Chandra X-ray Observatory image of Cassiopeia A,
a 300-year-old supernova remnant.
Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO.
It must be awful being a Creationist these days with so much information available on the Internet and having to be ignored or explained away and with so many new discoveries being made available to a mass audience and having to be avoided. At times it must be a bit like walking about in a rain storm whilst telling yourself there is no such thing as rain.
Take, for example, this article by Maria Cruz which appeared in Science last week. It concerned a paper published in the Journal of Astrophysics by Haenecour et al. (Astrophys. J. 768, L17 (2013)) which reported on the discovery of grains of material that pre-date the formation of the solar system. These grains were part of the molecular cloud out of which the solar system formed and which subsequently became incorporated into solid accretions.
These presolar grains can be identified by their unusual isotopic composition which can only have been formed outside the solar system. The team used sophisticated techniques called 'nano secondary ion mass spectrometry' (NanoSIMS) and 'Auger electron spectroscopy', to identify silica (SiO2)grains in two meteorites. The isotopic composition of the oxygen atoms in the silica suggests that they were formed in the core collapse of an earlier supernova - an exploding star in which heavier elements are formed out of helium by nuclear fusion under intense pressure and heat.
This reaction creates such a violent release of energy that it overcomes gravity and causes the star to explode, creating the nebulae in which new stars form. Unlike the first generation stars which formed out of collapsing molecular clouds of almost pure hydrogen, second and subsequent generation stars form from collapsing clouds which include these heavier elements, the so-called stardust. As the cloud collapses under gravity, the heat and gravity causes the fusion of hydrogen nuclei to form helium to start up. The release of energy causes the heavier elements to be thrown out to form an accretion disk out of which planets form around stable orbital centres. This is how we know that our sun is at least a second-generation star.
The problem for Creationist loons and the professional liars who promote Creationism as an alternative science, is that their preferred fairytale version of the creation of the Universe says that everything was created together in a single day, so there would never have been a presolar time or first and second generation stars. The existence of presolar grains will either have to be ignored altogether, or some other traditional coping strategy will need to be called into play, such as attacking the scientists or dismissing science as 'scientism', in order to handle the painful cognitive dissonance without incorporating this new information into their fairytale.
Reference: Supernova Grains Identified in the Lab, Maria Cruz,
Science 3 May 2013: 340 (6132), 526. [DOI:10.1126/science.340.6132.526-a]
This detailed report on Manuel "Manny" de Dios Agosto, aka @Sacerdotus and many other Twitter aliases, has just been published on Twitter by @Yhwh_TheLord. As regular Twitter Atheists will know, Manuel is a notoriously obsessive stalker, fantasist and abuser who uses Catholicism and an obviously fake piety as the excuse for his abusive posts there as well as on his blog site.
I happen to be his most recent obsession ever since I exposed his ludicrous claims to have scientific proof of the Christian god by simply challenging him to produce it and debate it in a neutral forum, but apparently I'm not the first.
It fully validates everything I had exposed about Manuel and his murky past in blogs here and here.
[Update] Within a few hours of this blog going live, Manuel had taken down most of the sites listed. Fortunately, anticipating Manuel's panic, @Yahweh_TheLord had grabbed and saved screenshots which are linked to at the end of this blog.
[Further update - 31 March 2024] Sadly, the online account where @Yahweh_TheLord placed the screenshots has now expired and Manuel has taken down all the social media posts they relate to. Sceptics might like to speculate about why he would do that if they don't incriminate him.
The Conversion of Saul, Michelangelo Buonarotti Simoni,
Capella Paolina, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican City.
One of the problems Bible apologists face is the frequency with which the Bible was obviously written by people who made crass errors because they were ignorant of so much history and yet needed to set their tales in olden times to give them credibility.
Leaving aside such obviously glaring examples as the Noah's Ark story which was set in an event which simply never took place at all - a global flood a few thousand years ago - and the Tower of Babel story which was set on a flat Earth before there were enough people alive to build such a building if the Flood tale was true, there are plenty of more subtle examples.
I have written about one, identified by Thomas Paine in The Age Of Reason, where Genesis talks of people being "chased unto Dan" - somewhere which wasn't so called until many hundreds of years after the event it purports to describe - See How Dan Destroys The Bible.
Outside near my garden right now is a male Blackbird in a beech tree announcing to the blackbird world, and particularly to any spare females, that this is his territory and he is available. He has been there every day for about two weeks or more singing variations of his repertoire of musical phrases and cadences and competing with the Gold finch's babbling silver trickle of notes and Great tit's piping in the same tree. (A typical Blackbird song on this RSPB site).
European Blackbirds are noted for incorporating musical phrases into their song and extemporising on them. This particular one seems to have a snatch of a song by Robert Burns called Ye Banks and Braes which is ironic really because the phrase it keeps singing is the tune to the lines "Thou'll break my heart, thou warbling bird, That wantons thro' the flowering thorn!"
Ye Banks and Braes
Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon,
How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I sae weary, fu' o' care!
Thou'll break my heart, thou warbling bird,
That wantons thro' the flowering thorn!
Thou minds me o' departed joys,
Departed, never to return.
Aft hae I rov'd by bonnie Doon
To see the rose and woodbine twine;
And ilka bird sang o' its luve,
And fondly sae did I o' mine;
Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose,
Fu' sweet upon its thorny tree!
And my fause luver stole my rose -
But, ah! he left the thorn wi' me.
Robert Burns
Maybe it's just a coincidence and that it my brain's ability to recognise patterns which is working, but what we have here is an example of a meme or ear worm. It's something every successful pop tune writer tries to achieve - a phrase you keep playing over and over in your mind.
This Blackbird has pulled off the neat trick of passing a meme across the species barrier so my mind now keeps singing "Thou'll break my heart, though warbling bird...". A meme is of course a unit of cultural inheritance; in this case a musical phrase which interprets in the context of my British cultural background and my personal development as a song by Burns, complete with the Galawegian Scottish dialect words with phrases like "And I sae weary, fu' o' care!" and "And ilka bird sang o' its luve, And fondly sae did I o' mine; Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose, Fu' sweet upon its thorny tree!"
In the context of the Blackbird's culture of course, that same meme has a totally different meaning understood only truly by another Blackbird.
This is the exact analogy of how genes only have meaning in the context of the environment in which they are expressed and by which the information in them is translated into meanings. This is a point which Creationist pseudo-scientists either don't understand or deliberately obscure when they claim that no new information can arise from mutation (which is nonsensical anyway) when what is important is not the information but what that information means in the context of the environment in which it expresses. Even with no change in information, an environmental change can produce a change in the meaning if that information and so an evolutionary change in the species carrying it.
The importance of the cultural context of memes is also illustrated in a blog I wrote a few days ago about cultural bias in which I presented some common 'proofs' of the existence of the locally popular god and the truth of different holy books with 'proofs' which only work on people with a pre-exiting belief in those gods and holy books. To people from other cultures, the fallacy of those 'proofs' is laughably obvious because it is quite simply devoid of an rational meaning.
It is because the interaction between the genotype and the environment produces the phenotype and the environment selects in favour of fitness to survive in that environment, that species look as though they were made for that environment. They were. They were made by the environment itself.
In an earlier blog I looked at life and showed how, although people use it to mean something else, biologically speaking, 'life' is simply entropy management. Most people use the word life to express some hazy, often muddled, idea including consciousness, thinking, existing or even an idea of a 'soul' as though being alive means you have some magical entity inside you which gives you 'life'.
Religious people even think 'life' is something you get at some stage in your development as an embryo, although they will argue ceaselessly about when this occurs - the moment of conception, at the first 'quickening', at birth. In this respect, as in so many others, the ideas religious people have are almost unchanged from the opinions held by people in the childhood of our species when the world was so poorly understood it must have seemed a magical place.
It has even been claimed that there is something qualitatively different about the chemistry of carbon and the molecules based on it - the so-called organic molecules - as though they obey a different set of physical laws which separates organic 'life' from inorganic 'non-life', so life is what carbon atoms, together with oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur and occasionally other atoms produce.
This muddle and confusion over what exactly life is would be amusing if only Creationists in particular didn't keep challenging people to explain what it is, or to create it, or to say what its purpose is. Challenging one of them to define it first is a sure-fire way to bring the conversation to a shuddering halt, often with an indignant flounce and an insult hurled over the shoulder together with a passive aggressive threat to back it up. But never any coherent definition of 'life' of course.
The Toca da Tira Peia Rockshelter during the 2008 excavations.
The news just keeps getting worse for the frauds at the Discovery Institute.
Today New Scientist brings news of what could turn out to be evidence that humans were living in Brazil 20,000 years ago, some 14,000 years before the Universe was created according to the Christian mythology the Discovery Institute is trying to get illegally insert into US public schools disguised as science.
For those who haven't yet encountered the Discovery Institute and its professional liars, it is the organisation behind the current attempt to con the American people into believing that 'Intelligent Design' is science, despite it being found not to be in the 'Dover Trial'.
The Discovery Institute is using the Wedge Strategy to try to discredit science and replace it with the primitive Bronze-Age origin myth from Genesis, prior to overthrowing the American Constitution and establishing a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. Its power ambitions are not limited to the USA. It is supporting similar subversive activities in other secular countries.
These theocracies would be almost indistinguishable from the form of government established in Afghanistan under the Taliban, complete with a Christian version of Sharia courts and a strict, literal enforcement of the biblical Laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. For more on this see Why Creationists Lie To Us.
Abstract.
When and how did the first human beings settle in the American continent? Numerous data, from archaeological researches as well as from palaeogenetics, anthropological and environmental studies, have led to partially contradictory interpretations in recent years, often because of the lack of a reliable chronological framework. The present study contributes to the establishment of such a framework using luminescence techniques to date a Brazilian archaeological site, the Toca da Tira Peia. It constitutes an exemplary case study: all our observations and measurements tend to prove the good integrity of the site and the anthropological nature of the artifacts and we are confident in the accuracy of the luminescence dating results. All these points underline the importance of the Toca da Tira Peia. The results bring new pieces of evidence of a human presence in the north-east of Brazil as early as 20,000 BC. The Toca da Tira Peia thus contributes to the rewriting of the history of the peopling of the American continent.
Of course, like all scientific claims, this one is not universally accepted. As Marshall says:
For others, it is the tools that are raising eyebrows. "Rock shelters are difficult to interpret," points out John McNabb of the University of Southampton, UK. Stones falling from above can break, making them look like human-made tools. As a result, McNabb calls the evidence "suggestive but unproven".
Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.
The Wedge Document,
Discovery Institute
It has long been accepted that the earliest traces of human habitation in the Americas were of the 'Clovis People' who are known to have entered North America from Siberia about 13,000 years ago. However, evidence have been accumulating for the last 30 years that there was an earlier colonisation by at least 15,000 years ago.
This latest find should probably be regarded as tentatively adding to that evidence, pending corroboration. If true, it would show that modern humans had crossed into North America from Asia and had penetrated down the Panamanian Isthmus and deep into South America much earlier than previously thought. It has long been assumed that they came via the 'Beringia Land Bridge' during a lowering of sea levels during a glaciation period. An earlier migration is certainly not precluded by that theory.
We will also pursue possible legal assistance in response to resistance to the integration of design theory into public school science curricula.
The Wedge Document,
Discovery Institute
But of course, even if 'Clovis' turns out to have been the earliest culture to arise in the Americas, it is devastating for biblical creationism and especially for a notion of a 6,000 year-old Earth and life being reset about 4,000 years ago by a devastating global flood.
The surprising thing is that Christian fundamentalists persist in this denial of the evidence when even one of their favourite founding fathers, regarded as one of their greatest thinkers, St. Augustine of Hippo, inadvertently proved that humans could not all have descended from Noah when trying to argue that people could not live on the other side of Earth:
But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours that is on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the earth is suspended within the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as on the other: hence they say that the part that is beneath must also be inhabited. But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled.
It is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man. [My emphasis]
To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.
The Wedge Document, Governing Goals,
Discovery Institute
Well quite. It's not often that I agree with St. Augustine but one can't argue with that logic. We know there are people living on the far side of Earth and, as St. Augustine points out, they wouldn't have been able to get there in such a short time, ergo there never was a flood and Earth is much older than the Bronze-Age goat-herders thought. St. Augustine's blunder was in making a testable prediction of course - something that the more astute apologists and creationist frauds know they must avoid at all costs incase it is ever tested.
St. Augustine's prediction has been tested and the Bible was promptly falsified, as is so often the case when its claims are compared to reality.
So, all we need now is for the frauds at the Discovery Institute to accept reality and abandon their strategy of trying to fool the American people into giving them unaccountable power to abuse and with which to abuse others. Any bets on that happening any day soon?
Reference:
Christelle Lahaye, Marion Hernandez, Eric Boëda, Gisele D. Felice, Niède Guidon, Sirlei Hoeltz, Antoine Lourdeau, Marina Pagli, Anne-Marie Pessis, Michel Rasse, Sibeli Viana, Human occupation in South America by 20,000 BC: the Toca da Tira Peia site, Piauí, Brazil, Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 40, Issue 6, June 2013, Pages 2840-2847, ISSN 0305-4403, 10.1016/j.jas.2013.02.019.
Confirmation bias is what causes people to say stupid things like, "Everything proves God/Allah". The Cosmological Argument and Teleological Argument depend on confirmation bias in the target audience - something of which religious apologists are only too well aware since they use it all the time.
Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs.
So what's this got to do with religion? You're probably thinking it doesn't apply to you. If you're religious you probably believe you have very good, objective reasons for your beliefs and you see evidence of your god all around you. The strange thing is, and what gives the lie to it being objective evidence, is that people of other religions see the same thing and think it's evidence for their god and their religion.
Well, you might say, we have proofs for our religion that can't be proofs for theirs. The problem is, so do they.
The strange thing is that your 'proofs' don't seem to convince people who don't already share your beliefs and their 'proofs' don't seem to convince you. Take a look at these which I came across researching for an article on miracles.
Any Muslims convinced by these and ready to accept Jesus as their personal saviour yet? Why not? Plenty of Christians are convinced.
How about these?
Have they got any Christians or Jews chanting, "There is no god but God and Mohamed is his Prophet", yet? How come? Millions of Muslims will tell you they are proof of Allah.
Isn't it strange how they only convince people who are already convinced?
You seen now why Atheists don't find any of these 'miraculous' appearances convincing at all? Just like Christians do with the Islamic 'evidence' and just like Muslims do with the 'miraculous' images of Jesus or Mary, we see them for what they are - evidence only of the human ability to see patterns and of the human ability to look for and find 'evidence' which 'confirms' pre-existing beliefs.
The problem with miracles is that no one can prove they happened - which is a bit of a drawback for a church like the Catholic Church which relies so heavily on miracles to impress the 'flock' and keep them in awe and wonder.
The problem is with the definition of a miracle in the first place. Here's what the Catholic Encyclopedia has to say:
(Latin miraculum, from mirari, "to wonder").
In general, a wonderful thing, the word being so used in classical Latin; in a specific sense, the Latin Vulgate designates by miracula wonders of a peculiar kind, expressed more clearly in the Greek text by the terms terata, dynameis, semeia, i.e., wonders performed by supernatural power as signs of some special mission or gift and explicitly ascribed to God...
The wonder of the miracle is due to the fact that its cause is hidden, and an effect is expected other than what actually takes place. Hence, by comparison with the ordinary course of things, the miracle is called extraordinary. In analyzing the difference between the extraordinary character of the miracle and the ordinary course of nature, the Fathers of the Church and theologians employ the terms above, contrary to, and outside nature. These terms express the manner in which the miracle is extraordinary.
A miracle is said to be above nature when the effect produced is above the native powers and forces in creatures of which the known laws of nature are the expression, as raising a dead man to life, e.g., Lazarus (John 11), the widow's son (1 Kings 17). A miracle is said to be outside, or beside, nature when natural forces may have the power to produce the effect, at least in part, but could not of themselves alone have produced it in the way it was actually brought about. Thus the effect in abundance far exceeds the power of natural forces, or it takes place instantaneously without the means or processes which nature employs. In illustration we have the multiplication of loaves by Jesus (John 6), the changing of water into wine at Cana (John 2) — for the moisture of the air by natural and artificial processes is changed into wine — or the sudden healing of a large extent of diseased tissue by a draught of water. A miracle is said to be contrary to nature when the effect produced is contrary to the natural course of things.
The term miracle here implies the direct opposition of the effect actually produced to the natural causes at work, and its imperfect understanding has given rise to much confusion in modern thought. Thus Spinoza calls a miracle a violation of the order of nature (proeverti, "Tract. Theol. Polit.", vi). Hume says it is a "violation" or an "infraction", and many writers — e.g., Martensen, Hodge, Baden-Powell, Theodore Parker — use the term for miracles as a whole. But every miracle is not of necessity contrary to nature, for there are miracles above or outside nature.
A cynic might think that the last sentence above is deliberately confused and designed to give the appearance of refuting Spinoza and Hume whilst not redefining a miracle to bring it within the realm of nature, and thus not miraculous. Both Spinoza and Hume had pointed out essentially the same thing - that miracles are, by definition, unnatural or 'super-natural' and are thus a violation of natural laws. To argue that a 'miracle' which is 'above or outside nature' is not contrary to nature is absurd if one accepts the normal definition of 'nature' as everything about the material Universe.
na·ture
n.
1. The material world and its phenomena.
2. The forces and processes that produce and control all the phenomena of the material world: the laws of nature.
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the cosmic.
So there can be little doubt, despite what the Catholic Encyclopedia tries to imply, that miracles, at least as they are defined and understood by those who promote them and those who believe in them, are things which have no natural explanation or, in Spinoza's and Hume's words, violate natural law. In fact, Spinoza goes further and says natural laws cannot be violated, so even if miracles appear to be unnatural, this is simply due to the ignorance of the observer. Miracles are simply natural events for which we don't yet have a natural explanation.
And this is where the problem begins.
We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.
Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions
Because there can be no natural explanation there can be no evidence other than someone else's word for it that a given miracle actually happened. Additionally, because miracles are unnatural the likelihood of them occurring spontaneously is zero - otherwise they could have a natural explanation. Even if we are charitable and allow that they are not actually impossible (how can something that happened be impossible?) but are just so highly unlikely that a natural cause can be excluded, or at least given a lower probability that a supernatural or 'divine' intervention, we are left with a highly unlikely event.
We are, in effect, being required to take someone's word for it that a highly unlikely, even impossible, event actually happened, without them supplying any evidence. Why on Earth would any rational person do that?
How many people would you believe if they told you, without the slightest scrap of evidence, that, for example, they had just seen the Virgin Mary appear out of thin air in Central Park, New York, or a man fly to Heaven and back on a winged horse from Hyde Park, London? How about if they claimed to have just witnessed a man satisfy the hunger of thousands of people with a few loaves of bread in Montreal, Canada?
What other explanations would you consider first? Which other perfectly natural causes could there be for that person telling you such a thing? Note: 'because it's true' is only one possibility amongst many. Why would you consider explanations other then it being true more satisfactory or more believable than that they were telling you the truth?
And would you really believe them without wanting to see just a little evidence? I suggest that you wouldn't believe a word of it. And yet when religious people read about, or are told about, miracles, they believe what they are told, yet nowhere in all that was there ever more than one person telling another something that you would never have believed had they told you first hand. The story has been given a spurious gloss of credibility by being repeated by authority figures - authority figures who had no more basis for belief that you did.
This is how the church uses its 'authority' to persuade people to believe the unbelievable. Believing everything the church teaches by faith simply means the church has not yet found your lower limit of credulity.
As John W Loftus points out, Christians have a double burden of proof when it comes to proving miracles.
On the one hand, they must show that a particular "event" was not very likely...
On the other hand, Christians must show that the purported miraculous event happened. And yet, everything they say to establish the first burden of proof takes away the strength of the second burden of proof. That is, the more they argue that an event was miraculous, the less likely such an event occurred. But the more they argue that an event was likely to have occurred, then the less likely that event can be understood as miraculous.
The only way people judge whether or not a miracle occurred is whether or not it fits within their control beliefs (i.e., which God he believes in and was taught to believe). One cannot start with the evidence for a miracle to show that the Christian God exists, simply because a person must already believe it’s plausible for the Christian God to exist in the first place (unless it’s a case of accepting what someone says because that person is believable). Otherwise, the evidence isn’t evidence for anything, much like how the evidence in a criminal trial isn't evidence of anything since the prosecutor and defense attorney will have two different ways of seeing that evidence based in separate control beliefs. And yet, how is it possible to believe in the Christian God in the first place without the cold hard evidence that will lead him to believe? The explanation of a self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit doesn’t solve anything.
So here is a simple challenge for any Christian. Take any miracle you wish and which you believe, and explain why a non-believer should believe it really happened and that the cause could only have been the Christian god. After all, if you believe in said miracle, that must be what you believe, so all you need do is explain the rational basis for your belief. It is not enough to say that someone else believes it.
What could be easier than that?
If you can't, you might like to consider exactly why you believe it yourself.
A lovely example of the very recent evolution of an entirely new plant species has been discovered in North Wales. I'm grateful to @Kaimitai on Twitter for bringing it to my attention.
The new species, Senecio cambrensis, also known as Welsh groundsel or Welsh ragwort, arose as a fertile allopolyploid hybrid between S. vulgaris or common groundsel, and S. squalidus or Oxford ragwort. Hybrids of these two species are the fairly common but sterile S. x baxteri (in taxonomic nomenclature 'x' indicates a hybrid) which is thought to have been the actual ancestor of S. cambrensis. Sometime in the early 20th century an accidental doubling of the chromosome number led to a fertile plant - the Welsh groundsel.
Left: Senecio vulgaris. Right: Senecio squalidus.
The new species can only reproduce with other members of its own species making it indisputably a new species - contrary to the claim made by Creationist pseudo-scientists that evolution cannot give rise to new species.
It was discovered in 1948 by Horace E. Green growing at Ffrith, Flintshire, Wales and was first systematically described in 1955 by Effie M. Rosser of Manchester Museum. In 1982 S. cambrensis was discovered growing in several sites near Edinburgh, Scotland. This population is believed to have arisen independently of the North Walian population in about 1974 but had disappeared by 1993. It has been reported, probably mistakenly, in Shropshire, England and more reliably at Wolverhampton, England. The Wolverhampton population now also seems to have disappeared.
One of the original parent species, S. squalidus or Oxford ragwort is an alien species in Britain having been introduced from Sicily in the 18th century. It's own history in the UK is an interesting example of how environmental change can bring about evolutionary change:
This Senecio [S. squalidus] was introduced into Britain via Francisco Cupani and William Sherard in the years of their visit 1700, 1701 and 1702 from Sicily where it lives as a native on volcanic ash to the Duchess of Beaufort's garden at Badminton. Later a transfer of the genetic material to the Oxford Botanic Garden by the "Horti Praefectus" (the title still given to the head gardener at the Oxford Botanic Garden) Jacob Bobart the Younger before his death in 1719 (which is also the same year that Bobart retired as Horti Praefectus and perhaps a good indication of when this species of ragwort and other invasive species might have "escaped" and started to make their home in the greater British Isles). The Sicilian ragwort escaped into the wild and grew in the stonework of Oxford colleges (with the specific mention of the Bodleian Library) and many of the stone walls around the city of Oxford. This gave the plant its common name, "Oxford Ragwort".
The vortex of air following the express train carries the fruits in its wake. I have seen them enter a railway-carriage window near Oxford and remain suspended in the air in the compartment until they found an exit at Tilehurst [near Reading, Berkshire, some 20 miles south-east of Oxford].
George Druce, 1927
Carolus Linnaeus first described Senecio squalidus in 1753, although there is a dispute as to whether the material came from the Botanic Garden or from walls in the city; the taxonomy for this species is further complicated by the existence of species with a similar morphology in continental Europe.
James Edward Smith officially identified the escaped Oxford ragwort with its formal name Senecio squalidus in 1800.
During the Industrial Revolution, Oxford became connected to the railway system and the plant gained a new habitat in the railway lines clinker beds, gradually spreading via the railway to other parts of the country. The process was accelerated by the movement of the trains and the limestone ballast that provides a well-drained medium which is an adequate replica of the lava-soils of its native home in Sicily.
So, from an escaped botanical specimen in Oxford, Oxford ragwort has spread throughout the UK assisted by human agency and facilitated by the Industrial Revolution - a process which is continuing today with other species with wind-distributed seeds by being blown along motorways and highways in the direction of traffic. It is now a widespread and common species and is something of a pest in the New Forest where regular eradication campaigns are conducted because it is thought to be harmful to the horses which roam freely in the forest.[However, see Update below]
There we have not only another example of recent speciation by hybridization, so disconcerting to Creationists, but a nice example of how environmental change can facilitate and drive evolution. Who would be a Creationist pseudo-scientist having to hope his credulous target market remains ignorant of this sort of information, especially when they have the Internet to contend with? What a way to earn a living!
No wonder religious superstition is declining so rapidly these days and is becoming more and more the province of the ignorant and scientifically illiterate upon whom Creationist cheats and con artists prey.
[Update 3 may 2013]
I am indebted to fellow blogger mabymynydd who has pointed out that it is the native Common Ragwort (Senecio jacobaea), not the Oxford Ragwort (S. squalidus) which is considered by some to be a pest in the New Forest, though the danger to horses is disputed. See comment below.
The recent Twitter spat between two people whom I admire has prompted me to look again at faith and what it can lead to. They are the (normally) left-leaning political journalist with a mercurial mind, rapier wit and impeccable logic, Mehdi Hassan, who is also a Muslim, and the evolutionary biologist, author, Humanist and Atheist, Richard Dawkins.
The spat began when Dawkins, who had previously been told by Hassan in a public debate, that he believed Mohammad had literally flown to Heaven on a flying horse, just as the Qur'an says, and Dawkins, perhaps rather abrasively (which is too easy with only 140 characters) seemed to question how he could hold such illogical views and still be considered an objective journalist.
If I'm honest and say I hate you people won't think I'm a kind, caring person. Tweet
I want you to think I have some power over you that you can't do anything about. Tweet
I like to think I have some power over you that you can't do anything about. Tweet
I like to think I have an invisible friend who hurts those who won't agree with me about everything. Tweet
I can't be bothered to learn stuff but I want people to think I'm better than you in some way. Tweet
I want you to feel guilty about beating me in an argument with facts I didn't like, because I should be allowed to win every time even though I can't be bothered to learn stuff. Tweet
You won't agree with me so I'll try threatening you with my really powerful imaginary friend. Tweet
I want people to think I'm religious because I'm hoping to get away with people thinking I'm someone they can trust. Tweet
I can't counter your argument so I want to threaten you whilst making other people think I'm your moral superior. Tweet
I want my friends to be impressed by me and admire my smugly self-satisfied piety. Tweet
I want people to think I'm so special I have a close personal relationship with the Creator of the Universe who makes my wishes come true. Tweet
It costs me nothing and is much easier than doing something practical to help. Tweet
Pretending to be other people' moral superior makes me feel good about myself. Tweet
If there really is a god I'm hoping to impress it with my piety, so I show it off at every opportunity. Tweet
What use is religion if you can't use it as a weapon when you need to? Tweet
What use is religion if you can't use it to try to elevate yourself above other people? Tweet
I'd really like to hurt you physically but I can only use words and make-believe in this medium and I'm a coward anyway. Tweet
Just like a rapist, I want to have power over you without any responsibility because I'm inadequate. Tweet
Isn't it great the way religion can be used against other people in so many different ways? Has mankind ever devised any better source of excuses for the morally bankrupt than religion? Tweet
You have to hand it to the Intelligent Designer. Just look at the way it came up with the idea of gallstones. Whatever would we do without them?
A gallstone is a crystalline concretion formed within the gallbladder by accretion of bile components. These calculi are formed in the gallbladder but may distally pass into other parts of the biliary tract such as the cystic duct, common bile duct, pancreatic duct, or the ampulla of Vater. Rarely, in cases of severe inflammation, gallstones may erode through the gallbladder into adherent bowel potentially causing an obstruction termed gallstone ileus.
Presence of gallstones in the gallbladder may lead to acute cholecystitis, an inflammatory condition characterized by retention of bile in the gallbladder and often secondary infection by intestinal microorganisms, predominantly Escherichia coli and Bacteroides species. Presence of gallstones in other parts of the biliary tract can cause obstruction of the bile ducts, which can lead to serious conditions such as ascending cholangitis or pancreatitis. Either of these two conditions can be life-threatening and are therefore considered to be medical emergencies.
The archetypal sufferer from gallstones has the five 'f's:
Female.
Fertile.
Fair.
Fat.
Forty.
Fair referring to skin colour.
However, many exceptions are found and gallstones are not uncommon in men, postmenopausal and thin women and non-Europeans although less so than in Europeans. They are very rare in young people.
The problem starts because body fluids with a high concentration of anything and especially salts, lend themselves to the formation of stones by simple chemical processes. Unfortunately, many of these fluids are collected in temporary stores such as, in the case of gallstones, the gallbladder. Stones may also form in places like the kidneys where they can obstruct the outflow of urine, causing kidney damage or be passed down the ureter to the bladder causing excruciating pain and sometimes accumulating there to obstruct urination, or salivary glands causing the flow of saliva to be obstructed and the face and neck to swell up as saliva accumulates.
The function of the gallbladder is to store bile until food is present in the small intestine. It then contracts squirting bile down the bile duct into the small intestine where it plays a role in digestion of fats. Bile is actually a waste product produced by the liver from dead red blood cells, or rather from the haem part of haemoglobin from which most of the iron has been removed and recycled. When the bile duct is obstructed bile is retained by the liver and passes into the blood where it causes jaundice and shows up in the urine which resembles freshly brewed tea or black coffee. If not treated, this can cause renal failure.
The problem is compounded by the fact that, for no apparent good reason, the bile duct joins with the duct from the pancreas to form the hepato-pancreatic duct before it joins with the small intestine at the 'ampula of Vater', so any obstruction in the hepato-pancreatic duct also obstructs the pancreatic duct. As well as controlling blood sugar levels with insulin, the pancreas also produces enzymes for digesting proteins so any obstruction or damage to the pancreas can also cause it to begin to digest and eventually destroy itself. Infections in the bile duct can also spread to the pancreas causing acute inflammation of the pancreas or pancreatitis which is fatal in about 25% of sufferers (though not all these are caused by gallstones).
It would be a particularly nasty and vicious intelligent designer who came up with this example of bad design which, in the time before anaesthetic surgery and before modern medicine would have been a common cause of death, especially of females in midlife and still is in people without access to health care. There is no purpose to gallstones; there is no purpose to them predisposing to infection by normally benign intestinal bacteria; there is no benefit from the pancreatic duct uniting with the bile duct and so making it easy for the pancreas to become involved with gallstones and any infection they may allow. Unless, of course, the purpose was to cause illness and death.
The entire system is a kludge; an "it'll do" solution which has its origins somewhere in evolution and particularly in embryology, and so we are stuck with it.
To understand why evolution, which we would expect to eliminate these kludges and lead to perfection of 'design', has not eliminated gallstones or 're-designed' the hepato-pancreatic duct we need to look at the common predisposing factors above. The reason is the same reason we have not eliminated cancer and degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, motor-neurone disease and Parkinsonism. There is little or no benefit to the genes from any mutations which would bring about these changes because they only present as problems after we have produced our offspring.
If there is no benefit to the genes there can be no evolution other than random genetic drift. The link to fair skin, which, in evolutionary terms provided some benefit particularly in a cloudy, relatively sunless north west Europe, suggests some linkage between changes in melanin (the dark pigment) production in the skin and gallstone formation, so they may simply be an unfortunate by-product of an otherwise beneficial mutation in the context of an environment with a lot of clouds. And that evolutionary change expresses before we produce offspring by reducing the incidence of rickets in growing children.
What benefit there might be to the genes in having mothers live long enough to be grandmothers, and so helping to raise the next generation carrying her genes is much less obvious than it would be if they affected her reproductive success directly, since her grandchildren are only one quarter her on average, but never-the-less we should expect to see some evolutionary change towards eliminating the formation of gallstones and/or reducing their potential seriousness over time even for that small advantage. But then we only evolved fair skin relatively recently so there will not have been time yet for this effect to be noticeable. Gallstones are probably part of the cost of evolving fair skin in a cloudy environment and we will still need to bear that cost for many years, possibly hundreds of thousands yet.
As an example of intelligent design and especially the design of an omni-benevolent designer, gallstones fail badly. Any designer who came up with this idea is neither intelligent nor benevolent. As an example of the mindless, undirected and amoral process of evolution, gallstones are readily understandable.
Sorry, Discovery Institute and your willing stooges who push fundamental Bible literalism disguised as science with 'Intelligent Design'. You have very many of these examples to explain. Ignoring them and relying on the ignorance of your credulous victims won't work with rational people.
If you're anywhere in Europe, and very many states in North America if not now then certainly very soon, you'll be able to look out of your window, or in any public garden or park and see an example of very recent evolution in the form of the Eurasian Collared DoveStreptopelia decaocto decaocto.
I still remember seeing my first one in Woodstock, Oxfordshire when on my way home from working in Oxford. This must have been in about 1964. One of the technicians in our laboratory was also a keen naturalist and had told me excitedly only a few days earlier that he had seen a pair in Charlton-on-Otmoor.
If you're a Creationists you'll know already that the Intelligent Designer created the entire Universe and everything in it just for us, and especially for you.
If you're a Christian you'll know it did it exactly as the Christian Bible says the Christian god did. You'll also know that you must never say that the Intelligent Designer is the Christian god because that would make it harder to get fundamentalist Christianity taught in American public schools, and schools in other secular countries, as though it is a real science, and not a religion, which would be illegal. You'll already understand though that the Intelligent Designer is completely indistinguishable from the 'one true' god in the Christian Bible, so it must be all the omnis, including omni-benevolent, and never does anything which isn't done because it loves you... and everyone else, obviously.
If you're a Muslim you'll know the Intelligent Designer is call Allah and created everything exactly the way Muhammad said it did in the Qur'an especially for humans and in particular for you personally, because it wants you to love and worship it.
So this is a heart-warming story of how the one true Intelligent Designer designed a little creature which those mad atheistic scientists call Dicrocoelium dendriticum or the lancet fluke because it is shaped a bit like a medical lancet which used to be used for cutting into veins to let some unwanted blood out.
Dicrocoelium dendriticum is a member of a group of flatworms called trematodes. Scientists call flatworms Platyhelminths, which means - you've guessed it - flat worms. Why do they bother making up all these big words, eh?
The Intelligent Designer designed this particular flatworm, like a lot of other flatworms, which of course it also designed, to live inside the bodies of other animals as parasites. Parasites don't need to bother with looking for food, avoiding predators and things like that because the animals they live in do that for them. Isn't that a brilliant idea, if you're a flatworm?
The Intelligent Designer designed this particular parasite to live in the biliary ducts of animals like sheep and cows and sometimes even humans. The biliary ducts are the tubes which take bile from the liver to the intestines where it is used to help with digestion of fats.
But that idea gave the Intelligent Designer a problem because, when the flatworms want to breed, they lay eggs which end up in the gut of their host and eventually outside the hosts body altogether, along with other waste. But they need to be back inside the host, which is where they were designed to live. How to get them there?
This is where the Intelligent Designer came up with a typically brilliant idea. It got snails to eat the faeces of the animals, together with the parasite's eggs, which hatch out inside the snail. But then it realised that the host animals like sheep and cows don't eat snails, so it had another brilliant idea. It came up with a design to get them back out of the snails again. It made it so the snails don't like the baby flatworms inside their bodies so they surround them with a hard case and get rid of them as cysts containing several baby flatworms in the slime they use to make their slime trails.
But then the Intelligent Designer realised its plan had hit another snag, apart from the baby parasites being still outside their hosts: cows and sheep don't normally eat snail slime, just like they don't normally eat snails and if they waited till the slime had dried up the baby flatworms would dry up to and die.
Here is where brilliant idea number three comes in. The Intelligent Designer noticed that ants eat snail slime because they want the moisture in it, so he made it so they also eat the cysts the snails excrete with the baby flatworms in them.
But there was another problem! Cows and sheep don't eat ants either! So it was still stuck for a way to get the baby flatworms into the sheep and cows. It now had them inside ants instead, having tried with getting them into snails and having to think up a way to get them out again.
Now came the most brilliant trick of all. It had to think of a way to get the ants eaten by cows and sheep and what do cows and sheep eat a lot of? Grass of course. But there was never going to be a way to get grass to eat baby worms.
Here is where the Intelligent Designer pulled out all the stops and really got creative. It noticed that every cyst contained lots of baby flatworms so it made one of them go to the ant's nerve centre and take control of it so it behaves in a very odd way for an ant. Normally, when it gets dark and cold, ants go back into the ant nest for the night and come back out when the sun rises. Ants who have been taken over by baby lancet flukes don't go back to the nest. Instead, they climb up a blade of grass, grip the stem tightly with their jaws so they won't be knocked off, and wait for a passing cow or sheep to eat the blade of grass, and them with it.
Voilá! The baby flatworms are back where they started - inside the cows and sheep, and occasional humans who might accidentally eat a contaminated ant and who can then become very ill. The cows and sheep can also become very ill and the quantity of meat and milk they provide for humans is reduced, and we have to be careful to cook the meat from them in case we get these parasites into our bodies.
So, how did that benefit us, which is what the Intelligent Designer wanted to do? The answer is, no body knows. Lancet flukes don't seem to do anything at all for us and can even be a problem. One theory is that the Intelligent Designer sometimes stops making everything for us and sometimes makes the world look like it was all designed for parasitic worms, or viruses, or bacteria, or grass, or tsetse flies, or any one of a million other creatures. Obviously when it designed the lancet fluke the Intelligent Designer was having a day when it hated things like snails and especially ants and wasn't thinking of cows and sheep or even us at all.
Another thing no body knows is why an Intelligent Designer would design things like these parasitic worms with such a complicated life cycle when it could have just designed them to lay eggs which hatch out where they live and not need three different hosts and several different stages before the adults get back to where their parent came from. It must be hard for people who believe in an Intelligent Designer to explain why it often acts like a really stupid one, which is probably why they normally ignore things like that.
Some mad scientists even think the Universe looks just like it wasn't designed for anything in particular and that all the different creatures have just fitted in. They even say it wasn't designed at all just because it doesn't look like it was!
But Creationists could easily prove the Intelligent Designer designed everything just for us - if only they could think of why it designed parasites like the lancet fluke, and million of other things that either don't do anything for us or even cause us a lot of harm in apparently random ways. And if only they could prove it was designed at all and could explain why it looks just the way it would if it wasn't designed and there was no intelligence or plan.
Is it the act of a rational person to believe the stories in the Bible or the Qur'an, or any other holy book? All you have is someone else's word for it that the events described actually happened yet you are expected to believe without question. Why is that rational just because these events were alleged to have happened a long time ago and a lot of people have believed them without question in the meantime?
Their belief didn't make the accounts come true, and they certainly didn't witness them. In effect, you are believing something highly unlikely simply because someone else did.
Why don't you do that with things you hear about today?
Try this little exercise for yourself:
Take any story you like from your holy book - stories about what the prophets did or said, or about what different tribes of people are said to have done, or stories about what a god allegedly said to someone - preferably stories which form the foundation of your faith but not necessarily so.
Now, imagine someone passing along your street told you that this event was happening right now, or had just happened, a mile down the road. Would it make any difference if this person wrote it down? Would you believe them or would you think they were deluded, mistaken or lying to you for some reason and probably selling you something?
I suggest that only the most gullible and credulous of people or the insane would believe these stories without at least asking to see the evidence, if they were reported as happening today.
Yet the people who wrote those stories down in the Bible or the Qur'an or other holy books either believed people who told them they had happened or expected other people to believe them without any available evidence. And that's exactly what you've done, if you believe those stories are actually true.
How is that different to believing the person walking along your street? More to the point, where does it leave your faith if you have no rational basis for believing the stories in your holy book?
Try the little exercise above and let me know which stories you would believe and what would convince you to take the word of a complete stranger that these extraordinary events were taking place just down the road today, without needing any evidence.
Sad that Picasso's Child With a Dove is to leave the UK, but what is even sadder is that this pivotal painting in Picasso's development and such an iconic painting has been bought by a private collector, which means it could disappear from public view to spend many years languishing in a bank vault.
Child With a Dove was one of the first paintings to fire my imagination and interest in art when, as child of about nine, we had a poster of it at my primary school in about 1955. We had to try to copy it. I believe it was an attempt as art education. My painting was singled out for special praise because the head mistress thought I have done the hands very nicely, which I felt a bit of a fraud about because I found that to be the hardest part to copy.
But what I saw in the painting was something which has stayed with me. I saw a child lovingly holding peace close to his/her breast (the child is actually, and I think deliberately androgynous) and treasuring it above all else, as symbolised by the forgotten toy ball on the ground. I saw it as anti-war and a tribute to the innocence of childhood.
The slaughter of World War II was then still fresh in many people's minds, including my father's who survived Dunkirk. The poor physical and mental wrecks of World War I still hobbled about on crippled feet from the trenches of Normandy, some with crippled lungs from gas and crippled minds from the horrors they endured as young men when those who could endure it no longer had summary execution for cowardice to look forward to. I remember too well when the new names from World War II were added to the war memorials which sprang up only a generation earlier in every town, village and hamlet. Child With a Dove told us we needed to hold onto our childish idealism if our generation was not to repeat the mistakes of earlier ones. Nothing is more precious than peace. Peace needs to be held gently but firmly, kept close and loved above all else. If we care more for peace than we care for toys we can make a better world.
I think Child With a Dove also influenced my political development.
Picasso was just 19 years old when he painted Child With a Dove in Paris in 1901. It represents a transition from his Impressionist style to his 'blue period' when he was probably in a sombre and reflective, even depressed mood following the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. His blue period is characterised with experimental paintings in a Post-Impressionist but still highly figurative style depicting 'the human condition'. Child With a Dove may represent Picasso's own farewell to the naive innocence of an Andalusia childhood. The child is distinctly Andalusian in appearance. Many Andalucian people can trace a North African Berber ancestry from a time when 'al-Andalus' was the Arabic name for Spain and Andalusia was a collection of Islamic Emirates.
Pablo Picasso never seems to have forgotten that childhood love of peace and was an inveterate peace-monger, depicting as he did the horrors of war with Guernica, and later on returning to the dove motif when he designed the poster for the 1949 Paris Peace Congresss. He named his fourth child, born the day before the 1949 Peace Congress, Paloma (Dove).
Addressing the 1950 Peace Congress in Sheffield, England Picasso said, "I stand for life against death; for peace against war". Almost fifty years earlier he had said that with Child With a Dove. I hope future generation get to see it too.
