - Dispersal Out of Africa

Map of sites with ages and postulated early and later pathways associated with modern humans dispersing across Asia during the Late Pleistocene.

Regions of assumed genetic admixture are also shown. ka, thousand years ago.

© Bae et al. 2017. On the origin of modern humans: Asian perspectives. Science.
Image by: Katerina Douka and Michelle O’Reilly

On the origin of modern humans: Asian perspectives | Science

One of the exciting things about science is how knowledge is never fixed and unchanging. It grows and develops as new findings are incorporated into existing understanding, sometimes even needing quite fundamental revisions of what we thought we knew.

One such branch of science is that of human evolution and dispersal out of Africa which is in an exciting phase at the moment as new archaeological discoveries are made and new techniques of DNA recovery and analysis are revealing genetic evidence of relationships and interbreeding.

Plagiarists For Jesus

Willaim Lane Craig. Accused of plagiarism

Christian Apologist William Lane Craig Accused of Plagiarizing Thesis.

In an article published yesterday by David G. Mcafee in the Patheos blog, No Sacred Cows, Christian apologist and apologist for faith-based genocide, William Lane Craig has been accused of plagiarising his Masters Degree thesis.

This accusation is not new; it has been around for several years, but has been given another airing by atheist, author and former student of William Lane Craig's, John W Loftus. Loftus has written extensively about Lane Craig's cowardice in refusing to debate him publicly despite Lane Craig making an issue of Richard Dawkins' refusal to give him a platform following his repugnant apologetic for the Canaanite genocide in which he presented infanticide as morally justifiable.

A Loving Nativity Scene That Christians Hate

Our neighbors’ two Joseph nativity is up & I’m beaming 🎄👬 pic.twitter.com/7OKbFLU7v1

— Cameron Esposito (@cameronesposito) 24 November 2017

Religious Conservatives Outraged By Gay Nativity ‘Sacrilege’

Apparently, conservative Christians are queuing up to be outraged by a Christmas nativity scene in a Los Angeles front garden that shows Jesus with two fathers.

It's not the pretty pink matching costumes that they're wearing but the fact that there are two of them which is causing the great gnashings of teeth and calls for retribution on the grounds of 'blasphemy'.

It was this Twitter tweet by Twitter user Cameron Esposito which sent them into a frothing-mouthed, venom-spitting spectacle on the social media.

But how is this a blaphemy? Isn't this exactly what the Bible says when it claims Jesus was the son of God, even making great play of the claim and basing the entire Christian religion on that claim, and also claiming Jesus was the son of Joseph and thus of the 'House of David' in fulfilment of a prophecy?

Bigots Kicked Down Under!

The Australian Senate

Photo: Lukas Coch / AAPIMAGE

The Senate Just Voted Down All The Conservative Amendments To The Same-Sex Marriage Bill

Following the stunning victory for basic human decency and those campaigning for an inclusive Australia in the same-sex marriage referendum recently, the Australian Senate handed out another kicking to the Christian bigots still looking for victims and demanding the right to persecute people of their choice.

According to this report by Lane Sainty in Buzz News, the Senate voted down by a large majority a series of amendments by the conservative Christian right that would have given Christians an effective veto on same-sex marriages and provided them with a legal right to continue to persecute and victimise homosexuals by denial of goods and services.

Still Not Yeti

Abominable Snowman? Nope. Study ties DNA samples from purported Yetis to Asian bears

Just like their religious myths, the myth of the Yeti is a central part of the folklore of Tibet and Nepal. In that respect if differs not at all from other mythologies, religious or otherwise from other parts of the world. Lots of anecdotes and stories of people who knew of someone who's acquaintance once met someone who saw a Yeti or accounts of people seeing a shadow in a blizzard.

In the case of the Yeti, however, there was maybe something a bit more substantial - a tuft of hair, some faeces, skin, teeth, even a bone or two.

The problem is, the people who purportedly found these bits of evidence and sold them to collectors and Yeti hunters never counted on modern forensics and especially nor on modern DNA recovery and analysis.

Muddling Through With 'Intelligently Designed' Mistakes!

Adaptive mechanisms such as activation and use of cryptic splice sites or alternative transcription start sites as well as nonsense-associated alternative splicing and skipped exons maintaining reading frame shore up a sea of mutations expected to cause premature translation termination and loss of function.

Artist: Neta Shwartz.

What can zebrafish teach us about our survival in the face of mutations? | Carnegie Institution for Science

What would you do if you were an intelligent, omniscient, omnipotent designer and found that your perfect design kept going wrong in unexpected and unpredictable ways?

Well, if you were a creationist intelligent designer it seems, you would still regard yourself as an omniscience, omnipotent, perfect designer but you would wouldn't improve your design so it didn't keep going randomly wrong - because it's already perfect! Instead, you would set about designing a clunky workaround that went some way towards rectifying those omniscient mistakes and you would settle for near enough is good enough - apparently.

This is (leaving out the intelligent designer nonsense) what researchers Steven Farber, Jennifer Anderson and colleagues, of the Carnegie Institution have show happens in the zebrafish to cope with detrimental mutations. Rather than putting up with mutations resulting in individuals failing and being removed from the population gene pool, zebrafish, and maybe lots of other species, have evolved mechanisms for coping with them by either neutralising them or at least minimising their detrimental effects.

According to the Carnegie Institution press release:

Another Faith-Based Massacre

The al-Rawda Sufi mosque, Bir al-Abed, Sinai, Egypt

Photo credit: EAP

Egypt attack: Gunmen kill 235 in Sinai mosque - BBC News

Islamic jihadists believed to be affiliated to Islamic State (IS) have attacked a Sufi mosque in Sinai, killing at least 300 people, now revised upwards from the BBC News report.

The reason? Because the Islamic tradition of Sufism is considered heretical by fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, so obviously those who believe they know the mind of Allah believe Allah wants heretics killed and needs their help to kill them.