Religious 'Nones' Quickly Becoming Less Religious

Religious 'nones' becoming more secular | Pew Research Center

More signs of the growing penetration of secular Atheism into that bastion of Christian fundamentalism, the USA, was published today by the Pew Research Center. One wonders if there will ever again be an honest survey which is good news for religion. It has been relentlessly bad news for about the last 50 years and seems to be getting much worse.

Recent surveys have tended to concentrate not so much on the growth of Atheism in America per se but in the growth on 'nones' as a proportion of the population and consequent decline in the proportion of groups such as Catholics, Episcopalian, Baptist and other Protestants, etc.

Several people have rightly pointed out that 'none' is not the same as Atheist and that many 'nones' remain religious, some deeply so. It simply means anyone who doesn't self-identify as affiliated to any particular faith or denomination.

The Power Of Magical Thinking

Believing What We Do Not Believe: Acquiescence to Superstitious Beliefs and Other Powerful Intuitions | PsycNET

How do religious people manage to hold two mutually exclusive view simultaneously?

How for example, does someone like Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project and passionate advocate for evolution on an old Earth in an older Universe, whose entire academic career depended on his understanding and acceptance of the role of DNA in evolution, still manage to believe he needs to beg forgiveness because he inherited the 'sin' of a founding pair of humans who were made by magic a few thousand years ago?

Blessed Are The Cringe-Makers...

Talking Jesus Booklet | Evangelical Alliance, Church of England & Hope Together

I wrote a few days ago about a survey showing that 39% of English people believed Jesus is fiction. This survey, carried out by Barna Group and ComRes, has now been published in the form of a booklet - and it makes some more astonishing reading.

Firstly, it found that, of those English adults who believe Jesus was real, only 20% believe he was a god. 47% think he was a normal human being, a prophet or a spiritual leader of some sort. If anything, this finding is even more encouraging than the 39% who think Jesus is fiction.

Evolution In Progress In Europe's Smallest Bird

Female Western goldcrest (R. r. regulus)

Photo credit: Missy Osborn Source: Wikipedia

We went to church this morning. To be strictly accurate, we went to a church car park.

Against the backdrop of a leaden sky and slightly damping but unseasonably mild breeze, and following a fair amount of rain yesterday, we decided to go for a slightly muddy walk in St Mary's Fields in Kidlington. What we saw leads me to another illustration of the logical absurdity and scientific sterility of the cult of creationism in its various sub-flavours.

We had to go to Kidlington to check on some work being done to a cottage for an absent relative, so stuck for something to do we decided to explore this village to the north of Oxford which claims to be the biggest

Good Without God - Children of Atheists More Generous

The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World | Current Biology

Despite their posturing as paragons of moral virtue, often shouted out from what more resembles the sewer beneath gutter than the rooftops they imagine they are standing on, a study has shown that children of religious parents, and so it must be assumed the parents from whom these children get their morals, are actually less moral than the children of Atheist parents.

How Humans And Rice Co-Evolved

Three geographically separate domestications of Asian rice : Nature Plants

Here is a good example of how a change in a species' environment can cause evolution and how that evolutionary change can feed back into the environment to cause changes in yet another species. In this case it's about how the different varieties of rice evolved and how these new varieties then facilitated changes in human populations and human culture.

It has generally been assumed that rice cultivation began in China along the Yangtze River Valley some

The Darwin Creationist Award 2015 - Call For Candidates

After a gap of a year, I've decided to reinstate the prestigious Darwin Creationist Award. Well, there are far too many hilarious anti-science, pro-ignorant superstition posts on Facebook and Twitter to waste on the gullible and credulous who probably don't appreciate the funny side or the sheer 22 caret gold balm-pot lunacy that lurks in creationism, so we might as well have a good laugh and allow a wider audience to enjoy them too.

And what better way to discredit creationism than a display of creationist... er... creativity, and lack of critical thinking skills, than to put them on public display?

Unlike the Darwin Award, which is given to anyone who, by an act so stupid, improved the human gene pool by removing themselves and their genes from it, the Darwin Creationist award is given to the creationists who, by a post on the social media so stupid that it helps to improve the human meme pool by removing creationism from it. The winner will be decided by popular vote. The prize will be getting their effort to a wider audience so they can enjoy it too.

Recent winners can be see here, and here. Can anyone beat Joe Cienkowski's winning entry from 2013?

Post links in comments below, in reply to the post on G+ or to my Facebook timeline here or the dedicated Darwin Creationist Award Facebook page. Please supply a link to the candidate post with enough detail to identify the poster and include an optional citation explaining why the candidate is worthy of the award. Posts must be original. Creationists may not nominate themselves, even if under the impression that the award is intended as an endorsement of their post.

Here's a starter:

1. Nominee: Richard Haralambos (Facebook) - 03 Nov 2015
   
   Text: Lots nonsense they drape in science that are nothing but (theories) they call it but rare nothing but logical fallacy and strawman invented stories....
   Smaller then the head of a pin.... Idiots with no common sense can tell that's weak and stupid...
   
   Citation: In typical creationist self-worshipping style, Richard feels he doesn't need to learn any science because his intuition tells him everything he needs to know, including the 'fact' that scientists are mentally defective for not agreeing with him.

Evolution In Progress: New Wasp Species Emerging

Utetes canaliculatus, one of the wasps in the process of evolving.

Sequential divergence and the multiplicative origin of community diversity | PNAS

And another mainstay of creationism - the nonsensical dogma that new species can't arise by evolution - comes crashing down, as does the dogma that speciation has never been observed.

Evolution is primarily driven by environmental change because these changes open up new opportunities for random variations to be an advantage in, so creating something for natural selection to select for (or not to select against). In this way, biodiversity feeds upon itself to give more biodiversity.

Jesus Is Fiction Say 39% of English People

Jesus 'not a real person' many believe - BBC News

According to a poll of 3,000 people living in England, conducted jointly by the Church of England, Hope and the Evangelical Alliance, 39% of those questions didn't believe Jesus was a real person. This was particularly marked amongst the under 35 year-olds who were 25% more likely to reject the historicity of Jesus than the over 35's.

The same survey also found that 'over 43%' of those interviewed believe Jesus rose from the dead. Stated that way round it doesn't look quite so bad for

Transitional Human Ancestor From Spain

Reconstruction of the skull and representation of Pliobates cataloniae.

Photo credit: Marta Palmero, Institut Català de Paleontologia

Miocene small-bodied ape from Eurasia sheds light on hominoid evolution

I said the other day that this was shaping up to be another bad week for creationists (are there ever any good ones?). Now scientists have only gone and found another of those 'non-existent transitional fossils'.

This one is from the our branch of the evolutionary tree at a point soon after the divergence of primates into the Old World or catarrhine monkeys and the anthropoid apes and close to the point where the anthropoid branch diverged again into the gibbons or hylobatids and the hominoids (great apes, including humans). It suggests that the last common ancestor of ours and gibbons was more gibbon-like than has generally been assumed.

Unlike Creationists, Ravens Can Tell Right From Wrong

Tolerance and reward equity predict cooperation in ravens (Corvus corax) : Scientific Reports

Who would you expect to be better at telling right from wrong and deciding on an ethical course of action, a devoutly religious person or a Raven?

The answer, if we take the word of creationists, religious fundamentalists and even many serious theologians, is maybe surprising.

God The Amnesiac Creator

Micromelerpeton credneri from the Early Permian of Germany. Regeneration of the forelimb is indicated in the sequence and results in a hand with malformations.

Credit: Kalliopi Monoyios - Science Illustration and Communication
Source: ScienceDaily

Deep-time evolution of regeneration and preaxial polarity in tetrapod limb development | Nature.

"Why doesn't God heal amputees?"

Despite all the claims of faith healers, all the assurances that if you have enough faith and pray hard enough, God will provide for your needs, humans don't regenerate limbs and nor do any other mammals. I suppose a small handful of amputees could be found who wouldn't want their limb(s) restored in full working order but I've never heard of one and I doubt many people have, so it's safe to assume that amongst amputees there are very many who must have tried prayer.

Yet there is no authenticated case of a human limb ever regenerating beyond the tip of a finger occasionally regenerating in children under 5 years old if the amputation is clean and above the nail bed.

Civil War Erupts In The Vatican

Vatican synod holds its line on gay couples but offers new hope to Catholic divorcees | World news | The Guardian

Pope Francis’s enemies inside the church leaked false story that he had a brain tumour, enraged Vatican says | National Post

Despite starting off with high hopes that Pope Francis would prevail in the Synod of Bishops in his efforts to liberalise the Catholic Church and soften its image, after three weeks of tortuous and acrimonious debate, the conservatives have again prevailed and reaffirmed the Catholic Church's implacably hostile bigotry toward homosexuality, again declaring that homosexuality is an 'intrinsic disorder'.

Why Smelly Eggs Evolved. No Intelligence There, Then!

Stick insect eggs

Photo credit: Piotr Naskrecki/Minden Pictures/Corbis | Source: Science

Stick insects lure ants with fatty knobs | Science/AAAS | News

Here's a lovely example of evolved mimicry, this time in stick insects. Stick insects are noted for their mimicry of, well... sticks really.

By studying the Australian stick insect, Eurycnema goliath, Australian scientists from Macquarie University, North Ryde, New South Wales and The University of Melbourne, have discovered that they also employ mimicry to have their eggs dispersed and protected - by ants.

Earliest Flowering Plants But No Bouquet for Creationists

Montsechia fossil

Photo: Bernard Gomez/Lyon University, France
Source: Smithsonian.com

Montsechia, an ancient aquatic angiosperm

I often used to start these sorts of blogs off with a comment about it being yet another bad week for creationism, but quite honestly it's increasingly difficult to find a week which hasn't been relentlessly bad for creationism.

No wonder they have just about given up trying to refute the scientific evidence against their crackpot notion and have tended to concentrate on trying to discredit the scientific method and even science itself, or simply trying to get away with ancient creationist articles that were long ago refuted by science, in the hope that they'll find a few ignorant dupes who don't know enough to know they've been refuted.

For example, this paper has pushed back the date of

How Science Works - New Thinking From Old Teeth

These 47 human teeth, dated to 80,000-120,000 years ago, were found in a limestone cave system in Daoxian, China.

Photos: S. Xing and X-J. Wu
Source: Nature (reprinted under licence #3733841429431)

Teeth from China reveal early human trek out of Africa | Nature.

An example of how science continually reassesses what it thinks it knows and adjusts its theories in the light of new evidence, was published a few days ago in Nature. It's things like this that makes science such an exciting, living thing, full of surprises and so rewarding for anyone interested in gaining a real understanding of the world we live in.

We thought we had the pattern of the expansion of fully modern humans out of Africa and into Eurasia pretty much worked out, give or take a few thousand years. It also seemed fairly clear that our interaction with the

Order From Chaos, Even In The Rocks Of Ages

Why Hexagonal Basalt Columns? | Physical Review Letters

I've never been to the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, nor to Fingal's Cave on Staffa in the Outer Hebrides but they're on my bucket list. Maybe one day when I'm rich from <irony>all my book sales </irony>. What I have seen though is the Great Whin Sill alongside Hadrian's Wall at Houseteads in Cumbria.

They're not so obvious there but parts of the Whin Sill are composed of hexagonal stacks like the Giant's Causeway. At first glance it would be easy to assume that they are man-made or even superman-made (hence the legend of Benandonner and Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn MacCool)), those remnants of the pre-Christian Irish pantheon.

Creationism Fails! Universe Didn't Need A God To Exist

Short distance physics of the inflationary de Sitter universe - IOPscience.

A team of Canadian theoretical physicists claim to have solved the question of how the Universe arose from nothing. And guess what? It didn't need a magic creator; it can all be explained in materialist terms.

Now, I don't have the maths or detailed knowledge of physics to be able to fully understand the underlying principles they used, let alone to be able to explain it in simple terms, so I'm dependant on what others have said.

Oldest Mammal Skin, Hair and Internal Organs.

Spinolestes xenarthrosus, 125 million-year-old remains, found in Cuenca, in what was the Las Hoyas wetland area of central Spain.

Photograph: Georg Oleschinski.
Source: The Guardian.

A Cretaceous eutriconodont and integument evolution in early mammals | Nature.

Like the stunning early bird fossil from Spain which I wrote about a few days ago, another fossil from Spain, this time of an early mammal from about the same period, demands some answers from creationists. Like the bird fossil, this one sheds a lot of light on the early evolution of this order as they diversified from their reptilian ancestors in an environment still dominated by the dinosaurs.

The thing about this fossil, apart from its age, is the amazing detail of the hair, skin and internal organs which has been preserved. The belief is that the body of this small, rat-sized, insect-eating mammal probably ended up in a bog where it became coated with a bacterial sheet soon after death which offered a degree of protection. It extends the earliest fossil record of mammalian skin back 60 million years to 125 million years.

No Doubt Now, Birds Evolved From Dinosaurs

A comprehensive phylogeny of birds (Aves) using targeted next-generation DNA sequencing | Nature.

Just a couple of days ago I wrote about another one of those 'transitional' fossils creatonists insist aren't there, and how this one shows how birds had evolved out of theropod dinosaurs and should more properly be regarded as flying dinosaurs.

I also speculated about whether it was warm-bloodedness and feathers which helps them survive the climate change following the the meteor strike which probably abruptly exterminated the terrestrial dinosaurs so opening up niches for the birds and mammals to radiate into.