Consciously Evicting God From Another Gap

Consciousness on-off switch discovered deep in brain - life - 02 July 2014 - New Scientist

One of the favourite arguments used by religious apologists is that somehow materialism can't explain conscious thought and that a 'random' [sic] process like evolution could only ever give rise to random thoughts and not rational arguments.

Of course, this argument is never revised to accommodate developments in science and in our understanding of neurophysiology and the microscopic structure of neurons, so it is identical in form whether used by C.S.Lewis, William Lane Craig or Ken Ham even though our understanding of the science has been transformed immeasurably in the intervening half century.

But then we need to remember that religious apologists are not seeking to make converts but to keep believers believing and thus to ensure their income stream is maintained and the arrogant claims they make to

Green River Exposes Layers of Creationist Lies

Green River Formation varves

One of my favourite creationist pseudo-scientists must be the psychologist with no qualifications in science or record of research in the subject, Dr. Paul D. Ackerman, who supplements his income from teaching psychology as an assistant professor at a minor university by writing bad science books and articles for creationists who also seem to have little knowledge or understanding of science. He ranks as one of my favourites becaiue he is so bad at it.

He is the notorious author of what must rank as one of the worst 'science' books for creationists ever published (it now has to be given away by the Institute for Creation Research) called It's A Young World After All: Exciting Evidence For Recent Creation. I've already dealt comprehensively with this book in a series of blogs so I won't dwell any more on it here, save to quote Dr Ackerman on what is one of the few nearly true things he said in his book:

Still Not Yeti!

Genetic analysis of hair samples attributed to yeti, bigfoot and other anomalous primates

Last October I reported on a tentative claim by geneticist Bryan Sykes of the Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project that he might have solved the Yeti question, only the Yeti is a descendant of a Paleolithic bear known from a single jawbone from northern Norway. This bear is believed to be ancestral to both the polar bear and the brown bear. His claim was based on a comparison of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from samples of hair claimed to have come from Yetis with those of known species held on the GenBank database, an international database of genetic information.

mtDNA is inherited in mammals from the female line only and, because it doesn't recombine during sexual reproduction, tends to be stable over time, mutating at a more or less constant rate. It thus makes an excellent means of tracing female line populations and evolutionary relationships. The biological significance of this find was not so much that it might have solved the Yeti question but that it might have revealed a living population of this Ice-Age bear in the Himalayas, where it might have taken refuge as the ice retreated.

Now Bryan Sykes has reported on a much more extensive investigation of mtDNA from hair samples of 'Yeti', 'Bigfoot', and

Told You So!

The thing about creationists is that they are nothing if not predictable.

What's the betting that, if someone hasn't already done so, one or more creationist frauds will be misrepresenting this discovery as the discovery of a vast ocean of liquid water, and proclaiming the craved-for scientific proof of the Noah's flood myth by explaining where all the water came from - the 'fountains of the deep', no less?

Rosa Rubicondior;
Massive Subterranean Ocean 15 June 2014

Right on cue, Step forward Brian Thomas of the Institute for Creation Research:

Ken Ham - Fraud or Fool?

It's always fun, if you have nothing better to do, than to go to a creationists site and play spot the fallacies. For example, this stunning example from Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis site.

Naturalism, Logic and Reality

Those arguing against creation may not even be conscious of their most basic presupposition, one which excludes God a priori, namely naturalism/materialism (everything came from matter, there is no supernatural, no prior creative intelligence)... The following two real-life examples highlight some problems with that assumption:

1. A young man approached me at a seminar and stated, "Well, I still believe in the big bang,

Chimps Have Fashions Too

A group-specific arbitrary tradition in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) - Online First - Springer

Ever since Richard Dawkins coined the term, 'meme' in The Selfish Gene we have known that cultures, like genomes, are passed on through the generations by replicators which can gradually change over time and which can be subject to selection pressures, just like genes and combinations of genes. The difference is that memes are inherited after birth and so, unlike genes, we can change them and chose which to accept and which to reject. We can also chose which to pass on and which to allow to be consigned to history.

Another Brilliant Idea By The Intelligent Designer

You can say one thing about The Intelligent Designer - it doesn't let liberal sentimentality, compassion or morality get in the way of a good idea. In fact, it's almost exactly like The Intelligent Designer doesn't have any emotions or compassion, nor any idea of right and wrong.

I'll take that back. There is no 'almost' about it. It's exactly like The Intelligent Designer doesn't have any emotions, compassion or sense of right and wrong. It's exactly like The Intelligent Designer doesn't have any intelligent plan or any real purpose for its designs either.

Fighting Back Against Evolution

Antibiotic resistance focus of UK’s Longitude Prize : Nature News Blog

Great news that, by popular vote, the £10 million ($17 million) Longitude Prize will be awarded to the group which comes up with "a cost-effective, accurate, rapid, and easy-to-use test for bacterial infections" within the next five years. The intention is to help target antibiotic use so reducing the rate at which bacteria are evolving resistance.

This comes close behind a stark WHO report which stated:

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) within a wide range of infectious agents is a growing public health threat of broad concern to countries and multiple sectors. Increasingly, governments around the world are beginning to pay attention to a problem so serious that it threatens the achievements of modern medicine. A post-antibiotic era—in which common infections and minor injuries can kill—far from being an apocalyptic fantasy, is instead a very real possibility for the 21st century.

WHO ANTIMICROBIAL RESISTANCE
Global Report on Surveillance

The report went on to say:

Henrietta Lacks Soul

Theists have a problem with souls.

The problem is that they were invented in ignorant times when people knew nothing of the microscopic structure of the human body and very little about how it actually worked. It sort of made sense to think that there is another entity living inside our body giving it 'life' and somehow looking out at the world through the windows of our eyes.

And of course, since it is almost impossible to imagine oblivion where all memory has gone and no thoughts

Parasite Problem for Creationists

Stone Age worm egg hints at origins of modern scourge - health - 20 June 2014 - New Scientist

News that the earliest known evidence of the parasitic flatworm which causes schistosomiasis in human has been found, reminds me how rarely we see creationist pseudo-scientists discussing parasites, least of all parasites on humans. Maybe they are just sensitive to the subject for understandable reasons given their generally parasitic lifestyle but that would require a social conscience. It's much more likely that it's impossible to fit them into a biblical model where a magic, benevolent god created everything for humans because it loves us.

Parasites, by definition, take from their hosts but give little or nothing in return. They also often make their hosts sick in the process.

Crows Picking at the Neanderthal Creationist Corpse

A creationists 'explains' two sorts of evolution.
Note the lie that evolutionary biologists claim trilobites were our ancestors
and that foxes are the same species as dogs and wolves.

The genomic landscape underlying phenotypic integrity in the face of gene flow in crows

How carrion and hooded crows defeat Linnaeus's curse

Creationists don't understand what evolution is. Creation pseudo-scientists on the other hand, understand perfectly well what evolution is - which is why the term has to be deliberately misrepresented, and the ignorance maintained by misinformation, misrepresentation and lies. And the most important muddle that must be maintained is what the term 'species' means, how it's understood by biologists and how evolutionary theory explains the mechanism by which it arises.

Unable to argue against the massive amount of observed and observable evidence that change over time can be seen both in the phenotype and in the genotype of a species, they have tried to come up with a compromise

Britons Rejecting Religion

Defining British Identity | British Social Attitudes Survey 31

Taxpayers' cash should not be used to fund faith schools, say voters | Education | The Observer

A couple more reports out this week confirm the rapid decline in the importance of religion in Britain and even growing hostility towards it. Both of these deal to some extent with the aftermath of the scandal of Muslim faith schools and state schools with a predominantly Muslim population in Birmingham being infiltrated by Islamic extremists.

They also come on top of the recent success of UKIP in

Magnetic Reversal For Creationism

What would it take to convince a creationist that Earth is not just a few thousand years old?

To be frank, the answer to that is probably nothing - nothing on Earth would convince them because nothing on Earth convinced them it was just a few thousand years old in the first place. They were told that was the right thing to believe and that to be immune to reason and blind to contradictory evidence is something to be admired. The conclusion is sacred so facts must be ignored.

But imagine if there was some way Earth could have recorded its age in a way that is irrefutable, like a prisoner in a cell making a mark on the wall every day, and suppose this mark was not just marked on stone or even carved in stone but embedded forever in the structure of the stone itself, so no-one could have forged it or changed it and the only way to get rid of it was to destroy the stone itself.

Massive Subterranean 'Ocean'

Massive 'ocean' discovered towards Earth's core - environment - 12 June 2014 - New Scientist

News this week that geologists led by Steven Jacobsen of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA, may have discovered a vast amount of water locked up in hydrated minerals deep in Earth's mantle. Estimates put the amount of water at some three times the combined volumes of Earth's oceans. Were this volume of water to be on the surface of Earth only the tops of mountains would be dry land.

Silly Bible - The Fishy Tale Of Jonah

It's sometimes fun to read through the Bible and work out which of the tales in it is the least plausible, the most pointless, the least well thought out, etc.

A strong contender for all three of these is the story of Jonah. It must rate alongside the Noah's Ark and the Tower of Babel stories as the silliest and, given that the Tower of Babel tale actually tries to explain why different people speak different languages so has some point to it, like Noah's Ark, the tale of Jonah doesn't actually offer anything by way explanation for anything we can observe.

Nor is it any more plausible because the scientific evidence shows that it couldn't have happened, although, to be fair to whomsoever made up the Jonah myth, at

Church of England in Terminal Decline

Figures compiled and published in British Social Attitudes 30 (2013 Edition) make grim reading for mainstream religions in Britain. Self-identification with religion shows that affiliations to the Anglican churches (Church of England, Church in Wales and Church of Scotland) have halved from 40 percent to just 20 percent between 1983 and 2012.

Only one in five Britons now identify with the established church whose bishops are appointed nominally by the Queen, but, for all practical purposes by the Prime Minister, and some of whose bishops sit by right in the upper chamber of the UK bicameral parliament without ever having stood for election even by the Anglican congregations.

At the same time, the proportion of self-identifying as having no religion has increased from 31 percent to 48 percent, having briefly topped 50 percent in 2009. 'No religion' is now the largest demographic group by far and even outstrips all the Christian groups added together. The only groups to increase over this period have been 'Other religions' which includes Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, etc of whatever sect, tripling from 2 percent to 6 percent, and 'Other Christian' group, which includes Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, United Reformed, Calvinist, Quaker, Plymouth Brethren, Mormon, etc, remained static and 'Catholic' declined marginally from 10 percent to 9 percent.

Bad those these figures are for the Anglican Church, the underlying trends must be giving them nightmares, especially those who earn their living from it. Of course, one has to be cautious about making accurate forecasts from trends, they are after all only trend and tend to become less accurate over time, representing only a best estimate, but these trends have been consistent now for 29 years. Projecting them forward for another 25 years (i.e. one generation) from the current year to 2039, and assuming a linear trend, we get a forecast guaranteed to spread gloom throughout the Anglican community in Britain - affiliations to the Anglican Church in Britain will be less than 1 percent of the population. Long before that stage is reached, the church will cease to be a viable entity having neither congregations to minister to nor clergy to minister to them.

On current trends, 'Anglican' will be the smallest demographic group, being outdone by all three other religious groups.

Meanwhile, 'No religion' will have reached the mid 6os, approaching two-thirds of the population.

As I said earlier, one has to be cautious about making form predictions from simple trends but these figures, especially those for 'No religion' are strongly supported by figures taken from a more detailed survey published in British Social Attitudes 28:

Those self-identifying as having no religion is almost exactly in line with the forecast for 2039 and tends to be hugher with each succecive generation. It might be tempting to assume that people tend to become more religious as they get older. However, the next chart shows otherwise.

In fact, religious attitudes and affiliations formed by the age of about 20 tend to be stable throughout life rarely deviating by more than a few percentage points. There are no crumbs of comfort to be gleaned from these figures for religion, least of all for Anglican Christianity. Given that only about 50 percent of children from actively religious parents tend to follow their example whilst only about 3 percent of children from non-religious parent will become religious. The next generation will be born to parents, 64 percent of whom are openly non-religious.

At some point in the next ten years or so, affiliation with the Anglican Church in Britain will fall below 10 percent of the adult population on it's way to de facto extinction, and will no longer be able to ignore the fact that its moral authority was long since lost, as was its smugly arrogant assumption of the right to guaranteed seats in our legislative body. The next head of state will inherit the title of Defender of the Faith with little or no faith to defend. He will he titular head of an irrelevant church with which almost no-one identifies and which few people will mourn the passing of.

It is time to disestablish the Church of England, to remove its bishops, and those of other religions who sit in the House of Lords by virtue of the positions of leadership of their respective faiths, to end its involvement in state-supported schools and to cut it loose from public subsidy and exemption from corporation tax on the considerable income derived from its investments in property, banking and industry. There is no justification for a faith subscribed to by only one in five Britons to be given special privileges over and above the rest of us. It's time to privatise the Church of England and allow it to find its place in the market-place for ideas, ethics and morals.

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Marriage in Secular Britain

Provisional figures for 2012 released by the UK Government Office of National Statistics (ONS) today show that the number of marriages in England and Wales have increased slightly, both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the unmarried population. However, 70% of marriages are now civil marriages with just 28.6% Christian of one denomination or another.

Source: ONS	Total marriages have declined from about 352,000 in 1981 to 262,000 in 2012 although this was up from just under 250,000 in 2011. Over the same period, religious marriages have declined from just under 180,000 to just under 78,000.
In 1981 more than half of all marriages were conducted in a place of worship with Anglican marriages accounting for the huge majority of them. They have now fallen to half their former numbers. The only religious category to show an increase over this period has been 'Other', which includes Jewish, Muslim and Sikh, up to 2920 from 1488 in 1981.	Source: ONS
Source: ONS	From being less than half of all marriages in 1981, civil marriages now comprise over 70% of all marriages.
The recent upturn in the number of marriages in England and Wales comes after many years of steep decline starting around 1970 when the post-war baby boomers - the 1960s generation - were coming of age, as shown by the blip between about 1965 and 1975. Marriages had been increasing steadily since these records began in line with population growth, being distorted by the two world wars.	Source: ONS

Whether the recent upturn is due to demographic changes with immigration into the UK from Eastern Europe under EU free movement laws, or whether this represents a bottoming out of the decline remains to be seen. There are a number of demographic changes that may have contributed to the decline in religion as an institution in Britain, not least of which has been, until very recently, a general feeling of security as the baby boomers and especially their children were brought up in the welfare state created by the post-war Labour government in response to the Beveridge Plan. People were better housed, better fed, better clothed, better educated, better paid and had more leisure time and disposable income than at any time in history. In addition, they were brought up in a less deferential culture and were more inclined to examine the old assumptions and think for themselves rather than being prepared to think what they were told. And these ideas were able to spread more quickly because of the mass communication media.

Better education made us more willing to see the old religious fables and origin myths as just that, not science or a useful description of the Universe any more. Better security rendered us less susceptible to the false hope that religion offers and better communication made us realise we were not alone in these new attitudes and new-found scepticism. And of course better and more accessible contraception and better sex education has turned sex into a recreational activity carrying far less risk, especially for females, reverting sex to probably it's more natural role in human relationships and freeing it from stigma and guilt that religion had imposed on it.

The strongest predictor of whether a person grows up to be religious is whether their parents are... In terms of keeping people, the non-religious are doing very well indeed. It is extremely unusual for somebody brought up in a non-religious household to join a religion, but it is not at all unusual for somebody brought up with a religious affiliation to end up as non-religious... The very fact that there is such a group, that it is quite big and that there wasn't such a group before is an indicator of secularisation.

Stephen Bullivant, theologian, St Mary's University, UK. Co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Atheism
Quoted in Losing our religion: Your guide to a godless future by Graham Lawton; New Scientist 30 April 2014

Now we have brought our children up to think for themselves, the biggest cause of religion - parental example - has been removed from half the population. Studies have shown that only about 3% of children with Atheist or non-believing parents are likely to become religious, whilst only 50% of children from actively religious parents are likely to follow them. In the UK, for every 10 people to leave Catholicism, only 1 joins.

Source: ONS

Clearly, for most people who bother to get married at all, the reasons are social and/or economic, or simply because of a wish to show commitment. Even for those who get married in a church, the reason often has more to do with wanting a 'traditional' marriage and a nice setting for the ceremony. Marriage now has little to do with seeking permission for sex of an irascible magic man who takes a rather creepy interest in our bedroom activities.

Even for religious people, premarital sex will have been the norm in almost every case and most will have been living as a couple for some time. As the last chart shows, for all but the youngest age group, over 50% had cohabited prior to marriage, rising to over 80% for 30-45 year-olds, only a little below the cohabitation figures for civil marriages at 90%.

Religion has almost ceased to have any relevance to the institution or 'sanctity' of marriage in England and Wales and marriage is no longer seen as a prerequisite to a full sexual relationship.

Sources:

ONS: Marriage Summary Statistics 2012 (Provisional) (Excel sheet 192Kb).
ONS: Marriage Statistics, Cohabitation and Cohort Analyses (Excel sheet 343Kb).
ONS: Facts About Marriage.

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Intelligently Designed Yeast

Students Build the First Eukaryotic Chromosome from Scratch - Scientific American

Interesting news recently in Scientific American. Students at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, have created an entirely synthetic chromosome and it works just fine, just like any other chromosome in fact, and why wouldn't it? Chromosomes are just chemicals after all. There is no magic involved.

The chromosome they were attempting to create was Chromosome 3 of the yeast used in wine-making and baking - Saccharomyces cerevisiae - which controls the yeast sexual reproduction and which contains 316,617 base pairs. However, rather than build the entire DNA chain, they synthesised only the active regions, ignoring the accumulated junk DNA from billions of years of evolution. In fact, all they needed to do was create the correct sequence of 272,871 base pairs. Still a massive task but not nearly so daunting as it might have been.

This is a pretty impressive demonstration of not just DNA synthesis, but redesign of an entire eukaryotic chromosome. You can see that they are systematically paving the way for a new era of biology based on the redesign of genomes.

Farren Isaacs, bioengineer,
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

The interesting thing is that the yeast with the synthetic DNA is thriving and behaving just like regular yeast. The plan now is to breed it through thousands of generations to see how the synthetic DNA evolves and how much junk DNA is produced in the process. The long-term plan is to build an entirely synthetic genome for yeast which can then be manipulated to produce proteins, medicines, biofuels, etc.

From the point of view of this blog, the significant thing is not so much that the DNA was built but that, when real intelligent designers got to work, the best approach was to get rid of all the useless stuff that an unintelligent design process has created over billions of years, resulting in a design which was more efficient in terms of resources and no less efficient in terms of function. Of course, this would have been completely unnecessary had there been any intelligence involved in the original design.

Sorry, creationists, but your pet superstition has been exposed as bogus yet again. There really is no such thing as magic.

Reference:

Narayana Annaluru, et al; Total Synthesis of a Functional Designer Eukaryotic Chromosome
Science 4 April 2014: Vol. 344 no. 6179 pp. 55-58 DOI: 10.1126/science.1249252

'via Blog this'

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Love Hormone Dogs Creationism

"Science can't explain love! (And because science can't explain love, it can't explain anything. And because love exists, therefore God exists!)". I'm surprised no-one has written a creationist hymn about it, so they can sing it loudly every Sunday to help shout down their doubts.

The lie to that claim was given in a paper published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNSA). A team of scientists from Japan, led by Teresa Romero of the Department of Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan, in a beautifully simple experiment, showed that the hormone oxytocin increases the pair-bond between dogs and their masters.

Significance
Although the positive impact of social bonds on individual’s fitness has recently been demonstrated, the mechanisms underlying the motivation to form long-term associations remain largely unknown. Current evidence shows that oxytocin modulates social behavior but evidence of its effects in bond maintenance remains scant, especially in nonreproductive contexts. We provide evidence that in the domestic dog oxytocin enhances social motivation to approach and affiliate with conspecifics and human partners, which constitutes the basis for the formation of any stable social bond. Furthermore, endogenous oxytocin levels increased after dogs engaged in affiliation with their dog partners, indicating a stimulation of the oxytocin system during social interactions. Our findings highlight the important role that oxytocin has in the expression of sociality in mammals.

Social Sciences - Psychological and Cognitive Sciences:
Teresa Romero, Miho Nagasawa, Kazutaka Mogi, Toshikazu Hasegawa, and Takefumi Kikusui
Oxytocin promotes social bonding in dogs
PNAS 2014 ; published ahead of print June 9, 2014, doi:10.1073/pnas.1322868111

The researchers sprayed either a preparation of oxytocin or saline into the nostrils of sixteen dogs then allowed them back into a room where their owners were waiting. The owners had been instructed to ignore any social contact from their dog and did not know whether they had received oxytocin or saline. There was a statistically significant greater tendency for dogs to try to interact with their owners by licking, pawing and sniffing if they had received oxytocin than if they had received saline sprays.

Oxytocin is known to enhance pair-bonding between parents and offspring in many mammals and makes humans more trusting, cooperative and generous. This experiment also supports the theory that it may be involved in social interaction and friendship and will even act across species, especially where both species have a broadly similar social structure.

So, where does this leave our creationist friends' claim that somehow love can only be explained by God and exists in some spiritual, non-material realm, placing it outside the reaches of science and beyond human understanding? It leaves it where it always was: a nonsensical, evidence-free assertion that science has now shown to be false. Love is a physiological, biochemical response firmly in the realm of neurophysiology and psychology and so fully accessible to science and amenable to rational analysis and measurement.

And no less enjoyable for that.

Another gap closed and found not to be containing a god, of course.

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Snake Bite Shock for Creationism

King Cobra (Ophiophagus hannah)

You know, sometimes, challenging creationist loons and putting up facts for them to either explain away, or more often, ignore all together, feels a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. A proud contempt for learning and an admiration for the moral and intellectual bankruptcy which means they aren't bothered about being right or wrong, must be such great assets for them. No wonder they seem to positively delight in displaying them, yet never enter into serious debate about the biological facts.

Take for example something that struck me in a long and very readable article in New Scientists by Bob Holmes this week about the evolution of snakes. (Unfortunately, this sits behind a paywall but articles like this justify my decision to stump up the £44 per year). The article discusses many aspects of snake evolution, most of which would precipitate ophidiophobia in any dedicated creationist, but the observation which is guaranteed to push any creationist into deep denialism concerned the evolution of snake venom.