Amy2B copy number variation reveals starch diet adaptations in ancient European dogs | Open Science
Here is a sweet treat for dog lovers, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists, though not so much for creationists.
An open access paper published very recently in Royal Society Open Science not only sheds light on domestic dog and modern human co-evolution but illustrates an important principle in evolutionary biology: evolution will occur in the presence of a change in the environment with little or no change in the information in the genome. It also shows how gene duplication can play an enormous role in the evolution of a species.
Religion, Creationism, evolution, science and politics from a centre-left atheist humanist. The blog religious frauds tell lies about.
Wednesday 16 November 2016
Monday 14 November 2016
Nasty Design. Nasty Designer?
Mycobacterium abscessus, a species of multidrug resistant mycobacteria, has recently emerged as a significant global threat to individuals with cystic fibrosis and other lung diseases. Picture credit: © adiruch na chiangmai / Fotolia Source: ScienceDaily |
I've written several posts with examples of the sheer malevolent nastiness of creationists' notional intelligent (sic) designer, asking if it can get any nastier, but this latest example really does take some beating.
It has now redesigned a mycobacterium so it can now overcome our attempts to stop it making children with cystic fibrosis even sicker, often fallay so!
This was discovered by a team from the University of Cambridge, UK and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute was published a few days ago in Science:
Labels:
Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Medicine
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Science
Thursday 10 November 2016
Brain Development and Creationism
Evolution of Osteocrin as an activity-regulated factor in the primate brain : Nature : Nature Research
Scientists at Harvard Medical School have discovered that a gene that regulates bone and muscle growth may also be involved in brain development and activity in primates, including humans. In particular, this gene appears to be active in areas of the brain involved in cognition and learning. Their finding were published yesterday in Nature.
This is a good example of how genes can be used by the evolutionary process for new functions, and, because this particular retooled gene is only found in primates, it suggests that the repurposing occurred in a common ancestor of this clade.
Scientists at Harvard Medical School have discovered that a gene that regulates bone and muscle growth may also be involved in brain development and activity in primates, including humans. In particular, this gene appears to be active in areas of the brain involved in cognition and learning. Their finding were published yesterday in Nature.
This is a good example of how genes can be used by the evolutionary process for new functions, and, because this particular retooled gene is only found in primates, it suggests that the repurposing occurred in a common ancestor of this clade.
Tuesday 8 November 2016
Ten Great Reasons Women Should Vote For Trump
Donald Trump is the perfect choice for women.
Here are ten great reasons women should vote for him!
Here are ten great reasons women should vote for him!
- He has a penis and you need a penis to run a country. Even a small one will do. Women are physically handicapped in the genital department.
- He doesn't have a vagina, despite what his enemies call him. A vagina would mean he can't think rationally.
- He grabs women he happens to meet in lifts by
Labels:
Politics
Monday 7 November 2016
Time For Positive Thinking!
It's time for Americans to think and act positively!
Don't be negative!
Don't vote for Hillary just because Trump is a racist who is supported by the KKK and just about every white supremacist redneck!
Don't vote for her just because Trump is a self-obsessed psychopath who regards everyone else as insignificant!
Don't be negative!
Don't vote for Hillary just because Trump is a racist who is supported by the KKK and just about every white supremacist redneck!
Don't vote for her just because Trump is a self-obsessed psychopath who regards everyone else as insignificant!
Labels:
Politics
Thursday 3 November 2016
Catholic Church Can Keep Child Abuse Secret!
Pope Francis "We will not take one step back..." |
The Batton Rouge diocese had contested a case for negligence brought against them and Fr. Jeff Bayhi by Rebecca Mayeux, now 22. She had claimed that in 2008, when she was 14, she told Fr. Jeff Bayhi that she was being sexually abused by a fellow parishioner but Fr. Jeff Bayhi did nothing to prevent the abuse continuing.
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Catholics
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Religious abuse
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Secularism
No Women Priests! Cowardly Pope Blames His Predecessor.
Pope Francis - ban on women priests for ever, Pope John Paul II said so! |
Popes are supposed to be infallible and to be the absolute, ultimate authority on all spiritual and ecumenical matters - but not when it comes to trying to ride two horses simultaneously, it seems.
Face with a question from a Swiss journalist about whether women ever being admitted to the Catholic priesthood, Pope Francis confirmed that the ban would remain in place. When pressed he blamed Pope John Paul II who confirmed the ban in 1994, saying, "Saint Pope John Paul II had the last clear word on this and it stands, this stands".
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Catholics
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Christianity
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Religion
Tuesday 1 November 2016
A Christian Husband's Guide to Sleeping Around
A good Christian man with a wife and bit on the side. |
Still trying to understand why American fundamentalist Christians regard Donald Trump as such a great role model and eminently suited to being President of the USA, I looked further into how Christian fundamentalists see a man's marital infidelities. So I turned again to the Biblical Gender Roles blog for an explanation.
Maybe fundamentalist Christians won't be surprised by the hypocritical double standards and cherry-picking approach to the Bible that I found there, but I suspect normal people might at least raise an eyebrow. After all, don't fundamentalists normally make a big thing of the Ten Commandments, including the instruction to not covet a neighbour's wife? Well, that was a mistake, apparently, or maybe it just applies to other people.
Labels:
Christianity
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Hypocrisy
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Morality
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Politics
Monday 31 October 2016
A Christian Guide to Making Your Wife Have Sex
Wholesome Christian husband using God-approved moral blackmail to force sexual compliance. |
Remember, Donald Trump's seduction technique, and one of the qualities that so endear him to fundamentalist Christians, is to grab a passing woman by her 'pussy' and expect her to become uncontrollably aroused at the thought of his large wealth. So how does this fit in with current Christian teaching? For this I turned to the fundamentalist Christian blogsite, Biblical Gender Roles.
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Christianity
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Humanism
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Morality
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Politics
Sunday 30 October 2016
Christian Hypocrisy and Donald Trump
Donald Trump. Candidate for Christian values. |
It can best be summed up in a single word - 'hypocrisy'. The longer version is 'power and influence at any price'.
Of course, with the Bible being a cherry-picker's delight, with it being possible to find a passage or two, or maybe a whole chapter, that supports almost any cause, it can be difficult to discern what might be termed 'Christian values' in the it. And most of these can usually be contradicted with another passage somewhere, but perhaps the nearest thing to a definitive statement of what Christian are supposed to behave like is the so-called Beatitudes from the 'sermon on the mount'.
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Christianity
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Politics
Friday 28 October 2016
'Alien' Life Beneath Canada?
Kidd Creek Mine, Timmins, Ontario. |
According to research results publish open access in Nature Communications yesterday, there could be life in water which has been isolated in rocks deep below Earth's surface for at least 1 billion years and possibly 2.7 billion years, i.e for maybe half the life of the planet.
This water, which is now seeping to the deep Kidd Creek mine 2.4 Km below Timmins, Northern Ontario, Canada, had been shown to have been isolated for this long in 2013. What is new in yesterday's report is the news that this water is capable of sustaining sulphur-based life similar to that found elsewhere in isolated subsurface water. Bacterial life has been found in similar structures in South Africa but this, if proven, would be ten times older.
Labels:
Biology
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Creationism
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Geology
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Science
Thursday 27 October 2016
Oh Creation! Interbreeding Chimps and Bonobos!
Chimpanzee genomic diversity reveals ancient admixture with bonobos | Science.
We are getting used to the relatively new science of genome analysis throwing up regular surprises and calling into question a few things we thought we understood reasonably well, but then that's science. Science wouldn't be any use if we didn't keep learning new things, revising old assumptions and so making progress.
For example, we once thought that modern humans evolved in East (or possibly South) Africa and that a small band of Homo sapiens followed an earlier migration of H. erectus and left Africa for Eurasia and thence into the Americas and the Pacific. We
We are getting used to the relatively new science of genome analysis throwing up regular surprises and calling into question a few things we thought we understood reasonably well, but then that's science. Science wouldn't be any use if we didn't keep learning new things, revising old assumptions and so making progress.
For example, we once thought that modern humans evolved in East (or possibly South) Africa and that a small band of Homo sapiens followed an earlier migration of H. erectus and left Africa for Eurasia and thence into the Americas and the Pacific. We
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Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Science
Monday 24 October 2016
'Gay Cake' Victory Over Christian Bigotry
Ashers of Belfast. Guilty of religiously-inspired homophobic discrimination. Source: BBC Northern Ireland |
In a victory for basic human rights over Christian bigotry, the Court of Appeal has ruled that a Northern Ireland baker was wrong to refuse to make and decorate a cake for a gay campaign to legalise same-sex marriage because they disagreed with their life-style. The cake was to bear the slogan 'Support gay marriage".
Ashers, a family firm of Belfast, initially accepted the order from gay rights activist, Gareth Lee, but then declined it on the grounds that it went against their religious belief. The cake had been ordered for a private party to celebrate the end of Northern Ireland Anti-homophobic Week.
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Christianity
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Human Rights
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Religion
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Secularism
Saturday 22 October 2016
Windsurfing Mute Swans!
Mute swan, Cygnus olor Credit: Wikipedia |
A lovely example of a structure evolved for one purpose being used for another, unrelated purpose was published very recently in a short communication in The Wilson Journal of Ornithology.
The author, Olle Terenius, of the Department of Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden, described seeing mute swans, Cygnus olor, using their raised wings to windsurf for some considerable distance. Regrettably, the full text sits behind a paywall.
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Biology
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Birds
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Science
Friday 21 October 2016
Double Dose Of Frog DNA Plagues Creationism
The genome of the frog X. laevis (top) is roughly double that of its relative, X. tropicalis (bottom). Credit: Professor Atsushi Suzuki, Hiroshima University |
There are so many different forms of creationism that it's difficult to find any consistency between any two creationists and even in the same creationist at times. This make it handy for them to move the goalposts around of course because they can always change this or that definition or declare this or that impossible or possible according to the needs of the argument in hand.
However, there are a couple of pieces of dogma that are fairly consistently trotted out and are common to most flavours of creationism:
- Mutations are always harmful and can't give rise to new information.
- New species can't arise by natural processes so have to be created.
It must come as a shock then when a scientific paper is published showing both of these to be untrue, and untrue moreover in the same species!
Labels:
Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Genetics
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Science
Something Fishy About Jaws!
Life reconstruction of Qilinyu, a 423-million-year-old fish from the Kuanti Formation (late Ludlow, Silurian) of Qujing, Yunnan, in Silurian waters. Photograph: Dinghua Yang |
A couple more of those little unknowns that drives science forward may have been solved this week by a team from Uppsala University, Sweden and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing, China.
The first is where did our jaws come from in our evolutionary past and the second is where exactly do the 'armour-plated', fish-like placoderms fit in with the evolution of bony fish and via them, the tetrapods, including us mammals. The Silurian placoderms lived over 400 million years ago and it was not clear whether they were the direct ancestors of the bony fish or a sister clade with the ancestral bony fish along with the cartilaginous fish.
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Biology
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Palaeontology
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Science
Wednesday 19 October 2016
Stone Age Cave Painters Recorded A New Species!
Early cave art and ancient DNA record the origin of European bison | Nature Communications.
For a creationist claim, the assertion that no new species have been seen to evolve takes some beating for its sheer denial of the readily available data. Now geneticists working at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, have shown that even the Stone Age painters of the caves such as Lascaux Cave, France, captured one such event in their art. Their findings were published yesterday in Nature Communications.
For a creationist claim, the assertion that no new species have been seen to evolve takes some beating for its sheer denial of the readily available data. Now geneticists working at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, have shown that even the Stone Age painters of the caves such as Lascaux Cave, France, captured one such event in their art. Their findings were published yesterday in Nature Communications.
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Anthropology
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Art
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Climate
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Creationism
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Evolution
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Geology
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Palaeontology
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Science
Thursday 13 October 2016
Lessons From Cyprus - Aphrodite, A Goddess For All Men
Birth of Venus (Aphrodite). Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) |
Cyprus, that beautiful, arid island in the eastern Mediterranean and possession of every Mediterranean power from Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Ottoman Turkey, and latterly Britain, is the place of legend. It is remote enough to be mysterious and culturally distinct, yet close enough to the major centres of regional power to be familiar. Not surprisingly, Cyprus had its own gods and its own legends about gods but, unlike those of Minoan Crete, we know quite a lot more about these gods if for no other reason than that, again unlike Minoan Create, the culture which worshipped the Cypriot gods didn't get wiped out in a sudden catastrophic natural disaster.
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Mythology
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Religion
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Secularism
Tuesday 11 October 2016
Irish Catholic Bishop Now 'Irrelevant'.
Fine Gael TD Kate O’Connell |
A measure of just how much contempt there is in the Irish Republic for the Catholic Church can be seen in an astonishingly frank attack on Archbishop Eamon Martin, Primate of Ireland, for his comments on the subject of the proposed liberalisation of Ireland's draconian abortion law, which is enshrined the Constitution.
A Fine Gael TD, Kate O’Connell, told the Irish Examiner,
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Anglicans
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Catholics
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Christianity
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Human Rights
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Humanism
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Religion
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Secularism
Sunday 9 October 2016
'Kind' Pope Francis Bashing the Gays Again!
Pope Francis: A 'global war' seeks to destroy marriage.
A few days ago in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, the Pope gave an almost perfect illustration of how the Catholic Church is completely incapable of reforming itself without giving up being the Catholic Church.
He reportedly told an audience of priests and seminarians that there is a 'global war to destroy marriage'. He was of course referring to moves to legalise same-sex marriage and so give equal human rights to homosexual couples rather than to stigmatise, persecute and deny basic rights to them as the church would prefer.
A few days ago in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, the Pope gave an almost perfect illustration of how the Catholic Church is completely incapable of reforming itself without giving up being the Catholic Church.
He reportedly told an audience of priests and seminarians that there is a 'global war to destroy marriage'. He was of course referring to moves to legalise same-sex marriage and so give equal human rights to homosexual couples rather than to stigmatise, persecute and deny basic rights to them as the church would prefer.
Labels:
Catholics
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Christianity
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Religion
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Secularism
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