Faking It At Fatima

Crowd watch the 'miracle of the sun'

Lúcia Santos (left) with her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto, 1917

Source: Wikipedia - Our Lady of Fátima

With the approaching 98th anniversary of the supposed miracles of Fatima, Portugal, it's worth looking at this particular example of how the Catholic Church operates and how truth becomes an early victim in its incessant search for spectacles to keep the faithful faithful and the money flowing in.

First a bit about 'miracles' in general.

The Catholic Church is notorious for using 'miracles' to convince its believers that it is the one true church, believing in the one true god and that it has a special relationship with the ruler and creator of the Universe. The problem it has to overcome is the problem of having no evidence whatsoever for that claim, so it needs trickery. Experience has shown that 'miracles' are particular effective on the poor, uneducated and unsophisticated people who make up the bulk of Catholic congregations worldwide.

Miracles are especially useful for the Church because, by definition, there can be no physical contradictory evidence, just as there can be no physical evidence for them, because otherwise they wouldn't be supernatural 'miracles' but perfectly natural events with perfectly natural explanations. 'Faith' fills the gap and renders the lack of evidence a mere inconvenience, even, in some strange way, confirmation.

Ignorance & Double-Think - The Bear Necessities of Creationism

Sloth bear, Melursus ursinus

Sloth bear, Melursus ursinus

Genetically isolated sloth bears rely on habitat corridors to connect populations -- ScienceDaily

This paper is interesting from an ecological point of view, illustrating as it does the importance of maintaining a diverse habitat in order to maintain biodiversity, but it also neatly illustrates something which creationists either genuinely don't understand or about which they feign ignorance.

One of the most annoying questions creationists keep asking, as though they imagine it to be a killer question which destroys the idea of evolution, is, "If humans evolved out of monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" The slightly more educated ones will use 'apes' instead of 'monkeys', but the underlying ignorance is the same. This question can only seem even slightly intelligent to those who have no idea how speciation by population isolation occurs.

Crap Intelligent Designer - A Sicko Pervert?

The Intelligent Designer punishing sin

Fecal microbiota transplant cures C. diff, blocks multi-drug resistant pathogens, study shows -- ScienceDaily

There's no getting away from it; if you believe in an intelligent designer (i.e. God, although ID advocates aren't supposed to say that because it gives the game away that ID is biblical literalism in disguise) you believe it intends us to either be very sick, or to put other people's poo up our bottoms.

You see, this intelligent designer designed a nasty little spore-forming bacillus called Clostridium difficile which seems to have only one function - when it gets the chance it causes a really unpleasant condition in

Early Bird Catches the Creationist Worms

Archaeornithura meemannae

Credit: Wang et al., Nature Communications

The oldest record of ornithuromorpha from the early cretaceous of China : Nature Communications : Nature Publishing Group

A team of Chinese paleontologists has discovered a spectacularly well preserved fossil bird from 130 million years ago which neatly fills the gap in the fossil record between proto-birds such as archaeopteryx and modern birds.

This pushes the earliest known ancestor of modern birds back 5 million years and, because it has several well-developed adaptations, shows the main features characteristic of modern birds must have evolved

The Future for World Religion

The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050 | Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project

The recent Pew Research Center's forecast for the growth of world religion has been greeted by theists in general with something approaching glee because it appears to forecast a decline in the proportion of people with no religious affiliation, which includes Atheists and agnostics, although this glee tends to become muted, especially amongst Christians, when they look below the headlines, because the same figures show the number of Muslims worldwide almost equalling the number of Christians by 2050.

However, it reveals something dark and nasty at the heart of religion and upon which religion depends; something of which no religious person with any sense of human decency can be proud.

And in the developed economies the forecast is far from good news for theism. Throughout much of it, the forecast is that the recent growth in non-affiliation and non-belief will continue to increase both in absolute numbers and in proportion of the population. In fact, the number of non-affiliated is set to increase throughout the world but is forecast to decline in percentage terms because of a larger increase in the number of religious people.

Ken Ham Reaches A New Low

Ken Ham

Nepal Suffering After Major Earthquake | Answers in Genesis

Ken Ham is no exception to the routine, run of the mill creationist pseudoscientists in being prepared to lie through his teeth and stoop to any misrepresentation of science to his scientifically illiterate victims for money.

He even boasts openly about teaching the unfortunate children of creationist parents how to disrupt science class at school or talks by scientists, and strike a blow for Jesus, by asking "Were you there?", and so avoid learning anything.

Intelligent Design Arguments Drying Up - Water, Water Everywhere!

Dark knots of gas and dust known as "Bok globules," which are dense pockets in larger molecular clouds. Similar islands of material in the early universe could have held as much water vapor as we find in our galaxy today, despite containing a thousand times less oxyge.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team

Water could have been abundant in first billion years after the Big Bang -- ScienceDaily

Regular readers will remember the dismay that creationists who trot out the 'Goldilocks' argument for intelligent design displayed when it was discovered that yet another body in the solar system may have abundant water.

The problem they have is that they have to convince those to whom they are selling the notion of Intelligent Design that Earth is unique in just about everything that affects life on it - so water on Earth has to be presented as something hugely unlikely, just as Earth's distance from the sun has to be.

Maybe it's just my perception but it seems to me that creationists are not using this argument so frequently

Convergent Evolution - No Intelligence Required

Convergent Evolution of Mechanically Optimal Locomotion in Aquatic Invertebrates and Vertebrates - PLOS Biology

A nice example here of how the environment drives evolution by imposing limits on what is possible and what is optimal, in this case by the physics of fluid dynamics.

Researchers from Northwestern University in Evanston Illinois studied 22 different species in eight clades from three aquatic phyla of a wide range of shapes and sizes that all swim by 'median/paired fin swimming', in other words, by using a pair of long fins, running along each side of their body.

Creationism Is As Dead As The Dodo

Head of a Dodo 1638 - Cornelis Saftleven (1607-1681). Probably the last depiction of a living dodo.
Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Ancient megadrought entombed dodos in poisonous fecal cocktail | Science/AAAS | News

For an illustration of the inability of evolution to predict the future and so lead a species to, if not actual extinction, then the brink of it, it would be hard to find a better example than this one from the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius.

Mauritius is famous, for amongst other things, being the home of that enduring icon of extinction, the dodo. The dodo was a flightless pigeon (itself an example of evolution because flight must have been something it lost after having arrived on the island) which went extinct in around 1662 probably through being hunted for food by humans and predated on by pigs. Hunting is probably too strong a word, as dodos reputedly had no fear of humans or any other predators, as there were none on the island prior to the arrival of European sailors. The Mauritius giant tortoise also went extinct for much the same reason.

But this wasn't the only example of dodos being incapable of adapting

Liars For Jesus Get A Taxpayers' Handout

CMI propaganda cartoon. Probably about as good as it gets.

Australian film agency awarded creationist film AUD$90,000 | Film | The Guardian

Creation Ministries International is the Australian version of Answers in Genesis from which it split when it's founder, Dr. Carl Wieland fell out with it's then president, Ken Ham, who went off to the USA where more money could be made.

It is little different to AiG in that it specialises in misrepresenting science to misinform the people to whom it sells books, and Christian fundamentalist groups who invite guest speakers to provide spurious confirmation of their existing bias by giving it the semblance of a scientific basis.

Closing The Gap - Why Science Is True And Religions Aren't

This salamander arived in South America before the Panama Isthmus formed, if current opinions are right.

Photo: STRI Archives

Ancient connection between the Americas enhanced extreme biodiversity -- ScienceDaily

The thing about science is that it tends to converge on a single answer, no matter what the starting point. Religions, on the other hand, rarely, if ever converge. If anything, they tend to diverge and splinter into different, mutually hostile factions, each clinging to its 'answer', each unable to muster up arguments why their answer is the right one while all the others have it wrong and each never being able to find that definitive, clinching piece of evidence that would make their arguments indisputable and win over the dissenters.

The reason for this is very simple, and is the reason

UKIP Promises a Bigot's Charter - Just For Christians

Extreme right: Nigel Farage

Ukip promises legal protection to Christians who oppose same-sex marriage | Politics | The Guardian

UKIP are scraping the bottom of the barrel for support and have apparently found some disgruntled Christians in the dregs.

UKIP are currently falling in the polls following some disastrous performances by Farage in televised live debates (something he later blamed on a bad back) and are scraping the bottom of the barrel for support. They are now forecast by some pollsters to get somewhere between 0 and 1 candidates elected and Farage may well lose the seat he himself is standing in.

Pain In The Back For Creationists

It's no secret that humans have back problems. About eight in ten of us will suffer back pain at some point in our lives, often chronically. One person in twenty will slip a disc - the fibrous cushions between the bodies of our vertebrae - most often in our lumbar region and most commonly, but by no means exclusively, in men between the ages of 30 and 55.

Actually, the disc doesn't literally slip; the capsule surrounding it tears and some of the contents herniate out. This causes inflammation and swelling; the muscles spasm to protect the injury and the swelling can put pressure on the sciatic nerves coming out of the spine and going to the legs. This causes referred leg pain or sciatica.

Loon At The Bottom

Jim Wells,
Protestant fundamentalist and Young Earth Creationist

Jim Wells resigns as Northern Ireland health minister - BBC News

The Young Earth Creationist and fundamentalist Christian, Jim Wells, who was appointed Health Minister in the Northern Ireland Power-Sharing Executive only last September (see Loon At The Top), has been forced to resign over remarks made in his campaign to become the DUP member for South Down in the Westminster Parliament. Wells had told a meeting that children brought up in households with same sex partnerships were much more likely to be neglected. The meeting was interrupted by uproar from the audience.

He is later alleged to have repeated his remarks during a conversation with a lesbian couple during door-to-door canvassing. Wells later tried to go into the couple's house to apologise but they refused to let him in or to speak to him. The daughter of one of the women involved, a former staunch DUP supporter, later said her mother would no longer be voting for the party. Although expressing regret that his bigotry had caused offense, whilst not withdrawing the allegation, Wells cited his wife's serious illness as the reason for his resignation, not his politically embarrassing bigotry.

Chimpanzees Make Spears To Hunt With

Tool-assisted hunting by chimpanzee at Fongoli, Sénégal. Adult male chimpanzee uses tree branch with modified end to (a–c) stab into a cavity within a hollow tree branch that houses a Galago he ultimately captures as (d) his adolescent brother looks on.

Images credit: BBC.

It's been many years now since we realised the thing that we thought made us uniquely human - the ability to use tools - isn't unique at all, but we still clung to the notion that, while many species use things like sticks and stones as tools, humans were the only species to actually make them. That too has now had to be abandoned since chimpanzees were seen making tools out of plant stems to fish for termites and crows have been filmed making tools out of wire - not a natural material - to solve complex problems.

Now a group of savannah chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) has been observed not only using spears to hunt with, but selecting suitable tree branches and sharpening a point on them. Like

How Wolves Evolved Into Dogs

How the wolf became the dog

There is no doubt now that the domestic dog is a domesticated wolf. It has recently been reclassified by taxonomists as a subspecies of wolf, Canis lupus, so instead of Canis familiaris it is now Canis lupus familiaris. It was almost certainly the first animal to be domesticated but ideas have differed over how this came about.

In 1907, Francis Galton proposed that humans had taken wolf puppies back to their camp and raised them, maybe as playthings for the children, but this view is now seen as naive. You can raise a wolf puppy by hand but you don't get a dog; you get a dangerous wild animal. The genes of children who played with growing wolf puppies would probably have been quite quickly eliminated from the human gene pool as well as the puppies' genes being eliminated from the wolf gene pool.

So, clearly something else happened.

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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[Right caption/credit]

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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