Even Other Apes Laugh At Creationists

Watch this video. It illustrates the work of Marina Davila Ross of the Psychology Department, Portsmouth University, UK, and her colleagues.

Be honest now, what was your reaction when you saw the bonobo laughing? I'll bet a fiver to Oxfam that you smiled at least, or even laughed.

What you were doing was responding just the way you would if you saw a human laugh. You did this because we share laughter with all the living Great Apes, even our most distant relative, the Orangutan, and the

Was Jesus a Fundamentalist Extremist?

Expulsion of the Moneychangers from the Temple,
Luca Giordano (1632–1705)

Reading all three so-called 'Synoptic Gospels', Matthew, Mark and Luke, they all agree that Jesus' arrest, trial and crucifixion followed closely after the 'cleansing of the temple' when Jesus allegedly drove the moneychangers out of the temple. Was this in fact the violent terrorist act of an extremist leading a bunch of dissidents in an attack on the Jewish authorities who ran Judea under Roman suzerainty and who were de facto the local government of the day?

There is no hard evidence that Jesus ever existed at all, and certainly no contemporaneous eye-witness accounts of anything associated with his life and death exist and even the two historians living and writing at the time (Philo-Judeus and Justus of Tiberius) are entirely silent on the matter, so it's hard to make a case for the stories of Jesus being based on

How Religions Evolved By Mistake

The evolution of superstitious and superstition-like behaviour

Ever wondered what the biological basis for irrational superstition and religions is?

It turns out to have a perfectly rational explanation in terms of biological evolution in a sentient species. Darwinian evolution can even explain why people are religious in the absence of any evidence for a god or any rational reason to suppose that gods ever do anything.

Human beings are superb at pattern recognition and see patterns in the natural world, often where there aren't any - Jesus on toast, a face in a cloud, etc. The only reason Muhammad never appears on toast is because no one knows what he

Confused Pope Abuses Childless Couples

Pope Francis. Confused.

Pope Francis: 'The choice not to have children is selfish' - People - News - The Independent

In another astonishingly insensitive outburst, just a few weeks after telling Catholics who had been obeying official Catholic teaching prohibiting contraception and effective family planning that they are wrong for "breeding like rabbits", he has now told childless couples that they are selfish for choosing not to have children.

There is no recognition of the fact that some couples

Darwin's Finches - Another Triumph For Science

Evolution of Darwin/'s finches and their beaks revealed by genome sequencing : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

On Darwin Day, it's good to see yet more scientific evidence showing just how robust and unassailable Darwinian evolution is as a scientific theory. This is confirmed paradoxically by a paper which showed he was ever so slightly wrong about the Galapagos Finches. He thought there were only 14 different species, now genetics has shown there are 17.

However, it confirms what Darwin said - they all radiated from a single founder population and the cause of diversity was natural selection. We now have the genetic evidence.

God Needs Darwin To Help Him Create Evil?

Few people can be unaware of the hysteria Stephen Fry caused recently in Christian circles, and not just with the fundamentalist with obvious mental issues. Even supposed 'moderate' Christians waded in to tell us childhood cancer was all our fault and their creator god can't be held responsible for the evil it creates. How it's all to show us how much it loves us and just to remind us all just how disgusting and unworthy we are of its love and lucky that it loves us so much in spite of our loathsome unworthiness.

Of course their hysterical over-reaction to Fry's simple little point is understandable, given their sensitivity to the point made by Epicurus in about 300 BCE:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?

Looking At Elms

The Cornfield.
John Constable 1826 showing typical English elms in the landscape

The National Gallery

We went to church today.

No, not that church, silly; to the real one where something worthy of praise and adoration lives. We went to the countryside; to the fields, hedgerows and woods where nature lives aloof and indifferent to us; offering no rewards for praise or threats for ignoring it, but deserving love and wonder and protection none-the-less.

We went for a walk in the English countryside on a glorious bright sunny February day with an azure blue Mediterranean sky and birds already staking out their territories and attracting mates with songs and displays. And we saw how natures budges over, accommodates change and carries on. We saw English elm trees in their new guise and role as hedge plants and small thickets for windbreaks and wildlife.

Forgive me if I get a little sentimental here - elm trees were big in my life as a child.

Anyone born after about 1970 in Britain will not remember the giant elm trees that seemed to line every

Maths For Christian Students

Inspired by the introduction to the two-volume Biology for Christian Students, I thought I would produce a little maths primer for Christian students based on the same principle. Creationist homeschoolers will find it especially useful.

The introduction to the Christian biology book, written by creationist Stephen S. Pinkston and publish by Bob Jones University, states on page 1:

1. 'Whatever the Bible says is so; whatever man says may or may not be so,' is the only [position] a Christian can take..."
2. If [scientific] conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them.
3. Christians must disregard [scientific hypotheses or theories] that contradict the Bible.

This Could Be Good News For Creationists!

Credit: The University of New Brunswick

Seafloor grooves record the beat of the ice ages

Scientists have discovered an amazingly accurate natural clock, more accurate even than the magnetic reversal clock found in mid-ocean ridges which makes an indelible record of every magnetic reversal Earth has gone through since the continents split and the oceans opened up. This new discovery should be great news for creationists because, if their beliefs are correct, this natural clock should prove once and for all that Earth was created just a few thousand years ago.

Twitter CEO Costolo "Ashamed" of Abuse

Dick Costolo, CEO Twitter.

In a leaked memo, revealed in The Verge, Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter (@dickc) has admitted he is ashamed of the way Twitter deals with abusive trolls and fails to protect it customers.

But he needs to do more than just control the trolls if he wishes Twitter to remain a platform for free speech and for exchanging ideas, no matter how they might upset vested interests, people who simply don't like people disagreeing with them and think it shouldn't be allowed, or people exposed for lies, deceptions and scamming gullible and vulnerable people who currently infest the Internet.

I'm frankly ashamed of how poorly we've dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO. It's absurd. There's no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front. It's nobody else's fault but mine, and it's embarrassing...

It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.

Dick Costolo

Unintelligently Designed Mitochondrial Disease

MPs vote in favour of 'three-person embryo' law | Science | The Guardian:

With todays new's that the UK House of Commons has passed a bill by a majority of more than 3:1 to allow a form of in vitro fertilization to include mitochondrial replacement in cases where the woman is a carrier of mitochondrial disease, I thought it might be worthwhile looking at the cell organelles called mitochondria and how they and the diseases they can cause fit into biological evolution, and how poorly they fit into intelligent design, especially intelligent design by a benevolent and omniscient designer.

Silly Bible - Even Language Refutes Creationism

European and Asian languages traced back to single mother tongue | Science | The Guardian

I've written a couple of time about how the Bible story of the Tower of Babel is, probably next to Noah's Ark, the least plausible story in the Bible. The problem was probably that even the Bible's authors didn't really understand or believe it but felt compelled to include it because it had gained the status of a sacred and holy text.

Later apologists such as Flavius Josephus even claimed that Yahweh dictated it to Moses, though that claim is never made in the Bible and a moments thought should tell you that the scribe doesn't normally write about his own death and burial in a secret place. Josephus was obviously reporting widely-believed myths rather than what he had actual evidence for.

Anyway, just to recap: according to this myth, Yahweh got spooked when it looked like his creation were going to get up to Heaven (which was directly over the Middle East and just above the sky, apparently). He hadn't seen that one coming and even had to go down to Earth to take a look. He then made everyone speak different languages so they couldn't work together any more, and that's how all the world's languages arose.

Don't laugh! These were simple people with no science to speak of and they lived in a world which they thought ran on magic.

Take Comfort in Moral Bankruptcy

If you want an example of the moral bankruptcy and the abdication of moral responsibility of fundamentalist Christianity you'd be hard pressed to find a better one than millionaire Ray Comfort's bloodcurdlingly inhumane celebration of the malevolent and vindictive personality of the god he worships, in his astonishingly brutal response to Stephen Fry.

Stephen Fry, TV personality, actor, author and Atheist Humanist, and one of the most respected and trusted people in Britain, was replying to a question from RTE chat-show host, Gay Byrne on Irish television. Byrne had asked, should Fry ever find himself standing in front of the Christian God, what he would say to him.

Genghis Khan And Gene-Meme Co-Evolution

Genghis Khan. Unknown artist.

Genghis Khan's genetic legacy has competition : Nature News & Comment.

A technical paper published a few days ago in the European Journal of Human Genetics shows how, at least in humans, genes can increase in frequency in a population not necessarily because they represent an adaptive advantage in their own right but because they are bound to other replicators, such as cultural memes, which give them an advantage. This linkage may be entirely due to chance.

For example, a culture which is hierarchical and expansionist, and especially where sons inherit the power, authority and privilege of their fathers, may facilitate the spread of genes carried by powerful men, especially where power gives access to females and comes with a higher standard of living so children are more likely to survive. The actual genes benefiting from this may be completely unremarkable.

This paper found that it was possible to identify a number of clusters of particular haplotype of the Y-chromosome (only carried by males and so indicating the male inheritance line). By counting the number of mutations in a given region of the Y-chromosome and assuming a regular mutation rate, it was possible to estimate the time when this variant arose in human evolutionary history. By assuming that the geographical location where most diversity was found was close to the place where the variant originated it was possible to estimate a likely place where this variant arose.

Rites and Reason in Tribal Religion

E. O. Wilson: Religious faith is dragging us down - opinion - 27 January 2015 - New Scientist.

Rite reasons: Why your brain loves pointless rituals - life - 19 January 2015 - New Scientist.

A couple of articles in New Scientist this week help explain the attraction of organised religion and why so many people are seduced by them despite the absence of any evidence that any religion is based on anything more than myth and superstition, so no objective basis for choosing one over another or indeed for following any of them.

Earth-Sized Planets May Be Commonplace.

Ancient planets are almost as old as the universe - space - 27 January 2015 - New Scientist

It's been another dreadful day for creationism.

Not only have we had news of another of those 'non-existent' fossils showing intermediate characteristics not just between species but between orders, with four fossil early snakes with lizard-like features and possibly even legs in one case, but now we learn that Earth-sized planets may well be common in the Universe and at least the Milky Way galaxy in which we live has been making them for 11.2 of the 13.8 billion years that the Universe has been around.

Oh Creation! Now It's Transitional Snake Fossils!

Source: Nature Communications

Fossils of oldest known snakes unearthed | Science/AAAS | News: "DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa6402"

Thanks to Science Magazine's excellent content sharing initiative, I'm able to embarrass creationists with another piece of science for them to ignore or lie about. This time it's news of the discovery of four very early snakes which push the known evolution of snakes back by almost 70 million years and they show unmistakable signs of transition from lizards with whom they are known to share a common ancestor.

So that's transitional snakes living between 143 and 167 million years ago, and already showing considerable diversification, suggesting an origin many millions of years earlier. It must be embarrassing having to try to force-fit facts like that into a superstition which claims Earth is only a few thousand years old

Haeckel's Embryos and Creationist Hypocrites

1874 illustration from Anthropogenie showing "very early", "somewhat later" and "still later" stages of embryos of fish (F), salamander (A), turtle (T), chick (H), pig (S), cow (R), rabbit (K), and human (M)

Source: Wikipedia - Ernst Haeckel

How fudged embryo illustrations led to drawn-out lies - life - 20 January 2015 - New Scientist

Haeckel's embryo drawings are something of embarrassment for biology, but how they have been used to mislead their dupes should be an even bigger embarrassment for creationist pseudoscientists, if it were even remotely possible to embarrass them with evidence of false claims, that is.

Haeckel produced his set of drawings intending to show how vertebrate embryology supported Darwinian evolution by pointing to a common ancestor and because the stages of development represented a replay of the evolution which led to their final adult forms. Unfortunately, he not only 'enhanced' his drawings to support this 'Recapitulation theory' but then

Unintelligently Designed Reproduction

Petunia (P. × atkinsiana)

Credit: Hiroyuki Kakui

Sophisticated system prevents self-fertilization in petunias | EurekAlert! Science News

Why would an intelligent designer design a system which is prone to errors then design a mechanism for avoiding those errors, and then, in different circumstances, have to break that avoidance mechanism because the solution is worse that the problem it was intended to solve?

I don't expect any self-respecting intelligent design creationists to answer that question because the default, "It's all a mystery which humans can't be expected to understand", or the easier, "I'm ignoring that question because it can't be true", response should have cut in by now.

Gender Gap in UK Religious Belief

Religious faith in Britain today

Women much more likely than men to say 'I'm a believer', study finds:

A survey out today has shown that 54% of British men born in 1970 now identify as non-believers but the same survey also showed that only 33% of women in the same cohort share this non-belief. The survey is the latest report from a longitudinal cohort study tracking the lives of 9,000 people born in a single week in 1970 being carried out by the UCL Institute for Education (IOE).

This gender gap is perhaps rather surprising but so is the wide range of different religious beliefs