Biodiversity News - A New Species of Chameleon From Ethiopia

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The new chameleon species, Trioceros wolfgangboehmei

Credit: Koppetsch et al.

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Living individual of Trioceros wolfgangboehmei

Credit: Koppetsch et al.

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Head detail of the new chameleon, Trioceros wolfgangboehmei

Credit: Koppetsch et al.

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Harenna Forest, Bale Mountains, Ethiopia.

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View from the deck of Bale Mountain Lodge

Source: Brilliant Ethipoia

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Lateral detail of a living Trioceros wolfgangboehmei sp. nov. from Goba, Ethiopia, showing the heterogeneous body scalation with both small scattered tubercles and enlarged flattened plate-like scales. In this individual the dorsolateral stripe is interrupted and forms a Y-shaped pattern on the flanks.

Photo by Petr Nečas.

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Living juvenile of Trioceros wolfgangboehmei sp. nov. from Goba, Ethiopia.

Photo by Petr Nečas.

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Digital elevation map of Ethiopia (generated by using the geographic information system ArcGIS 10.0; elevation in m a.s.l) indicating the currently known distribution of Trioceros wolfgangboehmei sp. nov. east of the Ethiopian Rift in the northern Bale Mountains (red stars; left star: Dinsho, right star: Goba). Black star: Addis Abeba. Grey dots show records of T. affinis based on distributional data after Largen and Spawls (2010) and Ceccarelli et al. (2014).

Highlands of diversity: Another new chameleon from the Bale region, Ethiopia | Pensoft blog

Here is another example of why fragile and vulnerable habitats need to be preserved, if only for the rich variety of new species that could be living there.

This time it is a new species of chameleon from the Bale Mountain forests of Ethiopia. This one was discovered by zoologists Thore Koppetsch and Benjamin Wipfler of the Research Museum Alexander Koenig in Bonn, Germany, and Petr Nečas from the Czech Republic. The new species, Trioceros wolfgangboehmei is a new small-sized chameleon living on the edge of the forest. Their findings were published in the open-access, peer-reviewed life science journal Zoosystematics and Evolution.

The Pensoft blog explains:

Evolution News - Science is Filling God-Shaped Gaps With Knowledge

A slab of shale with well-preserved macrofossils of algae.

Photo: K. Maloney.

Rare fossilized algae, discovered unexpectedly, fill in evolutionary gaps | The Geological Society of America.

More bad news for Creationists. A chance discovery in the mountains of Canada’s remote Yukon territory, by geobiology graduate student Katie Maloney, has filled in another of those precious god-shaped gaps and provided yet another of those pesky transitional forms that aren't supposed to exist.

The news release from the Geological Society of America tells the story:

Evolution News - Turns Out Altruism Is For The Fish

Convict chichlid, Amatitlania nigrofasciata

Turns out altruism is for the fish — Osaka City University

Christian fundamentalists will confidently assure you that their religion gives them superior morals to Atheists and members of other religions because they get their morals direct from a perfect god who defines right and wrong. Almost invariably, of course, the same fundamentalists who need to boast about their supposed superior morals are using religion for the excuses it gives them for otherwise unacceptable, antisocial attitudes and behaviour like homophobia, misogyny and/or racism, but that's another issue.

One of the claims they will make against Atheists, for example, is that Atheists see no reason not to be selfish, whereas Christian fundamentalist are altruistic because they know this is the right thing to do, not because it is inherently right but because their god tells them to be and promises them a reward for altruism or punishment for selfishness.

However, evolution by natural selection, operating at the level of genes is fully capable of explaining altruism as an evolved behavioural trait because self-sacrifice can often ensure the survival of those descendants and close kin who are carrying copies of the genes for altruistic behaviour, so ensuring the survival, even at the expense of individual carriers, of those genes through time.

So, this gene-centred evolution should predict altruism in other species; species moreover which don not need to read the Bible to know right from wrong because they have an innate, inherited, set of pro-social behaviours which are also situational - the situation depending on the probability of helping the survival through time of the genes for that behaviour.

This is the finding of a group of researchers from Osaka City University, Japan, whose results were published open access in Nature Communications a few days ago. They have shown that male convict cichlid fish, Amatitlania nigrofasciata can vary their behaviour between pro-social and anti-social depending on the situation.

The Osaka City University new release explains:

Support for Church of England Collapsing in Secular Britain

Poll conducted March 22, 2021

Daily Question | 22/03/2021 | YouGov

A YouGov poll conducted a few days ago shows a very clear majority of Brits think the Church of England should not be entitled to have its bishops sitting in the upper chamber of our bicameral parliament, the House of Lords.

Historically, 26 seats in the HOL are reserved for Anglican bishops in addition to the seats occupied by retired former Archbishops of Canterbury and York who sit in their own right as Peers of the Realm. The 26 Anglican bishops and archbishops together make up the 'Lords Spiritual', and have done so since the Restoration in 1660.

The Pattern-Recognising Ape - Seeing Things That Aren't What They Seem

A composite image of the USS Jellyfish in Abell 2877 showing the optical Digitised Sky Survey (background) with XMM X-ray data (magenta overlay) and MWA 118 MHz radio data (red-yellow overlay).

Credit: Torrance Hodgson, ICRAR/Curtin University.

Astronomers see a ‘Space Jellyfish’ - ICRAR

In an interesting manifestation of the very human phenomenon of pareidolia (the ability to perceive things which are not really there in patterns) was published by The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) when announcing the findings of an Australian-Italian team using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope to observe a cluster of galaxies known as Abell 2877.

What they 'saw' was a space 'jellyfish'!

Pareidolia is responsible for, for example, the multiple images of Jesus and Mary on toast or in the mess left by a dropped ice-cream. In one case, a chance damp patch on a newly-platered toilet wall in Mali was interpreted as the image of Mohammad at prayer, attracting several high-profile celebrities and politicians to come to see the 'miracle'.

Biodiversity News - 4 New Species of Lichen Found

Micarea stellaris is one of the recently described lichen species. The name refers to ´star´ and comes from intensely shining crystals that are visible when studying it in polarised light.

Scale bar 1 mm.

Vuria, the highest peak in the Taita Hills, reaches to over two Kilometres heigh. Land use has fragmented mountain forests.

Photo: Aannina Kantelinen

Montane cloud forest, Taita Hills, Kenya

Photo: Petri Pellikka

Ngongoni antilopes benefit from the tree cover destroyed by elephants during the dry spells as it increases grasslands in the dry savannah plains surrounding verdant Taita Hills.

Photo: Petri Pellikka

Four lichen species new to science discovered in Kenyan cloud forests | University of Helsinki

The fragility of Earth's biodiversity was highlighted a few days ago by news that researchers from the University of Helsinki Finnish Museum of Natural History, Luomus and the National Museums of Kenya, have recently discovered four new species of lichen, all of the Micrarea genus, growing in the mountain forests in Kenya's Taita Hills. This unique environment is under threat from increasing land use which is fragmenting the forests.

From the University of Helsinki news release:

Evolution News - How to Make a Giraffe Without Using Magic

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Photo credit: Mogens Trolle

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Reticulated Giraffe, Buffalo Springs, Kenya.

Photo credit: Mogens Trolle

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Help Us Stand Tall for Giraffes.
The U.S. is one of the leading importers of giraffe parts. We need your help persuading America’s leaders to protect them before they’re gone.

Photo by Philippe Chantecaille

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"The Last Giraffes on Earth"

Source: The Atlantic

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Image credit: San Diego Zoo

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Giraffes, found throughout sub-Saharan Africa, are susceptible to poaching and habitat loss.

Photo credit: Beverley Joubert, National Geographic Image Collection

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Source

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Giraffes on the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya.

Credit: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

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Reticulated sub-species of Giraffe at Loisaba conservancy in Laikipia, Kenya. As across the rest of African, they have declined steadily in recent decades.

Credit: AFP/Tony Karumba

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Girafffes in the Masai Mara.

Credit: Manoj Shah/Getty
Source: BBC Wildlife

The Trouble of Being Tall – Biologisk Institut - Københavns Universitet

Researchers at the Biologisk Institut, University of Copenhagen, and Northwestern Polytechnical University in China have succeeded in sequencing the whole genome of the giraffe and in doing so have uncovered the mechanisms by which giraffes evolved their unique features.

Evolving a long neck and tall stature presented the giraffe with a number of physiological and anatomical challenges:

• A very high blood pressure is needed to pump blood up to the brain. The giraffe BP is about twice the normal BP for a mammal and would normally cause severe damage to the cardiovascular system.
• Standing up from a lying position is difficult, as is bending down to drink, making the giraffe especially vulnerable while sleeping and drinking.
• At about 5 metres above the ground, there is little role for a sense of smell.

The researchers found a number of evolved genetic features which help giraffes overcome these problems, including a version of the FGFRL1 with seven amino acid substitutions compared with the same gene in other ruminants. When tested in mice, this gene gave them added protection against damage from high blood pressure and more compact, denser bones. The team believe the function of this gene may have application in the treatment of high blood pressure in humans.

As the Biologisk Institut news release explains:

Malevolent Designer News - Making the Leishmania Parasite Better at Making You Sick

Leishmania infantum life cycle

Credit: Mariana Ruiz Villarreal / Wikipedia

Dogs infected with Leishmania parasites smell more attractive to female sand flies | Lancaster University

Here is one of those papers that leave intelligent [sic] design creationists with two choices: they can either pretend that a designer who can come up with these sorts of designs is not really malevolent and being ever-more inventive in its endeavour to make us sick, or they can absolve it of any culpability by accepting that these things are the inevitable result of a purely natural, amoral, undirected natural process, operating under nothing more than the laws of physics and chemistry.

Cutaneous leishmaniasis ulcer

Credit: Layne Harris
Wikipedia

It is the discovery that female sand flies, Lutzomyia longipalpis, which are the main vectors for transmitting the parasite that causes Leishmaniasis to humans, are more attracted to dogs which are carrying the parasites than those which are healthy, so increasing the probability of infecting humans.

The discovery is the work of two scientists, Professor Gordon Hamilton and Monica E. Staniek, of Lancaster University.

The new release from Lancaster University explains:

Evolution News - Recovering From Mass Extinction Events

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After The Great Dying, the ecosystem changed drastically, and included many Lystrosaurus.

© Xiaochong Guo

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The plant-eating pareiasaurs were preyed upon by sabre-toothed gorgonopsians. Both groups went extinct during The Great Dying.

© Xiaochong Guo

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By the end of the Permian, pareiasaurs had become large and armored for self-protection. This complex ecosystem collapsed during The Great Dying.

© Xiaochong Guo

New study investigates how life on land recovered after “The Great Dying” | California Academy of Sciences

Life on Earth is incredibly robust and has come close to extinction altogether a few times but has always managed to bounce back and diversify again from a few founder species. In fact, of course, it once did that from a few founder simple cells, gradually diversifying and becoming increasingly fitted for the various environments found on and in Earth.

This recent study, published open access a few days ago in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows how it struggled to do so after the "Great Dying" event of 252 million years ago during the end of the Permian period, when 19 out of every twenty species went extinct. Some ecosystems in which key members have gone extinct can sometimes take millions of years to recover. This should be a salutary warning to us as humanity generates another great extinction event in what scientists now call the Anthropocene.

The study was carried out by an international team of researchers from the China University of Geosciences, the California Academy of Sciences, the University of Bristol, Missouri University of Science and Technology, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The news release from the California Academy of Science explains:

Evolution News - How Sperms Remember

New research shows how a father's experience can be passed on to his offspring.

How sperm remember | Newsroom - McGill University

This is the sort of paper that Creationist frauds can use to fool their scientifically illiterate dupes. It will be presented as 'proof' that Darwin was wrong all along and his 'rival' Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was right.

Lamarck, in his attempt to explain inheritance and evolution, had proposed that traits acquired after conception could be passed to children. He famously claimed a blacksmith, by developing string arms, would have sons who also had strong arms and be good blacksmiths. (In a sense, he was right but the mechanism, at least in sentient species, is via memes, not some assumed physical factor (genes were not know about then)). He was of course wrong about giraffes getting longer necks by stretching to reach higher leaves and passing on the stretched neck to their offspring. There is no way an acacia tree can stretch to avoid its leaves being eaten by giraffes, so Lamarckian inheritance can't explain arms races of that sort, even if it had some basis.

Darwin, on the other hand, argued that it was traits inherited from parents that were passed on and that these were fixed at conception (with occasional variations which could be 'favoured' by the environment in 'natural selection').

However, in recent years the science of epigenetics has thrown up a few challenges to the idea of a purely Darwinian inheritance . Basically, epigenetics is the study of how genes are deactivated in specialised cells so that the cell only performs the specific punction of its speciality. As I'll explain later, epigenetics, far from being the gift creationists have been praying for which is going to refute the hated Darwinian mechanism of evolution by natural selection, but it represents a major challenge to the neo-Creationist invention, intelligent [sic] design.

Creationist thinking is often simplistic and binary so, for example, if Lamarck was a little bit right, he was entirely right and Darwin was completely wrong. As this paper shows, and as always with biology, the truth is much more nuanced than that, which is partly why creationists have difficulty with the subject.

But first this piece of research by scientists at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, led by Sarah Kimmins, PhD, of McGill's Faculty of Medicine, Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics. As the McGill news release explains:

Genetic error led humans to evolve bigger, but more vulnerable, brains

The skull of Australopithecus sediba, a species of Australopithecines, who were our ancestors and whose brains started to grow two to three million years ago.

Image credit: Australopithecus sediba by Brett Eloff,
Courtesy Profberger and Wits University.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Genetic error led humans to evolve bigger, but more vulnerable, brains

If you're a creationist and need to protect yourself from the realities of science, then this is not for you. In particular, you should avoid reading the part highlighted in yellow below. The article quoted, from August 2018, refutes too many of your sacred dogmas, and without even trying:

• No new information can arise by mutation.
• All mutations are deleterious.
• The Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis, about to be overthrown and replaced by the evidence-free notion of intelligent [sic] design.
• And your newest one - all mutations are 'devolutionary' not progressive (&copy 2019 Michael J Behe/Discovery Institute) invented after this open access paper was published, by someone claiming to be a biologist and posing as an expert on evolutionary theory!

A group of scientists led by Professor Pierre Vanderhaeghen of the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology, Belgium have discovered genes which produce the super-sized human brain in the developing human fetus.

According to the article announcing the research, printed in Horizon, the EU Research & Innovation Magazine:

Trumpanzee False Prophet News - The Trump Delusion

Johnny Enslow, Prophet of God
"Trump is still President"

Johnny Enlow Insists Trump Has Been Secretly 'Ruling and Reigning' as the True President | Right Wing Watch

The distinction between religiosity and mental illness, if it's there at all, is often so blurred as to be indiscernible.

This was never more true than the case of the many Christian evangelicals who, whilst declaring themselves prophets of God, through whom God speaks, have now to come to terms with the fact that, to a man (or woman) they all prophesied, on God's authority, that Donald J Trumps would retain the presidency in November 2020. The reality is that their prophesies were false. Trump not only lost to the candidate who polled more votes than any other candidate in American political history, but, for the second time running, lost the popular vote.

Ever since then, every single prophesy by these frauds has proven false too. The courts never overturned the result; the 3vidence of 'massive electoral fraud' was never found; there never was a military coup or successful coup d’état by the Trumpanzees cult, despite trying, and Joe Biden is still president.

What a dissapointment! You felt sure that one more Trump term and you would finally gain the political power to which you're entitled! And it all went wrong when people voted the wrong way!

Evolution News - An Extreme Case of Evolved Mimicry

Two orange-yellow “blooms” at right are fungal mimics of flowers produced by yellow-eyed grasses, such as the one at left.

Credit: K. Wurdack/Smithsonian Institution

This Flower Is Really a Fungus in Disguise - Scientific American

This fascinating example of fungal parasitism comes from Guyana and was discovered by researchers from the Mycotoxin Prevention and Applied Microbiology Research Unit, National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research, Agricultural Research Service, US Department of Agriculture, Peoria, IL, USA.

It is produced by the novel fungus Fusarium xyrophilum which parasitizes two plant species of the Xyris genus, X. setigera and X. surinamensis, commonly known as yellow-eyed grass. Not only does the parasite mimic the petals of the flowers it mimics but also the scents they use to attract pollinating insects, so tricking bees and other pollinating insects into spreading the fungal spores instead of pollen.

The research team's findings were published last November in the journal, Fungal Genetics and Biology sadly, behind a paywall, however, the summary by the USDA Agricultural Research Service gives the following details:

Malevolent Designer News - Study Shows SARS-CoV-2 Transfer From Bats to Humans Was Relatively Easy

Natural selection in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in bats created a generalist virus and highly capable human pathogen

Creationist mode:

Well, it looks like the intelligent [sic] designer really thought it through before it created the bat virus that was to become the SARS-CoV-2 virus and cause a global pandemic to kill 2.6 million humans and infect 119.6 million more (latest figure at 14 Mar 2021).

According to scientists at the University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, Glasgow, United Kingdom, and colleagues, the move from bats into humans was relatively easy, all the heavy lifting being done in the ancestral bat virus.

As the PLOS press release explains:

Religious Abuse News - 100 Counts of Rape and Abuse in Christian Girls Home

Boyd and Stephanie Householder face more than 100 charges, including dozens relating to child neglect and abuse.

Missouri couple, who owned religious girls home, charged with over 100 counts of abuse, rape | State News | komu.com

Details are emerging of "horrific, sexual, physical, and mental abuse" of girls at a Cedar County, Missouri home for teenage girls run by Christian fundamentalists, Boyd and Stephanie Householder. The couple have been running the, now closed down, Circle of Hope Girls' Ranch boarding school for young ladies "who were destroying their lives through poor choices and behaviours", since 2006.

According to Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt's website:

Christian Hypocrisy News - Christian Apologist Sye ten Bruggencate Abused a Vulnerable Woman

Sye ten Buggencate,
(former) presuppositionalist apologist for Christianity

Christian Apologist Sye ten Bruggencate Took Advantage of a “Vulnerable Woman” | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

Anyone who has spent much time 'debating' with fundamentalist Christian apologists in social media will be familiar with the Canadian apologist, Sye ten Bruggencate, a leading proponent of the infuriatingly intellectually dishonest and childish 'presuppositional' school of apologetics.

Well, maybe no longer (at least for a while, anyway).

Someone dobbed him in regarding his inappropriate relationship with a vulnerable women and he has announced his withdrawal from 'ministry'. In other words, he's giving up lying for Jesus and suckering people with false arguments, because he's been caught... er... lying.

The details of the woman and who exactly dobbed Buggencate in to the elders of his Faith Presbyterian Church in Tillsonburg, Ontario, are sketchy and still emerging but he announced his 'retirement' on his website with a terse:

Evolution News - A Surfeit of Lampreys for Creationists

Artist’s reconstruction showing the life stages of the fossil lamprey Priscomyzon riniensis. It lived around 360 million years ago in a coastal lagoon. Clockwise from right: A tiny, yolk-sac carrying hatchling with its large eyes; a juvenile; and an adult showing its toothed sucker.

© Kristen Tietjen

Long-accepted theory of vertebrate origin upended by fossilized lamprey larvae | Canadian Museum of Nature

Here is a little news item of a sort that normally has Creationists' pulses racing while loudly declaring victory and the death of Darwin's hated Theory of Evolution. It is the discovery by a bunch of researchers with the Canadian Museum of Nature, the University of Chicago and the Albany Museum in South Africa that what we thought we knew of the early evolution of the vertebrates was wrong and, to coin a cliché, the textbooks now need to be rewritten.

The reality is though, that this is merely science doing its job and checking the facts and revising the information that we thought we had, now we know better.

What we thought was that the larvae of early lampreys were pretty much like the larvae of modern lampreys and thus represented a very primitive vertebrate, close to the basal vertebrates that all vertebrates subsequently evolved from.

From this recent research however, it appears that the larvae of early lampreys were not simple, blind filter-feeders with no mouth-parts as we thought and were really much more like their adult forms, complete with large eyes and a fully developed toothed suctorial disc for a mouth.

The news release from the Canadian Museum of Nature explains:

Malevolent Designer News - Making SARS-CoV-2 a Better Killer

With the new variant already detected in more than 50 countries worldwide, the analysis provides crucial information to governments and health officials to help prevent its spread.

Research news - Variant B.1.1.7 of COVID-19 associated with a significantly higher mortality rate, research shows - University of Exeter

News today that should thrill every devoted worshiper of the supposed creator deity who made the SARS-CoV-2 virus to kill us with!

Research "by epidemiologists from the Universities of Exeter and Bristol, has shown that the SARS-CoV-2 variant, B.1.1.7, is associated with a significantly higher mortality rate amongst adults diagnosed in the community compared to previously circulating strains."

So, from the point of view of someone who believes in intelligent [sic] design, where nothing evolves and everything is the deliberate result of design by this creative deity, it looks like this designer was quick to produce a new modification, almost immediately human medical science seems to have come up with a vaccine that gave us the ability to defend ourselves from its deadly creation.

This from the University of Exeter press release:

Malevolent Designer News - How Our Immune System Turns Against Us

A new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis implicates a type of immune cell — called a dendritic cell — in the development of chronic lung diseases that can follow after a respiratory viral infection. Shown is a stained section of mouse lung. Epithelial cells, which line the airway, are red. Dendritic cells are green. Any cell nuclei are blue.

Credit: Holzman Labs

Immune cell implicated in development of lung disease following viral infection – Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

Imagine a designer designing an aircraft with a vital system so designed that, on random occasions, vital systems failed spectacularly causing the plane to crash, killing everyone on board, not through accidents caused by inept design but deliberately, designed by its designer in the full knowledge of what it would do.

That's the sort of intelligent [sic] designer that Creationists worship, as we can see from this finding from Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, Missouri, USA. Creationists believe their putative intelligent [sic] designer is the Abrahamic god, whom they believe is omniscient, omnipotent and perfect in every way. They also believe it to be all-loving and wanting a maximally good world for its creation.

This means that there are certain fundamental axioms to which all ID advocates subscribe:

LGBTQ News - More People Rejecting Religious Dogma and Self-Identifying as Gay

LGBT Identification Rises to 5.6% in Latest U.S. Estimate

A Gallop poll surveying the number of American adults now self-identifying as gay illustrates the penetration of humanist ideals of tolerance, acceptance and freedom from the stigmatisation that religion inflicts on people, as they increasingly reject organised religions in an increasingly secular society.

Hopefully, the charts I have made from the data hop speak well enough for themselves, but perhaps the most noticeable aspect is how the younger the adults are the more likely they are to self-identify as gay. This is entirely consistent with other data which shows a marked correlation between age and rejection of organized religions, with the younger adults far more likely to self-identify as 'None' or non-affiliated. Very may of these will of course be Atheists or Agnostics.

It is clear that religions are losing their grip on Americans just as surely as they lost their grip on post-war Europeans, and no longer have ownership of the institution of marriage for example with even most 'moderate' Christian churches still opposed to the idea of same-sex marriages. Perhaps this is the explanation for the unedifying spectacle of the evangelical Christian abandonment of any pretence of morality in their desperate support for the odious, morally bankrupted Donald J. Trump and the sniff of political power and influence he gave them, amounting at time to hysterical, messianic worship.