Rosa Rubicondior

Wednesday 27 March 2024

Old Dead Gods - What Does The Cerne Abbas Giant Depict And When Was It Created?

The Cerne Abbas Giant, Cerne Abbas, Dorset, England.

Photo: Ray Gaffney. © National Trust.

Uncovering the mystery of Dorset’s Cerne Giant

The thing about most of the ancient monuments and hill markings like the Uffington White Horse after whom the district of Oxfordshire I live in was named, is that no-one knows what religion the people who made them believed in or how, if indeed it did, their religion inspired (or required) them to create these monuments. I have written extensively about monuments such as Stonehenge, Durrington Walls, Silbury Hill, Avebury Stone Circle and West Kennet Long Barrow as example of how little we know about these ancient people and their religion(s) because these ancient monuments stand as testament to the transient and ephemeral nature of gods and religions on the scale of human history.

Unlike science, which, if some disaster befell humankind and all memory of a major science were expunged from memory, could be reconstructed from basic principles because it describes reality, religions, once lost and forgotten are lost forever because there is nothing substantial upon which to found a rediscovery. The entire edifice of religion is unsupported and insubstantial, being nothing more than collective imaginings and handed-down stories and myths, dependent entirely on faith to sustain them in the absence of evidence.

How Evolution Works - Choas, Catastrophe and Tipping Points

Hyphal mycelium.

credit: Maxim Ohairwe.

Researchers Discover Evolutionary “Tipping Point” in Fungi

An interesting paper has just been published which illustrates how chaos theory and catastrophe theory are related and explain the appearance of 'punctuated equilibrium' in the fossil record. It concerns the small environmental change that can trigger a large phenotypic change in the growth and shape of fungal hyphae.

One of the more annoying things to emerge in evolutionary biology during the last 30 years or so is the idea that 'Punctuated Evolution' (PE) somehow either falsifies or replaces Darwinian evolution as the explanation for biodiversity. Of course, it does neither. The term was invented by Stephen J Gould and Niles Eldredge, to explain the appearance of sudden change in the geological column, where species appear to remain unchanged for prolonged periods of time, then change, in what, with the compression of time in the geological column, looks like instantaneously.

Sadly, the term quickly became entangled with both American nationalism and creationism; the latter because it appears to refute the person whom creationists think is the arch prophet of the 'evil' of evolution - Charles Darwin, the leading figure in creationist demonology - as though the entire body of evolutionary biology hangs on the authority of one 19th century biologist; the former because it appears to have replaced one of the most famous scientific theories with one 'discovered' by Americans, so asserting American pre-eminence in science.

Tell me about 'Punctuated Equilibrium'; who popularized the idea and the arguments for and against it. Punctuated equilibrium is a theory in evolutionary biology that suggests that the tempo of evolution is not constant but rather characterized by periods of relatively rapid change (punctuation) interspersed with prolonged periods of stability (equilibrium). This concept was popularized by paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould in their 1972 paper "Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism."

Arguments for punctuated equilibrium include:

Fossil Record: Eldredge and Gould argued that the fossil record often shows long periods of stasis, where species exhibit little morphological change over millions of years, followed by relatively rapid bursts of evolutionary change when new species appear.

Lack of Transitional Forms: They also pointed out that the fossil record frequently lacks the transitional forms predicted by gradualism, which suggests that evolution may occur in more rapid bursts.

Genetic Mechanisms: Some genetic models also support the idea of punctuated equilibrium, suggesting that small populations undergoing rapid change due to factors like genetic drift and founder effects can lead to rapid speciation.

Arguments against punctuated equilibrium include:

Lack of Evidence: Critics argue that punctuated equilibrium is based more on interpretation of the fossil record rather than direct evidence from genetic or ecological studies.

Sampling Bias: Some scientists suggest that the apparent gaps in the fossil record may be due to incomplete sampling rather than actual periods of stasis.

Mechanistic Explanation: Critics also question the mechanisms underlying punctuated equilibrium, arguing that it may be difficult to explain how rapid evolutionary change occurs in the absence of significant environmental pressures or genetic changes.

Overall, punctuated equilibrium remains a subject of debate within evolutionary biology, with proponents arguing that it provides a more accurate description of patterns of evolution observed in the fossil record, while critics suggest that it may overemphasize the importance of long periods of stasis and rapid bursts of change.

The Persian Plateau, where early human migrants may have lived for several thousand years before dispersing to other parts of Eurasia.

Photo: Mohammad Javad Shoaee

Persian plateau unveiled as crucial hub for early human migration out of Africa – Griffith News

In that period of the history of Homo sapiens, long before creationism's little god got the idea of creating a small universe resembling a small, flat planet with a dome over it, according to their legends, early migrants out of Africa settled for a prolonged period in the Persian, or Iranian, Plateau where they lived from about 28,000 years, before dispersing to other parts of the Eurasian landmass.

They had earlier migrated out of Africa where they had been evolving from the common ancestor they shared with the other African Great Apes, leaving others behind to evolve into the modern African peoples, while the migrants dispersed across the rest of the globe to become modern Eurasian, Melanesian and American people, interbreeding with the descendants of an earlier migration out of Africa as they did so.

The evidence for a prolonged occupation of the Persin Plateau and the Zagros Mountains comes from a combination of genetic, palaeoecological, and archaeological evidence by a team from multiple Italian Universities and including Professor Michael D. Petraglia, of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.

The team have presented their evidence in an open access paper in Nature Communications and explain it in a Griffith University news item: This study sheds new light on the complex journey of human populations, challenging previous understandings of our species’ expansion into Eurasia.

Creationism in Crisis - Now It's An Ancestral Amphibian from 270 Million Years Before 'Creation Week' - And Another Gap Closes

Fossil skull of Kermitops gratus

Brittany M. Hance, Smithsonian.

Researchers Name Prehistoric Amphibian Ancestor Discovered in Smithsonian Collection After Kermit the Frog | Smithsonian Institution

Once upon a time, about 10,000 years ago, a magic man made of nothing appeared from nowhere and decided to create a universe that looked like a small flat planet with a dome over it, or so some ignorant Bronze Age pastoralists told their children.

Of course, they were doing their best with what little knowledge they had of the world they lived in and its history, so they filled the gaps in their knowledge and understanding with stories, and of course got it almost entirely and spectacularly wrong.

We know this because, unlike the story-tellers from the fearful infancy of our species, we now have the knowledge and understanding that centuries of careful science has revealed to us - at least those of us with the capacity to learn and understand the science know it. This is why those still unable to believe their mummy and daddy could be wrong about the superstitions they were taught as children but have since learned some science, are increasingly calling the creation stories in the Bible allegorical or metaphorical, while those who have a more objective view dismiss then as the work of ignorant people who knew no better.

Of course, despite herculean mental efforts, none of the creation myth can be forced into an allegory or metaphor for the existence of early proto-amphibians 270 million years before the little domed universe was magicked up out of nothing, and the existence of just such an animal was shown to be a fact of history when it was examined by palaeontologists from George Washington University who examines a fossil in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and found to be 270-million-year-old fossil of a previously unknown proto-amphibian, which they have named Kermitops gratus after Kermit the Frog.

The three scientists who made this discovery, led by Calvin So, a doctoral student at the Department of Biological Sciences, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA, have pubished their finding open access in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society and explained it in a Smithsonian Museum news release:

Religious fanatics Jodi Hildebrandt, left, and Ruby Franke, center, being arrested on child abuse charges on Aug. 30, 2023, in Ivins, Utah.

Washington County Attorney’s Office via AP

YouTuber Ruby Franke's child abuse case rooted in religious extremism | AP News

Only a few days ago I wrote an article explaining why people who believe absurdities can be persuaded to commit atrocities and now we have a spectacular example of the truth of that claim.

It comes in the form of an Associated Press story of how a fanatical Mormon and mother of six, Ruby Franke, who held the absurd belief that magic demons can take over and 'possess' people because her religion teaches that these demons exist, became convince that her twelve-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter were the Devil incarnate and inflicted physical punishment, including deliberate starvation, on them, "to teach them how to properly repent for imagined ‘sins’ and to cast the evil spirits out of their bodies".

Belief in a magical 'evil' Devil figure is of course fundamental to the Abrahamic superstitions, of which Mormonism is a recent manifestation, and is found in all forms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and their derivative superstitions. It was particularly strong during the Middle Ages when thousands of (mostly) women were burned alive in the belief that they were so possessed.

Ruby Franke and a business associate, Jodi Hildebrandt, have each been sentenced to 30 years in jail after pleading guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse after the 12-year-old boy managed to escape through a window from the room he was locked in and alerted a neighbour who called the police.

Franke is a well-known YouTuber who made her name lecturing gullible people who assumed her religious fanaticism gave her special insight into how to be a good parent. She and Hildebrandt, a fellow Mormon and mental health counsellor, were arrested after neighbours, the Clarksons, answered their door to find an emaciated boy with bruising and other injuries on their doorstep.

Creationism in Crisis - How The Milky Way Was Formed - 12-13 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Researchers identify two of the Milky Way's earliest building blocks | Max Planck Institute for Astronomy

Between 12 and 13 billion years before creationism's little god decided to create a small flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle east, where the only people to notice were simple goat-herders from the Bronze Age, natural forces were creating the Milky Way galaxy out of two smaller galaxies that astronomers have named Shiva and Shaki:

Who are Shiva and Shaki? Shiva and Shakti are two fundamental concepts in Hinduism, representing aspects of the divine.

Shiva: Shiva is one of the principal deities of Hinduism. He is often referred to as the destroyer within the Trimurti, the Hindu trinity that includes Brahma (the creator) and Vishnu (the preserver). Shiva is also known as the god of meditation, yoga, and arts. He is usually depicted as a yogi, adorned with snakes and a crescent moon on his head, with a third eye on his forehead representing wisdom and insight. Shiva is often associated with asceticism, but he's also a family man, as he's married to the goddess Parvati and has two sons, Ganesha and Kartikeya.

Shakti: Shakti is the divine feminine energy and the primordial cosmic power in Hinduism. She is the personification of the creative energy of the universe. Shakti is often depicted as a goddess, sometimes alongside Shiva, and sometimes as an independent deity. She represents the dynamic forces that move through the entire cosmos. Shakti is considered the mother goddess, the source of all, and is revered in various forms such as Durga, Kali, Parvati, and others.

In some philosophical interpretations, Shiva represents the male principle (Purusha) while Shakti represents the female principle (Prakriti), and their union is seen as the basis of creation and existence. This union is often symbolized as Ardhanarishvara, a composite androgynous form of Shiva and Shakti, depicting the inseparable nature of masculine and feminine energies.

The discovery was made by two scientists working at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany who have identified the components of two proto-galaxies that merged to form the Milky Way, by combining data from ESA’s astrometry satellite Gaia with data from the SDSS survey. The astronomers have published their findings in a highly technical paper in The Astrophysical Journal and explain it in a Max Planck Institute for Astronomy news release:

Astronomers have identified what could be two of the Milky Way’s earliest building blocks: Named “Shakti” and “Shiva”, these appear to be the remnants of two galaxies that merged between 12 and 13 billion years ago with an early version of the Milky Way, contributing to our home galaxy’s initial growth. The new find is the astronomical equivalent of archeologists identifying traces of an initial settlement that grew into a large present-day city. It required combining data for nearly 6 million stars from ESA’s Gaia mission with measurements from the SDSS survey. The results have been published in the Astrophysical Journal.

The early history of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of joining smaller galaxies, which makes for fairly large building blocks. Now, Khyati Malhan and Hans-Walter Rix of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have succeeded in identifying what could be two of the earliest building blocks that can still be recognized as such today: proto-galactic fragments that merged with an early version of our Milky Way between 12 and 13 billion years ago, at the very beginning of the era of galaxy formation in the Universe. The components, which the astronomers have named Shakti and Shiva, were identified by combining data from ESA’s astrometry satellite Gaia with data from the SDSS survey. For astronomers, the result is the equivalent of finding traces of an initial settlement that grew into a large present-day city.

Creationism in Crisis - How Early Modern Humans Survived a Massive Super-Volcano Which Spurred Their Migration Out Of Africa

Excavations at a Middle Stone Age archaeological site, Shinfa-Metema 1, in the lowlands of northwest Ethiopia, revealed a population of humans at 74,000 years ago that survived the eruption of the Toba super-volcano.

Photo courtesy https://topographic-map.com, Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0

Toba super-eruption unveils new insights into early human migration | ASU News

This, the fourth in a clutch of very recent papers that casually and unintentionally refute creationism simply by revealing the facts that run counter to the claims of creationists. It concerns the effects of a devastating volcanic eruption of Mount Toba in Indonesia 64 thousand years before creationists think there was life on Earth, or even an Earth to have life on it.

They believe this because a bunch of Middle Eastern pastoralists made up a tale to fill the gaps in their knowledge and understanding and describe a magic man in the sky creating a small flat planet with a dome over it, just a few thousand years earlier.

The facts are those revealed by a research team which included Curtis Marean, Christopher Campisano and Jayde Hirniak from Arizona State University who have shown that not only did African populations of humans survived the effects of this volcano, the most devastating in human history, but that its effects may have facilitated human dispersal out of Africa into Eurasia. They have presented their evidence in the form of a paper in Nature and explained the research in a University of Arizona news release:

Type specimen (holotype) of Pebanista yacuruna, including a photo of the specimen and a surface 3D model in dorsal view.

Image: Aldo Benites-Palomino.

Ancient Giant Dolphin Discovered in the Amazon | | UZH

The third in a clutch of very recent papers casually refuting the childish beliefs of the creation cult.

This one concerns a giant freshwater dolphin that inhabited the Amazon 16 million years before creationists think there was a Universe, let alone an Earth with life on it.

Tell me about the Peruvian Amazon 16 million years ago. Around 16 million years ago, during the Middle Miocene epoch, the Peruvian Amazon region would have been significantly different from its present-day appearance. This period falls within the broader geological timeframe known as the Neogene Period, characterized by significant changes in climate and biodiversity.

During this time, the Amazon basin was undergoing a transformation from a relatively dry environment to a more humid and tropical one. The climate was warmer and wetter compared to today, with vast stretches of lush tropical rainforest covering much of the region.

The landscape would have been dominated by dense forests, rich in diverse flora and fauna. Ancient ancestors of many of today's Amazonian species would have been present, including various types of plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects. Megafauna such as giant ground sloths, glyptodonts, and various types of large herbivores and predators may have roamed the area.

The river systems of the Amazon basin would have been different as well, as the Andes Mountains continued to uplift and shape the landscape. However, the basic hydrological structure of the Amazon River and its tributaries would have already been established, providing the necessary water sources for the flourishing ecosystems.

Overall, the Peruvian Amazon 16 million years ago would have been a vibrant and biodiverse ecosystem, albeit with species compositions and environmental conditions differing from those of today due to ongoing geological and climatic changes over millions of years.

Creationism in Crisis - How Batesian Mimicry In The Female Diadem Butterfly Evolved - Convergently

The female Diadem (bottom left) mimics the African Queen (top left). The male Diadem (right) keeps a distinct pattern to attract mates

Scientists discover how Diadem butterfly mimics African Queen - News

This is the second in a sudden spate of research papers that casually and unintentionally refute creationism without even trying, simply by revealing the facts. It deals with the evolution of Batesian mimicry in a species of butterfly.

Scientists working at the universities of Exeter, Edinburgh and Cambridge, and Mpala Research Centre in Kenya have discovered the genetic basis for the clear example of Batesian mimicry to be found in the female of the pantropical species of butterfly, the Diadem butterfly, Hypolimnas misippus, which closely resembles the toxic African queen butterfly, Danaus chrysippus.

Batesian mimicry is the natural phenomenon where an otherwise harmless species evolves to resemble a harmful or distasteful species as a defence mechanism. The prerequisite for Batesian mimicry to evolve is that a prey species is predated upon by the predator of a harmful species which coexists in the same locality. The predator learns to avoid the dangerous or distasteful species so any other species that comes to resemble the harmful or distasteful species might be mistaken for it and avoided. The more closely it comes to resemble the avoided species, the more likely it is to survive and reproduce.

Creationism in Crisis - How Hair Evolved From A Keratin Gene In A Frog-Human Common Ancestor

Genetic basis for the evolution of hair discovered in the clawed frog

Western Clawed Frog, Xenopus tropicalis
Carries the precursor gene for mammalian hair.

"When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions" - Claudius in Hamlet.

That was never more true of creationism than it is today with the publication of not just the usual casual refutation of creationism we've come to expect most days, but of four disparate papers each of which casually and unintentionally refutes creationism to anyone who understands biology and is familiar with the basic dogmas of the creation cult, simply by revealing real-world facts.

The papers range from this one, which shows how mammalian hair has its genetic origins in a common human-amphibian ancestor, through how a female butterfly evolved Batesian mimicry, through the discovery of a giant Amazonian dolphin from 16 million years before creationists think Earth existed, to how early modern humans survived a super-volcano eruption in South-West Ethiopia a mere 64,000 years before 'Creation Week'.

With so many papers I'll do my best to cover all of them in the next few days, so keep checking back!

Firstly, the evolutionary origin of mammalian hair.

The gene for this originated in a common ancestor of humans (and the other mammals) and a modern clawed frog. The gene controls the growth of keratin, of which the claws of a clawed frog are composed, as is mammalian hair. The evidence for this common origin was found by researchers from the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, led by led by Leopold Eckhart. The team have published their findings open access in Nature Communications and described their work in a Medical University of Vienna new release:

A typical fairy circle on the Kamberg on the edge of the Namibian Desert

Photo: Stephan Getzin.

Information for the Media - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Scientists are hotly debating how the 'fairy circles' which arise in the vegetation on the edge of the Namib desert actually form. Whatever the process, they are examples of order emerging from chaos by the operation of natural forces. The debate is over what exactly those forces are.

Typical of the mindless parroting that constitutes creationism in the social media, is the claim that 'you can't get order from chaos', which of course is nonsense, since any chaotic system will tend to order if a directional force is applied to it.

Suns and galaxies condense out of the chaos of dust and gas clouds under the directional force of gravity; raindrops form in clouds under the directional forces of gravity and electrostatic attraction; and 'fairy rings' form in grassland under the influence of fungal hyphae and nutrient depletion, and rings form in ell grass because of a build-up of toxic sulphides in the marine sediment, just to cite a few examples

Here's a little bit of fun which you can use to show any creationist acquaintance what nonsense they've been fed. Next time you're playing Scrabble, place all the tiles in the upturned box lid and make sure no tile is on top of another. Ask them to swirl it round to show you're not cheating. Observe that the tiles are in a chaotic arrangement. Now apply a directional force in the form of gravity by tipping the box lid about 15 degrees to produce a slope and tapping it or shaking the lid gently to provide a little energy to the system. Observe now that the tiles have formed themselves into neat rows and columns at one end of the lid. If not, give it a little more shaking or tapping.

Order has emerged out of chaos under nothing more magical than the directional force of gravity.

More examples of emergence of order out of chaos are:

Creationism in Crisis - Closing The Last God-Shaped Gap - How The Simplest Cells Could Have Evolved, Naturally

Last Chance Lake in September 2022. At the end of the summer, the water has almost all evaporated, leaving a salty crust on the surface.

Credit: Zachary R. Cohen/Washington University

Did the first cells evolve in soda lakes?

According to a new study by Zachary R Cohen of the Chemistry Department of Washington University, Seatle, WA, USA and colleagues, soda lakes which are rich in sodium and carbonates could have provided the right conditions for the simplest, RNA-based cells to have arisen.

It is widely assumed that the earliest simple cells were based on RNA enclosed in a lipid membrane but there is a problem in that RNA requires divalent ions such as Magnesium (Mg²⁺ to function, but Mg²⁺ damages lipid membranes, so it isn't easy to explain how they could have co-existed within the same cell structure.

So the question is whether the low levels of (Mg²⁺ found in soda lakes, such as the Last Chance Lake in British Columbia, Canada, could have provided the right conditions of enough (Mg²⁺ for RNA to function but not so much as to prevent the formation of an enclosing membrane.

To explore this possibility, Zachary Cohen and his colleagues collected water from Last Chance Lake and the similar but subtly different Goodenough Lake after seasonal evaporation. According to information from Washington University published in phys.org:

These soda lakes each contained ~1 M Na⁺ and ~1 mM Mg²⁺ at pH 10. The authors found that spontaneous extension of short RNA primers occurred in lake water at a rate comparable to the rates in standard laboratory conditions.

The authors added fatty acids, which could have been available on the early Earth, to the lake water to see if the molecules would assemble into membranes. The membranes formed in dilute water that simulates a rainfall event, and the membranes persisted even when surrounded by concentrated lake water from the dry season.

According to the authors, soda lakes on the early Earth could have supported key features of protocell development, with RNA copying and ribozyme activity taking place in the dry season and vesicle formation occurring during the wet season.

The scientists give more technical details in their open access paper in PNAS Nexus:

Creationism's Heath-Robinson Designer - Muddling Through With Even More Ramshackle Complexity

Gut Bacteria Make Neurotransmitters to Shape the Newborn Immune System | Newsroom | Weill Cornell Medicine

The story so far, according to the Creationists Gospel:

Once upon a time, just a few thousand years ago, a magic man in the sky magicked a small flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle East, and then made some people to live on it.

It also made lots of harmful bacteria and other parasites to live in them and make them sick, but luckily, it also gave the humans an immune system to stop the parasites it made to make them sick, from doing what it designed them to do.

The only problem was that the ramshackle immune system it designed, which often doesn't do what it was designed to do, is also a little hypersensitive and prone to treating other things like the body it should be protecting as a parasite and mounting an attack on it so we suffer from all sorts of 'autoimmune' diseases that require another layer of complexity to keep in check. The other thing about it is that it needs training and until that's complete, it will treat all manner of things as parasites, including the food babies eat - and that could result in food allergies that would make life miserable!

But rather than do the simple thing and design the immune system to be able to tell the difference between food and harmful parasites, creationism's version of William Heath-Robinson went for one of the most bizarre solutions you can imagine. Rather like William Heath-Robinson's solution to an every-day problem, it co-opted things in the baby's environment to perform functions they were never intended to perform, like an upright piano being used to stand a step-ladder on to give it enough height, or a stick and some string being used to mend a broken spoke in a wheel, creationism's designer co-opted some of the bacteria that live in a baby's gut.

How it did this is explained in a free access paper in Science Immunology by a team of researchers from the Department of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, led by Assistant Professor Dr. Melody Zeng of the Gale and Ira Drukier Institute for Children's Research. Their work is described in a Weill Cornel Medicine news item:

An artist’s interpretation of the newly identified aetosaur Garzapelta muelleri

Márcio L. Castro.

Tanks of the Triassic: New Crocodile Ancestor Identified | Jackson School of Geosciences | The University of Texas at Austin

In that very long period of Earth's history, long before creationism's god decided to create a small flat planet with a dome over it, and before even the dinosaurs rose to pre-eminence, another group of reptiles had evolved into armour-plated tank-like creatures with thick body-plates and fringes of curved spikes to deter predators. Some of these were later to evolve into the modern crocodiles.

Now three researchers from the University of Texas at Austin have identified a new species that lived 215 million years ago in the Triassic. The newly-identified species was found on a museum shelf where it had been since its discovery in Garza County in northwest Texas, some 30 years ago by the palaeontologist, Bill Mueller. The researchers have named the new species in his honor, as Garzapelta muelleri (Pelta = plate).

Religion News - People Who Believe Absurdities Will Commit Atrocities!

Why Religions Seem to Involve Outlandish Beliefs | Psychology Today

It's axiomatic that people who can believe absurdities can be persuaded to commit atrocities.

One only need look at the history of just about every world religion to know that is especially true of people who hold to religious beliefs, yet most religious people will look at other religions and wonder how on Earth they can believe that nonsense, while having no understanding why others who look at their beliefs have the same thoughts.

How many devout Christians, for example, would find nothing strange in the belief that the sun was swallowed each evening by the goddess Isis, who then gave birth to it every morning or that ancient Celtic chiefs physically mated with the Earth goddess at Tara to unite the Irish people with the land they lived on?

Yet those same Christians have no difficulty believing that the blood sacrifice of an innocent person can atone for collective 'sins' inherited from ancient ancestors or that the dismembered bodies of ancient holy men can somehow persuade a god to change his perfect plans for their better one, or an omniscient, omnibenevolent god needs to be told about a wrong and why if should be righted, or a mind-reading god needs to be told their thoughts.

And a Moslem who believes the founder of their religion split the moon in half and flew to Heaven on a magic flying creature finds it incomprehensible that saying prayers to a painting of an ancient holy man or priest can change the direction of the universe, or that the prohibition on 'graven images' doesn't apply to gold-covered icons or depictions of a god nailed to a stick, worn by people who believe tiny images of a blood sacrifice or miniature instrument of torture worn around their neck protects them from evil spirits?

There are even people who believe the sun can be made to perform strange maneuvers in the sky while no-one else on Earth noticed it and without Earth itself needing to suddenly change its speed and direction of rotation or orbital path round the sun. Even the leaders of a major branch of Christianity, with a whole panel of expert scientific advisors, believe that really happened and continue to send people to Fatima where it is alleged to have happened - just one of the many equally implausible and evidence-free beliefs orthodox Catholics needs to hold.

Even coeliac suffering Catholics can believe a piece of wafer, when the right spells are cast over it, miraculously becomes the body of a dead god to be consumed in a cannibalistic ritual, while knowing they need to avoid eating it to avoid the consequences of gluten intolerance! That's a condition of belonging to a cultural group called 'Catholics'.

How Science Works - Checking, Rechecking and Questioning What We Think We Know. The Only Certainty Is That There Are No Certainties

New research suggests that our universe has no dark matter | About us

A leading theoretical physicist has questioned whether dark matter really exists.

Dark Matter is a placeholder for what appears to be mass without substance which suffuses the universe, observable only by the gravity it exerts and thought by mainstream cosmologists to account for 27% of the matter in the universe with 'ordinary' matter making up just 5%. The rest - 68% - being composed of dark energy, another placeholder for something theory says should be there to account for the expansion of the universe, but which we don't have a model for in the standard model of particles and related fields.

I don't pretend to understand this stuff, but I'll post it here by way of a rebuttal of creationist claims that scientists devise experiments to try to prove preconceptions and that peer-review is just to ensure conformity to scientific orthodoxy.

Besides, the HTML coding is the sort of challenge I enjoy.

In fact, science is about continued reassessment and revision with names made not by confirming preconceptions but by overthrowing established consensus or exposing flaws in it which require further investigation. The leading theoretical physicist is Professor Rajendra Gupta of the Faculty of Science, University of Ottawa, Canada, who has just published a paper in The Astrophysical Journal. He has also authored an earlier paper which he believes shows the Universe to be about twice as old as the mainstream consensus believes it to be, so he can hardly be described as subscribing to some establishment orthodoxy. His work is explained in a University of Ottawa News release:

Why Religious People Find Atheism and Science Hard To Understand - Study Shows Atheists Are Generally More Intelligent Than Religious People

Why Are Religious People (Generally) Less Intelligent? | Psychology Today

One of the frustrating things about trying to debate with religious people in the social media, especially fundamentalists and creationists, is that they seem to have difficulty understanding simple logic such as the idea that the only reason for belief is evidence or the fact that lots of people believe something doesn't affect the truth of the belief.

There is also the impression (actually, it’s more than an impression, it seems to be a characteristic) that they think ignored evidence can be disregarded, so they will never read an article showing their beliefs to be wrong.

They generally seem more easily fooled by, for example, believing that an internet source supports them, when it is almost a rule that a link to a science paper provided by a fundamentalist will always say the opposite to what they claim it says, or that the ridiculous parody of science they've been fed by a creationist disinformation site such as AnswersInGenesis.com that no sane person would believe, is actually what real scientists believe. They have simply swallowed a lie and didn't see any need to check.

So, why do so many fundamentalists come across as limited in their ability to assimilate information and use it as the basis for opinions, other than an arrogant assumption that their beliefs must be true because they believe them, so no evidence is required and any contradictory evidence can be dismissed out of hand as 'wrong' or 'lies' or part of a giant conspiracy, and why do so many creationists came across as having the thinking ability of a toddler with a teleological view of the universe where even elementary particles are sentient and need to be told how to behave and which rules they must obey?

A meta-analysis of 63 earlier studies showed a statistically significant negative correlation between IQ and religiosity.

Creationism in Crisis - From Where Did The Bible's Authors Get The Idea That Humans Are Materially Different To Other Animals? And Why Were They Wrong?

Greek vase decoration - Dionysus and three figures.(Gods created in human image)

Friday essay: from political bees to talking pigs – how ancient thinkers saw the human-animal divide

It's a fundamental part of the Abrahamic religions and other religions that there is something materially different to humans, above and beyond the sort of difference that distinguishes one species from another. Biologically, of course, this is nonsense as any study of comparative anatomy and physiology will show. Humans are just another mammal, albeit with some highly evolved abilities that other species lack such as language, the ability to invent narrative, etc. The differences, as with the differences between any pair of related taxons is quantitative, not qualitative.

So, from where did religions and, especially the Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - get the idea of human exceptionalism from and why did they need to invent narratives to explain it, usually in terms of a special creation or a special closeness to gods - even a familial relationship or at least created in their image like children to their parents? In fact, as we will see, it’s much more likely that gods were created by humans in their image.

In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation, Professor Julia Kindt, Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Sydney, SNW, Australia, explains the ideas origins in Ancient Greece and why it is wrong. Her article has been reformatted for stylistic purposes:

Archaeopteryx

Credit: Dotted Yeti/Shutterstock

A brief guide to birdwatching in the age of dinosaurs

What would it have been like to go bird-watching in that very long period of pre-'Creation Week' history just before a cataclysmic meteor strike cause the extinction of almost all the dinosaurs, 66 million years before creationists believe their god created a small, flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle-east?

At that time, Earth had a large population of dinosaurs, some of which were later to become modern birds which evolved to fill the vacated niches formerly occupied by the dinosaurs, while another survivor, a small rat-like early mammal, the descendant of mammal-like reptiles radiated into modern mammals.

For a period, these early birds, the avian dinosaurs which had evolved from the bipedal theropod dinosaurs, formed two major groups - the ornithuromorphs and the enantiornithine.

Creationism in Crisis - Rice Paddy Snakes In Thailand Diversified About 2.5 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Hypsiscopus murphyi sensu

Photo: Bryan Stuart

Rice paddy snake diversification was driven by geological and environmental factors in Thailand, molecular data suggests | KU News

In one of those far-away places that the simple-minded authors of the story in Genesis about a small flat Earth with a dome over it being magicked up out of nothing in the Middle East, 10,000 years ago, could never have guessed existed, and some 2.5 million years before they though Earth existed, major environmental changes were driving the diversification of a species of snake into several descendant species, just as the Theory of Evolution predicts.

If those simple-minded Bronze Age pastoralists had known about it and understood its significance in terms of the history of life on Earth and the dynamic geology of the planet, just imagine how different their imaginative tale would have been! As it was, they had to do their best with what little knowledge and understanding they had.

The snake in question was the Rice Paddy snake, otherwise known as a mud snake, and the far-away place was Thailand where the rise of the Khorat Plateau caused environmental changes that resulted in the evolutionary diversification of the Hypsiscopus genus.

The team of researchers from various American and Southeast Asian Universities, who have shown this link between environmental change and evolutionary radiation in a genus was led by Dr. Justin Bernstein, of the University of Kansas Center for Genomics. Their findings are published open access in Scientific Reports and are explained in a Kansas University news release:

A theropod track lies in rock near the west bank of the Kukpowruk River.

Photo: Anthony Fiorillo

Alaska dinosaur tracks reveal a lush, wet environment | Geophysical Institute

About 100 million yearsd before creationism's god decided to create a small flat planet with a dome over it to keep the water about its sky out, there were dinosaurs living in what is now northern Alaska. The problem for creationists is that the people who wrote their favourite creation myths were ignorant both of dinosaurs and Alaska so had no idea their tales needed to include something about them, which is why everything they wrote about either happened within a day or two's walk if the Canaanite Hills or were plagiarized from nearby cultures.

Now a team of paleontologists and archaeologists have discovered fossilised dinosaur footprints and the remains of plants in the Nanushuk Formation that show the climate there was warmer and wetter than today, at a time when species were migrating over the landbridge between Siberia in Asia and North America.

Unlike the Paluxy hoax, which had creationists fooled for the best part of a decade, there were no human footprints (hand-carved or otherwise) associated with these dinosaur tracks.

Because creationists will try to falsify the aging of the Nanshuk Formation, claiming the method must have been flawed to such an extent that if made 10,000 years or less look like 100 million years, here is actually how the dating was done - it’s; those dreaded zircons in volcanic deposits again, plus stratigraphy based on index fossils found in rocks of known age:

Do you have any information on the Nanushuk Formation in northern Alaska and how its age was estimated? The Nanushuk Formation is a geological formation located in northern Alaska, particularly in the North Slope region. It is primarily composed of sandstone, siltstone, and shale, and it contains significant oil and gas reserves. The formation is of great interest to geologists and petroleum geologists due to its hydrocarbon potential.

The age of the Nanushuk Formation has been estimated through various methods, including biostratigraphy and radiometric dating of volcanic ash layers within the formation. Biostratigraphy involves the study of fossil assemblages found within the rocks to determine their relative ages. By comparing the fossils present in the Nanushuk Formation to those found in other formations with well-established ages, geologists can infer the approximate age of the Nanushuk Formation.

Additionally, radiometric dating techniques, such as radiocarbon dating or uranium-lead dating, can be used to determine the absolute ages of specific minerals or volcanic ash layers within the formation. These methods rely on the decay of radioactive isotopes within the rocks to estimate the time since their formation.

Through a combination of these techniques, geologists have estimated that the Nanushuk Formation was deposited during the Late Cretaceous period, approximately 70 to 80 million years ago. However, the precise age estimates may vary depending on the specific location within the formation and the methods used for dating.

The team, led by Dr. Anthony R. Fiorillo of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science, Albuquerque, USA and including Professor Paul McCarthy of University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) College of Natural Science and Mathematics, have published their findings open access in the journal Geosciences. It is explained in a UAF news item:

How Science Works - Giraffes - A single Pan-African Species Or Several Distinct Species?

Reticulated giraffe, Buffalo Springs, Kenya. Photo: Mogens Trolle

Photo: Mogens Trolle

Gene flow in giraffes and what it means for their conservation – Department of Biology - University of Copenhagen

In an evolutionary picture that resembles that of humans, giraffes appear to have speciated, or partially speciates at different times and in different parts of their range, then hybridized, before splitting again with regular gene-flow between the groups.

Similarly, though over a greater range, humans seems to have partially speciated into isolated populations in Africa before coming together again and spreading to Eurasia as Homo erectus which then split into Neanderthals, Denisovans and possibly others before meeting up with H. sapiens coming out of Africa in a second wave, to interbreed with the Eurasian species. The result is genetically distinct populations with evidence of ancient hybridization and gene flow.

Because conservation efforts tend to be directed at the species level, it is important for giraffe conservation to determine whether there is a single pan-African species with local sub-species or whether there are four or more species, each with a smaller population and therefore more vulnerable to habitat destruction and extinction.

To try to resolve this issue, as part of the African Wildlife Genomics research framework led by research groups at the Department of Biology at the University of Copenhagen, scientist carried out an extensive genome analysis to establish whether the different populations have been genetically isolated for long enough to be regarded as distinct species, even though, in captivity, they freely interbreed.

The results were a little surprising but highlight the difficulty in determining whether speciation has occurred within a population where differentiation is still in progress and few barriers to hybridisation have arisen. The problem is compounded by the fact that there is not a fixed definition of species, although biologists understand what the term means in a given context.

I've previously written blog posts about this problem, using the Eurasian crows as an example - an article incidentally which was recommended reading for Scottish biology students doing their 'Highers'.

The researchers have published their findings open access in the online Cell Press journal, Current Biology and explain it in a news item from the University of Copenhagen Biology Department:

Malevolent Design - How The Malaria Parasite is 'Designed' To Evolve And Outwit Medical Science

The malaria parasite generates genetic diversity using an evolutionary ‘copy-paste’ tactic | EMBL

Devotees of creationism’s divine malevolence would be conflicted by this news if they understood it, because it shows the creative genius of any intelligent designer who could come up with this system, but, it looks like it did so (if you believe it couldn't happen naturally) by setting up an evolutionary process that creationists are obliged by dogma to believe doesn't work.

The news is that the organisms that causes malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, is 'designed' to quickly find a way to overcome the anti-malarial drugs medical science has developed to cure people suffering from it and to prevent others from getting malaria, by evolving very quickly.

The discovery was by researchers at European Molecular Biology Laboratory's (EMBL’s) European Bioinformatics Institute who have identified a mechanism of ‘copy-paste’ genetics that increases the genetic diversity of the parasite at accelerated time scales. This helps solve a long-standing mystery regarding why the parasite displays hotspots of genetic diversity in an otherwise unremarkable genetic landscape. Copy-paste' is a way of doing something creationists insist is impossible without the aid of god-magic of increasing the genetic information in a genome and making it available for evolution by mutation and selection without any loss of function in the original copied genes.

The team have recently published their finding in the open access journal PLOS Biology and describe it in an EMBL news item:

Acinetobacter baumannii seen under a scanning electron-microscope

Escherichia coli

What makes a pathogen antibiotic-resistant? | Sanford Burnham Prebys

One of todays examples of the stupidity of creationism is something of a novelty. Usually, by applying the central tenets of creationism, any putative designer of living things like parasites either appears malevolent (and sometime it has to be said, malevolent at a near genius level in the ways it finds to make us and other animals sick) or it looks incompetent in that its 'solutions' are often to problems of its own making and more often than not to solutions it designed for one side of an arms race which it now trets as problems for the other side.

But today's example can only be described as an example of incompetent malevolennce, as creationism's putative designer, faced with the same 'problem' of medical science developing antibiotics effective against two different species of pathogen, set about designign two completely different 'solutions' to this problem. - Talk about re-inventing the wheel!

The pathogens are: Escherichia coli and Acinetobacter baumannii.

Creationists will probably be familiar with Escherichia coli (E. coli) because they believe their guru, Michael J Behe, 'proved' their god exists by claiming (falsely) that E. coli's flagellum must have been intelligently designed because he didn't know it evolved out of a pre-exiting structure and couldn't think how else it could have evolved. But then such is the standard of creationist apologetics!

What Behe had unwitting done was destroy the traditional excuse creationists use to explain pathogens like E. coli by blaming them on another 'designer' called 'Sin' which somehow creates living organisms although the creationit designer god is the only entitiy capable of designing livign things, so any example of 'intelligent design, real or imaginary, if 'proof' of this designer god's existance.

So, what creationists are now left with is an E.coli with a flegellum designed by their god to make it better at making us sick, and now resitant to antibiotics to help it win against medical science trying to prevent it makign us sick!

But what creationists are less likely to be familiar with is the pathogen, Acinetobacter baumannii, so here is a little background:

Unintelligent Design - RuBisCO Is Slowly Evolving - And Becoming Even More Embarrassing For Any Creationist Who Understands It

Photo by Kumiko SHIMIZU on Unsplash

The world’s most prolific CO₂-fixing enzyme is slowly getting better | University of Oxford

The world’s worst enzyme, ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase, or RuBisCo as it is known, has featured in these blog posts several times and it described in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax as an example of the lack of intelligence in biological systems, and, as such, why it would be a major embarrassment to creationists - if they understood it.

Briefly, RuBisCo is one of the most ancient enzymes known and became an essential component of photosynthesis early on in the history of life on Earth when the first cyanobacteria evolved the ability to use the energy from sunlight to fix the carbon in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) to build the sugar glucose. Eventually, these photosynthesising cyanobacteria became incorporated into plant cells as the chloroplasts to produce the green plants at the base of most food chains. Because it is so inefficient, it quickly became probably the most abundant enzyme on Earth, making up with quantity what it lacked in quality.

But, evolution, unlike good intelligent design, is a one-way, utilitarian process in which whatever works better than preceded it will be retained and will provide the next basis for further evolution, because evolution has no mechanism to scrap a bad design and start again as any backward step will inevitably be worse, so will be quickly eliminated.

Tell me all about RuBisCo and why it's so inefficient. RuBisCo, or ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase, is an enzyme crucial for the process of carbon fixation in plants, algae, and some bacteria. It catalyzes the first major step of the Calvin cycle, which is the primary pathway for carbon dioxide fixation in photosynthesis. Despite its importance, RuBisCo is often considered inefficient for several reasons:

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