Another Gap Closed. No God Found

Blue Beach, N.S. The site is a trove of fossils from about 350 million years ago, when vertebrates first started emerging onto land.

Credit: Jason Anderson

It must seem to creationists that every few days their incredible shrinking little god is evicted from yet another gap and gets just a little bit smaller. It's almost the reverse of the Big Bang. I wonder if we'll hear a small 'pffut' when the little god finally disappears in it's own irrelevance.

A week or so ago, creationism's god was evicted from a gap which palaeontologists have dubbed Romer's Gap. This is (or rather was) a gap in the fossil record of the early Carboniferous era where there should have been fossils of creatures intermediate between fish and terrestrial tetrapods. Now an analysis of fossil fragments found in just one deposit from that era revealed a rich diversity of intermediate fish-tetrapod fauna sitting there right in Romer's Gap.

Abstract

The lack of fossil tetrapod bearing deposits in the earliest Carboniferous (‘Romer’s Gap’) has provoked some recent discussions regarding the proximal cause, with three explanations being offered: environmental, taphonomic, and collection failure. One of the few, and earliest, windows into this time is the locality of Blue Beach exposed in the Tournaisian deposits at Horton Bluff lying along the Avon River near Hantsport, Nova Scotia, Canada. This locality has long been known but, because the fossils were deposited in high energy settings they are almost always disarticulated, so the fauna has not been described in detail. Recent intensive collection has revealed a diverse assemblage of material, including for the first time associated elements, which permits an evaluation of the faunal constituents at the locality. Although not diagnosable to a fine taxonomic level, sufficient apomorphies are present to identify representatives from numerous clades known from more complete specimens elsewhere. The evidence suggests a diverse fauna was present, including whatcheeriids and embolomeres. A single humerus previously had been attributed to a colosteid, but there is some uncertainty with this identification. Additional elements suggest the presence of taxa otherwise only known from the late Devonian. Depositional biases at the locality favor tetrapod fossils from larger individuals, but indirect evidence from trackways and tantalizing isolated bones evidences the presence of small taxa that remain to be discovered. The fossils from Blue Beach demonstrate that when windows into the fauna of ‘Romer’s Gap’ are found a rich diversity of tetrapods will be shown to be present, contra arguments that suggested this hiatus in the fossil record was due to extrinsic factors such as atmospheric oxygen levels. They also show that the early tetrapod fauna is not easily divisible into Devonian and Carboniferous faunas, suggesting that some tetrapods passed through the end Devonian extinction event unaffected.

Anderson JS, Smithson T, Mansky CF, Meyer T, Clack J (2015)
A Diverse Tetrapod Fauna at the Base of 'Romer's Gap'.
PLoS ONE 10(4): e0125446. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0125446

Acanthostega.
The fragments found at Blue Beach were too small to be assigned to particular species.

Not only were the many fragments undoubtedly those of limbed animals, having a limb skeletal plan similar to all tetrapods with a single femur and two lower limb bones but they were intermediate between finned fish and terrestrial tetrapods in having a variable number of fingers and toes. The basic tetrapod plan of five digits maximum had yet to evolve.

Romer's Gap, named after the U.S. paleontologist Al Romer who first wrote about it, was a period of about 15-30 million years following the end of the Devonian era characterised by primitive forests of giant tree ferns and a highly diversified fish fauna, and the appearance of forests with flowering plants, more modern aquatic fauna and a diversified terrestrial fauna. Several hypotheses had been put forward to explain it, including low oxygen levels which couldn't support terrestrial vertebrates, differences in geochemistry which didn't support fossilisation and a mass extinction at the end of the Devonian.

They were present much earlier than we gave them credit for. This gap itself isn't really a thing,it's just the result of a poor fossil record and the difficulty of finding rocks from this particular time. It also means that Romer's gap may be a misinterpretation of the fossil data.

Jason Anderson,
associate professor of veterinary anatomy,
University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada

There has been some geological support for the low oxygen theory and for a mass extinction at the end of the Devonian period, following which a low marine vertebrate diversity might have delayed the evolution of terrestrial vertebrates. However, this discovery suggests the gap may be more apparent than real and is merely due to lack of finds from the period. The authors point out that a rich diversity of terrestrial tetrapods early in the period points to an earlier evolutionary radiation.

Normally, creationism makes a great deal of these gaps in the fossil record and supposed missing transitional forms, claiming that Darwinian evolutionary theory requires all the intermediates and no gaps in the record, otherwise the entire theory disintegrates. This claim is, of course, nonsense, since the TOE is not a theory about fossils but about how change occurs over time.

Nothing in the theory requires a comprehensive record and it only requires a little thought to realise that, with fossilisation being such an unusual and highly unlikely event for most species, the occurrence of a perfect series for every species is so hugely unlikely it could only be explained by design. In other words, a completely gapless fossil record would not be evidence for undirected, unintelligent natural evolution but for just the opposite. The lack of all these perfect series is actually evidence against creationism and for an entirely natural process.

But still, few creationists give much thought to things like that and like to believe that gaps like Romer's Gap somehow supports them, so it's always fun to watch them ignore it when science closes just such a gap, as it did with this find. It seems to be a difficult concept for creationists to grasp that science is essentially about discovery. If there were no gaps there would be nothing to discover. Significantly, of the myriad gaps closed by science, especially in the last few hundred years, not one single god has ever been found in any. Science only started to make real progress when it began to question whether there really was a god in every gap and went looking.

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Chick Embryos Reverted to Dinosaur Features

By blocking two genes that are activated when chicken embryos grow their beaks, U.S. researchers caused their jaws to 'revert' to a velociraptor-like or reptile-like snout.

Credit: Bhart-Anjan Bhullar/Yale University.

Dinosaur-like snouts grown on chicken embryos - Technology & Science - CBC News

It's more bad news for the Creationism and the Intelligent Design industry, and this one is going to take a lot of explaining away.

Scientists have shown that inhibiting a couple of genes responsible for facial development in domestic hen embryos, causes the chick to grow a dinosaur face instead of a bird face. The authors also suggest their method could be used to investigate the mechanism of other major transitions in vertebrate history.

Another Of Those 'Non-Existent' Missing Links Found

Hydrothermal vent field along the Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge

Credit: Centre for Geobiology (University of Bergen, Norway) by R.B. Pedersen.

Missing link in the evolution of complex cells discovered

It must be puzzling and disconcerting for creationists the way a new scientific discovery never seems to support creationism and always seems to support science. Not that this will affect creationist superstition, of course, but there is a very simple explanation for this: science is based on evidence and so is demonstrably true; creationism is a superstition with no supporting evidence and so is not demonstrably true.

It's entirely predictable therefore that evidence will always support science and never supports

Evolution for Brainy People

Gene that makes human brain unique identified by scientists | Science | The Guardian

A friend on Facebook has just drawn my attention to this scientific discovery from last February. I can't think how I missed it with such a catchy title to the paper (Human-specific gene ARHGAP11B promotes basal progenitor amplification and neocortex expansion). Hmm...

It appears then that a single gene might be responsible the the most profound difference between us and the other apes and between us and our immediate hominid ancestors.

Faking It At Lourdes

The Lourdes shrine to Bernadette Soubirous

Bernadette Soubirous

Source: Wikipedia

Continuing my series on the fake miracles used by the Catholic Church to keep the faithful faithful and keep the money flowing in, this one deals with the carefully concocted fraud at Lourdes, France.

This fake is, like the Fatima fake, based on the fantasies of an illiterate peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, from a remote village who, as with Lúcia Santos at Fatima, seems to have been trying to impress a couple of friends and who found herself locked into her own childish fantasies by a Church keen to exploit her.

There are three elements to the Lourdes 'miracle':

• The 'visions' of 14 year-old Bernadette Soubirous.
• The 'miracle' cures which come from drinking the spring water and praying at the grotto.
• The 'incorruptibility' of Bernadette Soubirous' dead body.

None of these stand up to close scrutiny.

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

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

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