Religious Bigotry News - Now Judaism is Exempt From Laws Protecting LGBTQ Rights, Thanks to SCOTUS

Justice Sonia Sotomayor
Blocked order forbidding Orthodox Jewish University from discriminating against LGBTQ students

By Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States, Steve Petteway Source - http://www.oyez.org/justices/sonia_sotomayor (direct link), Public Domain, Link

High court blocks recognition of LGBTQ campus at Yeshiva U

I wrote recently about how the American Methodists, and the Australian Anglican churches are both splitting over whether they should be continuing to victimise, demonise and generally discriminate against LGBTQ people or not. Now we have an Orthodox Jewish university in New York winning the right to discriminate on 'religious grounds'.

Yeshiva University, an Orthodox Jewish University in New York had appealed against a New York Judge’s ruling that their refusal to recognise an LGBTQ campus club violated New York City ‘s Human Rights Law, which bars discrimination based on sexual orientation, and ordered the university to recognise it as an official student club.

The University appealed to SCOTUS on the grounds that, as a religious organization, it was exempt from the non-discrimination law, by virtue of the First Amendment right to freely exercise religion. Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed with them and issued a temporary blocking order against the NY judge's ruling. The surprise is, that Sotomayor, who hears emergency applications from the state of New York on behalf of SCOTUS, is considered to be a liberal in SCOTUS with its 6:3 majority of conservative justices, courtesy of Donald Trump who rewarded his supporters on the far right by stuffing SCOTUS with partisan religious conservative.

Now, it seems, even the liberal justices are coming into line with the highly partisan SCOTUS. There is little doubt that this ruling will be confirmed by SCOTUS with a majority of at least 7:2 and will have the effect of giving any religious organisation the right to victimise anyone with whom they disagree and the right to pick and choose which laws to comply with. The problem is, the legal definition of a 'religion' in the USA is so nebulous that such a ruling would give carte blanche to any organization or group, formal or informal, to declare itself to be a religion and ignore any law it disagrees with on the same grounds that Sotomayor ruled constitutional.

The US Dictionary of Law entry on 'Religion' reads:

The Biblical Myth of the Destruction of the Cities of the Plain Could Be Based on a Real Event

BIBLICAL BURNING - Ancient city could have been destroyed by cosmic airburst | News Services | ECU

Professor Mitra's analysis of soot samples from Tall el-Hammam supports the research team’s theory that the city was destroyed by a high-temperature fire that the civilization at the time did not have the capability to generate.

It is common for ancient myths and legends to be based on a real event, embroidered over time and give a mystical spin, especially in oral traditions, to play to the beliefs and prejudices of the time. However, when that real events is discovered, just like the filling of all the other gaps in knowledge on which religions depend, the cause is invariably something natural and not requiring magic or supernatural entities in the explanation.

Location of Tall el-Hammam. (a) Photo of the southern Levant, looking north, showing the Dead Sea, the site location (TeH), and nearby countries. The Dead Sea Rift, the fault line marking a major tectonic plate boundary, runs through the area. Source of base image: NASA, Space Shuttle. “The Sinai Peninsula and the Dead Sea Rift”. Photo: sts109-708-024, taken 12/16/2009. From the NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Science Data Center (nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/astronauts_eyes/sts109-708-024.html). Modified by the authors using Adobe Photoshop CC2014 (adobe.com/products/photoshop.html). (b) West-southwest-facing view of the upper tall showing locations of the palace and temple behind the curve of the upper tall. The Dead Sea is in the background to the left.

Source: Bunch, T.E. et al (2021)

This could well be the case with the tales of the destruction of the 'Cities of the Plain', Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis, which may have been flattened, not by a god raining down fire and brimstone, but by a natural, though thankfully uncommon, cosmological event - a meteorite strike.

Creationism In Crisis - Modern Humans Were Cleverer Than Neanderthals Because of a Small Mutation in a Single Gene

Microscopy picture of a dividing basal radial glial cell, a progenitor cell type that generates neurons during brain development. Modern human TKTL1, but not Neandertal TKTL1, increases basal radial glia and neuron abundance.

© Pinson et al., Science 2022 / MPI-CBG

Modern humans generate more brain neurons than Neandertals: MPI-CBG

The scientifically nonsensical claim, often parroted by Creationists, is that all mutations are deleterious, therefore mutations can't be the basis for evolution. Although still pretending Creationism is science, following the repeated failure to convince a court of that, the reason Creationists give for that idiotic view of mutations is because, so their favourite myths say, all life was created magically and perfect by a perfect creator, so any change from that initial perfection must be imperfect in some way, and this was only possible because of 'The Fall'.

In other words, the dogma is barely disguised fundamentalist religion, plain and simple, and ignores the fact that many mutations are demonstrably advantageous and came to predominate in the species gene pool for that reason. There is of course, no mechanism by which a deleterious mutation can accumulate in the gene pool, let alone become fixed in the species, unless it rides on the back of a much more advantageous mutation in an associated gene.

And now a team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany, have discovered that a single mutation in a single gene could have given modern humans the intellectual edge over Neanderthals, and probably other archaic hominins. It will take considerable mental gymnastics for the frauds to present that as supporting Creationism to their cult.

The mutation was a single nucleotide change in the gene which changed a codon from that for the amino acid, lysine in Neanderthals, to that for arginine in modern humans. The research team have shown that this small change in the resulting protein, means modern humans have many more neurones in their brain, especially in the frontal region, which is responsible for cognition. This may have meant moderns were quicker to learn and generally more intelligent than Neanderthals.

The news release from the Max Planck Institute explains the research and the significance of this discovery:

Who really discovered the Americas?

Seven times people discovered the Americas – and how they got there

Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) is shown holding a globe in a detail from a painting by Peter Johann Nepomuk Geiger in the throne room of Miramare castle in Italy

It's almost axiomatic that Americans tend to be as clueless about their history as they are about geography and science. And of course, into this gap, fundamentalist Christians have inserted their favourite myths and presented them as facts. Even the recent 'history' is more mythology than fact.

One of the things that really grates with me is the insistence that America was discovered by Christopher Columbus, even having a national day named after him. Most Americans could probably make a guess about where he landed - probbly somewhere between Florida and Cape Cod.

The truth is, however, that Christopher Columbus, or Cristobal Colon to give him his proper, Genoese name, not only never set foot on the North American mainland, he may not even have seen it from afar, unless one of the ‘islands’ he reported seeing was the Isthmus of Panama, as seems possible. He made his first landfall, on 12 Oct, 1492, on the Island of San Salvador in the Bahamas, then known by the inhabitants as Guanahani. He main explorations were of the Islands of Cuba and Hispaniola.

John Cabot (1450-c.1500).

The first European (as distinct from Scandinavian) to land on the North American mainland, was the Venetian, John Cabot, in 1497, sailing under the patronage of Henry VII of England.

The other irritating myth is that Columbus set out to prove Earth isn't flat. In fact, it was generally known by then (1492) that Earth was a spheroid, the Greeks having calculated its circumference as 40,000 Km; what he set out to prove was that going west was a quicker route to the East Indies (and it's lucratice spice trade), than sailing round Africa and across the Indian Ocean or taking the overland 'Silk Road' across Central Asia and down through China. He got his sums badly wrong and calculated that Japan would be about 2,400 miles due West instead of closer to 11,000 miles, so he was lucky the Americas were in the way, because he didn’t have supplies for a voyage of that distance.

When he made landfall, he assumed he had missed Japan and China by sailing too far south and had landed in the East Indies, hence the Native Americans were called ‘Indios’.

But Columbus was far from being the first to discover the Americas; in fact he was the last of at least seven different peoples to discover the Americas.

Columbus landing on Guanahani Island, now known as San Salvador, in the Bahamas, 1492.

In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency, Nicholas R. Longrich, Senior Lecturer in Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Bath, tells how these different peoples got there and what impact they had if any. The original article can be read here.

It's worth noting, as you read this, just how little it coincides with the supposed history of humanity as described in the Bible and how there is no evidence whatsoever to support the fanciful mythology invented by the convicted con artist, Joseph Smith when he made up the 'Book of Mormon' as a ploy to trick his neighbours into giving him their farms, and their wives.

Unintelligent Designer News - When Yesterday's Soltion to the Problem You Created Earlier, is Today's Problem Waiting To Be Solved

These female hummingbirds evolved to look like males — apparently to evade aggression | UW News

Female white-necked jacobin hummingbird with male-like plumage

Irene Mendez Cruz

If you share the childish creationist belief in intelligent [sic] design, you must accept that the designer behaves like an amnesiac or an idiot, constantly discovering that the solution it designed to solve yesterday's problem is today's problem waiting to be solved. The result is an almost infinite number of examples of arms races and their results to be found throughout nature. An offshoot of this process is various forms of mimicry, where one species comes to resemble another because that helps protect it from a predator on both.

A case in point, but one with a slight twist, is the fact that one in five females of the white-necked jacobin hummingbird, Florisuga mellivora, have bright 'male' plumage instead of the usual duller ‘female’ plumage, however, they still have the lighter female bodyweight and have female patterns of behaviour.

Males of the species have dazzling blue-and-white plumage, as do all juveniles. Males are also aggressive in defending their territory and food sources. About 80% of the females develop a duller, green and white plumage as they mature. This pattern, where males are brightly coloured and the females are duller is common in birds, where males display to defend their territory and to attract a mate, while the females which don’t need to display to attract a mate, can afford to be duller and more difficult for predators to see.

So ,the question is, why do about 20% of F. melliflora hummingbird develop a 'male' plumage while retaining a lighter female body and behaviour? This was the question scientists from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA and the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA set out to answer.

The answer turned out to be an unusual case of mimicry, where the females are not mimicking another species for protection, but males of the same species. This works because the males are bullies and cowards, and tend to pick on the light-weight females while avoiding picking a fight with other males and with juveniles (which also seem to be getting protection against the cowardly males by, unusually for birds, having adult ‘male’ plumage as juveniles).

As the news release from Washington University explains:

Transitional Species News - Yes! It's More Transitional Fossils!

The Gunflint formation, north-western shores of Lake Superior.

Research News - Discovery of New Types of Microfossils May Answer an Age-old Scientific Question | Tohoku University Global Site

The bad news for the failing Creationist cult just continues to pile up. Not only do scientists regularly find fossils of 'transitional organisms' coming partway between an earlier taxon and a later one, but now they have found evidence, in 1.9 billion-year-old micro-fossils, of transition between the earlier, prokaryote cells and the more complex eukaryote cells that multicellular organisms eventually evolved from.

To conform to Creationist superstitions, though, they should not be that old and they should not be transitional between major taxons. The yawning gap between what Creationists are obliged to believe and what science shows to be true just got a bit wider.

The discovery was made by a research team from Tohoku University, Japan, and the University of Tokyo, Japan, who analysed micro-fossils from the Gunflint Formation which traverses the northern part of Minnesota, USA into Ontario, Canada, along the north-western shores of Lake Superior.

The news release from Tohoku University explains the finding and its significance:

Liz Truss - The Next Failure in Waiting

Mary Elizabeth (Liz) Truss
Prime minister of the UK

Liz Truss faces a financial whirlwind – will her plans for the economy work?

As I was writing this, Mary Elizabeth (Liz) Truss was appointed Prime Minister (PM) of the UK Government to replace Boris Johnson. Johnson was forced out of office by Tory MP's who were becoming increasingly embarrassed by his cavalier approach to the truth, disregard for the rules of decent parliamentary behaviour and blatant attempts to mislead parliament, which was costing them electoral support.

For those readers not familiar with British politics and our ‘constitutional monarchy' and unwritten constitution, here is a brief explanation of how government here works:

Although not written down in the same document, our constitution consists of traditions built up over many years. Some parts are governed by specific Acts of Parliament, such as the Act of Settlement by which the monarchy was restored following Cromwell's Commonwealth, which limits the power of the monarch and gives power to the government, and the Representation of the People Act, by which our electoral rules were laid down and the 1910 Parliament Act, which restricts the power of the appointed Upper Chamber (The House of Lords). Parliamentary procedures are based on the idea that honourable people will act honourably and are contained in a book known as Erskine May, after the then parliamentary library clerk who wrote it.

By the strange rules of UK politics, the head of government (PM) is not elected directly but is appointed by the monarch and asked to 'form a government'. The government can then only govern if it can command a majority in the House of Commons. It can fall by either losing a vote of confidence, or by being 'denied supply', i.e., failing to get the annual Finance Bill approved. Traditionally, it will also fall if it fails to get a major piece of legislation through the House, especially a measure from the manifesto on which it was elected, although that is more a matter of honour than of law. The Finance Bill gives the government legal authority to tax and spend, without which it cannot legally pay ministers and MPs, the Civil Service, the Armed Forces, the police or the judiciary and major spending departments and agencies such as the National Health Service (NHS), The Highways Agency, The Prison Service, Border Security and Air Traffic Control, would cease to operate.

The Prime Minister is normally the leader of the party with the most MP's in the Commons, so, to retain his/her position, he/she must have the support of that party because to lose the leadership would make it almost impossible to win a confidence or supply issue. Technically, the monarch can ask anyone to form a government, even a non-elected person such as a member of the House of Lords. The only test is to command the support of the Commons, i.e., to win a vote of confidence. Therefore, even if a government falls, it does not mean an automatic General Election because the monarch can ask someone else to try to form a government. In 2010, when no party had an overall majority in the House, David Cameron could only form a government by including members of the Liberal Democrats in his government (a Coalition) and making the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, his deputy Prime Minister.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Favourite Pestilential Malevolence Might Soon Try for Another Pademic

Laboratory staff wearing full PPE.

AAP Image/Joel Carrett

5 virus families that could cause the next pandemic, according to the experts

Creationism’s pestilential designer never tires of designing new ways to make us sick and die, or modifying old ways by improving their ability to harm us. It normally uses one of five different families of virus, its favourite until recently has been the Orthomyxoviridae family that includes the influenza virus, but it made good use of the Coronaviridae family recently with SARS and MERS as practice runs, and eventually SARS-CoV-2 that caused the on-going COVID-19 pandemic.

But it also has several other families in stock, so to speak, and can modify any of them to cause the next pandemic.

That's if you believe the Creationist claims that all life is designed by a magic designer and any change in its genome can only occur with divine intervention to make it happen. For incomprehensible reasons, they would rather we thought of their putative designer god as a pestilential malevolence than accept the scientific Theory of Evolution.

The following article from The Conversation by four Australian experts, outlines five different virus families from which the cause of the next pandemic could come. It was written by Professor Allen Cheng, Professor in Infectious Diseases Epidemiology, Monash University, Victoria, Australia, Dr. Andrew van den Hurk, Medical Entomologist, The University of Queensland, Australia Associate Professor Cameron Webb, Clinical Associate Professor and Principal Hospital Scientist, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia, and Professor Damian Purcell, Professor of virology and theme leader for viral infectious diseases, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

It is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here.

AAP Image/Joel Carrett

5 virus families that could cause the next pandemic, according to the experts

Allen Cheng, Monash University; Andrew van den Hurk, The University of Queensland; Cameron Webb, University of Sydney, and Damian Purcell, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity The CSIRO has delivered a comprehensive report on how we should prepare for future pandemics.

The report identifies six key science and technology areas such as faster development of vaccines and onshore vaccine manufacturing to ensure supply, new antivirals and ways of using the medicines we already have, better ways of diagnosing cases early, genome analysis, and data sharing.

It also recommends we learn more about viruses and their hosts across the five most concerning virus families. These causes of disease could fuel the next pandemic.

We asked leading experts about the diseases they can cause and why authorities should prepare well:

1. Coronaviridae

COVID-19, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), severe acquired respiratory syndrome (SARS)

The first human Coronaviruses (229E and OC43) were found in 1965 and 1967 respectively. They were low-grade pathogens causing only mild cold-like symptoms and gastroenteritis. Initial understanding of this family came from study of related strains that commonly infect livestock or laboratory mice that also caused non-fatal disease. The HKU-1 strain in 1995 again did not demonstrate an ability to generate high levels of disease. As such, coronaviridae were not considered a major concern until severe acquired respiratory syndrome (SARS-1) first appeared in 2002 in China.

Coronaviridae have a very long RNA genome, coding up to 30 viral proteins. Only four or five genes make infectious virus particles, but many others support diseases from this family by modifying immune responses. The viruses in this family mutate at a steady low rate, selecting changes in the outer spike to allow virus entry into new host cells.

Coronaviridae viruses are widespread in many ecological niches and common in bat species that make up 20% of all mammals. Mutations spread in their roosts can spillover into other mammals, such as the civet cat, then into humans.

Coronaviridae genome surveillance shows an array of previously unknown virus strains circulating in different ecological niches. Climate change threatens intersections of these viral transmission networks. Furthermore, pandemic human spread of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID) has now seeded new transmissions back into other species, such as mink, cats, dogs and white-tailed deer.

Ongoing viral evolution in new animal hosts and also in immune-compromised HIV patients in under-resourced settings, presents an ongoing source of new variants of concern.

– Damian Purcell

---

Read more:
Long COVID: How researchers are zeroing in on the self-targeted immune attacks that may lurk behind it

---

2. Flaviviridae

Dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis, Zika, West Nile fever

The flaviviridae family causes several diseases, including dengue, Japanese encephalitis, Zika, West Nile disease and others. These diseases are often not life-threatening, causing fever, sometimes with rash or painful joints. A small proportion of those infected get severe or complicated infection. Japanese encephalitis can cause inflammation of the brain, and Zika virus can cause birth defects.

While all these viruses may be spread by mosquito bites, when it comes to each individual virus, not all mosquitoes bring equal risk. There are key mosquito species involved in transmission cycles of dengue and Zika virus, such as Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, that may be found in close to where people live. These mosquitoes are found in water-holding containers (such as potted plant saucers, rainwater tanks), water-filled plants, and tree holes. They also like to bite people.

The mosquitoes that spread these viruses are not currently widespread in Australia; they’re generally limited to central and far north Queensland. They are routinely detected through biosecurity surveillance at Australia’s major airports and seaports. With a rapid return to international travel, movement of people and their belongings may become an ever-increasing pathway of introduction of the diseases and mosquitoes back into Australia.

A Sri Lankan health worker sprays insecticide to curb mosquito breeding earlier this year.

EPA/Chamila Karunarathne

Different mosquitoes are involved in the transmission of West Nile virus and Japanese encephalitis. These mosquitoes are more likely to be found in wetlands and bushland areas than backyards. They bite people but they also like to bite the animals most likely to be carrying these viruses.

The emergence of Japanese encephalitis, a virus spread by mosquitoes between waterbirds, pigs, and people, is a perfect example. Extensive rains and flooding that provide idea conditions for mosquitoes and these animals create a “perfect storm” for disease emergence.

– Cameron Webb & Andrew van den Hurk

---

Read more:
Japanese encephalitis virus has been detected in Australian pigs. Can mozzies now spread it to humans?

---

3. Orthomyxoviridae

Influenza

Before COVID-19, influenza was the infection most well-known for causing pandemics.

Influenza virus is subdivided into types (A, B, and rarely C and D). Influenza A is further classified into subtypes based on haemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N) protein variants on the surface of the virus. Currently, the most common influenza strains in humans are A/H1N1 and A/H3N2.

Zoonotic infection occurs when influenza strains that primarily affect animals “spill over” to humans.

Major changes in the influenza virus usually result from new combinations of influenza viruses that affect birds, pigs and humans. New strains have the potential to cause pandemics as there is little pre-existing immunity.

An Israeli worker disposes of chicken eggs to contain the spread of bird flu.

EPA/Atef Safadi

Since the beginning of the 20th century, there have been four influenza pandemics, in 1918, 1957, 1968, and 2009. In between pandemics, seasonal influenza circulates throughout the world.

Although influenza is not as infectious as many other respiratory infections, the very short incubation period of around 1.4 days means outbreaks can spread quickly.

Vaccines are available to prevent influenza, but are only partially protective. Antiviral treatments are available, including oseltamivir, zanamivir, peramivir and baloxavir. Oseltamivir decreases the duration of illness by around 24 hours if started early, but whether it reduces the risk of severe influenza and its complications is controversial.

– Allen Cheng

---

Read more:
My year as Victoria's deputy chief health officer: on the pandemic, press conferences and our COVID future

---

4. Paramyxoviridae

Nipah virus, Hendra virus

Paramyxoviridae are a large group of viruses that affect humans and animals. The most well known are measles and mumps, as well as parainfluenza virus (a common cause of croup in children).

Globally, measles is a dangerous disease for young children, particularly those who are malnourished. Vaccines are highly effective with the measles vaccine alone estimated to have saved 17 million lives between 2000 and 2014.

One group of paramyxoviruses is of particular importance for pandemic planning – henipaviruses. This includes Hendra virus, Nipah virus and the new Langya virus (as well as the fictional MEV-1 in the film Contagion). These are all zoonoses (diseases that spill over from animals to humans)

Hendra virus was first discovered in Queensland in 1994, when it caused the deaths of 14 horses and their horse trainer. Infected flying foxes have since spread the virus to horses in Queensland and northern New South Wales. There have been seven reported human cases of Hendra virus in Australia, including four deaths.

Nipah virus is more significant globally. Infection may be mild, but some people develop encephalitis (inflammation of the brain). Outbreaks frequently occur in Bangladesh, where the first outbreak was reported in 1998. Significantly, Nipah virus appears to be able to be transmitted from person-to-person though close contact.

– Allen Cheng

---

Read more:
What is this new Langya virus? Do we need to be worried?

---

5. Togaviridae (alphaviruses)

Chikungunya fever, Ross River fever, Eastern equine encephalitis, Western equine encephalitis, Venezuelan equine encephalitis

The most common disease symptoms caused by infection with alphaviruses like chikungunya and Ross River viruses are fever, rash and painful joints.

Like some flaviviruses, chikungunya virus is thought to be only spread by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in Australia. This limits risks, for now, to central and far north Queensland.

Many different mosquitoes play a role in transmission of alphaviruses, including dozens of mosquito species suspected as playing a role in the spread of Ross River fever. Many of these mosquitoes are commonly found across Australia.

But what role may these local mosquitoes play should diseases such as eastern equine encephalitis or western equine encephalitis make their way to Australia? Given the capacity of our home-grown mosquitoes to spread other alphaviruses, it is reasonable to assume they would be effective at transmitting these as well. That’s why the CSIRO report notes future pandemic preparation should work alongside Australia’s established biosecurity measures.

– Cameron Webb & Andrew van den Hurk

---

Read more:
How can the bite of a backyard mozzie in Australia make you sick?

---

Allen Cheng, Professor in Infectious Diseases Epidemiology, Monash University; Andrew van den Hurk, Medical Entomologist, The University of Queensland; Cameron Webb, Clinical Associate Professor and Principal Hospital Scientist, University of Sydney, and Damian Purcell, Professor of virology and theme leader for viral infectious diseases, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

---

Thank you for sharing!

Tweet Link

Space News - First Exoplanet Photo. No Life Yet, But It's Only a Matter of Time

NASA/ESA/CSA, A Carter (UCSC), the ERS 1386 team, and A. Pagan (STScI)

The Webb telescope has released its very first exoplanet image – here's what we can learn from it

NASA's James Webb Space telescope, which is performing much better than expectations, has just produced the first image of an exoplanet. The planet, HIP 65426b, is a gas giant rather like Jupiter, orbiting HIP 65426. It's presence had been inferred from data in 2017.

As a gas giant, it is not suitable for living organisms to have evolved but, with so many exoplanets being discovered, with over 5,000 discovered so far, and so many stars with potential planetary systems, it can't now be long before signs of life are detected on one or more of them.

When that happens, of course, it will destroy any remaining arguments from Creationists that the probability of a self-replicating molecule arising by chance is too small to be credible as an explanation for how life got going on Earth. It will show that, if the conditions are right, chemistry and physics alone are quite capable of producing that and the probability of a planet with those conditions being discovered, increases with every new exoplanet discovered.

The chances of finding such a planet are greater the closer the planetary system is to Earth for the simple reason that telescopes such as the James Webb, see distant objects as they were when the light left them, so a planet say, 10 billion lightyears away, will appear as it was 10 billion years ago. We know it took the Universe 10-11 billion years to give rise to Earth before life could get going some 500 million years later, so distant object may not have had time when we are seeing them, to have reached that stage. Closer objects will have had more time.

The image from the James Webb Space Telescope, and its significance is explained in an open access article in The Conversation by Professor Jonti Horner, Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland, Australia. The article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here.

Covidiot News - Massive Success for the Pro-Trump, Self-Genocide Campaign

Covid-19: U.S. Life Expectancy Continued to Decrease in 2021, Study Finds - USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology

More evidence of the astonishingly stupid, but highly successful pro-Trump antivaxx campaign against the COVID-19 vaccinations was produced today in the form of evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic death rate in the USA produced a significant fall in life-expectancy in 2021, continuing a sharp fall in 2020. It also showed how there were persistent disparities in life expectancy by race and ethnicity.

The antivaxx campaign came about in support of the then president, Donald Trump, who, realising he was out of his depth with the science, but due to his narcissistic personality disorder, was incapable of admitting it, panicked and set about politicizing the pandemic, threatening and vilifying scientists who tried to advise him and pressurizing officials to supress bad news and provide disinformation.

He first declared the pandemic to be a hoax, then to be a mild illness that would be over by April (2020) and which could be prevented with wackadoodle, untested 'preventative' chloramphenicol. This subsequently turned out to not only be ineffective in preventing infection or minimising the symptoms but was positively dangerous.

At one point, in a comical pretence of medical expertise that would have been funny if it hadn’t been so seriously stupid, the fool even suggested drinking surface disinfectants or inserting a UV light source into the body to cure the disease. Soon, wearing face-covering and social distancing became political acts, as did getting vaccinated when the vaccines were produced. Evangelical preachers preached against face-masks and for the right to continue to hold super-spreader events in their churches, and Trump's election rallies in which face-coverings were discouraged, became serious super-spreader events in their own right.

Consequently, when the Omicron wave hit, the death toll became overwhelmingly of unvaccinated people in Republican-leading areas of America, to the extent that some commentators referred to it as a self-inflicted genocide of the most gullible, as the Republicans Party became possibly the first political party in history with policies seemingly designed to kill their own supporters and with supporters who believed that risking the lives of themselves, their families and society at large was the patriotic thing to do.

All to save the orange buffoon’s face.

Human Evolution News - We have More Neanderthal DNA Now Than They Ever Had

Artists impression of a Neanderthal woman.

Artist: Tom Björklund / Moesgård Museum

Neanderthals died out 40,000 years ago, but there has never been more of their DNA on Earth

With almost everyone living north of the Saharah having up to 4% Neanderthal DNA, this means the 8 billion modern humans alive today have between them more DNA that the entire Neanderthal species ever had. So much for the extinction of our close cousins, Homo neanderthalensis.

This is one of the surprising facts about Neanderthals revealed by Peter C. Kjærgaard, Professor of Evolutionary History and Director, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Mark Maslin, Professor of Earth System Science, University College, London, UK and the Natural History Museum of Denmark, and Trine Kellberg Nielsen, Associate Professor, Department of Archeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, in an open access article in The Conversation recently.

Neanderthals lived in Eurasia for about 400,000 years, compared to the modern humans 40,000 year occupation. During that time, they evolved to adapt to a changing Northern Eurasian climate as the ice sheets expanded then retreated. By the time moderns arrived on the scene they had already begun to diversify into European and Asia subspecies and the Asian branch had already met, coexisted and interbred with a third species, the Denisovans, who have still to be given a definitive biological name.

Neanderthals probably evolved from an archaic hominin, H. heidelbergensis, itself a descendant of H. erectus which migrated out of Africa at an earlier date, although there has been an attempt to simplify the hominin evolutionary tree recently with a newly-named species, H. bodoensis, replacing several archaic species by regarding them as regional and temporal variants of H. bodoensis. Other authorities are continuing with the earlier nomenclature.

Why they became extinct is still something of a mystery with various contributory causes suggested, from inbreeding due to small population size and even smaller, isolated family groups, an inability to adapt to the changing climate at the end of the ice age, the fact that modern humans had domesticated dogs giving them an advantage when hunting, displacement and extermination by expanding modern humans, to simply being subsumed into the large and increasing modern population and subsequent elimination of all but the advantageous genes we inherited from them. In other words, they never did go extinct and live on in us.

Here is how the three authors in The Conversation see Neanderthals as fitting into the Hominin tree, and the contribution they made to the non-African part of modern humanity. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here:

God the Great Abortionist

Most human embryos naturally die after conception – restrictive abortion laws fail to take this embryo loss into account

Religious fundamentalists in the USA recently scored what might turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory in the struggle over a woman's right to choose whether to allow her body to be used to grow a new person or not. In a historic ruling, the right-leaning Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), recently stuffed with Republican placemen and women ruled that since there was no traditional right to an abortion, the states were free to regulate and restrict abortions.

This has led to about a third of American women losing the right to have an unwanted pregnancy terminated, in some states regardless of how the pregnancy occurred or the effects continuing with it might have on the health of the woman. So, in these states, for example an underage girl who was raped or the victim of incest will be obliged to carry the baby to term, and some states are even attempting to make it illegal to get help in another state where abortion is still decriminalised.

But what is this objection to abortion and the right of women to control their own bodies based on?

As we might expect with beliefs that lead to limitations on human rights, it is based on Christian fundamentalism and two things in particular:

Evolution News - How Australia and New Guinea Got Their Diverse Populations of Rodents

A hopping mouse of the Notomys genus. Hopping mice have evolved highly efficient kidneys to deal with the low water environments of Australia’s deserts.

Credit: David Paul/Museums Victoria

'Impressive rafting skills': the 8-million-year old origin story of how rodents colonised Australia

I've remarked before about how well the Theory of Evolution as an explanation for the biodiversity in animals, plants and fungi we see all around us, consistently meshes with other strands of science. For example, plate tectonic and the timing of the splits and collisions of land masses that have occurred exactly coincides with the deduced evolutionary divergence in major branches of the tree of life, so explaining the relationships between species on unconnected land masses such as Africa and South America or Europe and North America.

Here we have an account of the colonisation of Australia and New Guinea and neighbouring islands by rodents, and their evolutionary diversification, that exactly meshes with the rise and fall of sea level during cycles of glaciation and glacial regression, and with known periods of mountain building in New Guinea that transformed it from a group of small islands into a single large mountainous island.

The study, led by Dr. Emily Roycroft, a postdoctoral research fellow with the Australian National University's Division of Ecology and Evolution, Research School of Biology, Acton, ACT, Australia, and Pierre-Henri Fabre, of the Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution, Université de Montpellier, Montpellier, France, with colleagues from the Australian National University, and the Science Department, Museums Victoria, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, is published in the journal,Current Biology. Sadly, the main body of the paper is behind a paywall, despite the journals claimed support for open access publishing. However the abstract is available here.

Lead author, Dr Emily Roycroft has also written about their research in the open access online magazine The Conversation which, if you want factual, objective analysis of news, is well worth reading. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistence. The original article can be read here.

Stunning Images from NASA Courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope

A close up of the JO418 Einstein ring.

Image credit: Spaceguy44

Stunningly perfect 'Einstein ring' captured by James Webb Space Telescope | Live Science

In a departure for this blog, this has little or nothing to do with religion, Creationism or even politics, save only that the reality of the Universe, as shown in this stunning image compiled from data supplied by NASA's James Webb space telescope, bears no relationship to anything described or even hinted at in the Bible.

It is, in fact, an image which confirms Einstein's General Theory of Relativity in that it is produced by gravitational lensing, just as Einstein predicted, back in 1912 when he first announced his discovery. This is the way light can be bent by the gravity of a massive object such as a black hole, a neutron star or, in this case an entire galaxy (SPT-S J041839-4751.8).

Unintelligent Design - Seahorses Show How Creationism's Amnesiac Designer Creates Different Solutions for the Same Problem

Credit: Charlotte Bleijenberg / Shutterstock

Seahorse fathers give birth in a unique way, new research shows

Like an amnesic, Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer often forgets what it designed earlier and starts again. It did it with all the different forms of wing for flying organisms, for example, and with the seahorse and pipefish family, which it bizarrely designed so the male would be the pregnant one of the sexes, it designed a different mechanism for giving birth, even though it had designed a perfectly good mechanism for other viviparous fish and the one it would design later for mammals.

The male seahorse has a pouch at the front base of its tail which acts as a uterus, which, like in mammals, even contains a placenta to nourish the growing babies, so we would expect the same designer who designed both this and the mammalian uterus to use the same method for expelling the baby when it was time for birth, but not a bit of it!

Instead of smooth muscle contacting under the influence of oxytocin without conscious effort, as with the mammalian uterus, the male seahorse uses his skeletal tail muscles under conscious control, even though a 1970 study had shown that the fish equivalent of oxytocin, isotocin, induces labour-like behaviour in male seahorses. Apparently, the designer hadn't realised he could have made the pouch out of smooth muscle and achieved the same result. The designer only seems to have realised that millions of years later when designing mammals - something any omniscient designer would know he was going to do, and according to creationists, did on the same day!

How Evolution Works - Variation Matters in Predator-Prey and Parasite-Host Interactions

Melissa blue butterfly, Lycaeides melissa
Recently colonized alfalfa as a food plant for its caterpillars

Variation Matters: Genetic Effects in Interacting Species Jointly Determine Ecological Outcomes

The greatest diversity of life is not counted in the number of species, but in the diversity of interactions among them, according to the finding of a research group led by evolutionary geneticist, Professor Zachariah Gompert, of the Department of Biology, Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA, a 2019 NSF CAREER Award recipient.

The question the research group sought to answer was to what extent is the interaction between, for example, a microbe and a host is the same for all members of the microbe and host species, or does it vary according to the genetic make-up of the two species?

Not surprisingly, the outcome was that genetic variations in both species affect the interaction. This is, in fact, what so-called Darwinian evolution depends on, as small variations give more or less advantage to both species in an interaction, i.e. as the environment 'selects' for greater or lesser fitness.

Bigotry News - Religions Fighting For the Right to Discriminate and Victimise

Magaly Valentin (left), and Rosalba Gomez (right) Arlington Food Services prepare fresh salads and vegetable cups for the National School Lunch Program in the kitchen at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia, Wednesday, October 19, 2011.

USDA Photo by Bob Nichols.

USDA exempts religious schools from nondiscrimination rules to keep kids fed

Religions in the USA are continuing their campaign to be allowed to continue to victimise and bully minorities and women, using religion as their excuse.

The latest move is to persuade the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to drop its insistence that to participate in the free school lunch program, schools must not discriminate on the basis of sexuality or gender identity.

The National Schools Lunch Program is a federal initiative that provides meals for tens of millions of children in public and non-profit private schools. Schools had complained that participation in the program would oblige them to comply with the non-discrimination provisions of "Title IX" - a 1972 measure aimed at ensuring equal opportunities at educational establishment across the USA.

Last July, Grant Park Christian Academy of Tampa Florida, launched a lawsuit, supported by the unashamedly Christian nationalist hate group, Alliance Defending Freedom, claiming exemption from the non-discrimination provisions of Title IX on the grounds that the school taught a “biblical worldview about marriage, sexuality, and the human person.” In other words, it intended to discriminate against the LGBTQ community and teach the students to do the same, based on ancient texts written in the Bronze Age.

And recently, the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis, Missouri, withdrew from the lunch program, claiming that:

Accepting any federal subsidy would subject archdiocesan schools to federal mandates that could impede a school’s ability to faithfully carry out the teachings of the Catholic Church

In other words, the catholic schools would no longer be allowed to discriminate against the LGBTQ community, continue to condemn same-sex marriages and victimise and demonise homosexuals, and teach their students to do likewise. Obviously the Catholic Church would rather have children go hungry than to grant everyone full human rights.

Unintelligent Design - Giant Viruses Designed Only to Kill Another Of the Designer's Creation?

(A) General location and local geography of the Milne Fiord epishelf lake in 2015 (adapted from reference 7). Gray areas of map indicate lake ice detected by RADARSAT-2 imagery. (B) Cartoon showing accumulation of freshwater behind Milne Ice Shelf and the bottom topography of Neige Bay.

Giant Viruses in Climate-Endangered Arctic Epishelf Lake | ASM.org

Readers may recall how I wrote very recently about a 'giant virus' that is designed to infect and kill an amoeba, but whatever designed it, also designed a bacterium to defend the amoeba from it, in a seemingly pointless excercise in design for no apparent reason. That's if you see everything in terms of the childish intelligent [sic] design hoax.

Now scientists have discovered another 'giant' virus' that lives in a remote arctic lake and does nothing other than kill the cyanobacteria that also live there, which, presumably, Creationists believe were designed by the same designer who designed the 'giant virus'.

If you can't see the flaw in the reasoning that this must have been designed by a intelligent designer, then it's highly likely that you have fallen for the intelligent [sic] design hoax yourself, or your definition of 'intelligent' is at odds with the way the rest of the English-speaking world uses it.

Just a quick reminder about these "giant viruses": These are a goup of very large viruses that are several times larger than normal visues such as the COVI-19-causing SARS-CoV-2. They have a relatively complex genome which includes genes normally only found in cellular animals, plants and fungi. They are harmlees to humans since they only infect single-celled organisms such as amoebae and, in this case, cyanobacteria. They are relatively common in a marine environment and can have an impact at the lowest level of the food chain by killing the organisms that recycle nutrients from dead organisms from higher up the food chain. How and why they got their complex genomes is the current subject of study, but may be the result of horizontal gene transfer during evolutionary arms races between them and their hosts.

The discovery was made by microbiologists from Université Laval, Québec, Québec, Canada. Their findings are published, open access in the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) journal, Applied and Environmental Microbiology. How the discovery was made and its significance in terms of climate change are explained in the ASM news release:

How Science Works - Changing Our Minds When the Evidence Changes

Jujube, Ziziphus jujuba.

Source: Alex___photo/Shutterstock

A new discovery shows major flowering plants are 150 million years older than previously thought

Although Creationists seem to be baffled by the concept of uncertainty and the idea that knowledge can only ever be provisional, in fact, this is what gives science it's great power. By contrast, religions, which depend on certainty in the face of a lack of evidence and where a 'crisis of faith', i.e., doubt due to an unwelcome intrusion of reality, is considered a bad thing, are still mired in the Bronze Age when the basic ideas were first codified by people who knew little but sought certainty in a confusing and frightening, seemingly magical world, so made some best guesses with what little knowledge they had.

So, it's never surprising and always reassuring when another science paper is published showing that the scientific consensus was wrong about something. Unlike with black and white Creationists thinking, right and wrong are not absolute terms in science. Scientific ideas can be mostly right but not absolutely right since there are no absolutes where there is uncertainty and without uncertainty there is no scientific progress. Rather, science is a self-correcting, ever improving search for the truth as revealed by evidence.

As we say, science is reasonable uncertainty, whereas religion is unreasonable certainty.

Unintelligent Design - One Hand Doesn't Know What The Other Is Doing

The FISH image - FISH stands for a visualisation method called fluorescence in situ hybridisation - shows amoebae infected simultaneously with the Viennavirus (for the first time isolated in this study and therefore named by the research team) and the bacterial symbiont. In the image, the amoebae are shown in magenta, their symbionts in cyan and DNA in yellow. The larger yellow structures are the virus factories, which are still in the initial phase here and cannot produce infectious viruses.

Credit: Patrick Arthofer

Bacteria provide immunity against giant viruses

Here we have a very nice example of the reality of biology that devotees of the childish intelligent [sic] design notion, must either ignore or explain away as an unexplained mystery if they are to retain their childish superstition.

Similar example abound in nature, when one looks beneath the superficial of course, as I showed in my popular book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax, but this is an especially nice one.

It involved an amoeba, a bacterium - chlamydia - 'designed' to infect the amoeba, and a giant virus, also designed to infect the amoeba. The problem is, when the amoeba is infected with chlamydia, it gains protection against the giant virus. This was discovered by scientists from the University of Vienna, Austria, and the Université de Poitiers in France, led by microbiologist Matthias Horn from the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science at the University of Vienna.

Giant viruses are unique in that they are several times larger than normal viruses and contain genes normally only found in cellular organisms such as bacteria, animals, plants and fungi. Fortunately, they are harmless to all but Protista such as amoebae which they infect then takeover to turn them into virus factories. Their only purpose seems to be to kill amoebae and produce more giant viruses. Biologists believe the reason for such a large, relatively complex virus is due to an evolutionary arms race between the virus and chlamydia, each vying for control of the host amoeba. The exact evolutionary pathway remains to be worked out, but it looks like another example of horizontal gene transfer.

Chlamydia are infectious bacteria which infect many species, including humans where they are a serious, sexually transmitted pathogen. The species that infects amoebae is closely related to the human pathogen and normally takes up residence in the amoeba where is slows down growth. In that respect it behaves like a parasite, but it also behaves like a symbiont when it protects the amoeba against infection by the giant virus.

So, let's just summarise what intelligent [sic] design advocates have to believe. This is based on the assumption that a designer such as the one believed in by Creationists, i.e. an omniscience, omnipotent creator god, would have known exactly what its creations would do, so designed them for that very purpose and no other: