Creationists - More Green Than They're Cabbage-Looking

I thought I'd share some more holiday snaps. These were taken on the coastal path that runs along the Dorset coast near Durdle Door. They're wild cabbage (Brassica oleracea), although, with so many domestic cabbages around it's highly likely that they will have interbred so they may not be pure wild cabbages. Anyway, they're probably as close to the original wild cabbage as you're going to get in Britain.

The reason they're so abundant in this part of the world is because they evolved as a plant on lime-rich chalk and soil with high salt content. The covering of soil over these chalk deposits is ideal because that's what they've evolved to live on.

So why doesn't it look like a typical cabbage? Because, from this original wild type, by a process of evolution driven by human selection over thousands of years, humans have produced a whole range of different plants for food, each filling a different function and each exaggerating a particular feature inherent in the wild form. This neatly illustrates how a wide range of morphologies can be obtained by a simple selection process. We did the same with the close relatives of the cabbage, B. rapa, B. nigra, B. napus, B. juncea and B. carinata

The reason we were able to do this is because, at some time in their evolution, B. oleracea, B. rapa and B. nigra hybridized to form three entirely new species, B. napus, B. juncea and B. carinata and this gave a wide range of genetic potential. This is of course, a complete refutation of three creationist assertions; that mutations are always harmful, that new information can't arise, and that evolution can't give rise to new species.

Evolving Together In Amazonia

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Yanomami hunting party

Bacteria bonanza found in remote Amazon village : Nature News & Comment

Much to the chagrin of creationists, no doubt, we can trace our evolution by the evolution of the obligate parasites and symbiont organisms that live on and in us - our microbiome. Just as with the evolution of our lice, the evolution of which and their diversification from the lice which live on the other African apes, maps exactly onto our diversification from a common ancestor with those same apes, so our microbiome can show how human groups are related and have diversified over history.

It has long been suspected that the number of different species in our microbiome declined as we became more hygienic and especially since we discovered antibiotics, so a team who studied the microbiome of the recently-contacted Amazonian tribe, the Yanomami, expected to find a high degree of biodiversity - which they did, finding some 60 unique genes. However, what they didn't expect to find was that a number of the Yanomami gut bacteria have already evolved antibiotic resistance, including resistance to man-made antibiotics.

The general view of antibiotic resistance is that this evolves in bacteria in the presence of antibiotics because the environment is favourable to those with mutations which convey resistance in a basic Darwinian evolution by natural selection. However, the Yanomami have no history of antibiotic use, at least not in the way antibiotics are used by modern medicines.

So, there are two ways to look at this - either antibiotic resistance has evolved in the Yanomami's gut bacteria in response to naturally occurring antibiotics or toxins (toxic to the bacteria) which resemble them, or they have been exposed to man-made antibiotics even though they have remained isolated. This latter seems the least likely and the team believe they eliminated it, so, if their bacteria evolved resistance to man-made antibiotics the probability is that our gut bacteria already had the capacity to 'switch on' resistance even before we began synthesising them. And that raises some worrying possibilities for future antibiotics in our continuing arms race with bacteria.

Oldest Stone Tools Show Intelligence Pre-Dates Humans

Olduvai Gorge, Kenya

World’s oldest stone tools discovered in Kenya | Science/AAAS | News

Humans are known to science as Homo sapiens, or 'thinking man' partly because the thing which we used to believe distinguished us from other species was out ability to make tools, which was considered a unique skill indicating high intelligence.

That view has of course been under sustained attack for decades now ever since chimpanzees were seen to

Bummer For Behe As Science Proves Him Wrong Again

Credit: Sonja-Verena Albers

Attaching the propeller: How the motility structure of unicellular archaea is fixed to their surface -- ScienceDaily

Scientists working at Freiburg University, Germany, have worked out the structure of the flagellum used by archae. Archae are regarded as the most primitive prokaryotes - the group of single-celled organisms which don't have a cell nucleus and which includes bacteria.

And it's bad news for devotee of creationist loon and virtual designer of the Intelligent Design fraud, Michael J. Behe.

Readers may recall how Michael J. Behe was recently exposed as a liar by molecular biologist, Professor Kenneth R. Miller who

Even Pebbles on a Beach Refute Creationism

I saw something from our hotel room window a couple of days ago. It's not unusual; you can see it on almost any beach in the right conditions. And it utterly refutes one of creationisms central dogmas (to be fair to creationists, it's more a mindless mantra than a dogma and it's used more like a magic spell than a reasoned argument).

The claim is that you can't get order out of disorder (or chaos). They chant this to try to make the evidence for evolution go away because someone has fooled them into thinking evolution is some sort of increasing order from chaos.

Black Flamingo Poser for Creationists

Here are a few simple little questions for creationists to ignore in the hope they'll go away, like ignored facts do.

These pictures are of the only known all black flamingo. It was photographed in Cyprus in the last few days. There was one previous record of a black flamingo in Israel last year. This one from Cyprus may be a different one, but given that the Israeli one has disappeared and given that Cyprus is an easy flight for a flamingo from Israel, there is a strong possibility that this is the same one, and possibly the only one in the world.

Obviously, the mutation which gives rise to melanism (an overproduction of melanin) is a rare event. We know flamingos produce melanin because they have some black wing feather and some black on their beaks, so what is probably happening here is that the gene(s) controlling when and where the gene for making melanin is switched on (or off) has failed.

The New Forest - No Intelligent Design Here

I thought I'd share a couple of holiday photos with you. We've been to Bournemouth for a few days and spent one day in the nearby New Forest, just wandering around, looking at birds and flowers and generally appreciating nature.

But when you look at nature and really try to understand and appreciate why things are as they are, the one thing that stands out most markedly is how utterly stupid so much of it is. It is full of examples of pointless and ultimately wasteful arms races as one species seeks to gain an advantage over another in the general competition for resources or even as one species tries to use another as a resource and the other tries to resist it.

The result is the wonderful complexity and diversity we can see and enjoy but to pretend it all has some ultimate purpose directed towards humans is sheer anthropocentric arrogance.

Look at these pictures of thicker broad-leaf woodland and what do you see?

Bearing in mind that it's early Spring here in the UK and most trees are just breaking into leaf, so what you are seeing is the wood without it's canopy. In a matter of weeks this forest floor will be considerably darker than what you see here.

You Can't Blame Loonies on The Full Moon

OMG! The Lamb of God has appeared on the end of the Isle of Wight!
This must be a sign!

Stop blaming the moon: Intelligent people can develop strong entirely incorrect beliefs -- ScienceDaily

An article published a few days ago in Nursing Research shows how easy it is for people to misinterpret data to see a pattern where there is none. Professor Jean-Luc Margot took the data used in a 2004 paper which purported to show a correlation between the number of people admitted to an emergency department suffering from gastro-intestinal bleeding and the incidence of full moons.

The errors came from imprecision with the method

God The Ignorant Biologist

Jacob's lambs

Of all the passages in the Bible, even allowing for the nonsense about thinking with your heart and breathing 'life' into things, there is one passage which shows the author was utterly ignorant of basic biology. If this was a creator god then it is no excuse that we hadn't discovered basic genetics in the Bronze Age when this stuff was first made up; any decent intelligent designer should understand how its creation works.

That passage is:

How Europeans Evolved

Archetypal European hunter-gatherer

How Europeans evolved white skin | Science/AAAS | News

A new study has provided more detail on the discovery reported a year ago that Europeans evolved white skin fairly rapidly about 8000 years ago but not, as one might assume, in Europe itself but rather in three different distinct populations of hunter-gatherers and farmers who moved into Europe, each contributing genes to the 'European' genome.

A paper published in February this year showed that the origin of the Indo-European languages was probably a population of nomadic herders from the Russian steppe north of the Black Sea who appear to have migrated massively into Europe about 4500 years ago. These people are known as the Yamna Culture. Indo-European languages exist now in about 400 different languages and dialects from Irish in the west to Hindi and Urdu in the east.

Ancestral Adam & Eve Probably Never Even Met

The Y-chromosome point mutation rate in humans : Nature Genetics : Nature Publishing Group

Scientists have revised their estimate of when the last common ancestor of men lived, bringing it much closer to the estimate of when the last common ancestor of women lived. The basis for this estimate is the range of diversity in the Y-chromosome and the estimated rate of mutation.

The calculation for women is based on the same principle but based on mitochondrial DNA (mDNA). We inherit our mDNA from our mothers but males inherit their Y-chromosome from their father. Women don't have a Y-chromosome.

Origin of the Adam & Eve Myth

A pair of Old Testament scholars at Holland's Protestant Theological University, Amsterdam & Groningen believe they have found the origins of the Adam & Eve myth in the Hebrew Bible. It is a version of an old Canaanite myth based on the original Canaanite pantheon.

Dr Marjo Korpel and Professor Emeritus J.C. de Moor claim to have found the evidence on Ugaritic clay tablets of a 13th-century BCE story about the gods who lived on the slopes of Mount Ararat, in modern-day Turkey, in the 'vineyard of the great gods', identified with the Garden of Eden.

The top god was El the creator god and amongst the lesser gods in the pantheon or Elohim (children of El) were Adam and his wife. El is, of course, the Hebrew, Christian and Muslim god whom Arabic speakers still call Allah.

Cowardly Catholic Runs Away Again

Apparently, Mad Manuel, who many people will know as Sacerdotus or other less printable versions of his pseudonym, is claiming I have agreed to debate with him live on a web page he controls. Not surprisingly, given Manny's reputation as a habitual liar, this is a lie, as the record of our conversation on Google+ shows.

What I did do, however, was re-issued the challenge to him to hold an impartially moderated debate on neutral territory that panicked him several years ago. The result was the same - total panic, abuse, crude threats and a desperate attempt to save face.

Dutch Catholics Vindictively Castrated Abused Boys.

Harreveld Catholic boys home, Netherlands, were at least ten boys were abused by monks then vindictively castrated.

Most people are probably familiar with the way the Catholic Church used to routinely castrate choir boys before puberty to prevent their voices breaking so they could provide the 'female' voices in cathedral choirs. Obviously women couldn't be allowed in church choirs because the Bible forbade women to speak in church:

Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law.

1 Corinthians 14:34-35

Moral Compass - The Catholic Church and Excommunication

Fr. Jose Mercau, Excommunicated

Last November, Pope Francis defrocked and excommunicated a convicted paedophile priest from Argentina. Of course, many priests have been excommunicated by the Catholic Church before, but the case of Fr. Jose Mercau was unusual; he is one of the only Catholic priests to have been excommunicated for sexual abuse (technically rape) of a minor.

Pope Francis was apparently trying to convince the world that the Catholic Church had recognised the error of its ways and would no longer tolerate, facilitate and protect priests and nuns who abused children and vulnerable adults and now took a dim view of these previously accepted clerical recreational pass-times.

More Fascist Catholics

Fr. Josef Tiso with his friend and role model, Adolf Hitler

In addition to their close involvement in creating the first fascist state in Europe in Portugal, and their support for Italian and Spanish fascism, the Catholic Church was actively involved in another even more extreme fascist regime in Slovakia.

Unlike Portugal and Spain which stayed out of World War II and have no history of sending Jews to Hitler's slave labour and death camps, Slovakia, under the leadership of a Catholic priest and fascist dictator, Fr. Josef Tiso, enthusiastically shipped around 60% of Slovakian Jews (over 52,000 of the population of 89,000) to the death camps, mostly Auschwitz.

Mother Teresa and the Paedophile Priest

Fr. Donald McGuire, Jesuit, serial paedophile and spiritual advisor to Mother Teresa

Catholicism's favourite new demi-saint, "The Blessed" Teresa of Calcutta, was a friend of a paedophile priest and intervened to get him reinstated in his parish, where he subsequently carried on with his predatory paedophilia, sexually abusing more boys before finally being arrested and imprisoned.

This was revealed in papers leaked to the San Francisco newspaper, SF Weekly in January 2012.

The priest in question was Fr. Donald McGuire, currently serving a 25 year sentence for what the judge described as:

[P]articularly detestable because he abused the trust of parents and had perversely taken advantage of their children. [His Actions were] abhorrent, unacceptable, and‘a very, very serious sin.

USA District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer
(quoted in Chicago Sun Times online, February 11th, 2009)

This sentence exceeded federal guidelines for sentencing for these offences because Judge Pallmeyer felt the crimes were exceptionally serious.

Even Monkeyflowers Ridicule Creationists

M. lewisii (A), an F1 hybrid (B), M. cardinalis (C), and examples of variation in floral traits found in F2 hybrids (D–L).

Pollinator preference and the evolution of floral traits in monkeyflowers (Mimulus)

Imagine for a moment a species of flowering plant with a three important genes, each of which has two different alleles. Let's say Gene A which can be A₁ or A₂, gene B which can be B₁ or B₂ and gene C which can be C₁ or C₂. Gene A determining flower shape, gene B determining flower colour and gene C determining how much nectar the flower produces.

Now imagine two different pollinators which transfer pollen from one flower to another while gathering nectar, one having a preference for one shape and colour and the other having a preference for a different colour and more nectar.

It doesn't take a genius to work out what will happen. The flowers with the alleles which attract one pollinator are much more likely to pollinate other flowers with those same alleles and those with the other alleles will be much more likely to pollinate the flowers with these alleles.

In effect, there will be a premating or 'prezygotic' barrier to cross-pollination between plants with different combinations of alleles and selection pressure against permutations of alleles

Seeing Evidence Of Inept Design

Müller cells separate between wavelengths to improve day vision with minimal effect upon night vision : Nature Communications : Nature Publishing Group

Although they will probably deny it, even creationists must be aware of the inept design that is the vertebrate eye where the retina is wired backwards, so the nerves from the photoreceptor have to travel towards the source of light then across the surface of the retina to join up with the main optic nerve and finally back down through the retina, causing the 'blind spot' - an area of the retina where light doesn't register.

Our neural circuitry has to infill this area for us so we don't notice it. Consequently, there is a small risk that we won't notice pieces of grit, small flies and other foreign bodies that get in our eyes, and the nerves going in the 'wrong' direction inevitably create a barrier for the light to get through.

In effect, the photoreceptors are are actually shielded by their circuitry. It's like the designer of a digital camera putting all the wiring and processors between the lens and the detector. Creationists call this 'intelligent'.

Catholicism's New York Meltdown

St Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie, New York, USA

Patric D’Arcy Is N.Y. Archdiocese’s Only New Priest - NYTimes.com

I came across this while researching for another blog and it illustrates just how low Catholic fortunes have sunk in New York since the world-wide scandals of physical and sexual abuses of minors and other vulnerable people began to hit the Church.

In 2012, the Catholic Church in New York ordained a priest by the name of Patric D'Arcy. Nothing remarkable in that you might think.

However, he was the only one to be ordained in that year. In the 1960s the average was somewhere