If there is one thing that Creationists are good at, it is ignoring the facts that show their dogma to be wrong, so here is yet another research finding for them to ignore.
This time, the research concerns the ubiquitous white clover, Trifolium repens, which is abundant throughout temperate zones of the world to the extent that there can scarcely be a patch of grass anywhere that doesn't have its population of white clover, unless specifically treated with a herbicide.
According to a meta-analysis of several surveys carried out over the past 35 years by researchers from Michigan University's Institute for Social Research, American public opinion has now shifted firmly to a majority acceptance that humans evolved from ancestral pre-hominid ancestors, with a surge in support for evolution in the last decade, even amongst fundamentalist Christians.
However, there is now a marked difference between Republicans and Democrats and between fundamentalist Christians and moderate Christians/non-affiliated on the issue.
According to the Michigan University news release:
The glycan gate opens: Supercomputing-driven simulations depict the glycan N343 (magenta) acting as a molecular crowbar to pry open the SARS-CoV-2 spike’s receptor binding domain, or RBD (cyan), from a “down” to an "up" position.
Credit: Terra Sztain, Surl-Hee Ahn, Lorenzo Casalino (Amaro Lab, UC San Diego).
Scientist from UC San Diego, University of Pittsburgh, University of Texas at Austin, Columbia University and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have discovered how Creationism's beloved malevolence designed the nasty little SARS-CoV-2 virus to sneak past our defences, enter the cells lining our respiratory tract and either kill us, or make us very sick while producing lots of new virus particles with which to infect others.
In this way, it brilliantly produced the coronavirus pandemic currently wrecking economies and killing people by the tens of thousands a day and leaving very many more with long-term health problems. This same malevolence also allegedly designed our inadequate defences to protect us from the parasites, such as this virus, it creates to harm us! <sarcasm>Obviously, such a designer is worthy of our admiration and adoration and provides the role model for our social ethics.</sarcasm>.
According to a large study of over 17,000 women, conducted by University of Washington medical School (UV Medicine), pregnant and lactating women who received the COVID-19 vaccinations, did not experience symptoms any more severe than their non-pregnant counterparts. And what symptoms they had were minor and predictable, such as slight pain at the injection site.
The study was limited largely to healthcare workers because at the time the study was conducted, they were the only women of the right age to have been vaccinated, as healthcare workers were vaccinated early as a high-risk group. The study now needs to be conducted on a more generalised sample to ensure there is not something in this group that is skewing the result. However, this is the second such study to produce these reassuring figures and it's difficult to imagine what about being a healthcare worker could be skewing the results. Nevertheless, that small possibility needs to be eliminated.
A paper published in the journal Immunity a couple of days ago shows what we've pretty much known for several weeks now - that the surge in the δ variant of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus now being seen in America, Europe and elsewhere, is being facilitated by having a large population of, as yet, unvaccinated people to exploit, and not because it can evade the antibodies in those who are fully vaccinated.
This is why the current surge in the USA looks like a deliberate, self-induced genocide of supporters of the GOP and it's covidiot allies in the evangelical Christian churches, the Trumpanzee cult and the victims of the shadowy, pro-Trump QAnon organization behind much of the disinformation and lies in the antivaxxer movement.
Just as we would expect, and as this paper confirms, the δ variant is not able to make much headway in the vaccinated population because it can't evade their antibodies, hence the proportion of new cases coming from the red states and counties in the USA vastly outnumbers those coming from the blue states and counties. At the start of this recent surge, 40% of all new cases were coming from just three red states, Florida, Georgia and Louisiana, all of which have had a low take-up of the vaccines.
It's difficult to feel sorry for people like antivaxxer, evangelical Christian radio host and covidiot, Dr Jimmy DeYoung Sr, who devoted his last year of life to spreading disinformation to discourage his followers from getting the anti-COVID vaccine and who has now died of COVID-19, and Catholic Cardinal Raymond L. Burke, the homophobic right-winger who downplayed the coronavirus and similarly rubbished and lied about the vaccine, who is now fighting for his life on a ventilator, suffering from... you've guessed it!.. COVID-19.
A surf school owner who had been suckered in by the pro-Trump, neo-Nazi QAnon conspiracy theories ended up so paranoid that he killed his children, believing that was the only way to save the world from evil.
According to this report in the Daily Beast, he told FBI agents:
... that he was enlightened by the QAnon and Illuminati conspiracy theories and was receiving visions and signs revealing that his wife...possessed serpent DNA and had passed it onto his children [so he was] saving the world from monsters.
Coleman was arrested when he attempted to re-enter the USA from Mexico, the day after the bodies of his two children, a 3 year-old boy and a 1 year-old girl, were found at a ranch near Rosarito, Baha California, Mexico, to where Coleman had taken them a day earlier without telling his wife where he was taking them. The girl had 17 stab wounds and the boy, 12.
Coleman and his wife, Abby, ran the Lovewater Surfing School at Santa Barbara, California, offering 'surfing therapy' to child victims of sex trafficking.
In a (now deleted) Facebook post last November, Coleman told his followers about his Christian faith, speculating that:
...there is a type of Great American Renaissance following the years of Covid, censorship, and political divisiveness... that will empower each person’s heart to come alive and explode with innovative ideas, new business models, new music sounds and never seen ways to build an amazing community?
Last October, celebrating his daughter's birthday, in a post suffused with the 'coming battle' imagery of QAnon conspiracists, he posted about his 'visions' on Instagram:
While waiting for her to come, I kept feeling this sense that she was going to be born at a very pivotal time in history and that she would represent a dawn, or even awakening, to years of great blessing for our family and nation. Another picture that came to me was of God reaching down into a river bed and picking up a small stone (rock), examining it intently. Just as David had done before slaying Goliath, God examined the stone and was confident that it was just the perfect one for the battle. Although it was small, smooth and somewhat harmless looking, he knew that it would become great when placed into the palm of a skilled hand. My declaration over Roxy Rain is that she has been hand picked by God to slay the giants in the land.
Clearly, Coleman, who appears to have been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, began imagining visions and messages telling him something far more sinister, and more in line with the sort of paranoia being deliberately inculcated into their followers' minds by whoever is behind the QAnon conspiracy theories.
QAnon adherents believe in a myriad of far-right conspiracy theories, including the false belief that a cabal of Satanic pedophiles comprised of global elites, Hollywood actors, and Democratic politicians operate a global child sex-trafficking ring, and that former president Donald Trump was working to bring down the cabal. In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, which led to the election of Democratic nominee Joe Biden, QAnon adherents began spreading disproven election fraud narratives while also contributing to the spread of COVID-19 disinformation and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
The QAnon conspiracy theories have consumed relationships and marriages across the United States, with thousands of people sharing their stories on support groups such as Reddit’s r/QAnonCasualties subreddit. Countless spouses and family members shared stories about their “losing” their loved ones to QAnon. Recently, a student who survived the Parkland shooting in 2018 revealed in the subreddit that QAnon convinced his own father that the tragic shooting was nothing more than a hoax.
Clearly there is nothign the Trumpanzee cult and their allies in white supremacist evangelical Christianity, won't stoop to. No price is too high for them to pay in terms of damage to the mental health of individuals and destruction of families, to try to get the former head of the White House crime syndicate, Donald J Trump, back into the White House in 2024.
Two well-known Talibangelist Christian nut-jobs who have been doing their best to encourage the self-genocide of Trumpanzee evangelical Christians and GOP voters, through false witnessing about COVID-19, were in the news last week.
First off is the habitual liar, Mat Staver, of Liberty Counsel, an extremist conservative Christian, homophobic hate group, who, despite having no medical or other science qualifications and who manifestly knows nothing about how vaccines work, has been feeding his equally ignorant supporters with blatantly made-up disinformation about them. Back in 2019, Staver's Liberty Counsel was campaigning against lynching being made a federal offence because it extended that protection to LGBTQ people. Apparently, this would contravene the civil liberty of extremist Christians to lynch LGBTQ people whenever they felt like doing so.
Now, sounding more like a sex-obsessed paranoid psychotic, he told viewers of his "World Prayer Network" on Facebook, that the vaccines are part of Bill Gates' plan to reduce the world population by up to a billion people. He claimed, without offering the slightest evidence or saying where he got the information from, that this is being achieved by making people sterile and/or sexually dysfunctional. He said:
The world is heading for a severe food shortage as we approach a projected 9 billion people by 2050 (assuming global warming doesn't get us first!). To feed that number of people, farmers need to increase crop yields by some 50%. But there is a major road-block to achieving anything like that productivity from plants, because the entire system, indeed the entire cycle of life on Earth (save for a few chemosynthetic bacteria) is dependent on what must rate as the worst pieces of 'design' in all biology - RuBisCo.
RuBisCo, or to give it its full chemical name, ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase, would be a major embarrassment to intelligent [sic] design advocates if they had the knowledge and intellect to understand it. It is responsible for taking 6 molecules of inorganic carbon dioxide (CO2) and 6 molecules of water (H2O) and, using just the energy in sunlight, making a molecule of glucose (C6H12O6) which is then used as the energy source and as the basic building block for many structural and storage carbohydrates such as cellulose, lignin (wood) starch, glycogen, etc. This forms the very basis of almost all food chains. It also, in the process, makes 6 molecules of oxygen (O2) as a waste product.
Incidentally, note that 'living' (organic) glucose molecules are made out of non-living (inorganic) molecules, and all without the involvement of god magic!
The problem is, RuBisCo is notoriously bad at what it does. Not only is it highly inefficient as catalysing enzymes go, catalysing only about four reactions a second as opposed to the hundreds or thousands of reactions a second for most enzymes, but it finds it hard to tell CO2 from molecular oxygen (O2) which, when RuBisCo tries to 'fix' it, produces a toxic product that stops RuBisCo working and wastes energy.
No wonder Europeans look at America and ask, "What is wrong with these people?"
As though electing a narcissistic moron with the mentality of a spoilt adolescent wasn't stupid enough, they are still being led by the legacy of indifference to the coronavirus pandemic he left them with as a result of his own narcissism and inability to accept that there are people in the world who are more expert at something than he is. In this case, understanding the science behind a lethal viral pandemic as it rips through a population with little or no resistance to it.
I'm talking about Donald Trump and his disastrous 4-year term playing at POTUS from his room, via a Twitter account, of course, like a friendless teenager with nothing but the social media and a following count for self-validation and feeding his sense of self-importance.
The problem was, as leader of one of America's two main political parties in what is effectively a two-party state (or according to some, a one party state with two wings, each vying for dominance), party loyalists has little choice but to follow his lead and minimise the seriousness of the pandemic, or break ranks and face the opprobrium of their voters.
Now they are stuck with that policy and can't afford the political damage a volte-face on the issue would involve, with those Trumpanzee loyalists on the right accusing them of disloyalty and those on the left pointing out how their error had cost thousands of lives needlessly. Caught between a metaphorical rock and a hard place is never a comfortable position for a politician on the make to find him or herself.
The result of all this is of course, now the δ variant is raging through America, that new cases are coming predominantly from the states governed by GOP governors who have actively minimised the pandemic and rubbished the need for social distancing, face masks and vaccinations, and the parts of America where fundamentalist, Trumpanzee Christian churches are still influential and there are votes to be gained from pandering to them.
And all of this is the legacy of Donald Trump's initial knee-jerk response, which was to dismiss what he lacked the intellect to understand and the ability to formulate an effective plan against, to dismiss the scientists and epidemiologists as incompetent or unpatriotic traitors conspiring against him, and then stick to that fatal position at all costs and in the face of all the evidence that he had got it wrong. While Americans died on an unprecedented scale, he and his appointees tried to bully and intimidate the scientists and experts who delivered the facts he didn't like and didn't want people to know. And now GOP governors like DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbot in Texas are repeating Trump's blunder, politically unable to change tack, even going to the lengths of banning measures to mandate wearing of face-masks in the belief that face-masks are a symbol of political opposition to them, just as dopey Donald Trump did.
And now, as was entirely predictable, we have a new variant, the δ variant, that has a ready population of unprotected idiots who not only have not been vaccinated but for whom even taking basic precautions means losing face and probably provoking the ire of their peer group of suckers. Suckers who will see any precautions as signs of disloyalty and being politically suspect, even 'hating Jesus' by not accepting his 'protection' with faith, or even worse, being in league with Democrats and the "cannibalistic, child-trafficking paedophile deep state" that the pro-Trump QAnon, neo-Nazis have invented to scare their credulous victims with.
As a result of this unwitting, although entirely predictable, effective genocide of their own supporters by Trumpanzee cultists, cases in the USA are rising exponentially again, as are hospitalisations and deaths, almost all of unvaccinated people from red states. As Dr. Anthony Fauci, warned viewers of ABC News, things are going to get much worse, unless there is a massive change in the behaviour of GOP voters, evangelical Christians and Trumpanzee cultists. And, as the number of cases rises, so the number of people in whom even more virulent and possibly vaccine-escaping variants evolving increases exponentially and so the probability of that happening at all increases, also exponentially.
Donald Trump's lasting legacy to his own cult-like supporters, in alliance with evangelical Christians and neo-Nazi white supremacists, could be a self-inflicted genocide of those gullible enough to have believed he was a good president and giving a lead worth following instead of the narcissistic, criminally incompetent buffoon who deserved to be sacked and should now face prison. How on Earth can a president who through wilful dereliction of duty and incompetence not only allowed, but is now actively causing, the deaths of tens of thousands of those he was elected to protect, be allowed to get away with it?
It's always fun when Creationist frauds are exposed and their credulous dupes shown to be... well... credulous dupes (to be kind). It's even more delicious when the scientists unwittingly doing it are using those iconic birds, Darwin's finches, or more correctly, Galápagos finches of the genus Camarhynchus.
The story begins back in the 1960s when the parasitic avian vampire fly (Philornis downsi) was accidentally introduced onto one island in the Galápagos group. Females of this species lay their eggs in the nests of certain species of bird and the larvae feed on the blood and tissues of the young. They are especially attracted to the ears and nostrils of the chicks and cause distortions and deformities in those which survive to adulthood. 50-100% of a brood can be lost to an attack. After spending 10 days eating the chicks, the fly larvae then pupate in the base of the nest and emerge as adult 16 days later to begin the cycle again.
As a result of this newly-introduced predation, 10 species of Darwin's finches are now under sever threat of extinction so there is intense selection pressure on the birds to evolve strategies for resisting or avoiding this predation. There is similar selection pressure on the flies to continue their predation by selecting hosts with the lowest ability to avoid predation.
In other words, the introduction of these parasites has created a new host-parasite dynamic and the conditions for evolution to operate under selection pressure, so creating a 'natural' laboratory for studying how evolution works in practice. It also makes it possible to test out predictions made by the TOE. This has been closely monitored and investigated by teams of scientists from Flinders University.
Just when you thought the Vatican financial scandals couldn't get any murkier, we have news that someone is sending Pope Francis death threats, presumably to try to intimidate him into dropping the charges against former cardinal, Angelo Becciu and his shady cronies in the dodgy London property deal and money-laundering operation. Meanwhile the Vatican is degenerating into mutual back-stabbing and finger-pointing.
Readers may recall how Becciu was summarily sacked and stripped of his rank as cardinal last September. He had been replaced by Archbishop Edgar Pena Parra, as sostituto (effectively, Pope Francis' Chief of Staff), in 2018.
The Mafioso-style death threat, in the form of an envelope containing three 9mm bullets and a letter referring to Vatican financial mismanagement, addressed to "Pope Francis — Vatican City — St. Peter’s Square in Rome", was sent from France. According to this report, Vatican police believe they know the person who sent it.
So overwhelmingly are the new cases and deaths from COVID-19 coming from the unvaccinated/GOP-supporting segment of the American people that a self-inflicted genocide is the only realistic way to describe the current situation. The δ variant rages through the red states, infecting young and old alike, if they have been fooled by the right-wing, Talibangelical Trumpanzee and QAnon conspiracy nut jobs into remaining unvaccinated.
And prominent amongst the cheer-leaders in this genocide campaign is fruitloop Christian fundamentalist, Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel, who is using the American paranoia that there is always someone conspiring to 'come and take our freedoms away'. Recently, he told his credulous dupes that the vaccines are "maiming, paralyzing and killing people". In July he compared the vaccination campaign to the inhumane medical experiments carried out in Nazi Germany.
For admirers of Creationism's malevolent designer, the sheer inventiveness of their beloved malevolence must be breath-taking as science discovers more and more of the lengths it has gone to in order to increase the suffering of its creations.
Here, for example, is a parasitic plant, the cowpea witchweed, Striga gesnerioides, which seems carefully designed to maintain the poverty and malnutrition endemic to parts of Africa, as though malaria, sleeping sickness and other exotic diseases, and regular droughts weren't enough. The lengths it has gone to in this endeavour is revealed by a paper from scientists working for the Université de Montpellier, France, the Université Dan Dicko Dankoulodo de Maradi, Maradi, Niger and the Université Paris Diderot, France.
The importance of the cowpea as a crop is explained in the introduction to that open access paper:
The Young Earth Creationist fraud and Christian televangelist, Kent Hovind, or to give him his correct academic title, Mr. Kent Hovind, has been arrested on domestic violence charges, brought by his wife, Cindi Lincoln, who alleges that he 'body-slammed her' causing injuries for which she needed to go to an emergency room. The alleged assault took place in late 2020. She is now seeking a protection order against him to prevent him repeating the attacks.
She also alleges that he sent his 'right hand man' to her apartment to threaten her and had her apartment trashed the next day. She now says she fears he may try to kill her to shut her up because his following depends on his public persona, not on his private behaviour.
Hovind, who styles himself 'Dr Dino', is the owner of a Creationist scam park, Dinosaur Adventure Land, in Conecuh, Alabama, which he opened soon after being released from an nine-year jail term for tax fraud. He makes a living by fooling scientifically illiterate simpletons by pretending to have a legitimate academic doctorate and to have been a high-school science teacher. This works on his target marks who believe anyone called 'doctor' must be an expert scientist.
If ever there was a time for the Catholic Church, under the leadership of Pope Francis, to do some good for the future of mankind and life on Earth it is now, with two major crises currently playing havoc: the coronavirus pandemic and global warming. The latter being perhaps the most serious in the longer term.
And yet we have had very little in the way of encouraging Catholics, let alone the rest of us, to do something constructive about either!
In an article by Thomas Reese in Religion News Service, he simultaneously points out this failure by the Pope and identifies some of the reason for it. The main problem is that the Pope can no longer command the support and mandate the actions of Catholics, under the threat of hellfire and damnation, or even death for heresy for non-compliance, so all he can do is smile and mutter warm words and platitudes in the hope that someone will listen to him.
The problem is not just the lack of any moral authority from the leader of a church whose clerics systematically and routinely abused their positions of trust to sexually predate on children and vulnerable adults, but the fact that when Popes did have those autocratic powers, they almost invariably abused them. Far from supporting scientists like Galileo and Darwin on the basis that the truth is worth defending, they were condemned as heretics because they reported evidence that went against the established doctrines. The test was not "What does the evidence show?" or "What is the truth?", but "What do we need people to believe?".
Reese points out the contrast between when Popes could order Crusades against Muslims and how today the Pope is powerless to order a 'crusade' to save the planet, or to get the world's people vaccinated against the coronavirus:
And rather than organizing crusades against Muslims, as it did in the past, the church could mobilize its people to protect the health of the Earth and humanity. But today, the children’s crusade is led, not by the church, but by Greta Thunberg. Hopefully she will be more successful than the Children’s Crusade of 1212, which ended in disaster.
But of course, by the murderous Medieval crusades, and the Inquisition, the Pope showed how to abuse dictatorial powers, so those powers, post-enlightenment, have been removed.
Again, Reese points out:
There was a time when Christianity had the ability to do great things (some good, some bad).
We marvel at those Christians in the past who dug the foundations of great cathedrals, the completion of which they and their children would never see. The idea of taking on a project, like building a cathedral, that might take centuries to complete is incomprehensible to us.
Indeed, although it is quite difficult to think of many 'great things' that Christianity did. Reese cites the laying of foundations for Cathedrals for their grandchildren by people who would never see the full fruits of their labours, but those were invariably on the instructions of powerful bishops and monarchs, intent on consolidating their grip on the people with an ostentatious display of wealth and power.
It is doubtful that the labourers, or those who paid them, were motivated by a vision of the great architecture, impressive vaulting and stained glass that would follow. Skilled though they may have been, they were likely more motivated by the need to earn their daily bread and feed a family, in the case of the diggers, and their own self-aggrandizement in the case of the financiers, than thoughts of what their grandchildren might eventually see.
In stark contrast, there are the very many bad things that Christianity did, from witch burning, holy wars like the Albigensian Crusade (read, genocide of the Cathars), antisemitic pogroms, the Inquisition, marginalisation of women and minorities, the literal demonization of people suffering with mental health and neurological problems, imperialism and permitting slavery in the nameunder the guise of 'civilising' other peoples and teaching them the 'good news' of the need for salvation and how to achieve it by adopting Christianity, obeying the priests, accepting the autocratic rule of Christian kings and emperors, and knowing their place and staying in it.
Yes, Thomas Reese is right: the Pope could and should use what authority he still has to urge Catholics to do their utmost to save the planet and get on top of the coronavirus pandemic. But he cannot, for the simple reason that he has little or no moral authority left after centuries of abuse of their power by his predecessors, the accumulation of vast treasures of incalculable worth for nothing more important than self-glorification, decades of abuse of children and vulnerable adults by his priests and a long, sorry history of marginalisation, demonization and damnation of minorities, degradation of women, and the promotion of poverty and suffering as a blessing.
He now leads a church visibly struggling to keep up with the advances in humanist ethics now replacing the primitive, Bronze Age superstitions and brutal, misogynistic tribal moral codes that his church still holds sacred, in civilised countries. To paraphrase Stephen Fry's words in the Intelligence Squared debate, the Pope could take that vast wealth stored in the Vatican and use it to send his nuns and priest and monks out into the world with instructions to use it to vaccinate the poor and invest in green technologies and renewable energy.
If he did so, the Catholic Church could be a force for good in the world; but he does not, and it is not.
Despite warnings from the CDC, the self-genocide campaign in the Repugnican-controlled US states is continuing, as they encourage their gullible victims not to get vaccinated and not to wear face-masks, aided in this endeavour by their wack-a-doodle allies in the Evangelical Christian churches and QAnon conspiracy nut jobs.
Having early-on bought into the panicky, knee-jerk response from the acutely narcissistic Donald Trump when, lacking the intellect to grasp the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic, and the prtsonal integrity to admit he was out of his depth, he responded by minimising it, blaming it on 'liberals', pretending to be more expert than the experts, and claiming his do-nothing policy was the best one, resistance to any measures to mitigate the pandemic became, for the extreme right, a token of disloyalty to Trump and the right-wing cause in general.
As the news broke that former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, has been formally charged with sexual offences against minors, a survey revealed that 62% of American Catholics (52% of men and 69% of women) said they had never heard of him.
Given his former high profile as the senior Catholic cleric in America and the high-profile nature of both his crimes and his public laicisation, this shows an astonishing degree of indifference to the scandal of clerical sexual abuse that has engulfed the Catholic Church in recent decades. It suggests that many American Catholics are Catholic in name only, and have no particular affiliation to the Church or identification with what priests, Catholic school teachers, etc, have been doing under its protective and facilitative cover for decades now.
One of the evidence-free claims Creationism is forced into by virtue of dogma, is that modern humans are unique in several ways that sets them apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, as some sort of special creation; namely, sentience and self-awareness, aesthetic appreciation, and a sense of moral obligation.
However, the notion that we alone have self-awareness and are thus the only sentient species has long been discounted by animal behaviourists by demonstrating self-awareness and even complex puzzle-solving behaviour in many other, even non-mammalian, species such as octopuses, bees and several birds. But there has been an on-going debate in anthropology about exactly when aesthetic appreciation (or in lay terms, artistic appreciation and symbolism) first arose in the hominins. Until now, there were precious little evidence that anyone other than modern humans ever used symbolism and colour in any deliberate, representational way.
Now, however, a team of international scientists, including researchers from the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) have shown that red ochre pigments on stalactites in a cave in Andalucia, Spain, were taken there and applied deliberately on multiple occasions, at a time when only Neanderthals were present in Europe. As though, over a period of several thousand years, the site had special significance and needed regular restoration, indicating a long oral tradition lasting for a very long time.
Right: hyper-parasitoid wasp Mesochorus stigmaticus parasitising the larvae of a parasitoid wasp Hyposoter horticola within the caterpillar of Glanville fritillary butterfly. Left: adult Glanville fritillary.
The paper is by scientists from Helsinki University, Finland, and Cornell University, USA, and is an account of the consequences of the introduction of a species of butterfly to a small Finish island of Sottunga (full name Storsottunga) in the Åland Islands, at the mouth of the Gulf of Bothnia, at the North-Eastern end of the Baltic Sea.
What was also inadvertently introduced with the larvae of the Glanville fritillary that were taken to the island, were a couple of parasitic insects and a symbiotic bacteria, so what was created was an experiment on the founder effect and how a species and its symbionts/parasites evolve over time, and how this environmental change affects the evolution of other species in an ecosystem.
Back in 2014 I wrote an article about malignant melanoma, inspired by a holiday on the Côte d'Azur, explaining why people with pale skin are at risk because of poor 'design' creating the need for a balance between getting melanoma and producing enough Vitamin D in the skin to avoid rickets due to Vitamin D deficiency. In Eurasia, where the sun is lower in the sky, meaning it has more atmosphere to travel through, and the weather is more cloudy, than in our ancestral homelands in Africa, pushed this balance towards pale skin and therefore an increased risk of melanomas.
Now, however, judging by the way creationists seem to admire the many examples of malevolence in their beloved, putative intelligent [sic] designer, there may be another reason - mendacity and delight in watching us suffer, if we buy into this childish explanation for a moment...
So, if you've been taken in by the Intelligent Design Hoax and believe that nothing of this sort ever happens without the positive intervention of a magic designer to make it happen, and that this magic designer is an omniscient god, then you must accept that the recent findings of a research group at the Van Andel Institute (VAI), Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA, point to deliberation and not accident - which is excluded by the dogma of omniscience.
Fake miracles are the common currency of several Christian sects; used to fool the gullible into thinking there is a magic man in the sky who can suspend the natural laws at will and who sometimes grants this power to his preachers.
Here, for example is one such fraud, Pastor Nik Walker of Nik Walker Ministries, claiming to have healed a man's 'withered and useless' hand by simply baptising him. He even produces the 'evidence' in the form of x-rays, with a convincing (to anyone who doesn't know how hospitals work) backstory about how the x-rays were obtained.
Get a load of this. The ending is wild.
On his show yesterday, Pastor Perry Stone invited a guest who could PROVE miracles were real (with documentation!)...
Watch the clip. Pay attention to the last 30 seconds.
What we aren't shown however, is the before x-rays, so we have nothing to compare them to. We also don't have the name of the hospital, nor the doctor, so there is no danger of the story being checked out. We just have Pastor Stone's word for it. A word which, as we shall see, is not worth the paper it's written on. In fact, it's a blatant lie.
Also, what we aren't told is that these x-rays are not of the hand of an adult man (as any decent radiographer would have noticed) taken in an American hospital, they are in fact of the hands of four different (Chinese) children, ranging from that of a 7-year-old boy to that of an 11-year-old girl, all suffering from a condition known as Kashin-Beck Disease (KBD). They were collected from various centres in China where the disease is endemic, as part of an effort by Chinese scientists working at the Institute for Kaschin-Beck Disease Control and Prevention, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China, in order to get a better understanding of the disease. They have been plagiarised from a 2018, open access paper in the Nature journal, Scientific Reports in which these scientists published their findings.
In other words, the whole story is a blatant lie, concocted to deceive. There never was a man whose 'withered and useless' hand was miraculously cured by God when he was baptised. Nor was there a doctor in a hospital who was amazed at the change when he x-rayed the man's hand.
(A) Is a radiological image of the right hand with KBD-positive X-ray signs in an 8-year-old boy: some metaphyseal hardening signs, waviness or serration changes and small depressions (red arrows) are found in the zones of provisional metaphyseal calcification in the fingers (including index finger, middle finger and ring finger). (B) Is a radiological image of the right hand of a 7-year-old healthy boy: all metaphyses, epiphyses and diaphyses were glabrate, uniform, sinuous and non-destructive. The carpals were not completely formed. (C) Is a radiological image of the right hand of an 11-year-old girl with CRME in the equal-diameter period: the diameter of metaphysis and epiphysis are almost equal. Although it belongs to the normal development periods before complete closure of metaphysis-epiphysis (CCME), its imaging signs are similar to KBD-positive X-ray signs. Index finger, middle finger, ring finger and little finger show metaphyses serrated, wavy (green arrows). (D) Is a radiological image of the right hand of a 10-year-old girl with CRME in the ultra-diameter period: The diameter of epiphysis is longer than that of metaphysis. It occurs after the equal-diameter period normally and the features are similar to KBD-positive X-ray signs. Some metaphyseal waviness, serration and irregularly depressions are found in many fingers (white arrows).
Walker has chosen to be interviewed by a credulous dupe known for the readiness with which he accepts any old tosh told to him so long as it confirms his bias, or better still, confirms the bias of the credulous audience who donate money to have their biases confirmed in this way. Because he holds the same contempt for his target marks as a con-artist has for his, this is exactly the way Pastor Perry Stone of Perry Stone Ministries expects his target dupes to behave. You can almost hear him laughing all the way to the bank.
In 2020 it was announced that Stone had agreed to 'step aside' from his 'ministry' for an indefinite period because of his 'inappropriate actions' with female employees, although he wasn't required to 'step away' from his lucrative social media activities, such as interviewing blatant frauds like Nik Walker and helping him fleece his target marks.
Last April Stone, apparently unaware, in common with other parochial American fundamentalists, that there is a world outside the USA that is also suffering from the same pandemic (the clue in in the word 'pandemic'), revealed his theocratic ambitions and contempt for the US Constitution, when he announced that the God had told him the coronavirus was sent as 'a moment of reckoning' [for America]:
Because we have by law forced God out of our country and basically told him, ‘In public places, you’re not welcome.’ You’re not welcomed in our schools, so our schools are now shut down. No prayer in public school, no Bible reading in public school. Now, are you with me? They’re telling kids to stay home for who knows how long, so our schools are shut down.
He also told his dupes, gullible audience:
I know what I heard, I did not make that up. I audibly heard the phrase, a male voice speaking, and I believe it was the Holy Spirit.
And his guest, Nick Walker, did not make that up just like he didn't make up the miraculously cured 'withered and useless' hand, no doubt. Between 1999 and 2012 (the last time accounts were filed) Perry Stone Ministries had an income of $17 million.
Yet another sanctimonious evangelical con-artist who feels his piety allows him to self-license a few exemptions from the morals he expects others to live by.
When you show the world you know you need to lie for your faith, you show the world you know your faith is a lie that needs people to believe falsehoods.
It is clear from the testimony of serving Metropolitan Police officers to the Committee of enquiry into the violent insurrection in support of Donald Trump at the Capitol, Washington DC, on 6 January, 2021, that the people attempting the violent coup d’état were not, as the GOP and Trumpanzee cult maintain, assorted BLM/Socialists, but full-blooded Christian Jihadi terrorists. The terrorists were intent on creating a Christian evangelical theocracy in the USA.
Bizarrely, this was to be under the leadership of their idol, Donald Trump, possibly the least competent, most corrupt and most un-Christian US politician ever to hold public high office.
One of the police officer who gave evidence was Daniel Hodges, one of the on-duty officers who were violently attacked by the mob as they forced their way into the Capitol building, seeking to prevent the House from ratifying the EC vote confirming that Joe Biden had won the presidency and Trump had lost. Some were even calling for the seizure and summary execution of leading lawmakers.
During his harrowing testimony, he described being crushed by the mob against the Capital door and a Christian terrorist trying to gouge his eye out with his thumb.
He told the committee:
The sea of people was punctuated throughout by flags. Mostly variations of American flags and Trump flags. There was Gadsden flags. It was clear the terrorists perceived themselves to be Christians. I saw the Christian flag directly to my front, and another had 'Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president.' Another, 'Jesus is king.
To my perpetual confusion, I saw the Thin Blue Line flag, a symbol of support for law enforcement, more than once being carried by the terrorists as they ignored our commands and continued to assault us.
[The] rioters identifying as veterans said they had "fought for this country and were fighting for it again."
Others demanded that law enforcement refrain from attacking them because "'we're not Black Lives Matter,' as if political affiliation is how we determine when to use force."
From that last remark, it is clear that the Talibangelicals were entitled white supremacists who see themselves as privileged; entitled to exemptions from the law not available to non-whites; a law which they see as designed to maintain the social strata with blacks and Hispanics below the whites.
Other officers, such as Harry Dunn, a black officer and Sgt. Aquilino Gonnell (Hispanic), testified how they were subjected to racist abuse. When Dunn revealed that he had voted for Biden, a woman in pink shouted:
Did you hear that, guys? That [N-word] voted for Joe Biden!
And the mob began chanting "Boo! F**ing [N-word]".
Gonnell, who served in Iraq, was told he wasn't an American because of his race.
A screenshot from surveillance footage provided by the FBI shows Casey Cusick (red hat) inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan 6. along with his father Pastor Jim Cusick (white hat).
FBI Handout Photo
Amongst the 591 people so far charged in connection to the attempted coup d’état are an evangelical Christian pastor from Florida and his son. James Cusick is a pastor in the Global Outreach Church, Melbourne, Florida, of which his son, Casey is vice president. They have both been charged with disorderly and violent conduct at the Capitol. The FBI became aware of their involvement when they were named during questioning by a congregant who was also present. This was later confirmed by bodycam footage from the cameras worn by the police and surveillance camera footage.
Pastor James “Jim” Cusick Jr. of the Global Outreach Church of Melbourne, and his minister son, Casey Cusick, face charges of entering a restricted building, disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds and violent entry, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. A third man, Global Outreach church member David Lesperance, also faces charges.
Investigators say they first received a tip via telephone in January, followed by an anonymous letter on March 26, alleging that Lesperance and the Cusicks had traveled from Florida to D.C. and participated in the insurrection after listening to former President Trump speak.
The FBI found surveillance footage of the three men among the mob of Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol during the riots that left five people dead and roughly 140 law enforcement officers injured.
Investigators secured a warrant to search Lesperance’s cellphone and found both historical location data placing him at the Capitol on Jan. 6 as well as photos from his iCloud account that show James and Casey Cusick inside the building, the affidavit states.
It is becoming very clear that the attempted coup d’état was a Christian insurrection in alliance with the neo-fascist, white supremacist right; an attempt by Taliban-style Christian jihadis to take over the US Government. The subsequent lies by the GOP and their white Christian extremist allies, intended to blame the whole thing on BLM activists and Socialist Democrats, and their attempts to obstruct any attempt to reveal the truth of who was behind it, is indicative that they already know the truth but don't want the American people to know, or to know what they were trying to achieve - a Christo-fascist takeover by a white supremacist minority and an abolition of democracy.
Expect even more obstructionism from GOP representatives as the party abandons any pretence of being a democratic party determined to uphold American democracy and preserve the spirit of 1776. The party of the entitled white right is not going to take defeat at the polls with good grace. They feel, like Donald Trump, that they have been unfairly cheated of the power that is theirs by right. Democracy was only ever going to be tolerated so long as it delivered them that power.
For devotees of a supposed intelligent [sic] designer, the COVID-19 pandemic must look like their idol is simply obeying natural laws like an automaton.
For the supposed creator of the Universe, this is an embarrassing comedown - bound by statistical laws and compelled to act as though it has no free will but is just obeying the rules of Darwinian evolution; unable to prevent its design killing its supporters and detractors alike or prevent its supporters dying after attending one of their super-spreader events to gather together to shout and bellow songs of praise to it. And apparently, compelled to come up with modifications which are both predicable and predicted by scientists using scientific laws.
This is perhaps best illustrated by a communication from the University of East Anglia which explains how and why the SARS-CoV-2 virus mutates predictably according to clearly-understood Darwinian mechanisms such as random mutations and non-random natural selection, in a very large population, where highly unlikely mutations can quickly accumulate in the population to become the predominant form, driven by the prevailing environment in which it finds itself:
Relaxing Covid-19 restrictions could pave the way for new vaccine-resistant virus mutations – according to researchers at the University of East Anglia and the Earlham Institute.
A new article published today warns against relaxing Covid-19 restrictions prematurely.
It describes how we are in an ‘arms race’ with the virus and how rising cases could provide opportunities for it to evolve into even more transmissible variants.
The researchers fear that any new variants could be more virulent, more vaccine resistant, and more dangerous for children and vulnerable groups such as transplant patients.
Bishop Peter Libasci, centre, arrives at the Cathedral of St. Joseph for his Installation service as the Tenth Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, USA (2011). A lawsuit is accusing him of sexually abusing an unidentified, then 12- or 13-year-old youth, on numerous occasions in 1983 and 1984.
The latest senior Catholic to face allegations of the sexual abuse of a minor is Peter Libasci, bishop of the New Hampshire Catholic Diocese of Manchester.
A Lawsuit filed in Supreme Court in Suffolk County, New York alleges that he sexually abused a male youth aged 12 or 13 on numerous occasions while serving as a pastor in the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius and the Saints Cyril and Methodius School in Deer Park, New York, in 1983 and 1984. The youth was a student at the school at the time. The church and school are run by the Diocese of Rockville Center.
We worry that allowing the Bishop to remain in ministry may further endanger young lives in New Hampshire. We hope that the Bishop’s Metropolitan or the Vatican intervene to correct this troubling situation immediately.
Statement by Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP)
The lawsuit also names the church and the school as well as the Sisters of St Joseph, which is responsible for organizing activities at the school. Rockville centre is one of a number of New York Catholic dices that have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection because of the large number of abuse allegations which have emerged since New York abolished the statute of limitations, allowing formerly time-lapsed allegations to come to court. This is but one of the more than 200 allegations of sexual abuse that have been filed against this one Catholic diocese since then.
Evidence of the efficacy, and so the good sense of getting vaccinated, of the anti-Covid vaccine is emerging in astonishing statistics from the USA, which is divided on tribal lines on the issue, with 'red' (Republican) states following the disastrous Donald Trump and evangelical Christian lead in minimising the seriousness of the vaccine, eschewing the measures to mitigate the pandemic and now in opposing the vaccines, having much higher infection/hospitalisation/death rates compared to 'blue' (Democrat) states.
According to figures produced by DCD director, Dr Rochelle Walensky during a White House briefing in early July, 99.5% of recent COVID-19 deaths are of people who were unvaccinated!
According to this report, Dr Walensky told journalists:
It's looking as though, annoyed by the success of medical science's vaccines in combatting its latest attempt to kill as many people as possible with its SARS-CoV-2 virus, Creationism's favourite divine malevolence has opted for quantity, now quality has fallen, with its latest modification to its design - the δ-variant.
Scientists led by epidemiologist Jing Lu at the Guangdong Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Guangzhou, China, have shown why the δ-variant has spread so far so fast. The have shown that it has a shorter incubation period so people begin shedding viruses and infecting others more quickly, often before contacts can be traced. Infected people also have a 'viral load' up to 1260 times higher than with the original strain.
They reached these conclusions after tracking 62 people who were quarantined after exposure to COVID-19 and who were some of the first people in mainland China to become infected with the δ strain. They measured the viral load every day through the course of the infection and compared their data to that of 63 patients who were infected with the original strain in 2020.
A genetic tweak that targets RNA can grow crops that yield significantly more food and show increased drought tolerance, announced scientists from the University of Chicago, Peking University and Guizhou University.
One of the pieces of evidence that Creationism's putative god is not the god described in the Christian Bible is that there are so many examples of how it could have done more for mankind if it had wanted to, but did not do so, refuting any claims that it is a maximally good god who created everything for the benefit of its favourite creation - human beings.
I devote the final chapter of The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is Not Good, to some of the many examples of this - from the elephants' resistance to cancers, bats' superior immune system, birds' superior respiratory system, to the superior eyes of birds of prey such as the peregrine falcon, compared to the relatively mediocre eyes of humans. To provide humans with sub-optimal systems and then watch them suffer with an inferior version, is almost as mendacious as the malevolent act of creating parasites to make us sick; it's certainly an act of incompetence which refutes any notion of it being a perfect designer, if indeed, as Creationists like to imagine, it ready did all those things.
On the left, rice plants without the RNA modification. On the right, a rice plant with the RNA modification that boosts yield.
Now here is another example, discovered by scientists from Chicago, Peking and Guizhou Universities. This time it shows how a supposed designer god failed to provide us with more productive food crops, even though this should have been well within the capabilities of an omniscient, omnipotent god.
The scientists have discovered that adding a human gene coding for a protein called FTO, increases the yield of rice and potatoes by 50%, and makes them more drought-tolerant. Two of the major staple food crops for humans worldwide have been yielding only two thirds of what they could have been producing, while resisting total crop failures from droughts, if an omni-benevolent, anthropophilic creator god really had designed them.
Cycads, such as this sago palm, have bulbous, egglike roots that harbor nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Since nitrogen can be a limited nutrient in many terrestrial ecosystems, this gives cycads a competitive advantage over the plants that grow around them.
Somehow, creationist frauds have managed to convince their dupes that new genetic information can only arise if created by a magic man in the sky who can suspend the laws of physics and make the impossible happen, because it is impossible for new information to arise. This is supposedly due to some law of physics which is always poorly defined, but somehow has something to do with thermodynamics and a thing called 'information theory'. 'Thermodynamics' and 'Information theory' are nice, sciencey-sounding words that give Creationist dupes a cosy warm feeling when they use them, because they imagine it makes them sound as though they understand science, just like real scientists.
And there are few things a science-denying Creationist likes more than thinking his/her superstitions have a sound scientific basis.
The facts however, refute this notion, as can be seen with this new study, which shows how new genetic information can arise perfectly naturally, without magic. So using 'thermodynamics' and 'information theory' to argue that science can't explain how new genetic information arises, makes Creationist dupes sound exactly like scientifically illiterate, science-denying idiots and the willing dupes of frauds.
This new study shows how frequent gene duplication and the subsequent evolution of these 'spare' genes was responsible for the evolution of the large and diverse group of plants known as gymnosperms that includes pines, cypresses, sequoias, ginkgos and cycads.
