Gut Microbes Influence Our Evolution

Diet-Microbiota Interactions Mediate Global Epigenetic Programming in Multiple Host Tissues | Molecular Cell:

We need to stop thinking of the higher animals (and maybe plants) as a single species with a single genome as the unit on which natural selection operates.

We, along with all higher animals, are colonies of more-or-less cooperating species each of which has it's own evolutionary 'agenda' but each of which, like us, is inextricably bound up with the evolution of the colony as a whole. In effect, what is evolving is the colony with its distributed genome. This also has damaging implications for creationism and its dressed up little brother, intelligent (sic) design.

Those Poor Christians Are Being Persecuted Again!

John Freshwater

Ohio Supreme Court Is Right To Uphold Firing Of Public School Teacher Who Promoted Creationism, Says Americans United.

In a ruling that will no doubt shock and enrage Christian fundamentalists everywhere, the Ohio Supreme Court has confirmed once again that even Christians have to obey the laws of the land. This will almost certainly be presented as a war on Christianity and a denial of their 'freedom' to disregard laws they don't like whilst demanding the right to impose their own 'laws' on everyone else.

The ruling brings to an end a four-year campaign to have a fundamentalist Christian creationist teacher, sacked for disregarding instructions not to teach his superstition as fact to public school children in contravention of the US Constitution's 'Establishment' clause, reinstated and to be allowed to continue to flout the law, ignore the Constitution and use his salaried position to teach his creationist version of 'science' to school children.

In a 4:3 verdict, the court ruled:

After detailed review of the voluminous record in this case, we hold that the court of appeals did not err in affirming the termination. The trial court properly found that the record supports, by clear and convincing evidence, Freshwater’s termination for insubordination in failing to

A Newly-Discovered Species of Archaic Humans?

Two Vanuatu girls.

Photo credit: Graham Crumb
Source: Wikipedia

People from Melanesia may carry genetic evidence of a previously unknown extinct hominid species

It's hard to see how the Abrahamic religions can continue to hold on to the myth of a single ancestral couple for the whole of humanity in the face of the onslaught from scientific evidence that this model is nonsensical. The Catholic Church's attempt to subscribe to it as an essential part of their dogma whilst also accepting the scientific evidence for the evolution of humans from a common ancestor with other apes and through a series of archaic pre-modern hominids is becoming increasingly untenable.

Something Dodgy In America

Major Players in 2016 Election Get Low Marks, Including Trump | Pew Research Center

Somehow the election figures and post-election polling returns are not adding up!

Something is looking decidedly dodgy. It's almost as though the actual election was conducted elsewhere because the result it produced looks oddly out of place.

Firstly, there is the fact that, with counting still to be completed in places, Clinton not only won the popular

Holy Poland!

In Poland in the presence of the first persons of the state officially crowned Jesus Christ | true-news

Poland is now an official monarchy - if you believe the Catholic Church.

In a ceremony in Krakow Cathedral, reportedly attended by government officials including President Andrzej Duda, Jesus was crowned King of Poland. The ceremony was also attended by 'huge numbers' from Germany, Canada and the United States as well as from the rest of Poland.

This is not the first divine monarch to occupy the

Why Christians Supported the Very Un-Christian Trump

How the faithful voted: A preliminary 2016 analysis | Pew Research Center

One of the most outstanding features of the American presidential election was the complete abandonment of any pretense of morality by the evangelical white conservative Christians in their eagerness to promote a white supremacist, misogynist, serial adulterer, self-confessed serial molester of women and public mocker of disabled people, to the top job. Almost as noticeable was the eerie silence from the black evangelicals and Catholics, even the hispanic Catholic leaders.

Rapid Human Evolution in America!

Partners from Canada’s northwest coast (from left, Barbara Petzelt, Harold Leighton, Bill Pahl, Wendy Pahl, Yvonne Ryan and Joycelynn Mitchell) collaborated with an international team of researchers on a genetic study of First Nations peoples – both present day and ancient.

Photo courtesy Metlakatla First Nation

A time transect of exomes from a Native American population before and after European contact | Nature Communications.

Right on the heels of the paper showing how a change in the domestic dog's environment drove their evolution, pushing them closer to humans, we have this example of how changes in the environment by one human group can have a major impact on the evolution of another human group.

In this case, the environmental change was in the microbial and viral environment of Native Americans brought about by contact with European colonists.

It has long been recognised that the huge range of viruses carried by Europeans, probably as a result of

Canine Conundrum For Creationists

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.

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

Emergence and spread of a human-transmissible multidrug-resistant nontuberculous mycobacterium | Science

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:

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.

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!

1. 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.
2. He doesn't have a vagina, despite what his enemies call him. A vagina would mean he can't think rationally.
3. He grabs women he happens to meet in lifts by

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!

Catholic Church Can Keep Child Abuse Secret!

Pope Francis "We will not take one step back..."

The Catholic Church scored a victory in Louisiana, USA, a few days ago in it's struggle to prevent priests having to report cases of child abuse to the law enforcement agencies. The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that Catholic priests do not have a duty to report instances of child abuse if they learn about them in the confessional.

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.

No Women Priests! Cowardly Pope Blames His Predecessor.

Pope Francis - ban on women priests for ever, Pope John Paul II said so!

Pope Francis says women will never be Roman Catholic priests | World news | The Guardian.

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".

A Christian Husband's Guide to Sleeping Around

A good Christian man with a wife and bit on the side.

How to train your wife not to be jealous | Biblical Gender Roles

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.

A Christian Guide to Making Your Wife Have Sex

Wholesome Christian husband using God-approved moral blackmail to force sexual compliance.

In a bid to understand the fascination of fundamentalist Christians with Donald Trump, and especially with their apparent admiration for his seduction technique, I thought I would conduct a little research into Christian teaching on bedroom matters, and in particular the approved gender roles within a marriage.

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.

Christian Hypocrisy and Donald Trump

Donald Trump. Candidate for Christian values.

In one of my occasional forays into American politics, let's take a look at what the almost universal endorsement of Donald Trump for POTU by the American conservative Christian right tells us about the American conservative Christian right.

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'.

'Alien' Life Beneath Canada?

Kidd Creek Mine, Timmins, Ontario.

Sulfur mass-independent fractionation in subsurface fracture waters indicates a long-standing sulfur cycle in Precambrian rocks : Nature Communications.

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.

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

'Gay Cake' Victory Over Christian Bigotry

Ashers of Belfast. Guilty of religiously-inspired homophobic discrimination.

Source: BBC Northern Ireland

'Gay cake' appeal: Christian bakers Ashers lose appeal - BBC News.

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.

Windsurfing Mute Swans!

Mute swan, Cygnus olor

Credit: Wikipedia

Windsurfing in Mute Swans (Cygnus olor) | The Wilson Journal of Ornithology

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.

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

Doubling down on DNA - Scienmag

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!

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

Early fossil fish shows where our jaws came from - Uppsala University, Sweden

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.

Stone Age Cave Painters Recorded A New Species!

Grotte de Niaux (Niaux cave in Ariège, France)

Photo credit: via University of Adelaide

Early cave art and ancient DNA record the origin of European bison | Nature Communications.

Black painting of bison (putative European bison, or wisent) at Grotte de Niaux (Niaux cave in Ariège, France), dated to the Magdalenian period (~17,000 years ago).

Photo credit: via University of Adelaide (under Creative Commons licence)

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.

Lessons From Cyprus - Aphrodite, A Goddess For All Men

Birth of Venus (Aphrodite). Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510)

When you're the goddess of love, everyone, and especially men, are bound to sit up and take note, especially if your beauty is legendary.

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.

Irish Catholic Bishop Now 'Irrelevant'.

Fine Gael TD Kate O’Connell

Fine Gael TD: Archbishop’s opinion on abortion ‘is not at all relevant’ | Irish Examiner.

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,

'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.

It's Time To Dump Trump!

I don't normally comment here on American politics, if for no other reason that I'm not American and believe Americans should decide their own affairs.

However, Donald Trump provokes me to make an exception. Donald Trump is not fit to run a used car lot, let alone the most powerful nation in history with a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying everything on this planet several times over. He has shown himself to be emotionally unstable and quite incapable of controlling his most hateful impulses. He has a sociopathic, even psychopathic disregard for other people. This latest revelation should have done for him as a serious presidential candidate but it

Altruism and Spiders

A female dark fishing spider (left) and its male counterpart, which sacrifices itself as a food source immediately after mating. A new study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Gonzaga University has found that this cannibalism can benefit the male's offspring.

Photo: Karina I. Helm
Source

Ultimate sacrifice: Spider's post-sex cannibalism aids offspring | University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Altruism is one of those evolutionary traits that creationists claim not to be able to comprehend for a couple of reasons:

1. It seems to require some sort of morality and a knowledge of outcomes, and they normally find it hard to think why anyone would do something for someone else if there is no promise of a reward. At least that is normally behind their claim that you need their god to be moral.
2. How can a trait which is detrimental to the individual in that it causes loss or harm, be advantageous in the Darwinian sense, and so be passed on differentially in preference to a trait for selfishness?

Even Educated Bees Do It!

The buff-tailed bumblebee, Bombus terrestris.

Source: Wikipedia

Associative Mechanisms Allow for Social Learning and Cultural Transmission of String Pulling in an Insect | PLOS Biology

It's now well known that humans are not the only species capable of learning new skills and passing these on to others.

Despite the old religious-based view of humans as having a unique intelligence not seen in other animals, and thus standing us apart from the rest of 'creation', like tool construction and use and the ability to solve problems, learning and culture are now being seen in a whole range of other animals. Until now though, this had been confined mostly to vertebrates and almost exclusively to mammals and birds.

Does God Favour Axolotls?

Early development reveals axolotl mysteries -- ScienceDaily

You can understand a creator being quite fond of axolotls. There is something fascinating about them, especially the way they look and behave a lot like some sort of fish with legs and even breathe underwater using gills.

Basically, the Mexican axolotl, Ambystoma mexicanum, is a big salamander which spends most of its life as a tadpole. They even breed in their juvenile form and only become land-based adults when their water dries up. They also have a massive genome by mammalian standards, all packed into just fourteen chromosomes. Their genome is far larger than any other known amphibians but this appears to be due almost entirely to repetitive gene duplication.

We Owe It All To Pollution!

Dr Rosalie Tostevin. Field work in Namibia.

Source: UCL
Credit: Fred Bowyer

Low-oxygen waters limited habitable space for early animals | Nature Communications.

The great thing about science is the way it all meshes neatly together. Although there may currently be gaps in our understanding these gaps are getting smaller and the piece that fills the gap almost always neatly fits in with what we already know.

Of course, there may be occasions when the piece doesn't quite fit and so we need to look again at the surrounding science, but in the long run, these conflicts are always resolved to smooth out the wrinkles and fill in the cracks.

And another one of these little gaps looks as though it might have been filled in. Despite the ever and unrealistically optimistic hope of creationists that the very next gap will be found to be where their god lives, no such god was found by science yet again. The answer was entirely consistent with what we already know - which is inevitable, when you think about it. It is inevitable because science is about reality and reality is consistent.

Talking Neanderthals Give Creationists Earache!

Tympanic membrane (grey), ossicular chain (yellow, green, red), and bony inner ear (blue) of a modern human with a One-Eurocent coin for scale.

© A. Stoessel & P. Gunz
Source

Morphology and function of Neandertal and modern human ear ossicles

Creationists struggle with archaic human like Neanderthals, Homo erectus and H. habilis trying out various ways to dismiss them as diseased and deformed individuals, forgeries, etc.

The slightly less delusional ones have learned that there are limits to the amount of evidence that can be denied without looking more than a little insane, so have learned to accept a form of evolution, albeit a ludicrously rapid one which requires several fully-formed new species to spring into existence every generation. To these, all hominids are merely minor variations and have all developed from the fully human people who supposedly got off the Ark about 4000 years ago.

Has The 'Intelligent Designer' Been Tweaking Zika?

Fatal Zika Virus Infection with Secondary Nonsexual Transmission - NEMJ Correspondence

Parasites in general and viruses like the zika virus in particular continue to be an embarrassment to creationists who insist everything is intelligently designed for a purpose.

The main embarrassment of course is in explaining why it designed them in the first place, although 'The Fall' is regularly trotted out as the excuse. But, this gives away the fact that the 'intelligent (sic) designer' is the Christian god and that intelligent design 'science' is fundamentalist, Bible-literalist Christianity posing as science to try to sneak past the 'Establishment Clause' in the US Constitution.

Ostrich Eggs Cracking Creationism

3.8-million-year-old ostrich eggshell fragments from Laetoli, Tanzania.

Image credit: Terry Harrison.
Source: Sci News

Protein sequences bound to mineral surfaces persist into deep time | eLife

An open access paper published yesterday shows something which should be frightening the wits out of creationists frauds, even if their willing dupes won't understand or accept the significance of it. An international team of researchers has shown the proteins can persist in the fossil record for at least 3.8 million years - some 50 times longer than DNA.

The protein was found bound to the fossilised fragments of ostrich eggshells. The finding open up the possibility of detailed analysis of human evolution where DNA has not survived.

Doing Science With Elephants

Straight-tusked elephants (models)

Source: Wikipedia

Elephant history rewritten by ancient genomes : Nature News & Comment

How can elephant DNA teach us about why science works and creationism doesn't?

Creationists, with their simplistic black vs. white view of the world, often pour scorn and derision on science for changing its collective mind so frequently. This comes of course from a mindset which values 'certainty', no matter how illusory, more highly than truth. Truth is sacrificed in the search for the cosy comfort of 'certainty'.

But science doesn't look for certainty. Science simply tries to get as close to the truth as possible and a truth which can be demonstrated. The analogy is of a car being driven to a destination. Every movement on that journey is a sign of progress, not a sign of failure. Constant change of position is the method of progress. Science has to change its collective mind to make progress. Religions fail to make progress because they can't change their collective minds without abandoning their religion. With religions, the dogma is everything.

So what has this to do with elephant DNA?

Christians 'Cleanse the Streets' After Gay Pride March

The Freethinker - The voice of atheism since 1881 » In Belgrade, priests ‘cleanse’ the streets after Pride event

In an orgy of gratuitous anti-gay hate and abuse, Serbian Orthodox Christians, incensed at a gay pride parade in the Serbian capita, Belgrade, held a rally and march to ritually cleanse the streets of 'homosexual contamination'. The parade had been heavily protected by police preventing Orthodox and far-right nationalist extremists violently breaking it up as earlier years.

Amongst the expressions of Christian 'love' was a banner showing a homosexual being pushed into Hellfire by a Christian with a cross. The love of Jesus

Mexican Priests Still Raping Children

"I personally ask for forgiveness for the damage [some priests] have done for having sexually abused children. We will not take one step backward with regards to how we will deal with this problem, and the sanctions that must be imposed".

Catholic Church ACQUITS Mexican priest who admitted to raping 30 young girls | Daily Mail Online

In an extraordinary move, and one which flies in the face of official Vatican pronouncements on the subject of child-abusing Catholic priests, the Archdiocese of Mexico has formally acquitted an HIV carrying priest of any wrongdoing even though he admitted having sex with about 30 girls aged between 5 and 10 over many years.

The assaults were committed on indigenous girls in the southern province of Oaxaca which has a predominantly indigenous population and where the influence of the Catholic Church is very powerful, especially amongst the indigenous people. No criminal charges have yet been brought against the priest, José Ataulfo Garcia, despite his admission, almost certainly due to the Church's political influence in Mexico.

Americans Losing Faith

The factors driving the growth of religious ‘nones’ in the U.S. | Pew Research Center

In another attempt to understand the recent rapid growth in the 'nones' - those who don't self-identify with any religion - the Pew Research Centre took another look at the data to identify the factors driving this rejection of organised religion:

The share of Americans who do not identify with a religious group is surely growing: While nationwide surveys in the 1970s and ’80s found that fewer than one-in-ten U.S. adults said they had no religious affiliation, fully 23% now describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular.”

But there are differing ideas about the factors driving this trend – and its implications for society. While it appears the U.S. is becoming less religious, some contend that’s not necessarily the case. Instead, they say, the growth of the “nones” may simply indicate that people who are not religious are becoming more forthright and willing to say they have no religious affiliation, perhaps because being a “none” has become more socially acceptable.

Gregory A. Smith & Alan Cooperman
The factors driving the growth of religious ‘nones’ in the U.S.
Pew Research Centre - FactTank

Clearly this topic is exercising the minds of a lot of worried people. Although this study is a relatively superficial treatment of the phenomenon, analysing only a few factors such as age, former religion and strength of former religious commitment rather than any underlying cause of change in opinion, it shows a number of interesting and related trends. An earlier Pew Centre FactTank report had shown some of the reasons people give for rejecting religion, including a better understanding of science, but it would have been good to see some analysis of lifestyle changes such as ready access to information and exposure to the behaviour, ignorance and downright stupidity underpinning religious fundamentalism.

Death of a Modern Exorcist

Fr. Gabriele Amorth. 70,000 exorcisms.

World Famous Exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth Dies at 91 |Blogs | NCRegister.com

The thing about the modern Catholic Church is its modernity and the way it has enthusiastically embraced science and abandoned those old, mediaeval, unscientific superstitions like a flat Earth, six-day creation and the inferior status of the black, brown, yellow and red-skinned races.

They've even turned their back on the notion which lead to the persecution of women as witches - a world in which evil spirits could enter and take over human... er... except they haven't.

No, really!