Evolution News - Evolution of Skin, Fur and Feather Colours

Summary of Current Understanding of the Location of Melanosomes in Different Body Tissues and Organs and Putative Functions in Major Vertebrate Classes.

Functions of Melanin in Ancient Vertebrates

Fossil pigments shed new light on vertebrate evolution, UCC study finds | News and Views | University College Cork

A team of palaeontologists from University College Cork (Coláiste na hOllscoile Corcaigh), Ireland have uncovered how melanin, the pigment that now gives mammals and birds the colours in their skin, fur and feathers, once had a different function in our evolutionary ancestors, but, because of one of those effects of the utilitarian 'design' process of evolution by natural selection, it was also toxic. Unless, as a creationist who believes in intelligent [sic] design, you believe toxicity was a problem deliberately created so it could be solved with a clunky work-around later.

Of course, the work debunks intelligent [sic] design creationism simply by revealing the facts, especially its latest ploy - evolution = devolution!

Melanin initially evolved as part of a mineral storage system which also played a role in immunity, and was stored in several internal organs in the bodies of early amphibians and reptiles. But it has a tendency to produce free radicles and is thus mildly toxic. The benefits of a functional, albeit primitive, immune systems outweighed the damage done, but as later animals evolved improved immune systems - given added impetus by the toxic melanin, the dynamic shifted so that the net result of melanin in the internal organs was detrimental, producing selection pressure to remove it to a place of safety - namely, outside the body in the outer layer of the skin, in hair and feathers of the evolving mammals and birds.

This in turn created selection pressure favouring colouration for camouflage, display, etc, as well as protection from harmful solar radiation, so we now have a rich diversity in hair and feather patterns in the mammals and birds.

Religion Declining Even in Former Devout Islamic and Catholic Countries

Middle East: Are people losing their religion? | Middle East| News and analysis of events in the Arab world | DW | 04.02.2021

The increasing rejection of religion which we have seen in most of the predominantly former Christian Western industrialised world since the mid 20th century, is now also being seen in the predominantly Moslem parts of the Middle East according to a poll conducted by the Arab Barometer, a research group based in Princeton University and the University of Michigan. The poll was the subject of a recent article in The Economist.

Coincident with, or maybe because of, this loss of faith, there is a corresponding fall in the trust of political parties and religious leaders who, in some countries are one and the same.

U.S. Ethics Ratings for Clergy at Second Lowest on Record

Percentage who believe each profession has a high or very high standard of professional ethics.

Source: Gallup Poll Social Series^[PDF]

U.S. Ethics Ratings Rise for Medical Workers and Teachers

The level of trust of the US public in the ethics of the clergy continues to decline, according to a Gallup survey published just before Christmas, 2020, based on sampling over 1-17 December, 2020. The same poll shows an enhanced level of trust in the medical and medical-related professions, doctors, nurses and pharmacists, probably due to the way they are seen to be coping with the coronavirus pandemic.

The stock of the clergy, never as high as that of nurses, doctors and pharmacists has been in steady decline since 2004, falling 17 percentage points in the intervening 16 years to 2020, probably as a result of the child abuse scandals that engulfed the Catholic Church. The evangelical alliance with Donald Trump has done them little good either; all four of their worst years have been since 2016 when they fell below 40% for the first time, never again to rise above it.

The medical professionals all appear to have benefitted from the coronavirus pandemic in terms of perceived professionalism, all three showing sharp rises during 2020.

Anti-Covid-19 Vaccination Diary - The Beginning of the End!

Anti-Covid Vaccination Record Card

To begin at the beginning - we got a phone-call from our doctor's surgery last Wednesday inviting us to have the anti-Coronavirus vaccine. Of course, being fed up with restrictions on our movements for getting on for a year now, and looking forward to a holiday somewhere warm and sunny this year, unlike last year where we made do with a few days in Pembrokeshire, Wales, we jumped at the chance and were duly booked in today at the Village Hall in Clifton Hampden, about 5 mile drive away on the Wallingford road.

In this diary, I'll record our experiences, any side-effect and hopefully, come the day, our second dose and our road to a good level of immunity, how easy it is to do foreign travel, etc.

The purpose to to show that there is nothing to fear and averything to gain from this vaccine!

Malevolent Designer News - God Loves Elephants More Than he Loves Us

Artist's illustration of species within the taxonomic order Proboscidea, which includes elephants.

Credit: Liam Elward
Larger versions are available by contacting Charlotte Hsu at chsu22@buffalo.edu.

How elephants evolved to become big and cancer-resistant - University at Buffalo

Unlike most other mammals, and especially humans, elephants hardly ever get cancers.

The reason for this has been known since 2016 when researchers at the University of Chicago found that elephants have multiple copies of the TP53 gene, probably produced by gene duplication during their evolution to large size! The TP53 gene is involved in DNA repair, but in most mammals, this gene is not very efficient. Multiple copies of it seem to compensate for this inefficiency, however.

Now another team have shown that this is true for other related animals and was probably true for their remote ancestors.

This is how I explained it in by popular illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good as an example of something creationist's putative designer could have give us and other mammals, but chose not to (assuming you believe that magical nonsense):

Malevolent Designer News - Different Responses to the Same Cancer!

Moffitt Researchers Discover Mechanism that Regulates Anti-Tumor Activity of Immune Cells in Ovarian Cancer | Moffitt

Yet another conundrum to ponder for intelligent [sic] design creationists who like to believe their putative designer is one and the same as the allegedly all-loving god of the Christian Bible.

Why has it given some women a better immune system for dealing with ovarian cancers than it gave to others?

This difference was the subject of an investigation by researchers from the Moffitt Cancer Center to discover what it was that meant the outcomes from immunotherapies for this cancer were so variable from one woman to another. What they discovered was:

Malevolent Designer News - Now Bats Get the Batty Sadist's Attention

Hybernating bats infected with Pseudogymnoascus destructans, showing white-nose syndrome.

Credit: Government of Alberta/Flickr, CC BY-ND

How European hibernating bats cope with white-nose syndrome which kills millions of North American bats - Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research

It's not a good day to be an intelligent [sic] design Creationist. In addition to that little problem with Creationism's supposedly all-loving creative deity apparently trying to find ways around the vaccines human medical science has developed against the nasty little SARS-CoV-2 virus it created to kill us or make us seriously sick, we now have this muddle over its treatment of bats, where for some reason it has created a fungus that has been designed to kill North American bats but not European bats!

To believers in intelligent [sic] design who know the facts about bat immune systems (and I accept that's probably very few if any) it must appear that their putative designer has some special affections for bats. Either that, or it wants them to have a robust immune system so they can act as laboratories and testbeds for producing novel coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2.

As I said in my illustrated popular book, The Malevolent Designer:

Malevolent Designer News - How SARS-CoV-2 Mutates to Escape Antibody Binding

How SARS-CoV-2 Mutates to Escape Antibody Binding - University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

It's time to play at being intelligent [sic] design creationists again to see what mental summersaults are needed to believe in it.

This time it involves looking at how it is coping with the fact that human medical science has found a way to make the immune system it designed to protect us from the viruses like SARS-CoV-2 it creates to make us sick, actually do the job it would have done if only it had been competently designed in the first place.

Remember, one of the rules of the game is to pretend that nothing happens without the personal intervention of a perfect, omniscient god. The corollary to that is that whatever happens is exactly what that god intended to happen, nothing more and nothing less. Oh! And we have to pretend that this god is the god of the Christian Bible whom Christians believe is an omni-benevolent god, worthy of worship and praise.

Catholic Child Abuse News - Suffer Little German Children, Sold By Nuns to Paedophiles

Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki.
Refusing to publish the report into the sexual abuse of children by Catholic nuns and priests in his archdioces.

Child abuse in the Catholic Church — a scandalous approach to scandal  | Germany| News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW | 25.11.2020

We're used to stories of the sexual exploitation and abuse of children by Catholic nuns, what with the Irish Mother and Bay Homes scandal and reports of Spanish nuns selling new-born babies and telling their single mothers their baby had died, that it comes as little surprise that a scandal has been uncovered in Germany, involving nuns and priest selling orphaned children for sexual exploitation in the Archdiocese of Cologne.

This scandal has come to light as a result of a lawsuit brought by some of the victims.

The lawsuit alleges that boys living in the boarding houses of the Order of the Sisters of the Divine Redeemer were sold or loaned for weeks at a time to predatory priests and businessmen in a sick rape trade. The boys were denied the chance of being adopted or fostered out to families because selling them or hiring them out for sex orgies was more lucrative.

Evolution News - Evolution of Bitter-Taste Receptors Over 400 Million Years

Coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae.

Graphic: Sabine Bijewitz, Template Drawing: Robbie Cada.

PM_20210202_Press_release_Coelacanths_bitter_taste_receptor

Creationist dupes are constantly attacking what they like to pretend are problems with the fossil record, imagining that the entire Theory of Evolution depends on fossils and fossils alone.

It doesn't, of course and the TOE would still stand up to scrutiny even if we had never found a fossil. The geological/paleontological evidence of fossils is merely additional supporting evidence to the mass of evidence to be found in the biochemical, physiological, genetic and anatomical record, all of which show evidence of common origins and the nested hierarchies this predicts.

Now a team of researchers from Technical University of Munich Leibniz-Institute for Food Systems Biology have revealed even more evidence of common origins in the form of taste receptors in fish that perform the same function in humans. The team compared two original bitter receptor types from the coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) with four others from the zebrafish (Danio rerio) phylogenetically, functionally and structurally.

They found that they were essentially identical in both species even though they were separated by 400 million years of evolution. What's more, the test system they used showed that these fish taste receptors recognise the same bitter substances as do humans!

Altruism News - Covid-19 Plasma Donation is Fuelled by Kindness. No Religion Involved

Convalescent plasma is a treatment being trialled for Covid-19 and involves blood plasma from recovered Covid-19 patients being transfused into patients who are currently in hospital with the virus.

News - Research finds Covid plasma donation is fuelled by kindness - University of Nottingham

In a piece of research by psychologists from Nottingham University with colleagues from Australian Red Cross Lifeblood and the University of Queensland Australia, has identified 6 main motivations for recovered Covid-19 patients in the UK donating blood plasma, which is being used to treat people who are currently ill with the virus.

The study involved 419 UK residents who who indicated they had been infected with Covid-19 and were eligible to donate convalescent plasma. They were asked about their awareness of convalescent plasma, motivations, and barriers to donating.

The six main motivations were:

• Altruism from adversity.
• Post-traumatic growth.
• Moral and civic duty to help research.
• Patriotism and control.
• Reluctant altruism.
• Signalling reluctant altruism.

Covidiot News - Campaign to Boycott Jewish Newspapers for Telling the Truth

Stamford Hill campaign to boycott Jewish News for exposing lockdown criminality | Jewish News

America is far from being the only country where religious fundamentalists are being obstructive over measures to control the coronavirus pandemic currently killing millions, and putting the public at risk rather than be deprived of their assumed privilege to do what they want, when, where and how they want, without regard for the health and welfare of others.

Readers may recall my article of a few days ago about the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Charedi community that was routinely breaking the Covid-19 lockdown regulations by holding clandestine mass weddings with 300+ guests, some of whom were known to have tested coronavirus positive, in a local girls' school in Stamford Hill, London. That story had been broken by Jewish News and prompted prominent Jewish barrister, Daniel Greenberg, to condemn the organisers in blunt terms with:

Those who have attended illicit weddings under lockdown represent a self-indulgent sect that should be disowned by the rest of the Jewish world...

But the reality is that this is just a new emergence of something that many of us have known known or suspected for some time, and which now perhaps needs to be articulated clearly and publicly: much of the lifestyle for many Charedi communities is completely incompatible with the fundamental principles of Judaism...

It is time for the rest of the Jewish community to disown those individuals publicly and allow them to go their own mad and dangerous way, and turn to the task of publicly representing a more balanced approach to Jewish practice as being the real continuation of the Jewish heritage in all meaningful ways.

Evolution News - Tiktaalik Just Keeps on Transitioning!

Side-by-side comparison of Tiktaalik (top) and alligator gar (bottom) showing similarly shaped snouts that may suggest convergence in feeding strategies.

Credit: Justin Lemberg, University of Chicago.

New clues emerge in how early tetrapods learned to live—and eat—on land

Tiktaalik is one of those embarrassing fossils that drive Creationists bonkers because they annoyingly keep violating so many dogmas that it makes it difficult to fool even the scientifically illiterate simpletons who normally comprise the marks of Creationist frauds.

For one thing, it was discovered exactly where biologists, using the TOE, predicted it would be found in rocks of the right age and type for a species transitional between a fish and a terrestrial tetrapod.

Then back in January, 2014, a team from Chicago University, which included Dr Neil Shubin, who was one of the biologists who predicted where the fossil they named Tiktaalik would be found, showed how the hind limbs of terrestrial tetrapods had evolved out of the hind fins of a fish like Tiktaalik.

And now essentially the same team have shown how Tiktaalik roseae's skull shows the transition between feeding in water, where suction is important and feeding on land where biting is the main method of catching prey.

Trumpanzee Losers News - The Repugnican Party is Falling Apart.

Trump addresses a rally in Georgia ahead of the run-off election to decide both of Georgia's Senate seats, Jan 4th, 2021. Trump's Republicans lost both, conceding control of the Senate to the Democrats.

Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis

Exclusive: Dozens of former Bush officials leave Republican Party, calling it 'Trump cult' | Reuters

It's a well-known phenomenon, especially in political circles, that losing parties tend to turn inward and break up. This is especially true when the defeat is heavy. We saw it in the UK when the Tories fell apart after their catastrophic defeat in 1997 by Tony Blair's Labour; we saw it again when Labour fell apart after Gordon Brown's defeat by Cameron's resergent Tories in 2010; in 2017 when the Tories again degenerated into waring factions when Theresa May lost her majority in the House, and in Labour again in 2019 when Corbyn was beaten badly by Johnson.

And now, the American Republican Party is falling apart following Trump's defeat by Biden in 2020 and the loss of the two Georgia Senate seats and with them, control of the Senate, in 2021.

But perhaps the biggest cause of this mass desertion of the Republicans by former loyalist is not so much the scale of Trump's defeat but by his bizarre behaviour, supported by many senior Republicans, and the immense damage he did to the dignity of the office, afterwards. According to Reuters:

Ancient Humans in the Green Sahara

Engraving of Giraffes near Gobero in Niger, ca. 8,000 yrs old, witness ancient green times in the desert.

Photo: Mike Hettwer, 2006, www.hettwer.com

Past river activity in northern Africa reveals multiple Sahara greenings - GFZ Helmholtz

Today, we think of the Sahara Desert in North Africa as a hot, very dry place where only highly specialises species can live and where humans can only survive by careful preparation including a supply of water.

Having said that though, my experience of the Tunisian part of it, one unseasonably cold Spring about ten years ago, is that the Sahara is a cold, slightly damp place with a fine drizzle where the last thing you want to be dressed for is Summer!

Now, however, an international team including researchers from Germany, South Korea, the Netherlands and the USA, led by Cécile Blanchet of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Helmholtz Centre, Potsdam, Germany has shown that it was not always the hot, dry place most people find today.

Trumpanzee News - And Still The Fruitloops Come...

Lance Wallnau, False Prophet

Preacher: God Anointed Trump, Therefore Biden is an “Illegal Counterfeit” | Beth Stoneburner | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

The seemingly endless stream of evangelical Trumpanzee Christians unable to accept that their hero lost the November election and that Joe Biden is now POTUS, shows no signs of abating.

The latest forlorn nutjob is evangelist 'prophet' Lance Wallnau, who appeared on the Jim Bakker show (do people still listen to that serial adulterer and fraud?) to announce that Biden was an 'illegal counterfeit' in office because God had anointed Donald Trump, who was therefore still the real president.

Trumpanzee News - Catholic Priest's False Witnessing for Deranged Donald

Fr John Zuhlsdorf

Priest performed US 'election exorcisms'

Catholic priest and fanatical Trumpanzee, Fr John Zuhlsdorf, who maintains the popular Catholic, "Fr Z" blog, Has no worries about the truth of his claims when it comes to supporting President-reject Trump.

Falsely claiming his bishop had granted him permission to do so, he included the rite of exorcism after his noon Mass the day before the attempted coup d'etat at the Capitol on 6th January.

Having fully signed up to the evidence-free QAnon, pro-Trump conspiracy theory of a stolen election and massive electoral fraud, he claimed his reason for doing so was:

Christian Fundamentalist - Claiming the Right to Deny Rights to Minorities of his Choice

Bob Updegrove, photographer.
"Photographing LGBTQ weddings would violate his faith"

Christian Photographer Challenges Virginia Law That Could Force Him to Photograph Same-Sex Weddings : Society : Christianity Daily

One of the more obnoxious tendencies of fundamentalist Christians is their insistence that their faith entitles them to determine who should and who should not have basic human rights, as though the human rights of others are in their gift.

They feel it's an attack on their civil libertes to deny them the right to deny civil liberties to others, especially minorities of their own choosing and people who don't conform to their dogma.

We have seen this manifest itself in the UK when entitled fundamentalist Christians have even gone to the European Court of Human Rignts, asking the court to rule that to deny them the right to deny basic human rights to others is a denial of their human rights, as Christians.

Invariably, the ECHR has knocked them back, explaining that under the European Convention on Human Rights, no-one has the right to deny rights to others, and a person's religious beliefs dont't entitle them discriminate against and victimise others, hard though that might be for them to accept.

American fundamentalists are, of course, no different in that arrogant assumption that their rights should be paramount in any conflict. One such fundamentalist is wedding photographer Bob Updegrove, who is suing the state of Virginia, claiming the fact that it denies him the right to deny services to same-sex couples is a violation of his right to victimise same-sex couples by refusing to provide wedding photography services to them.

Evolution News - Another Case of Rapid Human Evolution

In the last 500 years, the people of Cabo Verde have evolved at a breakneck pace -- thanks to a genetic variant, inherited from their African ancestors, that protects against the ravages of malaria.

Credit: F. Mira

Malaria Threw Human Evolution Into Overdrive on This African Archipelago | Duke Today

Imagine if you will, you are setting out to prove Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. First off you fix in your mind the definition of evolution - change in allele fequency in a poulation over same - an allele being a variation of a gene.

According to Charles Darwin's theory, this happens when the environment differentially selects the allele in question for 'favour' so more descendants end up with the favoured allele, compared to those with the less favoured allele. The hypothesis you are testing then is that a population will, given enough time, have a greater frequency of the given allele than it started out with and this will be because of something natural in the environment. To check this latter requirement, you need to show that when that something in the environment is missing, there is no change in allele frequency in the population.

So, imagine if you could take large enough number of people, a few with the gene that gives an advantage in the given environment, and a lot with the 'normal' gene and put them on different islands in an archipelago, one with an environement which favours one allele, and the rest with an environment that doesn't favour any of them. Then you leave this setup for nature to take its course and then go back and measure the frequency of the different alleles on the different islands in, say, 500 years, if that were possible.

The hypothesis is that on the island where the favoured allele gave an advantage, there would, after enough time, be a greater frequency of it in the population gene pool than on the islands where there was no advantage to be had.

And this is precisely what the Portuguese colonialist who discovered the then uninhabited islands off the west coast of Africa, unintentionally set up. And 500 years later we have the results of this natural 'experiment'.

Catholic Abuse News - Former Priest Jailed for Sadistic Paedophile Offences

Former Catholic priest and education advisor to Catholic schools, Joseph Quigley,
"Sadistic paedophile and voyeur"

Ex-priest Joseph Quigley jailed for child sex offences - BBC News

Yes, it's yet another tale of a predatory paedophile Catholic priest and an archbishop (now cardinal) who did little to stop his abuses or safeguard his potential victims.

A former Catholic priest and former national education advisor for Roman Catholic schools, Joseph Quigley, has been jailed for 11 years and ordered to sign the Sexual Offenders' Register for life after being convicted at Warwick Crown Court last December of four counts of engaging in sexual activity with a child, two counts of sexual assault, one count of child cruelty and two counts of false imprisonment.