So Farewell Then 'Pillars of Creation'

A higher-resolution HST image of the Pillars of Creation, taken in 2014 as a tribute to the original photograph

Source: Wikipedia - Pillars of Creation

Slightly sad news today that the iconic 'Pillars of Creation' are no more, blown away in a massive supernova explosion in the star nursery, the Eagle Nebula.

The 'Pillars of Creation', a formation of gas and dust first photographed in 1995 by the Hubble space telescope quickly became one of the top ten deep space images. They were so named because they are (or were) the early stages of star formation, being condensing gas and dust clouds which would normally collapse to form stars. The taller pillar is a mere five light-years tall.

The Eagle Nebula is 7,000 light-years from Earth which means that the image we see was as it was 7,000 years ago - a bit of a problem for creationists who like to imagine the Universe is only 6,000 years old.

This was discovered by a team from l'Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, Orsay, France who used an infrared image of the region taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope, which revealed a hitherto unseen cloud of hot gas advancing on the pillars. They presented their findings last Thursday to a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington, USA.

Creationism - Ignoring the Elephant

First comprehensive analysis of the woolly mammoth genome completed -- ScienceDaily

Creationism is largely about ignoring evidence. In fact, it depends almost entirely on pretending the evidence either isn't there or means something else, whilst simultaneously pretending there is a lot of evidence supporting creationism - if only it could be found and didn't need to be misrepresented.

Take, for example the known evolution of the

Creationism's 'Goldilocks' Fairy Tale Debunked

Artist's impression of gas and dust - the raw materials for making planets - swirl around a young star. The planets in our solar system formed from a similar disk of gas and dust captured by our sun.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Bricks to build an Earth found in every planetary system | Royal Astronomical Society.

Contrary to the creationist fantasy that there is something special about Earth which makes it the only place in the Universe where intelligent life could live, and where everything is 'just right' for humans, a paper presented to the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, Wales last Wednesday by Prof Brad Gibson, of the University of Hull, showed how Earth-like planets are very probably the norm in solar systems in the Milky Way galaxy.

Minerals made from building blocks of carbon, oxygen, magnesium, and silicon are thought to control the landscape of rocky planets that form in solar systems around Sun-like stars. A subtle difference in

Another Intermediate Fossil - Dinosaur Ancestor

Wendiceratops pinhornensis, artists reconstruction

Photo credit: Danielle Dufault

PLOS ONE: Cranial Anatomy of Wendiceratops pinhornensis gen. et sp. nov., a Centrosaurine Ceratopsid (Dinosauria: Ornithischia) from the Oldman Formation (Campanian), Alberta, Canada, and the Evolution of Ceratopsid Nasal Ornamentation | PLOS ONE.

Like I said in a previous blog, these intermediate fossils, which creationists stoically maintain don't exist because they illustrate something they are desperately trying to convince themselves doesn't happen, are so common one could almost dedicate a weekly blog to listing the new ones.

Mistletoe Shoots Creationism in its Achilles Heel

Mistletoe species lacks genes found in all other complex organisms -- ScienceDaily

Creationism and the Intelligent Design hoax require a simple narrative to appeal to simple people who know little of science, have no intention of learning any and who believe their ignorant intuition is the best available measure of reality.

For the creation industry, this narrative includes the simplistic notion that the scientific theory of evolution states that all evolution involves increasing complexity brought about by mutation in functional genes.

Integrity - The Difference Between Science & Religion

Dong-Pyou Han, faked results.

Photo credit: Charlie Neibergall/AP

Scientist behind fake HIV breakthrough sentenced to prison after spiking results | Society | The Guardian

News that Dong-Pyou Han, a former scientist working at ISU, has been sentenced to four and a half years in prison for making a fraudulent misstatement so obtaining millions of dollars of government funding, should be a matter of pride for the scientific community because it shows how scientific fraud is exposed by the scientific method. In the long run, results which are not reproducible by other teams and which begin to stand out as outliers, come under closer and closer scrutiny and will eventually be discarded.

What a Shocker! Another Creationist is Lying Again!

.@AtheistAdvocate Creationists predicted radiocarbon would be found in dinosaur bones. It was. http://t.co/kajZi8fstN

— Creation-Evolution (@crevinfo) July 1, 2015

When you don't have any evidence but you have a sacred dogma to not only defend at all costs but which you're desperate to get other people to believe too, in the belief that the more people who believe it the more true it will become, what else is there for creationists but to lie?

I came across this exchange on Twitter today. It's a claim that is currently doing the rounds on creationists sites and something I was challenged with on Facebook about a week ago. The claim is that scientists have isolated soft tissue from dinosaur 'bones' which has been carbon-dated to not more than four thousand years old, in a fossil which was believed to be 65 million years old.

When faced with this on Facebook, my reply was that if the recovered 'soft tissue' had been carbon-dated to four thousand years old then that would be evidence that sample had been contaminated. My proponent promptly disappeared and has not been seen since. It turns out he had been repeating a lie, knowingly or unknowingly anyway. Maybe he realised he'd been duped and ran in embarrassment.

What Was Creationism's God Doing For Eight Billion Years?

Kepler-186f, first validated Earth-size planet to orbit a star in the habitable zone (artist's impression)

Credit: NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech

Even stars older than 11 billion years have Earth-like planets: Precise ages of largest number of stars hosting planets ever measured -- ScienceDaily

A paper published a few days ago in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of researchers from the Stellar Astrophysics Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark have shown what they believe is evidence of Earth-sized planets orbiting 33 stars in the Milky Way galaxy that are about 11 billion years old. In other words, these planets were formed at least 8 billion years before Earth in a Universe that appears to have had the right conditions for creating these planetary systems right here in our own galaxy.

What Idiot Designed a Worm That Injects Sperm Into Its Own Head?

Macrostomum hystrix

Hypodermic self-insemination as a reproductive assurance strategy | Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences

You really have to laugh at creationism's 'Intelligent (sic) Designer' when you see the idiot stuff it supposedly designs.

Take this hermaphroditic flatworm that uses its penis as a hypodermic syringe to inject sperm into it's own head, for example! What sort of idiot would come up with a solution like that to the occasional problem of not finding another flatworm of the same species to exchange sperm with?

But it gets worse! The sperm then have to swim all the way down the length of the flatworm's body to get to the eggs in the tail, so they can fertilise them and produce what are, in effect clones of their parent.

Unlike Fundamentalists, Chimps Can Tell Right From Wrong.

Chimpanzees’ Bystander Reactions to Infanticide | Human Nature

Unlike fundamentalist Christians, who proudly boast that they have to use their holy book to understand what's right and what's wrong, and so bizarrely claim to be more moral than people who don't need a handbook, it seems even chimpanzees understand the difference, either instinctively or through culturally-inherited memes. Ironically, this indicates that this ability may even have been present in the last common ancestor shared by chimpanzees and humans.

This was the conclusion of a team from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, who allowed chimpanzees to

Catholic Church Just Doesn't Get It!

Anthony Colin Fisher, Archbishop of Sydney. Inconceivable tht he would not have approved the letter.

Catholic church writes to companies that support same-sex marriage | World news | The Guardian

The Catholic Church really doesn't get it.

It's not just the paedophile priests and nuns, abuse of vulnerable adults, financial corruption, support for autocratic right-wing dictatorships, the sale of 'confiscated' children, the systematic, sometimes brutal, cover-ups, the habitual avoidance of responsibilities for their crimes and casual hypocrisy of the church and it's clerics, bad though they are, that are causing people to vote with their feet and stay away from church.

Cardinal Brady Admits Official Abuse Coverup

Cardinal Seán Brady. Intimidated victims to keep abuses secret.

Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry: Cardinal Seán Brady admits 'shroud of secrecy' over Church sex abuse inquiry - BBC News

Cardinal Seán Brady, former head of the Catholic Church in all Ireland, has admitted the official church enquiry into the sexual abuse of young boys by Catholic priest, Fr Brendan Smyth, was conducted under a cloak of secrecy designed not to reveal the truth and protect and compensate the victims, but to protect the abuser and the church against scandal.

For his part in this coverup, Cardinal Brady, who has never been officially sanctioned by even so much as being stripped of his title, was allowed to retire on a full pension at the normal retiring age for a priest, after spending a year on fully-paid gardening leave whilst an underling did his work for him.

Brady made this admission to the Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry and admitted that the questioning of a 14 year-old victim was intimidatory, intrusive and

Another Transitional Fossil Turtle!

Grandfather turtle, Pappochelys

Photo credit: Rainer Schoch. Source: Smithsonian.com

A Middle Triassic stem-turtle and the evolution of the turtle body plan : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

These examples of what creationists tell us don't exist - transitional fossils - are getting so frequent that I'm wondering whether it's worth writing yet another blog about yet another one being found, or whether it would be simpler to just publish a weekly list of the latest.

But, having almost certainly just shed any creationists who might have had the courage to read the blog at all with that shocking title, I'll carry on, as those interested in truth might find it interesting.

This example, published in Nature yesterday, is of a 240 million year-old fossil from Germany which is

Now Something Else For Creationists To Ignore!

One gene may drive leap from single cell to multicellular life - life - 22 June 2015 - New Scientist

Creationists need to isolate themselves as far as possible from the reality around them - which why they're oblivious to that fact that, to normal people, they resemble a comical King Canute, ordering the tide to retreat, except that they also have their eyes shut and are pretending to not even notice the tsunami of scientific evidence engulfing them.

Actually, to be fair to the much maligned Canute, whose tale was told by the eventual winners, he was almost certainly trying to demonstrate to his army that even a king's powers are limited, so he shouldn't really be compared to a creationist.

More Sex With Neanderthals But No Original Sin

Smile!

Photo credit: AFP/Getty

An early modern human from Romania with a recent Neanderthal ancestor | Nature

This isn't so much new information as adding detail to what we already know.

We've known for several years now that all non-African populations have some Neanderthal DNA, showing without a doubt that humans came up against and interbred with, to a limited degree, the Neanderthal population that had evolved from members of an earlier migration out of Africa.

Does God Hate Vultures Too?

Lappet-Faced Vulture, Torgos tracheliotus

Another Continental Vulture Crisis: Africa's Vultures Collapsing toward Extinction | Conservation Letters - Wiley Online Library.

With so many species in serious decline and under threat of imminent extinction, creationists and Intelligent Design hoaxers have some explaining to do. They at least owe it to their followers to explain why their creator god either intended this to happen or is powerless to prevent it. Admittedly, they will need to face up to some unpleasant realities to do so, but at least they'll know they aren't living a lie.

What they need to grasp is that their notion, it it were any good, would be applicable across the entire range of biological science, not just the cherry-picked pieces that make their dupes feel important or to provide easy, default answers to the parts that are hard to understand without learning basic science, putting aside

Watching Evolution as it Happens

Evolution and coexistence in response to a key innovation in a long-term evolution experiment with Escherichia coli | bioRxiv

The world's longest running evolutionary experiment has just produced another embarrassing result; embarrassing for creationists that is. The result is, of course, exactly what the Theory of Evolution predicts.

This experiment, Richard Lenski's Long-term Experimental Evolution Project, has been running since 1988 when Lenski set up 12 cultures of a single strain of E. coli. Every day since then a sample of each culture has been taken and used to seed a new culture. Every 75 days a sample of each cultural line is frozen so any future change can be backtracked. The main nutrient in the culture was glucose.

Pope Is Part Of The Climate Change Problem

Generally, Popes talk what can only politely be called cobblers, and so far the current pope has been no exception. Normally it quite easy to read something a pope has said and to write an article pointing out the bigotry, superstition, scientific illiteracy or clerical self-interest which underpins it. A religious commentator might even regard popes as a godsend for the frequency with which they open their mouth just wide enough to get a red-booted foot in it.

But now we see a pope actually talking sense about climate change and man's responsibility for it and for once the Catholic Church isn't supporting the right-wing and the forces of reaction. From a quick skim through an English translation of his encyclical, Laudato Si', it appears to be well informed and even well-argued. No doubt Pope Francis is not personally the author of it and has depended a great deal on his science advisers to do the actual science but that doesn't detract from his responsibility for the contents, and he deserves praise for it.

Toothed Whales Laughing At Creationists

Laughing at creationists

Mx1 and Mx2 key antiviral proteins are surprisingly lost in toothed whales - PNAS

More evidence today that the supposed 'intelligent designer' is neither intelligent nor a designer. It's not clear yet whether the ID industry will become honest as a result of all this evidence against their daft notion and give up exploiting gullible people, or whether they will ignore it all as usual and rely on their victims' aversion to reading any science literature which might shake their 'unshakeable' faith.

Researchers have shown that the toothed whales all have broken versions of two genes (Mx1 and Mx2)

Rapid Human Evolution - Update

Fore victim of kuru

Eating human brains helped Papua New Guinea tribe resist disease, research shows | Science | The Guardian

Researchers have discovered that the gene which arose in the Fore people of Papua New Guinea in response to the prion disease, kuru, also gives protection against other prion diseases.

Some time ago I reported on an unarguable case of rapid Darwinian evolution in the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. Briefly, the local religious custom of ritually eating the brain of dead relatives had produced a high risk of contracting the transmissible prion disease, kuru, an invariably fatal dementia very similar to BSE (mad cow disease) in cattle, scrapie in sheep and CJD in humans. This placed the population under intense selection pressure where any resistance to this disease had high survival value.