A man who cannot be named for legal reasons, a victim of the notorious, predatory paedophile Catholic priest, Gerald Ridsdale, has been given one of the largest amounts received to date, a A$1.5 million settlement on the eve of the court case in which he was claiming compensation for the abuses he received from Ridsdale and two Catholic teachers at his school in the Catholic dioceses of Ballarat, Victoria, Australia.
Ridsdale was sentence in 1994, initially to 12 months in prison for abusing 9 boys, but this was extended as more victims came forward. By 2006, he had pleaded guilty to 54 more child victims and his sentence was extended so he would not be eligible for parole until 2019.
Since then, a further batch of 23 additional charges have been brought against him, bringing his total number of victims to 65, and he will now not be eligible for parole untill 2022, Judge Irene Lawson deciding that even at the age of 83 he still posed a threat to the community.
Researchers from the University of Sussex, Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia) and Universidad de Costa Rica have shown how a change of environment and the presence of new pollinator species can induce rapid evolutionary change in flowers.
The common foxglove, Digitalis purpurea, is a native plant of Europe where it is normally pollinated by bumblebees. The markings on the inside of the corolla tube and the length of the tube are adaptations to facilitate these pollinators. However, in Costa Rica and Columbia, there were two independent introduction events about 200 years ago. These populations are pollinated by different bumblebee species and also hummingbirds, which are absent from Europe.
The researchers have shown that in these introduced populations, the corolla tube is significantly longer; a clear adaptation to new pollinator species. The British Ecological Society News release, explains:
The newly-independent nation of East Timor, or Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste as it shoud be called, is said to be the most devoutly Catholic country outside the Vatican City.
It was in this atmosphere of unquestioning trust, almost amounting to idolization of Catholic Priests as Men of God, that the American, Rev. Richard Daschbach, predated on children to satisfy his sexual perversion.
He had risen to local fame when he set up a refuge for the destitute and orphaned child victims of the long, bloody war for independence from Indonesia, that the Timorese final won in 2002.
The way that you determine who sits on his lap is by the list that he’d have on his door, and that meant that you were the little girl that was going to go with him.
Abuse victim
But there was a grim price to pay for his protection. Every evening a list would be posted on his bedroom door and the girl whose name appeared at the top of the list was expected to share a bed with Daschbach and another elementary school-aged girl. Fear of banishment from the shelter prevented the young girls from complaining or resisting at the time.
Readers will be familiar with self-styled prophet of God, Robin Bullock, of Youth Force Ministries Church International, and his increasingly deranged attempts to prove his God-given guarantee that Trump would win a second term was not a false prophesy, despite the fact that Biden won.
Only last week he claimed that God has given him authority to 'call' Donald Trump back to the White House. A month ago, he was declaring that President Joe Biden didn't really exist. Now he claims God has told him he is 'extending the hand of mercy' to this 'non-existent' Joe Biden. All he has to do is 'confess' that he is not the legitimate president and hand power back to Trump and all will be forgiven.
Donald Trump's right-wing fundamentalist appointees on SCOTUS are paying dividends for the Christian Trumpanzees in California.
Early in the coronavirus pandemic the Supreme Court normally ruled in favour of states imposing restrictions on gatherings in places of worship, citing the health and welfare of the public over the desire of religious people to gather together in a single place and so spread the virus. Now, following the replacement of the late Ruth Bader-Ginsberg with the Trump-appointed right-wing fundamentalist, Amy Coney Barrett, a move widely seen as a thank you for the support he received from the Talibangelicals, SCOTUS is leaning more towards prohibiting states from banning or imposing limits on these gatherings, citing religious freedom over the health and welfare of the public at large.
Last Friday, the court split 5-4 on the issue, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr joining with the three liberal justices in dissenting.
Pandering to the Christian need for martyrdom and victimhood the conservatives said that California treated at-home worship differently to hardware stores, hair dressing salons, retail stores, personal care services, movie theaters, private suites at sporting events and concerts and indoor restaurants. None of those were required to limit access to no more than three families.
However, in their dissent, Justices, Elena Kagan, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, said the majority had compared in-home prayer meetings with the wrong kinds of activities - a comparison not justified or required by the law. In other words, they had been highly selective to justify their bias:
Justice Kagan wrote:
The First Amendment requires that a State treat religious conduct as well as the State treats comparable secular conduct. Sometimes finding the right secular analogue may raise hard questions. But not today. California limits religious gatherings in homes to three households. If the State also limits all secular gatherings in homes to three households, it has complied with the First Amendment. And the State does exactly that: It has adopted a blanket restriction on at-home gatherings of all kinds, religious and secular alike. California need not, as the per curiam insists, treat at-home religious gatherings the same as hardware stores and hair salons—and thus unlike at-home secular gatherings, the obvious comparator here. As the per curiam’s reliance on separate opinions and unreasoned orders signals, the law does not require that the State equally treat apples and watermelons.
In other words, the blanket ban on in-home gatherings swept up in-home gatherings for religious services not because they were religious services but because they were in-home gatherings.
Justice Kagan further explained:
And even supposing a court should cast so expansive a comparative net, the per curiam’s analysis of this case defies the factual record. According to the per curiam, “the Ninth Circuit did not conclude that” activities like frequenting stores or salons “pose a lesser risk of transmission” than applicants’ at-home religious activities. Ante, at 3. But Judges Milan Smith and Bade explained for the court that
those activities do pose lesser risks for at least three reasons:
First, “when people gather in social settings, their interactions are likely to be longer than they would be in a
commercial setting,” with participants “more likely to be involved in prolonged conversations.”
Second, “private houses are typically smaller and less ventilated than commercial establishments.”
And third, “social distancing and mask-wearing are less likely in private settings and enforcement is more difficult.”
These are not the mere musings of two appellate judges: The district court found each of these facts based on the uncontested testimony of California’s public-health experts.
In other words, even if California had treated at-home worship differently to commercial premises, there was good reason to do so in terms of expert assessment of the differential public health risks.
In granting religions special privileges to the rest of society and in ignoring the threat to the health and welfare of the general public that their selfishness poses, Trump's compliant SCOTUS is posing a threat to American democracy and moving it closer to a de facto theocracy where a religion can apply to the Supreme Court to have its self-awarded privileges enshrined in American Law - which is exactly what Trump and his Talibangelical supporters wanted. Meanwhile these religions are spearheading the campaign against the anti-coronavirus measures and against the vaccinations that will reduce the virus' severity, citing all manner of ludicrous conspiracy theories and dubious interpretations of obscure Bible texts to justify it.
It's almost as though they believe science is interfering with their god's plan to kill as many people as possible with one of its nastier designs and it requires their help in doing so. If only the virus restricted itself to fundamentalists, it would be tempting to let them carry on and allow Darwinian evolution to improve the human species by natural selection.
This transport system may be widespread across many Gram-positive bacteria that contain proteins in the WXG100 superfamily. Tuberculosis kills 1 million people each year.
The sheer genius of Creationism's putative Intelligent designer is breath-taking on occasion.
In this case, almost literally, since it concerns the mechanism by which Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the cause of the common lung disease, tuberculosis, kills you. In its determination to make people sick, the Intelligent Designer constantly comes up with these ingenious ways to make sure its nasty little parasites do the job they were designed to do, despite our immune system it allegedly designed to protect us from the organisms it designed to make us suffer.
Scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Alabama, USA have just published the results of their research in which they discovered that M. tuberculosis not only produces a toxin to poison us with, but it also has a nifty way to make sure we get a good dose of it.
The problem the bacterium has is getting the toxin through its own cell membrane and into the host. Its cell membrane is designed to keep substances inside the cell, not leaking out, so it has to be able to control what leaves and provide it with a means of passing through small, special channels designed for the purpose. It does this by making two small proteins which join together to form dimers. Five of these dimers then join together as a ring in the bacterium's cell membranes to make tiny, star-shaped pores through which the toxins can pass.
Six years ago, Michael Niederweis, Ph.D., described the first toxin ever found for the deadly pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis. This toxin, tuberculosis necrotizing toxin, or TNT, became the founding member of a novel class of previously unrecognized toxins present in more than 600 bacterial and fungal species, as determined by protein sequence similarity. The toxin is released as M. tuberculosis bacteria survive and grow inside their human macrophage host, killing the macrophage and allowing the escape and spread of the bacteria.
Here, we show for the first time that small Esx proteins of the WXG100 family have an important molecular function inside the Mtb cell by mediating toxin secretion. Our results suggest a dynamic mechanism of pore formation by small Esx proteins that might be applicable to other members of the large WXG100 protein family. Thus, our study not only represents a major advancement in our understanding of secretion of TNT and likely of other proteins in M. tuberculosis, but also describes a biological function for Esx-paralogs in M. tuberculosis and their homologs in the large WXG100 protein family in Gram-positive bacteria.
EsxE and EsxF constitute the first known outer membrane components mediating protein secretion in M. tuberculosis, however, it is unlikely that EsxE and EsxF are sufficient for TNT secretion, since an energy source is required in all known bacterial protein secretion systems. Therefore, it is possible that EsxE-EsxF associate with other proteins or protein complexes to achieve CpnT export and TNT secretion.
This work was a remarkable achievement of an outstanding graduate student, Uday Tak, who did almost all of these experiments by himself.
Professor Michael Niederweis, Co-author
Department of Microbiology
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL, USA
For 132 years, the lack of an identified toxin in M. tuberculosis had contrasted with nearly all other pathogenic bacteria whose toxins contribute to illness or death. M. tuberculosis infects 9 million people a year and kills more than 1 million.
Now, in another groundbreaking work, the University of Alabama at Birmingham researcher and colleagues describe how two small ESX proteins made by the M. tuberculosis bacteria mediate secretion of TNT by pore formation in the membranes that envelop the bacteria. This finding may have broad application because a distinctive three-amino acid motif found on EsxE and EsxF — tryptophan/any-amino-acid/glycine, known in shorthand as WXG — is also found on many other small mycobacterium proteins and on the large WXG100 superfamily of bacterial proteins that resemble EsxE and EsxF.
“Here, we show for the first time that small Esx proteins of the WXG100 family have an important molecular function inside the Mtb cell by mediating toxin secretion,” said Niederweis, a professor in the UAB Department of Microbiology. “Our results suggest a dynamic mechanism of pore formation by small Esx proteins that might be applicable to other members of the large WXG100 protein family. Thus, our study not only represents a major advancement in our understanding of secretion of TNT and likely of other proteins in M. tuberculosis, but also describes a biological function for Esx-paralogs in M. tuberculosis and their homologs in the large WXG100 protein family in Gram-positive bacteria.”
TNT is one of two domains in the M. tuberculosis outer membrane protein CpnT; activity of the TNT domain of CpnT in the cytosol of the macrophage induces macrophage death by hydrolyzing NAD+. M. tuberculosis has an inner membrane and an outer membrane, and a protein needs to get through each layer to be secreted outside of the bacterium. How CpnT gets to the outer membrane was unknown.
EsxE and EsxF are part of the same gene segment as CpnT, and the UAB researchers hypothesized that the two small proteins might be involved in secretion of the toxin.
By creating different strains that lacked either EsxE or EsxF, they showed that both proteins were necessary for the translocation of CpnT to the cell surface of M. tuberculosis and for the secretion of TNT into the cytosol of macrophages infected with M. tuberculosis. Furthermore, EsxE and EsxF are surface-accessible proteins on M. tuberculosis as a membrane-associated complex.
To learn more about the mechanism of that translocation, the UAB team made mutants of each Esx protein, where the tryptophan amino acid of the single WXG motif on each protein was replaced by the amino acid alanine. The mutants showed that an intact WXG motif on EsxE and on EsxF were required for efficient CpnT translocation to the outer membrane of M. tuberculosis and subsequent TNT secretion into the cytosol of infected macrophages.
Purification of the water-soluble EsxE and EsxF proteins showed they formed EsxE-EsxF dimers, and five of these dimers assembled into star-shaped structures, as viewed by electron microscopy. Each was about 10 nanometers across, with a 3-nanometer central pore.
Experiments with planar lipid bilayers were key to understanding the molecular function of EsxE-EsxF, as they showed that the EsxE-EsxF pores formed channels through lipid membranes.
Finally, the researchers showed that the WXG motifs were required for pore formation and membrane disruption by the EsxE-EsxF complex, and the motifs mediated assembly of functional EsxE-EsxF oligomers. This now defines a biochemical role for the previously enigmatic WXG motif.
“EsxE and EsxF constitute the first known outer membrane components mediating protein secretion in M. tuberculosis,” Niederweis said. “However, it is unlikely that EsxE and EsxF are sufficient for TNT secretion, since an energy source is required in all known bacterial protein secretion systems. Therefore, it is possible that EsxE-EsxF associate with other proteins or protein complexes to achieve CpnT export and TNT secretion.”
The UAB researchers propose two models for the transport of CpnT by EsxE and EsxF. In the first, the EsxE-EsxF heterodimers form a pore in the inner membrane, and then form another pore in the outer membrane to create transmembrane channels. “Alternatively,” Niederweis said, “the inner membrane channel is extended to span the periplasm via filament formation, and connects to EsxE-EsxF pores in the outer membrane, exposing EsxF on the cell surface. In this model, the putative EsxE-EsxF channel tunnel enables export of the CpnT polypeptide to the outer membrane of M. tuberculosis, and subsequent secretion of TNT and EsxE-EsxF.”
Brilliant, what? This is the sort of thing that any self-respecting ID advocate, such as Michael J Behe, could make another fortune from, with a book claiming it is 'irreducibly complex' so couldn't have evolved and must have been designed by a magic man, proving Darwin wrong. And all to make a million people get progressively more debilitated and sicker until they die. It used to be a lot more than that in the good ol' days before human medical science came up with antibiotics that kill the mycobacteria, but the Intelligent Designer is working on that problem too, and has already come up with antibiotic resistant strains which are becoming more common nowadays.
Creationist mode:
Well that's how a Creationist should be seeing things anyway, since they also purport to worship this putative entity they claim designed and created all living things and, being omniscient, knew exactly what they would do and designed them for that purpose.
Here is how people who understand biology see it:
Abstract
Mycobacterium tuberculosis secretes the tuberculosis necrotizing toxin (TNT) to kill host cells. Here, we show that the WXG100 proteins EsxE and EsxF are essential for TNT secretion. EsxE and EsxF form a water-soluble heterodimer (EsxEF) that assembles into oligomers and long filaments, binds to membranes, and forms stable membrane-spanning channels. Electron microscopy of EsxEF reveals mainly pentameric structures with a central pore. Mutations of both WXG motifs and of a GXW motif do not affect dimerization, but abolish pore formation, membrane deformation and TNT secretion. The WXG/GXW mutants are locked in conformations with altered thermostability and solvent exposure, indicating that the WXG/GXW motifs are molecular switches controlling membrane interaction and pore formation. EsxF is accessible on the bacterial cell surface, suggesting that EsxEF form an outer membrane channel for toxin export. Thus, our study reveals a protein secretion mechanism in bacteria that relies on pore formation by small WXG proteins.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about ID Creationism is how it not only completely fails to provide any answers to basic questions about mechanisms, or provide any evidential basis for the claims it makes, but how it appears to blind its followers to the nasty realities of the natural world with it parasites and the suffering they cause, and the ultimate futility in the arms races which about and which make no sense at all as the product of a single master designer.
Amazingly too, they claim to get their morals from this hateful misanthropist!
As I showed in my beautifully-illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, the natural world is full of examples such as this of how any designer who came up with it could only be a malevolent sadist who enjoys watching suffering and creates it for the pleasure of watching its creation suffer, like an evil man who breeds kittens for the fun of burning them alive and the pleasure of watchig them suffer.
Something that extremist Talibangelical fundamentalists find hard to understand is how the US constitutional constraints on the US government don't apply world-wide or to private organizations, so imagine their shock and horror when they discover that they don't!
Laura Loomer, an extreme right-wing, Islamophobic conspiracy theorist and Trumpanzee nut-job was so incensed when SCOTUS declined to hear the case she brought before them, claiming her ban on Facebook and other social media for disseminating hate and disinformation violated her First Amendment right to free speech that she is threatening to have the SCOTUS case number tattooed on her wrist, like a Nazi death camp victim.
In effect, SCOTUS ruled that they have no jurisdiction over how a private company applies its own TOS that its customers have agreed to. It's hard to see how they could have reached any other conclusion, given that the First Amendment is explicitly a constraint on government and the social media are private companies and not part of the government or even agents of the government at any level in the USA.
With typical insensitivity, Loomer is equating the loss as what she regards as her special entitlement to abuse and foment hate with being a victim of the Holocaust!
Schematic model of SARS-CoV-2-induction of complement in respiratory epithelial cells. SARS-CoV-2 infects respiratory epithelial cells and induces an interferon response. IFNs signal via the IFN receptor to activate STAT1 via JAK1/2. STAT1 co-operates with RELA to induce transcription of IL6 and complement genes including C3, CFB, C1R and C1S. CFB acts as an alternative pathway C3 convertase to cleave C3 intracellularly to C3a and C3b. C3a engages C3aR and C3b engages CD46 on leukocyte subsets in the lungs to drive inflammation. These events can be pharmacologically targeted with antivirals (e.g., remdesivir), JAK-STAT inhibitors (e.g., ruxolitinib) and/or cell permeable complement inhibitors, including CFBi.
News today of what a brilliant job the Intelligent [sic] Designer did with the SARS-VoV-2 virus which is designed to make us sick and die.
An international team of researchers working with Majid Kazemian, assistant professor in the departments of computer science and biochemistry at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indian, USA, have discovered that a biochemical pathway, known as the immune complement system, is triggered in lung cells by the virus, which might explain why the disease is so difficult to treat.
According to the press release from Purdue University press release:
Poor Jim Bakker (I use the term 'poor' not in its wealth sense but as a term of concern for his welfare) is becoming more and more desperate in his frantic search for yet more money.
Following on from his inclusion of the wackadoodle conspiracist, Steve Quayle with his 'impending zombie apocalypse' prophesies on his show, he then invited another deranged conspiracist, Tom Horn, to expound on his loopy predictions and wackadoodle claims.
Tom Horn is a leading Trumpanzee cultist who, back in May, 2019 announced that God had chosen Donald Trump, to 'Help build the Third Temple' in Jerusalem in preparation for the return of Jesus. Sadly for Horn, Trump was booted out by the US electorate before the construction work began, having failed even to build a single wall.
Apparently, Horn has detected an approaching asteroid, due to strike Earth in 2029. Not only that, but reading the paranoid writings of a 1st or 2nd century CE author of a book of dubious legends and prophesies, the Bible, he has concluded that this asteroid will be carrying a virus that will turn into the antichrist. His 'evidence' is that said 1st or 2nd Century CE author wrote:
The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water — the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.
Revelation 8:10-11
Earlier this month Horn claimed to have died and met God and Jesus who told him what the future held.
No mention of viruses there, of course, because no-one had heard of them in those days of ignorance and scientific illiteracy, but not content with the mental gymnastics needed to turn a 'star' named "Wormwood" (from the days when stars were believed to be little lights, stuck to a dome over Earth and could be shaken loose by earthquakes, to fall down), into an asteroid named Apophis, Horn goes one better and includes it in a conspiracy invented for the purpose usig the 'logic' there must be consspiracy somewhere or my 'prophesy' would look implausible!
He needs to explain why the governments of the world (for Tom Horn's and his parochial target marks' world, read, the USA) aren't becoming concerned that an asteroid is heading our way, bent on destruction. So, he has concluded that 'they' (ie, the US federal government) are aware but are conspiring with Satanic forces to keep news of it leaking out and alarming people, presumably in case they start asking God to change his perfect plan and divert the evil asteroid with which he plans to kill us - which would turn Tom and the 1st or 2nd century CE author of the Bible into false prophets.
He told Jim Bakker:
I believe that Apophis is carrying an alien microorganism on it in which a virus is being sustained. I believe it’s going to make coronavirus look like a walk in the park. On impact with the Earth, the contagion that is going to be brought to this planet. … I think that it’s going to be a trigger event that ultimately leads to the Mark of the Beast, which will mean that you’re going to have to be vaccinated.
A contagion during the Tribulation period could sweep the world. Literally tens of millions of people are dying by the hour, and an international cry goes up around the world for some kind of cure, a vaccine. Well, a man comes forward — a single individual who happens to be the Antichrist — and he’s the only man on Earth whose blood is naturally immune to this alien virus. And so a vaccine is created from his blood by which all mankind then are required to be inoculated. So, it’s almost like a black communion.
Because, of course, that's how vaccines are made - from the blood of immune individuals. Clearly, Horn is even less of a biologist/immunologist than he is an astronomer or prophet.
But he has a handy book - the only book he needs - in which, with a creative imagination, the entire future of the world is spelled out in detail. All it needs is a few words to have their meanings changed and the historical context of the time it was made up, to be ignored.
Is this insanity caused by excessive religiosity, excessive religiosity caused by insanity or merely a fraud fleecing gullible fools by trading on ignorant superstitions and psychotic paranoias?
Just when you were beginning to think Trumpanzee Talibangelical Christians couldn't get any further round the bend, up pops Jim Bakker and Steve Quayle to prove you wrong!
Serial adulterer, Jim Bakker, who has a personal hotline to Jesus for when he needs his sin counter zeroed, has been earning a crust recently by selling his dupes products intended to help them survive the 'End Times' that he keeps on forecasting.
He's now turned that up a notch and thrown his lot in with equally sleazy, Steve Quayle, the extreme right-wing, conspiracy theorist fruitloop who earns his living selling goods to help survive the coming zombie apocalypse he keeps on prophesying.
Quayle's conspiracy theories are becoming ever loopier and byzantine. His latest is that coronavirus tests are to collect your DNA to be used to create targeted biological weapons that will infect people and either kill them or turn them into flesh-eating zombies. Bakker asked Quayle if zombies were a disease on Earth, like any other disease. Quayle 'explained':
A research paper dealing with the evolution of a widespread species of African monkey, the Mona Monkey, Cercopithecus mona, illustrates several mechanisms by which a species can diversify and speciate, and gives the lie to the Creationist claim that the Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis.
The reality is that the TOE is the foundation of modern biology and the only theory that explains the observed facts. Creationist frauds like to tell their dupes that it's about to be overthrown by some flavour of Bible-literalist fundamentalist creationism or other to make them feel intellectually superior to 'mad' scientists with their 'false' theories and wacky ideas.
Covid-19 Vaccine fact sheet produced by Hennepin Healthcare
This is not a joke, not even a belated April fools joke.
There really are people who, because they suffer from religion, can be induced to believe these absurdities.
An American health-care provider has had to put out a disclaimer stating that the anti-Covid-19 vaccine does not contain something called 'luciferase' or 'the mark of the beast" to mark recipients as followers of Satan.
Luciferase is the enzyme found in bioluminescent organisms responsible for making them glow in the dark. There would be absolutely no purpose in putting it in a vaccine. But what on earth is 'the mark of the beast'? Oh, I know all about the nonsense in Revelations about the number 666 and all that tosh, but how can it be a substance included in a vaccine?
Apparently, this is one of the latest QAnon-type conspiracy theories concerning the Covid-19 vaccine, which is circulating in fundamentalist Christian circles, as though, fresh from their success with the "Deep state, cannibalistic paedophile ring", Bill Gates' "tracking nanobots" and "gay genes", nonsense, the originators of this idiocy have gone one step further round the bend and taken their dupes with them.
I suspect that a small group somewhere is betting amongst themselves to see who can get people to say the most idiotic thing in public. I wonder if Republican politicians and evangelical, Talibangelist 'prophets' realise they're being made public fools of for someone's entertainment.
The scary thing is that, as Voltaire said:
People who believe absurdities will commit atrocities
How arrogant we once were, before science taught us humility!
When I was young, back in the 1950s, we assumed us humans were exceptional in so many ways that justified believing we must be a special creation with a special purpose, being blessed with so many unique abilities. Human exceptionalism justified so much about religion and our relationship with the rest of nature and the world, which we assumed had been created solely for our benefit to be used as we saw fit. There was even an account in our book of self-justificatory origin myths that related how and why everything was created this way - "And God gave Man dominion..."
But that was in the days before we knew any better. Now we know otherwise.
We used to think we were the only 'thinking' beings, now we know that many other species can think and solve problems.
We used to think we were the only beings with intelligence enough to make and use tools, now we know many other species also shape and use tools.
We used to think we were the only beings with ethics and moral codes, now we know several other species are also empathetic and know the difference between right and wrong in context.
We used to think we were the only beings with a sense of self, now we know many other species are self-aware and have a conceptual map of their environment with them at the centre of it.
We used to think we were the only beings with cultures, now we know that other species also form cultures which they inherit from their parents and peers.
And, that latter assumption has just taken another blow with the news that a group of researchers at the University of Konstanz and Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior in Germany have found that birds are able to change their culture to become more efficient. As the University of Konstanz press release explains:
The paper concerns the discovery of four new (to science) extinct species of snakefly which pose something of a problem. They were found in western North America in an area which our understanding of their modern counterparts says they shouldn't have been in.
All know modern snakeflies live in habitats which experience winter frosts and it was assumed that their over-wintering eggs needed a period of freezing in order to develop. However, these extinct species are all from temperate regions which experience few if any winter frosts, so the question is, why did their modern descendant evolve to be dependent on these winter conditions?
Sadly, the paper is behind a paywall, however, the Simon Fraser University media release has the details:
Another Gallop poll to gladden the heart of any Atheist or secular humanist, showing again the decline in religion in the USA. This poll appears to be undated, the only clue being that the last data points are for 2020 and the copyright is dated 2021, so we can assume the poll represents the state of religious opinion towards the end of 2020.
I'll let the charts speak for themselves since they need little by way of explanation. The trendlines in the first chart were added by me using Excel's 3 phase polynomial which gave a closer fit to the data points than a simple linear trend.
A whiff of the stinking cesspit of corruption that is the Vatican under Pope Francis was hanging around Southwark Crown Court in March when Judge Tony Baumgartner lifted a freezing order which had been placed on Gianluigi Torizi’s bank account. Torizi is the Italian businessman who was arrested in the Vatican City last year as part of its ongoing investigation into the London property deal at the heart of the financial scandal concerning the finances of the Vatican Secretariat of State.
Delivering his judgment, Judge Baumgartner criticised the Vatican Promoter of Justice offices for court filings that the judge said were riddled with “non-disclosures and misrepresentations.
Readers may remember how this scandal first surfaced when Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu suddenly 'resigned his rights as a cardinal' (a euphemism for 'was summarily sacked and stripped of his powers') over his involvement in financial scandals, including the London property deal, using a Vatican slush fund known as "Peter's Pence", and his doctoring of the Vatican's financial accounts.
The team zoomed in on the uniqueness of egg-laying in mammals. Today, chicks get all their nutrients from within the egg before they hatch. Newly-hatched puggles get some nutrients from within their platypus eggs, but they still need to lap mother’s milk. And of course, human babies initially get all their nutrients from milk. The research group demonstrated that chickens have three egg-producing genes, the platypus has one, and humans have none.
They concluded that since all three evolved from a common ancestor that laid eggs, the platypus lost two egg-specific genes while humans lost all three. This conclusion relies entirely on the premise of a common ancestor. It simply ignores the at least equally logical divine origins option. A smart Creator could have equipped each of these three creatures with the specific DNA sequences needed to carry out its own unique growth and development.
This subtle misrepresentation relies on three characteristics of Creationist frauds' target marks:
Hank Kunneman, One Voice Ministries
"People should trust the prophets who said Trump would win, because he did win really because the prophets said he would!"
In a presuppositional argument which would grace any list of Christian apologetics for its dishonest circularity, Talibangelical, Trumpanzee nut-job, Hank Kunneman, of One Voice Ministries, has said that Trump won really because lots of self-styled fundamentalist Christian 'prophets' prophesied he would win, therefore the election was stolen and the prophesies were correct, so people should continue to trust these 'prophets'.
In a chilling preview of what 'democracy' would be like in a Taliban-style fundamentalist Christian theocracy, comprised of people like Kummeman, elections are won and lost not on a count of the votes for the candidates, but by prophesies of self-styled, self-appointed 'prophets'. In other words, with typical fundamentalist Christian 'humility', the word of these fundamentalists loons overrides the will of the people expressed at the ballot box.
Regular readers might remember Hank, who crudely recently warned his dupes that "God hates those who point out when his prophets make false prophesies" (such as falsely prophesying a Trump win in 2020, for example) by misrepresenting... er... reinterpreting a Bible passage.
And of course, it goes without saying that the 'winning' candidate will always be the one who holds out the prospect of power, influence and increased wealth and job security for the 'prophets', because, naturally, that's the candidate whom God will favour too!
A few days ago in one of his "Prophetic Pulse 'conferences'", Kunneman, claiming there had been lots of signs in March that the alleged voter fraud that stole the election from Trump would soon be exposed, told his dupes:
President Trump won the election, so, for people to say, ‘Well, people prophesied that he’d win,’ he did win, and so we had a stolen election.
President Trump is not going anywhere. If you don’t like President Trump, that’s your problem because he’s not done talking, and God’s not done with him...
I’m sensing very strongly by the signs that God has given … that we are close to justice and righteousness being established. What we cannot do is quit, give up, point the finger, and then begin to think, ‘Well, you know what? All of this was just a smokescreen.’ No, that’s what the enemy wants because it’s a sad day if all of God’s messengers, prophets, intercessors, [and] Christians were somehow wrong and the fake news that we know has been fake news were the voice of truth. I don’t think so.
Curiously though Kunneman 'forgot' to tell his followers just what those mysterious signs were, or where the evidence proving this alleged fraud was to be found. For a prophet of an omniscient God, Kunneman seems to be remarkably poorly served in that respect. It's almost as though God doesn't know what that evidence is or where it may be found either.
But it seems his only 'evidence' that the election was stolen from Trump is the fact that he and so many of his fellow Talibangelical Trumpanzee cultists, said he would win. That's it! Trump won really because we said he would!
Well, either that or Kunneman is indeed the false prophet he so desperately now wants his dupes not to think of him as.
Police in Canada who went to check that a local Alberta church with a record of putting the health and safety of its congregation and the public at large at risk from Covid-19, was now complying with the law, were in for a treat.
Along with Pastor Artur Pawlowski's congregation in the Cave of Adullam Church, they were treated to a practical demonstration of Christian love, forgiveness and turning the other cheek - as he attacked them with a tirade of violent threats and abuse.
The reason for the routine and perfectly lawful check by the police was because of the churches recent history of ignoring the coronavirus mitigation measures and holding in-person services that exceeded the legal restrictions on attendance. Just days earlier, Pastor James Coates from the church had been released from jail following the Alberta government's decision to drop the case. He is still subject to financial charges for violating the health order.
A group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.
A further 37% were unsure. This means 46% (less than half) those adult Americans polled thought the statement was untrue!
Readers will be well aware that this belief is central to the QAnon conspiracy theories and fighting this "deep state", comprised of cannibalistic paedophile political elites, senior scientists and media moguls, is what Donald J Trump was put into power (by God) to fight. The same people who believe these theories also believe:
Close on news that a Hawaiian pastor has said his church should be allowed to continue holding Covid-19 super-spreader services because the authorities have allowed hospitals to remain open, we have fruitloop Robbin Bullock, fresh from the traditional abuse of LGBTQ people, claiming they would all be evangelical Christians really, only Satan has taken possession of them to prevent it.
Last November Bullock, founder of Youth Force Ministries Church International, told his dupes that God had told him the coronavirus pandemic was caused by people voting for Hillary Clinton in 2012, apparently unaware that most of those catching the virus and dying from it were from that unimportant little place called 'The Rest of The World', so couldn't have voted for Hillary Clinton even if they had wanted too. But Robin Bullock's parochial little world consists only of the USA - which is the only place of interest to his god too, it seems.
Pastor James Marocco, of the Church of the Sacred Covid Super-Spreader, aka, King's Cathedral, in Kahului, Maui, Hawaii, has come out with what must rate as one of the most bizarre, if not the most bizarre, arguments for refusing to close his church to help contain a massive cluster of Covid-19 cases already traced back to services in his church. He is arguing that because the authorities didn't close the local hospital when it was being overwhelmed by cases, they should keep his church open too!
When bone first appeared in the fossil record, it did not contain the bone cells (osteocytes) that are today considered essential for normal bone growth and development, so where did they come from? This is the sort of gap any diligent Creationist would look for and, when found, would plonk their god firmly in it, declare the fit to be perfect and proclaim the question answered, in the only way permitted to a Creationist - God did it!
But, as usual, when science looks in these gaps, Creationism's god is nowhere to be seen. Instead, they find it was never there at all because it was merely an illusion caused by gaps in the record, not gaps in the entirely natural processes that brought about the world as we see it today. As always, what is evolved out of what was, without magic or the involvement of a clever invisible magic sky man.
Just such a gap was closed recently by a team of scientists working for the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, headed by Dr Florian Witzmann who used the focussed ion beam of a scanning electron microscope at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) to examine the bone structures of 400 million year-old fossils of marine life in nanometre-scale, to calculate unprecedented 3D detail. The scientists believe they have even identified the environmental factor which drove this evolution - a shortage of the essential mineral, phosphorus.
The Intelligent designer has really pulled out the stops with this one!
It's only gone and designed a special virus to give sea lions cancer, and it's made it so it's sexually transmitted too!
According to researchers at The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, CA, USA, the cause of the cancer that is killing so many Californian sea lions, is a herpesevirus that has infected 1 in 4 sea lions.
The cancer starts in the genital tract of the sea lion then rapidly spreads throughout the internal organs. Sea lions that wash up on California's beaches suffering from the disease are normally in the terminal stages and so have to be euthanised humanely to prevent further suffering.
Mind you, clever and mendacious though it is, the intelligent designer needed a bit of help from humans with this one, albeit unwitting help. The problem appears to be exacerbated by man-made pollution with nasty chemicals like DDT and PCB. A lot of DDT was dumped in the sea around Southern California, which is one of the main habitats for these sea lions. DDT, especially, was once widely used as a general insecticide but proved to be extremely harmful to a multitude of species and was banned in most countries. However, it is very stable and stays in the environment for tens or even hundreds of years, being ingested, concentrated up the food chain, at the top of which sit species such as the sea lion, and put back into the environment when the animal dies, to be ingested again and recycled.
Nevertheless, the herpes virus was a brilliant masterstroke that really causes suffering, especially after the sea lions have been sexually active, so the sea lion's (geddit?!) share of the credit has to go to the malevolent designer of this nasty little virus!
Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have now produced an artificial cell that reproduces like any other single-celled organism.
In 2010 Venter produced the first cell with a synthetic genome when he constructed a genome that was almost identical to that of Mycoplasma mycoides, a bacterial parasite commonly found in goats.
In 2016, this genome was, stripped it down to its bare essentials to contain just 237 genes, to become the smallest known viable genome capable of independent living. However, there was something not quite right about the way this cell (termed Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn3.0) because when it replicated, the daughter cells were not equal in size, as they are in the wild type and in Venter's 2010 version (JVCI-syn1.0). It became apparent that some genes needed for normal replication had been removed along with about half the genome to reduce it down to 237 genes.
A 'missing link' protein that shows the transition between two ancient species of algae, red algae and cryptophytes.
This was a mystery that had been eluding molecular biologists for decades and it was only found because of the stay-at-home regulations to mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic and because of international cooperation. The discovery was made by biologists based at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. There findings were published a few days ago, open access in Nature Communications.
The University of New South Wales news release by Lachlan Gilbert tells the story:
Congratulations to America for joining the rest of the developed world, where religious non-affiliation and increasing secularisation of society are now the norm.
The latest Gallop poll shows that church, synagogue or mosque membership in the USA has fallen below 50% for the first time. Now at just 47%, this represents a 26% percentage point fall since 1937 when Gallop first began polling. And the downward trend show signs of accelerating, falling 22 percentage points since the turn of the millennium and 8 percentage points since 2015.
According to this report in the Guardian, President reject, Donald J Trump, has launched his new cult website (45Office.com) with an account of his disastrous presidency in which he appears to have forgotten certain key events.
Consistent with his narcissistic personality disorder, it is full of self-praise and 'alternative facts', such as his claim to have acted decisively over the coronavirus pandemic and implying that he was personally responsible for innovative medical treatments and two vaccines. What he 'forgot' to mention was that he had dismantled the plans and contingencies that his predecessor, Barak Obama had put in place in preparedness for just such a pandemic, in his obsessive zeal to undo everything Obama had done.
In what could pass for a parody of the kind of self-eulogising, and disregard for the facts, that characterises Trump's personality disorder, in his opening 885-word braggadocio, written in the third person, which is hard to read without laughing out loud, he says:
Research into the flower preferences of pollinating moths may have delivered a vital clue to the simple factors needed for the emergence of new species.
With characteristic intellectual honesty, Charles Darwin was always quick to acknowledge difficulties for his theory of evolution by natural selection, one of which he called an 'abominable mystery' in a letter to his close friend, botanist and explorer Dr Joseph Hooker in 1879. He wrote:
The rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery... Nothing is more extraordinary in the history of the Vegetable Kingdom, as it seems to me, than the apparently very sudden or abrupt development of the higher plants. I have sometimes speculated whether there did not exist somewhere during long ages an extremely isolated continent perhaps near the South Pole.
This 'mystery' had been used by Scottish botanist William Carruthers, keeper of botany at the British Museum, to argue for divine intervention in a 1876 lecture to the Geologists Association.
Now researchers Kelsey J. R. P. Byers and H. D. Bradshaw Jr., working at the Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA think they have gone some way to solving this mystery. The press release by the John Innes Centre explains:
This is my second blog post concerning the origins of historic cultural groups, the first being about the Basques of Northeast Spain and Southwest France. This new understanding has been made possible by advances in recovering DNA from ancient sources and techniques for analysing the results. In effect, it is the result of applied evolutionary theory.
The nomadic Scythians were a major force in Eurasia during the first millennium BCE. Their domestication of the horse allowed them to dominate the steppes of Central Asia and spread far and wide. Then they declined and disappeared from history.
Where they came from, how they relate to other Eurasia peoples and why they disappeared has long been a mystery for historians, but now the work of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, by analysing the DNA from the remains they left in their burial mounds is providing some answers. As always, the DNA shows the evolutionary changes and relationships that the Theory of Evolution leads us to expect. As the press release from the Max Planck Institute tells the story:
Generally thought of as fierce horse-warriors, the Scythians were a multitude of Iron Age cultures who ruled the Eurasian steppe, playing a major role in Eurasian history. A new study published in Science Advances analyzes genome-wide data for 111 ancient individuals spanning the Central Asian Steppe from the first millennia BCE and CE. The results reveal new insights into the genetic events associated with the origins, development and decline of the steppe’s legendary Scythians.
Color representation of the mixture and genetic structure in the Basque Country; the green symbolizing the Basques, and the blue and red blends it with the surrounding populations.
Isolated populations can either stay completely isolated and so gradually diverge from other populations of the same species by a combination of natural selection and genetic drift, or they can continue to exchange DNA with other neighbouring groups and so eventually merge and disappear as genetically distinct populations.
This true for all species, whether birds, mammals, reptiles or insects or, as in the case of the Basque people of Northeast Spain and Southwest France, humans.
A study by a mixed team from Spain and France, led by David Comas of the Departament de Ciències de la Salut i de la Vida, Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (CSIC-UPF), Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain has shown how the Basque people have retained genetic continuity with their Iron Age ancestors and have resisted genetic mixing with their neighbours, by a combination of linguistic, cultural and geographical barriers to gene flow.
