Tool bending in New Caledonian crows | Open Science
More evidence today that humans are not the only species with the intelligence and cognitive abilities to make and use tools.
We now know that several other species have the cognitive ability to make tools and at least one, the Caledonian Crow, goes one step further and not only makes simple modifications like stripping leaves from a twig but actually shapes the tool precisely, designing a tool fit for purpose.
We have known since 2002 that captive Caledonian crows such as the famous 'Betty' will bend wire into a hook to retrieve food. Wire is of course not a natural substance yet these crows appear to understand not only the shape and dimensions of the hook they need, but they also understand the tensile and maleability qualities of the wire they use. Because they were captive crows however it was always a possibility that there had been an element of training involved, even inadvertently.
Religion, Creationism, evolution, science and politics from a centre-left atheist humanist. The blog religious frauds tell lies about.
Wednesday 10 August 2016
Crows Intelligently Refute Genesis
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Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Intelligence
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Science
Monday 8 August 2016
Punishment For Abusive Priests - Catholic Style
Archbishop Anthony Sablan Apuron of Guam "On Leave" |
Life can be so hard for a humble Catholic priest! You wonder sometimes how they manage to put up with it.
Take for example Rev. Louis Brouillard. Brouillard served in Guam from the 1940s through the 1970s, teaching at San Vicente and Father Duenas Memorial schools. He is now 95 and lives quietly on his church pension in Pine City, Minnesota, USA.
While in Guam he molested somewhere between two and twenty boys - he could not remember the exact number. Nor could he remember Leo B. Tudela, now aged 73, who gave an emotional testimony to the Guam Legislature appealing for it to raise the statute of limitations from the current two years for those who have sexally abused minors, so that a case can be brought against the former Archbishop of Guam, Anthony S. Apuron, under whose jurisdiction the abuses took place.
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Catholics
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Humanism
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Morality
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Religious abuse
Why Science Works - And Religion Doesn't
The news from CERN that I wrote about yesterday reminded me for some reason about a blog post from a few years ago that neatly illustrates the fundamental difference between the way good science is done and the way 'good' religious apologetics is done.
The news from CERN was, of course, the news that scientists there had called a press conference to announce that what they thought was tentative evidence of a new, unexpected and unexplained fundamental particle was actually nothing of the sort. It was almost certainly a statistical anomaly as shown by the fact that they had been unable to replicate it.
The news from CERN was, of course, the news that scientists there had called a press conference to announce that what they thought was tentative evidence of a new, unexpected and unexplained fundamental particle was actually nothing of the sort. It was almost certainly a statistical anomaly as shown by the fact that they had been unable to replicate it.
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Atheism
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Christianity
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Religion
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Science
Sunday 7 August 2016
Why Science Works - LHC Blip Vanishes
Blip flop as tantalising bump in Large Hadron Collider data disappears | Science | The Guardian
These little news items about science getting something wrong, or changing it's collective mind, seem to excite creationists inordinately, appealing as creationism does to the ignorant and scientifically illiterate in society.
But of course, this is exactly what science is all about. It is all about honestly assessing and reassessing the evidence; about checking and rechecking and above all being prepared to change its collective mind when the evidence changes.
These little news items about science getting something wrong, or changing it's collective mind, seem to excite creationists inordinately, appealing as creationism does to the ignorant and scientifically illiterate in society.
But of course, this is exactly what science is all about. It is all about honestly assessing and reassessing the evidence; about checking and rechecking and above all being prepared to change its collective mind when the evidence changes.
The Great Flood Happened - In China
Outburst flood at 1920 BCE supports historicity of China’s Great Flood and the Xia dynasty - Science
One of the many problems faced by Bible literalists is the singular lack of evidence for any of it, especially the much-cherished early creation myths found in Genesis. This means that those who try to cling at all costs to this primitive superstition have to perform all manner of frankly idiotic mental gymnastics to either explain away the lack of evidence or try to force-fit other geological evidence into their mythology.
One traditional attempt is to claim that many/most/all other cultures have a flood myth in their history. No matter how little these, where there are in fact any, match the biblical flood myth, they will always be waved around as proof of the historical accuracy of the Bible, as though not actually equating to the biblical myth in time, location, scope or detail actually mattered. There is the story of a flood at some point, therefore this is the biblical flood - case closed!
One of the many problems faced by Bible literalists is the singular lack of evidence for any of it, especially the much-cherished early creation myths found in Genesis. This means that those who try to cling at all costs to this primitive superstition have to perform all manner of frankly idiotic mental gymnastics to either explain away the lack of evidence or try to force-fit other geological evidence into their mythology.
One traditional attempt is to claim that many/most/all other cultures have a flood myth in their history. No matter how little these, where there are in fact any, match the biblical flood myth, they will always be waved around as proof of the historical accuracy of the Bible, as though not actually equating to the biblical myth in time, location, scope or detail actually mattered. There is the story of a flood at some point, therefore this is the biblical flood - case closed!
Saturday 6 August 2016
Watching Evolution in Florida!
Study spots evolution in action in Florida bird | Science | AAAS
It's become something of an online ritual; almost a religious rite. Creationists come bursting into a debate group and announce confidently that evolution has never been observed and then they get given several examples of observed instances of evolution. Then they declare that that wasn't evolution and insist evolution is something unrecognisable as the scientific theory of evolution or the observable phenomenon the theory seeks to explain.
It's the equivalent ofsomeone posing as an expert on geometry and claiming there is no such thing as a circle, then, when shown a circle, declaring that a real circle should have a circumference to radius ratio of exactly 3 because the Bible says so.
It's become something of an online ritual; almost a religious rite. Creationists come bursting into a debate group and announce confidently that evolution has never been observed and then they get given several examples of observed instances of evolution. Then they declare that that wasn't evolution and insist evolution is something unrecognisable as the scientific theory of evolution or the observable phenomenon the theory seeks to explain.
It's the equivalent ofsomeone posing as an expert on geometry and claiming there is no such thing as a circle, then, when shown a circle, declaring that a real circle should have a circumference to radius ratio of exactly 3 because the Bible says so.
Labels:
Biology
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Birds
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Science
Intelligently Evolving Elephants
Genetic connectivity across marginal habitats: the elephants of the Namib Desert - Ecology and Evolution.
The importance of intelligent, memetic evolution, as opposed to genetic evolution, is being increasingly recognised especially in sentient species. Groups of sentient animals can appear to be a different species based on lifestyle, habitat, social organisation, etc and yet be genetically almost indistinguishable. Pods of killer whales, for example, may have very different hunting strategies and occupy different parts of the ocean but differ only from other pods by culture.
The importance of intelligent, memetic evolution, as opposed to genetic evolution, is being increasingly recognised especially in sentient species. Groups of sentient animals can appear to be a different species based on lifestyle, habitat, social organisation, etc and yet be genetically almost indistinguishable. Pods of killer whales, for example, may have very different hunting strategies and occupy different parts of the ocean but differ only from other pods by culture.
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Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Memes
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Science
Wednesday 3 August 2016
Catholicism In Ireland In Disarray!
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin - "unhappy about an atmosphere that was growing" |
From being the major power in the land in the Republic of Ireland just 25 years ago, Catholicism continues to degenerate into farce and disrepute.
The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin has now said he will stop sending trainee priests to the Republic's top Seminary, St Patrick's College, Maynooth and will be sending them to Rome's Irish College instead. This is because of what Archbishop Martin called a "poisonous culture of anonymous letters" amid persistent rumours and whistleblower attempts to expose a growing gay culture at the seminary.
Unintelligent Design - Evolving Blindness
Fossil cyclostomes from the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte (For caption see original paper) |
No sooner do we have a paper on the evolution of mammalian eyes that shows any hypothetical 'intelligent (sic) designer' as an incompetent fool with no plan, we have another paper which shows pretty much the same with regards to the evolution of eyes in the early vertebrates.
This time, creationist have to explain why their supposed designer gave hagfish perfectly good eyes then set about making them go blind with just remnants of their former functional eyes. It's revealing that creationist regard this as evidence of intelligence!
Using scanning electron microscopes, the research team led by Professor Sarah Gabbott from the Department of Geology, University of Leicester, UK, examined the 300 million year-old fossils of lampreys (Mayomyzon) and hagfish (Myxinikela) from Carboniferous rocks in Mazon Creek fossil bed, Illinois, USA. What they found has changed our understanding of the pace of the evolution of the vertebrate eye.
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Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Science
Unintelligent Design - Evolution Of Colour-Blindness
Seeing you in black and white. |
Why do dogs (and most mammals) not have colour vision? The answer seems to be that they lost it so they could better compete with predatory dinosaurs!
So how did that work? You would expect colour vision to be advantageous so if early mammals needed to compete with dinosaurs - which probably had colour vision, wouldn't having better colour vision be the way to go? But of course, evolution doesn't think and plan. Maybe if it did and used human intuition that's what it might have tried. However, the dinosaurs would also have been evolving and responding to the challenge of these better-equipped mammals and there is no guarantee that the mammals would have won that particular arms race.
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Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Science
Tuesday 2 August 2016
Extinction Of The Mammoths. No Intelligence Seen.
Timing and causes of mid-Holocene mammoth extinction on St. Paul Island, Alaska - PNAS
We probably now know what caused the final extinction of mammoths. It was a simple lack of fresh water in their last island refuge as the climate changed.
What creationists now have to tell us is why their intelligent (sic) designer decided to kill them off and why it chose this method, because it looks for all the world like the sort of thing that might well happen with a mindless, undirected natural process. But of course, a creationist has to believe nothing happens because of chance or unfortunate accident and everything happens for a purpose and according to a plan.
We probably now know what caused the final extinction of mammoths. It was a simple lack of fresh water in their last island refuge as the climate changed.
What creationists now have to tell us is why their intelligent (sic) designer decided to kill them off and why it chose this method, because it looks for all the world like the sort of thing that might well happen with a mindless, undirected natural process. But of course, a creationist has to believe nothing happens because of chance or unfortunate accident and everything happens for a purpose and according to a plan.
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Archaeology
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Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Science
Thursday 28 July 2016
Minnesota Sex Scandal - Pope's Envoy in 'Criminal' Cover-up.
Archbishop Niestedt |
The simmering sex scandals that have beset the US Catholic Archdiocese of Minnesota and St Paul bubbled over again this week with the news that an outraged priest, the Rev. Dan Griffith, released a memo in which he detailed possible criminal activity by none other than the Papal Nuncio. The Rev Griffith was working at a high level in the diocese and was the diocesan liaison with lawyers appointed to investigate the handling of sex abuse scandals.
The memo records how Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the Vatican's ambassador to the USA, ordered the destruction of evidence which implicated the former Archbishop of Minnesota and St Paul, Archbishop John C. Nienstedt, in possible criminal activities. In the memo Rev Griffith said the actions of the Papal Nuncio amounted to “a good old fashioned cover-up to preserve power and avoid scandal.”
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Catholics
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Religious abuse
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Secularism
Wednesday 27 July 2016
The 'Intelligent Designer' Gets Up Our Nose.
MRSA Photograph: By R Parulan Jr./Getty Images/Flickr RF |
Although examples of stupid design abound in nature, especially in the related fields of biological arms races and parasitism, this one take some beating. It's been going on not just under our very noses but up them.
The story so far (if you believe in intelligent (sic) design, that is): the common bacterium Staphylococcus aureus comes in several varieties, most of which are harmless to humans but a few are harmful. Intelligent (sic) design proponents who normally deny that intelligent (sic) design has anything to do with religion because that would make it difficult to get this Bible literalism disguised as science taught in schools in secular countries, will never-the-less tell you that these harmful bacteria are God's punishment on mankind for original sin.
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Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Health
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Science
Another End Of The World!
Rev John Hagee |
His current prediction is for 30 August this year. There is no doubt at all about this. Like all his other predictions, this has been revealed to him by God and from his study of 'God's Holy Word' in the 'inerrant' Bible, so there can't be any doubt. There never is any doubt! There was never any doubt about all the previous predictions either!
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Atheism
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Christianity
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Fraud
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Religion
Monday 25 July 2016
Morality And Pre-Roman Civilisation in England
Field system in South Downs, England South Downs National Park Authority |
A little news item from southern England has been causing a flutter of excitement by posing a few questions for historians recently. It should, if properly understood, cause fundamentalist theists to ask themselves a few questions too.
The news item concerned a recent discovery that agriculture was highly organised in the immediate pre-Roman era in England. This was shown by the discovery of an extensive field system in what is now modern West Sussex and Hampshire. It was discovered using a new laser-based aerial survey technique known as LiDAR.
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Anthropology
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History
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Humanism
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Morality
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Religion
Friday 22 July 2016
Gut Microbes Confirm Our Evolution
Artist's impression of hominid gut microbiota. Image credit: The University of Texas at Austin. Illustration by Jenna Luecke |
Further confirmation that scientists have the hominid family tree about right in terms of time and branching has been provided in a paper published today in Science. It shows that some of the symbiotic bacteria we carry in our gut today have been with not only us but our close relatives from before we diverged into the different African apes and humans, and that they diverged and speciated at the same time.
This isn't really a surprise to evolutionary scientists because that is exactly what we would expect to happen. Mere confirmation of what is already known from the fossil and genetic evidence would scarcely raise an eyebrow and might not even be considered worth publishing. But, from a scientific point of view, the interesting thing here is that we don't, as was thought, acquire all out gut microbiota from our general environment. At least some of it seems to be inherited, hence forming a relatively isolated genetic line which has been maintained in the different diverging species over hundreds of thousands of generations.
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Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Science
Tuesday 19 July 2016
Kendall House Abuse: What God Was Watching?
Kendall House Abuse Centre |
The report of the review of Kendall House, an Anglican girls' home in Gravesend, Kent, ordered by Bishop of Rochester, is truly shocking! It reveals a regime of systematic physical, psychological and sexual abuse of young, troubled girls, some as young as 11 years old, to the extent that almost every child was subjected to this abuse routinely and as a matter of 'normal' practice.
Bear in mind as you read this that one of the supposed 'selling points' of religion is that unlike 'atheistic' or secular institutions, they provide these social support institutions out of a sense of moral duty and obligation to their fellows - and because Jesus told them to!
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Anglicans
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Atheism
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Christianity
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Hypocrisy
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Religious abuse
Monday 18 July 2016
European Union - Impact of EU Immigration
Brexit Lie |
Maybe I'm talking to the converted and maybe I'm saying "I told you so!" but this report from the Centre for Economic Performance of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) by Jonathan Wadsworth, Swati Dhingra, Gianmarco Ottaviano and John Van Reenen, vindicates just about everything I have written about the immigration issue in respect of the EU referendum.
It reveals the blatant lies peddled by the Leave side for their own Machiavellian political ambitions, and it has to be said, shows the failure of the Remain side in failing to counter those lies.
Friday 8 July 2016
Transitional Bird Wings In Cretaceous Amber!
For description see original paper |
More bad news for creationists to find coping strategies for. An interesting find in amber deposits from Myanmar has revealed a little more about the evolution of birds, or more precisely feathers, during the Cretaceous. It shows a bird wing with a transitional skeleton!
The details were published in an open access paper in Nature Communications a few days ago by an international research team was led by Dr Xing Lida from the China University of Geosciences, and colleagues from Canada, United States and Professor Mike Benton from the University of Bristol, UK. It shows tiny wings in astonishing detail, including bones, skin, muscles and feathers. The fine structure of the feathers even shows what is probably evidence of colour.
The significance of this find, apart from the fact that the wings were tiny - only two to three centimeters long - is that they are from hatchling enantiornithine birds which still had fingers with well-developed claws. This group of early birds became extinct along with dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous.
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Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Science
Wednesday 6 July 2016
Just Another Catholic Paedophile Seminarian
Seminary Student Sentenced To 15 Years For Arranging Sex With Infants
It would not be fair to assume that all expelled Catholic seminarians were expelled for paedophilia, but this example shows the continuing weakness in the Catholic Church's recruitment procedures in that these predators are still not being picked up earlier. If they hadn't been so careless they might well have made it into the priesthood where they had trusted access to vulnerable people.
It would not be fair to assume that all expelled Catholic seminarians were expelled for paedophilia, but this example shows the continuing weakness in the Catholic Church's recruitment procedures in that these predators are still not being picked up earlier. If they hadn't been so careless they might well have made it into the priesthood where they had trusted access to vulnerable people.
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Catholics
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Parasitism
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Religious abuse
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